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French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century / G. Gutting.
Abstract
El autor aborda la historia de la filosofía francesa de 1890 a 1990. Examina la raíz del espiritualismo, el idealismo universal y la temprana filosofía de la ciencia; también estudia el rol privilegiado de la filosofía en el sistema educativo francés, las influencias de la literatura y la filosofía alemana que condujo al desarrollo de la fenomenología existencial y los consecuentes desarrollos del estructuralismo y posestructuralismo. Incluye a Bergson, Sartre, Beauvoir, Marleau-Ponty, Foucault y Derrida, entre otros filósofos franceses.
... Although this term began its career as a pejorative label and remains difficult to define, a common profile or family likeness may nonetheless be discerned among adherents (cf. Critchley, 2001;Glendinning, 2006;Gutting, 2005;Sim, 2000). Continental authors share a certain style of thinking, a common set of intellectual challenges and ideas. ...
... Concepts coined by him such as "epistemological rupture", "epistemological obstacle" and "technoscience" are still widely used, and were adopted by later authors. During recent decades, Bachelard's impact was primarily noticeable via the work of others, especially his students -Louis Althusser (discussed below) and Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1989;Gutting, 1989, p. 9;Gutting, 2005;Webb, 2005;Schmidgen, 2014;Simons, 2015;Ross, 2018) -but also via his influence on Thomas Kuhn. The latter's understanding of the history of science in terms of discontinuity and rupture in response to accumulating anomalies (Kuhn, 1962(Kuhn, /2000 seems clearly indebted to Bachelard, although Kuhn hardly mentions him (Fragio, 2020;Gutting, 2001;Simons, 2017;Stachel, 2016). ...
... During recent decades, Bachelard's impact was primarily noticeable via the work of others, especially his students -Louis Althusser (discussed below) and Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1989;Gutting, 1989, p. 9;Gutting, 2005;Webb, 2005;Schmidgen, 2014;Simons, 2015;Ross, 2018) -but also via his influence on Thomas Kuhn. The latter's understanding of the history of science in terms of discontinuity and rupture in response to accumulating anomalies (Kuhn, 1962(Kuhn, /2000 seems clearly indebted to Bachelard, although Kuhn hardly mentions him (Fragio, 2020;Gutting, 2001;Simons, 2017;Stachel, 2016). And although strictly speaking Bachelard did not coin the term "technoscience" as we have seen (Hottois 2018), he emphatically emphasises the decisive role of technicity in contemporary research (Bachelard, 1934(Bachelard, /1973Bachelard, 1953;Zwart, 2019Zwart, , 2020d. ...
In contemporary philosophy of science, continental approaches such as dialectics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis tend to be underrepresented compared to analytical and sociological ones, but the reverse is also true. Whereas continental philosophical discourse tends to focus on author studies, the urgency of coming to terms with contemporary technoscience often remains unrecognised. This volume builds on the conviction that a mutual exposure and confrontation between continental philosophy and contemporary technoscience is urgent and beneficial for both.
... รายละเอี ยดเกี ่ ยวกั บปรั ชญาการเมื องยุ คหลั งสมั ยใหม่ ตามแนวคิ ดของแดร์ ริ ดา ดู ใน เกษม เพ็ ญภิ นั นท์ , 2554; Gutting, 2001;Beardsworth, 1996;และ Tallack, 1995. 7 นั นท์ , 2554;Williams, 1998;Sim, 1996;Readings, 1991;และ Lyotard, 1984. ...
This research, Postmodern Political Philosophy, consists of two purposes of the study. They are: 1) to study the concepts and theories of postmodern political philosophy and 2) to study the postmodern political situations. Methodology used in the study is qualitative research: documentary research. The findings are as follows: The significant concepts and theories of postmodern political philosophy are: Foucault’s bio-power and governmentality; Derrida’s the politics of deconstruction;
Lyotard’s aesthetics politics and dispute; Deleuze’s becoming and the part of those who have no part; and Ranciere’s the part of those who have no part, aesthetics of politics, and democracy of who have no part. There are 5 kinds of postmodern political situations, result from practically using concepts and theories of postmodern political philosophy. They are: 1) blurred nation-state concept, 2) imperial sovereignty, 3) new social movement, 4) radical democracy, and 5) global politics.
Key Words: Political Philosophy/ Postmodern/ Postmodern political philosophy
... The Western academy, or more specifically, French academia, observing such turbulence, thus went about arguing for a breaking down of the ossified modes of thought that (for them) had led to such global disenchantment. In this regard, Gutting (2001) points out that by the early 1960s in France, structuralism was the dominant philosophical approach, and he emphasises in particular the contribution of Claude Levi-Strauss. Specifically, he recalls the long theoretical shadow initially cast by his famous work Tristes tropiques (1955), which was followed up by his Structural anthropology (1958), both of which left an indelible mark on French thought in the 1960s (Gutting, 2001:221-224). ...
The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personally distinguishable information wascollected without explicit permission from millions of Facebook users, once more brought intofocus the potential dangers of our now-pervasive social media use. What the scandal primarilyindicates is the unsettling idea that one’s personal information and what it reveals is open toan infrastructure capable of manipulating such information to its own ends. Despite suchdevelopments, in my experience of lecturing digital communication to students at a South Africanuniversity, there is a lack of awareness of how the technical infrastructures that makes up digitalcommunication can play a role in potentially negating our agency when using digital forms ofcommunication. And this lack of awareness is echoed in the lax global response to the CambridgeAnalytica scandal. In response, this article argues that digital space may well be antithetical tothe notion of agency through digital communication. To do so, it turns to a very specific source;the post-structural theorist, Gilles Deleuze, and his conception of digital societies of control, aswell as contemporary theoretical works that reflect his concerns over our agency within the virtualspaces we now increasingly inhabit.
... Most important here are its refusal of any concepts of objectivity, reality or truths and the rejection of the idea of social progress. For an overview see Gutting 2001Gutting , 2005Flynn 2008. 243 Phillips 2012. ...
The PhD thesis examines the theoretical foundations of the All Affected Principle (AAP) and their relevance for the legitimacy of democratic decisions. Based on an analysis of the two predominant interpretations of the AAP, the thesis develops two categories of democratic participation: Voice and Vote. The first part explores theories of democratic legitimacy and the Boundary Problem of democracy and derives principles of democratic legitimacy. The second part investigates the theoretical framework of Voice and Vote and the conceptual links to democratic legitimacy. The third part draws comparisons to historical roots and develops a corresponding understanding of political representation. The thesis concludes with a discussion of implications for intergenerational justice and institutional design.
... Said's work also introduced me to the world of postmodern literature and specifically the work of Foucault (1982), which inspired steady questioning of other taken-for- Foucault (1982) was interested in the relationship between power, ways of knowing and institutional practices (Gutting, 2001) He was interested in the way power relations transform human beings into subjects and in how we all become complicit in the face of that power (Foucault, 1982;Jardine, 2005). Foucault's work placed the lessons I learned from Said within a wider social context and helped me understand how we unintentionally shape and are shaped by the social systems and norms we create. ...
Relational processes in the context of interprofessional collaboration are understood mainly in terms of individual action. This study argues that focusing on individual action limits our understanding of some of the most successful relationship-based collaborative practices. To shift the focus from individual action to co-action, this study investigated co-action oriented practices in multi-agency teams working with children and young people identified as living with High and Complex Needs (HCN). The methodology used in this study combined a relational research orientation with the principles of narrative theory, in order to engage HCN practitioners in dynamic conversations. Through dialogue, the HCN practitioners investigated their valued collaborative practices. These practices were then further explored in terms of how collaboration could shift from individual to co-action. The outcomes of the study highlighted a number of successful relationship-based collaborative practices that are often overlooked. These range from simply having small talk, being personal and flexible, to addressing more complex situations that might otherwise be avoided. Appreciative exploration was identified as a way to step outside of one's own beliefs and become curious about how contradictory views might be valid within a community of understanding. Finding a respectful way to approach what we want to avoid holds arguably most potential for positive change. The study concluded that three aspects were critical to the engagement of practitioners in collaborative co-active practice: (1) paying attention to the process of relating; (2) acknowledging values, interests and concerns of practitioners in their daily practice, and (3) respecting current practices. Engaging with co-active practices in this way energised practitioners and fostered an innovation-seeking attitude and collective learning. As the practitioners in this study demonstrated, relational orientation opens up possibilities to shape co-action, and offers a unique tool for transforming collaborative practices. Put simply, the relational shift shows what we achieve together, we cannot do alone. ii
... It should be noted that Foucault's (1966Foucault's ( /1994 Order of Things (French title is Les Mots et les Choses) is typically viewed as the key work supposedly marking the grande coupure (great break or fissure) in French intellectual life between the reign of existentialism and phenomenology and that of structuralism and poststructuralism (Descombes, 1980;Gutting, 2001;Worms, 2009; for more references see Sass, 2014). Such an interpretation is not difficult to understand; indeed, as Sugarman (2022) correctly notes, Foucault himself often defined his work in contradistinction to phenomenology-albeit to a phenomenology he defines in a certain way: ...
This reply addresses three issues relevant to an article by Louis Sass (2022), “‘A Flaw in the Great Diamond of the World’: Reflections on Subjectivity and the Enterprise of Psychology (a Diptych).” First is the need to incorporate a psychoanalytic perspective and the question of how this would square with a strong advocacy of phenomenology. I note that psychoanalysis is not primarily focused on elucidating subjectivity as such, and clarify the contrast between a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious as an andere Schauplatz (other scene) versus a phenomenological focus on the ontological dimension of lived experience itself (the first more akin to Allegory, the second to Symbol). Second is the relevance of “social theory,” especially of Michel Foucault’s “historical ontology.” Here I discuss the hermeneutic-phenomenological sources of Foucault’s work, especially The Order of Things; this is congruent with Heidegger’s emphasis on “being,” understood as the grounding, ontological dimension of the human experience of reality. Third is a question concerning the kind of modern, self-conscious subjectivity that is epitomized and initiated by such late-Renaissance figures as Shakespeare and Rembrandt: Are these forms of experience truly novel, or do they express human universals with a far longer history? I argue that it would be misleading to speak here either of creation or of discovery: The advent of these new forms of self-awareness builds on an uncovering and promotion of an inherent reflexivity intrinsic to human consciousness, but also transforms subjectivity or selfhood into something qualitatively new.
... This research recognizes power as a complex and vibrant set of relationships between people and institutions that shift and change according to context and time. Power is both a force for action and resistance and affects how we perceive the world; it is pervasive [33][34][35]. It is necessary to unpack power to discern how vulnerability unfolds in natural hazard and disaster settings [36]. ...
Apartment dwelling is on the increase in many cities in Aotearoa New Zealand, including those in earthquake-prone regions. Hence it is important that people working in disaster management and housing improve their understanding on how the living situations of apartment dwellers influence their disaster management practices. This knowledge is crucial for efforts to promote safety and preparedness. This paper explores what enables and constrains apartment dwellers in their ability to prepare for an earthquake. Eighteen people were interviewed who resided in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) two years after the 2016 7.8 magnitude (Mw) Kaikōura earthquake. Of central concern was people’s ability to prepare for disasters and access knowledge about building and structural safety and how this knowledge mattered to what apartment dwellers were able to prepare for. We found that the agency to prepare was dependent on whether people owned or rented their dwellings. We report on participant accounts of dealing with body corporations, landlords, emergency kits, other emergency items, and evacuation plans.
... French epistemology is a tradition that is often overlooked in overviews of 20�� century philosophy (but see Gutting 2001). However, this tradition was crucial in the education of many French philosophers and its influence can be found in authors as diverse as Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Michel Serres. ...
É nas páginas de Matéria e Memória, lançado em 1896, que o filósofo francês Henri Bergson faz sua abordagem mais completa sobre o inconsciente, um dos temas centrais das discussões psicológicas e filosóficas do final do século XIX. Naquele contexto, tal noção ainda era combatida por muitos: essa oposição baseava-se, em grande parte, na concepção herdada da tradição filosófica moderna pelo qual o psicológico era identificado com a consciência. Um exemplo disso pode ser encontrado nas próprias aulas do Curso de Psicologia que Bergson ministrou quando do seu exercício docente na cidade de Clermond-Ferrant, reunidas no livro póstumo Aulas de Psicologia e de Metafísica. Neste livro, efetuamos o cotejo dos dois textos visando, primeiramente, identificar os argumentos utilizados pelo professor Bergson para se opor à noção de inconsciente; em seguida, procuramos expor as principais teses desenvolvidas em Matéria e Memória com o intuito de mostrar como essas implicam na superação daqueles argumentos; e, por fim, intentamos tornar manifesta a teoria do inconsciente presente em Matéria e Memória.
Este livro busca compreender o movimento do pensamento do filósofo francês Henri Bergson em torno da noção de inconsciente por meio de uma leitura de suas primeiras obras filosóficas e dos registros de seu ensino entre os anos de 1885 a 1896. Procuramos contextualizar tal leitura interna ao corpus bergsoniano ao remetê-la ao quadro mais amplo das diferentes tradições discursivas sobre o inconsciente estabelecidas no século XIX e ao contexto particular do espiritualismo francês. Tomamos como ponto de partida os primeiros registros do ensino de filosofia ministrado por Bergson nos quais manifesta-se uma recusa à aceitação da própria noção de fatos psicológicos inconscientes. Procuramos então mostrar que tal posição coadunava-se com a expressa nos principais manuais escolares da época. Buscamos destacar também o interesse de Bergson pelo hipnotismo e a influência que a psiquiatria dinâmica exerceu sobre seu ensino e sua filosofia. Em nossa leitura do Ensaio sobre os dados imediatos da consciência, defendemos que a obra propõe uma espécie de solução de compromisso sobre a questão da unidade do Eu, tema diretamente relacionado aos debates sobre o inconsciente da época: ao mesmo tempo em que preserva de direito essa unidade, reconhece-se de fato a sua pluralidade. Também procuramos mostrar que as teses defendidas nessa obra possibilitaram a Bergson reformular o problema do inconsciente no âmbito do seu ensino. Já em nossa leitura de Matéria e Memória, destacamos a defesa que Bergson faz da ocorrência de percepções inconscientes, comparando suas formulações com a teoria das petites perceptions de Leibniz, bem como da existência de fatos psicológicos inconscientes. Por fim, nos dedicamos a mapear os diferentes inconscientes delineados nessa obra e a indicar suas respectivas naturezas, procurando mostrar como as teses desenvolvidas por Bergson restauram a unidade do Eu.
Mississippi-born woman of letters Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey (1829–1879) deserves a place among nineteenth century American philosophers. Dorsey was a corresponding member of the New Orleans Academy of Sciences. Her lectures there in 1874–1875 on “The Philosophy of the University of France,” “The Aryan Philosophy,” and “The Present Condition of the Question of the Origin of Species” were among the first, if not the first, given by a woman before a learned society in a major city. A second presentation of the evolution lecture was called for and the text was published in The New Orleans Monthly Review. The first two lectures were published as pamphlets by the Academy, listed as Works Received by the St. Louis Journal of Speculative Philosophy and briefly reviewed by the Boston Literary World. The pamphlet on the University of France went through seven editions. The pamphlet on “the Aryan Philosophy” is held in 14 libraries. The pamphlet on the University of France is held in 50. This paper provides a contextualized introduction to her career.
Sarah Anne Dorsey’s premature death at the age of 50 while engaged in helping Jefferson Davis, the destitute former president of the Confederacy, complete his memoir of the Civil War, prevented her pursuing the career in philosophy that she had begun 5 years earlier with an invited lecture before the New Orleans Academy of Sciences on the Philosophy of the University of France. The open scandal that broke out in newspapers across the country upon the discovery that her will left all her estate to Davis replaced her image as a distinguished intellectual with that of an eccentric old (!) lady prone to hero worship.
But her eclipse was not permanent. Significantly, the beginning of the recovery of her intellectual reputation was due to her association with the New Orleans Academy of Sciences. Reporting on the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Academy, the Times Picayune recalled that “no address was ever enjoyed more” by the members than her lecture on the University of France (2/23/1913).
This article traces Aimé Césaire’s engagement with Marxism through the concept of alienation, which is central to the Marxist-Hegelian tradition. The idea of restoring human creative powers, which take on an alien character under particular historical conditions, deeply shaped Césaire’s analysis of French colonial assimilation, which compelled the Black colonized subjects to identify with French bourgeois culture instead of taking revolutionary action against capitalism. Situating Césaire within the intellectual milieu of interwar Paris, this piece draws out his links with the Marxist intellectual group called the Philosophies, which first published Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in France in 1929, and with Alexandre Kojѐve’s Marxian reading of Hegel. The concern with alienation would persist in Césaire’s later writings in the 1950s and the 1960s, where the concept is engaged through a theory of culture, defined as the creative life of a collectivity. This theory supplies the conceptual basis for Césaire’s idea of “tropical Marxism,” which he discusses during his trip to Cuba in 1968. Tropical Marxism emphasized the necessity for colonized peoples to integrate Marxism creatively to the particular conditions of their societies and opposed any alien top-down impositions of the doctrine by European communists. By situating Césaire in a Marxist-Hegelian intellectual genealogy, we glean a crucial component of his thinking, going beyond his affiliation with surrealism and his experience with the French Communist Party. We also come to see alienation as a rich concept belonging to the tradition of anticolonial political theorizing.
Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944) was an influential philosopher at the Sorbonne. Almost everyone who was anyone in postwar philosophy in France passed through his courses. Inspired by Spinoza, Pascal, and a brand of French idealism that was vaguely Kantian, he championed reason – and especially math and science – as the pinnacle of human existence. His ethics, which is closely tied into his view of religion, or spirituality, emphasizes reason. As such, a person should strive, with the help of reason, to put in harmony her own goals and ends with those of other persons, and with humanity in general. This leads, in his thought, to an emphasis on disinterestedness, a value deriving from reason, which serves to check a person's egoistic tendencies. Although inspired by Kant's moral theory, Brunschvicg's view emphasizes the results of our actions and not simply the intention or principle behind them.
This chapter applies the content/world barrier to more substantive debates in analytic philosophy, including to normative, modal, epistemic, and ontological debates. It is argued that assertions about norms and necessities are unsupportable in analytic philosophy (also due to the is/ought barrier and the contingent/necessary barrier) and must prudently be avoided. It is further argued that assertions about knowledge and abstract entities are equally unsupportable and must be avoided if knowledge or abstract entities are aspects of the world beyond content. In conclusion, any engagement in analytic philosophical debates about aspects of the world beyond content, that is, metaphysical debates in analytic philosophy, must prudently be avoided.
I argue that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) decided to constitute sociology, a novel field, as ‘scientific’ early in his career. He adopted evolutionized biology as then practiced as his principal model of science, but at first wavered between alternative repertoires of concepts, models, metaphors and analogies, in particular Spencerian Lamarckism and French neo-Lamarckism. I show how Durkheim came to fashion a particular deployment of the French neo-Lamarckian repertoire. The paper describes and analyzes this repertoire and explicates how it might have been available to a non-biologist. I analyze Durkheim’s very early writings between 1882 and 1892 in this context to substantiate my argument.
With the rise of far-reaching technological innovation, from artificial intelligence to Big Data, human life is increasingly unfolding in digital lifeworlds. While such developments have made unprecedented changes to the ways we live, our political practices have failed to evolve at pace with these profound changes. In this path-breaking work, Mathias Risse establishes a foundation for the philosophy of technology, allowing us to investigate how the digital century might alter our most basic political practices and ideas. Risse engages major concepts in political philosophy and extends them to account for problems that arise in digital lifeworlds including AI and democracy, synthetic media and surveillance capitalism and how AI might alter our thinking about the meaning of life. Proactive and profound, Political Theory of the Digital Age offers a systemic way of evaluating the effect of AI, allowing us to anticipate and understand how technological developments impact our political lives – before it's too late.
This article explores the thesis that novelty is central to a wide and diverse range of French philosophers in the twentieth century. Often these philosophers are seen on different sides of philosophic divides, but novelty brings them together. I will explore some of the fruitful areas for dialogue between French and process philosophy, particularly around the theme of novelty.
Contemporary debates on freedom traverse questions concerning metaphysics, the mind/body relationship, evolution, morality, and religion. Throughout his life, the French philosopher Henri Bergson dealt with these questions from the perspective of time, believing that spatializing these problems led to inadequate solutions. That freedom was a centralizing concern in his oeuvre can be demonstrated in the way he approached these questions in challenging determinism, materialism, mechanism, and finalism. Bergson studies, despite noting the importance of freedom for Bergson, have focussed on intuition and duration as his seminal contributions. Bergson himself never thematized freedom in any specific way, but by working with a positive conception of freedom, as a creation of the new within the flow of duration, freedom can be seen as a centralizing motif in his work. By clarifying the nature of freedom and its centrality, the ground can be cleared for a Bergsonian intervention into contemporary debates on freedom.
In diesem Artikel ist die Frage „Hat Religion Zukunft?“ der Ausgangspunkt für eine zukünftige Theorie der Religion(en), oder von Religiosität als solcher, die sich als „transreligiös“ versteht. Insofern als diese Frage und eine solche Theorie unvermeidlich im Kontext gegenwärtiger Säkularität stehen, in welchem Religion, Religionen und Religiosität entweder zu Sinnlosigkeit verbannt sind oder sich zu Bewältigungsmechanismen sozialer und psychischer Natur reduzieren lassen, oder gar als primäre Feinde von (ethischer) Menschwerdung karikierbar werden, ist die These hier zunächst, dass die Zukunft von Religion nur dann fraglich ist, falls Religion als eine kontingente Erscheinung einer notwendigen Naturalisierung unterlegen und durch sie bedingt wäre. Da aber eine solche Naturalisierung nicht notwendig, sondern selbst kontingent ist, hat Religion Zukunft.
This book proposes a radical new reading of the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. Henry Somers-Hall argues that the central unifying aspect of works by philosophers including Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida is their attempt to provide an account of cognition that does not reduce thinking to judgement. Somers-Hall shows that each of these philosophers is in dialogue with the others in a shared project (however differently executed) to overcome their inheritances from the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. His analysis points up the continuing relevance of German idealism, and Kant in particular, to modern French philosophy, with novel readings of many aspects of the philosophies under consideration that show their deep debts to Kantian thought. The result is an important account of the emergence, and essential coherence, of the modern French philosophical tradition.
This article focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. Though the discourse of the ‘death of man’ was regnant among French avant-garde intellectuals, this article argues that Derrida himself has to be described as a humanist at this stage in his career, even if a reluctant one. The case is made through close textual analysis of three of Derrida’s early and seminal works: ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (1963), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1964) and ‘The Ends of Man’ (1968). In these texts, Derrida grapples with issues of the subject and the other. They collectively reveal that the Derrida of the 1960s held fast to the view that philosophical thought could neither dispense with the subject nor escape the horizon of humanism. However, Derrida reconceived the human subject with reference to his core concepts of différance and arche-writing, making for an aporetic humanism that deconstructs the binary of humanism–antihumanism.
This book focuses on the image of the Czech judiciary viewed through the texts of its decisions. The texts of judicial decisions are understood as the self-portraits, which are being created by the judiciary itself. On the one hand, these self-portraits statically reflect the nature of the legal system and the role of the judiciary within this system; on the other hand, they represent a means of a dynamic change. This dynamic change is not only the change that fol- lows from the judicial interpretation and application of law, but also such that is capable of changing the role of the judiciary and its decisions themselves. The text of this book shows the ways in which the texts of judicial decisions reflect the relationship between the judiciary and the state authority. It also shows, how strong an influence does the judiciary have on the normative value of its case-law, i.e. the prominent element in its role of dynamically creating its own role within the legal system.
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In the context of reader-response criticism of a text, the main focus of this book is put on the addressees/readers of the judicial decisions. In particular, it focuses on the form, language, publication and presence of references to (legal) sources and their role in the formation of the audience of the judicial decisions. Based on the stylistic and semiotic analyses of texts, four main areas of focus have been chosen as a basis for the analyses of issues of the legitimacy of the judiciary and the issue of the addressees of judicial decisions.
These four areas of this book are: form and structure of the texts of judicial decisions, language of judicial decisions, publication of judicial decisions, and references to (legal) sources. In the context of these areas, individual elements have been identified and analysed. In relation to each of these ele- ments, this book debates the meaning they convey to their addressees and to what conclusions regarding the legitimacy of judiciary they lead.
Based on the analyses and discussions of the notion of comprehensibility of the language and publication of judicial decisions, it has been concluded that the primary addressee of the decision is neither a lay party to the trial nor the lay public. The communication sphere of judiciary and lay public is not – at least based on the texts of Czech judicial decisions – the primary legitimation sphere of the judiciary. Texts of judicial decisions are addressed primarily to the readers from the ranks of lawyers. Among these, a special group of addressees must be identified – the courts themselves, may it be in the context of the normative value of case-law or in the context of rela- tions between individual courts in the hierarchy.
The quality of the judicial decisions (as a sum of their legality, language, form, publication and persuasiveness of argumentation) – as a factor influ- encing the output legitimacy of the judiciary – plays a dominant role espe- cially when it comes to the lawyer audience. For the lay public, input factors seem to be more important, because to them, even an incomprehensible and unpublished judicial decision, not citing any case-law, may be legitimate. The explanation if this claim may be found in the fact that any authority needs from its subjects a faith in its legitimacy and participation in its processes. Generally speaking, texts of judicial decisions exclude some of their address- ees (to whom is the text addressed and to whom the rights and duties are
Abstrakt a klíčová slova
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SOUDNÍ ROZHODNUTÍ JAKO AUTOPORTRÉT ČESKÉHO SOUDNICTVÍ
imposed) from their readers (those who are able to understand the text and its regulative consequences).
In the light of the findings contained in this text and in the context of this book, it should be concluded that this situation is not acceptable. An open democratic society can hardly allow the existence of such a judiciary that is not open to the social control through comprehensible and effectively accessible texts of its decisions. Without these characteristics, there is no point in further debating the symbolic nature of information contained therein or the persuasiveness of deployed argumentation methods for the lay public.
Nancy has been criticised for rejecting the politics of emancipation that characterises the thought of some of his more militant contemporaries. To be sure, he does distance himself from the rhetoric of emancipation. He considers that the grand modern emancipation narrative of the Enlightenment, and of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, expired with the end of the Cold War, and that the ideal of emancipation carried by this narrative is dangerous insofar as it imposes “ultimate sense” on history and assumes an “essence of humanity” that is to be liberated. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Nancy’s rejection of the modern, linear account of emancipatory politics is a refusal of emancipation per se. Indeed, his reason for rejecting modernity’s simple narrative of emancipatory progress is that this framing of history is by a long chalk not emancipatory enough, and that it has far too much in common with the identitarian politics against which it seeks to set itself. So it should come as no surprise that Nancy uses emancipatory language in his very rejection of the politics of emancipation, arguing for example that we need “emancipation from a certain thinking of emancipation.” This article makes the case for Nancy as a rich and radical thinker of emancipation whose thought, far from being apolitical when it comes to liberation, offers us a broad, robust and practical account of the emancipatory. This case is made by weaving together two important strands of Nancy’s thought. First, his deconstruction of Christianity is examined in the light of the claim that Christianity is “in itself and by itself in a state of surpassing” and that Christianity’s self-surpassing is “perhaps its deepest tradition.” This leads, secondly, to a consideration of Nancy’s frequent meditations on Pascal’s statement that “man infinitely exceeds/surpasses man.” When they are taken together, what emerges from these two strands of Nancy’s thought is a pattern of emancipation that goes beyond simple historical ruptures to operate across multiple temporalities at once, each populated by plural vectors of continuity and change. Nancy seeks emancipation from a double slavery: the slavery of absolutising a continuity with the past, and that born of the ideological fantasy of a simple rupture with the past. Instead, he offers us an account of emancipation that is capable of navigating a subtler course through multiple dynamics of continuity and change. The article concludes by briefly examining Nancy’s use of the term ressourcement to characterise this radical account of emancipation, evoking the importance of the gesture described by this term for the biblical prophets, for the magisterial reformers and for Vatican II. Far from being weak in its emancipatory potential, Nancy’s thought takes the modern emancipatory imperative and returns it to us with greater depth, breadth and potency.
In contrast to China’s efforts to upgrade its system of governance around a stupefying amount of data collection and electronic scoring, countries committed to democracy and human rights did not upgrade their systems. Instead, those countries ended up with surveillance capitalism . It is vital for the survival of those ideas about governance to perform such an upgrade. This paper aims to contribute to that goal. I propose a framework of epistemic actorhood in terms of four roles and characterize digital lifeworlds and what matters about them both in terms of how they fit in with Max Tegmark’s distinctions among stages of life and in terms of how they generate their own episteme, the data episteme, with its immense possibilities of infopower (a term inspired by Foucault). Epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights – as part of a fourth generation of rights – are needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those roles. In the long run, we might well need a new kind of right, the right to the exercise of genuinely human intelligence.
Deepfakes are a new form of synthetic media that broke upon the world in 2017. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently most of their reach is limited to pornography, and they are also used to discredit people. However, deepfake technology has many epistemic promises and perils, which concern how we fare as knowers. Our goal is to help set an agenda around these matters, to make sure this technology can help realize epistemic rights and epistemic justice and unleash human creativity, rather than inflict epistemic wrongs of any sort. Our project is exploratory in nature, and we do not aim to offer conclusive answers at this early stage. There is a need to remain vigilant to make sure the downsides do not outweigh the upsides, and that will be a tall order.
The article analyzes the conflict between the “analytic” and “continental” approaches in philosophy on the example of the development of historical epistemology, which can be considered as “French style” in the philosophy of science. The French tradition is especially interesting due to the specificity of the reception of analytic philosophy that took place in it, where analytic philosophy did not receive an institutional form. The phrase “analytic philosophy” was problematized in the French academy in the 1950s and indicates the existence of a number of differences between the two types of philosophizing, as well as the absence of any stable connection between the French and Anglo-Saxon philosophical communities. One of the main reasons of this divide is that the philosophers interested in logical positivism and seeking to acquaint the French philosophical public with its ideas have suddenly passed away. The author’s argumentation is based on the material of historical epistemology in France, which was traditionally associated with the philosophy of science much more than epistemology in other countries. The article considers two approaches to defining the difference between analytic and continental philosophy: theoretical approach (distinctions between these traditions that are based on the subject of research, methodological techniques, key ideas, style) and institutional (based on geographical division – a particular philosopher belongs to a country or an academy – or based on the choice of his predecessors by the philosopher himself). The author demonstrates the inconsistency of the theoretical approach to the definition of analytic and continental philosophical traditions.
Sarah Hammerschlag’s essay “Nearly Neighbors: Reflections on Philosophy of Religion and its close encounters with Modern Jewish Thought” considers the role of Modern Jewish Thought in the history of the Philosophy of Religions and by way of three examples shows how the encounters between Judaism and philosophy in the modern era have served as sites of negotiation. In the process, Hammerschlag proposes that philosophy of religion should be considered less as a discipline focused on the validity of concepts and more as one that investigates their historical emergence and evaluates their subsequent usage and dissemination.
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