Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook

This article examines Sheila Watson’s interest in the notoriously difficult thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Watson read Weil’s work in English and French throughout the 1950s, especially during the time she spent in Paris in 1955 and 1956. While critics have examined Watson’s Paris journals for her discussion of modernists such as Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, little attention has been paid to her synthesis of, and response to, Weil’s thought in the same pages. Contextualizing Watson’s revisions to The Double Hook in her sustained reading of Weil, this article argues that Weil’s thought informs Watson’s aesthetic and ethical project in the novel. The article analyses Watson’s understanding of three central concepts in Weil’s philosophy – decreation, affliction, and metaxu – and offers a Weilian reading of The Double Hook. By resituating Watson as a reader of Weil, the article also highlights the Canadian author’s belonging within a wider circle of women writers in the mid-century who, like Weil and Watson, also demanded unsentimental responses to violence and suffering.

Introduction

This chapter situates the book within the development of an increasingly ‘global’ conceptualization of the Middle Ages, and links this conceptualization to a rising desire to reckon with the discipline’s colonialist, nationalist, and racist legacies. Tracing this development’s main stages and debates, the chapter explores the centrality of interconnectedness and cultural exchange as motifs in the study of the global Middle Age. Through negotiating debates in the field of world literature, the chapter argues for the efficacy of the term ‘world medievalism’ rather than ‘global medievalism’, not just because world medievalism shares the inclusive ethical project of world literature, but also because it enables us to formulate medievalism itself as ‘world-disclosing’—a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past ‘world’ opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. This chapter addresses the strengths and drawbacks of viewing non-European spaces through the lens of medievalism.

Colloquium 3 Aristotle on the Voluntariness of Vice

In Nicomachean Ethics III.5, Aristotle argues that virtue and vice are “up to us and voluntary.” Readers have long struggled to make sense of Aristotle’s arguments in this chapter and to explain how they cohere with the rest of his ethical project. Among the most influential lines of complaint is that the argument of III.5 appears to contradict his emphasis elsewhere on the power of upbringing to shape character, beginning in childhood. Scholars have developed two main interpretive approaches to III.5, which I label “libertarian” and “compatibilist.” I argue that neither approach succeeds in removing the appearance of contradiction. I develop an alternative interpretation that reveals the coherence of Aristotle’s commitments, showing that for him the voluntariness of character and the power of upbringing are in reality two sides of the same philosophical coin. Both are grounded in his fundamental idea that virtue and vice are acquired by practice.

Problems of False Consciousness

The second chapter takes up the harder case of false consciousness. It first attempts to show how the more limited methodology of its predecessor relates both to the three historical examples and to the long sweep of human ethical practice. Drawing on an account of the evolution of moral life (presented in The Ethical Project), it argues for the primacy of practices to address moral issues (to provide patterns for conduct). Ethical life emerges only when there are alternative ways for people to live, when the question “How to live?” acquires a significance. Ideals of the self provide answers to that question. False consciousness (in one important sense) arises when such ideals are denied to some groups of people.

DO UNIVERSAL (TIMELESS) VALUES EXIST? ETHICAL PROJECT OF MORITZ SCHLICK

Реконструируется этическая философия М. Шлика и акцентируется внимание на темпоральных аспектах его этики. Для этого анализируется его последняя работа «Вопросы этики», где он предпринимает попытку научного рассмотрения морали. Отмечается, что для начала ХХ века характерно обращение к рассмотрению ценностей, т. к. «старый» набор ценностей, дискредитированный во многом войной и последующим изменением общества, больше не мог «закрепить» человека в текучей современности. Делается вывод, что этика Шлика представляет собой результат тонкого чувствования изменяющегося времени с его потребностью в переосмыслении всех оснований культуры - начиная с того, как мы познаем этот мир, и заканчивая тем, как нам жить и действовать в этом мире. The article aims at reconstructing philosophical ethics developed by Moritz Schlick and at outlining its relation to temporality. We analyze in greater detail Schlick's last work 'Problems Of Ethics', in which he addresses the problems of philosophical reflection on morality. We place Schlick's work into the historical context of the early twentieth century, which can be characterized by an increased interest in values because the 'old' values were dismantled by world war and major social transformations. Human life and its meaning required renewed forms of orientation and meaning in «liquid modernity». In this respect Schlick's ethical reflection originates in the Zeitgeist with its search for new meaning of human life. For Schlick, the key question is why human beings act morally. To answer this question, Schlick investigates central concepts of ethics from the perspective of human activity. He also distinguishes his ethics of the good which relies on human nature, from the rationalistic ethics of duty, which, in his view, causes but alienation from life. Morality does not have to hinge on selfabnegation, while true virtue can be based on pleasure principle and remain independent from social pressures. Virtue can evolve from human free will and involve both reason and feelings. Thus, we argue that Schlick's heightened sensitivity to the spirit of the times with its need to reimagine the foundations of our culture shaped his approach to and his main concerns in ethical reflection, which embraced both the ways we can know the world and the ways we should live and act in it.

ERICO VERISSIMO E PEPETELA: DIFERENTES TRAJETÓRIAS LITERÁRIAS QUE CONVERGEM

The literary projects of the novelists Erico Verissimo and Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, known as Pepetela, affiliate themselves with the tradition of social intervention literature, in the same manner as it was configured in the 20th century, as they comprise an ethical project faithful to their world views and their social and human commitments, which isintensified by the aesthetic project that accompanies it. In this sense, there are ideological and aesthetic affinities between the two novelists with the confluence, on the ideological plane, of the humanist ideology and the social and human commitment that both present in their literary projects, and on the aesthetic plane, of the similarity between the narrative structures of their founding novels (the trilogy O tempo e o vento, by Erico Verissimo, and Yaka and Lueji, by Pepetela), due to the fact that the two writers use common themes and narrative strategies, such as the family saga, metafiction, counterpoint narrative technique and polyphony. Thus, we believe that the ideological affinity between Pepetela and Erico Verissimo led the Angolan writer to incorporate into his literary project some thematic and formal elements used by the Brazilian, according to the concept of intertextuality by Julia Kristeva (1974), who conceives the writing of a literary text as a reading of the preceding corpus. However, the relationship between them is based not only on the similarity in their common traits, but also on the differences that exist between their works and between their literary projects.

How to Have Your Quasi-Cake and Quasi-Eat It Too

Quasi-realism prominently figures in the expressivist research program. However, many complain that it has become increasingly unclear what exactly quasi-realism involves. This paper offers clarification. It argues that we need to distinguish two distinctive views that might be and have been pursued under the label “quasi-realism”: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. Of these, only conciliatory expressivism is a genuinely meta-ethical project, while quasi-realism is a first-order normative view. This paper demonstrates the fruitfulness of these clarifications by using them to address Terence Cuneo’s recent challenge that quasi-realist expressivists lack the resources to plausibly accommodate certain sorts of data points.

Politics and Ethic of Care of the Self in Albert Camus’s The Plague

Albert Camus’ The Plague articulates a new aesthetic of existence that resists biopolitical normalization. It means cultivating one’s self and not attempting to discover an authentic and hidden self because it entails a continual process of becoming. The sudden eruption of plague in Oran, signifies a rupture in history of its people as the “bored populace is consumed by commercial habits aimed at making money”. In The Plague, if some people become more self-centred and insensitive, characters such as Rieux, Rambert, Peneloux and Joseph Grand show concern for the suffering people and stand in solidarity with them. Their characterization as ordinary individuals who assume responsibility for others’ existence in times of disaster reflects Camus’ hermeneutic of care of the self as an ethical project. Camus aptly asserts that “ordinary acts of courage and kindness are more helpful than the illusion of superheroes”. Deriving a cue from Foucault, Heidegger and Levinas, the paper attempts to explore how care of the self is intertwined with ethics and politics. It is argued that without spiritual discipline and caring for others, the ethical transformation of self cannot take place. It indicates fashioning of the self more freely and self-reflexively and thus speaking truth to power and sacrificing for others. The paper examines this poetics of self which shares an ethical relationship with truth, freedom and kindness.

Early childhood education as a site of ecocentric counter-colonial endeavour in aotearoa New Zealand

This article draws upon a range of theoretical domains, first to outline the historical rationale for the urgent changes needed to challenge and transform the dominator culture which has justified exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the resources of the earth. It invites educators to reconsider the narratives that are either consciously or inadvertently promoted in our work, suggesting that we can learn from Indigenous epistemologies in which humans are situated alongside earth others, as respectful, related guardians and caretakers. It finally draws on some examples from a recent qualitative study conducted with ten early childhood centres from across Aotearoa, to illuminate possibilities for enactment of counter-colonial renarrativisation within early childhood settings in service of an ethical project of enhancing relationalities, reconnecting children and their families with the more-than-human world.

Early childhood education as a site of ecocentric counter-colonial endeavour in aotearoa New Zealand

This article draws upon a range of theoretical domains, first to outline the historical rationale for the urgent changes needed to challenge and transform the dominator culture which has justified exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the resources of the earth. It invites educators to reconsider the narratives that are either consciously or inadvertently promoted in our work, suggesting that we can learn from Indigenous epistemologies in which humans are situated alongside earth others, as respectful, related guardians and caretakers. It finally draws on some examples from a recent qualitative study conducted with ten early childhood centres from across Aotearoa, to illuminate possibilities for enactment of counter-colonial renarrativisation within early childhood settings in service of an ethical project of enhancing relationalities, reconnecting children and their families with the more-than-human world.