In the present chapter I try to determine to what extent the public policies adopted by Romanian governments following the fall of the communist regime contributed to alleviating the most egregious past injustice, the Holocaust. The measures taken for memorializing the Holocaust will be analysed through the lens of a mixed reparatory justice – relational egalitarian account. Employing such a framework entails a focus on symbolic reparations, meant to promote civic trust, social solidarity, and encourage the restoration of (...) social and cultural capital in societies affected by historical injustices. Such symbolic reparations can include public atonement, changing street names, establishing memorials, funding museums, including Holocaust study in the national curriculum, setting national days for the commemoration of the Holocaust, etc. The need for symbolic reparation has become increasingly clearer in the literature on Holocaust memorialization, and the present paper intends to go a step further, by providing researchers with a theoretical approach that can be used to make better sense of the effects of measures taken as part of the process of Holocaust remembrance. In the chapter I also address the issue of determining who the duty-bearers should be. I argue that there could be several indicators for reparatory justice, including in this case compensation programs and the establishment of institutions that would allow dialogue between descendants of the victims and descendants of the perpetrators, a sine qua non condition for restoring social trust in communities marked by violations of human rights, especially of such a scale as the Holocaust. (shrink)

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)

Filling a gap in knowledge in gender theory, genocidal, and Holocaust studies, this paper operationalizes the concept of phallicism as an analytic explanation of the simultaneous killing and sexual victimization of racialized men in western, capitalist, patriarchal societies. The theory of phallicism posits that racialization lays the basis for a sexualization process wherein racialized males are caricaturized as both salacious savages (who can be raped by the men or women of the dominant racial group) and bestial/wanton creatures deserving (...) of immediate death for the sake of liberal civility. Breaking with the dominant interpretive lenses in scholarly discourses around race and gender that understand racialized femininity as the basis of dehumanization, this paper will operationalize the notion of phallicism through historical and comparative analysis of the writings of political prisoner George Jackson and Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. With the theory of phallicism—the guiding theoretic of the paradigm of Black Male Studies—we can sharpen our conceptual acumen to account for the function of misandric patterns of intergroup violence and its role as the organizing principle of the negrophobia characteristic of Western, patriarchal, capitalist regimes. (shrink)

Steven Spielberg‘s filmed representation of the Holocaust dares its viewers to experience, as secondary witnesses, atrocities committed by the Nazis in Poland. The film is yet another form of testimonial narrative (audio-visual but lacking a full historical context, except for a few on-screen titles) which aligns the survivors, who have come to be known as the Schindler Jews, and their descendants, on the one hand, and Spielberg‘s cameraman (comparable to an internalized narrator), Spielberg the film director (an external, omniscient (...) narrator), and the film-theater audience, on the other. We are all turned into witnesses in the same process and at the same time in which the real witnesses, the survivors, testify to the horror of the Holocaust. (shrink)

This essay suggests that Continental Studies of Evil need a more global approach in thinking about political evils of today. Highlighting the need for a more comparative and global perspective, I explore two proposals: first, the in-between space of the geographical binaries of East/West and Global South/Global North cultivates many political evils. Second, taking issue with the conviction in Continental philosophy that the Holocaust caused a rupture in the thinking of evil, I argue for the continuity of evils (...) and characterize the insistence on the unprecedented character of the Holocaust as an example of Eurocentrism. (shrink)

Trauma and traumatization have arguably always been part of the human experience yet have in the last few decades come to occupy a prominent place in various popular and academic contexts. This chapter offers an interdisciplinary and comparative investigation of trauma and traumatization in different historical contexts. More specifically, my aim is to discuss whether the rich bodies of research in trauma and traumatization in Holocaust survivors and their descendants yield relevant insights for post-slavery contexts. It has been shown (...) that children of Holocaust survivors suffer from stress and other symptoms related to their parents’ traumatization which influence the interactions with their environments. Such results made me wonder whether the traumatic impact of chattel slavery—which has been abolished some 160 years ago—might have a similar impact, yet now across several generations. Issues of the transmission and current persistence of trauma are inherently linked to questions of social justice, recognition and reparations. This chapter is meant, however, as an exploration of interdisciplinary connections that should be studied in concert to account for the traumatic impact of historical and present day experiences. It starts by discussing the concepts of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. Continuing by exploring the phenomenon of the inter- and transgenerational transmission of trauma, it relies in part on the important body of research conducted on families of Holocaust survivors. I then turn to the much less researched ‘post-traumatic slave syndrome’ (DeGruy) and discuss two factors that might contribute to the transgenerational transmission of trauma in the families of former enslaved: epigenetics and the continuation of traumatization even after the abolition of slavery as articulated in Historical Trauma theory. Drawing upon these insights, I conclude that it is plausible that a continuing transgenerational transmission of trauma might occur in some families of slavery survivors, the knowledge of which might help to break the chains of such traumatization across generations. (shrink)

The challenge posed by legal indeterminacy to legal legitimacy has generally been considered from points of view internal to the law and its application. But what becomes of legal legitimacy when the legal status of a given norm is itself a matter of contestation? This article, the first extended scholarly treatment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s new definition of antisemitism, pursues this question by examining recent applications of the IHRA definition within the UK following its adoption by (...) the British government in 2016. Instead of focusing on this definition’s substantive content, I show how the document reaches beyond its self-described status as a “non-legally binding working definition” and comes to function as what I call a quasi-law, in which capacity it exercises the de facto authority of the law, without having acquired legal legitimacy. Broadly, this work elucidates the role of speech codes in restricting freedom of expression within liberal states. (shrink)

Recently, I have proposed an extension of the framework of the ethics of collegiality (Berber & Subotić, forthcoming). By incorporating an anti-individual perspective and the notion of epistemic competence, this framework can reveal the epistemic virtue/vice relativism, which, in turn, charts the tension between being a good colleague and an efficient, loyal employee. In this paper, however, I want to sketch how the ethics of collegiality could be applied to practical domains, such as the historical accountability and atonement of corporations (...) that participated in the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich and contributed to the Holocaust by using slave or forced labor. New studies suggest that corporations ought to engage in deeper historical reflection and ethical dialogue between Shoah survivors and top managers to address the issue of industrial compliance (Federman 2021), whereas most of the work on this topic traditionally focused on the issue of reparations litigation (Kelly 2016, Neuborne 2003). Through the notions of collective institutional epistemic vice and institutional ethos (Fricker 2021), the upshot is to assess whether it is feasible for corporations to be genuinely repentant regarding their role in the Holocaust thanks to the ethics of collegiality instead of merely offering compensation. I will argue that instead of emphasizing ethical leadership and the top-down approach to the (re-)implementation of values in corporate conduct, the spotlights should be on the bottom-up approach grounded in collegial solidarity among all employees. (shrink)

This study divides some of the philosophical anthropologies developed after the Holocaust into three frameworks. To do this the author shows how the present modern crisis is an anthropological one and unites the sum of the different crisis dimensions mankind is currently facing. The article approaches the postmodern journey from its two routes—the relativistic and the metaphysical. The second is presented as “status quo-oriented” or as a form of modernized democracy. Because of its popularity, the neologism “transhumanism” is here (...) examined togeth er with the hypothetical coming of a post-human era. This in turn is viewed as a revival of the illustrated myth of the happy world. The author first offers a “status quo” criticism “transhumanism” from the metaphysical anthropology viewpoint and then proposes an approach to a “third way, that is, the convergence of other anthropologies revolving around a person’s dignity born of his or her metaphysical roots together with a recovery of the value of human carnality. The article concludes by putting the different philosophers’ viewpoints face-to-face with the Person of Jesus Christ. (shrink)

Moral Clarity is one of those rare works which is trans-disciplinary. This review contextualises Neiman as a philosopher and theologian who performs her cultural work in domains as diverse as memory studies and discourses on the problem of empathy. The review critiques reductionist positions which see Neiman merely as an acolyte of Hannah Arendt.

A partire dall’incontro con l’opera di Darwin agli inizi degli anni Trenta, Primo Levi eleverà le scienze naturali a incrollabile a priori ontologico della sua riflessione etica e politica. Ciò che si intende mostrare è quanto una solida e consapevole conoscenza del darwinismo abbia costituito il “filtro di lettura” principale della riflessione su Auschwitz compiuta in Se questo è un uomo. È in quest’ottica che il binomio sommersi-salvati, vero e proprio nucleo del pensiero di Levi, rivela tutta la sua portata (...) concettuale. Quest’ultimo rappresenta infatti la risultante socio-antropologica delle leggi inegualitarie della vita, in opposizione alle quali Levi concepisce la disperata necessità della lotta umana contro i limiti dolorosi della materia vivente. Nelle opere della maturità, il naturalismo continuerà a fornire a Levi gli strumenti di base per l’elaborazione di originali soluzioni concettuali a problemi filosofici cruciali come l’origine della aggressività umana, la natura del male politico, il rapporto umano-animale e il nesso natura-civiltà. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), born in Hanover, Germany, was a public intellectual, refugee, and observer of European and American politics. She is especially known for her interpretation of the events that led to the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. -/- Arendt studied under German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and set out to pursue a path as an academic, writing a dissertation on St. Augustine. However, Hitler, the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and the bloody Holocaust forever (...) changed her life. Being Jewish, Arendt was forced to flee the country, seeking refuge in France and eventually the United States. After living through the outbreak of WWII, Arendt devoted the rest of her life to writing about politics, although less in a traditional philosophical sense and more in the vein of a political observer, interpreting events of the twentieth century. -/- This essay explains some central insights of her political thought and how she developed these concepts to overcome the loss of politics as public debate in Nazi Germany. (shrink)

Richard Landes is professionally a historian but in this book under review, he is a philosopher of violence; especially genocides and the Holocaust. The reviewer has synoptically read him, Susan Neiman on the one hand and Haruki Murakami and Stephen King on the other hand. The review flows between the history of ideas, philosophy and literary studies since all three are connected to each other.

The context of international health research involving human subjects, and this should appear obvious, is the human community. As such, basic questions of how human beings should be treated by other human beings, particularly in situations of unequal power – e.g., in the form of control, choice, or opportunity – lay at the foundations of related ethical discourse when ethics are discussed at all. I trace a narrative that follows upon a recent revision process of international guidelines for biomedical research (...) involving human subjects. I focus in particular upon the issue of a standard of care. In the second section, I draw upon philosophers John Rawls, Claudia Card, and Allen Buchanan to discuss concerns regarding the 'least advantaged members of society' in the context of global inequality. The paper includes reflections upon pedagogy in courses focused upon international health research involving human subjects. (shrink)

The paper suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against sympathy after the French Revolution, Walter Benjamin’s claims against empathy following the traumatic shock of Modernity and the First World War, and Hannah Arendt’s critical take on compassion. after the Holocaust are similar responses to singular historical crises. Reconsidering Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and its evocation of Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891), I show first that the novella bears the traces of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Appeal (...) to Law” (1809). Then, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trauma in Illuminations (1968, edited by Arendt), I discuss the political importance Arendt attaches to the proper way of telling a story, at a time when “the communicability of experience is decreasing” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 86). Through the analysis of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Arendt’s “heartless” report on the Eichmann trial (1963), I equally show that, according to Arendt, testimonies must be narrated, or rather performed, in a dispassionate, dry, and compact manner so that they can be historically and politically relevant. (shrink)

Nakba is ignored in Western philosophy encyclopedias, and the notion of genocide is rarely explained. In turn, there is much talk about the Holocaust.

ABSTRACT: Almost all the voices of the six million Jewish men, women, and children who perished in the Holocaust were shuttered in the massacres of the Einsatzgruppen and inside the gas chambers (and vans) of the six German extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka II, Bełżec, Sobibór, Chełmno, and Majdanek). Some of the victims' writings and drawings have survived, and these testimonies remain today a fraction of the millions of voices that were lost forever. With this paper I would like to (...) convey the idea that the (reconstructed and often fictionalized) voices that can be found in Holocaust feature films represent a homage to the victims who perished, and that these films (independently of their commercial success or their minor historical errors) often bring knowledge about the victims' suffering, antisemitism, the ghettos, the transports, the massacres, the Vernichtungslager and the Konzentrationslager to the vast public, and represent a glimpse into the shuttered voices of the Shoah. I also argue that, approached with caution, Holocaust films (antisemitic German propaganda films, post-war documentaries and post-war feature films) can be a valuable contribution to the historiography of the Shoah. (shrink)

Ordinary people shudder at the thought that people in positions of power might do whatever they think they can get away with. But that is often the way it is in the real world, and the risks go even higher when opportunity is compounded with impatience. The ways of negotiation and diplomacy are not considered entirely outmoded. But more and more we are being duped by a dream of some ultimate technological fix: that one more fancy gadget is all it (...) will take to solve the vexing problems that less well-tooled folks have been stumbling over for centuries. Our success rate, this reasoning goes, has been limited so far only by the limits on our equipment. With the new super-missile, or the new super-plane, or the new superlaunching system in space, we will be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound-or, what is more to the point, just blow them away and walk across the crater. "Bombs can be clean." "Nuclearwar is winnable." The illusion of omnipotence that accompanies this megalomania is well nurtured by manufacturers who stand in line for contracts to help build some super-weapon. This should not be surprising. What at first glance is surprising is the almost total failure of our commercial media to call this myth into question. This criticism is meant to be sweeping, but I will here focus my remarks on film. (shrink)

This was written for the Archdiocese of Calcutta's mouthpiece, The Herald in 2009 and published there. The audience is chiefly popular and not the usual academic audience both within Catholicism or in the academe in general. This essay makes a case for us in understanding and empathizing with the essential loneliness of the Catholic Religious (as understood by a married Hindu man). Further, literature is shown hear as effective therapy for resisting loneliness and as a therapeutic tool for self-help by (...) Catholic Religious. The author is not in possession of the published article but has been informed that copies of The Herald, Kolkata are kept at Goethals's Library, St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss in detail two of the earliest such documentaries: Death Mills (1945), directed by Billy Wilder; and Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), directed by George Stevens. Both film-makers were able to get direct footage of the newly-liberated concentration camps from the U.S. Army. Wilder served as a Colonel in the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare department in 1945 and was tasked with producing a documentary on the death camps as well as helping to restart Germany’s film industry. I (...) next review the great French Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955), directed by Alain Resnais. This was a widely acclaimed film, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1956. Resnais employed a camp survivor (Jean Cayrol) to write the dialogue, and it is powerful, indeed, truly lyrical in places. The last film I review in the essay is a generally overlooked British Thames Television documentary, Genocide: 1941-1945 (1974), directed by Michael Darlow (and narrated by Sir Laurence Oliver). It was the first of the major Holocaust documentaries to focus on the point that the Nazi genocide targeted first and foremost the Jewish people, and to explore the development of Nazi racial theory, and the rise of the SS. (shrink)

Art often is the subject of philosophy; it is more rare that a work of art becomes philosophy, pursued by means other than language. In its cinematic way, Son of Saul, a Hungarian film by László Nemes about the Holocaust, engages with the same set of problems that the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about.

In a recent opinion paper, it was argued that individuals with multiple retractions or a record of academic misconduct should not serve as editors, including as editors-in-chief, on the editorial boards of scholarly or academic journals. As a first step towards appreciating how such a policy could be applied in practice, the presence of 30 individuals listed on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard on editorial boards was screened. Six cases are highlighted to gain an appreciation of the potential reputational risks that (...) journals and publishers might incur by including individuals with a tainted academic record on editorial boards. Given the reputational, legal and other risks associated with this type of assessment and decision, more formal positioning and guidance are needed by global ethics policy-related bodies such as COPE, the ICMJE, and the CSE, even more so in journals that claim to follow these organizations’ ethical guidelines. (shrink)

Comments presented at the 35th International Seminar on the -- New Institutional Economics -- Empirical Methods for the Law; Syracuse, 2018.

This article offers a critical overview of a set of normative theories, namely Tianxia 天下 (all-under-heaven), whose purpose is to provide a renewed conceptual framework for the improvement of the world system. First, the article introduces the origins, main features, and differences within Tianxia, before discussing two major criticisms leveled against it. The article then argues that the most powerful parts of these criticisms come from the challenges posed against Tianxia’s legitimacy. The article elaborates on this and introduces two additional (...) challenges of the same kind which were not discussed before. While the article leaves open the question of whether Tianxia is a realistic utopia, it insists that meaningful discussion of Tianxia must take legitimacy challenges seriously. It ends with a discussion concerning whether China can be understood as a civilization-state and how this understanding affects Tianxia’s reception as a realistic utopia. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of Mesmer's theory.

This article provides an original account of slurs and how they may be differentially used by in-group and out-group speakers. Slurs are first distinguished from other terms and their role in social interaction is discussed. A new distinction is introduced between three different uses of slurs : the paradigmatic derogatory use, non-paradigmatic derogatory use, and non-paradigmatic non-derogatory use. I then account for their literal meaning and explain how a family-resemblance conception of category membership can clarify our understanding of the various (...) natural-language uses of slurs, -. The focus is restricted primarily to race-based and sex-based slurs used in the context of English speakers, and the article concludes with desiderata to be met by any subsequent analyses of slurs. (shrink)

In this paper, I expand my upon earlier linguistic research (Lian, 2023), which delved into the genre of abstracts from Western philosophical papers. I engage with the philosophical ramifications emanating from the guidelines established for crafting philosophy paper abstracts (Lian, 2023) and underscore their significance in the domain of academic philosophical writing. A pivotal focus of this research is to navigate the intricate philosophical challenges posed by cross-disciplinary investigations bridging applied linguistic statistics with philosophical paper composition, specifically, the nuanced interpretation (...) of linguistic findings in a manner palatable to philosophers. My exploration probes into the dynamics of various concepts within Inter-Disciplinary Research (IDR), highlighting the complexities in reconciling semantic intuitions related to the notions of "Method (M)" and "Conclusion (C)". I delineate three philosophical stances: (1) deferring to scientific authority, (2) recognizing domain-specific terminologies, and (3) interrogating peripheral scientific theories. I posit that these stances significantly influence the ways philosophers engage with and resolve the cross-disciplinary semantic and theoretical contentions stemming from the rhetorical structures of "Method (M)" and "Conclusion (C)". This work proposes avenues to attain either "theoretical coherence" or "disciplinary synthesis", thereby fostering enhanced cross-disciplinary collaboration and fortifying academic discourse across diverse fields. -/- Keywords: Inter-Disciplinary Research (IDR), Applied linguistics, Philosophical writing, Genre Analysis, Rhetorical Moves . (shrink)

Philosophical tradition has long held that free will is necessary for moral responsibility. We report experimental results that show that the folk do not think free will is necessary for moral responsibility. Our results also suggest that experimental investigation of the relationship is ill served by a focus on incompatibilism versus compatibilism. We propose an alternative framework for empirical moral psychology in which judgments of free will and moral responsibility can vary independently in response to many factors. We also suggest (...) that, in response to some factors, the necessity relation may run from responsibility to free will. (shrink)

A crucial question for artificial cognition systems is what meaning is and how it arises. In pursuit of that question, this paper extends earlier work in which we show that emergence of simple signaling in biologically inspired models using arrays of locally interactive agents. Communities of "communicators" develop in an environment of wandering food sources and predators using any of a variety of mechanisms: imitation of successful neighbors, localized genetic algorithms and partial neural net training on successful neighbors. Here we (...) focus on environmental variability, comparing results for environments with (a) constant resources, (b) random resources, and (c) cycles of "boom and bust." In both simple and complex models across all three mechanisms of strategy change, the emergence of communication is strongly favored by cycles of "boom and bust." These results are particularly intriguing given the importance of environmental variability in fields as diverse as psychology, ecology and cultural anthropology. (shrink)

Five reasons why teaching medical humanities in medical schools improves student performance, enhances wellbeing, and ameliorates patient outcomes.

We tend to identify “real” knowledge of nature with science, and for good reasons. The sciences have developed unique ways of disclosing and modifying the intricate workings of nature, building on quantitative, experimental and technologically advanced styles of thinking. Scientific research has produced robust and reliable forms of knowledge, using methodologies that are often remarkably transparent and verifiable. At the same time, laboratories and other research settings are highly artificial environments, constituting drastically modified versions of reality, allowing nature to emerge (...) in a particular way. This book starts from the conviction that there are other ways of knowing about nature besides science. Notably, literary documents (novels, plays, poems) on nature and natural entities (landscapes, animals, plant forms) often convey careful analyses and observations, quite elaborate and true to life. Comparative epistemology is the discipline that tries to assess, in a critical manner, the relative validity and value of various knowledge forms. This volume presents a series of case studies in comparative epistemology, critically comparing the works of prominent representative of the life sciences (such as Aristotle, Darwin, Mendel and many others) with the writings of their literary counterparts (such as Andersen, Melville, Verne, Ibsen, and many others). The book aims to contribute to the expanding field of Science and Literature Studies, allowing basic insights from the sciences and the humanities to mutually challenge and enlighten one another. (shrink)

Currently, there are many advocacy interventions aimed at reducing animal consumption. We report results from a lab (N = 267) and a field experiment (N = 208) exploring whether, and to what extent, some of those educational interventions are effective at shifting attitudes and behavior related to animal consumption. In the lab experiment, participants were randomly assigned to read a philosophical ethics paper, watch an animal advocacy video, read an advocacy pamphlet, or watch a control video. In the field experiment, (...) we measured the impact of college classes with animal ethics content versus college classes without animal ethics content. Using a pretest, post-test matched control group design, humane educational interventions generally made people more knowledgeable about animals used as food and reduced justifications and speciesist attitudes supporting animal consumption. None of the interventions in either experiment had a direct, measurable impact on self-reported animal consumption. These results suggest that while some educational interventions can change beliefs and attitudes about animal consumption, those same interventions have small impacts on animal consumption. (shrink)

This paper examines three cases of the clash between science and philosophy: Zeno’s paradoxes, the Frame Problem, and a recent attempt to experimentally refute skepticism. In all three cases, the relevant science claims to have resolved the purported problem. The sciences, construing the term broadly, are mathematics, artificial intelligence, and psychology. The goal of this paper is to show that none of the three scientific solutions work. The three philosophical problems remain as vibrant as ever in the face of robust (...) scientific attempts to dispel them. The paper concludes by examining some consequences of this persistence. (shrink)