A Marxist Critique of Alasdair MacIntyre\u27s After Virtue

Alasdair Macintyre asserts in After Virtue that contemporary moral discourse is only arbitrary assertion of the will. Appeals to reasoned arguments have been replaced by expressions of preference, attitude and feeling-- in short, by emotivism. Macintyre locates this moral breakdown in the Enlightenment philosophers\u27 failed attempt to replace Aristotelian teleology with a rational justification for morality. Macintyre\u27s analysis fails because he does not show whose interests are served through the assertion of arbitrary supposed will or whose interests were served when objective standard of the Middle the Ages prevailed. He does not acknowledge the preeminent role the material relations of production and exchange in the construction of a society\u27s moral standards. A class analysis suggests that emotivism originated in the overthrow of feudal society by the newly developing industrial class of free traders. The concept of the free individual facilitated the organization of production on the basis of wage-labour. The ensuing class struggle led to the dominance of emotivism in contemporary moral discourse. Macintyre\u27s revised version of the Aristotelian concept of the telos cannot establish a rational basis for morality. Without structural changes designed to eliminate class divisions, emotivism cannot be supplanted. It can only be suppressed by means of instruments such as Macintyre\u27s version of the telos. It is because Macintyre fails to analyze emotivism as the product of class struggle that he advises us to prepare for the new dark ages which are already upon us (Macintyre, After Virtue, hereinafter referred to as AV, p. 263)

The Patience of Film. Cavell, Nancy and a thought for the world

Despite considerable differences Stanley Cavell and Jean ­Luc Nancy share the demand for a renewal of thinking produced through and with the concept of the world. Their articulation of the legacy bequeathed by Heidegger and Wittgenstein begins with an understanding of the world in excess of knowledge and insists on this impossible mastery as the most productive incentive for thinking. Inasmuch as philosophy has understood itself as producer of worldviews, systems and principle, philosophy has constantly suppressed the thinking of the world, for any worldview absorbs and dissolves the world in its vision. For both Cavell and Nancy an insistence on this suppression leads to an emphasis on film. Two gestures can be said to intertwine in their thinking of film: to recapture our relation to the world as one that is not based on knowing as certainty, but on the reception of the singular; to recapture thinking as that which is attracted and called for by the insurgence of the singular, by the seam(s) in experience. Nancy and Cavell reverse the idea of cinema as completing the regime of representation stressing how cinema produces a step away from thinking as representation in view of what the article names thinking as patience. The article concludes by asking: what does it mean for philosophy to understand itself as patience

Must we measure what we mean?

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about “what we say”. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about “what we say” should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are (at least sometimes) engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success

Differential induction of apaptosis in human breast cancer cell lines by phenethyl isothiocyanate, a glutathione depleting agent

Phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) is a naturally occurring electrophile which depletes intracellular glutathione (GSH) levels and triggers accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). PEITC is of considerable interest as a potential chemopreventive/chemotherapeutic agent, and in this work, we have investigated the effects of PEITC on human breast cancer cell lines. Whereas PEITC readily induced apoptosis in MDA-MB-231 cells (associated with rapid activation of caspases 9 and 3, and decreased expression of BAX), MCF7 cells were relatively resistant to the apoptosis promoting effects of PEITC. The relative resistance of MCF7 cells was associated with high basal expression of NRF2, a transcription factor that coordinates cellular protective responses to oxidants and electrophiles and raised intracellular levels of GSH. This raised basal expression of NRF2 appeared to be a response to on-going production of ROS, since treatment with the antioxidant and GSH precursor N-acetylcysteine (NAC) reduced NRF2 expression. Moreover, pre-treatment of MDA-MB-231 cells with NAC rendered these cells relatively resistant to PEITC-induced apoptosis. In summary, our data confirm that PEITC may be an effective chemopreventive/therapeutic agents for breast cancer. However, differences in the basal expression of NRF2 and resultant changes in GSH levels may be an important determinant of sensitivity to PEITC-induced apoptosis

Ways of Relating: Hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness

This paper considers the relevance of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida to geography’s engagements with both mainstream moral philosophy and poststructuralist theory. This relevance lies in the way in which their work unsettles the ascription of normative value to relations of proximity and distance. Distance is usually understood to be a medium of moral harm or indifference. In contrast, Levinas presents distance as the very condition of responsibility. Grasping the significance of this argument requires an appreciation of the temporality of responsibility and responsiveness that both Levinas and Derrida emphasise. They present an alternative way of understanding the relationality of subjectivity and social processes. Through a schematic exposition of key themes in Levinas’ work, prevalent understandings of the spatiality of relations are shown to harbour their own forms of indifference and moral harm. The full effect of Levinas’ reconsideration of the value of relations between proximity and distance is bought out in Derrida’s recent writings on hospitality. For both thinkers, there is no natural geographical scene for the cultivation of responsibility. Rather, their shared focus upon temporality emphasizes the degree to which responsibility is motivated in response to the activities of others. The implication of this argument is that critical analysis should be reoriented towards practices that shape individual and collective dispositions to acknowledge the claims of others

Wittgensteinian Anti-Scepticism and Epistemic Vertigo

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On tacit knowledge for philosophy of education

This article offers a detailed reading Gascoigne and Thornton’s book Tacit Knowledge (2013), which aims to account for the tacitness of tacit knowledge (TK) while preserving its status as knowledge proper. I take issue with their characterization and rejection of the existential-phenomenological Background—which they presuppose even as they dismiss—and their claim that TK can be articulated “from within”—which betrays a residual Cartesianism, the result of their elision of conceptuality and propositionality. Knowledgeable acts instantiate capacities which we might know we have and of which we can be aware, but which are not propositionally structured at their “core”. Nevertheless, propositionality is necessary to what Robert Brandom calls, in Making It Explicit (1994) and Articulating Reasons (2000), “explicitation”, which notion also presupposes a tacit dimension, which is, simply, the embodied person (the knower), without which no conception of knowledge can get any purchase. On my view, there is no knowledgeable act that can be understood as such separately from the notion of skilled corporeal performance. The account I offer cannot make sense of so-called “knowledge-based” education, as opposed to systems and styles which supposedly privilege “contentless” skills over and above “knowledge”, because on the phenomenological and inferentialist lines I endorse, neither the concepts “knowledge” nor “skill” has any purchase or meaning without the other