Ethics After God's Death and the Time of the Angels

The philosophical idea of the death of God (God understood in pre-modern terms as living presence) has had various semantic operations within dominant (post)modern positions on human empowerment. Beginning with the significance of this, the article aims to discuss the half-life of a God who has become a metaphor. In other words, it explores the reverberation of God and God's death in secularized philosophy as well as the consequences of this for ethics and the conception of the Good. Then, the article illustrates the complex connection of this aim with the Occidental delimitation of human potentialities through gleanings from Murdoch, Arendt and Badiou´s ideas about the constellation ‘worldlessness, rupture, human frailty and everydayness’. It shows that such delimitation, operative in theories that share most of the assumptions surrounding the above constellation, re-sacralizes the justification of ethics as (in)humanist programme. Finally, it indicates how this particular delimitation of human potentialities can be revisited through the revival of the dead metaphor of the angelic and the kind of ethics it can animate

Curiosity and Democracy: A Neglected Connection

Curiosity’s connection with democracy remains neglected and unexplored. Various disciplines have mostly treated curiosity as an epistemic trait of the individual. Beyond epistemology, curiosity is studied as a moral virtue or vice of the self. Beyond epistemic and moral frameworks, curiosity is examined politically and decolonially. However, all frameworks remain focused on the individual and rarely imply a relevance of curiosity to democracy. The present article departs from such explorative frameworks philosophically to expand the research scope on curiosity in the direction of democratic theory. It highlights the complex politics of curiosity as a collective, rather than merely individual, desire for knowledge. I argue that curiosity should become a key analytical category for studying democracy as a political attitude and as a way of life. Investigations of the multifaceted curiosity of the demos may enhance the visibility of ethico-political issues that often escape the curious eye of citizens and researchers

Education and its philosophy as pandemic

Education and its contagion often get in each other’s way. Education, whatever the intentions of educators, often suffers from its contagious character, that is, from the fact that its often praiseworthy aspirations to transmission and dissemination turn education into a toxic social institution. Hence, education always requires care, critique and collective responsibility, especially in times that pass for asymptomatic, that is, when life seems normal and uneventful. Education should be pandemic, that is, universal, but non-toxically so

Of(f) Course: Michel Foucault, the Mobile Philosopher and his Dreamworlds

Foucault extolled the Iranian revolution and, anticipating the havoc that his public intervention in favour of the revolution would create, he wrote: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong”. Examining Foucault’s (so unlikely) valorisation of certainty and the partisan affectivity it bestows upon knowledge and truth, I read his unusual engagement with the Iranian revolution against the grain. A major tendency is to approach Foucault’s Iranian writings as aberration; against this tendency, I read them as an effect of Foucault’s specific epistemic and utopian optics. Through a critical reading of neglected aspects of Foucault’s comments on Iran, I argue that much nuance is missing when damning critiques fail to see why and how Foucault’s interest in an active rather than folklore non-European political identity unveils deeper tensions of his own worldview and outlook on international politics and interrogates mainstream appraisals of Foucault’s political philosophy

The Vision of a Future Europe: Infectious or Infected? The Position of Education

This essay aims to examine the discourse that conceptualizes the educational exchange and the European culture within the framework of a theory of European identity construction. Then, I shall discuss the main positions of this discourse, their concern with the global market and their indifference about political and material inequalities. The following question is posed: which are the innovative proposals that could set in course an ideal of a unified, just and radical Europe? A first approach to it is provided by Habermas' and Derrida's recent publications. Their views constitute the starting point of my intervention in the debate on the educational future of Europe and the inculcation of a European identity in students' consciousness. But my response to the above question challenges the kind of European philosophical discourse that does not rethink the main objectives of the social and political elites of Europe. I suggest that we criticize the dominant position of those elites and that we promote an alternative normativity of equality and justice. In the absence of such a normative condition, the bad side of modernity may continue to prevail and serve the material and symbolic interests of the privileged European classes