Interviews with Isaiah Berlin and others. Bibliography: p. 301-308. Includes index.

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

This is a revised and enlarged version of Bryan Magee's widely praised study of Schopenhauer, the most comprehensive book on this great philosopher. It contains a brief biography of Schopenhauer, a systematic exposition of his thought, and a critical discussion of the problems to which itgives rise and of its influence on a wide range of thinkers and artists. For this new edition Magee has added three new chapters and made many minor revisions and corrections throughout. This new (...) edition will consolidate the book's standing as the definitive study of Schopenhauer. (shrink)

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with it enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. (...) Drawing on a vast range of material, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. As with all of Nelson's work, how she thinks-and how that thinking expresses itself in style-is crucial to the book's achievement. Through her generosity, rigor, and willingness to critically engage reigning pieties, Nelson shows that new forms of thinking and talking are available to us, ones that welcome a chorus of voices, and recommit us to our entanglement, even at its most difficult. On Freedom is an ambitious, essential book that reinvigorates the art of criticism. (shrink)

A perennial debate in the field of global ethics revolves around the possibility of a universalist ethics as well as arguments over the nature, and significance, of difference for moral deliberation. Decolonial literature, in particular, increasingly signifies a pluriverse – one with radical ontological and epistemological differences. This book examines the concept of the pluriverse alongside global ethics and the ethics of care in order to contemplate new ethical horizons for engaging across difference. Offering a challenge to the current state (...) of the field, this book argues for a rethinking of global ethics as it has been conceived thus far. (shrink)

This chapter presents Maggie Gallagher's reply to John Corvino's discussion in Chapter 4. She insists on simple honesty about the underlying principle of gay marriage, and its effect on people who hold the contrary, traditional understanding of marriage. She says that Corvino's assertion that adding a new set of people who do not procreate will not change marriage is disconnected from reality. She claims that a sexual union of two males, endorsed by law and society as a marriage under (...) a new governing norm of “marriage equality”, will change the public perception of the relationship between marriage and procreation. Finally, she argues that marriage, as the key link in the great chain of being, is lost when the woman is taken out of the wedding. (shrink)

Postfoundational political thought is characterized by a distinction between “politics” (a socio-symbolic order that delineates what is knowable and thinkable) and “the political” (the instantiation of a socio-symbolic order). This article critically engages with the postfoundational thought of Jacques Rancière to rethink “the political” in the context of the pluriverse, a matrix of multiple distinct yet interconnected worlds. In so doing, this article challenges the idea that “care” is not properly political. Specifically, I argue that in the context of the (...) pluriverse, socio-symbolic orders, or worlds, are not instantiated as such; rather, they must be established and, importantly, reestablished in the face of one another. From this vantage point, caring for and maintaining worlds—especially worlds marginalized by relations of power in the global political economy—is of political and ethical significance. This article thus offers a decolonial and feminist approach to thinking about the political as it (a) destabilizes the Westerncentric assumption that there is one-world, and takes different worlds as worlds seriously; and (b) centers issues of care and reproduction, demonstrates how they are politically and ethically salient, and thereby contributes to the project of foregrounding the political import of care. (shrink)

According to Frantz Fanon, the psychological and social-political are deeply intertwined in the colonial context. Psychologically, the colonizers perceive the colonized as inferior and the colonized internalize this in an inferiority complex. This psychological reality is co-constitutive of and by material relations of power—the imaginary of inferiority both creates and is created by colonial relations of power. It is also in this context that violence takes on significant political import: violence deployed by the colonized to rebel against these colonial relations (...) and enact a different world will also be violent in its fundamental disruption of this imaginary. The ethics of care, on the other hand, does not seem to sit well with violence, and thus Fanon’s political theory more generally. Care ethics is concerned with everything we do to maintain and repair our worlds as well as reasonably possible. Violence, which ruptures our psycho-affective, material, and social-political realities, seems antithetical to this task. This article seeks to reconsider this apparent antinomy between violence and care via a dialogue between Fanon and the ethics of care. In so doing, this article mobilizes a relational conceptualization of violence that allows for the possibility that certain violences may, in fact, be justifiable from a care ethics perspective. At the same time, I contend that violence in any form will also eventually demand a caring response. Ultimately, this productive reading of Fanon’s political theory and the ethics of care encourages both postcolonial philosophers and care ethicists alike to examine critically the relation between violence and care, and the ways in which we cannot a priori draw lines between the two. (shrink)

In her 2015 article, Helena Olofsdotter Stensöta notes that ‘the ethics of care is often used as a lens to dissect the current arrangement of care provision (or rather non-care provision) in polici...

An accessible dictionary of the key terms, ideas, influence and legacy of G.W.F. Hegel, one of the most important German Philosophers of the 19th Century.

This chapter offers a counterpoint to Chapter 1 by presenting a case against same-sex marriage. It lays out in detail why the marriage tradition is just and reasonable and how same-sex marriage will change marriage. It addresses the following questions: What is marriage? Why is government involved in marriage? By what right does government insist that third parties view a relationship as a marriage? What will happen to marital rules and norms if government insists that both same-sex and opposite-sex unions (...) are equally marriage? (shrink)

In recent years, Aristotle’s views on sensation and mental activities have received increased interest from philosophers for their apparent similarities to contemporary theories in the philosophy of mind. Instead of seeking to explain mental states (feelings, beliefs, desires) as mere properties of the material constitution of an organism (i.e., brains and nervous system of higher animals), the most popular theories in the philosophy of mind focus on the function which mental states perform in life of an organism, and the organization (...) of the matter which allows the mental states to play this functional role. Theorists have seen in this focus on function and organization an affinity to the central place Aristotle gives to form over matter, and to his defining capacities in terms of their functional realization. While certainly similarities exist between contemporary theories of mind and Aristotle’s philosophical views on perception and mind, the description of the nature of mental states which contemporary theories give us is fundamentally at odds with Aristotle’s understanding of them. This is most clearly seen in the case of sensation, since Aristotle has most to say about it. Despite the difficulty in claiming that Aristotle’s views fit the requirements of contemporary theories, his insights into the actual nature of mental activities and states are nevertheless valuable precisely for illuminating these limitations of current theories, and for suggesting ways of overcoming some difficulties. In this presentation, I will briefly describe the theories for which Aristotle is thought to be relevant and their common, salient features and assumptions. Next, I will examine the details of some interpretations of Aristotle’s thoughts on sensation which allegedly support the contemporary theories. In the course of this examination, I will indicate the fundamentally different view Aristotle has of the physical processes involved in sensation, and try to indicate how these differences might help overcome problems in the contemporary views. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas often argues for the immateriality of the intellect and often employs one argument in particular, which he also attributes to Aristotle. As he explains in his Commentary on the De Anima, "Anything that is in potency with respect to an object, and able to receive it into itself, is, as such, without that object; thus the pupil of the eye, being potential to colors and able to receive them, is itself colorless. ... Since then (the intellect) naturally (...) understands all bodily things, it must be lacking in every bodily nature; just as the sense of sight, being able to know color, lacks all color" (Bk. III, Lect. 7, no. 680). The intellect has no bodily nature since it understands all bodily natures, and it is a condition of knowing a power that it lacks the nature it knows. Thomas Russman, however, in A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism, argues that what we know about the nature of perception invalidates the assumptions of Aristotle and Aquinas, and because this argument for the immateriality of the intellect depends on an analogy with sensation, its conclusion is undermined. Russman reasons that just as a pink retina can receive the form of green without any hindrance, so a material intellect can receive the forms of all material things without any hindrance. Since Aristotle and Aquinas turned out to be wrong about their understanding of the senses and used this mistake as a basis for their reasoning about the intellect, there is no reason to accept their conclusion that the intellect is immaterial. Although Aquinas and Russman attribute this argument to Aristotle, the version found in De Anima 3. 4 differs from it in one crucial respect. Whereas Thomas claims that the intellect is immaterial because it knows all bodies, Aristotle says that mind is 'unmixed' because it thinks all things (panta noei).(429a18-20) This difference, I contend, makes the argument as Aristotle actually formulated it immune from the criticism of Russman, for Aristotle can draw on his own distinction between being subject to a material alteration (taking on a form in a material way) and engaging in the activity of knowing (taking on the form of an object without matter by becoming one with it). (shrink)

In his essay, “Intentionality and Physiological Processes,” Richard Sorabji claims that Aristotle maintains a sharp distinction between the formal and material causes of sensation.1 To that end, Sorabji interprets a cluster of Aristotelian formulae about sensation as descriptions that exclusively pertain to perception's material cause. This material cause, according to Sorabji, is the process that the sense organ undergoes during an episode of sensation. These Aristotelian formulae fall roughly into three main groups: the claim that what perceives receives form (which (...) I will call the formal reception thesis), the claim that what perceives receives form without matter (which I will call the anahylic reception thesis2), and the claim that what perceives becomes actually like or such as its object from being potentially like or such (which I will call the likeness thesis). According to Sorabji, when Aristotle asserts any of these three theses, he is referring to one and the same physiological process by which the organ becomes actually and literally black or white, hot or cold, dry or fluid. In this paper, I show that this is not the case, because on a careful reading of _De Anima_ III. 4, _nous_ or mind is also receptive of form without matter for Aristotle, and that this, in fact, is essential for his arguments' success in this chapter. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The following is a study of Boethius' thought on signification which attempts to situate that thought historically and to evaluate it ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Encounters with Bertrand RussellBryan Magee and Introduced by Henry HardyBryan Magee (1930–2019), the celebrated philosopher, politician, journalist, author and broadcaster, was (and still is) well known for his brilliant television conversations with prominent philosophers—a triumph of uncondescending popularisation. He was a consummate interviewer and discussion chairman, and one of the most articulate and engaging expositors, especially of ideas, who ever lived.Born a cockney in Hoxton, east London, (...) he was educated at Christ's Hospital School in Sussex, and at Oxford, where he was elected president of the Oxford Union. Early in his career he presented the itv current affairs programme This Week, made documentaries about social issues, and wrote books, including the hugely successful Popper (1973) for Fontana Modern Masters. In 1974 he was elected as Labour mp for Leyton, but in 1982 defected to the sdp, losing his seat in 1983.He talked to philosophers for the bbc in the radio series Conversations with Philosophers (1970–71) and in the two tv series Men of Ideas (1978) and The Great Philosophers (1987). Substantial volumes on Wagner and Schopenhauer were highlights in an eventual total of 23 very various books, including The Story of Philosophy (1998), Ultimate Questions (2016), and three volumes of autobiography: Clouds of Glory: a Hoxton Childhood (2003), Growing Up in a War (2007), and Making the Most of It (2018).He left a large body of unpublished work: finished and unfinished books; essays, poems, interviews, "Notebooks" of short philosophical thoughts, correspondence. It falls to me as his literary executor to publish the best of it. I started with the selection from the Notebooks that appeared last year in the New Statesman, chosen by the editor of the magazine, Jason Cowley. Next in line are his pen-portraits of contemporary figures whom he knew well, or met [End Page 63] and sharply observed. Many of these, including the one published here,1 were written in a thick red bound foolscap notebook. Magee intended them to be published as a book, but never turned to the task.The following vignette of his meetings with Russell turned out to be a dry run for "Getting to Know Russell", Chapter 12 of Confessions of a Philosopher, which I described, when I reviewed it for the Times Higher Education Supplement,2 as a "challenging and readable invitation to philosophy" that is "exemplary in its clarity and breathtaking in its intellectual self-confidence". As Andrew Bone, co-editor of this journal, has observed to me, this original version is "More affectionate and less critical than the longer book-chapter that grew out of it."3 The later version is not as different from the earlier as Magee's closing words below imply it should be, but there are things in both versions that are not there in the other, so that it is worth having both in print. In the book Magee adds that Russell was one of the two geniuses he had the good fortune to get to know (the other, presumably, being Karl Popper), that "My first day with Russell remains for me the most memorable day of talk I have ever experienced", and that "Russell remains the most unforgettable character I've met." There are also factual differences: for example, Magee says below that they spent only "minutes" on the tv project that he visited Russell to discuss, but in the book "We discussed the television programme at useful length." Stories have a way of changing in the retelling. [End Page 64]________25 October 1970I have been putting off writing about Russell, because the task is so great, and the offhand way I have written this book is not appropriate to it. Perhaps first, simply, the facts of my acquaintanceship with him.When I was working at atv in the late 1950s it was wanted to include Russell in a one-hour documentary about the population explosion (a documentary which would have to say a good deal about world hunger). I rang him at his house in Wales to ask him to take part, and told him I was perfectly willing to bring a television unit down to Penrhyndeudraeth to film the... (shrink)

In academic and political spaces, as well as in the dominant culture in the United States, sex workers are granted little authority, and their lived experiences are not privileged as a form of valuable knowledge. As feminist scholars, we seek to counter this pattern by highlighting the situated knowledges and agency of sex workers in the United States. To do so, we share the words of sex workers through I-poems. I-poems are a form of poetic inquiry and a method for (...) qualitative research analysis. As a form of found poetry, these poems are constructed using only the words of the participants. Unlike prior scholars, we use focus groups that capture conversation about people involved in street-based sex work rather than individual interviews. By centering the participants’ own words, we hope to moderate our influence as researchers on the presentation of data. (shrink)

Employing an extensive archive of interview materials with major Anglophone poets, this book uncovers how they think in the moments of composition, providing a lucid account of the links between poetic composition and live performative thinking.

The essential guide to the history of western philosophy.

Personal data is highly vulnerable to security exploits, spurring moves to lock it down through encryption, to cryptographically ‘cloud’ it. But personal data is also highly valuable to corporations and states, triggering moves to unlock its insights by relocating it in the cloud. We characterise this twinned condition as ‘clouded data’. Clouded data constructs a political and technological notion of privacy that operates through the intersection of corporate power, computational resources and the ability to obfuscate, gain insights from and valorise (...) a dependency between public and private. First, we survey prominent clouded data approaches, suggesting their particular affordances produce distinctive versions of privacy. Next, we perform two notional code-based experiments using synthetic datasets. In the field of health, we submit a patient’s blood pressure to a notional cloud-based diagnostics service; in education, we construct a student survey that enables aggregate reporting without individual identification. We argue that these technical affordances legitimate new political claims to capture and commodify personal data. The final section broadens the discussion to consider the political force of clouded data and its reconstitution of traditional notions such as the public and the private. (shrink)

The stories we tell ourselves about our nature, about the moral importance of being human that conversations about cruelty provoke, reveal us to be inconsistent, our thoughts and emotions often immature, and our calls to action against cruelties grip-less, resulting in frustration, anger, and helplessness—that is, if the news, policy making, and attempts to respond to bullying, for example, are any indication. This chapter encourages us to collectively acknowledge and to make ourselves vulnerable to our fundamental ignorance in order to (...) carve a new path. This very ignorance, if tended to with proper care, is not our downfall: on the contrary, it can be the tincture of our creativity, which helps us be better at humanity. This chapter concludes by proposing that the shadow of humanity we have been chasing and courting in this exploration into cruelty and inhumanity is a fundamental capacity to see another creature, and acknowledge another creature as a limit to one’s will, to one’s agency, and insight, and that that capacity is propelled by our natural need to understand what makes each kind of creature flourish as itself, or as one of its kind: whether it is a child, a cat, a fly, a friend, a student, or a master—or, as in The Little Prince, a “perfect” sheep that is perfect because the Little Prince can’t see it. He can only imagine it. This activity of perpetual learning --necessarily rooted in uncertainty, in ignorance and getting it wrong-- is often an indication that we are working, not that we are broken. It might be our ignorance that is the well-spring of our moral significance after all, but only if nurtured. Concentrating on our reflections in the shattered mirror of cruelty helps us understand how we can be better at being human. This chapter outlines how being aware that we often don’t know what we don’t know can help us cultivate ourselves, our children, and each other more deliberately, with more awareness and more consciousness. We can capitalize on what makes being human morally relevant, which, as we’ve seen, is not always the usual suspects (reason and religion). This chapter extracts from validated studies in moral psychology, educational theories, social psychology experiments, and speculative arts to explore a variety of habits and practices that encourage the development of the perceptions of others and our own self-knowledge. It proposes that awareness, perception, reaction, responsiveness, adaptability, and action are key developmental issues for understanding both how we can be cruel and how we can do so less often. (shrink)

Is it yes? Or is it no? Does a sheep on a tiny planet eat the love of the life of the Little Prince of Asteroid B-612?Various elements of this book suggest practical courses of both thought and action in response to the topic of cruelty, and as importantly, to what we might think of as “humanity,” as something that matters. “Practical,” here, translates neither to “linear” nor to “easy.” To add another variability, this chapter revisits the “formula” that illuminates (...) the cruelty of any given action and continues to test it against commonly baffling scenarios, challenging its use, its effectiveness as a real practice. I’ve offered a mental tool, inviting the reader to engage and see if the understanding of cruelty that has been proposed and developed over the course of this book delivers clarity, depth, or, at bare minimum, confirmation that we still have much to learn about cruelty---and about ourselves.To hammer it home: before we engage our rationality—the often-supposed king of morality, that which separates beast from man, and other such well-accompanied misinformed fantasies—before we can even act irrationally, before rationality comes into play at all, we are separate from anything that is in front of us, and may not know if it is good, bad, with us, against us, or none of the above. Let’s assume it is harmful. Right before we see harm or are harmed we:Feel or PerceiveReactRespondAnd then, hopefully, we AdaptPerhaps you must believe we (you, me, him, her, they) don’t naturally mean harm. I am sorry to disappoint by saying what we already know and pretend we don’t: the truth is that human beings, we, as a species, are not apex predators. Siberian tigers and alligators, when attacked, don’t usually run from an attack, and they rarely freeze, unless it is strategic. The same can’t be said of us in the aggregate. Our vulnerabilities, or weaknesses—from the psychological, intellectual, to the physical—are important to understand so that we might not get trapped in self-deception, and might learn how we might do better at moral development, at beginning to develop what we are.This chapter concludes by attempting honesty. The propositions offered are both difficult and simple at the same time. And much of the emphasis here is on our perceptual capacities, the means through which we learn, and also our adaptive capacities, and how these three need to work together.We often restrict ourselves to, as Pierre Hadot says, “fencing in front of a mirror,” by relying on reason and a reflection that is deceptively-reflective, as the judge and jury. This has an impact on how we behave, how we practice being human, as well as an impact on our understanding of the virtue of humanity—when there can be virtue in that.My suggestion is that we take what senses we have, that we do not confuse certainty or objectivity with full knowledge, and that we learn to learn better, and that, most importantly, we learn that our moral value, the virtue of humanity, is that we are always learning.We are learning creatures. And we value humanity. And so, we have to value that the base of that humanity is instability about knowing quite how or when or where or to whom we belong, and those are things we are privileged to be able to learn. A sparrow cannot come to my aid if I have fallen. I, however, can learn to come to its aid. Or, I can get that attempted act of compassion wrong. That’s the price of being a learning creature, and one with a moral valence.END CAVEAT: I am often criticized for not having an answer, for provoking questions and not providing enough explanation. I have tried to justify that as best I can throughout this work, for those who are dissatisfied. At the end of editing the final draft of the full MS I asked one of my dearest friends and mentors, Professor Arnold Davidson, and he said, “There is a big payoff—this should help people learn how to ask new questions. And the value of philosophy lies more in its questions than in its answers. That is one of the things I like about Talmudists; they always say that a new question is more important than an answer.”“Cruelty: A Book About Us” provides a platform for further questions, discussion, and interaction. This last section is a primer and trigger for continued curiosity, dissatisfaction, and persistent learning—and, in that way, honors the most morally valuable aspects of being part of those aspiring towards humanity. (shrink)

Talking frankly and bravely about cruelty and about our claim that we can be inhuman when we are cruel invites scenes, scenarios, and rationales that can challenge our individual sanity and collective rationality. This chapter makes mercenary use of examples of banal cruelty (such as playground bullying), extreme cruelty (such as Edmond Kemper), and the confounding combination of ordinary and extraordinary cruelties (such as Himmler or the Menendez brothers). It also acknowledges the possibility of cruelty driven neither by intent to (...) harm, nor that results in extreme suffering: benevolent cruelty. For one instance of well- intentioned cruelty, Col. Pratt of the Carlisle School, in his passion for humanity and civility, ripped children from their indigenous ways of being “for their own sakes”. According to him and the Friends of the Indian: “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.” How do we make sense of ourselves in light of examples such as that? (shrink)

Many feminist philosophers of education have argued that the teacher's pleasure plays an important role in the classroom. However, accessing such pleasure is often easier said than done. Given our current academic climate, how might teachers develop pedagogical practices that cultivate these delights? This article investigates the (rather surprising) response to this question offered in Augustine's De catechizandis rudibus. Despite his reputation as a pleasure-hater, Augustine spends the majority of his text defending the delights of teaching. In particular, Augustine argues (...) that if teachers wish to find pleasure in teaching, they would do well to study the pleasures of mothers. To this end, I analyse the nature of Augustine's maternal appeal. What insight does Augustine find in the experiences of mothers? In what way does he hope his colleagues will allow these experiences to shape their pedagogies? I conclude by exploring the benefits and the risks of Augustine's claim for those who teach in the contemporary feminist classroom. Augustine's defence of pedagogical pleasure suggests that he shares a common interest with feminist philosophers. But, the social/political limits of his account highlight the value of submitting such pleasures to the terms of feminist critique. (shrink)

Following from Chapter 3, this chapter dives deeper into what we can learn from both our habits in approaching and avoiding cruelty. It analyses the eight characteristic, or most common responses, to cruelty that I have encountered—in philosophy, psychology, my own life, conversations with others, in order to try to understand what possibly drives each of them. The eight common responses are reiterated and then supplemented, through real-life journalistic accounts, as well as personal examples. The eight most obvious, or commonly (...) encountered explanations for how or why a behavior is experienced or labelled as “cruel” are:Ill intentExcess, Extremity, Unreasonable Causing of SufferingIndifference to anotherIndividually personalized or intimate psychological attackLegal/rule definitionPathological/psychologically aberrant given cultural conventionsHeresy (Religious)Naturalistic NihilismAs in chapter 3’s stage-run through Ordinary, Extraordinary, and Benevolentappearances of cruelty, this chapter offers us an opportunity to peek around our blind spots, to face our reactions and to acknowledge the deficiencies in the tools we us. We often rely on false gods in this area because the subjects make us insecure; this is a theme that runs throughout this book: we often seek definitive proofs, a clean answer, a truth, a tradition, something to lean on. That is what we want, but also something we have to overcome in order to get what we need. This chapter suggests that we learn to lean in, and to do so, we must not just accept that we may be wrong (and often are), but also that being wrong, the capacity to be wrong, is foundational to our moral relevance in the way we have invested in it. (shrink)

The Harm Threshold (HT) holds that the state may interfere in medical decisions parents make on their children’s behalf only when those decisions are likely to cause serious harm to the child. Such a high bar for intervention seems incompatible with both parental obligations and the state’s role in protecting children’s well-being. In this paper, I assess the theoretical underpinnings for the HT, focusing on John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle as its most plausible conceptual foundation. I offer (i) a novel, (...) text-based argument showing that Mill’s Harm Principle does not give justificatory force to the HT; and (ii) a positive account of some considerations which, beyond significant harm, would comprise an intervention principle normatively grounded in Mill’s ethical theory. I find that substantive recommendations derived from Mill’s socio-political texts are less _laissez-faire_ than they have been interpreted by HT proponents. Justification for state intervention owes not to the severity of a harm, but to whether that harm arises from the failure to satisfy one’s duty. Thus, a pediatric intervention principle derived from Mill ought not to be oriented around the _degree_ of harm caused by a parent’s healthcare decision, but rather, the _kind_ of harm—specifically, whether the harm arises from violation of parental obligation. These findings challenge the interpretation of Mill adopted by HT proponents, eliminating a critical source of justification for a protected domain of parental liberty and reorienting the debate to focus on parental duties. (shrink)

After recognizing we are on unstable ground in the previous chapter, we want to try to gain balance, naturally. In trying to gain our balance it is easy to take for granted what we think of as ourselves in the world, as human beings, to orient or vison ourselves and ground our feet in the traditional ways outlined in lectures, sermons, books we read that rely on reason, religion, “truth”, argument, rhetoric, and so on. In each case, clarity, or certainty, (...) or stability are kinds of promised life-lines. This chapter reinforces and clarifies a theme that runs throughout this book, which is that those may be misleading pathways and false promises. How we belong in the world, how we understand ourselves as belonging in the world around us, is dependent on fundamental aspects of being that are primary—that is prior to-- any particular moral, religious, cultural, or legal convention. This chapter continues the discussion and the hope that out of our “ignorance,” as I have called it, or our distance from knowledge, there can come a development of a more attuned attention to how to be in and with the world. This, I suggest, is critical not just to our understanding of ourselves as having moral relevance, but also to how we train ourselves and each other to make our being, as human, relevant, morally valanced. We are not born morally relevant, but we can make ourselves so.We often talk about the moral importance of responsiveness, but we don’t always talk about how important timing and the other senses with which we are equipped are for responsiveness—and that the dance among those is morally fundamental. Unfortunately, that dance is taught far more explicitly in teaching how to torture, how to be cruel, or inhumane, than it is in how to be less cruel, and more humane.Responsiveness, critical to not only our belonging, but also to our ideas of being “moral” or “human,’ is far more subtly complex, more nuanced, than many traditions acknowledge or cultivate. How to investigate this earnestly is a question this chapter tries to bring to the forefront. (shrink)

Paulo Coelho said, “Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind.” The usual way we go about talking about ourselves in relationship to the rest of nature—everything on the spectrum of the living that populates what counts as our world—tends to front with something to disguise our anxiety about whether and how we belong. I suggest that this anxiety is an organic, innate, constitutional part of having humanity, and though we may initially be a bit repulsed by that (...) or react defensively, it is justified; we have the reason and the possibility of the unraveling of reason and sense-making for it. We drape ourselves with prescriptions, declarations, suspicions, or conspiracies: we are rational or flout that we have reason, whereas the rest of what makes up this world is not or does not. We are divine, whereas the others are not. We are creators ourselves (free-will, autonomy, self-determination), or we are cursed, whereas the others—the rest of nature—are not. We can go to heaven or hell, or so some of us tell ourselves. And the others? Who is to judge? Who are we to judge? And to judge who is to judge? How? With What? Talk of what cruelty is turns quickly to talk about who or what can be accused of it: Us. What are we such that we, unlike a groundhog, can be so bad at our own nature that we can be said to be inhuman? There is no “in-groundhog” or “un-groundhog” groundhog. That brings up anxiety about how we belong in the world, how we explain how we humans belong in the world. This chapter illuminates our (often deeply hidden) anxiety and suggests that nearly all moral commitments and orientations, from religions to reason-worship are attempts to answer that calling or solve that anxiety. Works by philosophers, thinkers, writers, and theorists, such as Kierkegaard, Paulo Coelho, Cora Diamond, Christine Korsgaard, Raimond Gaita, Jean Amery, Pierre Hadot, Judith Shklar, St. Exupéry, along with very candid email exchanges with J.M Coetzee, and a few conversations with a self-described local “town drunk”’ guide us through from the acknowledgement of our anxiety to preparations for what to do about it. (shrink)

Incidences of cruelty may make us cringe in fear, empathy, or shame. They may make us turn away in horror because what is happening is unbearable to witness or to undergo, is beyond our capacities to imagine, or is confirmation of our fundamental helplessness and vulnerability. They may also incite curiosity—perversely or genuinely—or annihilate or cripple our bodies or psyches in cases of physical or psychological abuse. If we look with open eyes, we can see that they also can motivate (...) us, spurring us to learn to prevent, rectify, or heal from acts of cruelty, or even learn how to execute cruelty better by pushing the limits of what we can know about another and what we do with that knowledge. Sometimes, cruelty slides between our judgment of either good or bad and, therefore, matures us in necessary ways, like a stern guardian. Cruelty is all at once confounding, provocative, horrible, and ubiquitous. It is also, no matter the particular act or experience in question, uncomfortably intimate. This chapter surveys types of cruelty and offers the preliminary formulation we will use throughout this work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Difficult, Difficult, Lemon, DifficultMaggie TaylorI like to joke that my husband is a lemon—he suffers from manufacturing defects that prevent his body from functioning as intended. Illnesses other 40-somethings recover from quickly are things that land him in the hospital for weeks on end. So, it was no surprise last year that an epileptic seizure led to aspiration pneumonia, admission to the lCU, intubation, multisystem organ failure, and a (...) Helivac ride to a regional hospital for a higher level of care. I was told that his odds of survival were about fifty-fifty. At the time, I was training as a clinical ethics fellow, still relatively inexperienced but savvy enough to guess the true likelihood was probably lower. Doctors don’t usually like telling brutal truths to families.But the moral complexities of his treatment did not arise when he was on the verge of death. They came days later when he was getting better. He’d survived a major surgery, come off pressors, recovered from an acute kidney injury, did well on spontaneous breathing trials (SBTs), and tolerated sedation weaning. Ironically, this was the hardest part of the hospitalization for me. Some people tolerate endotracheal tubes. Others don’t. My husband is in the latter group. He’d even self-extubated on a prior hospitalization. This time, he was too weak to lift his arms. Instead of pulling at the tube taped to his face, he stared up at me with wild eyes that said I don’t know what’s happening but I hate it; make it stop.As his discomfort became more apparent, I pressed the intensivist, Dr. Roja1, about extubating. “He’s alert, following commands, and hit the benchmarks on his vent settings.”Dr. Roja responded by saying she didn’t feel my husband was ready. They would continue conducting SBTs and reevaluate the next day.She said the same thing the next day.And the next day. Then she suggested a trach evaluation. I rejected Dr. Roja’s proposed compromise. Forcefully.It wasn’t just that I had trouble seeing my husband in this state of confusion and discomfort, although I did. I also knew continued vent dependence was something he would not accept. Over the course of our relationship, we’ve talked a lot about what interventions my husband would tolerate under various circumstances. This makes sense, given my profession and his health problems. He doesn’t want to live no matter the costs, but only if he can do so without being a burden on those he loves or dependent on machinery long-term—which, for him, means a few weeks.This is what I told Dr. Roja. At least, this is what I think I told her. It’s doubtful I stated my reasoning [End Page 28] half that clearly, given my emotional, physical, and cognitive state. It had been two weeks since my husband was admitted, and I was depleted. I was living in a hotel across from the hospital, wasn’t eating, and had fallen back into the vice of smoking cigarettes. Exhaustion and stress had made me combative: I had to defend my husband against this doctor who refused to do the right thing and take the tube out.In what felt like a last-ditch effort to get me off her back, Dr. Roja suggested an ethics consult. It was embarrassing that the intensivist was the one to suggest ethics involvement. Consumed as I was by my job as my husband’s advocate, I had forgotten my actual job.The team was able to put together a family meeting within hours. Beforehand, the ethicist came to my husband’s room and introduced herself to me and my mother.“I work in ethics too, as a clinical ethics fellow,” I said.She responded: “Oh.”That was all. Not even a word, but a sound. I don’t know what response I wanted, but that wasn’t it. This made me suspicious of the process.My mother and I joined the ethicist, Dr. Roja, and a palliative care physician in the family room. Dr. Roja led with a summary of my husband’s clinical condition... (shrink)

“Come seek us where our voices sound.We cannot sing above the ground”. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 390.In the Victorian era monkey torsos were stitched onto large fish tails, addressing the public’s desire to behold a mermaid. These exhibits, apart from offering access to the grotesque, spoke to an innate need in man to mirror himself in nature. In this chapter, I take as my subject matter J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) and focus in (...) particular upon her representation and reinvention of the figure of the mermaid.In Rowling’s fantasy landscape, these creatures are deployed to speak to a particular principle of unification, not only between human and animal but also between different human cultures. In a world itself fraught by tensions between good and evil, muggles and wizards and, most importantly, between humans and animals; it is within these boundary spaces that compromise and ultimately change can exist. This chapter will explore how both the Harry Potter series and its accompanying taxonomy of imaginative creatures, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, shape the mermaid to teach a lesson in ethics and otherness aimed at young readers but also tied to older histories.Such creatures are, of course, themselves inherently dualised; they are both of land and of sea, of human and of animal. Yet in Rowling’s fantasy landscape, these creatures are deployed to speak to a particular principle of unification, not only between human and animal but also between different human cultures. In a world itself fraught by tensions between good and evil, muggles and wizards and, most importantly, between humans and animals; it is within these boundary spaces that compromise and ultimately change can exist. Interaction with the mermaid necessitates a transgression into their realm or in the limited spaces between. Travelling to this boundary and beyond, outside the comfort of the known, challenges the self to understand and be understood. This paper will explore how both the Harry Potter series and its accompanying taxonomy of imaginative creatures, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, shape the mermaid to teach a lesson in ethics and otherness aimed at young readers but also tied to older histories. (shrink)

We don’t always get it right. Our timing, for example, the “tense” in the world that often governs our responsiveness to others, is often out of sync. In fact, we most often do not get it exactly right, and at best only get a partial picture or understanding of how we belong in the world with everything else--from our children, to trees, to the weather, to our gods, to ourselves. In practice, if we are to own our lack of certainty (...) as our especially humane virtue, then we have to concede that the search for A Singular truth, being right, being certain, inhibits our capacity to inhabit the world as we are, and thus distracts us from how we might learn to belong: that is, from the practices of being that belong to belonging, and how we are different from many other creatures. Not only is it non-sensical to say a cat can be an “in or “un” cat, or have “in” or “un” “cat-ness,” it is also strange to think of a cat learning how to be in the world in the same way we must. Ours is a constant, perpetual, state of learning, of even, practicing to learn. That means we are constantly making mistakes. (shrink)

Children are presumptively regarded as incompetent to make their own medical decisions, and the responsibility for making such decisions typically falls to parents. Parental authority is not unlimited, however, and ethical guidelines identifying appropriate bounds on this authority are needed. One proposal currently gaining support is the Harm Threshold (HT), which asserts that the state may only legitimately intervene in parental decision-making when serious and preventable harm to children is likely. This paper considers two questions: in virtue of what underlying (...) principle or property does the HT gain its purported justification?; and does this underlying principle or property ground the HT as its proponents conceive of it? I identify two separate grounds represented in the literature: (i) J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle; and (ii) the liberty interests of parents. I find that the HT is not sufficiently grounded in either of these, revealing a substantial conceptual difficulty for its advocates. (shrink)

This chapter weaves together Trickster figures, emerging game formats and Learning, transformative theories, Exploration, explore relationships between these discourses and experiences. Tricksters are argued to have new twenty-first century Western Relevance. Augmented Reality, ARReality and Alternate Reality Games are described as Trickster tools. A Relationship, power between these tools and Learning, transformative is outlined.