Respect Relationships in Diverse Societies

The paper aims to clarify what is both meant and entailed when the notion of respect is invoked in relation to the issues of diversity. A distinction is introduced between two types of respecting agents: the state and the citizen. The paper then distinguishes respect in relation to a commonality – in this case citizenship – from respect in relation to specific difference. The importance of respect in relation to a commonality is stressed, whilst the distinction between the state and the citizen as the respecting agent is used to raise questions about respect of difference. The latter part of the paper looks at Peter Jones’ compromise position of ‘mediated recognition,’ and suggests the possibility of ‘mediated accommodation.’ I am grateful for insightful comments and discussions with Tiziana Torresi and Geoffrey Brahm Levey, as well as Laura Valentini, Leah Bassel, Adam Swift, Stephen Cohen, Miriam Ronzoni, Kerah Gordon-Solomon, Jennifer Balint, Toby Ord, and to the useful feedback from the editors of Res Publica. I am also grateful to The Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, where part of this paper was written whilst visiting in the Department.     

Thomas Kuhn's Misunderstood Relation to Kripke-Putnam Essentialism

Kuhn's ‘taxonomic conception’ of natural kinds enables him to defend and re-specify the notion of incommensurability against the idea that it is reference, not meaning/use, that is overwhelmingly important. Kuhn's ghost still lacks any reason to believe that referentialist essentialism undercuts his central arguments in SSR – and indeed, any reason to believe that such essentialism is even coherent, considered as a doctrine about anything remotely resembling our actual science. The actual relation of Kuhn to Kripke-Putnam essentialism, is as follows: Kuhn decisively undermines it – drawing upon the inadequacies of such essentialism when faced with the failure of attempts to instantiate in history or contemporaneously its ‘thought-experiment’ – and leaves the field open instead for his own more ‘realistic’, deflationary way of thinking about the operation of ‘natural kinds’ in science. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Autonomy,life as an intrinsic value,and the right to die in dignity

This paper examines two models of thinking relating to the issue of the right to die in dignity: one takes into consideration the rights and interests of the individual; the other supposes that human life is inherently valuable. I contend that preference should be given to the first model, and further assert that the second model may be justified in moral terms only as long as it does not resort to paternalism. The view that holds that certain patients are not able to comprehend their own interests in a fully rational manner, and therefore ‘we’ know what is good for these patients better than ‘they’ do, is morally unjustifiable. I proceed by refuting the ‘quality of life’ argument, asserting that each person is entitled to decide for herself when it is worth living and when it is not. In this connection, a caveat will be made regarding the role of the family. The author’s research interests include bioethics, free speech, tolerance and ethics in the media.     

How Causal is Downward Causation?

Summary  The purpose of this paper is to lay bare the major problems underlying the concept of downward causation as discussed within the perspective of the present interest for phenomena that are characterized by self-organization.In our discussion of the literature, we have focussed on two questions: (1) What sorts of things are said to be, respectively, causing and caused within the context of downward causation? And (2) What is the meaning of ‘causing’ in downward causation? We have concluded that the concept of ‘downward causation’ is muddled with regard to the meaning of causation and fuzzy with regard to the nature of the causes and the effects. Moreover, we have concluded that ‘causation’ in respect of ‘downward causation’ is usually understood in terms of explanation and determination rather than in terms of causation in the sense of ‘bringing about’. Thus, the term ‘downward causation’ is badly chosen.     

Entity, Identity and Unity

I propose a fourfold categorisation of entities according to whether or not they possess determinate identity-conditions and whether or not they are determinately countable. Some entities – which I call ‘individual objects’ – have both determinate identity and determinate countability: for example, persons and animals. In the case of entities of a kind K belonging to this category, we are in principle always entitled to expect there to be determinate answers to such questions as ‘Is x the same K as y?’ and ’How many Ks are there satisfying condition C?’, even if we may sometimes be unable in practice to discover what these answers are. But other entities apparently lack either determinate identity, or determinate countability, or both. In these terms I try to explain certain important ontological differences between familiar macroscopic objects and various rather more esoteric entities, such as the ‘particles’ of quantum physics, quantities of material stuff, and tropes or property instances. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Hermann Cohen and Bakhtin’s early aesthetics

In this article, Bakhtin’s early aesthetics is reread in the context of Hermann Cohen’s system of philosophy, especially his aesthetics. Bakhtin’s thinking from the early ethical writing Toward a Philosophy of Act to Author and Hero in Artistic Activity and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is followed. In Author and Hero, an individual is in his life conceived as involved in cognitive and ethical action but as remaining without a consummative form; the form, or the ‘soul’, is bestowed upon a person by the creative activity of the artist alone. In his understanding of artistic creativity and the relationship between the ‘hero’ and the author, Bakhtin closely follows Cohen, with the exception that for Cohen the object of artistic form-giving is the universal, idealized man, whereas for Bakhtin it is an individual. In the concept of a ‘polyphonic novel’ as developed in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin, however, considers this view of the activity of the artist (or the novelist) to apply to the “traditional” novel only, while in a Dostoevskyean novel the characters are not subordinated to any defining power of the author. Bakhtin’s theory of the Dostoevskyean novel is thus a return to the emphasis of the cognitive and ethical autonomy of the individual. His understanding of the encounter between persons as a ‘subject’—‘subject’ or an ‘I’—‘thou’ relation has a predecessor, among others, in Cohen.     

Respect and Membership in the Moral Community

Some philosophers object that Kant’s respect cannot express mutual recognition because it is an attitude owed to persons in virtue of an abstract notion of autonomy and invite us to integrate the vocabulary of respect with other persons-concepts or to replace it with a social conception of recognition. This paper argues for a dialogical interpretation of respect as the key-mode of recognition of membership in the moral community. This interpretation highlights the relational and practical nature of respect, and accounts for its governing role over other persons-regarding concepts.

Human Rights in the Perspective of Traditional Africa: A Cosmotheandric Approach

The notion of human rights is highly controversial and contested in modern scholarship. However, human rights have been defined as ‘the rational basis… for a justified demand.’ What constitutes demand should be understood as that which is different from favor or privilege but one's due, free from racial, religious, gender, political inclinations. But since rights are basic due to the fact that they are necessary for the enjoyment of something else, we are poised to examine it from the pre-figurative, configurative and post-figurative stages of development in Africa. This enterprise anchors on the belief in cosmotheandrisation of human rights in Africa: cosmos ‘earth’, theos ‘God’ and anthropos ‘human’. These three levels of horizontal and vertical relationship guarantee the respect for human rights in traditional Africa. Through this approach, this enterprise shows that the positive approach to human rights is majorly declarative without corresponding pragmatic manifestation.     

The Demise of the First Secularization: The Church of Gogol and the Church of Belinsky

The article presents Gogol as marking the end of a century-long phase of secularism in Russian culture, from Peter the Great to Pushkin, and as the first writer to represent the cultural phenomenon of the ‘New Middle Ages’ and renewed religious zeal, first described by Berdyaev; further, it highlights some commonalities between Gogol and Belinsky and takes Belinsky as a leading instance of ‘religious atheism’. The article goes on to consider Russian culture’s need for neutral ‘middle ground’ between its multiple and extreme polarities and, in this context, highlights Sergej Averintsev’s plea for an orientation towards Aristotelianism. These are the opening two sections of a longer paper delivered at a conference on ‘Russian Culture at the Crossroads. Art and Society’ at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,’ 24–25 November 1997. The title of the full paper is: ‘Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Secularization, Demonism and the Transition from a Binary to a Ternary Model.’     

Agonistic Recognition in Education: On Arendt’s Qualification of Political and Moral Meaning

Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by ‘thinking. Arendt’s conception of ‘thinking’ is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers constitute their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called ‘thinking’ to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education—thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt’s demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for ‘thinking’ as a qualification of political and moral meaning–the ‘taste’ to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community.     

Portraits as displays

Cynthia Freeland’s investigation of four kinds of ‘fidelity’ in portraiture is cut across by more general philosophical concerns. One is about what might be called the expression of persons--the persons or ‘inner selves’ of portrait subjects and of portrait artist: whether either is possible across each of the four kinds of fidelity, and whether these two kinds of expression are in tension. More fundamental is the problem of telling how self-expression is at all possible in any of these forms. Finally, she wonders how photography affects all these questions. This comment addresses portraiture not so much in terms of the four fidelities, but with another quartet of concepts: four ordinary types of ‘display’, in terms of which we see how artists’ self-expression is possible in all these forms, also including photography. Its key idea is that portraits are displays simply by being pictures or sculptures, which are kinds of artifacts, hence things that we perceive as having intentional affordance: that is, as being intentionally made ‘for’ something.

Why the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever Cannot Be Solved in Less than Three Questions

Rabern and Rabern (Analysis 68:105–112 2) and Uzquiano (Analysis 70:39–44 4) have each presented increasingly harder versions of ‘the hardest logic puzzle ever’ (Boolos The Harvard Review of Philosophy 6:62–65 1), and each has provided a two-question solution to his predecessor’s puzzle. But Uzquiano’s puzzle is different from the original and different from Rabern and Rabern’s in at least one important respect: it cannot be solved in less than three questions. In this paper we solve Uzquiano’s puzzle in three questions and show why there is no solution in two. Finally, to cement a tradition, we introduce a puzzle of our own.     

The drama of being: Levinas and the history of philosophy

The motif of the ‘drama of being’ is a dominant thread that spans the entirety of Levinas's six decades of authorship. As we will see, from the start of his writing career, Levinas consciously frames the tension between ontology and ethics in a dramatic form. A careful exposition of this motif and other related theatrical metaphors in his work–-such as ‘intrigue,’ ‘plot,’ and ‘scene’–-can offer us not only a better appreciation of the evolution of Levinas's thought, but also of his proper place within the western philosophical tradition. Levinas accuses western philosophers of being exclusively attuned to what he calls the ‘drama of existence.’ And even then, philosophers have eluded the implications of the tragic fatalism that define this drama. Philosophers are generally unaware of an ‘other scene’ that radically alters the fatalistic logic of the ontological drama. Levinas calls this other scene the ‘ethical intrigue.’     

‘Minimal Religion’ and Mikhail Epstein’s Interpretation of Religion in Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

This is an examination of two essays on minimal religion by Mikhail Epstein (1982 and 1999), assessing the usefulness of the term ‘minimal religion’ for the analysis of religion in contemporary Russia. An adapted version of a paper delivered at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University of London, on 8 December, 2003. Note regarding Mikhail Epstein’s use of the words ‘religion’, ‘religiosity’ and ‘spirituality’: Epstein uses the word ‘religion’ to signify ‘mainstream’, church-based manifestations of religion and also the institutional, hierarchical structures related to those. Although in English usage the word ‘religiosity’ has negative connotations – signifying either a superficially felt religious sentiment or a somehow false and insincere expression of religious feeling, intended for outward show – Epstein appears to use the term entirely neutrally. For him it simply serves as a synonym for the word ‘spirituality’. In the two essays examined in the present article the word ‘spirituality’ signifies the whole inner spiritual life and aspirations of the individual and her/his reflection on an ethical way of living, whether the person concerned is a committed, church-going believer, or someone engaged in a personal spiritual or philosophical quest for meaning, or else someone who has experienced what Epstein refers to as ‘the wilderness’ of the Soviet years and has learnt of a spiritual dimension to life through that formative experience.     

Observer perspective and acentred memory: some puzzles about point of view in personal memory

Sometimes I remember my past experiences from an ‘observer’ perspective, seeing myself in the remembered scene. This paper analyses the distinction in personal memory between such external observer visuospatial perspectives and ‘field’ perspectives, in which I experience the remembered actions and events as from my original point of view. It argues that Richard Wollheim’s related distinction between centred and acentred memory fails to capture the key phenomena, and criticizes Wollheim’s reasons for doubting that observer ‘memories’ are genuine personal memories. Since field perspectives in personal memory are also likely to be the product of constructive processes, we should reject the common assumption that such constructive processes inevitably bring distortion and error. Yet field perspectives tend to be treated as privileged also in the domains of memory for skilled movement, and memory for trauma. In each case, it is argued that visuospatial perspective in personal memory should be distinguished from other kinds of perspective such as kinesthetic perspective and emotional perspective.     

The big bad bug bites anti-realists about chance

David Lewis’s ‘Humean Supervenience’ (henceforth ‘HS’) combines realism about laws, chances, and dispositions with a sparse ontology according to which everything supervenes on the overall spatiotemporal distribution of non-dispositional properties (Lewis 1986a, Philosophical papers: Volume II, pp. ix–xvii, New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1994, Mind 103:473–490). HS faces a serious problem—a “big bad bug” (Lewis 1986a, p. xiv): it contradicts the Principal Principle, a seemingly obvious norm of rational credence. Two authors have tried to rescue Lewis’s ontology from the ‘big bad bug’ (henceforth ‘the Bug’) by rejecting realism about laws, chances, and dispositions (Halpin 1994, Aust J Phil 72:317–338, 1998, Phil Sci 65:349–360; Ward 2005, Phil Sci 71:241–261). I will argue that this strategy cannot possibly work: it is the ontology, not the realist thesis, that lies at the root of the problem.