bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative
Authors: Kaag John
Published: September 2014

This concluding chapter surveys the ground covered in the book, noting how it tries to understand the imagination through three intellectual periods: 18th century idealism, 19th century pragmatism, and 20th century cognitive neuroscience. Additionally, the chapter explores the relationship between Dewey and Peirce and concludes with a reflection on Thoreau's understanding of the imagination as serving as a bridge between thoughtful human action and the natural world.
Community
Authors: Longenecker Steve
Published: September 2014

This chapter describes Gettysburg’s pursuit of material gain, improvement, and religious growth from its founding until the antebellum period. The most noteworthy aspect of the town’s economy was a distant-market carriage trade. The chapter also surveys the maturation of religious institutions in Gettysburg, including the Lutheran Theological Seminary. With African Americans, non-English worship, non-Protestants, and small, dissenting, and nonconformist fellowships (Dunkers and Dissenting Presbyterians), the religious community was diverse. Finally, Gettysburg’s location along the border of slavery and its African American population made race relations tense. The chapter describes the local Underground Railroad and Thaddeus Stevens’s antislavery activities. Thus, Gettysburg and the surrounding Border North possessed an interesting mix of ethnicity, religion, and race that was unusually diverse and modern for small town and rural America.
Abovean and the Birth of the Native
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

This chapter first takes up the case of Khachatur Abovean (1809-1848), considered by the Armenian nationalistic discourse to be not only the “father” of modern literature, but also the herald and architect of modern language itself. Behind the figure of Abovean what is at stake here is the auto-ethnographic project. Through a reading of the preface of the novel The Wounds of Armenia, the chapter thus describes the intermediary moment of the nation-inventing process. Abovean's novel was the birth certificate for the “native,” the creature of the philologist, and the central figure of nationalist discourse. The second part of the chapter deals with the properly ethnographic elaboration of the program introduced by Abovean. The antiquity of “popular beliefs” is at the center of the philologists’ and folklorists’ investigations.
Orientalism and Neo-Archeology
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

This chapter takes another step into the past, toward the moment that inaugurated the national imagination and the beginnings of philology. The intent is here to show that the national imagination made its debut in the 1810s under the mantle of archeology, by forcibly establishing the necessity for a voyage toward the self. The national imagination is described in the context of orientalism, an orientalism that remains unintelligible without taking into account its realization in the midst of the ethnographic nations, as well as the phenomenon of “autoscopic mimicry” and the figure of the native, i.e. both the “orientalization” of the gaze (as described by Edward Said and Stathis Gourgouris) and the historicization of the object (as described by Michel Foucault). Because the American reception of Said's Orientalism has never explicitly highlighted its treatment of philology and never read it as a critique of philology, the chapter also engages in a rewriting of this critique.
The Other Scene of Representation
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

Through an analysis of Daniel Varuzhan's poem “To the Ashes of Cilicia” (the poem dedicated to the victims of the pogrom of Adana in 1909), this chapter discusses the connection between the system of aesthetic nationalism described in the previous chapters and art as a space of mourning. The poem is not a testimony, it does not aim to bear witness for the facts. It organizes within itself a staging of testimony. Hence it is testimony that needs to be discussed, as a gesture and as a genre. The recent theories of testimony are summoned here in order to be examined and criticized within the horizon of the catastrophe.
Erection and Self-Sacrifice
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

Beginning with the reading of one poem in Daniel Varuzahn's 1912 collection, Pagan Songs, this chapter dwells on the alleged oldest function of myth, as reinvented by the Moderns. They invented, it says, its ancient and immemorial character, the very idea of a foundational fiction. This modern “myth” of myth has been carefully analyzed by Jean-Luc Nancy in his book The Inoperative Community, in relation to Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology. The chapter shows that Varuzhan's paganism needs to be read in that context. It coincides at every point with the general thinking of myth in the modern age. This juxtaposition also invites to a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of orientalism, and allows us to understand the extent to which orientalist philology and all its features (historicity, privilege accorded to literature, centrality of the figure of the native) was saturated by the myth of the mytho-poetic. Finally the chapter offers a new account of the Romantic project of aestheticization for “nationalizing” the nation, by interpreting the nature of art as a “transubstantiation,” understood as the sublation of religion by art.
A Report on the Recent “Dig” into Royce’s MSS in the Harvard Archives
Authors: Oppenheim Frank M. , Dawn Aberg S.J. , Kaag John J.
Published: September 2014

Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag investigated the papers of Josiah Royce at the Harvard University Archives between July 2008 and September 2009. The goal of this project was to create a Comprehensive Index of these writings, which would provide an indispensable basis for organizing a critical edition of Royce's writings. The present report offers a description of the process and outcomes of this project under the following headings: (1) Background, (2) Digging, (3) Finds, and (4) Results: First Fruits from the Dig.
Individuals Ain’t Ones
Authors: Anderson Douglas R.
Published: September 2014

In this essay I explore Royce's use of the term “individual.” I argue that, following the inspiration of Charles Peirce, Royce develops a notion of the individual that involves a community. That is, each individual is constituted by a many-in-one. The uniqueness of individuals has to do not with fixed, specific traits, but with the overall process or career through which a person lives. I then suggest that Royce's conception of the individual has interesting consequences for our practices in the present—from legal considerations of punishment and ownership to simple human interactions in the everyday world.
Josiah Royce and the Redemption of American Individualism
Authors: Mullin Richard P.
Published: September 2014

According to Royce, the autonomous self is not something given, but rather, a task to be accomplished. The isolated human being is an arena of many opposing natural and social forces and lacks both autonomy and individuality. We achieve our selfhood through our social environment by imitation, and thereby develop the skills necessary to assert our individual autonomy. But to become more than a chaos of conflicting desires, we need loyalty to a cause that serves to integrate and justify our choices and behavior. Loyalty to a cause presents a particular problem for Americans, because from the beginning we have glorified the independent individual. Royce proposes a Doctrine of Life, derived from Christian thought, but not limited to it, which enables each individual to overcome isolation and achieve autonomous individuality through loyalty to the Great Community of Humankind.
Royce’s Relevance for Intrafaith Dialogue
Authors: Oppenheim Frank M. , Dawn Aberg S.J. , Kaag John J.
Published: September 2014

An awareness is slowly growing that to attain world peace and security, world health, and basic human rights, we must promote a unity of spirit and an effective cooperation among the world's religions. The term “intra-faith” indicates the interpersonal relations between members of the world religions. This chapter investigates how several key aspects of Royce's philosophy—including his notions of the unity of spirit, the invisible church, his ethics and metaphysics, and his attention to the social arts of interpersonal relationships—may provide the basis to promote intra-faith dialogue.
Necessary Error
Authors: Barnette Kara
Published: September 2014

This chapter argues that Josiah Royce's concept of error can be a fruitful addition to contemporary accounts of feminist epistemology. In particular, it contends that Royce's concept of error can illuminate the problems that arise when multiple individuals who have different forms of epistemic privilege give conflicting accounts of an incident. Moreover, this chapter claims that Royce's account of communal inquiry provides us with a potential basis for developing error sensitivity within communities. In order to illustrate these claims, this chapter draws upon the work of Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, and other feminist theorists to highlight how epistemologically privileged accounts can come into conflict in addition examining how Royce's account of error develops through The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, The Problem of Christianity, and “Error and Truth.”
Communities in Pursuit of Community
Authors: Mahowald Mary B.
Published: September 2014

Royce's mature concept of community provides the basis for an idealistic as well as pragmatic account of the topic. “Community” as end is an ideal towards which the genuineness of “communities” can be assessed: they are means to achievement of an ideal of mutual flourishing, based on each individual's and each community's egalitarian mix of abilities, disabilities and capabilities. Every genuine community pursues a distinct cause that is conducive to, although as yet not identical with, the ideal of Community. The ideal is best approximated through employment of the diverse standpoints of each (genuine) community, giving priority to the standpoints of those who are nondominant in society, who are otherwise likely to be ignored or underrepresented. This strategy is applied to the apparently conflicting positions of communities that advocate for people with disabilities and those that support prenatal testing for disability.
Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past
Authors: Ponzanesi Sandra
Published: September 2014

The promise of exotic and sensuous experiences lured European men away to the colonies. The colonies were also seen as a space of sexual liberation for people who did not fit European sexual norms. Within Europe, the responses to sexual dissidence have been far more diverse than acknowledged till now. In the case of Italy, the belated colonial experience in Eastern Africa coincided with fascist propaganda that cultivated a model of masculine virility. Yet the cult of the exposed healthy and athletic body harboured some contradictions.
The chapter analyses the colonial response to same-sex relationships in the colonies, including the question of racial difference. A consideration of the racial and sexual politics in colonial East Africa will also be linked to contemporary theorizations of sex tourism, before the essay closes with an evaluation of how the above analyses might help reshape Queer Theory and an imaginary of Europe.
Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American “Others”
Authors: Cairns Lucille
Published: September 2014

This chapter focuses on a key text by the French pioneer of queer studies, Marie-Hélène Bourcier: Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2 (2005). Bourcier analyses the role of one central European institution, the French Republican state, in relation to nation-state rights of sexual and other marginalized groups. She arraigns the resistance of L’Université française to “imported” intellectual paradigms such as cultural studies and queer. She interrogates the role of the openly gay politician Delanoë (dubbed the ‘homo republicanus’). Further, she links contemporary French xenophobia and Republican sexual democracy, and exposes the clash between French feminist politics and queer. Bourcier excoriates Republican universalism, but my own critique of her multiple critiques will explore the dangers of another form of universalism, viz. a conceptual universalism that posits “Queer” as the correct theory of politics.
Sick Man of Transl-Asia
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: September 2014

This chapter proposes that Bruce Lee’s celluloid cinematic interventions ought to be approached as texts and contexts of cultural translation. However, to say this, a rather twisted or indeed queer notion of translation needs to be established. Cultural translation is not to simply refer to translation in a linguistic or hermeneutic sense. Through a reading of Rey Chow’s work on the complexity of representations in cultural encounters (simulated or otherwise; mutual, reciprocal or asymptotic), this chapter assesses the complex event of the entrance of the dragon into Western/global/ized culture; an entrance which had a tangible impact on erstwhile notions of Europe, Masculinity and (European) Philosophy as much as its indubitable influence on mainstream Euro-American (indeed, global) popular culture.
Via Negativa and the Imaginal Configuring of God
Authors: Wolfson Elliot R.
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines the thesis that the salient feature of modern Jewish thought is the dialogical imagination, an act of theopoiesis centered on the figural iconization of the invisible deity in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms. The emphasis on the dialogical, which proceeds from Hermann Cohen's logical principle of correlation, bears the risk that what should not be subject to imaginary representation invariably will be so represented, even in the guise of the nonrepresentable. Transcendence, which is a property of the uniqueness (Einzigkeit) as opposed to the unity (Einheit) of God, signifies the utter dissimilarity and incommensurability of the divine; inescapably, however, the transcendent becomes immanent to thinking insofar as there is no way to think the unthinkable that does not encroach on its unthinkability. The infinitude of transcendence is unknowable, not because there is some hidden essence that cannot be known, but because transcendence is expressive of the continuous manifestations of finitude by which the unlimited is delimited. The chasm between infinite and finite is narrowed to the extent that the transcendent is immanent, which is necessitated by the fact that God serves as an ethical ideal that imposes a mutual obligation on divine and human through the mediation of the world. Moreover, to generate the personification of transcendence, which is required by Cohen's own notion of divine forgiveness and goodness, the archetype, the originary-image whence all images originate, would have to be conceived itself imagistically. Like Cohen, Rosenzweig and Buber promote a dialogical thinking that is rooted in the principle of correlation that preserves the separate identities of God, human, and world. But they, too, acquiesce inevitably to the anthropocentric personification of transcendence.
Immanent Atheology and the Trace of Transcendence
Authors: Wolfson Elliot R.
Published: September 2014

This chapter investigates the apophatic by turning to the role of immanence and transcendence in the thought of Edith Wyschogrod. More specifically, my analysis charts the ways in which Wyschogrod offers a deconstructive Jewish philosophy that may be called call, borrowing her own taxonomy, an immanent a/theology. What drives her post-phenomenological and post-structural analyses is her philosophical grappling with her Jewishness. This is not to parochialize her thought; on the contrary, it seems to me that, in the spirit of Levinas, she saw the particular as the only feasible way to implement the universal without reducing the other to the identity of the same. Contra Levinas, however, she did not seek a synthesis of Jewish revelation and Greek thought. On balance, I would proffer that her approach is characterized better by Derrida's appropriation of Joyce's hybrid expressions “Jewgreek” or “Greekjew.” By her own admission, Wyschogrod notes that her thinking sways between efforts to overcome manifestations of the negative and claims about its irrevocability, and that an especially important influence haunting her project is Hegel's struggle with the negative. Hegel's dialectic is such that every presence becomes what it is by negating what it is not, and hence every negation brings some presence in its wake. What is unthinkable for Hegel is the dialectical overcoming of the dialectic that results in the negation of the Absolute, a negation so profound that it generates an absolute difference—the Derridean différance—in which all difference is annihilated, the pure void, neither something nor nothing, in which all presence is eradicated. The undoing of undoing occasions a negative that is no longer subject to negation, since its own negativity would have been positively negated, whence it follows that the binary opposition of being and nonbeing is dismantled and primacy no longer given to the positive or to the negative. Wyschogrod thus distinguishes her understanding of transcendence from that of Levinas: the otherwise than being becomes the totality of beings that can never be conceptualized as a knowable plenum. At best, then, Wyschogrod, like Deleuze, can affirm an immanent theory of ethics and desire.
Foucault and Hayek: Republican Law and Liberal Civil Society
Authors: Vatter Miguel
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Vatter discusses Foucault’s claim that the neoliberal project consists in the introduction of legal principles into the economic order. Vatter offers an analysis of the neoliberal jurisprudence of Hayek and its role in his economic thinking. Whereas Hayek’s jurisprudence emphasizes “judge-made law,” which no longer carries any inherent reference to republican principles of constitutionalism, Vatter argues that Foucault’s critique of the neoliberal “economic rule of law” is premised on his adoption of a republican conception of freedom as the constituent power of law-making belonging to a people that is irreducible to the conduct of a population.
Parrhesia between East and West: Foucault and Dissidence
Authors: Forti Simona
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Forti situates Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia, the activity of speaking the truth to power, in relation to Foucault’s involvement, in the late 1970s, on behalf of the Polish Solidarność movement and of the Czech Charta 77 dissidence movement. Foucault’s often remarked advocacy of human rights is placed in the context of Jan Patocka’s theory of resistance, which is inspired by a return to the Platonic motif of a “care of the soul.” Forti argues that such care is anti-pastoral in its intentions, because by separating the soul from the body, it attempts to counteract the reasoning of the Grand Inquisitor, according to which what human beings want is not freedom and rebellion, but satisfaction of material necessities and the security of body and life.
Sovereign Consumption
Authors: Bertellini Giorgio
Published: September 2014

Italian-produced films found a vast audience in New York City theaters, encompassing motives of emotional longing and diasporic nationalism among immigrant spectators well into the 1920s. The essay investigates whether and how 1920s Italian American film culture resonated with assertive transnational connections. In particular, it looks at how the largest Italian American newspaper, Il Progresso Italo Americano, articulated self-assured ideas of cultural dialogue and exchange through film reviews, reports about film reception and stars, and advertisements for new films or talent agencies. The evidence Il Progresso provides reveals a dense circuit of newsmaking and popular response, indeed a culture of film consumption, that positioned Italy and America not as opposed, but in dialogue with one another. For an emigrant community long accustomed to endure racial and cultural prejudice and perceived to be strenuously attached to European customs and lifestyles, the 1920s saw the emergence of a geocultural confidence that impacted ideas and practices of film consumption turning manifest and inescapable affiliation into choice.
Italian Americans, Consumerism, and the Cold War in Transnational Perspective
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: September 2014

The chapter shows that the appreciation of so many Italian Americans for the material rewards that American liberalism had delivered to them was used as a transnational Cold War weapon—a means to convince Italians in Italy to choose the promise of American consumerism over communism in a crucial political moment in which the “homeland” was at the forefront of the clash between the two worlds. The chapter emphasizes how public campaigns like the mass letters and donations for Italian war relief that Italian Americans sent to their relatives in Italy to convince them to vote for anticommunist parties in the watershed elections of 1948 had in fact a double purpose: one international, influencing the self-determination of Italians in Italy and keeping the country in the U.S. sphere of influence; and one domestic, proving to other Americans that (despite indications or fears to the contrary) the levels of material consumption Italians had achieved in America had decisively won them to the cause of capitalism and Americanism. Furthermore, Italian Americans involved in organizations that worked to repeal the National Origins System quotas and reform American immigration policies set out to prove the fitness of Italians as both new immigrants and citizens in the 1950s and 1960s. One way they did so was to demonstrate that Italian immigrants who came to the United States after World War II adopted lifestyles that reflected the culture of mass consumption that prevailed in the United States.
Consuming Italian Americans
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: September 2014

Guido is a youth subculture originating in New York City’s Italian American neighborhoods. This chapter understands Guido as a collective ethnic subject defined by a signature consumption culture or style. The chapter traces the origin of Guido to the disco movement of the 1970s; an urban Italian American youth subculture specializing in expanded opportunities for leisure-based consumption referenced to the mass media and entertainment industries. Because stylized youth identities were embedded in lived Italian American communities, consumption became an important new site for reworking ethnic cultural differences. Just as Guido symbolizes the incorporation of commodities into a new Italian American cultural identity and status, it has become a commodity that is merchandised to wider markets. Inclusion in the media spectacle—see, in particular, the reality television show Jersey Shore (2009-2012)—brings alignment with core consumption values, although it compromises subcultural boundaries. Guido is seen as part of a larger pattern that constructs Italian American difference in relation to American consumer culture while exposing ideological divisions inside the ethnic boundary.
We Are Family
Authors: Parasecoli Fabio
Published: September 2014

By deconstructing advertisements and décor from Italian-themed chain restaurants, such as Maggiano’s Little Italy, Bertucci’s, and Olive Garden, the chapter proposes that “eating the Italian other” today in these Italian-themed environments accounts for the consumption of a hyperreal simulacrum of Italian American life. In the chain restaurants the chapter analyzes authenticity is a “product”—a company strategy carefully crafted with the methodology of postmodern pastiche. These establishments refer to traditions from Italy, its past, and the nostalgia it often elicits to promote a recognizable brand to large audiences and market a specific aspect of contemporary American popular culture: casual dining chain restaurants. The Italian American culinary heritage is invented—or at least recreated—and charged with relevant emotional and symbolic connotations as a marketable experience to respond to contemporary preferences and imaginations.
Toward a new Topology of Philosophy
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This introductory chapter presents Penelope Deutscher's interview with Barbara Cassin. The interview covers topics such as the meaning of sophistic history of philosophy; the relation between the sophistic history of philosophy and the history of philosophy; the relation between women and philosophy; question of the spirit of languages; and how political events engendered in Cassin new ways of thinking about performance and performativity.
Who’s Afraid of the Sophists?
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter introduces the neologism “sophistics.” It considers the question of why one should be interested in sophistics today. It argues that sophistics, is a good tool, maybe even the best tool to produce something like a new narrative of the history of philosophy. Sophistics produces a new delimitation of the entity called “philosophy” in relation to the other entities it constructs (sophistics as rhetoric and then as literature). The chapter discusses sophistics as historical fact and structural effect; the sophistical effect; and ethical correctness.
Seeing Helen in Every Woman
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter considers the question of how Helen has been constructed since Homer, such that she is seen in every woman. In gathering together her textual world, one notices that her reality, her consistency are entirely linked to language in all of its forms. If she is seen in every woman, it is because she has a discursive or linguistic consistency and existence. Helen as “Woman and Word,” is discussed under four headings. First heading: her proper name, with a reading of Aeschylus; second heading: her voice, with a reading of Homer; third heading: the relationship between word and thing, with a reading of Euripides; and fourth heading: the relation to logos, to discourse in general, in its difference from being, with a reading of Gorgias. Finally, the chapter ties up all of these threads by attempting to implicate them in Lacan's Encore and seeing how that holds together.
Topos/Kairos
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter argues, based on a close reading of Plato's Gorgias, that ontology invented rhetoric in order to domesticate time in discourse. Through rhetoric time is modeled as and reduced to space: a discourse is primarily an organism that unfolds, and it is articulated. From a “narrow” perspective, it is woven out of “tropes” and “metaphors.” In short, it is a question of shifting from the thread to-be-followed and the capture of the kairos, the point of time, to the topos and the topoi, the places of crafted speech. Thus, if there is a sophistic particularity of rhetoric, a strictly sophistical inventio of rhetoric and within rhetoric, it would entail identifying something like a “rhetoric of time,” which would be to the rhetorics of space as sophistic discursivity is to Platonico-Aristotelian ontology.
Time of Deliberation and Space of Power
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter analyzes the conflict between Greece and Rome, where the vanquished conquered its conqueror. Greek cultures, with its poets and philosophers, was “imitated,” or, to be more specific, reinvented and adapted by every vir bonus dicendi peritus—for instance, Horace, but also Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Seneca, or Quintilian, who all contributed to the glory and domination of Rome. One of the most interesting approaches to and interpretations of this conflict underscores the fact that this conflict is utterly about language and rhetoric. The best way to approach it is to look into how the great Sophist Ælius Aristides conceived it.
Aristotle with and Against Kant on the Idea of Human Nature
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter considers the idea of human nature, an idea that lies at the very heart of Aristotelian thinking about politics and education, in order to gain a clearer understanding of its meaning. It argues that some of the tensions which permeate Aristotle's work, particularly in the area of politics and rhetoric, can be explained only in terms of a hesitation on the philosopher's part between the Sophists and Plato. Aristotle's decision to stand with the Sophists represented an attempt to guard against a danger inherent in Platonism that was felt to pose the more serious threat. That aside, the idea that antiquity could be distinguished by the undisputed preeminence of the concept of nature can probably be rejected: in Aristotle's time there existed a critical awareness with respect to this concept that was often lacking in Kant's era, indeed even in Kant's work itself.
How to Really Do Things with Words
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter analyzes the status of rhetoric. It asks: in matters of discourse, must one count two or must one count three? What is the identity of the third term? Counting two is what philosophy has habituated us to. When one speaks, one can either “speak of” or “speak to,” according to an “or” that is evidently not exclusive. “To speak of,” to unveil, to describe, to demonstrate, is of the major register of philosophy, considered as ontology and phenomenology. “To speak to,” to persuade, to have an effect on the other, is of the register of rhetoric. The third term, the intruder, is sophist logology, Philosophy makes this third term inexist as far as it is able so to do, to its own benefit and to the benefit of rhetoric, which it subjects or subjugates.
Philosophizing in Tongues
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter lays out the intention of the Dictionary of Untranslatables and hence reflects on translation in philosophy. The Dictionary of Untranslatables does not pretend to offer “the” perfect translation to any untranslatable; rather, it clarifies the contradictions and places them face to face and in reflection; it is a pluralist and comparative work in its nonenclosing gesture, rather more Borgesian or Oulipian than destinal and Heideggerian.
Politics of Memory
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter compares three radically heterogeneous models for managing the relation between past and future: two procedures of exception (in Athens, after the civil war, the decree of 403 BC—it is as far as we know the first procedure of amnesty) and, in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) after the collapse of apartheid; and a third, “normal” procedure, that of the French management of sensitive archives (like those of World War II). These three models help shed light on certain relations between politics, discursive practice, and deliberation, and provide insights into the ways in which truth and deliberative politics are linked.
Responsibility—Of the Sense to Come (2002)
Authors: Derrida Jacques
Published: September 2014

The chapter is the transcription of a conversation between Derrida and Nancy that took place at a conference devoted to Nancy's work—once again at the International College of Philosophy—on 18-19 January 2002. The conversation begins with the question of the relationship between responsibility and the event, the question of whether one can ever bear or assume responsibility for an event, that is, for something that happens in some sense without or before any subject, without or before anyone's decision. This question provides the terms for then rethinking a whole host of other questions, from that of the gift and of debt to questions of the relationship between philosophy and Christianity, the meaning of revelation, sense, and guilt, the commonly assumed philosophical distinction between the human and the animal, and so on.
Introduction
Authors: Firer Hinze Christine , Hornbeck J. Patrick
Published: September 2014

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s main themes. This volume, along contains expanded and updated versions of remarks that speakers delivered at four of the “More than a Monologue” conferences hosted by Fordham University, Fairfield University, Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and Yale Divinity School. It also includes a number of new voices, chosen because of the pastoral, academic, or personal perspectives that they bring to the topic of sexual diversity in and around the Roman Catholic tradition. The chapters collectively aspire to tap into the richness of Catholicism, to address points of struggle and disagreement, and to contribute to its vitality and growth. They do so in the knowledge that while Catholic teaching and moral theology value continuity with the past, adhering to the Gospel in changing times and varied cultures has also required the Catholic moral tradition to continue to learn, to adapt, and to develop.
O Tell Me the Truth About Love
Authors: Tushnet Eve
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents the story Eve Tushnet, a young, single woman, next recounts how, as an undergraduate, she came to a decision to live in accordance with the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality. She reflects on the “hidden treasure” in Catholicism’s spirituality of celibacy, its theology of friendship, and its notion of vocation. She emphasizes that the commitment to celibacy to which the Catholic Church calls its LGBTQ (and other) members is not easy and ought neither to be undertaken lightly nor as a form of rule following. Yet, she argues, celibacy can offer new ways of expressing one’s love for others and for God.
Our Thirty-Three-Year-Long Dream to Marry
Authors: Peck Janet , Conklin Carol
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents the story of Janet F. Peck and Carol A. Conklin, two of the plaintiffs in the Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health court decision that permitted same-sex marriage in the state of Connecticut. They describe the significance that marriage has held for them both before and after their wedding in January 2009. Conklin, in particular, talks about her upbringing in an observant Irish Catholic household, her family’s reaction to her coming out as lesbian, and the lengthy journey to acceptance that her father undertook.
Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Husband, and Wife
Authors: Howes Hilary
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents the story of Hilary Howes, a public relations professional and transgender activist. She describes how she came to accept that her birth gender was not her authentic gender and her conversion to Catholicism in mid-life, in part inspired by the faith and love of her wife. Howes observes that while transgender Catholics are not as explicitly rejected by the church as are lesbian, gay, and bisexual Catholics, the absence of formal church policies on transgender individuals often renders them even more invisible.
Gay Ministry at the Crossroads
Authors: Cozzens Donald B.
Published: September 2014

This chapter describes the multilayered and often painful difficulties faced by the many gay priests in active ministry who are charged with representing and upholding church teaching on sexual diversity while often finding themselves consigned to a complex form of closetedness that is similar to the recently rescinded military policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It shows how the “plight of gay clergy” influences current seminary training and priestly practice, with direct consequences for priests’ lives, for those whom they are called to serve, and for the spiritual and moral well-being of the church.
The Experience of a Pastoral Advocate and Implications for the Church
Authors: Massingale Bryan N.
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents a critique—based on the chapter’s author’s own experiences as a university teacher, parish minister, and pastoral advocate—of the deleterious effects of what he calls “the pervasive climate of fear” and reactivity that surrounds even modest attempts at open conversation among Catholics about sexual diversity and the church. It suggest that this climate of fear is debilitating and dangerous, especially within a faith community charged by Jesus to “be not afraid.” Left unaddressed, this fear has wide-ranging effects that threaten the well-being not only of LGBT Catholics but of all Catholics and indeed the very mission and identity of the church.
Lord, I Am (Not) Worthy to Receive You
Authors: Varghese Winnie S.
Published: September 2014

In this chapter, an Episcopalian priest shares what she has learned about sexual diversity and the church through her experiences of growing up as a lesbian Christian woman and, later, of ministering as an ordained priest. Invoking the ancient links between Christian prayer, belief, and practice, she proposes that participating in the liturgical language of the Revised Book of Common Prayer has drawn LGBTQ Episcopalians and their fellow congregants to see better and to embrace more fully their dignity and worth in God’s eyes and thus in their own eyes as well. She acknowledges continuing struggles for the full recognition and participation of LGBTQ Christians in her own church as well as in the Roman Catholic Church. But she sees positive resources for moving forward in Catholics’ and Episcopalians’ shared commitment to honoring the truth as it is disclosed in human realities and as that truth is manifested and encountered in liturgy, especially in the community’s celebration of the Eucharist.
Calling Out in the Wilderness
Authors: Viau Jeanine E.
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents some narratives of LGBTQ men and women attending Catholic universities in the greater Chicago area. These individuals recount in their own words what it has been like to learn about Catholic teachings on homosexuality, or to be bullied by both teachers and students, or to encounter silencing among family members and peers, or, most poignantly, to experience the suicide of a friend and lover. It captures these young people’s descriptions of their experiences and the ways in which many of them have employed resources from the Christian and Catholic traditions to empower themselves and others. The chapter situates these intensely personal testimonies against the background of Catholic social ethics, laying the groundwork for further practical-theological explorations of their narratives.
The Stories We Tell
Authors: Averett Kate Henley
Published: September 2014

This chapter reflects on stories—those that we are told about life and those that our lives actually tell. The chapter traces a personal story, recalling a family, childhood, education, and youth suffused and indelibly marked by Catholicism. It describes the author being burdened, as a young adult Catholic, by the mounting sense of tension between what her church taught and how its leaders behaved, on the one hand, and her own sense of queer identity, integrity, and vocation to marriage, on the other. These tensions led to a dramatic internal struggle that culminated during Holy Week, 2010. At an existential crossroads, she made a painful choice. Reprinting the metaphorical “breakup letter” that she wrote at that time, she expresses the reasons for her decision, not without pain or regret, to end her relationship with the institutional church.
Tainted Love
Authors: Manson Jamie L.
Published: September 2014

This chapter describes the unsettling, wearying, and heart-rending mixture of belonging and marginalization, acknowledgment and invisibility that shapes this chapter’s author’s experiences as an active Catholic who is young, out, lesbian, and in a committed relationship. She reflects on the special harm and hurt that result when clergy (many of whom are themselves gay) and other Catholics, fearing exposure or shrinking from risks, fail to stand up for or fully stand with their LGBT brothers and sisters as they themselves face personal risk, exposure, and cost in the struggle for acceptance and participation in church and society.
A Voice from the Pews
Authors: Norko Michael A.
Published: September 2014

This chapter considers the lack of solidarity among fellow Catholics, lay or clergy. Detailing the events and actions taken by Connecticut’s Catholic bishops following that state’s Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage, this chapter’s author recounts a story of awakening to his responsibility and calling, as a lay Catholic professional, to enact solidarity with his LGBTQ neighbors by engaging with church leaders. Though his attempts to open avenues of communication and collaboration with the bishops of his state were not met with success, his embrace of his baptismal calling as a lay person energized efforts that contributed significantly to making the More than a Monologue conference series a reality.
At a Loss
Authors: Savage Dan
Published: September 2014

In this chapter, the author recounts the story of his strongly Catholic Chicago childhood and of his complex journey from a pious, seminary-aspiring altar boy to an adult “agnostatheist.” Both his identities as a gay man, husband, and father and his perduring, deeply harbored responses to his familial Catholicism and the Catholic Church play central roles. While harshly denouncing the harms inflicted by the church through its treatment of sexuality and sexual diversity, the author also speaks about the ache of loss that he feels not only at his mother’s death but also at his inability to feel wanted or welcomed in the faith community of his childhood and family.
The Impotent Mind
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs critically explores epiphenomenalism, or the impotence hypothesis as he sometimes calls it. He groups objections to the hypothesis into three main categories and argues that they all assume a dubious connection between consciousness and efficacy. The article has a modest goal of demonstrating the inconclusiveness of prominent objections to epiphenomenalism.
Santayana’s Philosophy of Mind
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

In this defense of epiphenomenalism, Lachs highlights Santayana's use of the Aristotelian distinction between process and activity to argue that mental life is an impotent byproduct of the body. Processes involve movement from potentiality to actuality and so are temporally differentiated. Activity by contrast is complete and self-contained, lacking heterogeneous parts or any essential temporal reference. Consciousness (or spirit, to use Santayana's terminology) is the actualization of physiological processes, possessing the perfections of pure activity. Being fully actualized, it lacks the power to bring anything into existence. Lachs argues that this position preserves our experience of the duality of mind and body while also leaving the world open to scientific investigation, unimpaired by mental or nonphysical forces.
Fichte’s Idealism
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs seeks to clarify the distinctive features of Fichte's version of idealism, giving special emphasis to his view of the self. In discussing Fichte's view that the self posits itself (and posits itself as positing), Lachs argues that positing is a nontemporal act whose model is the Aristotelian concept of activity. He ends with a critical appraisal of Fichte's treatment of finite selves.
Peirce, Santayana, and the Large Facts
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs notes seven important similarities Santayana and Peirce share, including commitments to realism, naturalism, and the existence of universals. Despite these commonalities, Lachs finds their respective views of the individual (isolated or social) and of reality (independent or communal) to be the source of their more apparent differences, especially with respect to Peirce's optimism and what Lachs calls Santayana's more “sober assessment” of reality.
The Transcendence of Materialism and Idealism in American Thought
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs argues that what is distinctive about American philosophy is its transcendence of the materialism-idealism option and with it a host of related dichotomies (subject-object, mind-matter, process-product). Criticizing Santayana's insistence on the impotent mind, and with it his emphasis on the realm of essence, Lachs argues that Santayana's view of animal faith, with its emphasis on human action, offers vital insights for a philosophy of life.
Primitive Naturalism
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs defends the view that the world in which we live and act is one continuous with our bodies and their agency. While he shares Santayana's commitment to animal faith, Lachs largely sets aside Santayana's ontology of different realms of being.
Questions of Life and Death
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Calling attention to the costs arising from new technology that helps extend life almost indefinitely, Lachs argues that we consider the seasons of life when determining how to spend social resources. Extraordinary medical and surgical intervention at social cost should be available only to those who are not in their terminal season.
A Community of Psyches
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs argues that the individual is the only moral substance (not atoms, not the state), for it alone is the seat of consciousness and desire required for action. Communities and organizations may “act” but only through the actions of their individual members. Individuals are ultimate in the social world, and the hallmark of a good society is tolerance of different individuals with their different goods. Lachs offers a theory of mediation as an explanation of social life.
The Cost of Community
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs contends that since social relations and structures are predicated on the notion of one individual performing a task on behalf of another, mediation lies at the heart of every society. Mediation's chief benefit is making possible complex communal behavior, but its costs include readiness to manipulate others, a growing sense of passivity and impotence, and an increase in the psychic distance between humans and their acts.
Public Benefit, Private Cost
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs explains costs and benefits in reference to the notion of a unified act, since mediation necessarily breaks up the unity of an act. In simple single-agent acts, the act is a continuous process of initiation (defined by intention), performance, and enjoyment (or suffering). This tripartite unity provides a context for understanding liberty and responsibility, since liberty is the unity of intention and act, while responsibility concerns the act and its consequences. The dismemberment of an act created by mediation generates problems for both. Mediation on a large scale results in each individual performing an act-fragment in ignorance of the act's other parts. Removal from decisions that initiate acts leads to impotence and passivity on the part of actors, thereby curtailing liberty. Distance from the consequences of our actions breeds indifference and irresponsibility. Lachs proposes reimmediation as a means of overcoming these costs. His proposals—including the educative efforts of leaders—are modest but require continuous effort in a world in which mediation is ubiquitous.