Disgrace , by J.M. Coetzee, is a story of a rape; more, it is a tale in which the victim of the rape, Lucy Lurie, is silent. She demands neither sympathy nor justice for what happens toher, presenting herself as neither a victim nor someone seeking revenge. Instead she stands as a witness, and does so by adopting an attitude reminiscent of the thinking of Simone Weil—rejecting the possibility of rights, and not looking for explanations. Rape, Coetzee thus suggests, is (...) an act without meaning, a trauma whose reality cannot be exorcised through narration. Fittingly, therefore, the novel ends with a tableau of Lucy growing flowers in her garden; living, like Candide, without rationalisation or consolatory myth. (shrink)

This paper explores potential points of synthesis between two leading theorists in Critical Theory and Critical International Relations Theory, Axel Honneth and Andrew Linklater. Whereas Linklater's recent work on the harm principle has turned away from the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School in favour of Norbert Elias and process sociology, the paper observes a fundamental complementarity between harm and the precepts of recognition theory that can bridge these otherwise disparate approaches to emancipation. The paper begins with a brief (...) overview of Linklater's emancipatory vision before examining his recent turn to the harm principle and Eliasian process sociology. It is argued that Honneth's work, particularly the ideas of mutual recognition and the diagnosis of social pathologies, clearly resonant with Linklater's defence of ethical universalism and can help further the emancipatory project of Critical International Relations Theory. In particular, Honneth's intersubjective concept of autonomy is argued to provide a normative and empirical standard for emancipation premised on the historically progressive expansion of attitudes of recognition, born out of social struggles, toward the ideal institutionalisation of mutual recognition in world politics. (shrink)

Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a French philosopher who is also a prominent figure in the tradition of Christian mysticism. In her early philosophical writings and lectures, she describes her understanding of the aim of philosophy as “the Search for the Good”. Very much influenced by Plato, Descartes and Kant, Weil states that God as the absolute Good is beyond known truths and can only be reached through Love. This treatment of love as a destructive power whereby the Self effaces itself (...) in order to get closer to God, echoes a somewhat mystical scheme. Weil believes that the only way to reach such knowledge and therefore God, which in her view is the sole purpose of life and should also be the purpose of philosophy. This dissertation focuses on the grounds that bring her to such conclusions as well as providing an analysis of whether Weil’s philosophical approach as an alternative to metaphysical and ethical problems in philosophy is able to stand firm on its own. (shrink)

Climate change and the destruction of the earth is the most urgent issue of our time. We are hurtling towards the end of civilisation as we know it. With an unflinching honest approach, Rupert Read asks us to face up to the fate of the planet. This is a book for anyone who wants their philosophy to deal with reality and their climate concern to be more than a displacement activity. -/- As people come together to mourn the loss of (...) the planet, we have the opportunity to create a grounded, hopeful response. This meaningful hopefulness looks to the new communities created around climate activism. Together, our collective mourning enables us to become human in ways previously unknown. -/- Why Climate Breakdown Matters is a practical guide on how to be a radical, responsible climate activist. (shrink)

I discuss three tiers of technological innovation: mild innovation, or the acceleration by technology of a human activity aimed at a good; moderate innovation, or the obviation by technology of an activity aimed at a good; and radical innovation, or the altering by technology of the human condition so as to change what counts as a good. I argue that it is impossible to morally assess proposed innovations within any of these three tiers unless we rehabilitate a natural-law ethical framework. (...) And I offer some moral starting points within such a framework, in connection with innovations of each of the three types. (shrink)

Businesses have long been admonished for being unduly focused on the pursuit of profit. However, there are some organizations whose purpose is not exclusively economic to the extent that they seek to constitute common good. Building on Christian ethics as a starting point, our article shows how the pursuit of the common good of the firm can serve as a guide for humanistic management. It provides two principles that humanistic management can attempt to implement: first, that community good is a (...) condition for the realization of personal good, and second, that community good can only be promoted if it is oriented towards personal good. To better understand which community good can favor personal good and how it can be achieved, we examine two recent humanistic movements—Conscious Capitalism and Economy of Communion—that strive to participate in the common good. From the analysis of these two movements, we identify a shared managerial willingness to adopt the two principles. Moreover, we also reveal that Conscious Capitalism and Economy of Communion present different ways of linking community good and personal good, and therefore, different means exist for firms to participate in the common good. (shrink)

Authority figures permeate our daily lives, particularly, our political lives. What makes authority legitimate? The current debates about the legitimacy of authority are characterised by two opposing strategies. The first establish the legitimacy of authority on the basis of the content of the authority’s command. That is, if the content of the commands meet some independent normative standard then they are legitimate. However, there have been many recent criticisms of this strategy which focus on a particular shortcoming – namely, its (...) seeming inability to account for who can legitimately command whom. This is the basis of the second strategy, which attempts to characterize the normative relationship that underlies and makes possible authoritative commands. The central point of Part I is that these two strategies are, in fact, not opposed and both raise questions which a theory of legitimacy must answer. If this is the case, then we need to ask: how ought we to determine the legitimacy both of the content of commands as well as who can command whom? Part II will answer this question. Starting with the question of standing, I argue that we ought not to look for normative principles outside of the institutions in which authority is embedded. Rather, one ought to start by elaborating the ontology of institutions in which a sui generis form of normativity arises. A joint commitment account of social ontology provides the tools necessary to see how the direction obligations emerge concurrently with the formation of institutions. Similarly, the question of content can be answered by paying close attention to the social ontology of institutions. We need not look beyond the internal constitutive standards of the institution itself. The constitutive standards provide an internal criterion by which the legitimacy of commands can be established. (shrink)

The tradition of republican patriotism articulated by Maurizio Viroli only seems to avoid the naturalizing dangers inherent in the discourse of nationalism, whether in its so‐called civic or ethnic modes. Rousseau's comment that he wishes the patrie to be experienced as “la mere commune des citoyens” reflects the republican patriot's desire to find a home in the patria. This sentiment originated in Rome and comes down to us primarily in texts written in the immediate aftermath of the Republic's demise, a (...) period characterized by widespread physical uprooting. The sentiment of republican patriotism can thus be seen as a nostalgic reaction to a sense of personal and political deracination and loss. In their yearning for a political home, at least, republican patriots like Rousseau share the rhetoric and desire of nationalists, and that similarity should cause us concern. (shrink)

How might a society wrong people by the way in which it remembers its past? In recent years, philosophers have articulated serval ways in which people may be wronged by dominant historical narratives. The aim of this paper will be to investigate an answer to this question which has yet to be explored by philosophers: a society may do wrong by employing historical narratives that consign people to history. The stories a society tells about its history may place certain identities, (...) or practices central to those identities, in a country’s past but not its present or future. I will begin by examining this phenomenon before going on to articulate the distinctive wrongs and harms involved in consigning to history. I will then argue that people have a prima facie duty not to develop or employ national narratives that consign people to history and a responsibility to challenge and resist the use of such narratives, though there may be cases where employing these narratives is justifiable. (shrink)

Hierarchy is a difficulty for theories of equality, and especially those that define equality in relational or social terms. In ideal egalitarian circumstances it seems that hierarchies should not exist. However, a liberal egalitarian defence of some types of hierarchies is common. Hierarchies of esteem have no further consequences than praise or admiration for valued individual features. Hierarchies of status, with differential reward, can, it is often argued, also be justified when they serve a justified social purpose and meet conditions (...) of genuine equality of opportunity. However, group hierarchies remain problematic, and evidence suggests that they are pervasive in human societies above a subsistence level of production. It has also been argued that group hierarchies are impossible to eliminate, and enormous cost is associated with attempting, and failing, to remove them. However, the perspective of ‘real-world’ political philosophy suggests measures to mitigate group hierarchy, starting with those that are either the easiest to address, the most damaging, or the most consequential. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explicate and compare the ideas of John Dewey and Simone Weil on wisdom. It is a conceptual analysis which proceeds on the assumption that cultivating a love of wisdom in a student is a teacher’s highest calling. The comparison is focussed around two main questions: 1) How is wisdom connected to experience from a psychological perspective? 2) How is wisdom connected to the social dimension of experience?

This article draws on theoretical resources from economic sociology and sociology of law to intervene in economic debates about the relationship between intellectual property and industrialization. Utilizing historical evidence from the earliest period of American intellectual property law and from a formative company in the New England textile industry, I propose a social process of influence that connects intellectual property law to industrialization. I argue that, consistent with the findings of New Economic Sociology, social relationship structures and social capital are (...) the proximate influential force in industrialization. However, I also argue that transformative changes in those social relationship structures are rooted in the emergence of a particular type of political culture: what I call here, borrowing from Hannah Arendt and Frank Dobbin, a “Natal-Industrial Culture.” A Natal-Industrial Culture, as I propose it here, is a political culture in which collective hopes for the future are placed in new technologies and new cultural products, as means for achieving economic growth. Intellectual property law contributed to the emergence of this new type of political culture by holding out the promise of property, as a reward for the provision of new technologies or new cultural products. Because of the way that hope works on motivation—through cognitive pre-rehearsals of future attainment, which involve semantically-meaningful propositions and contribute to positive emotional experience—the promise of property provided a powerful stimulant to social capital formation. Working through the semantic resonances of property, intellectual property law contributed to a political culture in which invention and creativity were expected to secure a future of growth within the political community, both for particular members and for the political community, as a whole. By fostering a Natal-Industrial Culture, intellectual property law contributed to systematic invention and social capital-formation, leading, in turn, to the transformative changes in working and material provisioning that constitute industrialization. (shrink)

This article seeks to challenge the regnant liberal orthodoxy that human rights are the highest and most important of our social virtues. It questions the individualist assumptions of such universa...

This investigation concerns first what Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricœur consider to be «the question of writing» in Plato’s Phaedrus, and then whether their conception of a general philosophical problem of writing finds support in the dialogue. By contrast to their attempts to «determine» the «status» of writing as the general condition of knowledge, my investigation has two objections. (1) To show that Plato’s concern is not to define writing, but to reflect on what is involved in honest and dishonest (...) inquiry. (2) To argue that Derrida’s and Ricœur’s determination of the instrumental (epistemic and moral) «status» of writing, overlooks crucial difficulties of dishonest writing that Plato’s discussion of the pharmakon reveals. The argument proposed is that honest and dishonest inquiry is not tied to the moral status that writing, as an invention or instrument, unconditionally involves, but to the moral quality of what a human being does when inquiring. (shrink)

In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’ Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’ which, on the whole, add little (...) to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge. On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself: I think, and indeed hope, that God-talk, and religious discourse more generally, is, or at least should be, dying out in the West, or more generally in a world that has felt the force of a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This sense that religious convictions are no longer a live option is something which people who think of themselves as either modernists or post-modernists very often tend to have. (shrink)

Human rights is a core issue of continuing political, legal and economic relevance. The current article discusses the historical perceptions of the very essence of human rights standards and poses the question whether the Realpolitik of the changed world and Europe can justify the deviation from the “purist” approach to human rights. The EU Charter, as the most eminent and contemporary “bill of rights”, is chosen as an example of the divergence from “traditional values”. The article does not offer solutions (...) but rather focuses on the expansive development in the doctrinal approach of interpreting human rights that has not been conceptually agreed upon by historians, philosophers and legal scholars. (shrink)

This paper identifies and offers commentary upon a previously un-remarked consonance between Nietzsche and Weil when it comes to the idea of a universal love of the world. The discussion focuses on five features of the Nietzschean account of affirmation, which are as follows: that the possibility of affirmation has the form of a fundamental question at the heart of human life, which has an all-or-nothing character ; that genuine affirmation is rare, difficult or traumatic in an existentially revealing way, (...) primarily because affirmation means facing up to the lack of finality in the world, and in particular the problem of meaningless suffering, which means that affirmation is tied up with a fundamental revaluation. The first half of the paper outlines the parallels between Nietzschean affirmation and Weilian ‘consent to necessity’ in relation to the first three of these, which are also the most general. The second half of the paper explores the fourth and fifth, so as to suggest a way of reading the underlying similarity between these two projects: both are attempts to rediscover the possibility of an all-embracing affirmation of reality in the absence of any existential teleology, and when eschatology has been presumed to be impossible. In other words, both Nietzsche and Weil are compelled to find a way of achieving a transfigured perspective on ‘the whole’ in the absence of any transformation of ‘the whole’. (shrink)

Gilberto Freyre, the great Brazilian historian and sociologist, described Brazil as a ‘racial paradise’, a place where different races and nationalities have come to live together in a sort of ‘racial democracy’. The literature on this topic has become extensive as anthropologists, social scientists and historians felt the need to either prove or disprove such a claim. The argument that Brazil is a racial paradise or democracy is certainly romantic, even utopian; but it is true that Brazil has not experienced (...) the sort of racial friction that has been found in places such as South Africa (e.g. apartheid) or the USA (e.g. segregation laws). This article analyses interculturalism and non-formal education in Brazilian society from the perspective of Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and demonstrates some of the advantages interculturalism has over multiculturalism. We further suggest that the example of modern and contemporary Brazil follows Martin Buber in ‘pointing the way’ for other countries and for other societies and cultures. (shrink)