Open Journals at Memorial University
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Fostering Coexistence: Insights for the Future of Tiger Conservation in India
No full textTeacher - Stephen Decke
The Age-Dependent Value of Life: State Responses to COVID-19 in Ontario’s Long-Term Care Homes from March to December 2020
No full textDuring the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada saw high infection rates among its long-term care residents, leading to disproportionately high death rates from the virus amongst this population. The pattern of high death rates among long-term care residents persisted throughout the pandemic. Notably, the Canadian province of Ontario continually fared poorly, recording a total of 5,044 resident and 13 staff deaths by July 1, 2022 due to COVID-19. In the spring of 2020, the Ontario government called upon the Canadian Armed Forces to support some of the long-term care facilities with high rates of COVID-19 infections. The Armed Forces documented instances of residents dying in what they referred to as deplorable conditions. This article argues that the Ontario government failed to protect long-term care residents from COVID-19 and in so doing, marked their lives as expendable. By analyzing legislation and public documents, I identify how the state protected the interests of private corporations that own long-term care facilities and the neoliberal status quo in senior care, rather than vulnerable residents and the predominantly racialized women who staff these facilities. I propose that to uphold the long-term care system’s neoliberal capitalist structure, the state constructed the lives of people living in long-term care facilities as dispensable through weaponizing discourses underpinned by currents of ageism, sexism, and racism, while constructing itself as “caring” for responding to an “inevitable” crisis. An analysis of state responses to the pandemic highlights flaws and can contribute to strategies that may prevent devastation in the future, implicating practices for how a society provides care to people in long-term care facilities.
The Divine Stakes of Human Freedom: Jonas in Dialogue with Schelling
No full textIn a recent article, Lore Hühn calls for a comprehensive study of the parallels between Schelling’s critique of the will, on the one hand, and the philosophies of nature and technology developed in the twentieth century by students of Heidegger such as Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, and Hans Jonas, on the other. Hühn notes, in particular, that:
essential moments of Jonas’s ethics of responsibility, with its critique of classical metaphysics’ neglect of the body and nature, cannot be understood without the background of Schelling; this holds as well for Jonas’s speculative figure of the self-retraction of God and for his theory of responsibility for the totality of beings.
In this article, I intend to contribute a small piece to that larger study by bringing Jonas’s speculative theology into dialogue with Schelling’s theodicy as outlined in the latter’s 1809 Freedom Essay. While there have been other studies on the Jonas–Schelling connection, they have mainly centered on points of convergence in their philosophies of life and have largely neglected the Freedom Essay, which is the only text by Schelling that Jonas demonstrably knew well. There is, nevertheless, a connection between Jonas’s philosophical biology, his theory of human freedom, and his theology that warrants methodological comparison with Schelling but that I can at the outset only mention here. Whereas Schelling attempts to understand how God and the world must be constituted if human freedom, as the ability to do good and evil, is to be real, Jonas attempts to understand how God and the world must be constituted if the phenomenon of life, broadly speaking, is to be saved as purposive and as, to various degrees, free. My focus will be on the theological significance of the advent of human freedom in the cosmos
