Madness as religious experience: The case of Allen Ginsberg

Various writers have considered madness to be a religious experience. On the basis of the literature in the area and conversations with psychiatric patients, it is argued that madness as a religious experience can be viewed as a four-stage developmental process. The four stages are: 1) The hurt-and-be-hurt state of being, 2) The self-induced psychedelic experience, 3) The confusion-and-dread reaction, and 4) The reconstruction-with-insight world view. To clarify how these four stages make up a religious experience, the poet Allen Ginsberg's so-called psychotic episode is organized around each of the stages.     

Mizpah of Benjamin

In this article I discuss the question of how to speak of the body in theology after Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as nihilistic. A purely theoretical and a-historic approach, such as could be found in much doctrinal theology as well as philosophy after Descartes, runs the risk of objectifying the body through its representations of it. The phenomenological approach to embodiment would instead help theology to avoid treating the body as a thing and instead as a communicative and expressive medium for relationships with divinity as well as other human beings. A critical theological somatology after Nietzsche would have to speak of the body through genealogical accounts of the traces of the body in biblical and theological texts as well as in religious practices such as prayer, liturgy and hymns with the aim of correlating this theological tradition with the articulations and configurations of embodiment today.     

Kantianism, Moral Worth and Human Welfare

Book reviewed in this article:
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives     

Kant, Nonaccidentalness and the Availability of Moral Worth

Contemporary Kantians who defend Kant's view of the superiority of the sense of duty as a form of motivation appeal to various ideas. Some say, if only implicitly, that the sense of duty is always ``available' to an agent, when she has a moral obligation. Some, like Barbara Herman, say that the sense of duty provides a ``nonaccidental' connection between an agent's motivation and the act's rightness. In this paper I show that the ``availability' and ``nonaccidentalness' arguments are in tension with one another. And the ``availability' idea, although certainly supported by some passages in Kant himself, is also clearly denied in other passages. My conclusion is that Kantians will need to abandon either availability or nonaccidentalness if they wish to have a consistent set of views about the sense of duty.     

Terrorism,War, and The Killing of the Innocent

Commonsense moral thought holds that what makes terrorism particularly abhorrent is the fact that it tends to be directed toward innocent victims. Yet contemporary philosophers tend to doubt that the concept of innocence plays any significant role here, and to deny that prohibitions against targeting noncombatants can be justified through appeal to their moral innocence. I argue, however, that the arguments used to support these doubts are ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, the philosophical positions in question tend to misunderstand the justification of both the prohibition against targeting noncombatants, and that of the permission to attack combatants, for which the paper offers a new account. Such misunderstandings make it all too easy to justify both terrorist actions and morally objectionable actions on the part of nations at war. Taking proper account of the role of innocence in the context of armed conflict will alter our ordinary ways of thinking about the ethics of war, with respect to both jus in bello and jus ad bellum.

阴暗时代的语言--卡内蒂、克莱姆珀雷、本杰雅明

暴力同语言保持着什么样的关系 ?[1] 一旦暴力将语言当作主要靶子 ,会发生什么 ?也许我们应该从界定暴力的内在逻辑着手 ,然后再论述它同语言的畸形杂交问题。莱维纳斯在收入论文集《艰难的自由》的一篇文章中指出 ,暴力活动乃是“人们仿佛只有他们在独自进行的那种活动 ;仿佛宇宙的其余一切只是为了接受这样的活动才存在 ;因此 ,我们所忍受的从各方面来说不是合作者的所有活动 ,同样也都是暴力的”。[2 ] 因此 ,暴力具有两种特征。一方面 ,它从不折不扣的幻想 ,亦即从自以为超强和独立得足以独自决定“宇宙其他一切”命运的那种意志假想中…     

Iraq, American Empire, And The War On Terrorism

Abstract: The U.S. government is trying to secure continuing American military and economic supremacy on a global scale over the long term. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is part of this imperial project, which is now being pursued under the mantle of the war on terrorism. This essay examines these developments in the context of U.S. military spending and foreign policy since the end of the cold war, and it argues that there is reason to be concerned about the continuing viability of democratic government in the United States.     

The Bible,Finland, and the Civil War of 1918

Reception history and the effective history of the Bible give a good paradigm to see the Bible in temporally and geographically different contexts. Here, I begin by discussing methodological issues of intertextuality, reception and effect. After that, I present two examples that illustrate the contextual possibilities of this paradigm. The first one is the use of the biblical lex talionis in the Finnish civil war of 1918. The second example is the modernist poet Edith Södergran, whose apocalyptic poems interpreted the same war. I argue that reception historical and effective historical approaches make it possible for biblical scholars to participate in the social and cultural discussions in their contexts.