On Holisms: Insular, Inclusivist, and Postmodern

Nancey Murphy's offer to take us “beyond liberalism and fundamentalism” is an exciting one: Who wants to be caught in the clutches of a fruitless theological dispute? She argues that the key to our escape is “Anglo-American postmodernity.” I analyze what Murphy means by this term and why it may turn out to be a more precarious escape route than one might think. Holism or “post-foundationalism” is indeed inescapable for science/religion discussions today, but an inclusivist holism is preferable to Murphy's insular holism     

Representative Women: Slavery,Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's “Damnation of Women”

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.     

The Problem of a Transcendent God for the Well‐Being of Continuous Creation

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of Lynn White's critique of Christianity, which set off the field of eco‐theology. At that time, apologetic theologians responded to the White critique, that the Genesis “dominion” command is largely responsible for the contemporary ecological crisis, through reformulating Christian doctrines to address ecological issues. These pioneers have brought us a long way in terms of addressing both how Christianity has been responsible in supporting harmful human‐earth relations and what resources within the tradition might be useful for addressing the contemporary ecological crisis. Building on this work, this article suggests that Christian theology (whether eco or not) will continue to support an understanding of the human being as rooted “outside of creation” as long as the concept of a transcendent, Omni, Creator‐God is left intact. In place of this theological discourse of transcendence which secularizes the natural realm, I suggest a “radical materialist” (Val Plumwood) understanding of Christianity that moves between idealism and reductive materialism (both are forms of transcendence) through a “planetary” (Spivak) understanding of Creation and a “bio‐historical” (Gordon Kaufman) understanding of anthropology.     

Temporality and the Lyotardian Sublime: Kant between Husserl and Freud

ABSTRACT

While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a “temporal crisis” that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes “experience” in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's “unconscious affect,” this “crisis” only becomes visible in contrast to a figure of subjective temporalization the model of which, I argue, is broadly Husserlian. Approaching the sublime as a temporal crisis thus allows not only for a clearer view of the import of Lyotard's late work on the affect with regard to subjectivity, knowledge, and experience; it also reveals what that work continues to owe to a certain phenomenological analysis.     

The object beyond objects and the sacred

In both Freud's and Winnicott's thoughts regarding our psychological origin, there is the assumption of a given relationship which precedes all human relations. I refer to Freud's primal father and Winnicott's primary ideal object. I have chosen to call the object of this primordial relation “the object beyond objects” and to reflect on this as the psychological basis for an individual's faith in God. By examining what both these authors have to say concerning the sacred and the individual's way of relating to it, I feel that I am also able to describe maturation processes in the believer's relationship with God.     

Forms of Our Life: Wittgenstein and the Later Heidegger

The paper argues that an internal debate within Wittgensteinian philosophy leads to issues associated rather with the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Rush Rhees's identification of the limitations of the notion of a “language game” to illuminate the relation between language and reality leads to his discussion of what is involved in the “reality” of language: “anything that is said has sense‐if living has sense, not otherwise.” But what is it for living to have sense? Peter Winch provides an interpretation and application of Rhees's argument in his discussion of the “reality” of Zande witchcraft and magic in “Understanding a Primitive Society”. There he argues that such sense is provided by a language game concerned with the ineradicable contingency of human life, such as (he claims) Zande witchcraft to be. I argue, however, that Winch's account fails to answer the question why Zande witchcraft can find no application within our lives. I suggest that answering this requires us to raise the question of why Zande witchcraft “fits” with their other practices but cannot with ours, a question of “sense” which cannot be answered by reference to another language game. I use Joseph Epes Brown's account of Native American cultures (in Epes Brown 2001) as an exemplification of a form of coherence that constitutes what we may call a “world”. I then discuss what is involved in this, relating this coherence to a relation to the temporal, which provides an internal connection between the senses of the “real” embodied in the different linguistic practices of these cultures. I relate this to the later Heidegger's account of the “History of Being”, of the historical worlds of Western culture and increasingly of the planet. I conclude with an indication of concerns and issues this approach raises, ones characteristic of “Continental” rather than Wittgensteinian philosophy.     

Inscrutability and its Discontents

That reference is inscrutable is demonstrated, it is argued, not only by W. V. Quine's arguments but by Peter Unger's “Problem of the Many.” Applied to our own language, this is a paradoxical result, since nothing could be more obvious to speakers of English than that, when they use the word “rabbit,” they are talking about rabbits. The solution to this paradox is to take a disquotational view of reference for one's own language, so that “When I use ‘rabbit,’ I refer to rabbits” is made true by the meaning of the word “refer.” The reference relation is extended to other languages by translation. The explanation for this peculiarly egocentric conception of semantics—questions of others’ meanings are settled by asking what I mean by words of my language—is to be found in our practice of predicting and explaining other people's behavior by empathetic identification. I understand other people's behavior by asking what I would do in their place.     

GETTING UNDER MY SKIN: WILLIAM JAMES ON THE EMOTIONS, SOCIALITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE

“You are really getting under my skin!” This exclamation suggests a series of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical questions: What is the nature and development of human emotion? How does emotion arise in social interaction? To what extent can interactive situations shape our embodied selves and intensify particular affective states? With these questions in mind, William James begins to investigate the character of emotions and to develop a model of what he terms the social self. James's studies of mimicry and his interest in phenomena now often investigated using biofeedback begin to explain how affective states develop and how it might be possible for something to “get under one's skin.” I situate these studies in the history of psychology between the psychological schools of structuralism and behaviorism. More important, I suggest continuity between James's Psychology and recent research on mirror neurons, reentrant mapping, and emotional mimicry in the fields of clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This research supports and extends James's initial claims in regard to the creation of emotions and the life of the social self. I propose that James's work in the empirical sciences should be read as a prelude to his metaphysical works that speak of a coordination between embodied selves and wider environmental situations, and his psychological studies should be read as a prelude to his reflections on spiritual transcendence.     

White Habits,Anti-Racism,and Philosophy as a Way of Life

This paper examines Pierre Hadot’s philosophy as a way of life in the context of race. I argue that a “way of life” approach to philosophy renders intelligible how antiracist confrontation of racist ideas and institutionalized white complicity is a properly philosophical way of life requiring regulated reflection on habits—particularly, habits of whiteness. I first rehearse some of Hadot’s analysis of the “way of life” orientation in philosophy, in which philosophical wisdom is understood as cultivated by actions which result in the creation of wise habits. I analyze a phenomenological claim about the nature of habit implied by the “way of life” approach, namely, that habits can be both the cause and the effect of action. This point is central to the “way of life” philosophy, I claim, in that it makes possible the intelligent redirection of habits, in which wise habits are more the effect than simply the cause of action. Lastly, I illustrate the “way of life” approach in the context of anti-racism by turning to Linda Martín Alcoff's whiteness antieliminativism, which outlines a morally defensible transformation of the habits of whiteness. I argue that anti-racism provides an intelligible context for modern day forms of what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” insofar as the “way of life” philosophy is embodied in the practice of whites seeing themselves seeing as white and seeing themselves being seen as white.     

Elements of a counter‐exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics

Into the Light, a recently mounted collectively curated museum exhibition, exposed and countered histories and legacies of 20th‐century “race betterment” pedagogies taught in Ontario's postsecondary institutions that targeted some groups of people, including Anishinaabe, Black, and other racialized populations, and disabled and poor people, with dehumanizing ideas and practices. This article advances understandings of the transformative potential of centralizing marginalized stories in accessible and creative ways to disrupt, counter, and draw critical attention to the brutal impacts of oppressive knowledge. The “counter‐exhibition” prioritized stories of groups unevenly targeted by such oppression to contest and defy singular narratives circulating in institutional knowledge systems of what it means to be human. The authors draw on feminist, decolonial and disability scholarship to analyze the exhibition's curation for the ways it collectively and creatively: (1) brought the past to the present through materializing history and memory in ways that challenged archival silences; and (2) engaged community collaboration using accessible, multisensory, multimedia storytelling to “speak the hard truths of colonialism” (Lonetree) while constructing a new methodology for curating disability and access (Cachia). The authors show how the exhibition used several elements, including counter‐stories, to end legacies of colonial eugenic violence and to proliferate accounts that build solidarity across differences implicated in and impacted by uneven power (Gaztambide‐Fernández).     

Practical Reason,Sympathy and Reactive Attitudes

This paper has three aims. First, I defend, in its most radical form, Hume's scepticism about practical reason, as it applies to purely self‐regarding matters. It's not always irrational to discount the future, to be inconstant in one's preferences, to have incompatible desires, to not pursue the means to one's ends, or to fail to maximize one's own good. Second, I explain how our response to the “irrational” agent should be understood as an expression of frustrated sympathy, in Adam Smith's sense of sympathy, rather than a genuine judgement about Reason. We judge these people because we cannot imaginatively identify with their desires and attitudes, and this is frustrating. Third, compared to the standard cognitive view, my account better explains the nature of our criticism of the “irrational,” and, by portraying “irrationality” as a cause of upset to other people, provides a better normative basis for being “rational.”     

VOCATION AND CREATION: BEYOND THE GENTILE‐HOMOSEXUAL ANALOGY

One strand of the church's conversation about homosexuality compares present‐day acceptance of homosexuals to the church's acceptance of Gentiles in Acts 15. In a previous article, “Gentiles and Homosexuals,” I presented the history of that strand. In a reply to my article, Olson proposes to reimagine the analogy via the “radical new perspective on Paul” and argues that doing so exposes problems with my original analysis. I defend myself against these criticisms, while also entering into the spirit of Olson's reimagined analogy. Expanding the scope beyond Acts to Paul opens up important facets that might otherwise be obscured. In particular, it includes voices that are sometimes silenced, and presses both sides for an account of sexuality grounded in vocation and God's purposes in creation.     

“Singing for Our Lives”: Women's Music and Democratic Politics

Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called “movement music,” supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the “women's music” of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, exemplifies this transformative power of musical sound.     

“The Lost Foundation”: Kristeva's Semiotic Chora and Its Ambiguous Legacy

The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora by re‐inscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates. The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material production and representation. I contend: (1) that the introduction of the chora in RPL is part of Kristeva's effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato's Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva's part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in‐between.”     

“A GREATEST MIRACLE”: STANLEY CAVELL,MORAL PERFECTIONISM,AND THE ASCENT INTO THE ORDINARY

What to make of “the ordinary,”“the everyday,” and their common “eventfulness”? What to think of what Veena Das, in her recent book Life and Words, prefaced by Stanley Cavell, has called our need to “descent into the ordinary”? Is there a parallel figure of “ascent,” again, into the same “ordinary,” that we might we want to juxtapose with it and that resembles the motif of “change,” even “conversion,” that Cavell analyzes at some length in The Claim of Reason and throughout his oeuvre as a whole? And what could be our reasons for doing so? This essay will draw on Cavell's reading of Ibsen's work in the volume Cities of Words to spell out what such an “ascent” might mean.     

A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame

Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: 1. One's blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent's wrongdoing. 3. One is warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the wrongdoing. 4. The target's wrongdoing is some of “one's business”. These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing”. Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone's standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer's action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non‐hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our “moral fragility”, the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the “equality of persons”.     

A Catholic Missiological and Ecumenical Appreciation of Together towards Life

The new mission statement Together towards Life does not so much propose new teachings about mission as point out pertinent reminders and reconfirmations of some of our beliefs and convictions about God's mission (missio Dei) in and for the world. The author suggests that among the many challenges expressed in the statement, three merit special attention: (1) the proposal to shift the mission concept from “mission to the margins” to “mission from the margins”; (2) the necessity to underline the intrinsic link between humanity and creation; and (3) the temptation to consider “mission” as at the service of the interests and aggrandizement of individual churches instead of the contrary. He concludes that this statement is an invitation to walk “together towards life” for the benefit of both humanity and the whole of God's creation, and that the urgent challenge is to forge concrete means to make this dream a reality, even in the face of paying the “cost of discipleship.”     

FORGETTING AND THE TASK OF SEEING: Ordinary Oblivion,Plato, and Ethics

The gaps, fissures, and lapses of attention in a life—what I call “ordinary oblivions”—are fertile fragilities that present a compelling source for ethics. Plato, not Aristotle, is the ancient philosopher specially poised to speak to this feature of human life. Drawing upon poet C. K. Williams's idea that forgetting is a “looking away” that makes possible “beginning again,” I present a Platonic approach to ethics as an alternative to Aristotelian or virtue ethics. Plato's Phaedrus is a key source text for this alternate picture; from it I suggest how we might construe Iris Murdoch's “task of seeing” in terms of the engagement with written form. Poetry is a central locale for such engagement, and thus suggests a kind of ethical praxis that arises from the theoretical emphases of my examination of forgetting, the unmoored self, remade other‐regard, and sacred sources.     

THE CASTRATION OF SIGNS: CONVERSING WITH AUGUSTINE ON CREATION, LANGUAGE AND TRUTH

This article takes as its starting point Nicholas Lash's use of the Buberian distinction between the basic words “I‐It” and “I‐You” to address the question of how the difference between God and creation is “displayed” within the world. Drawing on a rather different discourse—the semiotics developed by Augustine in the distinctions he makes between sign and thing, use and enjoyment—it seeks to explore the concrete shape that might be taken by practices that foster the speaking of the basic word “I‐You”, and which thereby manifest God's redemptive activity within the world, focusing specifically on practices of debate and argument. “What might a redeemed practice of debate look like?” is the question that this article seeks to answer.