In the last decades of his life, Ricoeur was dismayed by the undiminishing amount of violence that humans inflicted on one another. He felt impelled to address this unjustified suffering. He moved from theoretical philosophical discussions to develop an ethical project directed toward a just society. I trace Ricoeur’s development, starting from Fallible Man and Freedom and Nature, by way of The Symbolism of Evil, Oneself as Another, and The Course of Recognition, as he delineates his project. In this journey, Ricoeur emerges from the strict Protestant training of his youth to a more pluralist and inclusive ideal. During his elaboration of the ethical, as well as political and social conditions where human beings can flourish, Ricoeur does not appeal directly to religious terminology. Nonetheless, his work remains imbued with a deep love of humankind and wisdom, the roots of which remain entangled in his Christian background.

Taylor’s landmark work, A Secular Age, tells a complex story about the fate of religion in the West over the past 500 years. Taking issue with an overly-simplistic secularization theory, Taylor portrays a cultural landscape that, rather than speeding the withering of religion, has instead proliferated a dizzying array of spiritual options. This pluralistic reality places “cross-pressure” on those who inhabit these spiritual positions, fragilizing them through exposure to other lived possibilities. The widely adopted modern value of authenticity increases this pressure, encouraging people to carve out their own unique spiritual path and to eschew traditional, ‘spoon-fed’ answers to life’s existential questions. Yet what remains throughout these modern challenges to religion, says Taylor, is the quintessentially human quest for meaning, and the struggle against a modern nihilism that threatens to deny it. In this contested space, he suggests, humanity’s religious past is being called into an as yet unimagined future.

The following paper traces the relevance of teaching and pedagogy in Levinas’s philosophy of transcendence and ethics. By turning to his philosophy of language—including his posthumously published lectures on the phenomenology of sound and the voice—this paper addresses some dif􀏔iculties with the attempt to develop a philosophy of education departing from his work. Education appears to be the uniquely well-suited site for an ethical philosophy, and yet any claims about education and attempts to teach ethics risk hypocrisy as a structural possibility of transcendence and teaching.

In this essay, I argue that Nietzsche’s account of friendship must be understood as part of his therapeutic philosophy that promotes shared self-overcoming. Previous accounts of Nietzschean friendship give a strong foundation, but concentrate on his middle works and overlook the role of agon in higher friendship. In order to grasp the ethical connections that Nietzsche makes between friendship, agon, and self-overcoming, I argue that we must turn to Nietzsche’s writing on friendship in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, as well as in the middle works. Nietzsche brings enmity into friendship not to deny the possibility of friendship, but instead to transform friendship into an exercise of therapeutics that promotes free-spiritedness and, in doing so, challenges the life-denying practices of nihilism.

The activity of thinking has been traditionally set against the risk of error and its concomitants: inconsistency, incoherence, the false. Philosophy pursues and protects the truth; such is its mission statement. But this is, for Deleuze, an inadequate conception that gives us the image of a thought so weak, so thin and impoverished, that everything happens as if from the outside. What, asks Deleuze, of stupidity? How are we to account for it transcendentally? In his attempt at an answer, Deleuze draws directly from Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, though without clearly articulating either the form of Schelling’s concepts or presenting how exactly they are supposed to account transcendentally for stupidity. Further still, Deleuze seems implicitly to recapitulate—to the serious detriment of his conceptual schematic, as Derrida famously claimed in The Beast & the Sovereign—Schelling’s belief in a freedom that is solely human, and therefore the refusal of a capacity for stupidity to the animal as well. The present article intervenes here, reconstructing the Schellingian concepts necessary to an understanding of Deleuze’s theory, and sketching in conclusion the possibility of a revised account that need not stratify itself so straightforwardly along the human/animal divide.

Much has been written about Sartre’s contribution to the field of psychology. His phenomenology as whole and his proposal for an existential psychoanalysis in particular, have contributed to the field of humanist psychology in general and existential psychology specifically. Less has been written, however, about Sartre’s contribution to the field of moral psychology apart from the occasional analysis of his notion of “bad faith” or the use, by moral philosophers, of some of his colourful examples to illustrate a point. In this article, I want to examine an issue in contemporary moral psychology in light of Sartre’s philosophy, particularly as he develops it in his early major work, Being and Nothingness. The issue that I wish to address is that of practical reason. In contrast to both the neo-Humean and neo-Kantian positions, I want to explore a Sartrean alternative, which situates moral motivation neither in ordinary empirical desires, nor strictly in practical reason. Moral motivation, on a Sartrean account, is rather to be understood in ontological terms as an expression of the desire to be.

Hegel argues that we must recognize the essential role that contingency plays in moral action. Because the role that Hegel finds for contingency is both outside of one’s control and idiosyncratic, his view represents a significant challenge to the ideas that in morality we only account for what we can control and that our motivations should not be idiosyncratic needs. To bring out this significance, I look at three ways in which Hegel characterizes the relationship between the necessity of the moral law and the contingency of moral action, by drawing on three figures Hegel has emphasized in the history of moral action.

Most accounts of the historical a priori can be traced back to Husserlian phenomenology. Foucault’s appeals to the historical a priori are more problematic because of his hostility to this tradition. In this paper, I argue that Foucault’s diplôme thesis on Hegel, his studies of Kant’s Anthropology, his response to critics of The Order of Things, and his later work on Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” all suggest that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy helped to shape his conception of the historical a priori.

According to Habermas, Hegel’s early reflections in Jena on labour and language do not bear upon logical categories. In Habermas’s view, the formative model that Hegel proposes in his early texts on labour and language is lost in his mature philosophy. In this paper, I shall propose an intra-systematic reading of Hegel’s philosophy that challenges Habermas’s dualistic reading. I shall point out the dialectical relation between labour, memory, and the logical concept (Begriff). In doing so, I will emphasize the fact that memory and labour are based on the refutation of the use of mechanical causality in the genesis of the subject, the argument for which is illustrated in the Science of Logic. Finally, I will argue that the genesis of the logical concept coincides with a formative process that is grounded in the Science of Logic and yet underlies the genesis of subjectivity as spontaneous capacity of self-determination.

This article explores an intriguing, yet underdeveloped line of inquiry in Derrida’s late Death Penalty Seminars concerning the inherent visibility or spectacle of the death penalty. Showing how this inquiry surfaces in Derrida’s engagement with Foucault, the article argues that Derrida’s Seminars offer crucial resources for critically analyzing, and thus rethinking, sovereignty and the principle of capital punishment. In particular, it demonstrates how visibility forms a key component of the structural scaffolding around the death penalty put under pressure by deconstruction. It then develops this claim by drawing salient connections between the Seminars and Derrida’s work on other visual forms.

At the time of his death in 1984, Foucault’s late career forays into Stoicism and other sets of ancient texts were often little understood, except as part of a larger project on the history of sexuality. Indeed, outside of France and outside of an incipient queer theory, Foucault was often taken up in terms of debates over post-structuralism and postmodernism—themes all but absent from his writings. More than thirty years later, after the publication of all of his lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1970-1984 as well as his collected writings, we have gained a better understanding of the deep continuities in his set of concerns from Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961) to the third volume of his history of sexuality series, Le Souci de soi (1984). Yet many Foucault scholars continue to see momentous shifts in his writings, e.g., from knowledge (1960s) to power (1970s) to ethics (1980s), and the almost bewildering range of texts he covered in the years after finishing the first volume of his history of sexuality series, La Volonté de savoir (1976), lead to very different interpretations concerning what Foucault was attempting to do and how much his rendering of ancient texts differed from his own claims. Stuart Elden’s Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity, 2016) steps into this breach, using archival work to fill in many of the details of this period, from when and on what Foucault was lecturing to listing those with him in that amusing late photo of a beaming Foucault in an ill-fitting cowboy hat. The publication of Elden’s book marks a good time to assess this often misunderstood period in Foucault’s work, and we have gathered Stuart Elden (University of Warwick) and two more of Foucault’s best interpreters, Eduardo Mendieta (Pennsylvania State University) and Dianna Taylor (John Carroll University), to do so.

Hegel argues in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion that the notion that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) well expresses the self-developing infinitude of being. As such, love expresses the unity of difference and is, therefore, the “representation” (Vorstellung) of reason (Vernunft). This requires, however, transcending the abstract notion of the perfect God that stands over and above finite reality. At the same time love has a subjective dimension, embodied not only in mutual recognition but in the experience of the highest forms of unity with otherness. This ultimately requires of the individual that he or she embrace the nothingness of his or her being and yet also engage responsibly in ethical life (Sittlichkeit).

Hegel presents significant accounts of “conscience” (Gewissen) at decisive moments both in the early Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. In spite of some important similarities between these accounts, they present deeply different, perhaps even inconsistent, understandings of the nature and value of individual conscience. Roughly, on the Philosophy of Right account, conscience is fundamentally something inward and individualizing, requiring transformation if it is to be integrated into the social institutions and practices that constitute modern “ethical life.” By contrast, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, conscience is always already fundamentally social, entailing demands that individuals both realize their convictions in actions that are, in principle at least, available to others, and that they be able discursively to articulate, justify, and, in some cases, modify their convictions in relation to others. Drawing on this contrast between two understandings of the nature and value of conscience, I consider two models of the liberty of conscience. On the first model, the liberty of conscience fundamentally entails the need for the protection of an inward sphere over which institutions ought not to attempt to exercise coercive influence. On the second, the liberty of conscience entails acknowledging the discursive and social character of conscience, so that, while individuals should be entitled to a sort of moral autonomy, that autonomy entails an equal demand to be able to justify their convictions to others, and to respond reasonably to the claims that others make on them. I argue that Hegel’s concept of “spirit,” which suggests that selfhood is fundamentally a product of concrete relations among individuals, provides stronger support for the second model of the liberty of conscience.

Hegel’s detailed analysis of subjective religion and his forceful rejection of the movement in his own political environment to deny civil liberties to Jewish citizens give us the conceptual tools to respond to our contemporary cases of religious extremism without violating the value of the autonomy and inherent worth of the thinking person that fanaticism tramples. This paper first addresses Hegel’s analysis of fanaticism, demonstrating that its rejection of the order of existing structures in favor of an abstract ideal entails the Hegelian concept of spirit. When spirit’s implications are explored, it is evident that immediate religious certainty has the potential to elevate its adherents to thinking consciousness and therefore have the potential to follow its internal dialectics to the point where its convictions correspond with the major ethical principles upheld by modern states. Given the political freedom to explore their own latent truths and inconsistencies, subjective, even fanatical, religious consciousness can strengthen the state by its independent verification of the ideals embodied in the political community. In the meantime, autonomous reflection should be encouraged through free religious expression, including of religious views that run counter to the objective order of the state. However, any destructive attacks on this order must be confronted and stopped. These principles allow us to respond to the current Syrian refugee crisis, the controversy regarding municipal bans on burkinis in France, and violent, religiously-inspired terrorist attacks with clarity and consistency.

This essay examines Hegel’s variegated understanding of the relationship of religion and politics, especially as articulated in his idea of state as a “secular deity” or “earthly divinity.” It does so by engaging and expanding upon themes explored by Ludwig Siep in his 2015 Der Staat als irdischer Gott: Genese und Relevanz einer Hegelschen Idee. Its focus is fourfold: 1) It affirms the special role played by a civil religion in sustaining and maintaining institutions of modern states. 2) It details the religious dimension of Hegel’s theory of the corporation to explicate an account of rights understood not just formally but with reference to substantive claims oriented to considerations of social justice. 3) It ascribes to Hegel a political theology rooted in the uniquely self-causative elements of his constitutional theory and directed to ongoing reflection by community members on the conditions of their commonality. 4) It asserts that Hegel’s notion of Weltgeist furnishes elements of a transnational account of human rights, yet one that both depends upon and entails proper development of Hegel’s notion of state as an earthly divinity.

Contemporary reluctance to consider any complicity between philosophy and religion has led to an inability to consider, in Hegel studies, how the revelatory agency of the Absolute necessarily complements the narrative of human reason. According to Hegel, reason alone can do no more than end in the endless limitations of actuality, in the infinite approximations of a moral summum bonum and in the ad infinitum strivings for concrete political freedom. Recognizing where revelatory agency occurs in Hegel’s Science allows us to recognize the Idea’s freedom in the worldly, human expressions of art, religion and philosophy, in their philosophical study within the state University. Without such recognition, both Left and Right fields of Hegel interpretation tend to evaluate the success (or failure) of his philosophy based on inflated, unrealistic expectations of what is meant by “actuality.”

In this essay I explore some implications and effects of taken-for-granted expectations of achieved certainty as the only legitimate outcome of scientific and everyday inquiry. The analysis contrasts ubiquitous if often tacit expectations of certainty with a critique of how these very expectations can truncate productive engagement with matters ecological. The discussion focuses on the limited prospects of success in inquiry when certainty is the only putatively acceptable outcome, and it defends the value of situated quests for knowledge with their reliance on hermeneutic understandings of place and process as these involve real human knowers.

Apocalyptic fictions abound in contemporary culture, multiplying end-of-the-world fantasies of environmental collapse. Meanwhile, efforts toward global sustainability extrapolate from deep-past trends to predict and manage deep-future scenarios. These narratives converge in “eco-eschatologies,” which work as phantasms that construct our identities, our understanding of the world, and our sense of responsibility in the present. I critique ecoeschatology’s reliance on an interpretation of deep time that treats every temporal moment as interchangeable and projects the future as a chronological extension of the past. This enacts what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “catastrophe of equivalence” by domesticating the future and obscuring the incommensurability of what resists substitution, conversion, or exchange. By contrast, the renewal of our responsibility toward the future, without apocalypse or apotheosis, requires an intuition of deep time that respects the singular anachronicity of the present and refuses the framing of existence against a background of annihilation.