ON THE USE OF GILLIAN ROSE

Three recent attempts to draw resources for theology from the work of philosopher and social theorist Gillian Rose are examined. Although her work has received little attention, it has been influential in the development of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’. Yet her dense style has led to many misunderstandings of her work. Each of the three attempts to draw theological resources from her work examined is problematic, either because it misrepresents Rose's work or because it reads Rose too narrowly. The outline of a positive account of Rose's philosophy is developed through critical engagements with these three readers. I suggest that an alternative theological appropriation of Rose that focuses on her account of the theological virtues, particularly faith and love, might be possible.     

The Diremption of Love: Gillian Rose on Agency,Mortality, and Hegelian Feminism

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was an influential though idiosyncratic British philosopher whose work helped introduce the Frankfurt School's critical theory and renew interest in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Jewish thought in Anglo‐American philosophy. After years of relative oblivion, her life and thought have recently received new attention in philosophy, sociology, and theology. However, her work's critical Hegelian contribution to feminist philosophy still remains unexplored. This article seeks to reassess the place and the meaning of feminism and gender identity in Rose's work by addressing both her philosophical writings and her personal memoir, written in the months preceding her untimely death. It argues that although Rose's overall work was not developed in a feminist context, her philosophy, and in particular her ethical‐political notion of diremption, is valuable for developing a critical feminist philosophy that overcomes the binaries of law and morality, inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness—and focuses on the meaning of love as negotiating, rather than mediating, these oppositions.     

Harold Garfinkel and Edward Rose in the early years of ethnomethodology

This article documents the beginning of the intellectual companionship between the founder of ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel, and Edward Rose, who is most often associated with his program of “ethno-inquiries.” I present results from archival research focusing on the contacts and collaborations between Rose and Garfinkel in the years 1955–1965. First, I describe the review process for Rose and Felton's paper, submitted to the American Sociological Review in 1955, which Garfinkel reviewed and after Rose's rebuttal recommended for publication. The paper induced Garfinkel to write an extensive commentary that has remained unpublished. Second, I discuss the 1958 New Mexico conference sponsored by the Air Force, which was an opportunity for Rose and Garfinkel to work together on topics related to common-sense knowledge and scientific knowledge. Third, I give an overview of the ethnomethodological conferences in 1962 and 1963, supported by an Air Force grant written collaboratively by Rose and Garfinkel. Here I focus primarily on Rose's research on “small languages,” which stimulated many discussions among the early ethnomethodologists. Rose's work and exchanges with Garfinkel demonstrate the former's affinity for miniaturization as a research approach and search for ways to empiricize topics of sociological theory in locally observable settings.     

Individualism, Communitarianism and Consensus

There is a contemporary conflict between individualistic andcommunitarian conceptions of rationality. Robert Goodin describes it asa conflict between an enlightenment individualistic conception of a``sovereign artificer'' and ``a socially unencumbered self'' ascontrasted with the communitarian conception of a ``socially embeddedself'' whose identity is formed by his or her community. Should wejustify and explain rationality individualistically or socially? This isa false dilemma when consensus is reached by a model articulated byKeith Lehrer and Carl Wagner. According to this model, the consensusresults from the positive weights individuals give to others and use tocontinually average and, thus, aggregate their allocations. Aggregationconverges toward a consensus in which the social preference and theindividual preferences become identical. The truth of communitarianismis to be found in the aggregate and the truth of individualism in theaggregation. The original conflict dissolves in rational consensus.     

Yielding Actuality: Trust and Reason in Gillian Rose's Vision of Community

This article explores the conviction that the durability of communities is contingent, at least in part, on the conception of reason in play. It proposes that prospects for building and sustaining community are enhanced to the degree that rationalistic theories of rationality are rejected. The resulting equivocation in the processes of rule‐making, moral thinking, analysis, and critique, while problematic, will be preferable to the alternative and caricatured approaches premised on a strong division between reason and its so‐called others. This desirable equivocation involves an analysis of the role of trust in human relations and a revised conception of reason developed by philosopher and social critic Gillian Rose (1947–1995). Through an analysis of Rose's commentary on the folk legend of Camelot and the phenomenology of friendship, this article tries to show how relations constrained by alterity can be transformed.     

Scripture,Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer's The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary

This article reviews two books by Robert MacSwain, Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, which present and examine the work of Austin Farrer, perhaps the greatest Anglican theologian of the twentieth century. In Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry, MacSwain offers a critical edition of Farrer's 1948 Bampton Lectures, The Glass of Vision, printed with six essays which assess and examine the Lectures. In Solved by Sacrifice, he considers how Farrer's conception of what faith contributes to reasoned reflection on the study of God changed over the course of his lifetime. After drawing on the work of Henri de Lubac, E.B. Pusey, and contemporary critics, to reflect on The Glass of Vision, this article will suggest how Farrer's presentation of the form of divine truth in the human mind can illumine MacSwain's discussion of Farrer's religious epistemology.     

Invitation to the Triune Conversation: Explorations of Prayer through the Theology of Robert Jenson

This paper attempts to contribute to our understanding of prayer through an engagement with its crucial role in the systematic thought of Robert Jenson. I present prayer as our invitation to the triune conversation. Developing some of Jenson's categories, I work to show that a Christian understanding of prayer connects to a spectrum of systematic loci, especially creation and anthropology, the sacraments and ecclesiology, mission and eschatology. In these three modes, the anthropological, the ecclesial and the eschatological, prayer enters into the ultimate conversation that animates the world through faith, love and hope. This paper concludes by arguing that such an account of prayer, if authentic, supports a contemporary retrieval of the cataphatic dimension of theology.     

Heidegger,Sociality, and Human Agency

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being‐with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life.     

Otto Rank: Pioneering Ideas for Social Work Theory and Practice

This article examines Otto Rank's psychology and its profound implications for social work knowledge-building and practice. The paper begins with a brief biographical portrait, highlighting the significance of Rank's relationship and eventual break with Freud, and contextualizing the ideas that became the basis for the Functional Approach. We discuss Rank's conception of human functioning in the social environment, his influence on later theories, and a contemporary critique of Rank's ideas. The paper concludes with a discussion of Rank's contributions to the Functional Approach and to social work practice in general.     

COMMENT

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews around the world intensified their call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish Labour Bund, an Eastern European Jewish socialist party, had been, throughout its existence vehemently anti-Zionist, advocating instead its notion of doikayt (literally “here-ness”), which claimed that Jews should focus on building viable communities in any place in which they lived. This article will examine the way the movement remained steadfast in its opposition to Jewish statehood in the aftermath of the Holocaust and even in the wake Israel's establishment in 1948, and it will chart the process by which the Bund embraced Israel as quickly in 1955, looking at the rise of a Bund organization in Israel. I will argue that the Bund's position was neither desperate nor naïve. It was grounded in the Bundists' traditional enmity towards Zionism, and reflected their faith in a universalist answer to the problem of Jewish survival. This story complicates contemporary understandings of postwar Jewish and European history, and sheds new light on notions of diaspora and experiences of displacement.     

FORCES OF TOMORROW

This article examines the social experience of belonging to the British section of the international Socialist Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair. The study is based on interviews conducted with 10 former activists across four generations and focuses primarily on the movement in London. It will be argued that Hashomer Hatzair represented a unique alternative youth culture based on a model developed by the movement's founders in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This model synthesized Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting, the Jugendkultur of the German youth movements, Socialist Zionism and Marxism. Imported to Britain by young German and Austrian refugees from Nazism, this youth culture was reproduced initially in the English countryside, and after the war plugged into the pre-existing politics of Jewish radicalism in London and the general Zionist fervour that anticipated the establishment of Israel. Hashomer Hatzair emphasized autonomy from adult society. By creating autonomous youth spaces, the movement opened a portal for young Jews to shape their own identities. Through a process of politicization and education, the movement's adherents would identify life on Israeli kibbutzim as an ideal future in adulthood. In tandem with the projection of heroic Jewish role models, this process encouraged Hashomer Hatzair's followers to define their Jewishness in secular and existential terms, in opposition both to contemporary consumerist and urbanized capitalism, and to the traditional communal associations of the past.     

Inching towards wholeness: C.G. Jung and his relationship to Judaism

The evolution of Jung's relationship with Judaism is interpreted as reflecting aspects of the individuation journey over the course of a long life. The progress and limitations of his public positions and personal relationships are explored through his published work and correspondence. Perspectives from relational psychoanalysis and Jewish philosophy are used to amplify Jung's understanding of Jewish, and specifically Kabbalistic, text and image. Dimensions of the author's own journey toward greater acceptance of his own Jewish soul is also considered, along with the wider contemporary relevance of these themes.     

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD

Michael Wyschogrod is the most important Jewish thinker in the Modern Orthodox tradition since Joseph Soloveitchik. The key to Wyschogrod's significance consists in the point where he differs from Soloveitchik most dramatically. Whereas Soloveitchik held that “the religious or theological logos should not be employed as the medium of communication between two [different] faith communities”, Wyschogrod regards such communication as a Jewish imperative. The essay explores Wyschogrod's use of “the theological logos as the medium of communication” with reference to his understanding of the relation of faith and reason as illustrated by the story of Franz Redner, a Holocaust survivor.     

Organism,normativity, plasticity: Canguilhem,Kant, Malabou

Some of Catherine Malabou’s recent work has developed her conception of plasticity (originally deployed in a reading of Hegelian Aufhebung) in relation to neuroscience. This development clarifies and advances her attempt to bring contemporary theory into dialogue with the natural sciences, while indirectly indicating her engagement with the French tradition in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, especially the work of Georges Canguilhem. I argue that we can see her development of plasticity as an answer to some specific shortcomings in Canguilhem’s conception of organic or biological normativity as advanced in The Normal and the Pathological. Such a view of plasticity shows its potential to provide the basis for a powerful critical engagement with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, self-transformation, subjectivation, and the general theory of norms.     

How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?

Libertarianism has, seemingly, always been in disrepute among philosophers. While throughout history philosophers have offered different reasons for their dissatisfaction with libertarianism, one worry is recurring: namely a worry about luck. To many, it seems that if our choices and actions are undetermined, then we cannot control them in a way that allows for freedom and responsibility. My fundamental aim in this paper is to place libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible libertarian theory. I begin by arguing that Robert Kane's influential formulation of libertarianism actually generates an acute worry about luck, showing specifically that Kane's recipe for solving the problem of luck and his attendant conception of the location and role of indeterminism derived from it are deeply problematic. I then offer a reformulation of libertarianism – particularly a new conception of the location and role of indeterminism – that is capable of avoiding the problems that beset Kane's theory and that, I argue, places libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible theory.     

“As his name indicates”: R. S. Woodworth's letters of reference and employment for jewish psychologists in the 1930s

Letters of reference from Robert S. Woodworth identified some psychologists as Jews and reveal an implicit stereotype of Jewish “objectionable traits.” I examine these conceptions of “Jewish character” in the context of Woodworth's general views on individual differences and in the broader context of Jewish immigration to America and enrollment at Columbia University in the early 1900s. Constructing the exclusion of Jews from academic psychology in terms of the personality and social behavior of the individual and dividing of Jews into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” allowed for a face-saving gloss on the generally antisemitic hiring practices in 1930s American academia.     

Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.     

How the Good Obligates in Hegel's Conception of Sittlichkeit: A Response to Robert Stern's Understanding Moral Obligation

Abstract

In Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Robert Stern argues that Hegel has a social command view of obligation. On this view, there is an element of social command or social sanction that must be added to a judgment of the good in order to bring about an obligation. I argue to the contrary that Hegel's conception of conscience, and thus the individual's role in obligation, is more central to his account than the social dimension. While agreeing with Stern that Hegel's conception of Sittlichkeit does preserve a role for obligation, and that the social plays an important part in that account, I argue that there is no extra social component that converts the morally good into obligation. Rather, Hegel's conception of Sittlichkeit as the “living good” means that judgments of the moral facts are simultaneously judgments of obligation.     

“Keeping It in the Family”: Sarah Kofman Reading Nietzsche as a Jewish Woman

This article examines Sarah Kofman's interpretation of Nietzsche in light of the claim that interpretation was for her both an articulation of her identity and a mode of deconstructing the very notion of identity. Faulkner argues that Kofman's work on Nietzsche can be understood as autobiographical, in that it served to mediate a relation to her self. Faulkner examines this relation with reference to Klein's model of the child's connection to its mother. By examining Kofman's later writings on Nietzsche alongside her autobiography, this article contends that Kofman's defense of anti‐Semitism in Nietzsche serves to fend off her own ambivalence about being Jewish.     

Unruly difference: the politics of stigma and the space of the sacred

This essay looks at three contemporary Jewish American playwrights: Tony Kushner, Martin Sherman and Deb Margolin, whose plays ask fundamental questions about Jewish identity in its political, cultural and spiritual dimensions. Breaking from the concerns of their theatrical predecessors, most of whom ignored or disguised their Jewish roots, these playwrights draw on profoundly Jewish concepts to reconfigure narratives of redemption, obligation, ethical community, and Messianic utopianism. Their plays are characterized by a sensibility of “unruly difference.” Attracted by the politics of marginality; these writers re-imagine otherness in plays that celebrate a different understanding of faith and conjure the sublime. By carving out a more capacious definition of Judaism that embraces contradiction and contention, faith and doubt, progressive social vision and deepened spiritual commitment, they sit aslant the mainstream. They are drawn to their understanding of the spiritual power and cultural grandeur of the Jewish heritage, but question the politics of accommodation and the limitations of tradition and law. The ambivalence these writers express about Judaism adds to the complexity of their writing and to its value as a cultural indicator. Working in new idioms, they refute traditional discourses and dominant paradigms of conformity and coalescence that characterize modern Jewish-American life.