The Virtues of Vulnerability

There are many locations, relationships, and experiences through which we learn what it means to be a citizen. Contemporary healthcare—or “the clinic”—is one of those sites. Being drawn into the complex “medical-legal-policy-insurance nexus” as a patient entails all sorts of learning, including, it is argued here, political learning. When we are subjected as a patient, frequently through a discourse of “choice and control,” or “patient autonomy,” what do we learn? What happens when the promise of a certain kind of autonomy is accompanied by demands for a certain kind of humility? What do we learn about agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge, dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute vulnerability? This book explores these questions on a journey through medicalized encounters with giving birth, navigating death and dying, and seeking treatment for life-altering mental illness (here post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans). While the body has always posed a problem for Western thought, and has been treated as an obstacle to freedom and independence and something our rational capacity must master and control, this book aims to counter that intellectual-historical and political tendency by asking how we might reimagine the political potential of embodiment, or make space for considering “the virtues of vulnerability.” In particular, the book offers a novel conception of democratic citizen-subjectivity, grounded in an ethical disposition of humility-informed-relational-autonomy.

The Concept of Brutishness (Thēriotēs) in Aristo¬tle’s Nicomachean Ethics

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 64 (2016), issue 3. The article deals with “brutishness” or “beastliness” (thēriotēs), a concept introduced by Aristotle in the seventh book of the Nicomachean Ethics and defined by him as a negative ethical disposition, different both from vice (kakia) and from incontinence (akrasia), and leading to such pathological behaviours as cannibalism, paedophilia, omophagy, phobias and compulsions. Aristotle’s statements concerning brutishness (VII 1, 1145a15–35, VII 5, 1148b15–1149a24 and VII 6, 1149b23–1150a8) are examined and interpreted in order to clarify the following issues: the essence of thēriotēs as a specific ethical disposition (Sections I–II), its concrete forms and their causes (Section III), the moral-psychological condition of persons with a brutish hexis (Section IV), and their self-consciousness and moral responsibility for their brutish acts (Section V).

philosophical discussions with children: an opportunity for experiencing open-mindedness

Children develop and experience numerous thinking skills in the course of a philosophical dialogue, which is the didactic medium for the practice of philosophy with children, since its birth. One of them plays a paramount role in the possibility of true dialogue, as it relies on the meeting of minds: open-mindedness. Furthermore, this concept is omnipresent in the literature about philosophy for children (Lipman, 2003: 172-179 ; Tozzi, 2001, 2002) and thus, requires an exploration and a precis analysis, which is the aim of his article. More precisely, there are three objectives: define the nature and characteristics of open-mindedness, analyse its emergence in philosophical discussions and, moreover, studying its role in the practice of philosophy. Our research (lead in University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) has shown that certain indicators present in the children’s discourse manifest the occurrence of open-mindedness: reformulation of one another’s words, complementarity of statements, explication of each other’s ideas, establishment of nuances, disagreement on terms and critical thinking. These cognitive acts reveal an intellectual relation between children, so much so as open-mindedness can be defined as a two-dimensional attitude, both as a cognitive disposition enabling the understanding of someone else’s idea and an ethical disposition enabling the acceptance of alterity. Moreover, it signals an ethical posture: the capacity to take embrace the words of others, without necessarily agreeing, the ability to take into account an alternative view on the world. The research hypothesis, that is the result of seven years research in the French town of Romainville (East of Paris) is, therefore, the following: philosophical discussions constitute an opportunity for children to experience open-mindedness as a crucial thinking skill and ethical posture.

Introduction

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.

Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics

Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics provides a new interpretation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais in the context of his activity as a political negotiator between combatant parties during the French Wars of Religion. At the heart of the Essais lies a political conception of tolerance that is rarely considered today. Tolerance is usually conceived as an individual ethical disposition or a moral principle of public law. For Montaigne, tolerance is instead a political capacity: the power and ability to negotiate relationships of basic trust and civil peace with one’s opponents in political conflict. Contemporary thinkers often argue that what matters most for tolerance is how one talks to one’s political opponents: with respect, reasonableness, and civility. For Montaigne, what matters most is not how, but rather that opponents talk to each other across lines of disagreement. Using his own experience negotiating between Catholic and Huguenot parties as a model, Montaigne investigates and prescribes a set of skills and capacities that might help his readers become the kinds of people who can initiate and sustain dialogue with the “other side” to achieve public goods—even when respect, reasonableness, and civility are not yet assured. Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics argues that this dimension of tolerance is worth recovering and reconsidering in contemporary democratic societies, in which partisan “sorting” and multidimensional polarization have evidently rendered political leaders and ordinary citizens less and less able to talk to each other to resolve political conflicts and to work for shared public goods.