Politics and Philosophy

En este documento nos interesa exponer y poner en debate algunas perspectivas sobre la noción de mesianismo dentro del movimiento social que defiende el EZLN. Haremos una revisión de los comunicados del Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos a la luz de estudios antropológicos, sociológicos y bíblicos sobre el mesianismo con el fin de aclarar a qué tipo de movimiento se refieren sus escritos y, de esta forma, confrontarlo con las acusaciones de fundamentalismo que ha recibido la figura de Marcos y EZLN por parte de algunos sectores de la intelectualidad mexicana. Lo que  interesa en esta incursión es llegar a un análisis lo más honesto posible, para descartar las acusaciones que desprestigian al EZLN como un tipo de fundamentalismo y, al mismo tiempo, observar las auténticas motivaciones en su ideal de justicia, paz y libertad que podrían provenir de una inspiración mesiánica.

This paper addresses a range of issues relating to the reading of Heidegger's  Back Notebooks. It thus approaches the Notebooks from a hermeneutical perspective, although it also considers the issue of the way Heidegger's thinking during the period in which Notebooks II-XV were written is connected with his later thought.

This paper starts from the assumption that states may have a right to control their borders and thus regulate migration. Nonetheless, I argue that governments face severe moral restrictions in the exercise of their right to control admission; not only is their right to exclude migrants constrained by the existence of refugees, but also by limitations on which criteria they can legitimately use to assess admission applications. Further, the right to select among migrants is limited by moral considerations too, as some criteria of selection are simply impermissible. Additionally, the issue of harmful brain drain provides a further limitation, as it generates a duty to exclude skilled migrants when their admission would foreseeably enable harm. Thus, the presumptive right to control admissions is severely restricted by moral considerations; a detailed ethical scrutiny shows that the relevant forms of conditionality are such that states are much more constrained in their admission practices than it may prima facie appear.

The intention of this paper is to observe Plato's Epistles as a unique epistolary message. The idea stems from the similarity of the topics covered in the letters, their intertwining, and even the fragmentary repetition of content, given the time frame in which they were written and the referent events characterized by a limited chronotope. The multiplication and perpetuation of the partnership between philosophy and politics lay the foundation of Plato's Epistles. The productivity of this union is investigated from a rhetorical perspective with the application of the rhetorical devices the author himself used in the letters as a strategy to provide a persuasive argument for his efforts to permanently unite philosophy and politics as the supreme good in the establishment and maintenance of an institutionalized community.

Rabindranath Tagore has stood out prominently in world literature for more than a hundred years. Although his literary works are primarily in Bengali-one of India's many languages which is also the world's seventh most widely spoken languagehis output in English too is plentiful. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his English Gitanjali (1912), a collection of reworked versions of mostly devotional and spiritual poems written in Bengali, and became the first non-European to receive this accolade. Tagore's own English translations of his original Bengali work consolidated his literary acclaim. His literary and non-literary writings have been extensively read and assessed. This latest edited anthology of essays by Mohammad A. Quayum is a welcome addition to this scholarship. With four volumes of books on Tagore, including criticism and translations, to his credit, Quayum is a knowledgeable hand at Tagore. In a comprehensive Introduction to this collection of fourteen essays, including

This text later appeared as Chapter 7 of the book The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism. It incorporates much of the material from the articles entitled "A Letter from New Orleans" and "Postscript to a Letter from New Orleans."

A critique of "The Politics of Cosmology," a thousand-page manuscript by social ecologist and political theorist Murray Bookchin, based on his study of the history of philosophy and his lectures on that topic. It appears on my PM Press blog and my "It Is What It Isn't" blog from Changing Suns Press.

Αν μια εποχή η «εθνική» αγκιτάτσια περί ελληνικής αποκλειστικά και μόνο Μακεδονίας αποτέλε­σε την πολεμική ιαχή επέκτασης του ελληνικού κεφαλαίου στα «παρθένα» εδάφη που εγκατέλειπε μια καταρρέουσα οθωμανική αυτοκρατορία, δεν πρέπει να μας διαφεύγει ότι η ίδια η αστική τάξη ή τουλάχιστον οι ηγετικοί της κύκλοι, δεν πίστευε λέξη από την εθνικιστική της ρητορεία

The paper attempts to read together two otherwise unrelated questions – Deleuze’s views on philosophy and the question of nationalism in India – to explore what both can offer to each other without reducing the specificity of each. The paper, however, attempts to do this also keeping in mind two immediately topical concerns: the rising popularity of Deleuze studies in India and the political debates concerning nationalism. With such an attempt at reading one concept in an-other’s context, the paper thus attempts to raise broader questions concerning the conceptualisation of nationalism, philosophy and politics. Aiming to explore such concerns from the question of ‘other’, the approach can be summed in the following entangled sequences: conceptualising nationalism in relation to minoritarian perspectives, politics in relation to philosophy and western ideas in relation to non-western contexts. The paper, however, engages in such an approach as a cautionary experimentation of reading entanglements, divergences and contingencies without searching for some corrective or messianic possibilities.

In this work I aim to explain the theory of tyranny outlined by Alexandre Kojève in the essay entitled Tyrannie et Sagesse, that was originally composed as a review of Leo Strauss' On Tyranny. The paper tries to demonstrate that this specific Kojèvian theory is not occasional, but it represents an important articulation of the "Hegelian" System of wisdom created by the Russian philosopher. An articulation in which it shows a kind of "meeting place" of central parts of the System, in particular the philosophical anthropology based on desire (Begierde) and recognition (Anerkennung), the theory of Authority and the phenomenology of law. The common thread of my interpretation is the relationship thematised by Kojève between political power and philosophy. This perspective could open plural dimensions of tyranny in the Kojèvian thought. Dimensions which are interconnected in the direction of a post-historical and post-political State, in which the concepts of "stranger" and "alien" are dissolved into an universal and all-embracing reality.

Se detallan los pilares para la edificación de una política científica, tecnológica y transhumanista, la cual, propongo, es la extrapolítica. Esta propuesta posee una visión del filosófica científica, se basa en la evidencia científica y el adelanto tecnológico, una praxis política inclusiva y una moral  humanista secular.

Haack replies to a series of questions about how she came to be interested in pragmatism, what work she has done in the area, what she regards as its future, and so on.

This paper was written in response to an invitation from the editor, James Johnson, of a "Five Questions" volume on pragmatism. When, a couple of years later, Haack inquired, numerous times, about publication details, she never received ANY reply! She assumes (charitably) that the editor is deceased.

Elizabeth Frazer and Martin O'Neill discuss a vision of teaching Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) 'fit for the 21st century'. In an edition of the ISRF bulletin entitled 'Economics - ...Serious, But Not Hopeless' they discuss the problems of teaching a coherent Politics, Philosophy and Economics course when each of these three disciplines increasingly require very technical but very different skill sets.

That man is rational, is the most universal concept, the most axiomatic concept and yet, intrinsically not understood. Plato, in his philosophical inquiry thought of man as a composite of soul and body, with the 'soul' being a part of the divine reason that is capable of knowing the eternally real things of the universe. Later, Aristotle refuted this duality principle and conceived man as an embodied spirit. This position saw to the definition of man as a 'rational animal' (Zoon logikon): an animal that is conscious of its existence and capable of

Paper for the 8th annual London Conference in Critical Thought, 6 July 2019, @ the Centre for Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The attempt of my speech is to play with Canguilhem’s work on social and vital normativity inside the pattern we are sketching with the Permanent Seminar of Philosophy & Politics, based in Pisa. I tried to track down the political dimension of Canguilhem’s work and fit it into our new reflection instead of reading it under the light of the biopolitical thought, that could have been an over-rehearsed work. Thus, I’m going to define first what Canguilhem means with vital or biological normativity. Then, I will focus on social normativity, showing how it differs from the first one. But the core of my speech will be on how, besides an irreducible difference, the social and the vital dimensions determine one another, and on how the gap between them represents the place in which a simple individual can turn into an ethical and political subject, that is an active agent in the process of social normativity. In this way, I will show with Canguilhem’s words how the plan of immanence of life needs to front and struggle with its inherent negation to institute the political dimension, which is one of the main themes of our Permanent Seminar.

Offering the first developed account of political liberal education, this book combines a thorough analysis of the theoretical groundwork of political liberal education with application-oriented approaches to contemporary educational challenges. Following in depth engagement with the shortcomings of Rawls’ theory and addressing some key objections to neutrality-based restrictions in education, the volume moves on to provide an insightful discussion of topics such as same-sex relations in sex-education, the position of migrant children and the rights of religious parents to determine the education of their children. This book outlines a political liberal account of education which provides a useful contribution to the current debates about liberalism and education in a way unprecedented in the literature on political liberalism so far. It is of interest to anyone working at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of education as well as for scholars with a broader interest in how liberalism can respond to the challenges of value pluralism.

In order to prepare the field for an analysis of the role played by Sein und Zeit inside Heidegger's pathway of thinking, it proves decisive to show the theoretical horizon from which this first fundamental work of his takes its start. That is why, on the basis of Heidegger's hypothesis that the experience of the 'forgetfulness of Being' constitutes the dimension from which Sein und Zeit originates, our aim is to supply a preliminary elucidation of the sense of this enigmatical locution. Therefore, our dissertation dwells upon the difference between philosophical investigation and modern scientific knowledge, insofar as the latter is methodologically grounded just on the forgetfulness of Being. Assuming that the aim of Sein und Zeit is to reawaken a sense for Being, the confrontation between the positivistic interpretation of the world and Heidegger's analyses contributes to point out the menace impending on the sense of scientific knowledge and of knowledge as s...

J.  C.  Nyiri  has  argued  in  a  series  of  papers  that  Ludwig  Wittgenstein  is  a  conservative philosopher.  In  ‘Wittgenstein  1929-31:  The  Turning  Back’  Nyiri  cites  Wittgenstein’s admiration for Grillparzer as well as overtly philosophical passages from On Certainty in  support  of  that  thesis.  I  argue,  in  opposition  to  Nyiri,  that  we  should  separate  Wittgenstein’s  political  remarks  from  his  philosophical remarks  and  that  nothing  Wittgenstein says in his philosophical work obviously implies a conservative viewpoint, or any other kind of political viewpoint. In his philosophical work Wittgenstein was concerned with  untangling  conceptual  confusions  rather  than  with  putting  forward  a  political viewpoint  and  the  two  kinds  of  activities  are  quite  different.  There  is,  however,  some evidence of elements of conservatism in the stances that Wittgenstein took on political issues  although  there  is  also  some  evidence  of sympathy  for  left-wing  views,  particularly  during  the  ‘late’  period  of  Wittgenstein’s  work  after  he  returned  to  philosophy  at the end of the 1920s. Wittgenstein’s philosophical work cannot be claimed by people of any  particular  political  persuasion  as  their  own  but  it  can  be  used  to  untangle  philosophical problems in the work of a great variety of political philosophies.

Previous literature has demonstrated the important role that trust plays in developing and maintaining well-functioning societies. However, if we are to learn how to increase levels of trust in society, we must first understand why people choose to trust others. One potential answer to this is that people view trust as normative: there is a social norm for trusting that imposes punishment for noncompliance. To test this, we report data from a survey with salient rewards to elicit people’s attitudes regarding the punishment of distrusting behavior in a trust game. Our results show that people do not behave as though trust is a norm. Our participants expected that most people would not punish untrusting investors, regardless of whether the potential trustee was a stranger or a friend. In contrast, our participants behaved as though being trustworthy is a norm. Most participants believed that most people would punish someone who failed to reciprocate a stranger’s or a friend’s trust. W...

Fake news and hate speech have always been inextricably linked, coexisting symbiotically, and commonly serve the interests of groups that aim to achieve or maintain power. These are two subjects curiously morphologically confused these days, because when we reflect on both, we find ourselves in a Siamese duality and  pragmatic subjectivity. Indeed, they are sociological, philosophical and moral dysfunctions that have done very badly, and will continue to do the humanity.

lato in his philosophy gives very important place to the idea of justice. He used the Greek word "Dikaisyne" for justice which comes very near to the word morality or  righteousness, it properly includes within it the whole duty of man. It also covers the whole field of the individual's conduct in so far as it affects others. Plato contended that justice is the quality of soul, in virtue of which men set aside the irrational desire to taste every pleasure and to get a selfish satisfaction out of every object and accommodated themselves to the discharge of a single function for the general benefit.

This essay explores Jacques Derrida's writings on hospitality and his collaboration on the Cities of Asylum project of the International Parliament of Writers. This chapter of Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011) was first published in Anselm Franke, Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman (eds.), Territories: Islands, Camps, and Other States of Utopia (Berlin: Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003).

“Who Struggles for Recognition? Axel Honneth’s Moral Logics of Social Conflicts”. (Kto zabiega o uznanie? Moralna logika konfliktu społecznego według Axela Honnetha) a review of A. Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, ETYKA vol. 48, 2015, pp. 157-162.