Energy Commons

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (93) ◽  
pp. 94-101
Author(s):  
Imre Szeman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Common

This article argues for the necessity of articulating and struggling for an energy common. An energy common is not intended to substitute for articulations of the common in general. Rather, the specific discussion of energy in relation to the common accomplishes two things. First, it underscores the problematic lack of attention to energy in existing discussions of the common, as in autonomist political philosophy. Second, adding energy to our thinking about the common produces new insights into the political and environmental commitments of existing articulations of the common. The possibilities of a common that is alert to the limits of natural resources and operates in relation to them are described in Ivan Illich’s 1973 essay “Energy and Equity.” This article takes Illich’s essay as a beginning point for creating an energy commons today.

Plato’s Philosophical Politics

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
V. Bradley Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
The Common ◽  
Plato's Political Philosophy ◽  
Favorable Conditions ◽  
Political Character ◽  
Actual Trial

This paper suggests an alternative account of the political character of Plato’s political philosophy. After pointing toward some problems of the common developmental paradigm, which emphasizes discontinuities between Plato’s Socratic early writings, the mature utopianism of the Republic, and the late pessimism of the Laws, it proposes that Plato’s two large constructive works, the Republic and Laws, are related to two actual historical events in which Plato played a role, the trial of Socrates and Plato’s failed intervention in Sicilian politics. On this view, the Republic is to the Apology of Socrates as the Laws is to the Seventh Letter. The Republic is an imaginative reconstruction of the sort of defense of philosophy under more favorable conditions than obtained in the actual trial; the Laws is an imaginative reconstruction of the sort of political reform that Plato advocated under more favorable conditions than obtained in Syracuse under Dionysius II. The paper suggests this as the basis of a unified interpretation of Plato’s political philosophy. 


RESPONSIBLE CHOICES, DESERT-BASED LEGAL INSTITUTIONS, AND THE CHALLENGES OF CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
The Real ◽  
Brain States ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

AbstractNeuroscience is commonly thought to challenge the basic way we think of ourselves in ordinary thought, morality, and the law. This paper: (1) describes the legal institutions challenged in this way by neuroscience, including in that description both the political philosophy such institutions enshrine and the common sense psychology they presuppose; (2) describes the three kinds of data produced by contemporary neuroscience that is thought to challenge these commonsense views of ourselves in morals and law; and (3) distinguishes four major and several minor kinds of challenges that that data can reasonably be interpreted to present. The major challenges are: first, the challenge of reductionism, that we are merely machines; second, the challenge of determinism, that we are caused to choose and act as we do by brain states that we do not control; third, the challenge of epiphenomenalism, that our choices do not cause our actions because our brains are the real cause of those actions; and fourth, the challenge of fallibilism, that we do not have direct access to those of our mental states that do cause our actions, nor are we infallible in such knowledge as we do have of them.

Thomas Paine’s democratic linguistic radicalism: a political philosophy of language?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carine Lounissi
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Man

Carine Lounissi’s premise in this chapter is that characterising Thomas Paine’s radicalism is a challenge, which she takes up by focusing on his “democratic style” as a way to make his ideas accessible to the common man. The author thus studies Paine’s “democratic style”, for which he was harshly criticised, as being part and parcel of his inherently republican and democratic radicalism. She argues that in his writings Paine sought to deconstruct the discourse of the political elite of his time, associated with the trappings of royalty, and promoted the language of common sense instead as an instrument of resistance predicated on the universality of human nature. He invented a radical linguistics whereby he wished to go back to the roots of words.

scholarly journals Biopolitics and/or biopower

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-189
Author(s):  
Alpar Losonc
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Negative Answer ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The Common ◽  
Dynamic Relations ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Classical Age

The author of this article thematizes the meanings of life in political philosophy. There are two answers to the question concerning the legitimacy of life in the political philosophy. The first, negative, answer is connected to Arendt, the second is connected to Michel Foucault who has delineated the genesis of the biopolitics in the Western tradition and argued that, since the classical age, "deduction" based on the practice of sovereign power has become merely one element in a range of mechanisms working to generate incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces of life. Nowadays, the capacity to manipulate our mere biological life, rather than simply to govern aspects of forms of life, implies a biopolitics that contests how and when we use these technologies and for what purposes. The author of this article emphasizes the significance of the common treating of the biopower and sovereignty, but he critizices the concept of biopolitics based on the idea of the emancipation of the subordinated body. Polical philosophy demonstrates that there is an irreducible difference between these types of power, but it is necessary to analyze them simultaneously. There are a lot of tendencies (for example, biosecurity) that prove the importance of sovereign power for the practice of biopower. However, the sovereignty without biopolitics is exposed to weaknesses and regression. The task for political philosophy is to articulate the dynamic relations between sovereignty and biopower today.

Playing Political Philosophy

2016 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-308
Author(s):  
Charles Blattberg
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common

Ronald Beiner wants to have it both ways. We know this because, near the end of his book, he tells us that he is a “dualist,” someone for whom “philosophy and citizenship are defined by radically distinct purposes: the job of philosophy is to strive unconditionally for truth, and the job of citizenship is to strive for good and prudent judgment about the common purposes of civic life, and each should focus strictly on fulfilling its own appointed end without worrying too much about the other.” So there needs to be “a steady appreciation of the fundamental chasm between what we (as citizens) need in the world of practice and what we (as human beings) need from the world of theory” (224). This, however, would be abhorrent to most of the political philosophers Beiner covers. Because they are not dualists but monists; to them, theory and practice should be one.

Love of Glory and the Common Good

1982 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 825-836 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Highest Good ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City

How the city, the political community, may ask its citizens to sacrifice their lives for the sake of its preservation has plagued us since the birth of political philosophy. This article examines Thucydides' presentation of Pericles' attempt to solve this problem by reconciling the highest good of the individual and the good of the city by means of the love of glory. I contrast the central themes of Pericles' speeches in Thucydides, especially his renowned funeral oration, with other parts of Thucydides' presentation of Periclean Athens, in particular his famous account of the plague, to demonstrate his doubts about the efficacy of the Periclean solution to the political problem.

What is a Complex? Freudian Resistances

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham
Keyword(s):  
Value Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Military Industrial Complex ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Common ◽  
Post War

This chapter evaluates the question of the ‘complex’ in a range of scientific, political and psychoanalytic contexts, asking not only where lines of connection and demarcation occur among specific distributions of meaning, value, theory and practice; but also probing the psychoanalytic corpus, notably Freud’s writings on the notion of a ‘complex’, in order to reframe various implications of the idea that this term tends to resist its own utilisation as both an object and form of analysis. This section establishes connections between three sets of theoretical questions: the common practice of describing modernity and its wake in terms of a drive towards increasing complexity; the meaning and cultural legacy of phrases such as ‘military-industrial complex’ and sundry derivations in the political sphere; and the intricacies and ambiguities subtending the term ‘complex’ within psychoanalytic theory. As a concept that Freud both utilised and repudiated, the provocative power of the term ‘complex’ is linked to the way it thwarts various attempts at systemization (providing nonetheless an apparatus of sorts through which contemporary science, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Freud, Eisenhower, and post-war politics can be articulated to one another).

Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Dombrowski
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Static View ◽  
Process Oriented ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

In this work two key theses are defended: political liberalism is a processual (rather than a static) view and process thinkers should be political liberals. Three major figures are considered (Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne) in the effort to show the superiority of political liberalism to its illiberal alternatives on the political right and left. Further, a politically liberal stance regarding nonhuman animals and the environment is articulated. It is typical for debates in political philosophy to be adrift regarding the concept of method, but from start to finish this book relies on the processual method of reflective equilibrium or dialectic at its best. This is the first extended effort to argue for both political liberalism as a process-oriented view and process philosophy/theology as a politically liberal view. It is also a timely defense of political liberalism against illiberal tendencies on both the right and the left.

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