1,720,987 research outputs found
Stirred by Your Presence
No full textTraces of you reach me through my senses. But without wondering in your presence, I cannot see you. For beings of sense and meaning such as ourselves, being stirred by another’s presence opens wondering. The implications of such claims are striking for what perception involves, for being in touch with another, and for good relationships. The paper proceeds as a series of “strobes,” from an ancient Greek word for whirling. Turning quickly about, words enact being stirred into wondering, interspersed with visual glimpses, a photographic series. Building on recent work by the author, the paper draws on Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology; Daniel R. Scheinfeld, Karen M. Haigh, and Sandra J.P. Scheinfeld’s early childhood educational theory, and a phrase by Martha C. Nussbaum describing the intentionality of wondering. This is deepened by attention to what the phenomenological tradition calls “passive synthesis,” and what the author, following F.W.J. Schelling, has called “positive anxiety,” the soul’s excitement around the possibility of sense and meaning
Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder
No full textIn an unconventionally written open access book that challenges the literary imagination of its readers, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer explores how wonder is central to Martha C. Nussbaum’s normative project. Nussbaum’s work is opposed to the emotional and political conditions of ‘narcissism’ – the tendency to seek to control the wills of others in order to defend oneself against perceived vulnerabilities. Our capacity for wondering is important for growing beyond narcissism. Bendik-Keymer elaborates a politics of wonder that is consistent with understanding this idea. Taking issue with understandings of wonder viewing it as an emotion of surprise or delight, he develops an alternate tradition finding wonder in concert with the freedom of imagination found by degrees within much of human understanding. The result is a constructive rereading of Nussbaum’s oeuvre, surprising for how it disencumbers her work of some falsehoods surrounding anxiety and anger and for the ways it implies an egalitarian politics of relational autonomy more socialist than liberal. Misty Morrison’s visual inquiry accompanies the book creating space for the reader to wonder. Morrison paints and prints how families involve wonder, starting with moments in her child’s life when she wonders what they might see. Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder is an important contribution to the philosophy of wonder and is crucial for understanding the work of a leading philosopher. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0. licence on bloomsburycollections.com
A Minimal Participatory Condition on Democratic Right
Full text linkThere are two problems that plagued the construction of representation in the U.S. constitution leading up to its ratification, and these two problems could conceivably be addressed through a single, practical condition on democratic participation. The first problem is the problem of poor judgment. The second problem is the problem of remote representation. In this essay, I will propose that both problems be partially but substantially addressed through a minimum participatory condition on democratic right. Let me first set up each problem textually
Presentism the Magnifier
Full text linkSpeech given at the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) 10th Annual Meeting: “Thinking and Acting Ecologically” at the University of East Anglia, U.K. on June 12-14th, 2013
Poor in Practical Capacity: How Environmental Alienation Is Really a Deficit of Political Know-How
Full text link“Alienation from nature” is a popular notion in Western environmental culture. Influential Anglophone critical theorist Steven Vogel claims that it makes no sense, unlike alienation from our productive capacity to dwell on Earth, called “alienation from the environment.” His criticism is accurate, but his view isn’t. The normative sets appropriate production and consists of social processes of arriving at norms. Politics is foremost among these processes, and it is fundamentally know-how. Given these assumptions, poor practical capacity ends up being the heart of “environmental alienation” – alienation from the built environment. Look at large-scale, anthropogenic, environmental change: a deficit of political know-how leaves people alienated from the planetary environment created by human engineering
“Goodness itself must change” – Anthroponomy in an age of socially-caused, planetary environmental change
Full text linkGiven the reality of socially-caused, planetary-scaled, environmental change, how – if at all – should our ethical concepts change? It has been a hallmark of environmental literature in recent years to insist that they should or even must. It will be argued that, yes, our ethical concepts should change by exploring the changes needed for the core ethical concept of goodness. Goodness, it will be argued, must change to reflect a change in priority from personal intentions to the right relation between an agent and the collective to which he/she belongs. This relation, which is called herein the civic relation, centers on taking responsibility for the structure which produces unintentional, aggregate effects at the level of planetary ecology. Examples include a fossil fuel-based infrastructure, isolationist nationalism that undercuts international climate agreements to decarbonize energy, and the lack of a political forum to respect the rights of future generations. More generally, goodness according to the civic relation must express an anthroponomic orientation to life – a sustained, life-long attempt to build the practice of the collective self-regulation of humankind as a whole. Of the many consequences of this meta-ethical change in goodness, one is that it addresses the banality of evil today
The Wind ~ An Unruly Living
Full text linkA process begun in Pisa, Italy in April of 2016 during a workshop on political theory in the Anthropocene, The Wind ~ An Unruly Living is a philosophical exercise (askêsis, translated, following Ignatius of Loyola, as “spiritual exercise”). In his exercise, Bendik-Keymer throws to the void: the ideology of self-ownership from a society of possession. By using the Stoic kanôn, the rule of living by phûsis, he follows an element. Unhappily for the Stoic and happily for us, the wind is unruly. A swerve of currents through a social fabric, it’s full of holes, all holely. Stretch and stitch as you want, it might settle more shapely tattered into light, but it will never become whole. The wind’s only holesome
A Planetary Imagination: Responses to Chakrabarty’s Socio-Natural Historiography, Editorial Introduction
Full text linkDipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 essay in Critical Inquiry, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” sent tremors through the environmentally aware humanities in the 2010s. Last year, he published the book that brought that essay forward into the present, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. It’s no overstatement to think of this book as having clanged the bell for a new normal in the humanities and social sciences when it comes to telling the story of ourselves, that is, when it comes to human history. Responsible history should today be geological even when recounting the human record. Chakrabarty raised a series of open-ended, difficult questions about a range of core concerns in the humanities and social sciences from how we can understand ourselves and society to how we ought to think about political economy and morality. How should these concerns be reconsidered – and their study reorganized – given the rupture of the Earth system sciences – and more generally the “planetary” – into their domains
The Practice of Ethics
Full text linkThe point of this talk is not to school you in the practice of ethics, but to raise questions about the practice of ethics. There is a standard picture of the practice of ethics that goes like this: Ethical theory is done in a classroom. It is divided into normative theory, meta-ethics, and descriptive ethics. Students learn to see how the ethics in their society and community works; they learn how to discover true ethical beliefs and sometimes discover them during class. Through meta-ethics, they understand what it is to have an ethical belief. Then –and here comes the practice part- they go out and practice ethics.
In this picture, the domain of ethics is the domain of everyday life, and academic life has the role of providing the theory of everyday life, in this case, the theory of ethics. The point, then, is to apply what you learn in the classroom. The school is the think-tank for your world
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