The first complete intellectual biography of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, Leo Strauss.

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

The article contributes to the discussion of political reasoning in general, and public reason in particular, analysed from the vantage point of comparative political theory. It aims to bring out the complexity and diversity of actual political reasoning, and it serves as a corrective to some over-simplified discussions of public reason, by defenders and critics alike. I argue that the notion of public reason can be extended to and is operative in non-liberal and religious societies, with the acknowledgment that it (...) needs to undergo a methodological metamorphosis in the process. This requires what I call multiple justificatory strategy, which allows the use of different justifications in order to respond to the plurality existing in society. However, there are certain qualifications in the use of multiple justifications. I argue that this leads to two important conclusions, that the functioning of an inclusive notion of public reason requires the strategy of multiple justifications, and it contests... (shrink)

Although most people still behave like happy meat eaters, there are good reasons to think that many are in fact ambivalent about meat. Following up on earlier findings, in this paper we describe how, in focus groups, cultured meat triggered much discussion about meat, especially among older people. While young people wondered whether they would eat cultured meat products, older people thought about diet changes in a historical perspective and wondered if and how cultured meat might become a societal success. (...) Beneath the surface of everyday behavior, in which they followed mainstream norms, many of our research participants harbored moral concerns and in various ways expressed an interest in collective change. Reflecting on the focus group discussions, we suggest, first, that appreciating the important role of ambivalence in processes of moral change requires rethinking relations between ambivalence and morality. Second, the entanglement of ambivalence with ambiguity increases the “fluidity” of such processes of change: when it is no longer clear what exactly meat is, the meanings and experiences of eating it also become unsettled. This has implications for thinking about morality in times of change. Studying consumer choices cannot do justice to processes of ambivalence and ambiguity below the surface of behavior. More generally, the idea that morality resides in making up our minds about clear moral choices gives way to the need to become skilled, collectively as well as individually, in dealing imaginatively with ambivalence and ambiguity. (shrink)

This paper explores how whiteness as the transcendental norm shapes the meaning structure of Black-being-in-the-world. If home is a place, a site, a dwelling of acceptance, where one is allowed to feel safe, to relax, to let one’s guard down, then being Black in white supremacist America is anathema to being at home for Black people. Indeed, to be Black is to be a stranger, something “strange,” “scary,” “dangerous,” an “outsider.” To be Black within white America belies what it (...) means to dwell, to reside, to rest. In other words, one’s sense of racialized Black embodiment remains on guard, unsettled, hyperalert. Phenomenologically, there is a profound sense of alienation, where one’s racialized body is ostracized and shunned. On this score, I examine, within the mundane context of an elevator, how the dynamics of intersubjectivity and sociality are strained through the dynamics of the white gaze. The white gaze, among other things, functions to police the meaning of the Black body and attempts to de-subjectify Black embodiment. In this way, the only real perspective is white. Black bodies are deemed devoid of a perspective on the world as there is no subjectivity, no sense of agential meaning making. One might say that Black people, on this view, constitute an essence, a typified mode of being. Unlike the existentialist thesis where existence precedes essence, Black people are locked into an objecthood, a fungible and fixed essence. This racial and racist myth is what, for Schutz, would collapse the importance that he places on intersubjectivity and sociality. Indeed, within this paper, I delineate the threatening, necro-political dimensions of whiteness that I experienced after writing the well-known article “Dear White America.” That experience cemented, for me, and for many other readers, what it means to occupy the residence of whiteness, an abode that can take one’s life in the blink of an eye. The experience of the racialized stranger means walking a tightrope, a precarious situation where one flirts with death, where one’s body is deemed hypersexual, inferior, frightening, and monstrous. Based upon this construction, the white body is deemed the site of virtue, safety, deliverer, protector of all things white and pure. Think here of “the white man’s burden” or the idea of “white manifest destiny.” Stain, blemish, taint, and defilement are indelible markers of the stranger. And based upon the logics of racial purity, one must extinguish the “vermin,” the “criminals,” the “rapists.” While I don’t explore this within the paper, Schutz scholars will immediately recognize the genocidal implications of what would have been at stake for Schutz had he not escaped Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic gaze and his Anschluss of Austria. My sense is that Schutz would have understood not just the horrors of white racism but would appreciate the necessity of theorizing the need to rethink home as existentially capacious and intersubjectively vibrant. I conclude this paper by thinking through the concept of “breakdown”, delineating its spatial, phenomenological, and subjectively embodied implications. Breakdown, as I use the term, upends forms of white racialized habituation, creating possible embodied psychic space for what I term un-suturing, which involves undoing the machinations of white safety in the face of alterity, where the stranger invokes wonder and self-critique. (shrink)

MANY READERS HAVE TAKEN THE ELEATIC STRANGER to represent a later stage of Plato’s philosophical development because the arguments or doctrines the Stranger presents in the Sophist appear to be better than those Socrates articulates in earlier dialogues. In particular, in the Sophist Plato shows the Stranger answering two questions Socrates proved unable to resolve in two of his conversations the day before. In the Theaetetus Socrates admitted that he had long been perplexed by the fact of (...) false opinion; he was not able to explain how it was possible. Likewise, in the Cratylus Socrates and his interlocutors were not able to determine satisfactorily the relation between names and the things to which they refer. Through his teaching about the idea of the other, the Stranger shows not only how false opinion is possible but also why names do not always correspond to the kinds or ideas of things. More generally, in the course of his account of previous thought the Stranger presents a fundamental critique of the teaching of “friends of the forms” like Socrates. When we examine the definition of the sophist to which the Stranger comes at the end of the dialogue, however, we find reasons to question the adequacy of his teaching and, consequently, his superiority to Socrates. If philosophy consists in knowledge—of the whole or merely of self— we are forced to conclude, neither the Stranger nor Socrates is a philosopher. Each or even both might appear, therefore, to be a pretender—or sophist. If, on the other hand, philosophy consists in the search for knowledge by means of a dialectical sorting of things according to kinds, Socrates and the Stranger represent two different, although related types. (shrink)

Not very long ago, Plato'sSophistwas often presented as a dialogue devoted to the problem of being and not-being, entangled with limited success in an inquiry into the nature of the sophist. Thanks to the renewal of interest in the dramatic form of Plato's dialogues, recent works have shown that this entanglement is far from ill-conceived or anecdotal. However, the inquiry into the sophist is itself introduced by another question, concerning the nature of the Stranger from Elea himself. I would (...) like to show that this question and the way in which it is raised in the prologue may themselves shed light on the relations between the many threads which run across this very complex dialogue. (shrink)

Maurice Blanchot’s “The Strange and the Stranger” (1958) is an essential text for understanding Blanchot’s thought, its development, and its enduring importance. He presents an early account of the impersonal “neuter” in subject-less experiences like “alienation,” “alteration,” “dispersion,” “disappearance,” and “absence.” These experiences of strangeness threaten thought, which is only “itself and for-itself its own experience.” Relatedly, they also reveal “the neutrality of being or neutrality as being.” With reference to both Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, Blanchot clarifies the (...) meaning and exigency of a neuter that can take “upon itself the reality of alienation.”. (shrink)

This keynote takes a fresh look at Schutz’s essay on “The Stranger” of 1944. After a brief reflection on the probably universal topos of the stranger, it discerns three different kinds of strangeness in that essay: 1. the otherness of the other and the inaccessibility of the other’s experiences; 2. the strangeness vs. familiarity of elements of knowledge; and 3. the social acceptance by the in-group. Then some methodological implications of Schutz’s approach are pondered, his somewhat hidden offer (...) of an alternative sociology and the postulate of adequacy. Subsequently, two critical issues are discussed: Schutz’s handling of values and value-relations and his complete omission of affects and emotions in spite of all the hardship the immigrants at that time suffered from. An outlook on future Schutzian research concludes the paper. (shrink)

This essay considers how normal aging might over the long run be thought of as undermining to “thinking as usual” in a society undergoing rapid social change. Informed by the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, the criteria for thinking as usual are considered. Derived from his essay “The Stranger,” these criteria were developed by Schutz about the experience of an immigrant stranger approaching a new culture. Here it is argued that they might also help us better understand the experience (...) of aging. It is suggested that in the context of social change older people can, under the right circumstances, feel like strangers in the culture they have known all their lives. (shrink)

This chapter offers an examination of the evolving relationship between the West and the Other, tracking its various stages from the critiques of Western capitalism and imperialism that emerged amidst the antagonistic culture of the 1960s–1970s, to the present-day apologia of dominant Occidentalism in the era of globalization. The study highlights the Westernism that has been compelled to confront the challenge posed by the foreigner, whose social, religious, and cultural differences represent a profound diversity. The current moment demands an honest (...) reckoning with the historical and contemporary power dynamics that have shaped the West’s relationship with the Other and an exploration of ways in which this relationship might be transformed into one that recognizes and values the richness of cultural difference. This essay aims to contribute to this crucial conversation by offering a nuanced analysis of the complex and evolving dynamics at play in the Western-Other relationship. (shrink)

This article draws on Kristeva's theories of the foreigner within the national boundaries and, combining this with her earlier work on the abject, considers the challenge posed by the individual who is rejected as foreign, to the boundaries which constitute collective and individual identity. With reference to Prévost's Le Passé sous silence, it argues that the solutions posited by Kristeva are of limited value within contemporary French society, and concludes by considering the potential of literature as an alternative means of (...) reconciliation with otherness. (shrink)

The traditional approach to cognition, often labeled cognitivism or representationalism, posits that intelligence operates primarily through the creation and manipulation of internal symbolic mappings of an external, pre-given world. In this model, cognitive agency is successful insofar as the "formulas" possessed by the agent accurately hold in the environmental model, rendering the representation of the world correct. This foundational commitment to representation implicitly necessitates a form of systemic self-enclosure, where meaning is derived from pre-given, abstract correspondences and calculations. -/- The (...) critique leveled against this framework by alternative theories, specifically the enactivist paradigm, is radical and fundamental. Enactivism, attributed to the seminal work of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991), argues that cognition is not the internal processing of representations, but rather the ongoing, embodied enactment of meaningful relations within the environment. The strategic rejection of representationalism continues to mark a crucial difference between enactivism and cognitivism. -/- Critically, the difference between these paradigms is not merely a dispute over whether one model explains more phenomena than the other. Rather, the conflict centers on the very criteria used for explanation and evaluation. Representationalism, by its nature, aims for systemic closure; the goal is to render the world fully comprehensible and appropriable within the system's predefined categories. However, an ontological analysis reveals the failure of representationalism to account for true alterity. If a system is structurally designed to map static external objects and process difference (das Andere), it is inherently incapable of integrating the truly radical and un-categorizable Strange (das Fremde) without destabilizing its own internal structure. This limitation demonstrates the philosophical necessity of abandoning the paradigm of internal world-modeling in favor of an open-ended, relational model of cognitive life. -/- This report establishes a comprehensive theoretical line to overcome this cartographic challenge. The central argument posits that a non-representational account of cognition is defined by its responsive openness to what resists appropriation. This framework is constructed by synthesizing three core philosophical movements: Martin Heidegger’s existential analytic, which provides the ontological grounding for world-disclosure; the Enactivist paradigm, which supplies the embodied, anti-representational mechanics of sense-making; and Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology, which introduces irreducible alterity as the constitutive structure of cognitive emergence. (shrink)

In recent years, many medical schools around the world have formally established professionalism education as part of their standard curriculum. While the call to prepare future doctors to behave ethically and professionally is not new, what is new is the emphasis on identity formation in the context of the expanding online universe. Nonetheless, role modelling the professional image is challenging in the digital age, especially when cultures and customs across disciplines and generations collide. Against the backdrop of hyper-vigilance about our (...) professional image, this paper explores whether the hidden professionalism curriculum may inadvertently stifle creativity and humanity. It proposes the positive use of social media as relational or pedagogical tools in teaching learners about work-life balance and responsible online behaviours. (shrink)

The spiritual philosophies of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the Bengali poet and Nobel Prize winner of Literature in 1913, and Roberto Assagioli (1888-1974), Italian psychiatrist and founder of psychosynthesis, are remarkably similar in their fundamental understanding of the relationship between the Infinite Self and the personal self. Tagore and Assagioli met in 1926 during Tagore’s visit to Italy. Both were universalists and humanists, emphasizing action as well as contemplation as essential elements to uniting our finite selves with the Infinite. Despite their (...) diverse cultural inheritances, each one experienced a similar evolutionary process in the formation of their visionary understanding of the transcendental personality of humankind. (shrink)

Caring for the stranger -- Why compassion in politics? -- Historical perspectives on social welfare and global development -- Historical perspectives on human rights -- Compassion in religious and secular thought -- Justice and moral responsibility -- Altruism, empathy, and the making of "Us" and "Them" -- The moral politics of Liberals and Conservatives -- Politics against compassion in the United States -- Compassion in public policy and law -- Creating a more compassionate and just society.

The large number of xenophobic attacks that broke out in different places in South Africa during 2008 was still continuing unabated 10 years later. We were stressed to come to terms with the reality that this occurred in a country that is globally considered to be an example of reconciliation. It is clear that we were confronted by the politics of fear, which were manifested in xenophobia and all the other -isms. In this article, the primary causes of these xenophobic (...) outbreaks were scrutinised and placed within the wider framework of a culture of fear. The central research question is: Why are we still struggling with this phenomenon more than a decade after it first appeared on South African soil? In-depth analysis will be performed on what is lying behind the culture of fear underlying these acts of violence. After exploring some of the factors related to a culture of fear by making use of a sociological frame, the author moved on to answer a second question: How do we, as preachers, researchers and practical theologians, respond in a theological way to the challenges posed by a xenophobic culture in our preaching activities? Finally, the impact of violence and fear on the practice of preaching within a Christian context was discussed. (shrink)

In Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II commends the way in which the Church Fathers engaged philosophical schools, including those considered erroneous: “Faced with the various philosophies, the Fathers were not afraid to acknowledge those elements in them that were consonant with Revelation and those that were not. Recognition of the points of convergence did not blind them to the points of divergence”. Similarly, Kuipers seeks to provide a “serious, meaningful engagement with the positive elements and the constructive suggestions” (...) in—rather than simply to echo the standard criticisms of—Richard Rorty’s work. In the first half of the book, Kuipers identifies what he regards as the positive features of Rorty’s work. Focusing on Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he brings into relief the contours of his postmodern critique, respectively, of the Western philosophical tradition and of the traditional role of the philosopher. The book opens with a succinct account of Rorty’s critique of Western philosophy, an examination of Rorty’s variant of pragmatism, and an insightful discernment of “the emergence of an ethical concern for justice and human flourishing” in Rorty’s writing. Kuipers approves Rorty’s criticisms of philosophy-as-epistemology, with its emphasis on ontological, ahistorical foundationalism, and shares Rorty’s fear that the realist’s claim of correspondence to truth may lead to a substitution of coercion for conversation, which would thereby silence other voices. Because the human faculty for rationality is a limited tool, given our historical and linguistic contingencies, Rorty advocates instead an “edifying philosophy” with ad hoc, cultural criticism that inclusively seeks to find solutions for current social problems. This pragmatic shift from theory to practice, rather than leading to a loss of touch with the world, actually entails a sense of responsibility. Kuipers applauds how Rorty thus “gives us a heightened, ethical awareness of the responsibility involved in the intellectual task”. In contrast to fellow nonfoundationalist Joseph Margolis, who still affirms the role of the philosopher as someone possessing knowledge that others do not, Rorty holds that the responsibility for imaginatively and poetically redescribing ourselves belongs not only to the philosopher but to all members of society. (shrink)

On a widespread conception of singular thought, part of what makes a thought singular is the obtaining of certain worldly facts. Had those facts not obtained, the thought wouldn’t be a singular one. Which means that for any given singular thought one can conceive of circumstances under which it (that thought) would not be singular. In the present essay, I want to trace out the motivations for this view. The story I want to tell is one part of a longer (...) story about the difficulties of coming to terms with an idea that Wittgenstein developed in his later work. The idea may, in very general terms, be put as follows: the world doesn’t only determine the truth or falsity of a thought, it also contributes to determining what counts as a thought’s being true or false. It is by misunderstanding the import of this idea that we can be led to the aforementioned conception of singular thought. (shrink)

To what extent can business ethics be hospitable to Levinasian ethics? This paper raises questions about how business ethics relates to its guests, in this case the guest called Levinas; the idea of introducing or inviting the work of an author into a field, as its guest, is by no means a simple problem of transference. For Jacques Derrida, there is hospitality only when the stranger's introduction to our home is totally unconditional. Such a conceptualization of hospitality becomes even (...) more demanding when the stranger that is near our home is an ethics also demanding hospitality, such as the ethics proposed by Levinas. An invitation puts in place particular circumstances that allow only for an arrival of the one invited. These conditions precede the so-called stranger, thereby predetermining the route to be taken, the destination to be reached and the correct manner of self-presentation. An invitation already reduces the Other to that which is expected by the inviter, that is to the Same. The hospitality of the field of business ethics becomes an endorsement of a particular version of the stranger, therefore recognizable by the field. Perhaps conceptualizing Levinasian ethics as an ethics that cannot be invited might protect it from procedures that reduce the strangeness of the stranger, making it knowable. That is the argument presented in this paper. (shrink)

This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical-political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of textual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty-first century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not-legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent (...) ontological status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of speech and action in equality with “others.”. (shrink)

In his famous work on the stranger, Alfred Schutz focuses on the interpretative discrepancies between in-groups and out-groups from the per­spective of a stranger approaching a new group. In doing so, Schutz emphasizes that strangers can overcome their strangeness within a social group by adapting to the prevalent cultural patterns. Shifting the perspective from the stranger to the in-group this essay aims to argue that the experience of the Other’s strangeness due to a discrepancy of interpretative schemes (...) is only one dimension of how the stranger is perceived in everyday life. A second dimension can be derived from Schutz’ work on appresentation. This essay will follow four analytical steps. First, this essay summarizes the Schutzian approach on perceiving the Other as a taken-for-granted part of everyday life within an assumed intersubjective understanding based on an assumed reciprocity of perspectives. Referring to Eberle’s description of an irreciprocity of perspectives, the second section analyzes the Schutzian stranger based on an intersubjective understanding. The third section then focuses on the appresentational pro­cesses of perceiving the stranger in everyday life. By using Goffman’s distinction between virtual and actual social identity, the interplay of categorizing and experiencing the Other in everyday life can be described. Finally, considering the question of how it comes that people can find themselves strangers in their own society, this paper closes by merging the argumentation with a description of the Schutzian perspective on the processes of stigmatization. (shrink)

This paper pursues three goals: First, to develop a lateral reading of Camus’ Stranger. A lateral reading is characterized by the displacement of the central conflict. In the case of The Stranger, I argue that the central conflict in the novel lies in the relation between the author and the protagonist, not, as direct readings would have it, in the relation between the protagonist and his predicament. Second, to spell out more precisely why it should be read as (...) an anti-existentialist novel. Here I argue that a lateral reading shows that the foundational existentialist opposition between telling and living is ironically dismantled by the very lateral structure of the novel. Third, to develop the notion of a lateral reading with a view to its potential advantages. Here, I point out that literalism involves positionalism and dynamicism. Positionalism refers to the reduction of fictional entities to their role in relation to each other. Dynamicism refers to the resulting view that those roles are further reducible to forces. I conclude that the lateral reading, with its commitments to positionalism and dynamicism is a model generalizable to the analysis of other fictional works. (shrink)

The work of Albert Camus in general, and his literary work in particular, is filled with Nietzschean references from its beginning to its abrupt end. This article aims to highlight the subtle presence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought in The Stranger and Caligula. Through a philosophical analysis of the novella and the play, the article seeks to identify the presence of certain theses from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, a posthumous text by the German thinker, in order (...) to trace the literary development of these ideas in the characters of Meursault and Caligula, their views on society, and the workings of the justice that condemns them. (shrink)

Neither the apparently cold-blooded murder of a complete stranger, the central event in The Stranger, nor Hugo's murder of Hoederer in Dirty Hands—a political assassination or crime of passion, depending on how one views it—can be considered unusual acts, in literature or in life. The topic of murder has itself created an extremely popular genre: the detective novel or "whodunit," which has become a huge industry and has aficionados everywhere, Sartre being one. In French theater, the topic of (...) political assassination has resulted in such famous plays as de Musset's Lorenzaccio (1834), which ostensibly deals with Florence in the sixteenth century and the tyrannical Alexandre de Médicis, who is assassinated by his young cousin, but is in fact "a limpid transposition of the failed revolution of July 1830." It is well known that Sartre was an admirer of Musset and Romantic theater. In 1946, Jean Cocteau, who helped with the staging of Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands), wrote L'Aigle ` deux têtes (The Two-Headed Eagle), which was inspired "by the sad life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria and her tragic death by the hand of the Franco-Italian assassin, Luigi Lucheni." Sartre himself, in Nausea, has Anny use the engraving in Michelet's Histoire de France depicting the assassination of the Duke de Guise as a perfect illustration of "privileged situations.". (shrink)

According to a profile in The Guardian , Mary Midgley is 'the foremost scourge of scientific pretensions in this country; someone whose wit is admired even by those who feel she sometimes oversteps the mark'. Considered one of Britain's finest philosophers, Midgley exposes the illogical logic of poor doctrines that shelter themselves behind the prestige of science. Always at home when taking on the high priests of evolutionary theory - Dawkins, Wilson and their acolytes - she has famously described evolution (...) as 'the creation-myth of our age'. In Evolution as a Religion , she examines how science comes to be used as a substitute for religion and points out how badly that role distorts it. As ever, her argument is flawlessly insightful: a punchy, compelling, lively indictment of these misuses of science. Both the book and its author are true classics of our time. (shrink)