Scatter—Freedom!

The Practice of Philosophy within its Limits Jason Read (bio) CITIZEN SUBJECT: FOUNDATIONS FOR PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY BY ETIENNE BALIBAR TRANSLATED BY STEVEN MILLER New York: Fordham University Press, 2017 In reviewing Etienne Balibar’s Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, it is important to grasp what kind of book, what kind of work, one is dealing with. The immediate answer would be a collection of essays. This superficial apprehension makes sense, especially because Balibar has written predominantly essays since he emerged on the scene with his contribution to Reading Capital. With the exception of the short studies on canonical figures, such as The Philosophy of Marx, Spinoza and Politics and Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, as well as the Welleck Library Lectures, Violence and Civility, Balibar’s publications have mainly appeared as a series of essays collected in such books as Masses, Classes, Ideas; We, The People of Europe?; and Politics of the Other Scene. Treating Citizen Subject as merely a collection of essays misses the methodological point. Not only were the essays not intended as an organized book, but their episodic character belies a fundamental methodological point. As Balibar writes in the Introduction all the essays in this volume consist of readings; they bear upon texts or traverse the interpretation of texts. These texts are always rigorously individualized not only in the sense they are authored but also in that, above all, they are each time unique. I compare these texts to one another but I do not discuss “works” in the sense that literary and university ideology gives this term, nor, even less, the “systems” or “tendencies” [End Page 152] that would be represented in each product. I propose a new reading of the Second Meditation and not of Cartesianism . . . of the Phenomenology of Spirit (or a few moments therein) and not of Hegelianism, of the section from Capital on “commodity fetishism” and not of Marxism and so forth. (2017, 9) Balibar’s attention to the specific moments of reading is framed by a theoretical interest in what it means to “write in the conjuncture,” to write within a specific historical moment, with its constitutive tensions and contradictions. As Balibar argues, “not only do philosophers write within a conjuncture, but conversely, within the conjuncture, they write” (2017, 10). Balibar’s emphasis on the conceptual pair of the conjuncture and writing suggests that the context determines but does not define writing. Text exceeds context. The specificity of the moment is short-circuited by the practice of writing, which inserts the moment in a longer signifying chain, while this chain is in turn broken, or turned into knots by the exigencies of the conjuncture. The two of these converge in aporias, tensions, everything that Althusser formerly identified through symptomatic reading, now slightly reconfigured as a symptom of the tension between thought and its historicity. Balibar does not seek some balance between text and context or situate these texts in some overall historical progression but puts them to their maximum tension, seeking the point of heresy, the moment where the conjuncture interrupts the writing of philosophy and writing of philosophy breaks open the conjuncture. Despite this attention to the moment, to the points of heresy, Balibar’s book is not without its overarching theme, its large problem. It is more than a series of interventions and readings of particular conjunctures. As the subtitle suggests, it is work in philosophical anthropology, on the intersection of citizen and subject as ways of conceptualizing and problematizing what it means to be human. These concepts and problems, philosophical anthropology, citizen and subject not only are concepts that are in some sense implicitly universal, as perhaps all concepts are, but also make an explicit claim for universality. Philosophical anthropology claims to be an understanding of humanity as such. The citizen is in some sense the political corollary of such a universal figure. If one wanted to sum up in a word why “philosophical anthropology” has fallen out of favor as a philosophical problem or why the citizen is no longer seen as the center of politics, the criticism could [End Page 153] be summed up with one word: “universal.” The problem...

The Security Council is the only international body capable of authorizing the use of force in cases other than self‐defence. Its main mission is to protect international peace and security, and this has been reinterpreted in recent decades to include the protection of human rights in situations of grave humanitarian emergencies as well as to allow it to exercise legislative powers. Given this extraordinary range of functions, it is worth asking whether the Security Council is justified in their exercise. Should the international community entrust such power to an institution with the authority, structure, and decision‐making process of the Security Council? This article explores the implications of a distinctive tradition in political philosophy – namely, the public reason tradition – for judging the adequacy of some of the proposals for reform of the Security Council. I show that the scope of authority of the Security Council, as well as some of the proposals for reform, can be challenged on the basis of an emerging global public culture.

The pleasure of being in Rome is greatly enhanced by honor of addressing this most renowned forum, where so many distin guished persons have presented papers in past thirty years. My sense of honor at appear ing before this forum grew as I paged report on activities of this society since 1947, and I saw there photographs of many whose writings and international works and diplomacy have shaped contemporary mind and contemporary world: Alcide de Gasperi, Paul Henry Spaak, Joseph Luns, Cardinal Casarolli, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, to name just a few. It is a privilege to participate in this distinguished lecture series. It's also a marvelous pleasure to be in Rome in spring. For me, Rome is a pleasure of a very special sort. It is kind of pleasure which Samuel Johnson called the wine of life and of which St. Augustine wrote it rejoices soul. For me, truly, significance of this city lies less in undoubted beauty of its fountains and its squares, less in richness of its museums and its galleries, or majesty of its great public buildings, less in its dazzling sun and its Mediterranean visage than in its place in our shared history. It takes only a bit of poetic license to see Rome as heart of West ern Civilization?our civilization. Capital of antiquity, capital of Christendom, home of Renaissance and modern mind; Rome has for more than two thousand years reflected essential aspects of Western style of civili zation?the rule of law, mixed constitution, idea of constitutionalism itself. These and other key elements of mod ern liberal democratic tradition are explicated in Italy's rich contributions to modern political philosophy. Certain of these elements seem to me especially crucial to contemporary scene. When I think of Italian tradition in political philosophy and its contributions to world, I think of contribution of Marsiglio, whom many consider very beginning of modern tradition in political philosophy. Marsiglio gave us first modern version of a doctrine of social

The Deconstructivist Laclau Paula Biglieri (bio) and Gustavo Guille (bio) Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014) became famous within the academic field when he published, together with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics in 1985. This text brought fresh air into the field of radical politics not only because it challenged the overwhelming number of conservatives who were currently delighted in celebrating the failure of the socialist project, and thus the unsuccessfulness of Marxist theory, but also because this theoretical intervention made a difference: it reoriented the political leftist debates that, up until then, had been at an impasse. This theoretical intervention was later designated as the starting point of post-Marxism. Laclau was therefore characterized as a post-Marxist thinker, or as the creator of a new kind of theory of hegemony. However, he was never introduced as a “decontructivist” author. This is quite peculiar if we consider that in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in an enormous gesture—which could be interpreted as a work about their Marxist heritage—the authors deconstructed Marxist theory in such a vast way that they ended up disintegrating its foundations. Once they recognized that antagonism inhabits the heart of the subject and any objectivity, the assertion that there could be a final, coherent resolution without any remainder proved absurd. Thus they affirmed that enigmatic phrase “society is impossible”—a metaphor to say that society lacks the ultimate foundations from [End Page 1] which the totality of a partial process could be established. The inevitable conclusion was that it is no longer possible to hold on to a view that the subject of history could be determined a priori (the proletariat) and that it has a preestablished destiny (the reconciled society of communism). Yet the authors persisted with the idea of social change and antagonism, but this time without any possibility of reaching a dialectical resolution. Moreover, they insisted on the idea of emancipation, which would become a plural term—emancipations—leaving aside any possibility of an eschatological ending. From then onward, and taking into account these elements of perseverance, Laclau’s theoretical and political target became to make politics thinkable again. Politics—or, better said, hegemony—as the form of the political, antagonism, dislocation, and his last response to think of politics, that is, populism, became a key concept of his theoretical development. We could say that Laclau had a “political thought,” in order to contrast with the idea that his work was a “political philosophy,” in the sense that Laclau would have never accepted that politics was a mere sub-system of philosophy, that is to say, that politics would just refer to the institutionalized forms of interchange. For Laclau, politics went far beyond that; there was also “the political,” which had an entirely decisive dimension. In this sense, Laclau’s perspective is close to Derridean deconstruction inasmuch as Derrida always questioned the limits established by political philosophy and political theory regarding what has to be examined and what not as politics. As Ana Penchaszadeh and Emmanuel Biset have written: “Deconstruction questions the disciplinary boundaries that make political philosophy a defined area within philosophy, with a clear object to be examined and also a clear and distinct concept of politics” (2013, 10). In any case, the deconstructivist Laclau did not finish his task once he had deconstructed Marxist theory. We can say, in a way, that he continued with a deconstructivist gesture over his entire work, even when he presented his notion of populism. It is worth mentioning that in Laclau’s work the deconstructive face is [End Page 2] characterized by a critical or destructive aspect, while when constructing his theoretical and political proposal the deconstructive face is supplemented by psychoanalysis (in its Freudian-Lacanian version). In this article we will only focus on his deconstructivist gesture, which can be divided into two key moments: first, the deconstruction of classical Marxist theory and the radicalization of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony; and second, the deconstruction of the idea of populism and its radicalization. The Deconstruction of Classical Marxism Deconstruction, at least as developed by Derrida, is closely linked to the work of revisiting the Western philosophical tradition...

On Method, Nature and Grace in Caritas in Veritate Vincent L. Strand S.J. POPE BENEDICT XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate [hereafter, CV; cited by § no. in parentheses below] elicited an enormous immediate response by religious and secular commentators. Vatican Radio reported that, two weeks after the encyclical’s release, 1,800 articles had been written about it.1 While the document received some critique from the Catholic left—such as from the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who exclaimed, “How good a dose of Marxism would be for the Pope!”—in general, the encyclical drew heavier fire from neoconservative and libertarian supporters of free market capitalism.2 [End Page 835] For example, according to George Weigel, CV “resembles a duck-billed platypus” with incisive passages written by the Pope himself mixed together with passages reflecting current Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace default positions that Weigel finds unimpressive. He suggests that the reader of CV note the former passages with a gold marker and the latter with a red marker, distinguishing those valuable passages to be kept and pondered from those to be disregarded.3 In a similar spirit, Michael Novak praises elements of the encyclical, in particular its “beautiful” discussion of caritas, but nonetheless insists that, “if we hold each sentence of Caritas in veritate up to analysis in the light of empirical truth about events in the field of political economy since 1967, we will find that it is not nearly so full in its veritas as in its caritas.”4 Thomas Woods, author of The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, offers a boisterous libertarian critique of the encyclical, saying that, at worst, CV is “bewilderingly naïve, and its policy recommendations, while attracting no one to the Church, are certain to repel.”5 [End Page 836] These responses are noteworthy, given that the previous social encyclical, Centesimus Annus, was lauded by Weigel, Novak, and other Catholic neoconservatives.6 Upon first consideration, we might attribute the critique that CV elicited from these authors solely to the document’s specific economic and political policy recommendations: for example, its calls for redistribution of wealth and a world political authority (§§ 37 and 67). I would like to propose, however, that the [End Page 837] disagreement is more fundamental: it is not about the value of one economic theory or another, but instead about the role of economics as an autonomous science and about the degree to which Christianity should shape our economic and political thinking. The first part of this article will set a backdrop against which to consider these questions. It will offer a cursory exposition of the debate between Catholic neoconservatives (the so-called “Whig Thomists” long associated with the journal First Things7) and those thinkers associated with the journal Communio (sometimes referred to as “Augustinian Thomists”8). Second, I will argue that CV places Benedict’s thought in the latter camp. As I will show, this is due less to the content of Benedict’s theology than to its structure. I will suggest that CV contains a methodological newness that distinguishes it from earlier, more Thomistic social encyclicals: in CV, economic positions are obtained through revelation and a theological anthropology developed from Christological and Trinitarian reflection. Third, I will suggest that this methodology is an expression of Henri de Lubac’s position on nature and grace. The essay will conclude by naming several issues that merit further consideration. Christianity and Capitalism: A Debate A prolifically sustained argument in recent decades about the Church’s relationship to society has occurred between Catholic neoconservatives and the Communio school.9 It is not my intent here to offer a full exposition [End Page 838] of this debate. Instead, I would like to focus on their argument concerning the relationship of the Church to economics. Neoconservatives generally see the possibility of a smooth merger between democratic capitalism and Catholicism.10 At times, particularly in the work of Novak, this entails the strong claim that capitalism can be a source of spirituality.11 For his part, Weigel has proposed this merger by underscoring the virtue of creativity, which he finds present both in democratic...

Living Law Eugene Avrutin and Bruce Rosenstock (bio) Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt By Miguel Vatter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 348 pp. IN MEMORIAM Professor Bruce Rosenstock (1951–2023), passed away on the morning of January 5, 2023 after a long battle with cancer. A passionate activist for justice, equality, and pluralism, Professor Rosenstock taught at the University of California, Davis and at Stanford University before joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty in 2002. Professor Rosenstock was the author of numerous well-received books on political theology and modern Jewish philosophy, including New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile (2002), Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond (2010), and Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (2017). Most recently, Rosenstock was at work on a book titled "Hegel and the Holocaust," an exploration of four thinkers who have attempted to respond to the Holocaust in the terms of Hegel's philosophy. An inspiring teacher, Rosenstock was a longtime member of the Executive Committee in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society and served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religion. [End Page 213] _______ Over the last couple of decades, miguel vatter has established him-self as one of the most original and penetrating scholars of Continental political thought working today. Since 2014, he has published three monographs that cover the most significant themes in the field, from biopolitics, the constitutional basis of state sovereignty and international law, to human rights and political theology (Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society, Fordham University Press, 2014; Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt, Oxford University Pres, 2020; and the volume under review). In his always illuminating and thought-provoking close readings of the major figures of modern political philosophy, Vatter returns again and again to a set of fundamental claims around which his argument is structured: the ontological grounding of human rights in the unique emergent property (my phrasing) of humanness; state sovereignty as the usurpation of the power residing in humanness; republican democracy as the political expression of humanness; and Jewish and Christian political theology as competing discourses about the divinity of humanness versus the divinity of sovereignty. I read Vatter's work as being squarely located within the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach and the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and their concern to liberate humanness (they call it the human "species being") from its political-theological alienation. For Vatter, the deification the human sovereign is the quintessential alienation of humanness, whereas the "living law" that vests humanity with inalienable dignity restores humanness to its rightful place in the scheme of creation. What makes Vatter's work so richly rewarding is that his engagement with his chosen themes is always mediated through deep and erudite readings of the primary sources of modern political thought. The book under review here is a tour de force exposition of the major Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, from Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig to Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, and Hannah Arendt (with [End Page 214] a brief discussion of Martin Buber and his influence on Arendt). Vatter's stress on the centrality of the category of Creation as the ground of human dignity makes his book a fitting complement to Benjamin Lazier's treatment of the anti-Gnostic tendency of these thinkers in God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton University Press, 2008). Each of Vatter's chapters builds toward a synthetic understanding of modern Jewish political theology as founded on the principle that divine sovereignty is revealed in the power of the human to freely form republican communal life under an egalitarian legal order grounded in dignity as a natal property of every human. In the book's epilogue, Vatter argues that, with the creation of the human, the "Throne of God" is emptied of its glory and transferred to the human being. Each new human birth inaugurates a new rights-bearing creature who is the only sovereign power on earth. In a synoptic statement near the conclusion of...

The Myth of the Jew:Negating the Negation Nitzan Lebovic (bio) Keywords Myth, Jewish thought, Paul Hanebrink, Elad Lapidot, Ole Jakob Løland Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Elad Lapidot, Jews out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. Ole Jakob Løland, Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. To what degree is jewish studies still engaging with the myth of the Jew? A popular view identifies Jewish monotheism with a consistent opposition to mythological cyclicality and a pantheistic view of nature. In contrast, academic research demonstrated how limited this view is, and how important mythological themes have been to Jewish scripture and commentary.1 Take, for example, the impact of mythological images of nefilim—fallen beings, but also angels or giants—most clearly visible at times of crisis and "political judgments against royal power."2 Three recent books—in political history, critical thought, and political theology—exemplify how vibrant but problematic myth-making still is for our understanding of Jewish culture. Before turning to these recent books, however, it is worth briefly revisiting the history of the problematic relationship between Jews and their myths. If in premodern times Jews were represented in popular imagery as angels and giants, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the mythic [End Page 327] representation of Jews turned antisemitic and hypernationalist. As a result, after 1945 philosophers and historians in the West adopted a skeptical view of myths and prophetic tropes. The German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the Polish-born Israeli historian Jacob Talmon admired myth as a literary and artistic form, but detested its role in modern politics; myth, they felt, had been at the core of the new language of violence and antisemitism that arose with radical nationalism and racism. "Perhaps the most important and the most alarming feature in this development of modern political thought," Cassirer, then a refugee in the United States, wrote in 1946, "is the appearance of a new power: the power of mythical thought."3 Anchored in the ancient language of death and revival, its political form "is nothing but the dark shadow cast by language on the world of human thought."4 A decade later, Talmon identified a "collective state of permanent excitement" that had turned nineteenth-century national mythic language into twentieth-century "political messianism" and "totalitarian democracy" (1956). For Talmon, as for the political thinker Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism. (1951, 1954) came out shortly before Talmon's first book, capitalism and fascism had certain characteristics in common, such as the popularity of myth among masters of mass media.5 In the following decades, Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Hans Blumenberg, among others, analyzed myth both as a form and as an agent of historical change. Considering it as a multivalent phenomenon was necessary to capture its power as a cultural force and a strange political beast. Instead of biblical catastrophes or Homer's creatures and heroes, the modern nation gave birth to a cult of self-aggrandizing "authoritarian personalities" and an unparalleled play of propaganda that fueled new myths. The post-1945 analysis of myth focused on the relationship between politics and language. Historians and theoreticians showed that the new evocation of power relied on a process of "emptying out" of meaning. For example, Viktor Klemperer's Lingua tertii imperii (Language of the Third Reich, 1947), unpacked the Nazi "emptying out of language" and the injection into it of mythic and collective "excitement." In contrast to Cassirer's historical overview, Klemperer's linguistic analysis focused on recent examples such as Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century or Josef Goebbels's articles in the Nazi dailies. The emptying out of language was [End Page 328] needed in order to dehumanize the Jew and shape the image of the Hitlerian Übermensch. A decade after Klemperer, Cassirer, and Talmon, Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957) interpreted myth from the perspective of semiology—the study of symbols and signs—which he contrasted to the power of poetics. While avoiding a direct confrontation with the fascist use of myth...

Tumbling Dice: Gilles Deleuze and The Economy of Répétition Daniel W. Conway (bio) The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution. . . Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. —Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus In his 1962 classic Nietzsche et la philosophie, Gilles Deleuze proposes a beguiling figure for Nietzsche’s enigmatic teaching of eternal recurrence: the dicethrow. By means of this figure, Deleuze attempts to capture the double movement that governs the economy of repetition, whereby necessity and chance, being and becoming, are simultaneously affirmed in their constitutive difference. Hence the centrifugal economy of the teaching of eternal recurrence, at least on Deleuze’s interpretation of it: any genuine affirmation of the possibility of reactive forces already involves (and in fact presupposes) the necessity of active forces. In this essay I apply the figure of the dicethrow to Deleuze’s own thought. The figure of the dicethrow serves, I contend, not only as the master trope of his political thinking, but also as a model for his account of the economy of repetition. Most importantly, the figure of the dicethrow provides us with a blueprint for putting Deleuze himself to work, as a desiring machine in his own right. Here the [End Page 7] influence of Nietzsche is doubly useful to us: we may map outbreaks of Deleuze’s own schizophrenia by charting his use and abuse of Nietzsche; and we may employ Deleuze’s experimentation with Nietzsche as a model for our own experimentation with Deleuze. On the Use and Abuse of Eternal Recurrence Gilles Deleuze situates his thought along an unexplored seismic rift, which threatens to shift the tectonic plates that undergird the unstable metaphysical landscape of post-Kantian philosophy. Having egregiously mismeasured the Richter magnitude of the Copernican revolution, Kant and his successors have systematically ignored the ramifying cracks and fissures that fault the foundation of their metaphysical projects. They consequently have failed to meet the calamitous demand placed upon philosophy by this earth-quaking critique of metaphysics: the production of difference. Positioned at a historical remove from the epicenter of Kant’s Copernican revolution, Deleuze investigates a seismic vortex in which the aftershocks of this critique reverberate with heightened severity. It is the peculiar business of metaphysics, he believes, to misplace relations of difference behind relations of binary opposition, which are weighted toward one of the two terms in accordance with the precepts of (fabricated) first principles. Metaphysicians characteristically codify the lifeworld of human experience by enforcing a farrago of standard binary oppositions: order is preferred to chaos, stability to change, unity to multiplicity, mind to body, reason to passion, and so on. While one might have thought that Kant’s leveling critique of metaphysics had cleared the way for an exploration of difference, metaphysicians continue to ply their trade, albeit now in disguised form. Deleuze’s designation for the metaphysical recidivism of post-Kantian philosophy is “the dialectic,” a term that captures under its umbrella any attempt to derive a productive result from the clash of binary opposites (Deleuze 1983, 8–10). The dialectic thus functions to redeem the oppositional nature of traditional metaphysics, by teasing from its obfuscatory operations a “higher” synthesis or truth. According to Deleuze, however, practitioners of the dialectic succeed merely in compounding the swindle perpetrated by pre-Kantian metaphysicians. By enshrining binary opposition as the preferred model for all relationships between attributes (irrespective of any productive syntheses that opposition might magically yield), the dialectic perpetuates the signature prejudices of metaphysical thinking. The dialectic thus rehabilitates metaphysics following the devastating blow dealt it by Kant, but only at the expense of [End Page 8] postponing indefinitely the investigation of difference. As Deleuze sees it, the enduring appeal of the dialectic trades on an egregious confusion of cause and effect: affirmation is not the effect of the negation of negation, but its cause or precondition. The negation of the negation, which dialecticians claim to orchestrate through the clash of binary opposites, thus presupposes affirmation as its ground and provenance...

Evolutionary Psychology in the Service of Moral Philosophy:A Possible Future for Ethics? William S. Lewis Someone may ask, "What is the difference, then, between moral philosophy and moral psychology?" The answer may be that there is no interesting difference and that the issue is of interest only to university administrators. —Gilbert Harman, "Three Trends in Moral and Political Philosophy" (2003) In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (1891), William James provides a rough taxonomy of the state of ethical philosophy at the time that he was writing. Making a division between psychological approaches that identify the good with the feeling of pleasure derived by a naturally evolved organism and metaphysical approaches that hold that the good is conceptual, James argues that both are equally goods and that each implies similar obligation.1 James's solution, therefore, to the problem of which type of good must be honored is a pragmatist one: both are seen to have an effect on the organism and are thus equally real. Both are therefore equally worthy of consideration and respect. [End Page 48] Today, it may be harder to make the same kind of sweeping survey of the state of ethics and to solve the problem of casuistry in one stroke. In some department, somewhere, every type of moral philosophy is actively defended. However, for almost four decades, the "brain-borne" or metaphysical approach to ethics has been dominant in academic philosophy, and the evolutionary psychological understanding of happiness has played a secondary role. Now, deontologists, contractarians, utilitarians, experimental philosophers, and many virtue theorists work on how to conceptualize the good properly. Meanwhile, evolutionary moral psychologists have taken up the other part of James's project, albeit with little of his concern as a moral philosopher about finding how to achieve the most good. Instead, these scientists look to clues in our own and in other species' development in order to determine why we perceive certain activities and actions to be good (e.g., caring for others) and others to be bad (e.g., cheating on exams). The question this essay takes up is that of whether Ethics as a discipline has something to learn from the literature in evolutionary moral psychology and if this mode of explanation should be part of its future. Its primary thesis is that Ethics does have much to learn because the sciences that study the evolutionary mechanisms by which ethical judgments are produced will allow us, in a naturalist and pragmatist fashion, to better understand the possibilities for achieving our ethical goals. They will do so not because they demonstrate that all effective and achievable moralities must be anchored in evolutionarily derived moral faculties or intuitions but because these sciences can help to reveal the means by which our culturally derived ethical ideals might be realized as well as indicate the innate psychological and psychosocial stumbling blocks and hurdles to these ideals' realization. In "The Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life," James proves a keen diagnostician of the aim of moral philosophers as well as a keen analyst of the main questions to which moral philosophy must find answers if it is to be successful. Regarding the goal of moral philosophy, he notes that it aims "to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make of the world . . . a genuine universe from the ethical point of view."2 In order to construct such a system, James notes that the moral philosopher must answer questions about the psychological origin of our moral judgments, about the meaning of our primary ethical terms such as good and obligation, and about how to rank competing goods and duties in order that we may [End Page 49] act correctly.3 In order to assess the importance of evolutionary moral psychology for moral philosophy, this essay will primarily be concerned with what James labels the origin question. However, the semantic and casuistic questions will be returned to when this essay argues that evolutionarily derived moral sentiments mean and demand something different than do second-order moral sentiments and that the latter should be given primacy over the...

Reviewed by: Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups edited by Naoko Saito and Paul Standish Thomas Wallgren Naoko Saito and Paul Standish. (eds) Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. Fordham University Press, New York, 2012. 262 pp. including index. The main strength of this volume is its clarity of focus. The focus is on what Hilary Putnam tells us is his “favorite definition of philosophy”, “Stanley Cavell’s ‘education for grownups’” (p. 37). I take it that the quote is Putnam’s favorite not only because of the truth of the definition but also because it may strike many professional philosophers as surprising. It serves to awaken us to the importance of something we know but have forgotten that we know, and that we have therefore lost hold of. In this volume it is probably Cavell himself who provides the most memorable clue to how we may begin to unravel the truth of his definition. There are two claims. One is that “the learning of speech, the ordering and reordering of words” is “the most fundamental of the matters we can be said to learn”; the other is that such learning has an internal connection to the “practice of philosophizing” (p. 23). If mainstream, analytical, representationalist theories of meaning are basically true the only internal connections between philosophizing and the learning of speech are that philosophy tells us what we have learnt when we have learnt to speak and how, thanks perhaps to compositionality, “ordering” of words has countless possibilities. In this volume there is no criticism of such philosophy. Instead it provides a set of elaborations of the notion that the language we have learnt when we have learnt to speak remains enigmatic to us in ways that representationalist theories fail to capture and that we need to understand if we are to understand ourselves. The basic idea is most easily recognizable when we think of ethics. If we say that “it is always possible to improve one’s understanding of a concept like ‘bravery’ or ‘justice’“ (p. 45) many will agree. The element of surprise comes in when the claim is generalized. Not only the “grammar” of bravery and the grammar of key words in theoretical philosophy, such as knowledge and meaning have the said character. Also ordinary words, words like “chair”, “have a grammar” (p. 24) that implicates us as carrying responsibility for how we place them in our lives The explication of this idea is an important theme in Wittgenstein’s later work. Cavell has probably done more than any other philosopher [End Page 257] in bringing attention to it. It is particularly helpful that Cavell has shown that the topic of skepticism in Wittgenstein’s later work is inseparable from his notion of philosophy as an activity in which we seek friendship, community, recognition and acknowledgement in the face of the threats of denial, exile, and isolation. It is this positive vision of how a philosophy that does not work with arguments and theories that are supposed to serve the discovery and establishment of truths can be important for us that is central to Cavell’s definition of philosophy. The contributions by Goodman, Standish, Bearn, Colapietro, Arcilla, and Saito in the present volume all provide useful discussions of how nothing less than the “moral coherence” (p. 152) of how we live is at stake in such philosophy. It is an additional strength that many of the contributors also stress that because our struggle for clarity about grammar is a struggle for clarity about how we can share life with others, their educational philosophy is a political philosophy, a philosophy that creates “the appetite for democracy” (Putnam, p. 168). The back-cover and the editorial introduction to the volume indicate a desire to make Cavell’s philosophy relevant in particular for educators. The contributions by Standish, Bearn, and Arcilla address the issue head-on (with Bearn using Whitehead to surpass limitations he claims to see in Cavell’s and Wittgenstein’s “flight from the sensual”, p. 108). When education is seen as involving “inculcation into the practices of community” and hence, achievement of membership in a polis (p. 84), this notion can be used...

Reviewed by: Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun by Dean Anthony Brink Dennis Stromback (bio) Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun. By Dean Anthony Brink. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Pp. xvi + 201. Paperback $22.95, ISBN 978-1-350-14110-0. There is certainly a lot of academic buzz these days around the relationship between Buddhism and physics. Of course, as we learned from Donald Lopez's famed book Buddhism and Science (2008), there is a long history, beginning in the nineteenth century, to this proclamation that Buddhism is compatible with modern day science. Indeed, Dean Anthony Brink's book Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun is one of many contemporary examples of this effort to forge this intimate connection--except that this effort is launched from the perspective of the Kyoto School's approach to physical phenomena. Unlike Lopez's work, which is less interested in verifying the accuracy of this relationship and more about exploring how and why these two seemingly disparate modes of inquiry have been so persistently linked throughout history,1 Brink's work is aimed at exploring "the implications of new developments in physics and related dialogues among Japan's leading philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century" (p. 1). And so, in all fairness, this book is not just another attempt at smoothing out the relationship between Buddhism and science, but rather an effort to examine the leading Kyoto School thinkers' assimilation, as well as contestation, of the latest developments and discoveries within physics in order to provide "opportunities for rethinking a range of issues touching on political philosophy as well as the philosophy of the foundation of physics" (p. 3). In this regard, Brink's book, for the most part, succeeds, but mainly because it sidesteps the romantic orbit many of the Buddhologists and philosophers have established in their quest to affirm their spiritual identity. Instead, what scholars and students will find in this short text is how these leading Kyoto School thinkers approach the problem of materiality and the sort of implications that could be derived therefrom that speak to issues in critical materialism and posthumanism (pp. 144–147). The book consists of five chapters, with three of them entirely devoted to Nishida Kitarō's, Tanabe Hajime's, and Tosaka Jun's engagement with physics [End Page 1] or science. The first chapter provides the historical background to the Kyoto School and sketches out the relationship the Kyoto School has had with the scientific and philosophical discoveries and innovations occurring in the Western world. From beginning to end, which is clear after reading the first chapter, the Kyoto School is framed as a unique world philosophy that comes close to the insights formulated within the theory of relativity and quantum physics. And while the last chapter, "What We can Learn from the Kyoto School," summarizes the central points of the book, it is also the venue where Brink ceremoniously crowns Nishida and Tanabe as the true champions of cross-cultural scientific humanism. As Brink ponders, "Nishida and Tanabe have dedicated their thoughts and schematic forays into definitions of modern modes of relationality in ways that stand apart from the work of others attempting similar definitions in ontologies and epistemologies inflected by modern physics" (p. 137). What about Tosaka Jun? For Brink, Tosaka never stayed up to date on the research developments of physics and therefore defaulted to a position that refuses "to situate dialectics in a post-causal way" (p. 136). In the second chapter, Brink discusses the areas of Nishida's philosophy that engage scientists like Heinrich Hertz, Rudolf Lotze, and Herman Minkowski. According to Brink, Nishida borrows from these scientists, as well as from many other philosophers of the day, in order to clarify the quasi-dialectical relation between subject and object (p. 16). Nishida was dedicated to establishing a nondualistic relationship between subject and object from the very beginning, and as his work evolved over time, he would begin, for instance, to incorporate...

Reviewed by: America's Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-First Century by Stephanie N. Brehm Jacob Martin SJ America's Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-First Century. By Stephanie N. Brehm. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 226 pp. $30.00. On the heels of the presidential inauguration in January 2017, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert became the number one rated late-night talk show on network television; a position it has held ever since, which speaks to its hosts' gifts for political satire and social commentary. That Colbert, as one of the most prominent media figures in the United States, is also a practicing Catholic—who regularly speaks publicly about his faith—makes him a glaring anomaly in the almost exclusively secular realm of mainstream American culture. Stephanie Brehm's America's Most Famous Catholic is one of the first attempts to analyze, in depth, the significance of Colbert's media presence as it relates to the American Catholic experience. [End Page 98] With that said, it should be noted that the book is primarily a case study of Colbert's previous television incarnation, Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, wherein he portrayed the titular host "Stephen Colbert," a bombastic, politically conservative talk-show host in the style of Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, a figure decidedly unlike the left-leaning persona that the "real" Stephen Colbert has traditionally presented to the public. Indeed, a significant component of the book comes out of Brehm's delineation of the character COLBERT—as she identifies the televised character in the text—from the actual man, Stephen Colbert. Brehm utilizes the dual figures of Colbert/COLBERT to be representative of the larger American Catholic situation, as she says, "by being both a character and a real person simultaneously, Colbert/COLBERT embodies the contradictions and heterogeneity in the Catholic Church" (60). The book approaches its subject through the lens of both media ethnography and discourse analysis. Brehm deconstructs and examines multiple comic scenes from The Colbert Report, which she integrates with lived religious methods in order to present an account of contemporary American Catholic identity, as well as the role of humor and "infotainment" in the life of the contemporary Catholic. Brehm places Colbert in his role as Catholic media authority as a direct descendent of both pre-World War II (and virulent anti-Semite) radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin and 1950s television priest, Fulton Sheen. She simultaneously links Colbert with Catholic comedians such as George Carlin and Louis CK, through his satirical criticisms of the institutional church, and argues that Colbert's integration of the two roles allows for innovative modes of catechesis along with new means of exchange between lay Catholics and the church hierarchy. Brehm coins the term, "Colbert Catholicism," which she puts forth as a sort of "via media" between conservative orthodoxy and progressive dissent, utilizing humor as a means of speaking about Catholic issues and the lived Catholic experience. She contends that "Colbert Catholicism" should not be understood as a new religious movement or sociological category, but rather can be helpful "when one is discussing [End Page 99] individuals, like Colbert, who use satire, comedy and humor to understand their own religious identity and investment in religious institution" (119). The book's strength is in its explicit utilization of Colbert/COLBERT as an ethnographic analogue for the lived experience of the American Catholic. Brehm does well in both linking the dual personas of Colbert to both sides of the American ecclesial spectrum, while simultaneously arguing for comedy and humor as the middle ground by which to transcend those established binaries. One of the book's key problems is that though it briefly examines Colbert's current show, the book's primary focus, The Colbert Report, is no longer easily accessible for viewing by the general public and has been off the air since 2014, a very long time in the realm of media analysis. The book's analysis of comedy and humor is scattered and shallow, appealing to a plethora of psycho-social sources without ever appearing to...

Reviewed by: Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic Americaby William B. Kurtz Mary C. Kelly Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. By William B. Kurtz. The North’s Civil War. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 236. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6886-3; cloth, $120.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6753-8.) Nativism, reinforced by the massive influx of immigrants during the Irish famine of the 1840s, revitalized perceptions of American incompatibility with Catholic loyalty to Rome. Debates over manifest destiny, the [End Page 186]U.S.-Mexican War, abolitionism, and sectionalism exacerbated the Catholic Church’s embattled condition in the Civil War era. William B. Kurtz’s study of Catholicism at a pivotal juncture in American history effectively documents a tumultuous progression. Kurtz initially unscrambles bitter sectional tensions disrupting northern Catholic fidelities to church, region, and party before and during the Civil War. Most Catholics opposed prowar Republicans, he notes, but wartime service allowed War Democrats to enhance their prospects as “true Americans” (p. 43). Catholic colleges supported the Union army, while the reputations of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania regiments soared. Commanders Thomas F. Meagher and Michael Corcoran, alongside other soldiers, supported emancipation, temporarily affirming the compatibility between faith and patriotism. The more than six hundred nuns who bolstered the national Catholic profile more than “the actions of Catholic chaplains or soldiers” contributed much, Kurtz continues, but ethnic prerogatives continued to challenge assimilation prospects (p. 68). Bishops’ indecisiveness on emancipation neutralized the value of Catholic military service for many northerners, while debates over abolition sidelined the repeal movement for Irish Americans committed to their home-land’s independence. Catholic advocator Orestes A. Brownson’s prowar, pro-emancipation stance confronted the conservative stance of New York’s Archbishop John Hughes, who based his opposition in economic and faith concerns and not in mere “unprincipled obstructionism,” Kurtz argues (p. 109). The brutality of incensed Irish New Yorkers who lashed out against conscription in the 1863 draft riots is adroitly counterpoised against bishops’ efforts to renounce the violence and contextualize factors of “patriotism, disaffection, ethnicity, class, and racism” underpinning the clash (p. 110). The virtual erasure of Irish Catholic sacrifice in the Union army from contemporary culture is recognized, while Kurtz positions the failure to exempt clergy from the draft against Protestant hostility to Pope Pius IX’s “mostly humanitarian” appeal for an end to the war (p. 121). But Protestant antipathy to a cohort associated with such violence, and therefore seen as incompatible with America’s founding principles, eclipsed the pope’s call. Proposals for Catholic veterans to defend the Papal States against Italian nationalist forces seemed to confirm Catholic disloyalty as Thomas Nast’s cartoons kept draft riot memories alive. Kurtz concludes that while Knights of Columbus and Ancient Order of the Hibernians commemorations of Irish Civil War heroism asserted local and regional Catholic cultural empowerment, negative perspectives remained until their abatement during World War II. Several focuses merit additional scrutiny, including Father Edward Purcell and the Cincinnati-based Catholic Telegraph’s “fierce advocacy of the war and emancipation,” Horace Greeley’s anti-Catholic attitudes, curtailment of U.S.-Vatican diplomatic relations in 1867, and Catholic cohorts other than Irish or German (p. 123). Kurtz is unduly cavalier in citing Irish priority of church over radical nationalism, but deft in summarizing that “[s]upport for Ireland, the working class, and the church were not necessarily incompatible, and were in many cases simply three different but related parts of Irish Catholic Americans’ daily lives” (p. 132). His contention of Catholic aspirations to [End Page 187]“uphold law, order, and stability” also warrants further exploration, while the “separate Catholic America” of the title is somewhat disingenuous—Catholics arguably forged a distinct, rather than “separate,” religious culture in the modernizing United States (p. 91). Any book tackling such thorny topics should inevitably prompt such questions, however. Kurtz is to be commended for his masterful interrogation of the fusion of faith, national crisis, and ethnic identity at a critical moment in American history. This is a notable and welcome contribution to Catholic, Civil War...

Reviewed by: Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx by Leif Weatherby Jocelyn Holland (bio) Leif Weatherby. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 472 pages. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a truly impressive work of historical scholarship. Leif Weatherby demonstrates that he has a solid grasp of the German philosophical tradition, including both major figures (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling) and those who are less well-known outside the field of German studies. As the title suggests, he takes the familiar concept of the organ and reveals it to be at the crux of a rapidly changing philosophical landscape, whose terrain encompasses metaphysics, the philosophy of the subject, the history of science, literature, and aesthetics. One of the strengths of this [End Page 790] project is the careful balance it maintains between unity and complexity. At the same time, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a very challenging book to read because it assumes that readers have more than a casual familiarity with German history and philosophy. The scope of its argument also precludes facile summaries, but this is precisely due to the number of philosophical discussions in which the concept of the organ played an important role. This review will therefore provide a brief glimpse of the whole before describing the chapter breakdown and focusing on one or two particular questions. In terms of conceptual history, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ traces the transformation of the philosophical term organon into organ; the emergence of the term in late eighteenth-century life sciences; and its appropriation as a metaphor by different philosophical schools of thought around 1800 and afterward. Weatherby does not shy away from the explosion of "semantic confusion" (22) that characterizes the competing appropriations of organ but rather exploits these moments as theoretically interesting for a larger tendency he refers to as "organology." He also shows how the philosophical discourse on the organ often served as a front for other questions, such as those of function (whether in a physical or theoretical sense), method, and other process-driven mechanisms that, particularly around 1800, tended to foreground intersections of traditionally heterogeneous discourses (literature and science being one familiar case). The notion of a "transcendental organ," which Weatherby discusses in relation to Schelling, is also relevant here because a significant component of organology is reflection on the conditions of an organ's coming into being. The prolonged focus on the organ allows Weatherby to analyze familiar institutions from a new perspective. For example, in the case of German Romanticism, he makes a strong argument that it is productive to reconsider such familiar projects as Friedrich Schlegel's and Novalis's encyclopedia from the point of view of organology. In his reading of Schelling, Weatherby shows how organology can be understood as a "metaphysics for dealing with the emergent properties of human creation(s)" (25) and reveals an artificial quality of the organ in Schelling's work that anticipates some technology-driven discussions of the organ in surprising ways. Readers who keep the big picture in mind—that "the organ ties the question of being to the question of knowledge" and, in terms of function, both "unites and divides" (49)—will have an easier time navigating Weatherby's arguments as they unfold in the individual chapters. The first chapter, which focuses on "metaphysical organs and the emergence of life" (51), begins with a historical observation that lays the groundwork for future arguments when it claims that Leibniz does not use the term in a biological sense but gives it a metaphysical meaning "which could be extended to language, scientific apparatuses, and indeed the operations of the understanding," thus laying "semantic groundwork for the next century" (53). By the end of the chapter, Weatherby will have arrived at Kant and Herder's use of the term "organization" to create an analogy between mind and body (71). Readers can thereby witness the gradual emergence of the organ as a philosophical tool, a connection [End Page 791] that the second chapter, "The Epigenesis of Reason: Force and Organ in Kant and Herder," explains more clearly. There we learn how the theories of procreation...

Reviewed by: Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation Kenneth Wayne Howell Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation. By Mary Farmer-Kaiser. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Pp. 292. Graph, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780823232116, $80.00 cloth; 9780823232123, $26 paper.) In the last few decades, scholars have produced a voluminous body of literature on the Reconstruction era. These works have generally reshaped our understanding [End Page 89] of the social and political landscape of this critical period in American history. Only recently, however, have scholars studied gender during the Civil War and Reconstruction years, providing students of this era with a clearer understanding of how women, who were once relegated to the private sphere of domesticity, actually helped shape public life in profound ways. In this same tradition, Mary Farmer-Kaiser’s Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Politics in the Age of Emancipation advances our understanding of gender roles during Reconstruction by examining the relationship between African American women and the agents of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau), a topic that has received little attention until now. Farmer-Kaiser examines the gendered nature of four distinct areas of the bureau’s public policy: the bureau’s efforts to alleviate physical suffering of the freedpeople by providing federal material relief; the agency’s attempt to create and implement a free labor system and bring an end to vagrancy; the bureau’s defense of the parental rights of the freedpeople and to end the white South’s abusive apprentice system; and the bureau’s efforts to secure civil rights and equal justice for the former slaves. In each chapter of Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau, the author reveals the consequences of bureau policies at work. Despite the fact that most of the policies of the bureau were issued without regard to gender, the implementation of the agency’s policies at the local level was often different for freedwomen and freedmen. For example, recognition of freedwomen’s gender by bureau agents often provided certain protections that were not available to freedmen. This point was clearly evident in cases where bureau men ignored federal policy that aid should only be handed out to freedpeople who were physically unable to work. Instead, the agents expanded definitions of the deserving poor in a way that allowed them to administer relief to able-bodied freedwomen. Likewise, agents amended official bureau labor policies that required able-bodied freedpeople to enter contracts or face prosecution as vagrants. Instead of prosecuting freedwomen, the local agents refused to prosecute African American women who did not enter into labor contracts. However, such attitudes also worked against black women. Given that the bureau officials and agents were influenced by the gender standards of the nineteenth century, they often encouraged freedmen to control and contract the labor of family members, including their wives and daughters. Although African American women were sometimes relegated to second-class citizenship, a fate shared with white women in both northern and southern states, the author reminds us that they were active participants in remaking Reconstruction society. They openly engaged in the battle to define and defend freedom and citizenship for African Americans on their own terms by continuously interacting with the bureau. Throughout the South, freedwomen turned to the Freedmen’s Bureau and demanded that local agents recognize them as women and that the federal government consider their needs. In turn, local agents often ignored the freedwomen’s race and instead focused on the fact that they were women. Therefore, black women in the South enjoyed privileges and protection that were unavailable to black men. Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau is well researched and written. The author’s research is based primarily on the records of four southern states—Virginia, [End Page 90] Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana. As such, the broad conclusions reached in this work will need to be examined in other regions of the South. This, however, in no way diminishes the merits of the study. Mary Farmer-Kaiser...