Browse

The form and content of the study of theology in the modern epoch are marked by a vast quantity and variety of the most diverse and, in part, the most divergent points of departure. The classical unity and perspicuity of the world of theological thought, so typical in earlier centuries, have dissolved with the plurality of the horizons and problems of modern thinking. The reality of the world, science, and theology appears no longer as a single “orbis,” but rather as an open and unbounded space. Indeed, precisely for the study of theology in modern universities, the catchphrase, the “new vastness,” thus appear to hold as well. This book provides an access to Karl Rahner to unpack his thinking and to make a theological inspection of his work possible. In this respect it is essential to locate the central point of departure for the theology of Karl Rahner in the concerns and questions of human beings and, to take a cue from the key concept of the “anthropological point of departure,” to make understandable the underlying tendency of Rahner's work.

“Every other is truly other, but no other is wholly other”. This is the claim that this book defends. Taking up the question of otherness that so fascinates contemporary continental philosophy, this book asks what it means for something or someone to be other than the self. Emmanuel Levinas and those influenced by him point out that the philosophical tradition of the West has generally favored the self at the expense of the other. In response, postmodern thought insists on the absolute otherness of the other, epitomized by the deconstructive claim “every other is wholly other”. But absolute otherness generates problems and aporias of its own. This has led some thinkers to reevaluate the notion of relative otherness in light of the postmodern critique, arguing for a chiastic account that does justice to both the alterity and the similitude of the other. These latter two positions—absolute otherness and a rehabilitated account of relative otherness—are the main contenders in the contemporary debate. This book traces the transmission and development of these two conceptions of otherness by examining the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel. Levinas's version of otherness can be seen in the work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, while Marcel's understanding of otherness influences the work of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney. Ultimately, this book makes a case for a hermeneutic account of otherness. Otherness itself is not absolute, but is a chiasm of alterity and similitude.

This work examines and compares the role of a sense of justice in the ethical and political thought of Confucius (Kongzi) and John Rawls, and presents an argument concerning why comparative studies are worthwhile. Several scholars of Confucianism have suggested that there are such stark differences between the structure and content of the work of modern liberal philosophers like Rawls and the work of classical Confucian philosophers that it is reasonable to doubt that there is any value in trying to compare them. Against these claims, this book argues that the central concerns of the Analects (the most influential record of Confucius’ thought) and Rawls's work intersect in their emphasis on the importance of developing a sense of justice, and that despite deep and important differences between their two accounts of a sense of justice, these views on the relationship between moral psychology and political philosophy a source of significant philosophical agreement. This study also offers a larger argument concerning the reasons why comparative work is worthwhile, the distinctive challenges comparative studies face and approaches to resolving those difficulties, and how comparative work can accomplish distinctive and significant ends—which is a necessity for and sheds light upon the central argument of the book. This work argues that a comparative study of the capacity for a sense of justice in Confucius and Rawls can not only help us to better understand each of their views, but also helps us to see new ways to apply their insights, especially with respect to the contemporary relevance of their accounts.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind identifies a decreative ethics, whereby self-dispossession underwrites an ethical obligation to preserve the other from harm. The author shows how obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: between the other’s subject affirmation and one’s own dislocation, between what one has and what one has to give, between a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand of asking nothing. In the unfolding and reiteration of themes issuing from the other’s claim upon oneself develops a complex picture of the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality. Just how these tensions both subtend and undercut an other-centered ethics of preservation is the question this book tarries with. By proposing a way to read the distinct ethical charge of the other’s claim not to be harmed, Decreation and the Ethical Bind offers a novel treatment of the concept of decreation in the thought of Simone Weil, putting her work in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler. In examining themes of ethical obligation, vulnerability and the force of weak speech, the present study places Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech are bound up with questions of ethical appeal. It contributes a new and critical voice to the current conversation in theory and criticism that addresses a difficult form of ethics that isn’t grounded in subjective agency and narrative fruition, but in the risks taken to fulfill the claims it makes.

This book brings the powerful insights of Continental philosophy to bear on some of the most challenging difficulties of ethical life. Currently philosophy is being radically transformed by questions of how to live well. What does such a way of life mean? How are we to understand the meaning of ethicality? What are the obstacles to ethical living? And should we assume that an ethical life is a “better” life? The movement of history and the developments of culture and knowledge seem to have outstripped the capacity of traditional forms of reflection upon ethical life to understand how we might answer these questions. Ranging from existentialism to deconstruction, phenomenology to psychoanalytic theory, and hermeneutics to post-structuralism, the twelve essays in this volume take up a wide but clearly connected set of issues relevant to living ethically: race, responsibility, religion, terror, torture, technology, deception, and even the very possibility of an ethical life. Some of the questions addressed are specific to our times; others are ancient questions but with quite contemporary twists. In each case, they concern the philosophical significance of ongoing historical, cultural, and political transformations for ethical living and thinking.

The central argument of this book is that the traditional notion of Natural Law has almost disappeared from the ethical and moral discourse of our time. For Thomas Aquinas, the author whose conception of Natural Law forms the foundation for the book, the ontological and ethical orders are not autonomous but inseparable—in effect, his ethical system is an “ontological morality.” For Thomas, the ethical (practical wisdom) must be understood as an extension of the metaphysical (speculative wisdom). Most modern philosophers, by contrast, consider these two orders to be entirely separate. Here the author shows how traditional Natural Law (the form Thomas Aquinas developed from classical and medieval sources) was transformed by thinkers like John Locke and Kant into a doctrine compatible with early modern and modern notions of nature and morality. In early Modern Europe one of the first of the great debates about moral philosophy took place in sixteenth-century Spain, as a philosophical dispute concerning the humanity of the Native Americans. This foreshadowed debates in later centuries, which the author reevaluates in light of these earlier sources. The book also includes a close examination of the recent work of scholars like John Finnis and Brian Tierney, who argue that traditional Natural Law theorists were defenders of a doctrine of positive rights. Rather than attempt to make the traditional doctrine compatible with modern rights theory, however, the author argues that traditional Natural Law must be understood as a form of pre-Enlightenment ontological morality that has survived the onslaught of modernity.

What does it mean to lead a moral life? This book offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. It takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” The book shows that these questions can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory. In three chapters, the book demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, it eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought. The book offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves? By recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, the book illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

This book explains how human beings can live more peacefully with one another by understanding the conditions of possibility for dialogue. Philosophically, this challenge is articulated as the problem of: how dialogue as dia-logos is possible when the shared logos is precisely that which is in question. Emmanuel Levinas, in demonstrating that the shared logos is a function of interhuman relationship, helps us to make some progress in understanding the possibilities for dialogue in this situation. If the terms of the argument to this point are taken largely from Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity, this book further proposes that Levinas's 1974 Otherwise than Being can be read as a deepening of these earlier analyses, delineating, both the conditions of possibility and impossibility for discourse itself. Throughout these analyses this book discovers that in Levinas's view dialogue is ultimately possible, only for a gracious subjectivity already graced by God by way of the other, but where the word God is inseparable from subjectivity as graciousness to the other. Finally, for Levinas, the facilitation of dialogue, the facilitation of peace, comes down to the subject's capacity and willingness to be who he or she is, to take the beautiful risk of a peaceful gesture offered to the other, and that peace, in this gesture itself. As Levinas himself puts it: “Peace then is under my responsibility. I am a hostage, for I am alone to wage it, running a fine risk, dangerously.” Levinas's philosophical discourse is precisely itself to be read as such a gesture.

Can we truly claim that metaphysics is over? That we are living, as the post-phenomenological trend claims, in the epoch of the “end of metaphysics”? Through a close reading of Levinas’s masterpiece, Totality and Infinity, Raoul Moati tries to show that things are in fact much more complicated. Contrary to a certain common understanding of Levinas’s work, Totality and Infinity proposes not so much an alternative to Heidegger’s ontology, but a deeper elucidation of the meaning of “Being,” beyond Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. For this reason, the metaphor of the night becomes crucial to the exploration of a nocturnal face of the events of Being, beyond their ontological reduction to the understanding of Being. The deployment of being beyond its intentional or ontological reduction coincides with what Levinas calls “nocturnal events.” Insofar as the light of understanding hides them, it is only through the de-formalization of the traditional phenomenological approach of phenomena, that Levinas, Moati shows, leads us to their exploration and their systematic and mutual implications. Moati then elaborates, following Levinas, the possibility of what he calls a “metaphysics of society,” which cannot, in any way, be integrated into the deconstructive grasp of the so-called “metaphysics of presence.” In that sense, Moati’s philosophical inquiry constitutes an impressive meditation on the meaning and the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the epoch of the “end of metaphysics.”

This book details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it's classically understood. It insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But the book argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and it searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, it engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburō Ōe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables the book to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, the book calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it's lived, the book works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.

Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life’s becoming on earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche. In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of “studying” life and in the Socratic ideal of an “examined” life, and remains a deep source of wisdom about living.

This book is a study of Max Scheler being one of the earliest phenomenologist and greatest figures in the early years of the 20th century, whose theory of ethical personalism has become a major voice in the formulation of phenomenological ethics of today. This book follows Scheler's use of the classic phenomenological approach, by means of which he presented a fresh view of values, feelings, and the person, and thereby staked out a new approach in ethics. The book recreates the logic of Scheler's quest, revealing the basis of his thought and the reasons for his dramatic changes of direction. This study provides a framework that allows us to understand Scheler's insights in the context of their dynamic evolution of his thought. It corrects imbalances in the presentation of his ideas and defends Scheler against key misunderstandings and criticisms. In short, this book continues the process of developing Scheler's pioneering theory of ethical personalism.

Debates over cloning and genetic engineering often revolve around the question of sovereignty and who has the right to choose. Debates over capital punishment revolve around questions of the sovereignty of the state to decide who lives and who dies. In this book, I complicate these discussions by introducing Jacques Derrida's challenges to the liberal conception of sovereignty. Developing, extending, and applying his critique, I reframe debates over life and death, from cloning to capital punishment, in the hopes of opening an alternative path through the thickets of these controversies. Combining deconstruction with psychoanalysis, I attempt to delineate the concepts of sovereignty, freedom, choice, nature, and culture as they come to play in debates over reproducing life and death, from cloning to capital punishment. Deconstruction with a psychoanalytic supplement can assist us in moving through the dense undergrowth of ethical problems and political dilemmas surrounding technologies of life and death.

Moral philosophy and poststructuralism have long been considered two antithetical enterprises. Moral philosophy is invested in securing norms, whereas poststructuralism attempts to unclench the grip of norms on our lives. Moreover, poststructuralism is often suspected of undoing the possibility of ethical knowledge by emphasizing the unstable, socially constructed nature of our practices and knowledge. This book argues that Judith Butler's work makes possible a productive encounter between moral philosophy and poststructuralism, rethinking responsibility and critique as key concepts at the juncture of ethics and politics. Putting into conversation Butler's earlier and most recent work, this book begins by examining how Butler's critique of the subject as nontransparent to itself, formed thoroughly through relations of power and in subjection to norms and social practices, poses a challenge to ethics and ethical agency. The book argues, in conversation with Butler, Levinas, and Laplanche, that responsibility becomes possible only when we do not know what to do or how to respond, yet find ourselves under a demand to respond, and even more, to respond well to others. Drawing on the work of Butler, Adorno, and Foucault, the book examines critique as a central practice for moral philosophy. It interrogates the limits of moral and political knowledge and probes methods of social criticism to uncover and oppose injustices.

This book seeks to articulate the evil that happened in Bosnia within the context of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Its analysis centers on the question of whether it is possible to understand evil as action. Since the foundations of the social are found in human action, evil's assault on these foundations results in the demise of the social. While evil simulates the outer form of action, ultimately evil belies itself as action. Can someone act with an evil end? Socrates says no, no one willingly does evil. Although, with a mixture of reason and empiricism, the book tries hard to overcome the Socratic position—searching for evil's agency, purpose, means, conditions, and ethos—in the end, the search fails. The book concludes by accepting the Socratic position: action whose end is evil is unthinkable. This tack provides an alternative to recent theorizing about evil by philosophers such as Richard Bernstein and Jeffrey Alexander. The book understands evil via a neologism—as sociocide, the murdering of society. In Bosnia, not only were families destroyed, but their homes as well. Not only were bridges, libraries, schools, mosques, and churches demolished, but towns and cities were obliterated. Bosnian Muslims were murdered behind the mindless rhetoric of “ethnic cleansing,” and their history and collective memory were viciously attacked. In the first case, the social violence is called “domicide,” in the second, “urbicide,” and in the third, “genocide.” The book develops the significance of sociocide as the consequence of evil in order to understand the suffering and tragedy of people and communities in Bosnia.

In contemporary philosophy, the will is often regarded as a sheer philosophical fiction. In this book, the author argues not only that the will is the central power of human agency that makes decisions and forms intentions, but also that it includes the capacity to generate new motivation different in structure from prepurposive desires. The concept of “projective motivation” is the central innovation in the existential account of the everyday notion of striving will. Beginning with the contrast between “eastern” and “western” attitudes toward assertive willing, the author traces the lineage of the idea of projective motivation from NeoPlatonic and Christian conceptions of divine motivation to Scotus, Kant, Marx, Arendt, and Levinas. Rich with historical detail, this book includes an extended examination of Platonic and Aristotelian eudaimonist theories of human motivation. Drawing on contemporary critiques of egoism, it argues that happiness is primarily a byproduct of activities and pursuits aimed at other agent-transcending goods for their own sake. In particular, the motives in virtues and in the practices as defined by Alasdair MacIntyre are projective rather than eudaimonist. This theory is supported by analyses of radical evil, accounts of intrinsic motivation in existential psychology, and contemporary theories of identity-forming commitment in analytic moral psychology. Following Viktor Frankl, Joseph Raz, and others, the book argues that Harry Frankfurt's conception of caring requires objective values worth caring about, which serve as rational grounds for projecting new final ends. The argument concludes with a taxonomy of values or goods, devotion to which can make life meaningful for us.