Heaney and the neighbour: poetry between politics and ethics

In this essay I argue that Heaney uses the figure of the neighbour to examine questions of otherness and cultural difference and their relationship to history and politics. The neighbour is of course a figure that has played a central role in Western philosophy and theology for centuries, from the Gospels and Kant to Freud and Lacan. It is also a concept to which Western poetry often returns, particularly in the work of Herbert, Clare, Eliot and Auden. Heaney too belongs to this tradition, in that his oeuvre contains many poems which consider the relationship between neighbours, and do so in ways profoundly suggestive for consideration of the relationship between historical events, social structures, cultural difference and psychic affect. In my essay I argue that Heaney sketches a profoundly materialist conception of subjectivity in its relationship with the Other. In doing so I contrast Heaney’s treatment of the neighbour, with its emphasis on questions of politics and locality, to the treatment of the neighbour in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

Environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century: an age adjusted citation analysis of the influential articles, journals, authors and institutions

We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics. We depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field. We adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article's publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference — especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors. We analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009. We provide rankings of the influential articles, authors, journals and institutions and find that Ecological Economics, Energy Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management have the most influential articles, they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most. The University of Maryland, Resources for the Future, the University of East Anglia and the World Bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics.

Environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century: an age adjusted citation analysis of the most influential articles, journals, authors and institutions

We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics. We depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field. We adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article's publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference — especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors. We analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009. We provide rankings of the influential articles, authors, journals and institutions and find that Ecological Economics, Energy Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management have the most influential articles, they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most. The University of Maryland, Resources for the Future, the University of East Anglia and the World Bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics.

Recurrent Deletion of ZNF630 at Xp11.23 Is Not Associated With Mental Retardation

ZNF630 is a member of the primate-specific Xp11 zinc finger gene cluster that consists of six closely related genes, of which ZNF41, ZNF81, and ZNF674 have been shown to be involved in mental retardation. This suggests that mutations of ZNF630 might influence cognitive function. Here, we detected 12 ZNF630 deletions in a total of 1,562 male patients with mental retardation from Brazil, USA, Australia, and Europe. The breakpoints were analyzed in 10 families, and in all cases they were located within two segmental duplications that share more than 99% sequence identity, indicating that the deletions resulted from non-allelic homologous recombination. In 2,121 healthy male controls, 10 ZNF630 deletions were identified. In total, there was a 1.6-fold higher frequency of this deletion in males with mental retardation as compared to controls, but this increase was not statistically significant (P-value = 0.174). Conversely, a 1.9-fold lower frequency of ZNF630 duplications was observed in patients, which was not significant either (P-value = 0.163). These data do not show that ZNF630 deletions or duplications are associated with mental retardation. (C) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Perfectionist Philosophy as a (an Untaken) Way of Life

I am honored to respond to Paul Guyer’s elaboration on the role of examples of perfectionism in Cavell’s and Kant’s philosophies. Guyer’s appeal to Kant’s notion of freedom opens the way for suggestive readings of Cavell’s work on moral perfectionism but also, as I will show, for controversy. There are salient aspects of both Kant’s and Cavell’s philosophy that are crucial to understanding perfectionism and, let me call it, perfectionist education, that I wish to emphasize in response to Guyer. In responding to Guyer’s text, I shall do three things. First, I shall explain why I think it is misleading to speak of Cavell’s view that moral perfectionism is involved in a struggle to make oneself intelligible to oneself and others in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for moral perfection. Rather, I will suggest that the constant work on oneself that is at the core of Cavell’s moral perfectionism is a constant work for intelligibility. Second, I shall recall a feature of Cavell’s perfectionism that Guyer does not explicitly speak of: the idea that perfectionism is a theme, “outlook or dimension of thought embodied and developed in a set of texts.” Or, as Cavell goes on to say, “there is a place in mind where good books are in conversation. … [W]hat they often talk about … is how they can be, or sound, so much better than the people that compose them.” This involves what I would call a perfectionist conception of the history of philosophy and the kinds of texts we take to belong to such history. Third, I shall sketch out how the struggle for intelligibility and a perfectionist view of engagement with texts and philosophy can lead to a view of philosophy as a form of education in itself. In concluding these three “criticisms,” I reach a position that I think is quite close to Guyer’s, but with a slightly shifted emphasis on what it means to read Kant and Cavell from a perfectionist point of view.

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Critique as technology of the self

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.

The aesthetics of ideology, or 'the critique of ideological judgment' in Eagleton and Zizek

The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in many ways. This essay examines the works of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In this way, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as Plato. The essay's conclusion reflects on this "aesthetic turn" in the theory of ideology: what work it allows, and its limits.

Rawls and Health Care

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), his first major work articulating his theory of justice as fairness, was immediately recognized as a fundamental contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century. Working within the tradition established by previous philosophers such as Kant and Locke, Rawls employed the contract theory approach. Taking it to a higher order of abstraction, he sought to determine not what the structure of social organization would be, but what the principles which governed social institutions would be under a hypothetical contracting situation. Rawls uses this contract theory approach to construct a society in which the morally irrelevant contingencies of nature and social arrangements are mitigated by principles of justice which govern the basic institutions of society. A common observation has been that Rawls left out any discussion of health care and how it might fit into his conception of a just society. Several philosophers have articulated expansions of the theory to account for health care. In the chapters that follow I will continue this tradition and consider how justice as fairness might be expanded to account for just health care allocation. In doing so, I hope to answer a particularly strong critique of the theory brought up by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and to argue for a broadened conception of health care which takes into account the complex causal relationship between society and human health.

Aesthetic dimensions of educational administration and leadership

The Aesthetic Dimensions of Educational Administration and Leadership provides an aesthetic critique of educational administration and leadership. It demonstrates the importance of aesthetics on all aspects of the administrative and leadership world: the ways ideas and ideals are created, how their expression is conveyed, the impact they have on interpersonal relationships and the organizational environment that carries and reinforces them, and the moral boundaries or limits that can be established or exceeded.

The book is divided into three sections.
Section I examines various philosophical traditions in aesthetics as they inform administrative life, focussing on major modern traditions arising from Kant, romanticism and Nietzsche, Collingwood, the pragmatic school, and critical theory.
Section II explores four aesthetic sources for administrative critique - architecture, literature, film, and movement - as they serve both to understand the social construction of administration and leadership and provide a critique of values, roles, power and authority.
Section III examines more topical and applied problems of charisma, heroism, and authority in practice, concluding with a discussion of the aesthetic analysis of politics and power within the context of contemporary educational administration and leadership theory.

While presenting a significant departure from conventional studies in the field, the international contributors reflect a continuity of thought on the creation, use and abuse of administrative and leadership authority from the writings of Plato through to contemporary theory. This book should appeal to school administrators and leaders and those aspiring to these roles.

Becoming children : the hidden meaning of the incarnation

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel“ – which means, "God with us."

When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

Matthew 1:18-25 (NIV)

Neo-positivist or neo-kantian? Karl Popper and the Vienna Circle.

This paper re-contextualises Popper within a Kantian tradition by examining his interaction with the Vienna Circle. The complexity of Popper’s relationship to the Vienna Circle is often a point of confusion as some view him as a member of the Vienna Circle while others minimise his association with this group. This paper argues that Popper was not a member of the Vienna Circle or a positivist but shared many neo-Kantian philosophical tendencies with the members of the Circle as well as many of their philosophical problems and interests. By better understanding the influence of the Circle’s members upon Popper, we not only remove the myths surrounding Popper’s positivism, but also place the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle within its proper philosophical context. This paper further argues that it was Popper’s friend during his formative philosophical years in Vienna, Julius Kraft (1921–1960) who was responsible for the way in which Popper approached Kant. Through Kraft, Popper was introduced to the thought of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927) and Jakob Fries (1773–1843) as well as a tradition of critical rationalism which Popper would continue both in his methodological orientation as well as through his late German Enlightenment intellectual values.

Hope

From the now iconic Barack Obama "Hope" poster of the 2008 presidential campaign to the pit-head "Camp Hope" of the families of the trapped Chilean miners, the language of hope can be hugely powerful as it draws on resources that are uniquely human and universal. We are beings who hope. But what does that say about us? What is hope and what role does it play in our lives?

In his fascinating and thought-provoking investigation into the meaning of hope, Stan van Hooft shows that hope is a fundamental structure of the way we live our lives. For Aristotle being hopeful was part of a well-lived life, a virtue. For Aquinas it was a fundamentally theological virtue and for Kant a basic moral motivation. It shapes how we view ourselves and the world in which we live. Whether we hope for a life after death or for good weather tomorrow – whether our hopes are grand or humble – hoping is part of our outlook on life. What we hope for defines who we are.

Drawing on everyday examples as well as more detailed discussion of hope in the arenas of medicine, politics and religion, van Hooft shows how hopefulness in not the same as hope and offers a convincing and powerful defense of the need for realism. There are few contemporary philosophical discussions of hope and Stan van Hooft’s book offers an accessible and insightful discussion of the topic that shows the relevance of philosophical thinking and distinctions to this important aspect of human life.