aa
QUOTES:
aaa [AH] Albert, Hans. Treatise on Critical Reason. 1985
aaa [DK] Korten, David. The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.1999.
aaa [DY] Yankelovich, Daniel. Profit With Honor.2006
aaa [GK Klosko, George. The Developments of Plato’s Political Theory.1986.
aaa [GT] Tinder, Glenn. Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions.6th ed. 1995.
aaa [JR/PL] Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. 1999.
aaa [LT] Thiel, Leslie. Thinking Politics: Perspectives in Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Political Theory.1997.
aaa [MR] Raskin, M. Liberalism
aaa [NM] Nagel, Thomas and Liam Murphy. The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice.2002
aaa [RE] Ellis, Ralph. Just Results: Ethical Foundations for Policy Analysis. 1998
aaa [RP] Pirsig,
aaa [SB] Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self. 1992
aaa [SR] Rosen,
aaa [WC] Connolly,
aaa [WG] Galston,
abstractions
action [GT/168] “…if we sink unprotestingly into doubt and indifference regarding the ends of power, those ends are likely to be set by the irresponsible and insensitive.”
adoption Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure,
1895: “The beggarly question of parentage – what is it, after all? What does it
matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is your be blood or not?
All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of
the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents
for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like
class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean
exclusiveness at bottom.” – pp. 274-275
Being [SR/178[ quoting Heidigger: “ ‘Each epoch of world-history is an epoch of error,’ namely, the mistaking of the temporal appearance of beings for Being.”
campaign finance [John Rawls/LP] at p. 140“In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.”
capitalism [DK/154] “The open insistence by
capitalist ideologues that the capitalist rightfully bears no responsibility
for the consequences of his or her actions for the wider society is one of
capitalism’s more perverse aspects,. They thus presume to give the most
powerful among us an exception from our shared responsibility to maintain the
foundation of trust that is a
fundamental condition of a civilized society. It is a wholly irresponsible
claim. A healthy society depends on a cultural norm of ethical behavior in all
aspects of individual and public life. It also depends on the recognition that
although a modest profit is an important facilitator of economic efficiency,
profit is no the overriding goal of economic life.”
capitalism [DK/213-214] “Although the
culture of materialism has been created by history’s most sophisticated and
highly paid propagandists, it is at its core a falsified, manufactured, and
nonconsensual culture. If material acquisition were truly the dominant value of
the human species, then surely capitalism would find it unnecessary to spend
$450 billion a year to propagate it throughout the world. Nor would so many of
the advertising messages and images that promote these desires be designed to
appeal to our longing for acceptance, love, and contact with nature. Successful
as capitalism has been in creating a mass consumer culture, the fact remains
that its values are largely alien to our basic nature.”
capitalism [DK/241-242] “We are in the midst
of a fundamentally new phenomenon I the modern human experience, the creation
of a new civilization form the bottom up. The creative leadership comes not
from conventional power holders, or e4ven from intellectuals and artists. It
some rather from ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things to build
functioning local communities and ecosystems. Most are driven more by a simple
desire to create viable living spaces in the midst of a t9orubled world than by
grand visions of planetary change. Yet as they link together in ever expanding
and strengthening alliances, they are as well reclaiming expanding physical,
social and economic spaces for life. Day by day, they are creating a new
planetary reality through processes that mimic the self-organizing dynamics of
healthy ecosystems.”
choices [GW/771]
choices [GW/771]
citizens [John Rawls /LP] p. 135ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact.”
civil society [DY/73] "I endow the concept of civil society with a definite set of moral values, because that is the way the vision is often understood in nonacademic contexts. This vision, then defines civil society as the realm of family friends, neighbors, schools, churches, and workplaces. It is the home of an ethic different from either the self-interest of the market economy or the coercive force of government, Its ethic reflects voluntary ties of obligation embodying such values as reciprocity, respect, trust, stability, neighborliness, civic involvement , and love. These values are not inherent in a free-market economy and are in some ways antithetical to it."
common sense
[Plant] quoting Rawls "Thus the real
task is to discover and formulate the deeper basis of agreement which one hopes
is embedded in common sense.
concept [SB/208] “Adorno and Horkheimer argue that it is the ‘concept’, the very unit of thought in the western tradition that imposes homogeneity and identity upon the heterogeneity of material. This drive for identity of conceptual thought culminates it the technical triumph of western ratio, which can only know things in that it comes to dominate them. ‘The Enlightenment relates to things as the dictator to humans.’”
considered judgments [John Rawls /JF/30]“Many of our most serious
conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgments are
always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic; not uncommonly they are
ideologues and zealots. The question arises: how can we make our own considered
judgments of political justice more consistent both within themselves and with
the considered judgments of others without imposing on ourselves and external
political authority?”
criticism From an editorial for the "Kansas City Star" on
definitions [RP/193] Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t define reason without them.”
democracy [MR/240] "Democracy is never a completion, but like humanity itself is always in the process of becoming."
democracy [WC/100] "Representative democracy, by constituting its members as citizens who vote, thereby defined them as more than role bearers with a set of social assignments. It constitutes them as political agents who can question, interrogate, doubt, dissent, protest, organize, resist, disturb, prod, and disrupt the fixed priorities, as well as a mandate and obey general laws. Capacity of the self as a citizen/dissident informs and energizes its other roles within bureaucratic institutions, career planning, erotic engagements, family life, gender performances, class relations, and cross-national social movements. This disruptive, de-naturalizing dimension of democratic citizenship is to be prized."
democracy [WC/101] Connolly refers to democracy as representative democracy in which political agents doubt, dissent, protest, organize, resist, disrupt fixed priorities as a as well as mandate and obey general laws. "While Democratic idealists often celebrate the citizen as the consummate agent through which a legitimacy, freedom, and a common will is realized, and while Democratic realists often reduces citizen to a self-interest calculator voting in periodic elections, this [his view] conception prizes a citizen partly because it dissipates in defining the laws of the state and partly because its corollary role as critic of previous patterns of state authority supports and energizes its critical political capacities in numerous arenas. Democratic citizenship is idealized here because citizenship itself is the site of a constitute ambiguity: it is at once the means through which general programs are crystallized and enacted through governing assemblages and a medium through which previous settlements sedimented into institutional practice are interrogated and unsettled. These two contending dimensions of politics can be embodied in the same political subject: the citizen as participant in the representational politics of the state and as activist and social movements that interrogate previous patterns of settlement in the state and other social institutions. Maintenance of productive tension between these interdependent dimensions of citizenship constitutes the perfection of democratic politics."
democracy [WC/152] "today the territorial/security state forms in the space of democratic liberation and imprisonment. Yet deliberates because it organizes democracy democratic compatibility through electoral institutions. It imprisons because it confines and conceals democratic energies flying over and through its dikes. The confinement of democracy to the territorial state – to a (paradoxical) sovereign place where (ambiguous) understandings (dis)organize the common life-consolidates and exacerbates pressures to exclusive nationality. Every protean nation demands a state, and every state strives to become a nation-often in the name of territorial democracy.”
democracy [WC/154] ". Democracy is, among other things, an affirmative cultural/political response to the problematization of final markers that helps to define the late - modern condition. It contests authoritarian and totalitarian modes of responses and conditions because they draw upon contemporary instruments of surveillance, repression, and social mobilization to reinstate coercively old markers that have become destabilized. It treats the contestation of final markers as a contribution to freedom, self -formation, and self -governance among constituencies no longer required to believe that how they have been constituted historically is what nature requires them to be. And it cultivates agonistic respect among multiple constituencies who respond differentially the mysteries of being while acknowledging each other to be worthy of respect partly because they are implicated in this common condition. A democratic ethos balances the desirability of governance through democratic means with a corollary politics of democratic disturbance through which any particular pattern of previous settlements might be tossed up for grabs again. The ethos of democracy, understood in these terms, has territorial/institutional conditions of existence, but it also embodies the crucial cultural disposition: at least a significant minority of those implicated in it understand that the porous understandings they share rest upon contestable foundations, that there are numerous differences among them grounded in a matrix of uncertainty, and that a laudatory way to respond to these uncertain commonalities and shared uncertainties is to cultivate respect for a politics of democratic governance and contestation that limits ways in which contested changes are to be initiated and disturbed traditions to be retained. The ethos of democracy both fosters a recurrent problematization of final markers (for they constantly tend to reinstate themselves) and foments a culture of agonistic respect among those who affirm this "alienated" world. The key to a cultural of democratization is that it embodies a productive ambiguity at its very center, always resisting attempts to allow one side or the other to achieve final victory: its role as a mode of governance is balanced and countered by its logic as a cultural medium of the periodic denaturalization of settled identities and conventions. In a world for the paradox of politics is perpetually susceptible to forgetfulness, there is a perpetual case to be made for the renewal of democratic energies of the naturalization. For if the second dimension of democracy ever collapsed under the weight of the first, state mechanisms of electoral accountability would become conduits for fascist unity."
democracy [WC/158] "You may be loyal to the faith of your church, but not necessarily to its legal proposals in the domains of capital punishment, abortion, the right to die, or gender relations. You may be loyal to your union with respect to the issue of dues check-off, but not necessarily to its endorsement of political candidates. Similarly, with respect to the state, one might be loyal to its institutionalization of democratic elections and to any rights it endorses constitutionally, but not necessarily to its war policies, and strategic course, its classification practices, its resource dependencies, its constitution of criminality, or its ecological practices. Most pertinently, there is no apriori reason why the differences with respect to the state priorities must be expressed only within the parameters of state politics. In a multidimensional, pluralist world, every particular allegiance is contingent because the occasion might occur when it collided with another you have found to be even more fundamental at this time.
democracy [WC/80] quoting Macpherson: " we cannot achieve more democratic participation without a prior change in social inequality in any consciousness but we cannot achieve the changes in social inequality and consciousness without a prior increase in democratic participation." --- this is referred to as a paradox of democratic politics --- his interpretation of a developmental power in this sense that democracy allows for human development is as follows: "but this leaves open the question, what are these human capacities?... [They] include the capacity for rational understanding, for moral judgment in action, for aesthetic creation or contemplation, for the emotional activities of friendship and love, and, sometimes, for religious experience."
democracy [WC/86] “I agree with Macpherson that every political theory, whether realistic or idealistic, individualistic or communitarian, unitarian or pluralistic, egalitarian or inegalitarian, democratic or authoritarian, contains somewhere in its structure deeply contestable postulates or projections about the relation between the actual and the possible. I concur, too, that many of the most fundamental differences between contending theories have not yet been settled by the play of historical experience, scientific evidence, or reason." Connolly disagrees with make Macpherson in some things: "I find Macpherson’s postulates, indeed, to be dangerous in some ways. From my perspective, they are in-attentive to profound dangers in the pursuit of unity, coherence, and harmony; and they are in-alert to the indispensable, ventillating effects of political disturbance in the enactment of new identities, even in the most developed or ‘realized’ democracy."
democracy [WC/98] "For a democratic culture that disrupts dogmatic identities opens up possibilities for politics of pluralization: increases the number of positive identities and change the tone of contention and collaboration between constituencies. Such an ethos constitutes a significant improvement over other alternatives. ---"It is impossible to become detached entirely from identities coursing through us; for we float, swim, and sink in the pool of normality and abnormality in which they are set. But partial distantiation is both possible and ethically allowable."
democracy [WC/xx] “There is no identity without difference. Everything, my friend, depends upon how this paradoxical relationship is negotiated. The stronger the drive to the unified nation, the integrated community, and/or the normal individual, the more powerful becomes of the drive to convert differences into modes of otherness. And the more implacable the cultural drive to convert differences and to otherness the last feasible it becomes to build a majority of assemblage is a democratic governance. They can actually governed a diverse population.”
determinism and individual autonomy [CS/107] "That a configuration of thought or action is conditioned or informed by its context is not tatamount to its being determined by its context."
discourse ethics [SB/42] no way of life is prima facie superior to another and the prima facie validity it confers upon certain normative practices cannot be taken for granted if one cannot demonstrate with reason to others who are not members of this way of life and even to skeptics among one’s way of life as to why these practices are more just and fair than another
discourse Benhabib,
p. 4: “It is my hope to create cracks and fissures in the edifice of discursive
traditions large enough so that a new ray of reason which still reflects the
dignity of justice along with the promise of happiness may shine through them.”
discourse Simon and
Garfinkle , song The Sound of Silence: And in the naked
light I saw ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening.
enlightenment [SR/145] “In general, the Enlightenment attempts to replace what we may call the metaphysical absolute by the absolute certainty of effective solutions to practical problems.”
equality [GT/243] “…human uncertainty contains an intuition not only of freedom but also of equality. One person may know more about mathematics or automobile engines than another, but in the face of the perennial questions, we are all, in our lack of definite, demonstrable answers, equal. The wise stand above others, it would seem, only in their consciousness of this primal equality.”
equality [GT/76] “If human beings are essentially equal, if the denial of their essential equality will not be compensated on another plane of being but does grave and irreparable harm, and if the social order is a product of human will rather than divine will, then privileges and power that cannot be justified in terms of the public good are intolerable. About two hundred years ago, it began to seem that all of these conditions existed. The idea of equality was no longer doormat.” [The principle thinkers were Rousseau and Marx –the life of each human being shaped by society and not some transcendental force; thus change in social institutions imperative.
equality [GT/82] “Inequalities of results necessarily produce inequalities of opportunity.”
ethics [CS/101] "Just as one finds the specialized discipline of epistemology to exude a measure of philosophical incoherence in its effort to solve the problem of the knowledge of knowledge, so one would be well advised to consider theorizing about the ethical to be an elusive search for a foundationalist justification of how we are to live our lives." --- "The characterization of the ethical as being composed of fitting responses within the context of community has been designed to call attention to ethics as a praxis rather than an inventory of theoretically grounded principles. The ethical has to do with ethos in its originate sense of a cultural dwelling, a mode or manner of historical existence, a way of being in the world that exhibits a responsibility both to oneself and to others. It is this that defines the bearing of the self as ethical subject, whose subjectivity is always that of an intersubjectivity.
examined life [GK/32] quoting Socrates from the Apology : I say that to talk every day
about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining
myself and others is the greatest good to man.” [Note
facts "All
human action is at the same time valuations. Factual, conceptual statements
about it thus express a moral reality. To try to extract from a 'fact' its
'value' component is only to conceal from view what is designated a 'fact' is
simultaneously and unavoidably assigned a positive or negative role in the
achievement of the comprehensive goal whose value is necessarily affirmed
whenever the designating activity is performed." (citation lost)
facts Jason De
Parle re Welfare Reform in MY Times News Service, DBNJ
facts Jason De
Parle re welfare reform” “Years of ideological war have left all sides invested
I a view. from academic conferences to political campaigns, opinions abound,
but facts are scares.” New York Times News Service, DBNJ 2.21.99
family [John Rawls /LP] p. 163 It seems intolerably unjust that a husband may depart the family taking his earning power with him and leaving his wife and children far less advantage than before. Forced to fend for themselves, their economic position is often precarious. A society that permits this does not care about women, must less about their equality, or even about their children, who are its future.
fascism [MR/29] "There is a postmodern technological fascism that kills as many personal and social spaces is possible and permits the use of surveillance and control as defenses against the unknown and the other."
foundationalism [WC/36] quotes Foucault: "there is no way you can say there is no truth." [To say that there is no truth is to assert the truth.].
foundationalism [WC/4] the quote refers to various non-foundation list, such as a Rawls, Habermas, Walzer and Blumenberg and Rorty --- “They contend that every detailed interpretation presupposes answers to fundamental questions of being, and that this is indeed one of the territories of modern discourse in the requires a critical reflection.” --- Connally argues that nothing is fundamental.
foundationalism [WC/40], “Nothing is fundamental…Therefore, almost everything counts for something. An ethic of care for the diversity of life locates itself cautiously, between these two statements, presenting this "therefore" as its gift to the protean diversity of life. Knowledge is the need to limit its own self-assertion so that other faiths can count for something too. It suggests that one element in a generous ethic is the recognition that neither it nor its competitors is grounded on something that is demonstrably fixed, automatic, solid, commanded, or necessary. But this means that the ethical disposition one admires the most is never guaranteed. It's now trembles as a human possibility without cosmic grounds or pragmatic guarantees. An ethic of care for the diversity of being honors both the indispensability and the fragility of ethics."
freedom [SR/4] “If freedom is our goal, then reason is less reasonable than the imagination.” --- “The rhetoric of freedom that is traditionally associated with modern science loses all force as soon as it is identified as rhetoric on scientific ground. Accordingly, science, as well as the underlying subject-object distinction that characterizes the modern epoch, is no more reasonable than any other product of the will.
freedom [SR/4] “The rhetoric of freedom that is traditionally associated with modern science loses all force as soon as it is identified as rhetoric on scientific grounds. Accordingly, science, as well as the underlying subject-object distinction that characterizes the modern epoch, is no more reasonable than any other product of the will. Indeed, if freedom is our goal, than reason is less reasonable than the imagination.”.
God is dead [SR/161] In the nineteenth century we learned, first form Hegel and then more effectively from Nietzsche, that God is dead. [SR/161]In the twentieth century Kojčve and his students, like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead, thereby as it were opening the gates into the abyss of postanthropological deconstruction.”
good [RP/255] “If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just ‘intuition.’ not just unexplainable ‘skill’ or ‘talent.’ It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.”
harmony see peace of mind
health care [MR/236] “…throughout modern history many health workers have sought a connection between the health of the individual and the health of the nation. The reason seems clear while modern medicines law as it stands dealing with the help of the particular individual, whether through drugs for other forms of intervention, it is also clear that the health of the nation, and of the world, affects individual, whether it is a starving child in Uganda, those who suffer from the pain of Agent Orange, nuclear poisoning, unclean drinking water, or AIDS."
hermeneutics [SR/145] “The metaphysics of methodology is the attempt to replace or to fortify the judgment of the reader with a methodology for the selections of methods of reading.”
hermeneutics [SR/161]“We may conclude this history of hermeneutics with the following remark. The initial purpose of hermeneutics was to explain the word of God. The purpose was eventually expanded into the attempt to regulate the process of explaining the word of man. In the nineteenth century we learned first from Hegel and then more effectively from Nietzsche, that God is dead. In the twentieth century Kojčve and his students, like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead, thereby as it were opening the gateways into the abyss of postanthropological deconstruction. As he scope of hermeneutics has expanded, then, the two original sources of hermeneutical meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them the cosmos or world and leaving us with nothing but our own garrulity, which we choose to call the philosophy of language, linguistic philosophy, or one of their synonyms. If nothing is real, the real is nothing; there is no difference between the written lines of a text and the blank spaces between them.”
history [SR/162] history became the surrogate within modern ontology for the hidden God
honesty
Rogers M. Smith “Should We Make Political Science More of a Science or More
about Politics? in PS, June 2002 at p. 200 “The core value of all genuinely
scientific inquiry is intellectual honest.” – “honest presentations of what we
have learned” and “honest about everything we have found.”
human being [GT/46] “A human being is fundamentally and everlastingly mysterious.”
human nature [GT/29] “…a human being is not an object, like a rock or planet, which can be objectively studied and understood. Hence choosing being Hobbes and Aristotle depends finally on faith. This does not mean one’s choice is blind. It may be shaped and guided by daily newspapers and other kinds of empirical evidence, by great literature, by the bible, or by all of these. But finally, … you must choose sides. You must pick the view of human nature you can live with.”
human nature [SR/133] “baseness is as much in conformity with nature as is nobility. The correct evaluation of nature is not ‘given’ by nature in a direct, publicly certifiable manner….”
human nature [SR/146] …this is precisely human nature, to be unfinished, and hence, to exist in and as a search for completion.
human nature [SR/146] If there is no human nature that remains constant within historical change, and so defines the perspectives of individual readers as perspectives upon a common humanity, then reading is impossible. Whether one’s primary orientation is ontological or philological, interpretation depends upon the initial accessibility of the sense of the text as independent of clarification an deepening by the subsequent application of theories, methods, and canons.
human nature Aristotle [in contrast to Hobbes] : “ The man who is isolated – who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is self-sufficient – is not part of the polis (the city- state), and must therefore be either a beast of a god.” [quoted in GT/28]
human nature Thomas Hobbes and universal essence is that all have “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” [Leviathan quoted in GT/27]
hypotheses [RP/100] “If the purpose of scientific method is to select form among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses can never be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.”
hypotheses [RP/99] “The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from no on knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly – flash! – he understands something he didn’t understand before.”
individual choice My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating
moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them.
Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior --- David Brooks,
columnist, New York Times,
international law [John Rawls /LP] 78 I think enlightenment about the limits of liberalism recommends trying to conceive a reasonable just Law of Peoples that liberal and nonliberal peoples should together endorse. the alternative is a fatalistic cynicism which conceives the good of life solely in terms of power.”
international power [John Rawls /LP] p. 29 quotes Thucydides account of Athenians’ first speech to the Spartans: “We have done nothing extraordinary, contrary to human nature in accepting empire when it was offered to us, then refusing to give it up.” -- “Those who really deserve praise are those who, while human enough to enjoy power, nevertheless pay more attention to justice than compelled to by heir situation.”
international relations [MR/237] "In our time American society will not be loved for its freedom and yearning for political equality, economic and social justice, technological innovation, cultural diversity, and caring. It will be known as an arrogant bully, having lost the chance, that is, the choice to open wide the doors of history to decency and dignity. It will have trapped itself. Like Icarus, thinking that the mushroom cloud of nuclear weapons are more real than the sun and nature itself and that destroying a threatening to destroy is the same as preservation and reconstruction."
international relations [MR/239] "in the case of the United States, the choice is dark and clear either American civilization will build out of its exemplars and the great social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, or American leaders and future generations will confuse force with morality, military technology with good ends, stability with justice, and hubris with knowledge."
international [John Rawls /JF/11-14] -- Rawls concerned about the international but
quotes Dahl approvingly: “today no unit smaller than a country can provide the
conditions necessary for a good life, while no unit larger than a country is
likely to be as democratically governed as a modern polyarchy.”[fn12]
interpretation [SR/142] “…the destruction of hermeneutical theories may return us to the older stage in which competent persons argued about the meaning of writings without interposing methodological filters between themselves and the texts.” – “If there is such a thing as the interpretation of a text, as opposed to the writing of a new text by the ostensible reader, then it is obvious that there is a core meaning in the text that has been placed there by the author, who expected it to be intelligible to perceptive readers without the aid of elaborate hermeneutical tools. This leaves all the room that is necessary for unintended meanings.” ---“no text worth reading wears its meaning on its sleeve.”
interpretation [SR/144] “
judgment Benhabib, p. 8 quoting Hannah Arendt: “The power of judgment rests on a potential
agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging
something is not like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between
me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone
in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I
know I must finally come to some agreement. And this enlarged way of thinking,
which as judgment knows how to transcend its individual limitations, cannot
function in strict isolation or solitude; it need the presence of others ‘in
whose place’ it must think, whose perspective it must take into consideration,
and without whom it never as the opportunity to operate at all.”
justice principles
[John Rawls /JF/7] role of the
principles of justice (as part of a political conception of justice) is to
specify the fair terms of social cooperation (Theory, par.1)” – they “provide a response to the fundamental
question of political philosophy for a constitutional democratic regime. That
question is” what is the most acceptable political conception of justice for
specifying the fair terms of cooperation between citizens regarded as free and
equal and as both reasonable and rational, and (we add) as normal and fully
cooperating members of society over a complete life, form one generation to the
next?
justice [John Rawls /JF/116] “The maxim that
justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done, holds good not only in
law but also in public reason.” --- “The question is not simply what is true,
or what we think is true, but what we can reasonably expect equal citizens, who
are often politically at odds, to convince one another is true, or reasonable,
even in the fact of the burdens of judgment and especially the complexities of
political judgment.”
justice [John Rawls /LP] p. 128 quoting Kant from Rechtslehre: “If justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth.”
justice Richard
Kearney, “Derrida’s Ethical Re-Turn” in Working Through Derrida, 1993 –
For Derrida “Justice is deconstruction and deconstruction is justice.” – p. 36
justice Plato, Apology at p. 43 of C.D.C. Reeves’ The Trials of Socrates. Ed. in 2002. “You’re not thinking straight, sir, if you think that a man who’s any use at all should give any opposing weight to the risk of living or dying, instead of looking to this alone whenever he does anything: whether his actions are just or unjust, the deeds of a good or a bad man.”
knowledge [GT/161] “[Given the attacks on what we know from the skepticism of Hume to the epistemological discouragement of Kant regarding objective knowledge] it is hard not to wonder whether we can know anything at all except, perhaps, that we inhabit an impenetrable darkness.”
knowledge [HA/79] "...behind every piece of knowledge-conscious or unconscious-stand decisions."
knowledge Plato, Apology at p. 33 of C.D.C. Reeves’ The Trials of Socrates. Ed. in 2002. “Then I tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but wasn’t. As a result, he came to dislike me,and so did many of the people present. For my part, I thought to myself as I left, ‘I’m wiser than that person. For it’s likely that neither of us knows anything fine and good, but he thinks he knows something he doesn’t know, whereas I, since I don’t in fact know, don’t think that I do either. At any rate, it seems that I’m wiser than he in just this one small way: that which I don’t know, I don’t think I know.’”
leadership [GT/189] “Political leadership necessarily involves the use of power – molding minds and influencing behavior i order to reach preconceived goals.”
legal positivism Drucilla Cornell, “The violence of the Masquerade” in Working
Through Derrida (ed. by Gary Madison), 1993 at p. 80: refers to “the most
recent and sophisticated brand of legal positivism, which of course does assert
that might does indeed make right.”
liberal
alternatives Sandel, p. 66: “From a practical political point
of view, the positions of Rawls and Nozick are clearly opposed. Rawls, the
welfare-state liberal, and Nozick, the libertarian conservative, define between
them the clearest alternatives the American political agenda has to offer; at
least where issues of distributive justice are concerned. “
liberalism [MR/2] "Yet, every step of the way it is liberalism that is open to the human possibility, believing as it does in this invariable moral sense, turning the "ought" into the "is" for all of humanity. Human freedom and dignity can be more than a dream for the few."
liberalism [MR/117] Raskin's third-stage liberalism stresses that economics is not value neutral: "If economics at its core is to be understood as a set of moral purposes for our time, and not those of the 18th century, it must be approached as a form of moral inquiry that seeks to decide structures and institutions of distribution. They reflect fairness consistent with the wealth and potential wealth of a particular society that in turn has clear obligations to emerging world civilization and the natural environment.].
liberalism [MR/30] Raskin sets forth what he calls third stage liberalism. This refers especially to economic institutions and political arrangements. They work more fully towards the dignity and equality of each person. He quotes John Dewey with regard to the flowering of human beings. Dewey said that this "can be attained only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests." There must be "a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based upon them. These changes are necessary in order that social control the forces and agency socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together and the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty."
man is dead [SR/161]In the twentieth century Kojčve and his students, like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead, thereby as it were opening the gates into the abyss of postanthropological deconstruction.”
methodology [SR/144] “Just as the ‘bourgeois’ layman is unable to perform any fundamental activity without the assistance of a technical manual, so the ‘sophisticate’ professor cannot read a page without methods and antimethods. No one can say how we are to read our manuals.” --- at. p. 145: “One need not go to the absurd extreme of rejecting methodology in its legitimate domain in order to obese that the obsession with method is a sublimated form of the desire for the absolute.” ----“The metaphysics of methodology is the attempt to replace the judicious selection of methods by a comprehensive method of selection. In the case of hermeneutics, it is the attempt to replace or to fortify the judgment of the reader with a methodology for the selection of methods of reading. “
moderation [SR/138] “Unfortunately, there is no coherent philosophical defense of moderation as moderation, or what might be called ‘good-natured and liberal muddling through’” --- “The twentieth-century rebellion against the scientific truth – and the consequent popularity of doctrines of historicism and linguistic conventionalism, whether derived from Nietzsche or Wittengenstein – is thus a rebelling against the enlightenment, and it comes dangerously close to being a rebellion against truth. Whatever was intended by the leaders of this rebellion, there can be no doubt that ht thesis that art is worth more than the truth is the dominant principle of our time. We have protected ourselves against rationalism not by prudent moderation in its use but by a reckless embrace of recklessness, or the rejection of rationalism in favor of the imagination.”
moral ideas [NM/188]The moral ideas that do the work of legitimation have to be graspable and intuitively appealing, not just correct.
moral order Daniel
Bell: "Any society, in the end, is a moral order that has to justify…its
allocative principles and the balances of freedoms and coercions necessary to
enforce such rules."
moral order Daniel
Bell: “Any society, in the end, is a moral order that had to justify … its
allocative principles and the balances of freedoms and coercions necessary to
enforce such rules.”
moral principles [John Rawls] p. 103 “…there is never a time when we are excused from the fine-grained distinctions of moral and political principles and graduated restraints
moral principles
Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 7: refers to “the crucial fact that
jurisprudential issues are at their core issues of moral principle, not legal
fact or strategy. “
moral rights Dworkin, Taking Rights
Seriously, 197: “It is part of the job of governing to ‘define’ moral rights
through statutes and judicial decisions, that is, to declare officially the
extent that moral rights will be taken to have in law.” re 1st
amendment
morals Charles
Murray, a leading libertarian thinker: "The more control that a system
gives to individuals, the more moral it is." --CSM date? -- c. 1998 --
Linda Feldman: "There are times in society when a policy question carries
such profound moral implications, all the key players are forced to stop and
become philosophers for a moment."
multiculturalism [MR/151] "In other words, respect for other cultures does not mean blind acceptance of them and their own tendencies, which may contain strong doses of domination and oppression, such as crude or refined modes of domination women have faced virtually every culture and religion. Instead, within each culture it is necessary to find those elements of advocacy and confrontation the champion human liberation but may have been suppressed. It is absurd to think that feelings of liberation are not universally found, just as it is foolish to believe that Western civilization is an immaculate conception that needs no correction."
natural law [GT/226] “The concept of nature underlies the most durable and powerful idea in the whole history of Western moral and political thought – natural law. This is the idea … that human relations are subject to a law that is discernible by reason and unaffected by historical change. Times and customs might change, but the deepest principles governing human relations remain the same. Some of our most civilized institutions, such as personal liberties, democratic government, and international law and organization, can be traced back to this idea. If this one timber in the structure of our civilization were withdrawn, we might suddenly find ourselves standing in the midst of ruins” --- opposed is the idea that” human nature is not a changeless, transhistorical form. A human being is free, or subjective, and thus beyond every fixed objective principle. Not immutable order, but incalculable freedom, is at the heart of reality.”
natural law [GT/229]: “It may be that the natural and moral order that sometimes seems to be dissolved in history is, in actuality, being created by history and thus may be the innermost logic of the historical process.”
natural law/civil disobedience Plato,
Apology at p. 45 of C.D.C. Reeves’ The
Trials of Socrates. Ed. in 2002. “I’ve the utmost respect and affection for
you, men of
norms [DY/68] "If we are to add norm changing to our repertoire of cultural skills and capabilities, we ought to have at least a rudimentary understanding of where particular norms come from and what is involved in changing them."
patriotism [John Rawls /LP] p. 111-112 “A proper patriotism is an attachment to one’s people and country, and a willingness to defend its legitimate claims while fully respecting the legitimate claims of other peoples.“
peace of mind [RP/265] regarding technical work: “What really counts in the end is … peace of mind, nothing else. The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.” --- at 267: “Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.” – hence “when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings.” – It produces a “material reflection of a spiritual reality.” --- “Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
peace [John Rawls /LP] p.123 Political liberalism begins with terms of the politically reasonable and builds up its case from there. One does not find peace by declaring war irrational or wasteful, though indeed it may be so, but by preparing the way for peoples to develop a basic structure that support a reasonably just or decent regime and makes possible reasonable Law of Peoples.”
perceptions Simon
and Garfinkle , song The Boxer : All lies and
jest, still a man hears what he want to hear and disregards the rest.
philosopher Kojčve as cited by Rosen at p. 100: “‘…man is not by nature a philosopher ….’ It is not the nature of human self-consciousness to extend itself until it acquires complete satisfaction. To the contrary, ‘ one must make incessant efforts in order to enlarge more and more self-consciousness, which by nature tends to maintain fixed limits,; and I believe that man might very well not make these efforts.’”
philosophy [John Rawls /LP] p. 123 “it is often thought that the task of philosophy is to uncover a form of argument that will always prove convincing against all other arguments. There is, however, no such argument. Peoples may often have final ends that require them to oppose one another without compromise.”
philosophy [GK/25] Klosko says what has been said many times by many scholars about Socrates: “For Socrates, philosophy was not a system of abstract truths but a way of life.”
pluralism [John Rawls /LP] pp. 122-123 Given the pluralism of liberal democratic societies – a pluralism which is best seen as the outcome of the exercise of human reason under free institutions – affirming such a political conception as a basis of public justification, along with the basic political institutions that realize it, is the most reasonable and deepest basis of social unity available to us
pluralism [WC/104] “So, if a pluralizing ethos presupposes a ‘consensus,’it is mobilized above all around reciprocal appreciation of the contestability of contending presumptions about the fundamental character of being. It is an ironic consensus."
pluralism [WC/26] "Again, the most powerful contemporary pressures to social fragmentation throw from struggles between contending, dogmatic identities, each hell-bent on installing itself as the universal to which everyone and everything must conform."
pluralism [WC/35] "detachment from any particular set of test positions and presumptions inevitably attaches one to another set. It is hard, indeed impossible, to become detached as such. So it is important to articulate to be ideal to which your strategies of critical detachment are attaching you."
political life
Leslie Thiel, p. 120: “To live a political life, one must establish relatively
firm epistemological and ethical positions. To hold such position, one must
make judgments about opportunities, events, institutions, and people. “ --
“Forming opinions and taking action are important. Even more important is
having good reasons from one’s opinions and actions.” -- “In political life we
ought not to yield thoughtlessly to power nor thoughtlessly to reject its use.
We must exercise judgment and take action.”
political philosophy and its role: [John Rawls /LP] p. 128 “By showing how the social world may realize the features of a realistic utopia, political philosophy provides a long-term goal of political endeavor, and in working toward it gives meaning to what we can do today.”
political
philosophy [John Rawls /JF/84] “One role of political philosophy is to help us reach
agreement on a political conception of justice, but it cannot show, clearly
enough to gain general and free political agreement, that any single reasonable
comprehensive doctrine, with its conception of the good, is superior.”
political philosophy [John Rawls /JF/28] “one task of political philosophy is to
try to work out a conception of justice that narrows disagreement on at least
the most disputed questions.”
political philosophy [NM/173ff] – pure reflection on what would be just has its place in the discussion of public policy and is the main task of moral and political philosophy. But it is a long way from the description of such an ideal to its enactment or even influence; and if the ideal involves the criticism of ingrained conceptions so unconscious that they seem natural, the obstacles are formidable. In addition, the appeal to justice is only one motive in political debate, and by no means the most powerful
political philosophy [Rosen, Stanley/HP/188] quoting Michael Foucault: “we can formulate the traditional question of political philosophy in the following terms: how is the discourse of truth, or quite simply, philosophy as that discourse which par excellence is concerned with truth, ale to fix limits to the rights of power?...My problem is rather this: what rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth?” – Rosen describing Foucault: : “Discourses of truth are produced by power. More specifically, any society is permeated by relations of power, which are themselves established by, and function as, the production of discourses of truth. --- and again quoting Foucault: “We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.”
political philosophy [SB/4] re: communitarianism and postmodernism in alliance with feminist universalism:” By focusing on the fragile and shifting nature of such conceptual alliances and confrontations, I hope to illuminate the contradictory potentials of the present moment in our intellectual lives. It is my hope to create cracks and fissures in the edifice of discursive traditions large enough so that a new ray of reason which still reflects the dignity of justice along with the promise of happiness may shine through them.”
political
science Rogers M. Smith “Should We Make Political
Science More of a Science or More about Politics? in PS, June 2002, at p.
199:”Quite reasonably, most people who think about it at all believe that
political science ought to improve human knowledge o political questions
generally thought to be important.” --- There is no knowledge “for its own
sake.” – “I do not believe that ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’ have ‘sakes.’ Scientific
inquiry is something people choose to pursue. They do for a variety of reasons,
but all those reasons are forms of human interest.”
political theory from a postmodern perspective: [SR/11] “How do we know that Habermas’s ‘theory’ is not in fact a perspectival hermeneutic of human existence that, like any rhetorical doctrine, depends for its effectiveness on persuasion rather than truth?”
political Leo
Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 1930 in Zuckert,
Postmodern Platos at p. 108: “when the political is threatened,
the seriousness of life is threatened. The affirmation of the political is in
the last analysis nothing other than the affirmation of the moral.”
politics [SR/20] Rosen, interpreting
and explaining Kant’s ideas on politics, science and morality. Politics is
motivated by natural inclination, which seeks self-interest and the
gratification of the passions. As a consequence, whereas it might be said, or
rather hoped, that political progress tends toward a conjunction with morality,
we can never know this. On the other hand, politics cannot be simply identical
with natural science, since it is clearly a matter of prudential calculation or
‘cleverness’ (Klugheit) and therefore concerns the contingent
particulars of everyday life. Otherwise stated, if politics were determined by
nature, it would be impossible to speak of freedom or responsibility. There
would be no basis for hope.
postmodernism [SR/178] re: a statement by Lyotard: “it reminds us in a polite but firm manner that too much of the Anglo-Saxon celebration of postmodernism reduces politics to the question of who will be the next president of the Modern Language Association.”
postmodernism [SR/3] “the cluster of contemporary movements which we are now accustomed to call ‘postmodernism,’ although they understand themselves as an attack on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, are in fact a continuation of that Enlightenment.”
postmodernism [SR/47] “Contemporary philosophy thus presents us with the mad spectacle of a sick man consulting two surgeons, each of whom insists that to be cured, he must be hacked to pieces.” –re postmodernism
postmodernism [SR/5] “to reason is to interpret, because reason is itself an interpretation.”
power [Rosen, Stanley/HP/188] quoting Michael Foucault: “we can formulate the traditional question of political philosophy in the following terms: how is the discourse of truth, or quite simply, philosophy as that discourse which par excellence is concerned with truth, able to fix limits to the rights of power?...My problem is rather this: what rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth?” – Rosen describing Foucault: : “Discourses of truth are produced by power. More specifically, any society is permeated by relations of power, which are themselves established by, and function as, the production of discourses of truth. --- and again quoting Foucault: “We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.”
power [RP/106] “He [Phaedrus] felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for control of individuals in the service of these functions.”
power Thomas Hobbes and universal essence is that all have “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” [Leviathan quoted in GT/27]
quality [RP/185] “But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!”
quality [RP/224] “Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experience.” [[Might these “previous” experiences include inherited from years of evolution and genetic transportation? From whence comes the idea, notion, thought, compulsion, of maternal love to the point even of self-sacrifice even to death?] ---In a sense, it’s the student’s choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.”
rational autonomy [John
Rawls /PL/72] this is shown in persons
exercising their capacity to form, to revise, and to pursue a conception of the
good, and to deliberate in accordance with it. It is shown also in their
capacity to enter into an agreement with others (when subject to reasonable
constraints).
rational discussion of problems of value [HA/89] Albert referring to Max Weber: "His investigations...make it clear that he regarded the function of a rational discussion of problems of value to be the clarification of all the logical and factual relationships involved, as well as the disclosure of the fundamental normative positions that act as a starting points in deciding such questions. But the decision to adopt one of these positions over another, and therefore the concrete decision that resulted in the given practical situation, must be left by science to the agent."
reasonable [John
Rawls /JF/35] “to some degree all our concepts, and not only our moral and
political concepts, are vague and subject to hard cases. This indeterminacy
means that we thus must rely on judgment
and interpretation (and on judgments about interpretations) within some range
(and not sharply specifiable) where reasonable persons may differ.”
reflection [DY/68] "If we are to add norm changing to our repertoire of cultural skills and capabilities, we ought to have at least a rudimentary understanding of where particular norms come from and what is involved in changing them."
relativism [SR/184} “We must therefore observe, however moderately, that by the tenets of his own doctrine, [Richard] Rorty could have no evidence and no ‘arguments’ in the current Anglo-Saxon sense with which to persuade us that there is nothing ‘out there.’”
religion and politics [GT/39] “Numberless generations in all
parts of the globe have assumed that people can be properly related to one
another only if they are properly related to the divine. We must ask whether
this is so.” – contrasts with humanism which means “the belief that human
powers are adequate for achieving all reasonable human ends; religion has
little, if any, role to play.” [[GT indicate that most intellectuals in
religion [HA/8] "I have no sympathy for contemporary definitions of totalitarianism which treats secular political religions and the institutional structures which bear their stamp is forms of decadence to be sharply marked off from the political-religious traditions of the Christian West; for history is full of totalitarian excesses committed in the name of Christianity, right up until the most recent times. Rather, the important thing is that seen from certain structural view-points, Catholicism, Calvinism, Communism, and Fascism belong together, not because all these historically very complex phenomena are in every respect the same in nature or even in value, but because in all of them the extreme opposite of the neutrality posited by analytical thought was or is it were; blind partisanship, obedient faith, incorrigible commitment."
rights Ralph Ellis, 1998, "Some people hastily assume that it is easy to define a clear criterion for whether and in what cases rights should be infringed, simply by saying that everyone has the right to do whatever we want as long as we refrain from harming others. This is often expressed in the formula, 'Your freedom to move your fist ends where my face begins.' But the problem with this simplistic view is that in a society where people are constantly affected by the actions of others (as all societies are), almost everything we do harms someone. ... A genuinely rights-based approach must therefore qualify its criterion for limiting rights and freedoms in some way -- for example, by saying not that my freedom ends where its exercise harms someone, but rather where it harms someone in a particular way in which the person has a right not to be harmed." (e.g., harmed when someone takes our job due to better work but no right to expect competitors not to harm us by taking our jobs but do have a right to expect people's fists not to interfere with our health by punching us)
rights [MR/38] "Rights emerge from the biological nature and spiritual needs of humanity. That which is natural and that which is biological are melded together." -- -- "In a political sense, rights are more than individualistic protections. They are the necessary social understanding to ensure that all people in the first instance are accorded that set of protections that distinguishes the human from the non-human." -- -- "Our genetic histories are statements of our dependencies and interdependencies. It is understood that individualism begins with a person's death, not his or her birth. Then we can claim to be individuals."
rule of law [MR/39] "The rule of law as a boundary said or meant to compromise the past, present, and future, with greater weight given to past understandings except where shifts in underlying social, economic, and legal struggles occur." -- -- "the rule of law as the politics of the past laid on the present and future. It's hallowed nature may be no more than the product of a power grab, as for example, Chief Justice John Marshall's decision that the Supreme Court had the power to declare Congressional acts unconstitutional." -- -- "Law can never be value neutral, for neither justice nor in justice is value neutral. It is humanly constructed out of interest, purpose, consequence, and affections."
science Ralph Ellis, 1998, p. 184: "That science is a game of uncertainties is well known by scientists and intellectuals of whatever persuasion, though dimly understood by the general public. The hypothesis that A causes B predicts that A and B would be observed to correlate 'significantly' in a well-controlled study, but only after we have decided what level of uncertainty we are willing to live with and what methods of measurement we are willing to accept. The margins for error thus chosen are value driven. A correlation strong enough to motivate legislators to adopt a social welfare policy may not be strong enough tot support a physical theory on the basis of which nuclear plants will operate."
scientific method [RP/101] “The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. Nut historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of fats, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.”
self [CS/63] "The abstract intellectualism of the Cartesian principle is dismantled on the way to its refiguration into 'I choose, therefore I am.'"
self [SB/7] “In the
final analysis, conceptions of self, reason and society and visions of ethics
and politics are inseparable.”
self-deception Ralph Ellis, 1998, p. 47: "It is true that there is always the possibility of self-deception. However,...the probability of self-deception is usually greater, at least for most mature adults, with unconsidered and unreflective beliefs and feelings than with considered and reflective ones."
self-interest [DY/55] refers to "enlightened self-interest -- the notion that one can do well by doing good."
self-perception Tim O'Brien. Going After Cacciato.1975: "Why not a smooth, orderly arc from war to peace? These were the questions and the answers could come only from hard observation. Doc was right about that. He was right, too, that observation requires inward-looking, a study of the very machinery of observation -- the mirrors and filters and wiring and circuits of the observing instrument."
social control
[DK/104]– “The metaphor by which science defines itself serves as the lens
through which it views and interprets reality. To a significant degree our
reality as a global society has come to be defined by the lens that science
wears. A science that embraces the machine or clockwork as its model sees a
world that is deterministic and composed of static and discrete elements..” ---
“This leads to the assumption of a nondemocratic
hierarchy of control dictated by predetermined and unchanging genetic
structures that deny life’s consciousness, intelligence, freedom to choose, and
capacity for intentional cooperation – which are among life’s more important
defining features.” --- referring to the
metaphor of “the self-organizing living organism”: “I was convinced that [this]
insight into life’s incredible capacity to self-organize in ways that
maintaining the integrity of both the individual and the whole holds a critical
key to resolving humanity’s deepening economic and social crises.”
social control
Simon and Garfinkle , song The Sound of Silence:
“Fools!” said I, “You do not know silence like a cancer grows.” --- “And the people bowed and prayed to the
neon god they made. And the sign flashed out its warning. In the words that it
was forming, and the signs said “the words of the prophets are written on the
subway walls and tenement halls.” And whispered in the sounds of silence.”
social science
state [WC/152] "today the territorial/security state forms in the space of democratic liberation and imprisonment. Yet deliberates because it organizes democracy democratic compatibility through electoral institutions. It imprisons because it confines and conceals democratic energies flying over and through its dikes. The confinement of democracy to the territorial state – to a (paradoxical) sovereign place where (ambiguous) understandings (dis)organize the common life-consolidates and exacerbates pressures to exclusive nationality. Every protean nation demands a state, and every state strives to become a nation-often in the name of territorial democracy.”
statesman: [John Rawls /LP] p. 97 “The ideal of the statesman is suggested by the saying: the politician looks to the next election, the statesman to the next generation. It is the task of the student of philosophy to articulate and express the permanent conditions and the real interests of a well-ordered society. It is the task of the statesman however, to discern these conditions and interests in practice.” –must be selfless: “The statesman must get it right, or nearly so, and then hold fast from this vantage.”
Strauss [SR/107] Strauss was one of the most hated men in the English-speaking academic world - -- Kojčve was highly respected in France although , like Strauss, highly eccentric – also left-wing – Strauss spoke for the “detested ‘conservatives’” [now seen as linked to the neocons who have been on the ascendancy]- --Strauss preached a message of spiritual aristocracy to a nation obsessed with egalitarianism – he counseled prudence and – apparently – a return to the past --- he was an extraordinary scholar who knew so much more than his colleagues that they regarded him as incompetent --- question of role of philosopher and the state [i.e., why philosophers cannot be kings and kings philosophers] Strauss argued that political philosophy has to convince the city that philosophers are not atheists and that they do not profane all that the city regards as sacred, that they are good citizens, and even the best of citizens – Rosen argues that both Kojčve and Strauss make it evident that political philosophy is the public appearance of philosophy, -- that genuine philosophy cannot in the nature of things make a public appearance but must always present itself in an accommodated form – Strauss saw a tension between the true interests of the philosopher and those of the city – Strauss, if not an outright opponent of the Enlightenment, gives us no reason to believe that the historical – and hence the political – resolution of the conflict between philosophy and politics will ever occur – but Strauss is a son of the enlightenment in that public advocacy of philosophical accommodation to the city is already a rejection of philosophical accommodation to the city – for Kojčve and Strauss political philosophy is philosophical propaganda – Enlightenment is propaganda because it belittles its opponent – religion – and exaggerates its own power, or is carried away by the charm of scientific and technical competence – lowers the standards of morality or spiritual refinement in the pursuit of popular success
taxes [NM/188]nothing can be more mundane than taxes, but they provide a perfect setting for constant moral argument and possible moral
teaching [GK/35] “While Socrates’ message can be analyzed and summarized … and thus learned by rote, it will not be learned until the individual examines it and decides on its validity by the light of his own reason.”
text and meaning Hans-Georg
Gadamer as paraphrased by Catherine Zuckert in Postmodern Platos,
1996 at p./ 90: “To learn from an historical work we have to ask not simply
about the meaning of the text in itself but about its meaning for us.”
theory [SR/132] “A philosophical theory can no more certify itself than can a scientific theory. Both are confirmed or invalidated with reference to something else. (I am here … taking “theory” in the modern sense of a conceptual construction.).
theory [SR/132] A philosophical theory can no more certify itself than can a scientific theory. Both are confirmed or invalidated with reference to something else. [taking theory in the modern sense of conceptual construction]
thinking [GT/168] “…if we sink unprotestingly into doubt and indifference regarding the ends of power, those ends are likely to be set by the irresponsible and insensitive.”
thinking [GT/17] “…however disputable the conclusions of thought may b, we cannot live as human beings without them. Ideas enable us to live by understanding rather than by instinct.”
thinking [GT/17] “Regardless of any conclusions that are reached, thinking in itself helps us gain a humanity not available in any other way. We are thinking beings, and even through inconclusive thinking, we can gain access to our humanity. “ --- “…questioning and reflecting enable one to realize one’s own being in its freedom and distinctness.”
thinking [GT/18] “Thinking is not only the realization of the self through denial and doubt, but also a way of gathering together and tentatively defining the self. To reflect on a problem of philosophical scope is to call your strongest impressions and convictions into consciousness, to relate them to one another, and to test them. It is to think back on all you have read and experienced, trying to fathom its significance. Thinking is a summoning of the self. Hence the subjective character of philosophical thought, which makes it unverifiable, is not altogether a drawback. It may deprive philosophy of the universally compelling force of scientific law, but it reflects its personal nature. Struggling with and living with doubt has a role in the formation of individual identity.”
thinking [GT/21] “…we humans are thinking beings. Only through thought do we affirm our rationality, our freedom, and our loyalty to being. Hence, if we learn to consider questions with clarity and determination and an open mind, we learn something that is irreducible to objective answers – the wisdom and poise of human uncertainty.”
thinking [GT/215] “…anyone who wishes to think and understand would do well to approach middle positions with caution. They encourage us to quit thinking, under the assumption that the question is settles.” --- at p. 216: “Political moderates often assume that human beings are mediocre and life prosaic. The ideal of human glory, expressed for example i the Greek conception of the gods as immortal and powerful human beings, is lost. The potentialities of life come to be identified with the most uninspiring actualities. Revolutionaries refuse to acquiesce in any such identification; they reassert the possibility of splendor.”
thinking [GT/242-243] “Kant and Kierkegaard alike suggest that wisdom is not gained by answering questions once and for all but in establishing a thoughtful and continuing relationship to questions. They suggest that wisdom is a thinking state. But to think is to b uncertain; likewise, to entertain antinomies or paradoxes is to be uncertain. We are led in this way to the idea that wisdom lies in uncertainty. To acknowledge this and to maintain a stance not of absolute assurance but of inquiring openness is what I mean by ‘human uncertainty.’”
thinking [GT/247] “No human example of the life of inquiry or of the faith on which inquiry rests, however, is more instructive that that of …Socrates, the homely, amiable, and disturbingly intelligent Athenian who was put to death on account of his uncompromising pursuit of rational inquiry.”
thinking [MR/170] Raskin argues that words, things, subjective observations, and judgments are mixed, fit together and affect our views of reality. “ The framework of higher education and inquiry allows for the continued correction through rationality of our understanding of natural and social reality, including our epistemological construction of both."
thinking Plato, Apology at p. 55 of C.D.C. Reeves’ The Trials of Socrates. Ed. in 2002. “…it’s the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day, and the other things you’ve heard me discussing and examining myself and others about, on the grounds that the unexamined life isn’t worth living for a human being ….
thinking Plato, Euthyphro at p. 15 of C.D.C. Reeves’ The Trials of Socrates. Ed. in 2002.--- –“EUTHYPHRO: All right, I’d say that the pious is what al the gods love, and its opposite, what all the gods hate, is the impious. --- SOCRATES: Then aren’t we going to examine that n turn, Euthyphro, to see whether what we said is true? Or are we going to let it alone and accept it from ourselves and from others just as it stands? And if someone merely asserts that something is so, are we going to concede that it’s so? Or are we going to examine what the speaker says?”
tolerance [GT/190] ‘[Tolerance] rests on a compelling fact – that there can be no genuine life and no true relationships if there is no tolerance. If people have to think and act in conformity with official, or even with merely social, requirements, then everything is falsified. Tolerance thus is one of the primary requisites of life….There must be tolerance for beliefs we consider erroneous and actions we deem immoral. Tolerance must extend far enough to be dangerous. Otherwise it is a mere formality, a courtesy I extend to those who think and act on the whole as I do, and not a policy that accepts important disagreements and differences and does this in an effort to make room for abounding life and serious communication.
toleration Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously,
195: “I know of no genuine evidence to the effect that tolerating some civil
disobedience, out of respect for the moral position of its authors, will
increase such disobedience, let alone crime in general.”
tradition Roger Paden summarizing Alasdair MacIntyre: quoted by Ralph Ellis, 1998, p.36: "Not only does tradition provide the moral standpoint from which various practices and possible lives can be criticized, but, MacIntyre claims, it also shapes our existence. It is through participation in our tradition that our lives gain content....Tradition gives our lives meaning and purpose....MacIntyre also wants to avoid the foundationalism of humanistic ethical theories....Ethical arguments will involve appeals to reasonable interpretations of our tradition. An action or project which cannot be justified on any reasonable interpretation of our tradition can be rejected as unethical. (Paden 1987, 135-36)
truth [search for the transcendental, essential truth] Soren Kierkegaard: “The paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity….The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.”
truth and power [SR/191] Foucault seems to have understood that truth is by its nature repressive – of falsehood, ignorance, and superstition.
truth or control [RP/106] “He [Phaedrus] felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for control of individuals in the service of these functions.”
truth Jüergen
Habermas quoted by Richard Bernstein in “An allegory of Modernity/Postmodernity: Habermas and Derrida” in Working Through
Derrida ed. by Gary Madison, 1993: at p. 211: “Nietzsche’s critique consume
the critical impulse itself.” – “If thought can no longer operate in the realms
of truth and validity claims, then analysis and critique lose their meaning.”
truth [HA/121] "as is now well known, and convictions that in no way correspond to reality -- the inadequacy of which is readily apparent with critical observer -- can prove extraordinarily stable if they are supported strongly enough by the society. correspondence to reality can be extensively replaced by social anchoring."-------- "in certain circumstances, then, an emotionally rooted desire for certainty can create a situation in which the belief system that helps individuals orient themselves in reality that can take on the character of a defense network against threatening information, so that the protective function overshadows the theoretical function of orientation in the world. We have here a situation-developed in classical epistemology into a conception of rationality of a certain sort-in which the drive for certainty overcomes the search for truth. The system thus becomes a close one, so that information selection is increasingly oriented toward system-confirming, rather than merely system-relevant, information. Instead of paying attention to information that cannot be integrated into the system and seeking alternatives, people tend to collect confirming information, opened by this course to minimize undesirable cognitive dissonance. If by chance prima facie contradictory information is encountered, the inclination is to reinterpret it appropriately and to rework it into system-confirming ways-applying, in short, immunization strategies that are directed toward maintaining the belief system, regardless of the epistemological costs of such procedures. Under some circumstances people are even prepared to sacrifice logic in order to keep beliefs safe from harm; in such decisions the authoritarian attitude of the believer towards certain institutionally defined authority figures sometimes plays a considerable role."
truth [GT/224] If truth and right really do change in the course of history, then there are no fixed points in relation to which life can be organized and guided. … And not only right and wrong, bur reality itself dissolves and is swept away in the flux of events. You cannot hold to ‘human nature’ or to any other rock. Indeed, if you fully pursue the idea that all basic principles change in the course of history, you will find that ideas itself escaping like water through your fingers, for it too must change in the course of time.
truth [HA/179] "The claim to convey truth without any such objectification taking place presumably rests on a misunderstanding of the activity of human language, which is distinguished from the means of communication of animals why exactly this capacity represent facts, and, beyond that, to allow argumentation."
truth [SR/138] “The twentieth-century rebellion against the scientific truth – and the consequent popularity of doctrines of historicism and linguistic conventionalism, whether derived from Nietzsche or Wittengenstein – is thus a rebellion against the Enlightenment, and it comes dangerously close to being a rebellion against truth. Whatever was intended by the leaders of this rebellion, there can be no doubt that the thesis that art is worth more than the truth is the dominant principle of our time. We have protected ourselves against rationalism not be prudent moderation in its use but by a reckless embrace of recklessness, or the rejection of rationalism i favor of the imagination.”
truth HA/xvi] “However, there is no need to give up the idea of truth and the possibility of approaching truth by the method of science. Neither skepticism nor any kind of relativism should have a claim on us. Those who abandoned the fusion of truth and certainty that is usual in classical thinking have no reason to surrender to skeptical or relativistic views, as they are fashionable today even in analytic philosophy. By no means do we need to choose between a consistent empiricism with relativistic and skeptical consequences on the one hand and a transcendentalist dogmatism on the other.”
universal values [MR/151] "In other words, respect for other cultures does not mean blind acceptance of them and their own tendencies, which may contain strong doses of domination and oppression, such as crude or refined modes of domination women have faced virtually every culture and religion. Instead, within each culture it is necessary to find those elements of advocacy and confrontation the champion human liberation but may have been suppressed. It is absurd to think that feelings of liberation are not universally found, just as it is foolish to believe that Western civilization is an immaculate conception that needs no correction."
universities [MR/167] "Some wanted the University to be relevant to the marginalized in society, and they wanted social sciences that would transform class, race, and gender inequalities."
universities [MR/170] Raskin argues that words, things, subjective observations, and judgments are mixed, fit together and affect our views of reality. “ The framework of higher education and inquiry allows for the continued correction through rationality of our understanding of natural and social reality, including our epistemological construction of both."
university [MR/175] "It is entirely compatible with free inquiry to suggest that there should be an agenda of concern to create human dignity. The relationship between is, ought, and the necessary for dignity and decency for the individual and the community must be a fundamental concern and component of a university in a democratic society."
university [MR/179] "the compartmentalization of facts and values can be eliminated as the attempt to bring back a linkage between moral choices and scientific objectivity. This question should be debated in every aspect of university life, especially in the various disciplines."
university [RP/132] “ The legal corporation called a university cannot teach or generate new knowledge – “The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.”
value [RP/255] “Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It’s the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived.”
values and fact [MR/179] "The compartmentalization of facts and values can be eliminated as the attempt to bring back a linkage between moral choices and scientific objectivity. This question should be debated in every aspect of university life, especially in the various disciplines."
values [CS/93] "Values become values only when they are taken as being valuable within the concrete context of everyday life. Like fact, values are constituted and defined against the backdrop of communalized interpretive practices."
well-ordered society [John Rawls /LP] p. 108 “I believe that the causes of the wealth of a people and the forms it takes lie in their political culture and in the religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that support the basic structure of their political and social institutions, as well as in the industriousness and cooperative talents of its members, all supported by their political virtues [note use of the term virtues here]. I would further conjecture that there is not society anywhere in the world – except for marginal cases – with resources so scarce that it could not, were it reasonable and rationally organized and governed, become well-ordered. Historical examples seem to indicate that resource-poor countries may do very well (e.g., Japan )while resource-rich countries may have serious difficulties (e.g., Argentina).The crucial elements that make the difference are the political culture, the political virtues and civic society of the country, its members’ probity and industriousness, their capacity for innovation, and much else.”
wisdom [GT/242-243] "Kant and Kierkegaard alike thus suggest that wisdom is not gained by answering questions once and for all but in establishing a thoughtful and continuing relationship to questions."