Friendship as a Political Concept: A Groundwork for Analysis

What kind of a concept is friendship, and what is its connection to politics? Critics sometimes claim that friendship does not have a role to play in the study of politics. Such objections misconstrue the nature of the concept of friendship and its relation to politics. In response, this article proposes three approaches to understanding the concept of friendship: (1) as a ‘family resemblance’ concept, (2) as an instance of an ‘essentially contested’ concept, and (3) as a concept indicating a problématique. The article thus responds to the dismissal of friendship by undertaking the groundwork for understanding what kind of a concept friendship might be, and how it might serve different purposes. In doing so, it opens the way for understanding friendship’s relation to politics

Healing Multiculturalism: Middle-Ground Liberal Forgiveness in a Diverse Public Realm

This article examines debates about political forgiveness in liberal, pluralist societies. Although the concept of forgiveness is not usually taken up by liberals, I outline a plausible conception by exploring two recent approaches. The first, ‘unattached articulation’, concept requires no real emotional change on the forgiver’s part, but rather a form of civic restraint. In contrast, the second version highlights a strong form of empathy for perpetrators. In spite of their advantages, each concept proves too extreme. The problems are revealed by focusing on the case of the Harkis, who fought for the French during the Algerian war. Often still marginalised in French society, their case helps to highlight the conceivability of a ‘middle-ground’ or moderate concept of political forgiveness. Its core rests on the forgiver’s care for the social world. While this concept brings considerable challenges also, and is not inevitable in any particular case, it entails a more plausible combination of emotional and rational shifts in the forgiver’s world-view. Although the article does not recommend forgiveness by any person or group, it observes, recalling Arendt’s idea of amor mundi or ‘love of the world’, that political forgiveness may sustain a viable connection between diverse citizens’ public and non-public lives

Conflicts of Values and Political Forgiveness

Citizens have a right to be governed by officials with an acute awareness of the conflicts between the constitutional values of liberal democracy. Such an awareness is an integral part of a public official's integrity. That is why citizens should have a say in deciding whether to remove from office an official with such integrity. In this article, this type of conflict between constitutional values is translated into the terms of an individual official's decision making with the help of moral theory. This yields two paradoxes: one focusing on the decision maker and the other on the object of his or her decisions: the citizen. These paradoxes lead to the following questions: If running a liberal democratic constitution essentially involves moral complexity, should we not try to have it run by officials with a sensitivity to that complexity? And if officials with that sensitivity are bound to commit moral wrongs because of complexity, do not we owe them something like political forgiveness? The paradoxes are used to formulate conditions for political forgiveness

Settler state apologies and the elusiveness of forgiveness : The purification ritual that does not purify

Peer reviewedPostprin

Sprache: Deutsch – und ein paar Seitenblicke aufs Englische

Das erste Kapitel umreißt den Zusammenhang zwischen Sprache und Denken insbesondere im Hinblick auf die muttersprachliche Entwicklung. Das zweite Kapitel behandelt die Frage, warum „ein leichtes Umschalten auf eine andere Sprache nicht möglich ist“ insbesondere in Berufung auf L. Wittgenstein. Danach werden mit Beispielen die Verbsysteme im Deutschen und im Englischen illustriert. Das vierte Kapitel rückt die Besonderheit des syntaktischen Gefüges im Deutschen in den Mittelpunkt. Das folgende Kapitel beleuchtet die Frage des Übersetzens, wobei es um das „In-einem-Kontext-Stehen“ geht, weshalb eine getreue Übertragung in eine andere Sprach oft unbefriedigend bleibt. Das Schlusskapitel geht mit der Frage des Zuhauseseins in der Muttersprache um.(Verlag)The first chapter outlines the connection between language and thinking in particular respect of the development of the native speaker capacities. The second chapter treats the question, why „easy switching to another language is not possible“ in particular with reference to L. Wittgenstein. Afterwards the verb systems in German and in English are illustrated by means of various examples. The fourth chapter focuses on the characteristics of the syntactic structure in German. The following chapter embraces problems of translation putting emphasis on the fact that contextual relationship is more important than vocabulary to the effect that ‘word by Word transmission’ often remains unsatisfactory. The concluding chapter deals with phenomenon of „the Being-at-home” in one’s mother tongue. (Verlag