In this post‐9/11 era marked by religious and ethnic conflicts and the rise of cultural intolerance, ambiguities arising from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism jeopardize the delivery of culturally safe nursing care to non‐Western populations. This new social reality requires nurses to develop a heightened awareness of health issues pertaining to racism and ethnocentrism to provide culturally safe care to non‐Western immigrants or refugees. Through the lens of post‐colonial feminism, this paper explores the challenge of providing culturally (...) safe nursing care in the context of the post‐9/11 in Canadian healthcare settings. A critical appraisal of the literature demonstrates that post‐colonial feminism, despite some limitations, remains a valuable theoretical perspective to apply in cultural nursing research and develop culturally safe nursing practice. Post‐colonial feminism offers the analytical lens to understand how health, social and cultural context, race and gender intersect to impact on non‐Western populations’ health. However, an uncritical application of post‐colonial feminism may not serve racialized men's and women's interests because of its essentialist risk. Post‐colonial feminism must expand its epistemological assumptions to integrate Taylor's concept of identity and recognition and Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and unfinalizability to explore non‐Western populations’ health issues and the context of nursing practice. This would strengthen the theoretical adequacy of post‐colonial feminist approaches in unveiling the process of racialization that arises from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism in Western healthcare settings. (shrink)

The Common School should promote a sense of the distinctive worth of all human beings. How is the respect thus owed to every individual to be properly understood? This familiar question is explored by discussing ‘lookism’, a form of discrimination on the grounds of appearance. The treatment is located within a wider analysis of stereotyping. Ultimately stereotyping overlooks persons as sources of actions with moral significance and as potential owners of moral virtues. The Common School could profitably approach traditionally emotive (...) issues such as racism indirectly by helping students to understand in some depth how ‘lookist’ attitudes deny agency. It could then encourage students to apply these insights to traditional forms of discrimination. (shrink)

A cross‐national study of differences in the identities of nursing in England and Australia and how this has affected nurses’ capacity to respond to hospital reform This paper examines similarities and differences in the identity of nursing in England and Australia. In doing this we examine how in each country nursing has developed different ideologies and strategies. Our analysis draws on data derived from a cross‐national study of hospital staff in England and Australia. We demonstrate how differences in the occupational (...) identity of nursing in each country are registered in their values, attitudes and beliefs. We suggest that these differences reflect the interplay of factors such as the strategic stances of nursing professional and industrial organisations and how nurses in each country have positioned themselves in responding to recent changes in health policy. (shrink)

In my paper, by drawing on the writings Heidegger developed in the late 1920s, I wish to display what we may refer to as the thorough educational nature of Heideggerian reflection. It is my argument that the analysis of Dasein we find in the early Heidegger displays an extraordinary deep and dense reflection on selfhood and subjectivity, a reflection that is rooted in subject’s freedom and transcending. By paying attention to the interplay between these two features, I argue that in (...) the late 1920s, while challenging the notion of an all-encompassing consciousness as the place where everything should be understood and managed, Heidegger built a conception of selfhood and subjectivity in terms of freedom, responsibility, and ongoing transformation. Such a conception, I argue, is in and of itself educational. (shrink)

The positioning of theory in relation to educational practice has provoked much recent debate, with some arguing that educational theory constrains thinking in education, while others dismiss ‘theory’ out of hand as belonging to the world of the ‘academic’, abstracted from the ‘realities’ of the classroom. This paper views theory as necessarily implicated in all practices, but argues that depending on the theories embraced, and the understanding of theory itself, education can be understood in very different ways. Resisting the separation (...) of theory from practice, the paper takes up the call to consider the entanglement of theory with practice, or how theory matters. It takes formative assessment as a particularly fertile case for this discussion. Formative assessment has been considerably developed in schooling across different national education systems. Its aspiration is for assessment to support learning, rather than only to credentialise learning. Having first emerged as a concept when behaviourism held sway, it has been considered through different theoretical lenses. Drawing upon empirical studies of classroom assessment practices, the paper draws out the different ‘mattering’ implicated in the different languages of assessment used by practitioners, raising questions about the practices this produced. The paper concludes by asking if formative assessment could become ‘educational’ in a more radical sense, if opportunities to focus on the contingencies and politics of our meaning-making were sometimes taken up more openly and dialogically with students, as opposed to formative assessment sitting in a instrumental relationship to a given curriculum. (shrink)

In my paper, I set The Language Animal against a broader picture of Taylor’s intellectual trajectory. Sources of the Self (1989) left three major questions open in its wake: (a) the viability of religious moral sources in a ‘secular’ age; (b) the compatibility between a robust moral realism and a genealogical account of modern identity; (c) the meaning and destiny of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. This is the framing topic of his last book. Although Taylor’s variety of hermeneutics is unquestionably (...) a product of the linguistic turn, he has operated with a broad notion of the linguistic capacity from the start. Language is, for him, a shared activity and the acknowledgment of its animal embeddedness functions in his work as an antidote against any too idealized a view of the kind of creatures that humans are. In his earlier writings, however, a structural tension lurked below the surface between a Gadamerian notion of Sprache and a more phenomenological, Merleau-Pontyan, embodied outlook that was less modeled on articulate speech. My claim is that his new book marks a shift from a more speech-oriented to a more body-oriented understanding of language. (shrink)

This article explores the differences between Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor with respect to their theories of secularization. It starts by looking at their resemblances; it continues by distinguishing a two-fold difference in their approach. The variation within their similar methodologies is examined, and then the consequences of these divergent definitions of religion are investigated. We focus on four themes: the role of the Axial religions, the significance of Incarnation and Reformation, the significance of Christianity as the ‘religion of the (...) departure from religion’, and the possibility of religious ‘conversion’. Taylor's and Gauchet's views on the future of religion diverge as a function of their different interpretations of ‘fulfilment’ and ‘hunger for meaning’. (shrink)

Extending recent appropriations of Charles S. Peirce's work in political theory, we argue that the same epistemic norms that justify democracy offer a plausible basis for justifying multiculturalist policies aimed at protecting at-risk cultural groups. Because this epistemic argument is compatible with a full range of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, it fully accommodates the fact of reasonable pluralism, thereby skirting the Rawlsian objection to which the multiculturalisms of Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka fall prey.

I am called herewith a collaborator-in-chief, mountain climber, and prophet. They all arise from the writers' largesse, not facts on the ground. But I will embrace them momentarily and then turn to...

The central idea of this article is that social freedom should range over socially constituted practices and ways of life rather than merely individual actions or aggregations of such actions. To be free, it is argued, is to be capable of pursuing opportunities to engage in socially constituted practices and ways of living that one has reason to value from the point of view of one's practical identity (or identities). The implication of this position is that supporting social freedom must (...) involve positive support of those social relations that constitute those practices and ways of life. Hence negative freedom views, such as liberal or republican accounts, are incomplete as conceptions of the kind of freedom that is so deeply valued within democratic cultures as well as in liberation struggles against social systems where freedom is systematically denied. (shrink)

My point of departure is the idea that Wittgenstein's work, especially his later work with its explicit emphasis on practices, seeks to engage a reader who is likely to come to philosophy with a certain cast of mind that includes unexamined commitments from a particular cultural context. I show how a substantial number of remarks by Wittgenstein in which he addresses cultural topics bring out the importance of the quite specific connections he saw between the philosophical problems with which he (...) grappled and the historical cultural context in which those problems have arisen. Not only is a grasp of this aspect of his writing integral to a proper understanding of Wittgenstein as a thinker, bringing out these connections serves to put these remarks into a coherent conceptual framework. In assessing the relation of Wittgenstein's cultural concerns to his engagement with metaphysics, I show how his development of Spengler's thought is an important connecting link. Particularly important for this analysis will be my discussion of Wittgenstein's understanding and employment of the concept of a Betrachtungsform , as well as a few closely related concepts. I then offer an interpretation of what I believe to be the significance of the connection in his later thought between his philosophical activity and his views about the modern West. (shrink)

The article is aimed at a philosophical study of the foundations/causes of war. Its background is a definition of the Russian-Ukrainian full-scale warfare as an irreconcilable existential conflict of the "Russian world" between the "Russian world" and the national world of Ukraine. Methodological specific of the article is reliance on the everydayness of a boundary situation of war to define the cultural world, as well as cultural identity as concepts that get existential meaning. Philosophy potential is used to clarify the (...) key question for today's war discourse about why the parties to the conflict are determined to take military actions, but not to resolve the conflict through peace negotiations. The answer is sought by comparing two ontologies of the world that there are in Habermas' communicative theory of action and Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Each of them provides an alternative concept of understanding and, accordingly, different foundations for its truth theory. This also provides a perspective, firstly, to distinguish two alternative positions of participants in the discourse of war – "internal" one as "being in a culture at war" and another of an "external" observer. Secondly, this distinction helps to explain why war as a conflict of cultural worlds could be considered from different philosophical points of view, namely from the position of the philosophy of communicative action, as well as in the context of existential analysis of being. Examination of the explanatory potential of both approaches is carried out on the basis of a comparison of different concepts of the world, fundamental to each of philosophers. It is done by clarifications of basics of two ontologies of understanding and, accordingly, of their theories of truth. The article indicates that the theory of truth in communicative philosophy is based on the regulative idea of the unity of the objective world. Instead, with reference to examples from Charles Taylor and Jean-Luc Nancy, the author claims that the fundamental ontology can be reinterpreted in terms of the plurality of being-in-common of people in sovereign cultural worlds. Accordingly, the interaction of representatives of different cultural identities under certain political conditions, i.e., official propaganda can turn into a radical disagreement of different existential understandings of the meaning of being, into a war of cultural worlds that cannot be overcome by just negotiations at the level of competent communication. The article ends with an open question about searching for ways to unify the mentioned ontological approaches. (shrink)

Charles Taylor’s conception of the relationship between democracy and social creativity developed through a critical synthesis of various traditions, including the Romantic Movement and liberal political philosophy. However, it is argued that Taylor’s understanding of the implications of religion and revolution significantly differentiates his standpoint from that of pragmatism and theories of democratic creativity. Taylor’s defence of religious transcendence is shown to give rise to tensions with the latter perspective. The theorists of democratic creativity suggest that democracy originates in the (...) rupturing of religious significations and their closure of meaning. Taylor essentially inverts these arguments and perceives that the loss of transcendence may lead to a closed world structure. Taylor claims that the dilemmas of the modern immanent frame were prefigured in the French Revolution’s inability to generate an institutional form consistent with its understanding of democracy and that social creativity should be qualified in light of this historical experience. (shrink)

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born...

Schleiermacher's "Soliloquies" not only represent a pivotal work in this classically modern theologian's development as a moral philosopher. They are also arguably the principal moral writing of the early German romantic movement and therefore a significant, if widely overlooked, contribution to the history of ethics in the West. This essay provides a comprehensive interpretation and modest retrieval of this unusual and difficult work by bringing Schleiermacher's early "ethics of individuality" into conversation with Charles Taylor's conception of "expressivist" understandings of human (...) selfhood. It argues that the Monologen are a signal instance of what Taylor has subtly characterized as romanticism's expressivist impulse. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Dans sa lecture du rôle de la religion dans l’espace public, Habermas fait abstraction du pouvoir de la religion d’instituer symboliquement les communautés. Gauchet part d’une vision de la religion dans laquelle cette dimension est centrale. Je considère toutefois que Gauchet sous-estime également la mesure dans laquelle la religion a conservé ce pouvoir au sein de la société post-séculière. ABSTRACT: This article seeks to demonstrate that in his reading of the role of religion in the public realm, Habermas (...) has overlooked religion’s power to symbolically institute communities. Although Gauchet starts from a vision of religion in which this dimension is central, I contend that he too underestimates the extent in which religion has retained this power within postsecular society. (shrink)

This article seeks to demonstrate that in his recent reading of the role of religion in the postsecular public realm, Habermas overlooks a most fundamental dimension of religion: its power to symbolically institute communities. For his part, Gauchet starts from a vision of religion in which this fundamental dimension is central. In his evaluation of the role of religion in postsecular society, he therefore arrives at results which are very different from those of Habermas. However, I believe that Gauchet too (...) underestimates the extent to which religion’s power of symbolic community institution has remained intact within modern, postsecular society. In support of this position, I show how relatively heterogeneous phenomena within Western societies, such as the renewed importance of religion in the public realm, the revival of certain forms of nationalism and the associated demand for recognition of group rights and hence for forms of legal pluralism, may prefigure a new transformation of the public realm. (shrink)

After having identified several shortcomings of the so-called ‘standard accounts’ of shared intentions, this paper will develop a novel framework for understanding such intentions. The framework to be advanced hinges on a notion of ‘expression’, as well as on the claim that shared intentions are expressed—that is, manifested, grasped, shaped and clarified—throughout the unfolding of the joint actions they animate, as well as in the various expressive activities and behaviours that accompany joint action. This claim will be defended with particular (...) reference to the work of Charles Taylor on expression, as well as recent work on embodied cognition. (shrink)

In Chapter 8 of The Language Animal, Charles Taylor claims that narratives are unsubstitutable for an appropriate understanding of social life and ‘human affairs’ in general. In order to identify open questions in his argumentation as well as unwanted consequences of his outlook, I proceed in three consecutive steps. I first problematize Taylor’s distinction between laws and stories, then go on to address his intentional blurring of stories and histories, and finally suggest that the concept of genealogy might be a (...) promising candidate for describing Taylor’s approach, concluding that he implicitly forms the equation: narrative equals history equals critique. (shrink)

It is a noteworthy achievement of Western liberal democracies that they have largely relinquished the use of force against citizens whose lifestyles offend their members’ sensibilities, or alternatively which violate their members’ sense of truth. Toleration has become a central virtue in our public institutions. Powerful majorities are given over to restraint. They do not, by and large, expect the state to crush eccentrics, nonconformists, and other uncongenial minorities in their midst. What precipitated this remarkable evolution in our political culture?The (...) road to toleration originates in the debates provoked by religious dissent in the early modem period. This road was paved in part by a grudging appreciation of the necessity for pragmaticaccommodation. The wars of religion that had devastated the Continent educated the political classes about the costs of persecution. A policy of state-imposed religious intolerance was widely understood to be imprudent.In the early modem period there occurs, however, a shift in the arguments adduced in support of the duty of toleration. (shrink)

Here lyes that mighty Man of SenseWho, full of years, departed hence,To teach the other world Intelligence,This was the prodigious Man,who vanquish’ d Pope and Puritan,By the Magic of Leviathan.Had he not Controversy wanted,His deeper Thoughts had not been scanted;Therefore good Spirits him transplant:Wise as he was, he could not tellWhether he went to Heaven or Hell.Beyond the Tenth Sphere, if there be a wide place,He'll prove by his Art there's no infinite space:And all good Angels may thank him, for (...) thatHe has prov’ d they are something, tho men know not what.Hobbes's Epitaph. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary on the articles by William Rehg and Robert Asen in this issue of Informal Logic. It compares the subject matter of the two papers, offers an interpretation of and commentary on each paper separately, then discusses their overlapping problematic: the importance of public sphere argumentation.

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top-down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom-up” intuitive (...) responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves. (shrink)

On the whole, the essays and arguments in *After Physicalism* assume that the mind-body problem is independent of the physical, biological and social history of human beings. If I am right in what I have argued about the objectification that runs throughout so much of this volume, such assumptions of independence are not only false, but impede our ability to understand the actual nature of mind in our world. Moreover, coming to an understanding of mind in our world is as (...) much about developing a positive ethical conception of human being in the world as it is about achieving epistemic clarity about human action. This is hard, challenging work (much harder and more challenging than contemporary physicalists and dualists realize), and we need more philosophers who will rise to the task of an engaged philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This article examines the learning of a scientific procedure, and its connection to the greater scientific community through the notion of Wittgensteinian rules. The analysis reveals this connection by demonstrating that learning in interaction is largely grounded in rule-based community descriptions and judgments rather than any inner process. This same analysis also demonstrates that learning processes are particularly suited for such an analysis because rules and concomitant phenomena comprise a significant portion of any learning interaction. This analysis further reveals the (...) elucidating merit of Wittgensteinian rules, their relation to community and the concept of practice, and promotes the efficacy of participant-generated rule-formulations as analytic descriptors. (shrink)

Although it has acquired an extraordinary social diffusion, entrepreneurial education has a certain lack of definition associated with its conceptualisation and meaning. It seems clear that entrepreneurial education is linked to the economic sphere, but it is not limited to the productive sector. The idea of entrepreneurial education has been progressively enriched, being linked to the development of skills for personal growth and social progress. Further clarification of the meaning and scope of entrepreneurial education is, therefore, needed. Thus, it is (...) relevant to analyse entrepreneurial identity in the context of personal identity via the theoretical–explanatory investigation of a model developed in two phases. A critical analysis leads us to study the different factors that intervene in the configuration of this identity in an attempt to construct a systemic map of entrepreneurial action. Between the private and the public, entrepreneurs seek new ways of facing the challenges of our times, trying to find new ways of regenerating the links between individuals and institutions and with society in general. In this sense, we show how entrepreneurial educational ecosystems acquire relevance insofar as they consider the subject as the principle of action rather than merely the result of various contextual factors. (shrink)

Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem (...) with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates. (shrink)

Abstract.The United Kingdom Department of Health initiative on “The Expert Patient” (2001) reflects recent trends in political philosophy, ethics and health services research. The overall objective of the initiative is to encourage patients, particularly those suffering from chronic conditions to become more actively involved in decisions concerning their treatment. In doing so there would be (perhaps) an expectation of better patient compliance and (arguably) a resultant improvement in quality of life. Despite these anticipated beneficial influences on health outcomes, there may (...) be a danger that such initiatives are being carried along by the general swell of enthusiasm for recognising and facilitating the claims of disadvantaged or discriminated against groups. What more attractive than that patients should be “liberated” from what might be seen as the oppression of medical paternalism? To a great extent the potential for success of the Expert Patient venture turns on:(a) whether and to what extent a patient can be considered truly to be an expert and (b) full acceptance by the medical and heath care professions of allowing patients a more equitable and positive role.Whilst clearly the patient is an expert in the hermeneutic sense – it is they and they alone who experience their illness – there is nevertheless a risk of confusing experience with expertise. Experience limited to an individual does not of itself give rise to the generalisations that underlie reliable clinical treatment. Neither do the vast majority of patients possess the physiological and pharmacological knowledge to fully appreciate the biological nature of their illness nor the basis, risks or limitations of therapeutic measures. Might the notion of “The Expert Patient” as informed co-decision maker become a well-meaning but rather vacuous aspiration similar to that of informed consent? Even worse, could patient “empowerment” have a deleterious effect? The paper reviews some of the major issues and concludes that the expert patient initiative could have benefits for both patients and health professionals if operated on the basis of concordance: an informed collaborative alliance that optimises the potential benefits of medical care. (shrink)

Argument teachers and scholars have frequently invoked external justification-impressing one's viewpoint upon another-as the primary social function of argument. Pluralism and fundamental disagreement in contemporary democratic societies raise questions regarding the status of argument, including the functions argument should serve. In this essay, I suggest alternatives of agenda expansion, responsibility attribution, and identity formation as important functions of argument in diverse societies. Thesealternative functions are especially important under conditions of social inequality, since they allow less powerful individuals and groups to (...) confront more powerful actors in situations where decision making is not open to all. (shrink)

While being generally appreciative of Sen's theory of capabilities, the point of this paper is to raise some conceptual challenges that arise in addressing entrenched conditions of power and domination from the capability paradigm. The enhancement of people's capability prospects with regard to education, employment, decent living standards and political participation can empower them to challenge various dominating conditions in society. It can also bestow a sense of self-confidence in people to stand up against discriminating practices. Yet, the objectives of (...) the capability theory remain less secure as long as citizens’ capability prospects are dependent on and subjected to arbitrary power and domination. I argue that Sen's theory of capabilities can be strengthened and developed as an effective antidote to the liberal hegemony in political theory by drawing on resources from Pettit's republicanism particularly by accommodating the robustness condition of freedom and by envisioning individual freedom as intimately tied to the common good of the polity. (shrink)

: If liberal theory is to move forward, it must take the political nature of family relations seriously. The beginnings of such a liberalism appear in Mary Wollstonecraft's work. Wollstonecraft's depiction of the family as a fundamentally political institution extends liberal values into the private sphere by promoting the ideal of marriage as friendship. However, while her model of marriage diminishes arbitrary power in family relations, she seems unable to incorporate enduring sexual relations between married partners.

If liberal theory is to move forward, it must take the political nature of family relations seriously. The beginnings of such a liberalism appear in Mary Wollstonecraft's work. Wollstonecraft's depiction of the family as a fundamentally political institution extends liberal values into the private sphere by promoting the ideal of marriage as friendship. However, while her model of marriage diminishes arbitrary power in family relations, she seems unable to incorporate enduring sexual relations between married partners.

Este libro promete ser una contribución para el estudio de la teoría crítica en general y para el análisis de la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en particular. Todos los trabajos que están contenidos en este volumen hacen parte del amplio marco teórico de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Muchos siguen las huellas de los fundadores de esta tendencia, mientras que otros se presentan como críticos de la misma y unos cuantos más tratan de vincular problemas y contextos (...) de relevancia a los conceptos más destacados que se empezaron a construir hace cien años en Frankfurt. Encontramos como buena excusa para su publicación precisamente el año centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social. Además, hemos creído conveniente organizar los materiales en secciones que van desde la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt hasta la consideración de algunos interrogantes de actualidad motivados por el desarrollo de la teoría crítica. No obstante, con esto no pretendemos establecer límites absolutos de clasificación. Confesamos que nuestra forma de organizar los ensayos responde simplemente a criterios editoriales más que a cuestiones teóricas y conceptuales. Claramente las intersecciones entre los estudios aquí presentados son amplias y hacen que cada una de las propuestas pueda dialogar con las otras en función de sus evidentes parecidos de familia. (shrink)

Offers a renovated form of Confucian liberalism that forges a reconciliation between the two extremes of anti-Confucian liberalism and anti-liberal Confucianism.

RésuméL'authenticité et la diversité font aujourd'hui figure de slogans dans les sociétés contemporaines de part et d'autre de l'Atlantique nord. En revanche, on a peu exploré les liens entre ces deux idées. À cette fin, cet article aborde les écrits tantôt convergents, tantôt divergents de Charles Taylor et Martin Heidegger pour prolonger leurs réflexions respectives sur l'authenticité et montrer en quoi elles peuvent servir defondement à une nouvelle forme de diversité culturelle. Pour tous deux, l'être-au-monde authentique nous permet d'accider au (...) tréfonds du matériel culturel dont nous devons disposer pour que se nouent des rapports fructueux avec les autres cultures. (shrink)

After characterizing Taylor’s general approach to the problems of solidarity, we distinguish and reconstruct three contexts of solidarity in which this approach is developed: the civic, the socio-economic, and the moral. We argue that Taylor’s distinctive move in each of these contexts of solidarity is to claim that the relationship at stake poses normatively justified demands, which are motivationally demanding, but insufficiently motivating on their own. On Taylor’s conception, we need some understanding of extra motivational sources which explain why people (...) do (or would) live up to the exacting demands. Taylor accepts that our self-understanding as members of either particular communities or humanity at large has some motivational power, but he suspects that in many cases the memberships are too thin to resonate deeply and enduringly within us. In Taylor’s view, a realistic picture of what moves people to solidarity has to account for the extra motivation, when it happens. We propose an alternative view in which morality, democracy and socio-economic cooperation can be seen as separate spheres or relations which are normatively justified, motivationally demanding, but also sufficiently motivating on their own. (shrink)

Agency and representation are viewed as preconditions for democratic action. The dominant understanding of agency and representation is defined in terms of certain capacities and abilities that are considered to constitute the basis of personhood. The article will put into question this understanding and the assumptions that underpin it and argue that it rests on a mistaken conception of human animality – one that reduces the self to an autonomous and disembodied rational mind. The article will also suggest that it (...) is problematic because it marginalizes more than human forms of life – as well as those of us who are differently human – and excludes their points of view from the political processes of world making. In contrast, I will put forward an understanding of agency and representation that is attuned to the relational dimensions of all life on earth. By paying attention to the semiotic propensities that all forms of life share – which entails considering nonlinguistic forms of communication – this article responds to the need for more radically democratic ways of listening, giving voice, and caring for the earth’s beings and the relations that form the conditions for life to flourish. (shrink)

Noting the prevalence of a misguided suspicion towards tradition, as well as an overt misunderstanding of the very notion of tradition in certain academic circles, this essay seeks to outline some of the basic tenets of an alternative understanding of tradition, based on a ‘sociological’ reading of several major philosophical works. It does so by revisiting and synthesizing some well-known, highly influential conceptual arguments that, taken together, offer a compelling, comprehensive interpretation and understanding of tradition, which manages to avoid and (...) overcome the false dichotomies that have dominated social-scientific thought. The article offers three corresponding analogies that capture the complex nature of tradition: tradition as language, tradition as narrative, and tradition as horizon. It then goes on to discuss the main implications these analogies carry to our understanding of tradition. (shrink)

Recent discussion about the future of mission has engaged with concepts such as missio Dei, polycentrism, Christendom and glocalisation. In order to provide a philosophical response to these and to introduce a new conversation partner, this article explores key ideas from the nomadic theory of Rosi Braidotti. Notions such as the embodied subject, the rhizome and various forms of becoming could be of benefit to the evolving multilogue about mission futures, and an initial attempt is made to show their relevance (...) to the task of reforming an approach to cross-cultural mission usually associated with Christendom and the power of the West. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel's epistemologically-informed conception of critical thinking is one of the most influential accounts of critical thinking around today. In this article, I seek to open up an account of critical thinking that goes beyond the one defended by Siegel. I do this by re-reading an opposing view, which Siegel himself rejects as leaving epistemology ‘pretty much as it is’. This is the view proposed by Charles Taylor in his paper ‘Overcoming Epistemology’. Crucially, my aim here is not to defend (...) Taylor's challenge to epistemology per se, but rather to demonstrate how, through its appeal to certain key tropes within Heideggerian philosophy, Taylor's paper opens us towards a radically different conception of thinking and the human being who thinks. Indeed, as will be argued, it is through this that Taylor and Heidegger come to offer us the resources for re-thinking the nature of critical thinking—in a way that exceeds the epistemological, and does more justice to receptive and responsible conditions of human thought. (shrink)

In the last three decades, we in the West have seen nationalism turn from an apparently progressive force, as in Cuba, Vietnam, and many countries in Africa, into a negative force of degenerating chaos, as in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. Elsewhere, during the same decades, the record of nationalism has been, or at least been perceived to have been, more mixed, for example in Belgium, Canada, and India. The assessments themselves are uncertain and suspect, however. Maybe (...) nationalism was not so clearly progressive or so clearly retrogressive where we had previously thought it so. Maybe we misjudge its ambivalence elsewhere. Maybe we are not even dealing with the same kind of phenomenon.More generally, we have yet to understand the role of nationalism in two world wars and countless imperialist incursions. We have only the vaguest ideas of its connection to social ideologies and movements like racism, fascism, and Nazism and little understanding of its relevance to economic systems like capitalism and socialism. (shrink)

In recent years, theorists of radical democracy have criticized the liberal pluralist model of politics, a model which views the political forum primarily as a space for bargaining and the aggregation of individual preferences. While conceding that some measure of bargaining and preference aggregation is probably an ineliminable feature of democratic politics, radical democrats have charged that this model underestimates or ignores the transformative effects of democratic political interaction. In particular, liberal pluralism does not allow for the possibility that democratic (...) politics can generate new forms of solidarity, enhance personal freedom, and inculcate virtue. (shrink)

There seems to be an overall agreement that parents qua parents are, almost by definition, in need of support and hence that there is always a ‘parental deficit’. In order to help parents out many initiatives are taken, predominantly drawing from a technical conception of parenting. This particular conception defines the deficit as a shortage of practical and theoretical knowledge, and conceives of the predicament of parenting or upbringing as something that can be successfully dealt with. Two criticisms are developed (...) in this article. First, this conception of parenting is exposed as a ‘frictionless fiction’ that makes a very strong appeal to many of us, inhabitants of late modern Western societies, perhaps because it promises answers where there are none to be given. Second, a different conception of the parental deficit is developed following Ramaekers and Suissa who spelled out a parental hermeneutical-existential deficit drawing upon Cavell. This specific kind of deficit picks out another kind of support. I develop this alternative by sketching a figure of strong engagement that provides parent support. (shrink)