“I,” Singular and Universal

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Béatrice Longuenesse
Keyword(s):  
Singular Term ◽  
First Person ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

In each instance of its use, “I” refers to just one individual: the individual currently saying the sentence or thinking the proposition in which “I” (or, as the case may be, the first-person inflection of the verb) is in use. At the same time, having available the concept and word “I” is understanding that any other person using “I” thereby refers to herself, the thinker or speaker. Moreover, uses of “I” are not necessarily the expression of an egoistic obsession with our individual person. Some of the sentences in which “I” is in use display a striking combination of the singular character of the word and concept “I” and the universality of the claim we make on others, using the singular term and concept “I.” The chapter explores these contrasting features of “I” in relation to our cognitive and agential access to the world.

Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ignatieff
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Universal Declaration ◽  
Global Ethics ◽  
Citizen Action ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
The World ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
The Individual

In a 1958 speech at the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt took stock of the progress that human rights had made since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ten years before. Mrs. Roosevelt had chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration and had hoped that, in time, it would become “the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere.” Her answer to the question of how to measure human rights progress has become one of the most frequently quoted remarks of the former First Lady: Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

Human Rights and the Poor in the World Religions

Horizons ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Soko
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Global Ethic ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThe experience of the many poor and of the many religions in today's world are two issues which this study addresses, from the perspective of human rights. Its thesis is that concern for the poor is not unique to Judaism and Christianity, but that all religions examined here contain an affirmation of the value of the individual person, as well as a compassion for the poor, which can lead to a universal concern for the rights of the poor and marginalized. Viewing human rights as a concept which expresses the aspirations of many religions, it examines their perceptions of human rights language and their concerns for the poor. In doing so, it rejects the postmodernist claim that all religions are incommensurable and cannot be compared on issues such as justice, human rights and concern for the poor, and argues for continuing efforts toward a global ethic.

Wiederentstehung und Erneuerung (Tit 3:5) Zu einem erhaltenswerten Aspekt der Soteriologie des Titusbriefs

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-295
Author(s):  
Christiane Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
New Creation ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Preceding Term

AbstractThe soteriological metaphor in Tit 3:5 δια λουτρου παλιγγενεσιαζ και ανακαινωσεωζ seems to be a combination of Pauline and pagan language. The Pauline neologism ανακαινωσιζ describes the individual salvation in the context of the new creation as a universal process, and seems to serve as an explanation of the preceding term παλιγγενεσια. The author of Titus uses the expression παλιγγενεσια, which is probably influenced by the reception of Stoic terminology by Philo, to describe not only the salvation of the individual person, but also of all believers in a universal sense. As the Stoic term παλιγγενεσια is used for the cosmic renewal of the world, this connotation has to be remembered even in Titus. Consequently παλιγγενεσια has to be translated rather with “regeneration” than with “rebirth”.

scholarly journals Overdiagnosis: An unrecognised and growing worldwide problem in healthcare

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 147-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Brodersen
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Risk Factor ◽  
Cause Of Death ◽  
High Income ◽  
Pharmaceutical Drugs ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
The World ◽  
Disease Mongering ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of deviations, abnormalities, risk factors, and pathologies that in themselves would never cause symptoms (this applies only to risk factors and pathology), would never lead to morbidity, and would never be the cause of death. Therefore, treating an overdiagnosed condition (deviation, abnormality, risk factor, pathology) cannot, by definition, improve the patient’s prognosis, and can therefore only be harmful. Overdiagnosis is an extremely harmful and big problem all over the world, and the problem is increasing. This is especially the case in high-income countries, where more sensitive tests, more testing, more screening and earlier diagnosis is in focus, and more of the same will be implemented in the future. Moreover, disease definitions have been and are still being widened, plus thresholds for treating, e.g. risk factors, have been and are still being lowered. Finally, disease mongering is growing, because it is cheaper and faster to invent new “diseases” than new pharmaceutical drugs. From the definition of overdiagnosis it can be reasoned that a patient who has been correctly diagnosed and a person who has been overdiagnosed can have the same kind of pathologies. Therefore, at the level of the individual person or patient it can never be verified whether he or she has in fact been correctly diagnosed or overdiagnosed. Therefore, the complexity, dilemmas and pitfalls in understanding what overdiagnosis really is so succinctly captured by this quote from the Danish philosopher S⊘ren Kirkegaard (1813-55): ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards’.

scholarly journals Humanizacja w XXI wieku nowoczesnego podmiotu

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-185
Author(s):  
Irena Grochowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
The World ◽  
External Conditions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Final Effect ◽  
Mature Person

The crisis of sense, which affects us badly nowadays, causes us to reflect on and promote new solutions as well as create personalities fulfilling the requirements of the modern world. The answer requires a comprehensive analysis of the problem in order to present the integral vision of the man in the world. The attempt to shape the survival man and the features he should possess has its justification in the influence of the environment on the integral shaping of the man and his survival. The need for ecological reflection is caused by intensive changes in political and social life. The approach based on ecological space and eco-development requires a properly shaped and mature personality. In contemporary civilization obligations, jobs and responsibilities too often are beyond the capabilities of an individual person. The responsible, "auxiliary" functions require the integrally shaped person rather than learning the individual roles. Therefore, the important hierarchy in shaping the man has a considerable influence on the final effect, which is the "real" man. Education, formation, and then, on this foundation, training for particular roles and jobs taking into account the structure and condition of the man as well as all his internal and external conditions, may lead to the fully mature person, ready to undertake activities in agreement with the defined aims.

The problem of sex in the religions of the Abrahamic tradition

2001 ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
N. Nedzelska
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
First Person ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Systems

The paradox of the existence of the species Homo sapiens is that we do not even know: Who are we? Why are we? Where did you go from? Why? At all times - from antiquity to our time - the philosophers touched on this topic. It takes an important place in all religions of the world. These eternal questions include gender issues. In the religious systems of the religions of the Abrahamic tradition there is no single answer to the question of which sex was the first person. Recently, British scientists have even tried to prove that Eve is 84 thousand years older Adam

New walls to keep the bad out: populism and the totalitarian psyche

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Coline Covington
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychic Development ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 and marked the end of the Cold War. As old antagonisms thawed a new landscape emerged of unification and tolerance. Censorship was no longer the principal means of ensuring group solidarity. The crumbling bricks brought not only freedom of movement but freedom of thought. Now, nearly thirty years later, globalisation has created a new balance of power, disrupting borders and economies across the world. The groups that thought they were in power no longer have much of a say and are anxious about their future. As protest grows, we are beginning to see that the old antagonisms have not disappeared but are, in fact, resurfacing. This article will start by looking at the dissembling of a marriage in which the wall that had peacefully maintained coexistence disintegrates and leads to a psychic development that uncannily mirrors that of populism today. The individual vignette leads to a broader psychological understanding of the totalitarian dynamic that underlies populism and threatens once again to imprison us within its walls.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

The Autobiographical Subject and the Death Penalty

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
E. S. Burt
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
First Person ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Why does writing of the death penalty demand the first-person treatment that it also excludes? The article investigates the role played by the autobiographical subject in Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I, where the confessing ‘I’ doubly supplements the philosophical investigation into what Derrida sees as a trend toward the worldwide abolition of the death penalty: first, to bring out the harmonies or discrepancies between the individual subject's beliefs, anxieties, desires and interests with respect to the death penalty and the state's exercise of its sovereignty in applying it; and second, to provide a new definition of the subject as haunted, as one that has been, but is no longer, subject to the death penalty, in the light of the worldwide abolition currently underway.

“Utopia First!” A Machiavellian Conception of Solidarity in More's Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93
Author(s):  
Marie-Claire Phélippeau
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Farm Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Difficulties ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
Communal Organization

This paper shows how solidarity is one of the founding principles in Thomas More's Utopia (1516). In the fictional republic of Utopia described in Book II, solidarity has a political and a moral function. The principle is at the center of the communal organization of Utopian society, exemplified in a number of practices such as the sharing of farm work, the management of surplus crops, or the democratic elections of the governor and the priests. Not only does solidarity benefit the individual Utopian, but it is a prerequisite to ensure the prosperity of the island of Utopia and its moral preeminence over its neighboring countries. However, a limit to this principle is drawn when the republic of Utopia faces specific social difficulties, and also deals with the rest of the world. In order for the principle of solidarity to function perfectly, it is necessary to apply it exclusively within the island or the republic would be at risk. War is not out of the question then, and compassion does not apply to all human beings. This conception of solidarity, summed up as “Utopia first!,” could be dubbed a Machiavellian strategy, devised to ensure the durability of the republic. We will show how some of the recommendations of Realpolitik made by Machiavelli in The Prince (1532) correspond to the Utopian policy enforced to protect their commonwealth.

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