Open Journals at Memorial University
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Schelling and Levinas on Theodicy and the “Life” of Evil
No full textTo begin, let us recall the two paths that Schelling identifies in 1809 as alone able to give us a non-reductive elucidation of evil: dualism and kabbalism. He writes:
To demonstrate that there are but two means for explaining evil—the dualistic, according to which an evil ground-being with modifications supposed as much beneath as beside the good; and the Kabbalistic, according to which evil is explained through emanation or contraction, and that thereby every other system must sublimate evil—[to demonstrate this] would require nothing less than the entire power of a … fundamentally expanded philosophy.
The dualist path, setting good and evil either in a vertical (unter) or a lateral relation to each other, and the kabbalistic or ecstatic-instatic path, to which Schelling adds surreptitiously the neo-Platonic terms “emanation” and “distance”—these are the sole approaches liable to do justice to the reality of evil
The Organic Form of Time in Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology
No full textHow must time be so that consciousness can emerge? As we can infer from the second part of this question, time is concerned here with the conditions for the appearance of consciousness. So, time does not question the fact of the existence of consciousness, but given the latter’s fact, it looks for the grounds on which consciousness could have emerged. But it is not at all obvious what time has to do with the coming-into-being of consciousness. The question somewhat implies that time is one of the conditions for the becoming of consciousness, but it also posits a relation between the very idea of emergence and that of time. If we want to know the conditions in which consciousness can emerge at all, we have to look into the specificity of the relation between time and the conditions for consciousness’ coming-into-being
The Ugly Face of the Labour Market: The Social Organization of Field Education Coordination
No full textThis study uses Dorothy E. Smith’s Institutional Ethnography to examine social work field education coordination in an urban locale in Southern Ontario, Canada. Beginning with the standpoint of racialized students who were searching for a placement—the mandatory, practice-based component of accredited social work programs—I examine how the ruling relations socially organize field education coordination. I draw from textual analyses as well as conversations with key informants: five racialized social work students as well as two field education coordinators. A key finding of the study was that field education represented configurations of race, gender, and class with labour in social work education. By examining how field education coordination amidst the “crisis” of placement shortages was locally and translocally organized, this study explores the ways in which racialized students in one Canadian locale were systematically disadvantaged by neoliberal and managerialist discourses
Towards a Decolonial Abolition Feminist Methodology: A Research Project Exploring Women’s Experiences of Strip Searching in Prison
No full textin research with Indigenous and Black women as a white woman settler involves critical considerations related to white supremacy, settler colonialism, and misogynoir. This is particularly true when the participants have been imprisoned and the researcher has not. As such, this article describes my unique abolition feminist methodology rooted in a framework of relational accountability which centred experiences of Black and Indigenous women who have been strip searched in prison. It describes the specific steps I took to enact the ethics of relational accountability – reciprocity, respect, and responsibility – in each phase of the research. This includes an innovative method of meaning-making whereby I listened to the recorded conversations with women while I was on the land of a federal prison. This facilitated more wholistic and embodied meaning-making as I was able to hear and feel what the women were sharing while being in the presence of a federal prison. I also engage in abolition feminist praxis by critically reflecting on the ways in which power and practices of superiority showed up throughout the research process
Les Musées de Montréal. La non-appropriation par la communauté haïtienne: La non-appropriation par la communauté haïtienne
No full textParmi les nombreuses recherches qui se rapportent aux thématiques muséologiques, celles concernant l’évaluation muséale, etparticulièrement la question des publics qui se rendent aux musées, sont au coeur du débat depuis plus d’une vingtaine d’années. À elle seule, la problématique de fréquentation intéresse plusieurs chercheurs, de pays différents. C’est le cas du professeur Bernard Schiele, dont je suis étudiant, selon qui un musée ne survit pas sans visiteurs et une exposition n’existe que si elle est visitée
Affective Attachments: How "Doing and Being Good" Undermine the Liberatory Possibilities of Participatory Action Research
No full textCritical appraisals of participatory action research (PAR) tend to focus on better partnering practices among community and university collaborators with less attention to theorizing the material effects of our affective attachments and aspirations toward socially just outcomes and relationships. In this qualitative inquiry, I draw on interviews with 29 academics, community-based professionals, and peer researchers with extensive experiences of PAR. I use affect theory as an analytic entry point to explore how our commitments to socially just outcomes and relations act to paradoxically undermine PAR’s liberatory possibilities and displace the socially unjust conditions that PAR practitioners aim to transform
Dead Mirrors: Nature, Ideology, and the Intellectual Intuition
No full textIn his essay “Constructing the Natural: The Darker Side of the Environmental Movement” (1985), cultural ecologist Neil Evernden questioned what he described as the use and abuse of ecology. The growth of a popular or vulgar environmental movement—from which the first signs of a bourgeoning neoliberal environmentalism emerged—was proof enough: the conceptual organon of ecology and its associated natures could be used to serve a wide variety of ends, few of which had anything to do with social and ecological justice. The ecological turn could not be relied upon to provide a principle capable of securing and maintaining the ideological intent of a left-leaning academic holism. Ecology was just as equally a means of rebranding the status quo. Ecology was both the “mask” and “blunt instrument” for certain kinds of societies, a kind of “institutional shaman that [could] be induced to pronounce natural anything we wish to espouse.” Indeed, and in retrospect, Evernden’s critique exposed a tendency within environmentalism, as many of the Deep Ecologists surrounding him started openly expressing misanthropic tendencies that allied them with radicalizing forms of neoconservatism. As it turned out—as the legacy of Deep Ecology should teach us—creating an environmental movement capable of critiquing the failures of the neoliberal project while remaining free of crypto-fascist tendencies was harder than it first seemed. In Evernden’s words, our recourse to ecology and nature “justifies nothing, or anything.”3 All ecology was ideology—all ecology was an ecologism
Becoming as Formation of Boundaries: Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature and Whitehead’s Process Philosophy
No full textThe beginning of process philosophy is usually associated with Alfred N. Whitehead. Nevertheless, with regard to the understanding of the whole of nature as a process, there are obvious precursors to be found in the philosophy of nature around 1800 and especially in that of F.W.J. Schelling. Hans Jonas registered this proximity, at least indirectly. In his contribution to A Philosophical Biology, traces of both Schelling and Whitehead can be found, even if he never quotes the former directly and thinks he has to differentiate himself from the latter despite all kinship. A central question in common for Schelling and Whitehead concerns the formation of boundaries and, thus, of structures and forms. This question appears too in Jonas’s work, albeit less radically insofar as he understands only organic life and its permanent metabolism, rather than the whole of nature, as processual. Thus, Jonas poses the question of identity formation solely with respect to organic life. The process-philosophical perspective on the whole of being, which is shared by Schelling and Whitehead but rejected by Jonas, is, however, justified from certain points of view, especially in view of a holism increasingly discussed in the Anthropocene