INTRODUCTION Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as ...

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its basis (...) in a theory of life. (shrink)

One of the major works of an important modem philosopher, Matter and Memory investigates the autonomous yet interconnected planes formed by matter and perception on the one hand and memory and time on the other. Henry Bergson (1859-1941) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927. His works include Time and Free Will, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Creative Evolution, and The Creative Mind.

Emmanuel Levinas is variously used to provide a conceptualization of ethics from which to deduce an ethical politics, an account of the movement from ethics to politics or an exhortation to continually interrupt politics in the name of ethics. What all these approaches share is a reading of Levinas where ethics and politics are separated and ethics is prioritized. My argument in this article is that if the concept of the Third is given due weight in Levinas's work then this (...) separation and prioritization is untenable. The reading advanced foregrounds the Third and in doing so demonstrates that the unproblematized ‘ethics’ often drawn from Levinas is more complex than might initially appear. I argue that if the Third is taken seriously then Levinas's work leads to a requirement to think in terms of the ethico-political, so complicating any attempt to deduce politics from ethics which draws on this. (shrink)

" In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the ...

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its basis (...) in a theory of life. (shrink)

Legal philosophers have been preoccupied with specifying the differences between two systems of normative guidance that are omnipresent in all modern human societies: law and morality. Positivists propose a solution to this ‘Demarcation Problem’ according to which the legal validity of a norm cannot depend on its being morally valid, either in all or at least some possible legal systems. The proposed analysis purports to specify the essential and necessary features of law in virtue of which this is true. Yet, (...) the concept of law is an ‘artefact concept’, that is, a concept that picks out a phenomenon that necessarily owes its existence to human activities intended to create it. Artefact concepts, even simple ones like ‘chair’, are notoriously resistant to analyses in terms of their essential attributes, precisely because they are hostages to human ends and purposes, and also cannot be individuated by their natural properties. Twentieth-century philosophy of science dealt with a kindred Demarcation Problem: how to demarcate epistemically reliable forms of inquiry from epistemically unreliable ones, that is, how to demarcate science from pseudo-science or nonsense. Like the legal philosophers, they sought to identify the essential properties of a human artefact (namely, science). They failed, and spectacularly so, which led some philosophers to wonder, ‘Why does solving the Demarcation Problem matter?’ This essay develops the lessons for legal philosophy from this episode and its philosophical aftermath, and concludes that, in order not to become embroiled in pointless Fullerian speculations about the effects of jurisprudential doctrines on behaviour, we should abandon the Demarcation Problem in jurisprudence. (shrink)

This essay attempts to sharpen significantly the critical debate around Levinas’s work by focussing on the question of politics, which is, it is argued, Levinas’s Achilles’heel. Five problems in Levinas’s treatment of politics are identified and discussed: fraternity, monotheism, and rocentrism, the family, and Israel. It is argued that Levinas’s ethics is terribly compromised by his conception of politics. In order to save Levinasian ethics from this compromise, two possibilities are explored: first, to follow Derrida’s separation of ethical form from (...) political content in his recent reading of Levinas, which allows for a notion of political invention linked to ethical responsibility, and second, to link Levinas’s conception of ethics to what is called in the essay the anarchistic disturbanceof politics. In conclusion, this anarchistic experience of ethics in linked to a quite different understanding of politics as the dissensual space of democracy. (shrink)

Examines the philosophy of Henri Bergson, explains his concepts of duration, memory, and elan vital, and discusses the influence of science on Bergson.

Emmanuel Levinas' radical heteronomous ethics has received a great deal of scholarly attention. However, his political thought remains relatively neglected. This essay shows how Levinas moves from the anarchical, ethical relationship with the Other to the totalizing realm of politics with his phenomenology of the third person, the Third. With the appearance of the Third, the ego must respond to more than one Other. It must decide whom to respond to first. This decision leads the ego from the an-archical, ethical (...) realm to the realm of politics. Although the Third universalizes the an-archical relationship with the Other into the political realm, it does not supplant the original ethical relationship. Instead, there is a never-ending oscillation between ethics and politics. The world of institutions and impersonal justice must be held in check by the an-archical responsibility for the Other. Levinas calls for both an-archy and justice. (shrink)

The relationship between tort law jurisprudence and the ethics and phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas.

Two conservative theorists, F. A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott, have advanced theories of law with important and plausible central theses focusing on the rule of law. The author argues, however, that in each case the theorist ‐ or at least some of his followers on the contemporary British and American political scene ‐ have wrongly inferred strong conclusions from these theories which are inimical to the welfare state. In conclusion, the author points to possible ways of reconciling rule of law (...) to social justice. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas' radical heteronomous ethics has received a great deal of scholarly attention. However, his political thought remains relatively neglected. This essay shows how Levinas moves from the an-archical, ethical relationship with the Other to the totalizing realm of politics with his phenomenology of the third person, the Third. With the appearance of the Third, the ego must respond to more than one Other. It must decide whom to respond to first. This decision leads the ego from the an-archical, ethical (...) realm to the realm of politics. Although the Third universalizes the an-archical relationship with the Other into the political realm, it does not supplant the original ethical relationship. Instead, there is a never-ending oscillation between ethics and politics. The world of institutions and impersonal justice must be held in check by the an-archical responsibility for the Other. Levinas calls for both an-archy and justice. Key Words: Derrida • ethics • Levinas • liberalism • the Other • politics • responsibility • said • saying • the Third. (shrink)