Introduction

The problem of forgiveness may rightly be regarded as a perennial philosophical problem. Introducing his 1973 essay “Forgiveness,” Aurel Kolnai writes that, logically, forgiveness seems to be either “unjustified or pointless.” The logical and ethical problem of forgiveness acquired distinctive urgency in the 1960s when statutes of limitations on Nazi war crimes were set to expire. In the resulting debates, the ethicist Vladimir Jankélévitch occupies a central place. In his book Forgiveness and elsewhere, Jankélévitch singles out Spinoza as a philosopher with a particularly inadequate account of forgiveness. This article contextualizes Jankélévitch's argument and argues that Spinoza's conception of evil and forgiveness is essential for understanding why Jankélévitch himself cannot consistently account for his refusal to advocate forgiving the German people after the Holocaust. Drawing on Sylvain Zac's account of forgiveness in Spinoza, as well as Deleuze's account of the problem of evil as it arises in Spinoza's correspondence with Blyenburgh, this article argues that Spinoza offers an account of forgiveness that makes sense of what is ethically required in the face of what Carse and Tirrell call “world-shattering” wrongs such as the Holocaust.

As twentieth century philosophy fades into the distance, Martin Heidegger seems to be standing the test of time. His stature in continental philosophy is beyond question, and those French thinkers who avoid his influence most noticeably (such as Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze) are often difficult for precisely this reason, since it is Heidegger who has shaped our vision of philosophy more than anyone else. Even analytic philosophers have begun to find useful insights in Heidegger's works, while no analytic thinker has a comparable influence in the other direction - not even Wittgenstein. As the dust settles on the past hundred years of philosophy, it is Heidegger who looms as the ancestor whose influence we most need to absorb and resist. No one has seen this more clearly than Emmanuel Levinas. His claim that we must leave the climate of Heideggerian philosophy, and that we cannot do so by returning to a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian, strikes me as definitive. Nor does Levinas offer this statement as merely a vague program: in my view, he has done more than anyone else to move us into the post-Heideggerian climate that he recommends. In the works of Levinas, the lasting breakthroughs of Husserlian phenomenology are present in easily recognizable form, even if played in a strange new key. He grapples with Heidegger's question of being and his famous tool-analysis, reworking them in ways their author never attempted. Levinas does this along two separate paths. First and most famously, he senses the lack of any ethical philosophy in Heidegger, and also identifies a new space for such an ethics: the famous alterity or exteriority of the other. In this way Heidegger is challenged from above, with an appeal to the good beyond being. In a second and less prominent sense, Levinas challenges Heidegger from beneath, with his concepts of enjoyment and the elemental. While Heidegger submits all objects to a relational system of tools serving a series of purposes, Levinas objects to this form of holism. Entities are not simply dissolved in some global system of purposes, but close off in themselves, with a sort of inviolable integrity apart from all networks or functions. Humans always stand somewhere in particular, bathing in the material reality of wind, water, and stars, not to mention hammers and cigarettes, none of them entirely used up by their assignment to wider purposes. It is often forgotten that this second criticism of Heidegger is the basis for the first: for in Totality and Infinity, it is separation that paves the way for exteriority and transcendence.1 In this article, I will claim that there is also a third critique of Heidegger to be found in Levinas, one more closely related to the second than to the first. As Alphonso Lingis has lucidly observed,2 Levinas gives us a new definition of individual substance without relapsing into the traditional substance discredited by Heidegger's shifting system of tools. For Levinas, specific things are not just ontic debris to be dissolved in a mighty ethical Other, but neither are they just formless elements such as water or clouds. Things are substances, closed off in themselves even while permeated by what lies beyond them. If metaphysics for Levinas is inconceivable without the command of the Other, it is also unthinkable without the integrity and resistance of specific, autonomous entities. Heidegger misses the ethical moment, but perhaps more fatefully, he also misses the unyielding autonomy of specific objects. While Heidegger is quick to dismiss drums, houses, and tea plantations as ontic, Levinas glimpses the metaphysical dimension of particular things. My one criticism of the Levinasian approach is that it remains too human-centered, too much in the shadow of Kant's Copernican Revolution. Things may hide behind their contours in substantial plenitude, resisting human effort, but Levinas also seems to grant them independence only when humans are on the scene to feel resistance. …

This book is intended to be a contribution to the theological turn in political philosophy. It reinscribes contemporary political concepts and experiences in the ‘theological locus’ from which they supposedly come and at the same time looks for alternative semantic derivations for the political theory and practice. The discursive trajectory of the book has engaged with the discussions of different continental philosophers, theologians and historians of the twentieth century. Moreover, the book explores the extent to which theological discourse has been, and continues to be, relevant in shaping the meanings, symbols and realities of certain instituted political practices. This relevance has historically manifested itself in the hybridisation of theological and political concepts, images, gestures, and rituals. Combining theological and political concepts, the book shows that some divine traces are embedded in institutionalised political practices. It argues that these theopolitical figures – scripture, prophecy, oath, charisma and hospitality – should be read negatively as other names of God, in the sense of a negative theology, in the post-secular world. By analysing the symbolic meaning of these figures, Theopolitical Figures sheds new light on crucial questions for contemporary societies, such as the unconditional character of justice, the unfeasibility of historical expectation, the stability of the word, the idea of power as a gift, and openness to otherness as an ethical-political imperative.

The topic of enlightenment remains, as Foucault's remark indicates, central to contemporary debates in social and political philosophy. This is perhaps most notably the case with regard to the energetic debate between advocates of critique and of genealogy sparked by Habermas's trenchant criticisms of Foucault's genealogical style of philosophical reflection in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In this context, Habermas's discourse supports the orthodox picture of genealogy as an anti-enlightenment form of reflection, as an example of the lawless use of reason. Since this picture exercises considerable force, it is worth illustrating that it offers a bowdlerized—and to that extent, untruthful—picture of the relationship between genealogy and enlightenment. Such is the task of this essay, in which I will argue that Nietzsche's development of genealogy as a form of critical reflection is precisely oriented to overcoming the aporetic character of Kant's account of enlightenment (the account that underpins Habermas's own reflections on this topic). More specifically, this essay will show that Nietzsche's own commitment to enlightenment as an immanent ideal represents both a radicalization and deepening of Kant's account of enlightenment which aims to negotiate the aporia that Kantian critique bequeaths us.

Although family foster care, designed to provide temporary protection and nurturing for children experiencing maltreatment, has been a critical service for millions of children in the United States, the increased attention given to this service in the last two decades has focused more on its limited ability to achieve its intended outcomes than on its successes. This has resulted in a questioning and devaluing of family foster care as well as predictions of drastic reductions in its use. The reality, however, has been quite different. Though the use of the service has shifted, reflecting social and political events, family foster care remains an important child welfare service. Reaffirming its commitment to family foster care, the Child Welfare League of America's National Advisory Committee on Family Foster Care recommended that a special issue of Child Welfare be published on the subject. Aware that recent history has shown out-of-home care reacting to rather than anticipating change, the Committee decided to focus the special issue on family foster care in the next century. This issue would thus provide the opportunity for the field's best practitioners, researchers, and managers to share their knowledge as well as their expectations, concerns, and hopes for family foster care. Acting on the Committee's recommendation, a call for abstracts was issued in the fall of 1997, with overwhelming results: three times the number of abstracts usually submitted for a special issue were received. Both the range of content addressed and the quality of the abstracts received were impressive, making selection of the 11 articles included in this issue difficult. The need to consider balance and coverage of specific topics necessitated the exclusion of many fine papers. Immediately after CWLA issued the call for abstracts, Congress enacted major federal legislation impacting family foster care-the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (P.L.105-89)reminding us of the importance of legislation as it reflects social trends and political thinking and shapes practice. A review of that act, as well as other major child welfare legislation, provides an important contextual element for this volume. In 1980, in response to the drifting of children in care, Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-272), a key factor in shaping the current status of family foster care. The legislation responded to concerns that placement in out-of-home care was being used when other services were more appropriate, that children were remaining in care for excessive periods of time, and that children were simply being forgotten once they entered out-of-home care. The goal of the act was to reduce reliance on out-of-home care and encourage the use of preventive and reunification services; it also mandated that agencies engage in permanency planning efforts. By 1984, P.L. 96-272 was showing some success in reducing the number of children in care and the length of time spent in care. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, however, a dramatic 74% increase in the number of children in out-of-home care occurred [Petit & Curtis 1997]; the length of time children remained in care and their rate of reentry into care also rose. Concurrently, the out-of-home care system found itself facing new challenges: the overrepresentation of children of color; an influx of infants and preschoolers; children with increasingly severe emotional/ behavioral problems; the pervasiveness of substance abuse and its impact on families; the growing number of children infected/ affected by HIV/AIDS; and the discharge of many youths from care who lacked jobs, homes, and connections to a family.* Once again, the out-of-home care system found itself straining to deal with the sheer number of children in the system and with the complex issues that had brought them there. Concern grew that many children were coming into care needlessly and that many more could go home or achieve permanency with another family if more family-centered, intensive services were available. …

How Did We End Up With Donald Trump? John McMillian (bio) Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. 342 pp. Bibliography and index. $28.00 Hillary Clinton was likely in an upbeat mood on September 9, 2016. Earlier that day, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur had pledged $20 million to Democratic groups backing her presidential candidacy. Later that evening, she spoke at an LGBT fundraiser in Manhattan, before a large crowd that had just been warmed up by Barbra Streisand. Naturally, Clinton's remarks were recorded.1 When she quipped that you could fit "half" of Donald Trump's supporters into a "basket of deplorables," her supporters responded with laughter, cheers, and applause. Clinton was seemingly so pleased by the crowd's laudations that she extemporized her next sentence, which also was about Trump supporters: "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it."2 Trump pounced on her statement via Twitter, and Clinton apologized the next day. But her gaffe was not soon forgotten. It did not help Clinton's cause when a group of celebrated left-of-center columnists amplified her remarks. Armed with polling and research data, Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic), Jamelle Bouie (Slate), Charles Blow (the New York Times), Jonathan Chait (New York), and German Lopez (Vox) argued that Clinton had no reason to apologize. A few of them went further. If Clinton had erred at all, they said, it was only because she had downplayed the portion of Trump supporters who were, indeed, hateful bigots.3 There was no gainsaying that the GOP had taken a dark turn. The 2016 presidential campaign should have made clear that Trump was not fit for the Oval Office. He was vain, vicious, and vulgar. No one had ever seen a candidate so childish, so eager to put his base motives and epic resentments on proud display. Trump was picking at the sores of a wounded nation, and he seemed delighted to do so. Still, the situation required deeper understanding. Scholars, analysts, and political professionals weighed in on the big questions of the day: What foul forces were feeding Trumpism? What knowledge from the past could shed light on our current problems? In June of 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a syllabus for a course titled, "Trump 101."4 This was a collaborative [End Page 310] project involving twenty accomplished scholars from a range of disciplines, but most of them were historians. The syllabus's authors left no doubt that they regarded Trumpism as a baleful phenomenon. Among the classic works they recommended were Theodor Adorno's (et al.'s) The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1966). Harvey Mansfield, the conservative political philosopher, urged readers to turn attention to such ancient thinkers as Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle, who warned that when demagogues attain power in democracies, the demagogue is not chiefly to blame; the blame rests with those who elect him. None of the arguments or ideas embedded in the "Trump 101" syllabus are controversial in academic circles. Still, "Trump 101" was not well received. The problem, according to 349 humanities scholars who signed an open letter that appeared on the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) website, was that the syllabus did not recommend any works by "scholars of color" or "LGBTQ people." That was true. Although numerous books on the syllabus examined the perniciousness of racism and ethnocentrism, those books were written by white authors. The oversight led the letter's signatories to conclude that Trump 101's authors were "committed to presenting a 'whites only' portrayal of American political history." The letter's 349 signatories took the lack of nonwhite authors on "Trump 101" as evidence that the syllabus was "inappropriate," "highly offensive," "intellectually dishonest," "irresponsible," "racially illiterate," and "an artifact of racism."5 Within a week, two historians who critiqued "Trump 101"—N.D.B. Connolly, of Johns Hopkins University, and Keisha N. Blain, of the University of Pittsburgh—had crowd-sourced an alternative document, "Trump Syllabus 2.0." This new syllabus was five times larger than its predecessor, partly...

This introduction explains the title of this special issue as a call for transdisciplinary and culturally-oriented research on law in Germany. In an initial overview of pluralism, the text asserts that a German discussion of the pluralistic nature of legal authority predates the twentieth-century one within legal anthropology, legal theory, and political philosophy. The first part of the text reviews the early discussion of legal pluralism in the context of debates about state formation and an appropriate balance of forms of normative authority. This discussion points to the inherent plurality and affectivity of law. The second part of the introduction, in turn, is devoted to an argument in favor of the culturally-embedded and - mediated nature of legal phenomena made through an analysis of images relating to the so-called refugee crisis. On the basis of this analysis, it is posited that critical cultural methods and concepts are needed to comprehend current processes such as the so-calledEuropeanizationof law, the increasing heterogeneity of legal systems and cultures, and to critically bracket the idea of “legal culture” in and of itself. The last part of the introduction offers an overview of the essays in this special issue. On the one hand, each essay contributes to the thesis that law is pluralistic and has to be investigated interdisciplinarily, using a plurality of methods. On the other hand, all of the contributions make a different kind of claim for how law transpires and is transported through theatrical, visual means, narratives, and affects.

The year 2014 marked the 300th anniversary of the publication of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the bees, or private vices, publick benefits. To celebrate this occasion, as well as its own centennial, the Erasmus University Rotterdam organized an international conference on the work of Mandeville, its historical and intellectual context, and its present relevance, on June 6, 2014. The conference was organized around three keynote lectures,1 which discussed a different field Mandeville worked on or influenced: science and medicine, moral and political philosophy, and political economy. Papers presented at the conference ranged thematically from the co-evolution of commerce, medicine and moral philosophy in the Dutch Republic, via Mandeville's attitudes to religion to the social and intellectual context of his analysis of the passions.This special issue on Mandeville presents a selection of the twenty-two papers presented at the conference. The papers have been selected both for their quality and for their thematic diversity. They thus indicate the range of conference themes as well as the multifaceted nature of current Mandeville scholarship. All papers went through the normal process of blind review before being accepted for publication by this journal.Mandeville was born to a family of city physicians in Rotterdam in 1670, in an age when science, politics and commerce were rapidly changing in their methods and substance. These revolutions forced men of science and letters to reflect anew on the nature of economy, state and society. Mandeville was undoubtedly one of the most radical of these thinkers, proposing controversial new ideas about human motivation, the relationship between individual behavior and the common good, and the role of the state in society. Politically, the Mandeville family were affiliated with the States Party, which favoured economic, political, and religious liberty, as opposed to the Orangists and the allied conservative Calvinists. In the aftermath of the so-called Costerman riots in October 1690, the family was banned from Rotterdam. Bernard Mandeville, who had been educated in medicine at Leiden, ended up in England where he started publishing pasquils and pamphlets, while practicing as a physician.The famous Fable of the bees elaborated one of these pasquils, the poem The grumbling hive, or knaves turn'd honest (1705). Published in 1714 (shortly after Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics of man, manners, and morals [1711]), the Fable could not have been more at odds with Shaftesbury's claim that mankind's virtues automatically align with the common good. Mandeville promised to unveil man's true nature by observing the trifling films and little pipes of the human frame (Mandeville 1988, vol. I, 3). He claimed, provocatively, that it was human wickedness from which social benefits were to be expected. Luxury, though a private vice, contributes to a nation's prosperity; frugality leads to public ruin. Mandeville published several other increasingly philosophical works, the most important being the second volume of the Fable (1729), which substantially altered its earlier message, and An enquiry into the origin of honour, and the usefulness of Christianity in war (1732).After the Fable was condemned in 1724 by the Grand Jury of Middlesex for its diabolic attempts against religion, Mandeville's notoriety increased sharply. His shocking paradox that mankind's vices contributed to the common good haunted moral philosophers, social scientists and economists ever since. In a famous lecture on the Dutch philosopher, Friedrich Hayek wrote that Mandeville, in his efforts to understand modern commercial society, was asking the right questions (1967, 127). But as Hayek's political antagonist the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson noted, the main question has never been properly answered (1962, 19). The papers in this collection reveal that Mandeville's lasting importance cannot be reduced to what Hayek considered his most important insight: that the unintended consequences of self-interested human actions can be mutually beneficial. …

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See O'Grady, 2010. I am no empiricist but the thought: how does she know … has she heard them all? See, within this journal Moe (2007 Moe, V. F. 2007. Understanding the background conditions in skilled movement in sport: A study of Searle's background capacities. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 1(3): 299–324. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) and within this volume Lopez Friaz. See for example, in ethics (http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/mds/projects/HaPS/PCCS/MESH/ieen/index.aspx; accessed 19 November 2012) and bioethics (https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/197543/2/IT001-2004-Medicine-Health-Care-Philosophy-editorial.pdf, accessed 19 November 2012); political philosophy (See Schramme, 2008) and, of course, the history and philosophy of science have often proceeded hand-in-hand (http://css.au.dk/forskning/projects/philosophyofcontemporaryscienceinpractice/workshopsandconferences/empirical-methods; accessed 19 November 2012). Witnessed in the special issue edited by Irena Martinkova and Jim Parry (5: 3) and the upcoming special issue by Andrew Edgar (7: 1).

This is a special issue on political theology in the Nordic countries. The Nordic countries represent a region in Northern Europe and the North Atlantic and consists of five countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Nor way and Sweden, including their associated territories, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Aland. Around 25 million people live in an area of 3.5 million km 2 . Although there are significant differences between the countries, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that they also share a common history, including similar societal structures, cultures and religious heritage. Linguistically, they all, with the exception of Finland and the Sami people (that inhabit Finland and Norway as well as Sweden), belong to the same language group, and throughout history there has been a constant exchange, sometimes of a more war-like and sometimes of a more friendly nature. In the fifteenth century, all of the Nordic countries were united in the Kalmar Union; it was not until the twentieth century that all five countries that we now have were independent from each other. Politically, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are constitutional monarchies with a parliamentary system, whereas Finland and Iceland are parliamentary republics. Iceland and Norway do not belong to the European Union, whereas the other three do. Religiously, Christianity has been the dominant religion in the Nordic countries for more than a thousand years, and the latter were all part of the Lutheran reformation in the sixteenth 1. Ola Sigurdson is professor of systematic theolog y and director of Centre for Culture and Health at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The author of more than fifteen books on systematic theology, political philosophy, theology and culture and political theology, his most recent publication is Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Analyzing social wrongs

Abstract: In a 1978 lecture in Tokyo, Foucault drew a comparison between his own philosophical methodology and that of ‘Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy’, claiming the label ‘analytic philosophy of politics’ for his own approach. This may seem like a somewhat surprising comparison given the gulf between contemporary analytic and continental philosophy, but I argue that it is a very productive one which indeed might help us reconsider this gulf. I proceed through a comparison between Foucault and the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, one of the analytic philosophers Foucault had in mind in his Tokyo lecture. By focusing on the methodological commonalities between Foucault and Austin, this article identifies the core of a philosophical methodology that cuts across the analytic/continental divide in philosophy in general while constituting a powerful alternative to the methods applied by analytic political philosophers specifically. This approach, which I term ‘analytic critique’, is one that starts from a critical analysis of what happens in ordinary lived experience and theorises ‘bottom-up’ in an avowedly politically engaged way – thereby challenging the conceptual and political aloofness of contemporary political philosophy in the liberal-Rawlsian tradition. Foucault’s appropriation of the label ‘analytic philosophy’, it is argued, ought to function as a call to more imaginative methodological-theoretical engagement across the traditional division between continental and analytic approaches.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. First published in 1994, and revised in 2006, the third edition of this best-selling, concise introduction and translation has been revised and updated throughout, to take account of recent scholarship. Featuring an expanded introduction, an updated bibliography and a guide to further reading, the third edition also includes timelines and biographical synopses. The Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition of Nietzsche's major work is an essential resource for both undergraduate and graduate courses on Nietzsche, the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, history of political thought and ethics.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. First published in 1994, and revised in 2006, the third edition of this best-selling, concise introduction and translation has been revised and updated throughout, to take account of recent scholarship. Featuring an expanded introduction, an updated bibliography and a guide to further reading, the third edition also includes timelines and biographical synopses. The Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition of Nietzsche's major work is an essential resource for both undergraduate and graduate courses on Nietzsche, the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, history of political thought and ethics.

Emmanuel Levinas never wrote about cinema. To the uninitiated, this may appear surprising, given that his life spanned the twentieth century, in which film emerged as a major art form, and his work includes tantalising allusions to films and the cinematic medium. Far from surprising, however, the liminal place that cinema occupies in Levinas’s thought is entirely understandable. Although his philosophy features many cultured references to literature and the other arts, and he discusses the work of such writers as Marcel Proust and Michel Leiris in some detail, his early work is dismissive of the aesthetic dimension in ethical terms. More significantly still, his philosophy bears a challenging relation to questions of vision and the phenomenological world of appearance, tending towards the anti-ocular and revealing an iconoclastic approach to images. There is something provocative, then, in wanting to ask what Levinas’s philosophy has to say about cinema, if we understand this realm as the location par excellence of the moving image. Yet this is precisely the guiding question of this Special Issue, which is the first to bring together articles on the work of Levinas and the insights that his philosophy can offer to film studies. The collection features an international selection of contributors, and includes Levinas specialists as well as film scholars. There is no easy bond to be forged between this philosopher and film, and the possibility of making this connection remains open to interrogation throughout some of the articles. But by taking Levinas to the cinema, while tracking the cinematic aspects of his thinking, all of the contributors address this hitherto occluded relation in generative ways, and each creates a critical opening for future research in the field.