Contempt, Community, and the Interruption of Sense

In the early modern period, contempt emerged as a persistent theme in moral philosophy. Most of the moral philosophers of the period shared two basic commitments in their thinking about contempt. First, they argued that we understand the value of others in the morally appropriate way when we understand them from the perspective of the morally relevant community. And second, they argued that we are naturally inclined to judge others as contemptible, and that we must therefore interrupt that natural movement of sense-bestowal in order to value others in the morally appropriate way. In this paper I examine in detail the arguments of Nicolas Malebranche and Immanuel Kant concerning the wrongness of contempt, emphasizing the ways in which they depend on conceptions of community and of the interruption of moral sense-bestowal. After showing how each of these arguments fails to comprehend the nature and the wrongness of contempt, I argue that we can find the resources for a more adequate account in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and specifically in his reflections on ontology and on the meaning of communit

Obligation Without Rule: Bartleby, Agamben, and the Second-Person Standpoint

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, the narrator finds himself involved in a moral relation with the title character whose sense he finds difficult to articulate. I argue that we can make sense of this relation, up to a certain point, in terms of the influential account of obligation that Stephen Darwall advances in The Second-Person Standpoint. But I also argue that there is a dimension of moral sense in the relation that is not captured by Darwall’s account, or indeed by any of the accounts of obligation that have been most prominent in the history of western philosophy from the early modern period up to the present. More specifically, I argue that what is brought out in the relation between Bartleby and the narrator is the separation of the experience of moral necessitation from the rule that would give its content. I attempt to show that this obligation without rule is a genuine moral phenomenon and that we can begin to understand it in terms of the ideas of love, singularity, and potentiality as these are developed in the work of Giorgio Agamben

On the classifying space of the family of finite and of virtually cyclic subgroups for CAT(0)-groups

Let G be a discrete group which acts properly and isometrically on a complete CAT(0)-space X. Consider an integer d with d=1 or d greater or equal to 3 such that the topological dimension of X is bounded by d. We show the existence of a G-CW-model E_fin(G) for the classifying space for proper G-actions with dim(E_fin(G)) less or equal to d. Provided that the action is also cocompact, we prove the existence of a G-CW-model E_vcyc(G) for the classifying space of the family of virtually cyclic subgroups such that dim(E_vcyc(G)) is less or equal to d+1.Comment: 14 page