To Remake Man and the World...comme si? Camus's "Ethics" contra Nihilism

Whether Albert Camus’s “existentialist” thought expresses an “ethics” is a subject of disagreement among commentators. Yet, there can be no reading of Camus’s philosophical and literary works without recognizing that he was engaged in the post-WW2 period with two basic questions: How must we think? What must we do? If his thought presents us with an ethics, even if not systematic, it seems to be present in his ideas of “remaking” both man and world that are central to his The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Curiously, however, this apparent recommendation is ambiguous for the fact that while Camus proposes as much he does so “comme si,” i.e., form a perspective of “as if.” A clarification of this qualification is presented here in the light of the fact that Camus rejects any nihilist project that countenances either suicide or murder. Thereby one may argue that Camus indeed has an ethics that remains pertinent to today

Reasoning in a multicultural society

Multicultural society as a way of being-with-others needs a certain form of public reasoning. Unfortunately, the current yet dominant form of public reasoning is infiltrated by biases from occidental culture. This mode of reasoning does nothing but uproot participants from their cultural identity for the sake of universal consensus. Multicultural society, however, consists of identities which are embedded in the individuals’ cultural tradition. This sociological fact demands a richer form of rationality that does not deny the multiplicity of cultural values and embedded identities. We need a form of public reasoning which emphasizes cultural understanding rather than abstract consensus. We might call it a multicultural, contextualized and other-regarding form of public reason.KEYWORDSMulticulturalism, multicultural society, culture, reason, public reason, occidental reason, communicative rationality, apodictic reason, ad hominem reason, value pluralism

Reasoning in a Multicultural Society

Multicultural society as a way of being-with-others needs a certain form of public reasoning. Unfortunately, the current yet dominant form of public reasoning is infiltrated by biases from occidental culture. This mode of reasoning does nothing but uproot participants from their cultural identity for the sake of universal consensus. Multicultural society, however, consists of identities which are embedded in the individuals' cultural tradition. This sociological fact demands a richer form of rationality that does not deny the multiplicity of cultural values and embedded identities. We need a form of public reasoning which emphasizes cultural understanding rather than abstract consensus. We might call it a multicultural, contextualized and other-regarding form of public reason

Politics of Religious Freedom

When tackling the topic of “religious freedom” what are policy-makers and academics trying to define? Is religious freedom a universally defined set of liberal human rights from a secular state, or is religious freedom also seen in religious states? The Politics of Religious Freedom goes into the depths of complexity that is “religious freedom.” The book explores what religious freedom is in a variety of settings: South Asia, North Africa, Middle East, Europe, the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil

Husserl's Teleologie der «tiefen» Assoziationen as Foundation of the Theory of Judgment in comparison with Millikan's Teleosemantic Theory

The paper inquires Husserl's immanent teleology of conscious life, conceived as a Teleologie der «tiefen» Assoziationen. The associative genesis entails synthetical processes in the primordial-associative field, driven by the general concept of interest. The resulting syntheses ground the various forms of judgments, both judgments on experience and predicative ones in general. Since the theory's foundation relies on pre-predicative experience, then it must encompass its teleological dimension and, in this sense, the concept of evidence – pivotal in the theory – mirrors the result of the synthesis of fulfilment. This latter, in turn, is driven in an asymptotic path towards a teleological idea of adequacy. This account expresses the complementary mirroring that characterizes the relationship between judging and teleology, without the need to separate teleology from reason. In order to highlight the significance of this framing, the paper is closed by a brief comparison with R. Millikan's teleosemantic theory, whose concept of teleology is shown as flawed by the general concerns proper to naturalism

Jesuit and seonbi (±) in East Asia and the production of the first Korean supplemental teaching by Yi Byeok: the idea of God in The essence of sage teaching as an exercise in self-cultivation (sudeok) and self-expenditure (jeonghan)

The Jesuits, particularly Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), were the first enlightened missionaries who once in China discovered that the association of the God of the Bible with the old Chinese belief in the Lord of Heaven (Sangje) neatly conformed with the supplemental doctrine of the Deity they were reintroducing in the Middle Kingdom. Ricci's idea of God revealed a profound and apodictic interpretation of the Deity. If on the one hand, it built on the old revered Chinese notions of religiousness, on the other hand, it had little to do with a metaphysical, compassionate concept of self-expenditure one could associate with the experience of love-pain, or jeonghan.Since the early 1970s the Korean concept of han — the conventional meaning of which may be expressed in the English term resentment — has been the subject of theological discourse amongst Korean theologians who identify it with liberation theologies that have developed in Latin America and elsewhere. Han suggests a wide range of meanings and 'pathologies.' Dominant amongst them in recent Korean Christian discourse is wonhan, which implies the bitterness of one who has been treated wrongly and who harbours resentment and hatred. While recognising that this is the traditional understanding of han, this thesis will fundamentally dwell on another dimension of meaning as conveyed in the term jeonghan which suggests a 'pathetic' — that is com-passionate, love-pain — rather than pathological dimension of meaning. The thesis chooses the term 'com-passionate' in recognition of the affinity of meaning between jeonghan and the Greek notion of pathe understood as self-expending affection, or in Cicero's term sensu amandi which holds life suspended in 'pathetic' self-expenditure. This reflects the interpretation given by the Korean seonbi (scholar), Yi Byeok (1754-1786), whose main work provides the central focus of this study.The aim of the thesis is to invoke this more com-passionate and self-expending understanding of han. It will do so by examining the epistemological interaction between the Jesuit encounter with China's religious traditions, with special reference to Matteo Ricci's True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603) and the Jesuit influence on a particular group of seonbi in Joseon (Korea) represented by Yi Ik, An Jeong-bok, Jeong Dasan and Yi Byeok. Against a background analysis of Joseon's encounter with Ricci's Western Learning (Seohak), the thesis includes an original translation of Yi Byeok's main work, Essence of Sage Teaching (Seonggyo yoji), together with the original Chinese version. Exegesis of the main concepts of this work will elucidate Yi Byeok's understanding of the idea of God as self-expenditure (jeonghan), which constitutes the end of self-cultivation (sudeok) through com-passionate affection towards the Other, towards whom the neophyte seonbi lives a heightened apprehension of sincerity and reverence (S&iSc).From this textual study the thesis moves in conclusion to a constructive philosophical evaluation of jeonghan drawn from the insights of Yi Byeok. It is argued that jeonghan should be understood as an existential path, insofar as it constitutes a return to Heaven, in which the individual existence reflexively enlightens, and thus transmutes, the dark experience of han, apprehended in a "ruined universe", through an ethico-spiritual process of self-cultivation (sudeok) which it lives as reverence and self-expenditure

Moral Truth and Hume's Fork: The Prospects of Reconciliation

Hume’s division of truth into agreement with matters of fact or relations of ideas casts doubt on our capacity to have moral knowledge, as moral propositions do not seem to fall obviously into either category. This thesis looks at how two views, ‘descriptive moral functionalism’ and ‘moral concept essentialism’, try to account for moral truth as agreement to matter of fact and relations of ideas, respectively. Descriptive moral functionalism uses our folk-theoretic template of moral intuitions to try to fix the truth conditions for when a state of affairs possesses a moral property. Moral concept essentialism tries to find a place for moral truth among relations of ideas by appealing to the essences of concepts. I conclude that both views are unsatisfactory and that this should motivate us to look for other accounts of moral truth if we want to preserve our claim to moral knowledge

An anatomy of power: the early works of Bernard Mandeville

The thesis takes Mandeville's medical works at Leiden as a starting point. Translations of his first three works - all originally published in Latin - lay the foundation for a consideration of his approach to medicine, medical discourse and the contemporary seventeenth-century debates on Cartesian thought. From this basis, Mandeville's early English works are examined in detail. His fables are seen to develop the first stages of a complex theory of imitation which is closely related to his medical ideas on digestion. Mandeville elaborated this theory in three major works - The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) and The Fable of the Bees (1714). Each of these works is examined in the context of contemporary texts and ideas. Taken as a trilogy, the works are shown to explore the problems of the individual in a rapidly changing society. The thesis argues that in The Virgin Unmask'd Mandeville considers the nature of seual identity and the various ways in which the new consumer society could operate to determine that identity. In A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, it is shown that Mandeville continues his exploration of the effects of consumerism on the individual. In this text, however, he is concerned with consumption in both its literal and metaphorical dimensions as he fully develops the medical theories on digestion which he had begun to consider as a student in Leiden. Finally, Mandeville's first edition of The Fable of the Bees is examined in the light of his medical works and his interest in the nature of consumerism. Through the readings of each of these texts it is shown how Mandeville uses both the dialogue form and the `Remarks' of The Fable of the Bees to equip the reader with a set of interpretative tools. By using his chosen literary forms to question the notions of `knowledge' and `ignorance', he offers a perspective from which to `anatomize' the structures of power that were beginning to take shape in early eighteenth-century England

The Neganthropocene

In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end “banality” of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in