scholarly journals Beyond Atheism and Atheology: The Divine Humanism of Emmanuel Levinas

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Manuel Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Divine Transcendence ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Creation

Is the divine a meaningful and indispensable element of moral responsibility? Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics have brought new expression to the question of God and the Good. Contemporary engagements with Levinas’ provocation, however, have generated a morass of contrary judgments and enigmatic explications, including praise and criticism for its atheology, secular transcendence, and crypto-religious conceit. The essay takes issue with secular and atheistic interpretations of Levinas, arguing that his mature ethics offer a philosophical species of divine humanism, one that justifies the indispensable significance of the divine for moral responsibility. It examines the philosophical problems that lead to the creation of new phenomenological descriptions for divine transcendence, and it sheds light on the seemingly erratic scattering of divine names—infinite, third person, trace, immemorial past, absence, beyond being, illeity—as improvisational orchestrations for God at the margins of moral responsibility.

Performing Arts

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-186
Author(s):  
Ted Nannicelli
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Ethical Dimension ◽  
Bodily Harm ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Art Performance ◽  
Performing Art ◽  
The Relationship

In a discussion of three kinds of performing art—performance art, music, and theatre—this chapter explores three topics: (1) The performer’s moral responsibility to her- or himself. When this topic is broached in the criticism of an artwork, it is often because a performer has done something that raises the question of whether he or she should treat him- or herself in that way—often, but not always, in a way that involves bodily harm. (2) The ethical dimension of the relationship between performers. In cases of collaboration, the creation of such performances necessarily involves an interpersonal dynamic, which, in turn, has an essential ethical dimension. It also considers the additional complication of performances in which audience members contribute to the performance in a sufficiently robust way as to be regarded as co-performers or co-creators. (3) The ethical dimension established by the relationship between the performer(s) and the (non-interactive) audience, rather than performers and other performers.

scholarly journals Folk Intuitions and the Conditional Ability to Do Otherwise

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nadelhoffer ◽  
Siyuan Yin ◽  
Rose Graves
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
First Person ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Folk Intuitions ◽  
Ability To Do Otherwise

In a series of three pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering a stranger), and (d) the difference between people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility in response to first-person scenarios and third-person scenarios. We predicted that once we focused participants’ attention on the two different abilities to do otherwise available to agents in indeterministic and deterministic scenarios, their intuitions would support natural incompatibilism—the view that laypersons judge that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. This prediction was borne out by our findings.

The Question of Food and Philosophy in Levinas

2018 ◽  
pp. 548-566
Author(s):  
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Dual Roles ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Philosophical Phenomenology

This essay explores the role played by food and hunger in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. By examining instances in which Levinas mentions food, eating, or hunger, over the course of his career, this essay argues that Levinas was not a “philosopher of food” but, instead, someone for whom food and the body had specific meanings within the tradition of philosophical phenomenology. By engaging with the work of historian of science Steven Shapin, this essay argues Levinas’s work offers an ideal corpus for a reexamination of philosophy’s traditional denigration of the body and its appetites. Furthermore, eating and hunger took on important dual roles in Levinas’s thought, being related both to the creation and maintenance of the self, and to our openness toward the alterity of other persons.

An Inhuman God for Our Inhuman Times

Symposion ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-232
Author(s):  
Rajesh Sampath ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Divine Transcendence ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Human Flesh

This paper attempts a careful reading of chapter I of Division Two, particularly section 53, on death in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our aim is to deconstruct some of Heidegger’s assumptions while imagining the margins of his text that could warrant a comparison and contrast with the biblical theological material of the New Testament. In parallel by reading the Synoptic Gospel of Mark on Jesus’s agony in the garden prior to his arrest, trial, death, and resurrection, we can initiate a series of comparisons and contrasts. For Heidegger, there is no conception or idea beyond death, and yet death itself as a possibility, even as the greatest possibility to be, is not like any other point in time that a human being can experience, grasp, remember, or anticipate while they are alive. It is not the witnessing of the medically certified death of another person or animal. Out of this paradox, we will argue for a greater philosophical degree of complexity that Jesus the human being experiences when it comes to the possibility of death and the impossibility to surmount it. In the same token we cannot exclude the theological doctrine of the single hypostatic substance (as two natures) of the historically finite person Jesus as human flesh and divine transcendence. So philosophically speaking, his death is unique even though its event as physical expiration on the Cross is like any other human being. However, the physical death of the human called Jesus does not answer the question of the meaning of death in the split-natured unified hypostatic substance of Christ, the Second Person of the Triune Christian God, which includes the First Person of the Father and the Third Person of the Holy Spirit. By tracing a series of complicated philosophical relations, we hope to contribute to the fields of philosophical theology, albeit a heterodox one, and the philosophy of religion while attending to the inherent secular limits that Heidegger’s philosophy requires in so far as he imagines his project as ‘ontological,’ and not ‘theological’ or ‘historical.’ We conclude with certain philosophical speculations to what is other to both Heidegger’s ontology and mainstream Christian theology.

The Obligation to Believe

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 01-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Brinton
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
William James ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Moral Questions

Do we ever have an obligation to choose to hold beliefs, religious or otherwise? The relations between belief, volition and moral responsibility are the subject of William James' widely discussed essay ‘The Will to Believe’. James first takes up the relationship between volition and belief: Does it make sense to speak of choosing to believe a proposition? His answer is that it does, in the sense that we can choose to act in ways which encourage the production of a believing attitude in ourself. For example, we can be selective in attending to evidence, and we can incline ourselves toward belief by acting as though we already believe. By avoiding certain influences and subjecting ourself to others, we can encourage the development of belief. In so doing, we in effect treat ourself as a third person, and our behaviour is analogous to what we might engage in when encouraging others toward favourable evidence. The question of moral responsibility then becomes appropriate in our own case in a way analogous to that in which it does with respect to our belief-producing actions toward others. Just as the deception of others raises moral questions, so does the deception of ourselves.

scholarly journals Reading the intentions of be going to. On the subjectification of future markers

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Budts ◽  
Peter Petré
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Functional Changes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grammatical Subject ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Modern

Abstract This paper provides a detailed corpus-based account of the formal and functional changes that be going to underwent in Late Modern English. Despite be going to’s popularity, such studies remain rare for this period, in which the construction’s grammaticalization went through a second phase. Our analysis shows that the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a shift from intention to prediction, which originated in contexts with third person subjects. Reporting the intention of others generally involves a certain amount of guesswork, which eventually resulted in the creation of an additional, epistemic layer of prediction, reinforced by the gradual extension of be going to to express non-imminent future situations. It is argued that this shift involves an increase in subjectivity, as the emphasis gradually moved away from the grammatical subject to the speaker: what mattered was no longer the intentions of the subject, but the knowledge of the speaker about them. Attention is also drawn to parallel developments in other future markers, particularly will. Interestingly, and in spite of significant differences, each of these went through an intermediary stage that involved past tense uses with reference to a future in the past, which was already known to the speaker.

scholarly journals The Rule of the System of Technology and Its Algorithms and the Problem of Moral Responsibility

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Mariusz Wojewoda ◽  
Paweł Jędrzejko
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Technological System ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
Technological Systems ◽  
Max Horkheimer ◽  
Jacques Ellul ◽  
System Today

The article offers an analysis of the problems of technology in the context of exercising power in an organization. The power of the system today is addressed in terms of the “rule of numbers,” based on the impersonal authority of the algorithms which is an extension of the modern concept of the instrumental reason. In keeping with the rules of efficiency the employees manifest modes of behavior analogous to those characterizing the functioning of technology and specifically emphasized by Max Horkheimer and Jacques Ellul. In the author’s view, the rule of the algorithm-based technological systems leads to the atrophy of the moral responsibility and the loss of agency. Attempting to defend the idea of man’s free agency in the context of the algorithm-based technological system, the author invokes Hans Jonas’s theory of moral responsibility and refers to the concept of “ethical anarchism” as proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas.

Reply to Rosebury

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Silcox
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Moral Luck ◽  
Present Issue ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Moral Responsibilities ◽  
Epistemic Obligations ◽  
Commonsense Morality

AbstractIn his paper 'Moral Responsibility and Moral Luck,' Brian Rosebury argues that believers in moral luck ignore the fact that an agent's moral responsibilities often encompass certain epistemic obligations not usually recognized by commonsense morality. I have suggested in my article 'Virtue Epistemology and Moral Luck' that the plausibility of Rosebury's position depends upon a philosophically dubious account of the relation between first- and third-person perspectives on ethically significant events. Rosebury has defended himself against this charge in the present issue of this Journal; here, I develop my criticism at greater length.

scholarly journals Revisiting Frankfurt on Freedom and Responsibility

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (142) ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Leonardo de Mello Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

According to Harry Frankfurt’s account of moral responsibility, an agentis morally responsible only if her reflected choices and actions are not constrained by an irresistible force —either from the first- or the third-person perspective. I shall argue here that this claim is problematic. Given some of the background assumptions of Frankfurt’s discussion, there seem to be cases according to which one may be deemed responsible, although one’s reflected choices and actions are constrained by an irresistible force. The conclusion is that Frankfurt should have acknowledged that freedom from an irresistible force is not a necessary condition for responsibility.

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