Gewalt und Kommunikation

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Normal Case ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Philosophy Of Dialogue ◽  
The Individual

In ethics, when discussing problems of justice and a just social existence one question arises obviously: What is the normal case of the relation between I and you we start from? In moral philosophy, each position includes basic socio-anthropological convictions in that we understand the other, for example, primarily as competitor in the fight for essential resources or as a partner in communication. Thus, it is not the human being as isolated individual, or as specimen of the human species or socialised member of a historical society what needs to be understood. Instead, the individual in its relation to the other or others has been studied in phenomenology and the philosophy of dialogue of the twentieth century. In the following essay I focus on Martin Buber’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of intersubjectivity which I use in order to explore the meaning of recognition and disrespect for an individual. They offer a valuable contribution to questions of practical philosophy and the socio-philosophical diagnosis of our time.

Torture, The State and the Individual

1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 345-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanford H. Kadish
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Innocent Person ◽  
Democratic Community ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Painful Question

The Report of the Landau Commission puts a painful question for public debate: can it ever be morally acceptable in a liberal democracy for the state to use cruel measures against a person to compel him to reveal information needed to prevent grave harms, such as the loss of lives? The question, of course, belongs to a class of questions that has baffled and divided people for generations. Are some actions inherently and intrinsically wrong, so that they may not be redeemed by the net good consequences they produce on balance? Even if this is the case in general, can it be true regardless of the enormity of the consequences? Battle lines in moral philosophy are drawn in terms of how these questions are answered. For consequentialists the morality of all actions is solely determined by their consequences, near and long term. For deontologists the morality of all actions is always determined, at least in part, by their intrinsic wrongness, so that if they are wrong they are not made right by their desirable consequences. Each side has, so it seems, an unanswerable objection to the position of the other. Deontologists ask: then you mean you are ready to declare, for example, that punishment of innocent persons may be morally justified if it is necessary to prevent crime? And consequentialists (without answering) ask in turn: then you mean that even if the life of thousands and the preservation of the basic freedoms of a democratic community depend on it, you would regard it as morally prohibited to use any force against a single innocent person?These questions are among the hardest of all hard questions. But they become even harder when they are asked in the context of a public debate over how a government should act in some immediate crisis.

Leon Petrażycki and contemporary socio-legal studies

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Transnational Law ◽  
The One

AbstractThe work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture.

Biological Ideas and Their Cultural Uses

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 111-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Benton
Keyword(s):  
Biological Evolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Do So

The topic of my talk is a very ancient one indeed. It bears upon the place of humankind in nature, and upon the place of nature in ourselves. I shall, however, be discussing this range of questions in terms which have not always been available to the philosophers of the past when they have asked them. When we ask these questions today we do so with hindsight of some two centuries of endeavour in the ‘human sciences’, and some one and a half centuries of attempts to situate the human species within a theory of biological evolution. And these ways of thinking about ourselves and our relation to nature have not been confined to professional intellectuals, nor have they been without practical consequences. Social movements and political organizations have fought for and sometimes achieved the power to give practical shape to their theoretical visions. On the one hand, are diverse projects aimed at changing society through a planned modification of the social environment of the individual. On the other hand, are equally diverse projects for pulling society back into conformity with the requirements of race and heredity. At first sight, the two types of project appear to be, and often are, deeply opposed, both intellectually and politically.

Common Laborers? Industrial Pluralists, Legal Realists, and the Law of Industrial Disputes, 1915–1943

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Ernst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
William James ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Standards Of Conduct ◽  
Industrial Disputes ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Developing Society

At the turn of the twentieth century, when highbrow political thinkers rebelled against the consensual epistemology and ethics of the Victorians, when they argued, as William James did, that “neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer,” when they declared themselves to be living in “a world where truth and justice are to be carved from culture rather than found already etched in reason,” they created an unprecedented problem in liberal political and legal thought. Previous thinkers could take the individual as the fundamental political unit and attribute to “him” a capacity for knowing and doing right that “he” shared with all God's children (as “commonsense” moral philosophy held) or all participants in a consensual, organically developing society (as historicist scholarship had it). Armed with such premises, they could confidently judge diverse social practices against universal standards of conduct.

scholarly journals Incurably Religious? Consensus Gentium and the Cultural Universality of Religion

Numen ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob De Roover
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
The One

Abstract For centuries, the question whether there were peoples without religion was the subject of heated debate among European thinkers. At the turn of the twentieth century, this concern vanished from the radar of Western scholarship: all known peoples and societies, it was concluded, had some form of religion. This essay examines the relevant debates from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: Why was this issue so important? How did European thinkers determine whether or not some people had religion? What allowed them to close this debate? It will be shown that European descriptions of the “religions” of non-Western cultures counted as evidence for or against theoretical claims made within a particular framework, namely that of generic Christian theology. The issue of the universality of religion was settled not by scientific research but by making ad hoc modifications to this theological framework whenever it faced empirical anomalies. This is important today, because the debate concerning the cultural universality of religion has been reopened. On the one hand, evolutionary-biological explanations of religion claim that religion must be a cultural universal, since its origin lies in the evolution of the human species; on the other hand, authors suggest that religion is not a cultural universal, because many of the “religions” of humanity are fictitious entities created within an underlying theological framework.

Study of the concept of detention in theater’s Jean -Paul Sartre

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (138) ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Thakaa Muttib Hussein
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
French Theater ◽  
The Third ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Conscious Choice ◽  
The World ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
The Individual

The two plays, No Exit and The Condemned of Altona, are works of modern French theater. The author presents the detainee’s suffering and his relationship with others within a specific reality and time circumstance. In the first chapter, we review the play of a closed session and the story of three criminal suspects living their fate after death in Hell in a strange and unimaginable atmosphere. As for the play the Condemned of Altona, the writer portrays the tragedy of a generation of young people after World War II as they live the tragedy of their actions that they took against humanity during the war. In the second chapter, we examine the study of the pre-detention period and the world of memories, in order to reach the reality of the events separating the detainee between his past and present, once with himself and the other with others. In the third chapter, we examine the detention between illusion and reality, and that the detainee in theater’s Sartre is nothing but confined to others' view of what he is doing and how voluntary detention will ultimately be the existential act. And how that encourages the individual to make conscious choice embodied in personal freedom to commit and acknowledge his actions to the end of his life.

Die Idee des Schaminstinkts in Kants anthropologischen Schriften

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-402
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Falcato
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Moral Deliberation ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Historical Injustice ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The One

Abstract This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics have been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of negative emotions like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Finally, I raise some paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light.

Surveillance, Conspiracy, and the Nanny State

Security ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Security ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Individual Citizen ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes

This chapter argues that the provision of security is not only an act of care but also an expression of power. And power is always something that stands to be abused. Agencies of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes consistently and explicitly claimed to maintain security by inculcating insecurity among the masses. The perverse logic is that fear alone sustains the need for security, which consequently legitimizes the state's existence. This logic has at least two alternative results. On the one hand, the care for the individual citizen has simply been converted to the care for the state. Here, security is a dehumanizing project that shifts all concern to a realm well beyond the human. On the other hand, precisely by promulgating fear among the populace, such projects also inadvertently humanize. Stripped of personal security—deprived of the privation of concern—the subjects of these regimes are left with nothing more and nothing greater than the capacity to care.

Plato, Levinas, and Transcendence

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Michael L. Morgan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
The One ◽  
Dual Commitment ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

Although Levinas frequently references Plato positively, they are engaged in different philosophical enterprises. Whereas Levinas takes his place in the tradition of modern moral philosophy for which the atrocities of the twentieth century are undeniable burdens, Plato is concerned with cultivating dispositions that promote psychological and social harmony. For Levinas, Plato’s Form of the Good signals a dual commitment, on the one hand to the primacy of ethical action to existence, and on the other to the connection between ethics and transcendence, in the sense of absolute otherness or separation. But this reading is anachronistic.

scholarly journals A EXPERIÊNCIA DO EXÍLIO: DESEJO E REPULSA ENTRE DOIS ESPAÇOS

2003 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvio Renato Jorge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Abstract Thinking ◽  
Collective Process ◽  
Private Context ◽  
The Individual

Ao pensarmos as relações luso-brasileiras no século XX, inevitavelmente somos levados a discutir a emigração e o exílio como formas concretas através das quais o indivíduo estabelece, no âmbito pessoal, esse processo coletivo. Investigar a presença, nos textos de autores que vivenciaram essa experiência, do sentimento de pertencer a um espaço intervalar, pautado em um discurso que mescla repulsa e/ou desejo pelos dois territórios – o perdido e aquele que se vislumbra –, é o objetivo deste trabalho. Abstract Thinking of lusitanian-brazilian relationship in twentieth century, it is unavoidable to discuss emigration and exile as concrete ways for the individual establishes this collective process in a private context. To inquire into the presence of this feeling of belonging to an intervallic space in the texts of the authors who had experienced this process, based on a discourse that mingles repulse and/or desire for both territories – the lost one and the other that is glimpsed – this is what this work aims at pointing up.

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