Ferenczi as social trauma thinker*

In the 21st century, the notion of trauma is so commonly used that one can speak of a culture of trauma. Today, a wide variety of people claim victimhood, pointing to their traumas as validation. Fassin and Rechtman denounce the way in which recognition strategies make use of the identity of victim to justify compensation policies and financial reparations. This paper presents Sándor Ferenczi’s contributions on trauma, showing how his theory takes into consideration relational and political aspects that were underemphasized by Freud. When Ferenczi is compared to contemporary recognition thinkers (such as Honneth, Fraser and Butler), one can see that what is at stake in his theory is neither identity nor victimization. It is deeper: Ferenczi shows the importance of the vulnerable dimension in all of us, suggesting that recognizing mutual vulnerability is a basis of the sense of connectedness and solidarity with the other.     

Tolstoj as analytic thinker: his philosophical defense of nonviolence

By way of countering Tolstoj’s reputation as an alogical and inept philosophical thinker, this paper explores the tension between maximalism and reasonableness in his defense of the ethics of nonviolence. Tolstoj’s writings of the last decade of his life show that he was perfectly capable of making appropriate conceptual distinctions, recognizing legitimate objections to his position, and responding rationally to them; in so doing, he made valuable points about the unpredictability of human actions, the futility of using violence to combat violence, the equal worth of all humans lives, and the immorality of revenge. Yet his conception of the moral ideal, together with his missionary zeal, led him to exaggerate the absoluteness of his moral message, causing him to predict the unpredictable and demand the impossible of human beings.     

Kierkegaard and Philosophy

Book reviewed:
Alastair Hannay. Kierkegaard and Philosophy. Reviewed by M. Jamie Ferreira     

克尔凯郭尔与尼采

当代哲学中两个富有特征的基本概念,“生存”和“存在”,最初是由尼采和克尔凯郭尔创造的。尼采的哲学思考始终围绕着“生存”的现象,克尔凯郭尔的思考活动不断深入“存在”的问题。因此,他们二人的兴趣都首先而且几乎只是指向人,指向人的生存和人的存在的。所以,他们的哲学不是一个以封闭方式包括人类学的形而上学体系,相反,其哲学活动的内在系统的基础完全在于将一切问题都概括为这样一个基本问题：“人是什么?”和人成为了什么。这样,二者的哲学都是在一种实验“心理学”的名义下的哲学人类学。     

Kierkegaard and the hermeneutical circle

Such is the criticism commonly passed upon Socrates in our age, which boasts of its positivity much as if a polytheist were to speak with scorn of the negativity of a monotheist, for the polytheist has many gods, the monotheist only one. So our philosophers have many thoughts, all valid to a certain extent; Socrates had only one, which was absolute.