Situating psychoanalysis as the foundation of the therapeutic community and as a spiritual exercise, the author argues that contemporary approaches articulate a form of akēdia – a desire to be elsewhere – both in its focus on expectation and its misunderstanding of the nature ‘place’. This amounts to an avoidance of being-with the subject of psychosis. This leads to a discussion of the formation necessary for therapeutic community practitioners which is in opposition to the notion of training. Such a formation (...) amounts to an inscription into the discourse of the therapeutic community with specific reference to the Law (Oedipus). -/- L’autore intende la psicoanalisi come esercizio spirituale e la colloca come base fondante della Comunità Terapeutica. Egli critica gli approcci contemporanei al trattamento della psicosi, poiché mettono in atto qualcosa di simile al desiderio di essere altrove -akēdia- sia per quanto riguarda le aspettative che l’incomprensione del ‘luogo’ della natura. Questo atteggiamento porta a un evitamento dell’essere-con la psicosi. Tali premesse aprono di fatto la discussione sulla necessaria formazione degli operatori di una comunità terapeutica che non può essere racchiusa nella parola training. La formazione degli operatori è nell’essere, nell’appartenere alla stessa comunità terapeutica e non può che far preciso riferimento ai concetti edipici di confine e di Legge. (shrink)

One goal of this paper is to argue that autobiographical memories are extended and distributed across embodied brains and environmental resources. This is important because such distributed memories play a constitutive role in our narrative identity. So, some of the building blocks of our narrative identity are not brain-bound but extended and distributed. Recognising the distributed nature of memory and narrative identity, invites us to find treatments and strategies focusing on the environment in which dementia patients are situated. A second (...) goal of this paper is to suggest various of such strategies, including lifelogging technologies such as SenseCams, life story books, multimedia biographies, memory boxes, ambient intelligence systems, and virtual reality applications. Such technologies allow dementia patients to remember their personal past in a way that wouldn’t be possible by merely relying on their biological memory, in that way aiding in preserving their narrative identity and positively contributing to their sense of well-being. (shrink)

I contend that the well-established phenomenological distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-awareness needs to be further supplemented with more refined distinctions between different modes of pre-reflective self-awareness. Here I distinguish between five modes, which we come across in perception, lucid dreams, non-lucid dreams, daydreams, and episodic memory. Building on the basis of a phenomenological description, I argue that perception entails the pre-reflective self-awareness of the perceiving ego; non-lucid dreams implicate the pre-reflective self-awareness of the dreamed ego; in the case of (...) lucid dreams and daydreams, we are faced with a split pre-reflective self-awareness, which entails the self-awareness of the dreaming and the dreamed ego. Lastly, in the case of episodic recollection, we are confronted with a threefold pre-reflective self-awareness: the self-awareness of the remembered ego, the remembering ego, and of the temporal unity of experience. The phenomenological analysis here offered leads to the conclusion that pre-reflective self-awareness need not be spoken of in the singular, but in the plural, and that while some modes of pre-reflective self-awareness constitute the foundations of selfhood, others enable the subject of experience to flee its facticity and become someone other than it is. (shrink)

The aim of the work is to examine the relationship between the concepts of “immanence” and “politics” in the works of Hegel and Deleuze. Both Hegel and Deleuze are thinkers of immanence and they explicitly think this concept in relation to the problem of political practice. As I show, they attempt to “ground” politics in immanence. The purpose of this work is to prove that there exists an inherent paradox in the undertaking to “ground” politics in immanence. Both philosophers are (...) confronted with a paradox that emerges from this “grounding”. The paradox appears in the form of natural violence. Both authors fail to contain this violence through arguments. In order to show this, I examine the relationship between two further concepts: history and the state. I compare Hegel’s and Deleuze’s formulations of world-history and universal history, tracing the analogies and differences in how they think the relationship of the state to history. Based on the conclusions I then focus on the relationship of politics to immanence. The paradox of natural violence, I show, emerges from the relationship of the state at the “end of history”. (shrink)

To ask whether the postcolonial is postsecular demands asking for whom, where, and when? To that end, what follows is a reflection situated in two Canadian contexts, separated by time and place, but both connected to the ‘colonial secular’. Engaged in the public deliberation and storytelling of civic secularism, through which political legitimacy is achieved through comparing religions, these two contexts are twenty-first century Québec and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. More specifically, I consider two moments in which the state exerted its (...) authority in order to reshape bodily practice and stories of place: the debate over the ‘secular charter’ in Québec and the founding of the railway town of Prince Rupert on Tsimshian land. These acts of negotiation and law-making turned to religious forms of legitimation in a way that was at once ambivalent, comparative, and forgetful of the historical founding of the state’s own power. That is, in forming their ‘natural sovereignty’ over others, states often forget that their claims to power are, in part, acts of pretending. (shrink)

This article investigates dilemmas in the archiving and sharing of qualitative data in educational research, critically engaging with practices and debates from across the social sciences. Ethical, epistemological and methodological challenges are examined in reference to open access agendas, the politics of knowledge production, and transformations in research practices in the era of data management. We first consider practical and interpretive decisions in archiving qualitative data, then map current policy and regulatory frameworks governing research data management, taking Australia as a (...) case-study. We argue that governance and protocols for data sharing have not attended sufficiently to the distinctive ethical and methodological dimensions and knowledge claims of qualitative research. Instead, approaches associated with quantitative data are extrapolated in ways which construct an imaginary of decontextualised data, abstracted from the conditions of its production. We further argue for more critical attention to the double-edged affordances and ambivalent effects of data sharing and openness and to how data archives are imagined, constructed and curated. This includes greater acknowledgement of the affective and temporal dynamics involved in data archiving, understanding them as practices of (re)invention that also curate ‘archives for the future’ and help to foster an historicising imaginary in educational research. (shrink)

This is the Introduction to a collected volume.

The article provides a new interpretation of the most widely cited essay on historical consciousness, Friedrich Nietzsche?s?On the use and abuse of history for life? from 1874, reconnecting it to current debates in educational science and the role of the historian and educator in a post-colonial situation. It reminds us how historical consciousness is an always contested and critical space, where our existential commitment to justice is also tested. The interpretation moves beyond the standard understanding of Nietzsche as only favouring (...) a life-affirming use of history. It displays how his argument opens the door toward understanding historical consciousness as a transcultural ethical space of an encounter between the dead and the living. It addresses the contemporary debate in education science concerning the relation and preference between a broader and more limited notion of historical consciousness, questioning the possibility of a conclusive theory of historical consciousness for practical-pedagogical purposes. It exemplifies its conclusions in regard to the legacies of the Holocaust and to Apartheid, as also pedagogical challenges. (shrink)

The number of traumatic events that occur worldwide is increasing, yet the literature pays little attention to their implications for leader development. This paper calls for a consideration of how collective trauma such as genocides and the Holocaust can shape the cognition of leaders who are second- and third-generation descendants. Drawing on research on the transgenerational transmission of collective trauma, social learning, social identity and psychodynamic theories, we identify three mechanisms through which collective trauma can be transmitted to leaders: cultural (...) artifacts, community events and family narratives. In this article, we introduce the topic of collective trauma in leader development and draw on the theories of psychodynamic, social identity and social learning to explain how the transmission of collective trauma occurs. We also propose how the transmitted trauma shapes leader cognition, values and behaviors. This framework can serve as a basis for future theory-building in leader and leadership development that will be key to the study of authentic and ethical leadership. (shrink)

Memory is everywhere in Blade Runner 2049. From the dead tree that serves as a memorial and a site of remembrance (“Who keeps a dead tree?”), to the ‘flashbulb’ memories individuals hold about the moment of the ‘blackout’, when all the electronic stores of data were irretrievably erased (“everyone remembers where they were at the blackout”). Indeed, the data wiped out in the blackout itself involves a loss of memory (“all our memory bearings from the time, they were all damaged (...) in the blackout”). Memory, and lack of it, permeates place, where from the post-blackout Las Vegas Deckard remembers it as somewhere you could “forget your troubles.” Memory is a commodity, called upon and consumed by the Wallace Corporation, purchased from the memory-maker, Dr Ana Stelline, who constructs and implants “the best memories” in replicants so as to instil in them real human responses. Memory is ubiquitous in Blade Runner 2049, involving humans, replicants, objects, and machines. Even “God,” we are told, “remembered Rachael.” Nowhere, though, is the depiction of memory more important than in the attempt to solve a question of identity. Officer K has a memory of his past. Even though he knows it is an implant, it is a memory he is emotionally attached to, frequently narrating it to Joi, his digital girlfriend. But it is a memory that starts to puzzle and trouble him. When K discovers the remains of a dead replicant, a female NEXUS-7, he uncovers a secret—this replicant was pregnant and died during childbirth, a discovery that could “break the world.” K is charged with hunting down the child and making the problem disappear. Yet as K starts seeking answers to the question of the child’s identity he gets inextricably caught up in the mystery. Is he merely Officer K, or is he Joe, the miracle child of Rachael and Deckard? The answer to this question hinges on K’s memory. But is the memory genuine? Is the memory his? Blade Runner 2049 encourages us to think deeply about the nature of memory, identity, and the relation between them. Indeed, the film does not just serve as a starting point for thinking about philosophical issues related to memory and identity. Rather, as we show in this chapter, the film seems to offer a view on these philosophical issues. Blade Runner 2049 offers us a view of memory as spread out over people, objects, and the environment, and it shows us that memory’s role in questions of identity goes beyond merely accurately recalling one’s past. Identity depends not on memory per se, but partly on what we use memory for. (shrink)

The point of departure for this article is a comparative study of Adorno and Arendt on the question of evil and modernity. To be precise, I observe how Adorno and Arendt present us with very different ways of understanding radical evil as an expression of the modern project of acceleration. This divergence presents us with a problematic which does not fit easily into the framework of the contemporary post-metaphysical engagement with evil. The latter projects a relational, non-substantive concept of evil (...) addressed under the order of collective memory and against the background of a normatively neutralized order of history. Yet I show, by tracing the continuities and discontinuities which exist between Arendt and Adorno’s conceptualizing of radical evil, on the one hand, and the different elements of this contemporary engagement, on the other, how the initial problematic is symptomatic of a continuing investment in history and can only be addressed in terms of such an investment. This investment is the product of a dynamic between history and memory, informing the work of both thinkers, which partially intersects with the Hegelian strategy of theodicy. I thus conclude with a consideration of whether certain aspects of the latter should be rehabilitated. (shrink)

This study elaborates on narrative resources emerging in the treatment of longlasting musculoskeletal and psychosomatic disorders in Norwegian psychomotor physiotherapy. Patients’ experiences produced in focus group interviews were analyzed from a narrative perspective, combining common themes across groups with in depth analysis of selected particular stories. NPMP theory expanded by Løgstrup’s and Ricoeur’s philosophy, and Mattingly’s and Frank’s narrative approach provided the theoretical perspective. Patients had discovered meaning imbued in muscular tension. Control shifted from inhibiting discipline and cognitive strategies, towards (...) more contingence with gravity and sensation, and increased freedom to be what and who they were. Trust, time, open speech, and being respectfully listened to were described as therapeutic pre-conditions. The body was experienced as the source of their voice as their own. As tension patterns transformed, novel experience in sensation appeared to feed narrative imagination, reshaping past plots, embodied identity and future prospects. NPMP was disclosed as a treatment integrating detection, battle and repair as narrative subplots, but the core narrative was the journey of transformation. Novel embodied narrative resources nourished the quest for a life and identity in tune with the body as one’s own. (shrink)

This paper critically revisits the A-bomb victims’ plea for cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. To this end, I first elaborate the nature of cosmopolitan commemoration espoused by A-bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in comparison with another form of cosmopolitan commemoration pertaining to the Holocaust victims. I then analyze limitations in these cosmopolitan commemorations and explore how they can be transcended. In light of my critical analysis, I argue that genuinely cosmopolitan (...) commemoration, a prerequisite for reconciliation and world peace, will appear on the horizon if the commemorations of the two events are synthesized with the help of ‘historians’ debate’ that continuously subjects the logic of nationalism to critical reflections. This synthesis has the potential to help people envision cosmopolitan politics – cosmopolitics – where they can engage in peaceful but agonistic struggles, not as enemies but as fellow humans, in collectively governing their lives in today’s war-torn world. (shrink)

Bergson identifies multiple forms of memory throughout his work. In Matter and Memory, Bergson considers memory from the perspectives of both psychology and metaphysics, and he describes what we might refer to as contraction memory, perception memory, habit memory, recollection memory, and pure memory. Further, in subsequent works, Bergson discusses at least two additional forms of memory – namely, a memory of the present and a non-intellectual memory of the will. However, it is often not clear how these different forms (...) of memory relate to one another. With the aim of providing an overview of Bergson's philosophy of memory that can also serve as a point of entry to his philosophy as a whole, this article explores the different senses and forms of memory that Bergson describes, paying special attention to how they are distinct from one another and how they are unified. It is my intention to show that, although these various senses and forms of memory are different from one another , they are also continuous and unified insofar as they are equivalent to different tones of one's mental life and to different tensions of one duration. (shrink)

Pádraig Hogan has argued for a powerful conception of education as epiphany that is illuminated by the work of Heidegger and Joyce. But what are we to make of Stephen Dedalus’ intention (pretension?) to ‘Remember your epiphanies’? Developing the phenomenological Erinnerungsversuch or ‘essay in memory’ of David Farrell Krell, I will examine three ‘epiphanic fragments’ from the literature of education. The problem of the temporality of the educational epiphany will be identified and a resolution will be attempted. I hope thus (...) to extend an ontological account of memory into the educational experience, and also to develop the educational significance of the remembered or recollected epiphany. The article concludes with some emerging thoughts on the relation of education, literature and vocation. (shrink)

In one of his more recent works, Paul Ricoeur attempts to re-instate the philosophical discussion of memory at the very center of a more general discourse on human existence. In his exposition, Ricoeur relies upon what he himself characterizes as a phenomenology of memory. It is the aim of the present article to supplement the phenomenological account of memory discussed by Ricoeur with a hermeneutics of memory conscious of its own limitations. Such a hermeneutical supplement would not only be of (...) complementary value but also provoke a rethinking of the relation between key concepts in the western discourse on memory, such as image, imprint, and trace. In this regard, the proposed hermeneutical reconfiguration of memory exceeds its own limitations and overflows into an investigation of the primordial passive and past ground, which motivates and allows the hermeneutical activity in the first place. Following the analyses of Emmanuel Lévinas, I will argue that this immemorial past must be conceived in terms of a responsibility that cannot be fulfilled. (shrink)

The question of forgiveness in politics has attained a certain cachet. Indeed, in the fifty years since Arendt commented on the notable absence of forgiveness in the political tradition, a vast and multidisciplinary literature on the politics of apology, reparation, and reconciliation has emerged. To a novice scouring the relevant literatures, it might appear that the only discordant note in this new veritable symphony of writings on political forgiveness has been sounded by philosophers. There is a more-than-healthy cynicism directed at (...) what many philosophers see as an uncritical promotion of forgiveness, which – they fear – risks distorting and cheapening forgiveness as a moral ideal, on the one hand, and ignoring the moral and political values of justice, accountability and the cessation of harmful relationships, on the other. Are philosophical fears about the dangers of thinking about forgiveness in political terms warranted – or do they perhaps depend in part on conceptual conservatism regarding what exactly political forgiveness might be? I argue that most, if not all, standard objections to political forgiveness emerge from theoretical reliance on a picture of forgiveness I will call the Emotional Model. Once we make conceptual space for descriptions of forgiveness in performative and social terms, the concept is more easily adapted to a political account without at least some of the risks feared by philosophers. (shrink)

On the extended mind hypothesis (EM), many of our cognitive states and processes are hybrids, unevenly distributed across biological and nonbiological realms. In certain circumstances, things - artifacts, media, or technologies - can have a cognitive life, with histories often as idiosyncratic as those of the embodied brains with which they couple. The realm of the mental can spread across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains. My independent aims in this chapter are: first, to (...) describe two compatible but distinct movements or "waves" within the EM literature, arguing for the priority of the second wave (and gesturing briefly toward a third); and, second, to defend and illustrate the interdisciplinary implications of EM as best understood, specifically for historical disciplines, by sketching two case studies. (shrink)

The reconstructive turn in memory theory challenges us to provide an account of successful remembering that is attentive to the ways in which we use memory, both individually and socially. I investigate conceptualizations of accuracy and integrity useful to memory theorists and argue that faithful recollection is often a complex epistemological/ethical achievement.

While memory is conceptualized predominantly as an individual capacity in the cognitive and biological sciences, the social sciences have most commonly construed memory as a collective phenomenon. Collective memory has been put to diverse uses, ranging from accounts of nationalism in history and political science to views of ritualization and commemoration in anthropology and sociology. These appeals to collective memory share the idea that memory ‘‘goes beyond the individual’’ but often run together quite different claims in spelling out that idea. (...) This paper reviews a sampling of recent work on collective memory in the light of emerging externalist views within the cognitive sciences, and through some reflection on broader traditions of thought in the biological and social sciences that have appealed to the idea that groups have minds. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the relationship between these kinds of cognitive metaphors in the social sciences and our notion of agency. (shrink)

This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help reproduce settler colonial processes of accumulation and displacement at the micro-level. The article draws on archival data from avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist colonies to explicate patterned representations of (...) Palestinian villages that Zionist forces gradually displaced prior to and during the 1948 War/Nakba. I demonstrate how the colonial settlers attributed political meaning through five representational modes: contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive and settlers as progressive and developed; denying an indigenous connection to the land; emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural progress and settler superiority; asymmetrically assessing settler and indigenous belongings to national collectives; and legitimizing land purchases that dispossessed indigenous cultivators, despite the settlers’ socialist ideology, while reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation. I theorize a form of settler colonial memory based not merely on erasure, but on recognition and disavowal. Finally, I argue that local memory is a significant site of production in which the conceptual tools to both trace the historical processes of supremacy and subvert asymmetrical sociality lie. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of human conscience as an attentional mode of being that effectuates an original capacity for discernment. Such an undertaking, after the necessary terminological and phenomenological clarifications, requires one to cope with its specific background, especially the critique of the moral worldview and the postmetaphysical setting of contemporary thinking. Taking into consideration the Heideggerian view of the matter, I reflect on the doubts Ricoeur addressed to the former, and take advantage of Ricoeur’s early philosophy to (...) reinterpret and develop his own stance as expounded in Oneself as Another. His later work on ideology and utopia may contribute to helping to establish some criteria for the functioning of the conscience. (shrink)

This article is one of the author’s serial writings to assimilate Ricoeur’s three-fold ethical investigation into various areas of human acts of forgetting, including 1) the therapeutic or patholog...

The two volumes of _Maus_ composed by Art Spiegelman were the first graphic novels to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. These volumes introduced a new genre of graphic novel in the form of comics. The present study examines the hierarchical content and subtexts of Maus and the unique presentation methods of comics. The researcher employed the concepts of “Threefold mimesis” proposed by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, to see how Maus interpretate the Jewish history of suffering in Holocaust and the (...) postmemory. Spiegelman is the icon of the graphic novel world, however, so far research on his work still seems to be rare in Taiwan. This study starts from Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics, hope to elucidate how the new model of contemporary autobiographical comic was created. (shrink)

The debate on the right to be forgotten on Google involves the relationship between human information processing and digital processing by algorithms. The specificity of digital memory is not so much its often discussed inability to forget. What distinguishes digital memory is, instead, its ability to process information without understanding. Algorithms only work with data without remembering or forgetting. Merely calculating, algorithms manage to produce significant results not because they operate in an intelligent way, but because they “parasitically” exploit the (...) intelligence, the memory, and the attribution of meaning by human actors. The specificity of algorithmic processing makes it possible to bypass the paradox of remembering to forget, which up to now blocked any human-based forgetting technique. If you decide to forget some memory, the most immediate effect is drawing attention to it, thereby activating remembering. Working differently from human intelligence, however, algorithms can implement, for the first time, the classical insight that it might be possible to reinforce forgetting not by erasing memories but by multiplying them. After discussing several projects on the web which implicitly adopt this approach, the article concludes by raising some deeper problems posed when algorithms use data and metadata to produce information that cannot be attributed to any human being. (shrink)

The paper is focused on Genesis 1 – 3 where the primordial man [adàm] is created ‎and he was given the proper name Adam [adàm]. ‎ In Hebrew man and Adam are the same word, spelled the same way – [adàm]. ‎Different translations of Genesis 1-3 use for the first time the proper name Adam in ‎different places versions Gen 2:25; The German Luther ‎Bible Gen 3:8; Some English Protestant versions Gen 3:17; Bulgarian Protestant and many ‎English Protestant versions Gen (...) 3:20-21). The paper decodes the phenomenon by ‎studying the Hebrew original and several semiotic views on common and proper names ‎‎. Through these opinions the ‎important question “Who wrote the Bible?” is discussed. The analysis interfaces the new ‎linguistic relativity theory.‎ Four layers of symbolism are decoded: 1. The man became Adam; 2. The two men in ‎Gen 1:27 and in Gen 2:7 man [adàm] ‎is made by earth, ground [adamà]; 3. The two men in the New Testament ; 4. Edom, Adam and cultural discourses in both Testaments.‎. (shrink)

In cognitive psychology, a false memory refers to a fabricated or distorted recollection of an event that did not actually happen. Both ‘memory-distortion’ and ‘false memory creation’ refer to the processes of recollection in which the recollected events are not actually happened. This paper has three aims: to examine Ricoeur’s analysis of memory and imagination; to explain and reinforce the constructive role of memory; to show in what manner the first two aims lead to the conclusion that the phenomena of (...) ‘distorted or false memory creation’ are reproductive because the nature of recollection is constructive in the sense of representation of past. In this regard, Ricoeur’s trajectory not only displaces the essential structure of memory and imagination behind the curtain of their distinction and connection, but also contributes to the debates in cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies themselves co-constitute narratives and our understanding of these narratives by configuring characters and events in a meaningful (...) temporal whole. We propose a hermeneutic framework that enables us to categorise and interpret technologies according to two hermeneutic distinctions. Firstly, we consider the extent to which technologies close in on the paradigm of the written text by assessing their capacity to actively configure characters and events into a meaningful whole; thereby introducing a linguistic aspect in the theory of technological mediation. Secondly, we consider the extent to which technologieshave the capacity to abstract from the public narrative time of actual characters and events by constructing quasi-characters and quasi-events, thereby introducing the social in our conception of technological mediation. This leads us to the outlines of a theory of narrative technologies that revolves around four hermeneutic categories. In order to show the merits of this theory, we discuss the categories by analysing paradigmatic examples of narrative technologies: the bridge, the hydroelectric power plant, video games, and electronic money. (shrink)

The overall aim of the composite thesis is the critical examination of the poetics and politics of memory, particularly in the extended role of the ekphrasis in literature. The creative work A Strange Chinese Tale draws on theoretical elements from Debord, Deleuze, Lefebvre, and Baudrillard, and provides a narrative for the post-modern political and cultural landscape of contemporary China, in relation to the individual’s search for a sense of belonging. The exegesis The Poetics, Politics and Writing of Memory argues for (...) the extension of the ekphrastic project into the domains of the photographic image and the ‘space of memory’. (shrink)

Baudrillard interpreta el «nuevo terrorismo» como un intercambio simbólico de regalo y contra-regalo: la muerte del terrorista es un contra-regalo irrefutable que rompe el círculo coercitivo de las relaciones sociales «impuestas» por el sistema global. A su vez, la concepción de Derrida tiene dos dimensiones, explicativa y normativa: en primer lugar, Derrida considera el 11-S como un síntoma multifacético de una crisis autoinmune que tiene aspectos políticos, religiosos y tecno-capitalistas. En segundo lugar, Derrida arguye que existe un «momento» de terror, (...) violencia y sacrificio que es constitutivo en las decisiones y en la responsabilidad éticas. De forma crítica, argumentaré que la concepción de Baudrillard se basa en una noción extremada y partidista de un sistema que se interpreta como un inmenso mandato de un gobernante totalitario. Por su parte, Derrida convierte de forma innecesaria la observación de que las acciones humanas pueden tener consecuencias perversas en una ley de la autoinmumidad inspirada en la biología. Al considerar el terror como algo constitutivo incluso en las relaciones éticas más comunes, Derrida corre también el riesgo de convertir un fenómeno extremado en un concepto que lo abarca todo, y de perder contacto con la práctica ética corriente. Concluiré que las concepciones de Baudrillard y de Derrida sobre el terror y el terrorismo comparten un «gusto por lo extremado» que las hace en última instancia poco convincentes. (shrink)

The gaps, fissures, and lapses of attention in a life—what I call “ordinary oblivions”—are fertile fragilities that present a compelling source for ethics. Plato, not Aristotle, is the ancient philosopher specially poised to speak to this feature of human life. Drawing upon poet C. K. Williams's idea that forgetting is a “looking away” that makes possible “beginning again,” I present a Platonic approach to ethics as an alternative to Aristotelian or virtue ethics. Plato's Phaedrus is a key source text for (...) this alternate picture; from it I suggest how we might construe Iris Murdoch's “task of seeing” in terms of the engagement with written form. Poetry is a central locale for such engagement, and thus suggests a kind of ethical praxis that arises from the theoretical emphases of my examination of forgetting, the unmoored self, remade other-regard, and sacred sources. (shrink)

In the last decades, the notions of forgiveness and reconciliation have been applied more and more in the public sphere. This paper claims that forgiveness in transitional justice practices is often difficult if not impossible to achieve, and that it could generate counterproductive processes. It is unclear what ‘collective forgiveness’ is, if it is a realistic concept at all. The expectation of forgiveness seems to generate much resistance, even when former oppressors take up responsibility or show regret. Often past-sensibilities are (...) too strong, and in many victim-groups self-respect is lacking. Moreover, the role of emotions in public settings remains obscure. These complexities raise the question of whether forgiveness is an appropriate ideal to aim at in transitional justice practices, especially when participants are involved in attempts at reconciliation in more or less coercive ways. To give up the ideal of forgiveness, however, does not imply that reconciliation is unattainable. Alternative accounts of reconciliation are presented which do not start from forgiveness. These alternative accounts show that reconciliation is possible, but it seems important for former victims to regain some sense of self-worth and recognition by others first. Only then people can enter into the long process of rebuilding relationships of trust with former wrongdoers. (shrink)

Memory brings the past into the present. It is a feature of human temporality, contingency, and identity. Attention to memory's psychological and social importance suggests new vistas for work in religious ethics. This essay examines four recent works on memory's importance for self-interpretation, social criticism, and public justice. My focus will be on normative questions about memory. The works under review ask whether, and on what terms, we have an obligation to remember, whether memory is linked to neighbors near and (...) distant, how memory is related to justice and forgiveness, and whether memory sits easily with the kind of relationships that allegedly characterize life in democratic public culture. (shrink)

Cybervetting has become common practice in personnel decision-making processes of organizations. While it represents a quick and inexpensive way of obtaining additional information on employees and applicants, it gives rise to a variety of legal and ethical concerns. To limit companies’ access to personal information, a _right to be forgotten_ has been introduced by the European jurisprudence. By discussing the notion of forgetting from the perspective of French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the present article demonstrates that both, companies and employees, (...) would be harmed if access to online information on applicants and current employees would be denied. Consistent with a Humanistic Management approach that promotes human dignity and flourishing in the workplace, this article proposes guidance for the responsible handling of unpleasant online memories in personnel decision-making processes, thereby following Ricoeur’s notion of forgetting as “kept in reserve”. Enabling applicants and employees to take a qualified stand on their past is more beneficial to both sides than a right to be forgotten that is questionable in several respects. (shrink)

Modern cognitive and experimental science is increasingly working to explore the meaning and importance of forgetting. Forgetting is one of the most important mental functions on an individual level, but also on a social and national level, since it enables healing, purifies the mind of difficult memories, prevents obsession with problems, and eliminates the possibility of psychosomatic illnesses. The famous British TV series Black Mirror, which has become a symbol of the challenges that modern and futuristic technology brings to man, (...) deals with the problems that arise due to the obsession of the gadget culture with abolishing forgetting through technological enhancement. Several episodes are based on gadgets that expand the potential of memory and make it constantly available to other subjects, in the way that data from a person’s entire history become available. In a dialogue with Brooker’s ideas, the author re–examines the problems spawned by this future society without forgetting, and searches for possible solutions. Moderna kognitivna i eksperimentalna znanost sve više se bavi istraživanjem značenja i važnosti zaboravljanja. Zaboravljanje je jedna od najvažnijih mentalnih funkcija na individualnoj, ali i na društvenoj i nacionalnoj razini, budući da omogućuje iscjeljivanje uma i brisanje neugodnih sjećanja, sprječava opsesivno razmišljanje o problemima i otklanja mogućnost pojave psihosomatskih bolesti. Poznata britanska serija Crno zrcalo, koja je postala simbol za izazove koje moderna i futuristička tehnologija donosi čovjeku, bavi se problemima koji nastaju zbog opsjednutosti kulture gadgeta da se tehnološkim napretkom potpuno onemogući zaboravljanje. Nekoliko epizoda serije temelji se na gadgetima koji proširuju potencijal ljudskog pamćenja te ga čine dostupnim drugima, a time podatci o čitavoj nečijoj prošlosti postaju dostupni. Razmišljajući o Brookerovim idejama, autor razmatra probleme koje bi iznjedrilo takvo buduće društvo lišeno zaborava i traži moguća rješenja. (shrink)

As Japan marks the 75th anniversary of World War II in 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not offer a fresh apology and maintained that future generations should not have to keep apologizing for past mistakes. This paper uses the unresolved war issue of the military comfort women system as a context to discuss what it means for political apologies to be more than mere political gestures founded on political interests and discusses what it takes to facilitate forgiveness. It will (...) examine the features of a repentant wrongdoer who deserves forgiveness based on how one relates to one’s past wrongdoing in order to distinguish political apologies that are genuine from those that are mere gestures aimed at hasty reconciliation. This will be discussed through the works of Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Next, through Jankélévitch’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of forgiveness, it will be discussed how matters of justice and forgiveness should be understood as well as how the history of past wrongs and injustice is necessary for a genuine apology and makes forgiveness possible. It is also a moral responsibility for both perpetrators and victims to remember history in order to achieve personal forgiveness as well as begin social and political reconciliation. (shrink)

The argument claims the vital importance of the idea of the fundamental unity of humankind for any intercultural philosophy, and succinctly traces the trajectory of this idea – and its denials – in the Western and the African traditions of philosophical and empirical research. The conclusion considers the present-day challenges towards this idea’s implementation – timely as it is, yet apparently impotent in the face of mounting global violence.

This article reconsiders the relationship between Simmel and Heidegger. Scholars commonly argue that Simmel’s work on the topic of death and mortality influenced the early Heidegger’s work on the same topic, as evidenced in Being and Time. I argue however that Simmel’s work particularly in the Lebensanschauung should be read as challenging the basic presuppositions of Heidegger on death. I then compare the two on the issue of immortality in order to show that Simmel is much closer to the subsequent (...) critics of Heidegger than he is to Heidegger himself. (shrink)

Although most scholars trace the Liar Paradox to Plato’s contemporary, Eubulides, the paper argues that Plato builds something very like the Liar Paradox into the very structure of his dialogues with significant consequences for understanding his views. After a preliminary exposition of the liar paradox it is argued that Plato builds this paradox into the formulation of many of his central doctrines, including the “Divided Line” and the “Allegory of the Cave” and the “Ladder of Love”. Thus, Plato may have (...) been the first to formulate the view that Graham Priest calls dialetheism, roughly, the view that some contradictions are, in an illuminating way, inescapable and true. The paper argues that Plato builds this Liar paradox into the formulation of his signature views because he holds that the attempt by finite human beings to theorize about transcendent realities results in the simultaneous necessity, and impossibility, of transgressing the limits of language—leading to the paradoxes. Finally, it is argued that the existence of these paradoxes in these Platonic doctrines is the direct result of an intrinsic hermeneutical circle in Plato’s aforementioned signature views. (shrink)

This article explores the phenomenology of mothers as they return to memorable photographs.[i] It reviews research on three mothers who articulate the lived experience of photographs, and how such experience might reveal basic ontological aspects of motherhood. The phenomenology of a mother’s memorable photographs discloses an aporia of human relationships that involves the connectedness she has with her children, and the awareness that her children have become separate individuals. These two themes – separateness and coexistence – are indissolubly at odds. (...) Each constitutes a mother’s potential lived experience of photographs as viewed in front of her. A concluding discussion reviews how each of these contradictory themes provides the necessary context for the other to arise, mutually presupposing the other. (shrink)

I argue that the aporetic character of clemency must be understood in terms of its unmerited and merited character to achieve the underlying purposes of justice within criminal justice: justice as fairness (punishment must be deserved and proportionate) and justice as restoration (repair of the harm to victims and society and the reintegration of offenders) are paramount goals. Rather than destabilizing political order, pardons can render productive potential tensions between justice as fairness and justice as restoration. Taking as my conceptual (...) point of departure Paul Ricoeur's claims about the suprajuridical and supraethical character of pardon, I develop the argument through three central sections: an excursus into historical and contemporary practices of clemency in the United States; a critical analysis of the merited and unmerited aspects of clemency with respect to remorse and atonement theories within theological and legal discourse; and a normative engagement with pardons and felony disenfranchisement. (shrink)

Forgiveness has been a central issue for humankind since ancient times; it emerged in theology, but in recent decades it has received significant attention from different disciplines, such as philosophy and psychology. More recently, forgiveness has received attention also from organizational and managerial studies, particularly, in studying how individuals respond to interpersonal offenses, or perceived harm and wrongdoing in the workplace. Forgiveness is a complex concept, as it can be understood as a family of related constructs and can be analyzed (...) at different levels. Even if social sciences have widely recognized that the nature of forgiveness can be both conditional and unconditional, the notions of conditionality and unconditionality have not yet received sufficient study, especially in organizational and managerial fields. In these fields, forgiveness has been predominantly studied under a psychological approach, looking for the conditions under which it may occur in the workplace. Unconditional forgiveness has received less attention: with a few exceptions, managerial and organizational literature has limited the conceptualization of forgiveness, weakening its scope and probably not catching a relevant part of forgiving experiences in the workplace. This article proposes to follow a more comprehensive approach to forgiveness in the workplace, according to the social sciences field, which can take into account both conditionality and unconditionality. It focuses on unconditional forgiveness according to Continental philosophy, in particular, to the thought of Jacque Derrida and Paul Ricoeur. Through their contributions, the unconditionality of forgiveness is deepened, and the implications of considering both conditional and unconditional forgiveness are discussed. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime is examined in the context of the emergence of the epistemological practice of scientific observation. By focusing on the genre-stylistic and semantic-structural features of the text the authors demonstrate the mechanisms of observation as well as the methods of describing the results characteristic of mid-eighteenth century science. The authors consider Kant’s treatise to be a hybrid text: on the one hand, it attests to the importance of the natural (...) science paradigm and the degree of its influence on the humanities in the modern period; and, on the other hand, it bears witness to the multi-genre character of philosophical treatises, combining as they do the considered and serious wisdom of philosophy, the precision of scientific terminology and the figurativeness of a work of fiction. Kant is perceived not only as a researcher and philosopher capable of bringing out the essence of the particular and changeable captured in observation, but as a writer with a consummate command of the apparatus for keeping the reader’s attention through linguistic devices and practices of image-creating. The authors demonstrate how the categories of the “beautiful” and “sublime” become a general framework for the description of the moral and mental properties of human nature. The authors show that Kant’s use of “aesthetic” wording in the title of his treatise does not announce that his aim is analysis of artistic perception and practices, but mainly refers to the form of his anthropological study and conceptualisation of scientific knowledge. Kant has transferred the technique of visualisation from natural sciences to the objects of philosophical inquiry, thus contributing to the development in the humanities of representative practices, the scientific method of observation as well as the corresponding epistemic and literary genre. (shrink)

Dirty hands cases are often seen as a crucial challenge for political ethics. Michael Walzer’s analysis of dirty hands cases has been especially influential. On closer inspection, however, Walzer’s analysis contains some serious flaws. This article examines how and to what extent the political ethics of Paul Ricoeur can remedy the problems in Walzer’s approach. It is shown that Ricoeur’s approach can offer a better understanding of what is at stake in dilemmas in political action and that it can provide (...) guidance for dealing with such issues. Ricoeur’s analysis, furthermore, provides the foundation for a more critical political ethics than Walzer can offer. (shrink)

At the heart of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of religion one discovers a commitment to the diversity of religious expression. This commitment is grounded in his understanding of the linguistic and temporal conditions of religious phenomena. By exploring his contribution to the debate concerning the so-called ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology in relation to his studies of translation, this essay explores Ricoeur’s understanding of religious phenomenality where meaning is experienced as the simultaneous advance and withdrawal of an originary event in (...) the traces of its interpretations. With such an understanding of religious phenomenality, the way is opened for philosophy of religion to advance a more robust consideration of religious diversity and, therefore, to reconsider notions of universality better suited to the things themselves. (shrink)