Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice

Author(s):  
Nathan Coombs

This chapter argues that although Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy has been received as a scientistic realism, its fundamental commitments are shaped by political opposition to Hegelian historicism. By drawing on published fragments of his long-awaited book, The Divine Inexistence, the chapter shows that it is Meillassoux’s rejection of the historical symbol of modernity and its collective politics that leads him to propose replacing it with an individual, ethical orientation guided by speculative philosophy. Read in the context of this wider body of work, Meillassoux’s After Finitude realises the authoritative trajectory set in motion by Althusser and Badiou.

Author(s):  
Didier Debaise

Process and Reality ends with a warning: ‘[t]he chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence’ (PR, 337). Although this danger of narrowness might emerge from the ‘idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization’ (PR, 337), we should not be mistaken: it occurs within philosophy, in its activity, its method. And the fact that this issue arises at the end of Process and Reality reveals the ambition that has accompanied its composition: Whitehead has resisted this danger through the form and ambition of his speculative construction. The temptation of a narrowness in selection attempts to expel speculative philosophy at the same time as it haunts each part of its system.


Moreana ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (Number 195- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Yelena Mazour-Matusevitch

The inherent utopian tension between the ideal pattern and the earthly reality will be examined here in the context of the Pythagorean tradition, which Utopia shares with Plato’s Republic and Cicero’s De Republica, taken in its widest sense as the vision holding cosmic harmony as a model for organization of human affairs. The article aims to show how this tradition, by means of modification by the Renaissance Neo-Platonists, manifests itself in Utopia, putting to test Thomas More’s moral convictions as well as his faith in Neo-Platonist speculative philosophy.


Author(s):  
Eko Arisaputra ◽  
Resti Yulistia Muslim

This study aims to determine the influence of organizational ethical culture, professional commitment, and ethical orientation on ethical sensitivity. The sample in this study is BAWASDA in Padang. The sampling technique with convenience sampling method. The total of questionnaire distributed counted 120 and able to be used  105. The study use Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with AMOS application version 16.0 to examine the structural relationship among variables that affect officer sensitivity to ethical situation. The results of this study indicated that: (1) the organizational ethical culture have a significant effect on idealism. (2) the organizational ethical culture have a significant effect on relativism. (3) professional commitment doesn’t significant effect on idealism. (4) professional commitment doesn’t significant effect on relativism. (5) idealism significant effect on ethical sensitivity. (6) relativism significant effect on ethical sensitivity. (7) organization ethical culture significant effect on ethical sensitivity and (8) professional commitment doesn’t significant effect on ethical sensitivity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-403
Author(s):  
Andreas Gelhard

AbstractHegel’s approach to ancient scepticism is often discussed only in the context of epistemological questions. But it is also of crucial importance for his practical philosophy. Hegel draws on central figures of Pyrrhonian scepticism in order to subject Kant’s antinomies – i. e., Kant’s cosmology – to a fundamental revision. He radicalises Kant’s sceptical method to “self-completing scepticism”. At the same time he gives Kant’s concept of the world a practical twist: In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, world means an inhabited sphere in which powers and counter-powers are in conflict with each other. In doing so, he opens up the tradition of negativist thinking in political philosophy, which ranges from Marx and Adorno to the current theories of radical democracy. When Hegel calls Pyrrhonian skepticism a “negative dialectic”, he thereby marks what he views as a deficit: the inferiority of Pyrrhonian skepticism to speculative philosophy. However, it is precisely the practical dimension of Hegel’s dialectic that suggests that the sceptical motives of his thinking should be given great weight. This can be seen most clearly in Hegel’s concept of Bildung, which defines emancipation processes as the reactivation of open power relations in static conditions of domination.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Deniz Nihan Aktan

Abstract Focusing on queer-identified amateur football teams, this article investigates the potentials of the mobilities and alliances of gender non-conforming footballing people to disrupt the seemingly effortless structure of the football field. While football is arguably one of the sports with the strongest discriminatory attitudes toward gender non-conforming people, it has also become a site of resistance for queers in Turkey as of 2015. How political opposition groups relate to the football field, which is mostly considered as a male-dominant and heterosexualized space where social norms are reproduced, are classified into three groups in my research: resistance through, against, and for football. I give particular attention to the category “resistance for football” as a distinctive way for gender non-conforming people to inhabit the field. I discuss how the link between sexual and spatial orientations shapes the domain of what a body can do, both in terms of normativity and capacity, and I explore what these teams offer in order to exceed spatial and sexual boundaries. Lastly, I present recent queer interventions in the value system of the game through which I reflect upon the concept of “queer commons” and the processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities.


Author(s):  
Susan Petrilli

AbstractIdentity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: (1) Premiss; (2) Justice, uniqueness, and love; (3) Sign and language; (4) Dialogue and alterity; (5) Semiotic materiality; (6) Globalization and the trap of identity; (7) Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; (8) Ethics; (9) The World; (10) Outside the subject; (11) Responsibility and Substitution; (12) The face; (13) Fear of the other; (14) Alterity and justice; (15) Justice and proximity; (16) Literary writing; (17) Unjust justice; (18) Caring for the other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Li

Abstract This article explores Kierkegaard’s largely overlooked 1838 paper “Telegraph Messages from a Mousvoyant to a Clairvoyant concerning the Relation between Xnty and Philosophy,” and argues that it can be read as a polemic against the speculative unity of philosophy and Christianity and speculative thought’s epistemological optimism, especially targeting the Danish speculative theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. It will be suggested that the “Telegraph Messages” offer a corrective to this view by separating Christianity and philosophy and underlining the ambiguity of human existence and the paradoxicality of the religious sphere, thus foreshadowing key themes in Kierkegaard’s mature pseudonymous authorship.


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