Corona Phenomenon: Philosophical and Political Questions

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022

I Introduction Citizens have long wanted a reliable measure of police performance. They want to know whether the police are producing something that is valuable with the assets entrusted to them. They want to be able to hold the organization to account for its performance. Police managers, too, have needed a measure of police performance-partly to meet external demands for accountability, and partly to establish a form of accountability inside their organizations that could focus attention on achieving valuable results rather than simply reliably executing established policies and procedures. A crucially important task for both citizens and police managers, then, is to out an understanding of how the produced by policing can be recognized and assessed. Generally speaking, developing appropriate measures of police performance has been treated as a managerial or technical problem to be solved through some combination of the practical methods of business management (develop a bottom line for policing) or the statistical methods of social science (conduct a program evaluation of police departments focusing on the ultimate outcomes produced by the police). And it is true, of course, that developing suitable performance measures do raise important managerial, technical, and scientific issues. The managerial issues focus on how different measurement systems can be used to guide, motivate, or enable the learning of an organization. The technical issues concern the development of the statistical measures and instruments that can reliably capture the dimensions of performance that the police deem important. The scientific inquiry focuses on the extent to which performance measurement systems can help the police find out what particular programs work to accomplish various police objectives. In the end, though, it seems self-evident that the development of police performance measures is also, and perhaps most fundamentally, a normative and political question; not only or even primarily a management or technical issue. After all, to develop a standard for assessing the performance of an organization as or bad, improving or deteriorating, is to make a normative, value claim as well as a positive, scientific claim. One has to have an idea of the or the as it applies to police operations to be able to defend a standard of police performance. One also has to have a theory about whose views of the and the should count in setting a standard for policing--more particularly, whether it is the views of individuals deciding for themselves what they think is and as they encounter the police as individuals seeking assistance or individuals who are stopped, cited, or arrested; or whether the idea of the good and the right in policing emerge from some kind of collective political process in which the body politic gathers itself together to say what is good and right for the whole, and where that view trumps the views of individuals. One may also have to have an idea about the kinds of deliberative processes that should, ideally, go into the formation of a collective judgment about the good and the right as it applies to public police departments. In short, the important question that lies at the core of developing any adequate measure of police performance is for citizens and their elected representatives to decide what it is that is intrinsically valuable, or what it is that we as a political community value in the activities and operations of a public police department. That is simultaneously an issue for political philosophy and practical politics, as well as for professional management and science. Indeed, once one sees the issue as a normative, philosophical, and political question, a great many additional questions arise, including the following: * Who does the valuing of public sector operations? Are police operations properly evaluated by the customers of the police (those who receive services from the police and/or pay the costs of keeping the police operating)? …

As one of the most influential philosophers in 20th century, Heidegger is not only acclaimed for his tremendous effort and achievement on contemplating the question of Being(Seinsfrage), which also inspired other great minds in different intellectual domains; he also suffered some of the most severe critiques for his once “lost” in political actions and practices. Although he could return to his own course with a detached and critical attitude, he was still blamed for not willing to admit his own “fault” directly and publicly. Scholars of philosophy, politics and sociology pose different standpoints, interpretations, and judgments toward the so-called “Heidegger’s Case.” Under such background which forms a pre-understanding, this thesis attempts to return to Heidegger’s thinking legacy as such, takes it as the point of departure, and responds to the core problem of the case－the problem of the political. Based on such studying interest, instead of his political stance and assertions, we concentrate on Heidegger’s philosophical efforts－thinking the question of Being－try to find the foundation for his thinking on the political, locate both the end and the way of his thinking on such question. As a result, the thesis is divided into two major parts. The first part answers the following questions with three chapters: How did the question of Being come into Heidegger’s horizon? How and why such question is connected with the question-raiser’s Being-transitive? During the period between 1927’s magnum opus, Being and Time and the early 1930s, how did Heidegger put a philosophical question which asks “Who we are” as a political question? The second part which includes the fourth chapter represents my own attempt. Following the question “Who we are,” I try to sketch out the contour of the political which Heidegger never put aside but contemplate far more than ever known. Finally, I would like to show that, by way of retrieving its origin and making a leap (Ur-sprung) for it, Heidegger’s interpretation and excavation of polis unified his deliberations between Being, the political and “We.” This also provides us a possibility which enable us to take up the question of how to settle ourselves in the world during the age of the flight of Gods and the exhaustion of the earth, anew and constantly.

When in 1798 Brown finished writing Wieland or, the Transformation, an American Tale, he sent a copy of the book to Thomas Jefferson, who was then Vice President of the United States. The fact that Brown intended his text to be read for the first time by such an outstanding figure of the nation shows that he had written the novel with a clear aim in mind. Retaking Jane Tompkins's reading of the novel as a work useful in the area of national politics, I will discuss that this text is firmly rooted in the historical background of post-Revolutionary America and that as such, it is a desperate warning note on the dangers lurking within the optimistic dream of a new society. From this point of view, I read Wieland neither as an expression of Brown's preoccupation with art and artifice, nor as a symbolic representation of the universal dark side of human consciousness, nor as a battle between Calvinist pessimism and the merits of Enlightenment idealism. Neither do I read it as a political tract, but as a post-revolutionary jeremiad which encapsulates a passionate analysis on some aspects of eighteenth-century American thought and culture. Consequently, the two different sets of components —Gothic elements and explorations of social, political and philosophical questions— are made to serve one main objective: the dissection of the American mission and of the happy assurances of national self-fulfillment endorsed by the Republican ideology.

Philosophy, ethics, medicine and health care: the urgent need for critical practice

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO ESTABLISH THE RELEVANCE OF the question that forms its title for contemporary political theory. It is not an obvious question, both because it is not obvious what the answer is, but also because it is not obvious what it means in contemporary terms. In order to establish its significance, it is necessary first of all to establish what the question does mean, and what the term ‘corporation’ means within it. It is, ultimately, a philosophical question, and the idea of the ‘corporation’ has therefore to be understood in a more abstract sense than is usual in contemporary political discourse. Because of this, the question has a tendency to sound archaic, if not obscure, when set out in philosophical terms. Nevertheless, I hope to demonstrate its continuing relevance by looking at one particular attempt to answer it, undertaken by a political thinker who was self-professedly not a philosopher, writing in a setting that was recognizably modern. The thinker was the legal historian F.W. Maitland, who produced in the early years of this century a series of essays in which he set out the contemporary significance of a problem which he believed went to the heart of the identity of the modern state. Of course, the question of the state's corporate identity is a perennial theme of European, and more particularly German, political philosophy, but Maitland wanted to demonstrate that it was also a question of practical significance, even for those who are traditionally unmoved by grand philosophical themes. That it is still of practical significance I hope to illustrate by applying some of Maitland's conclusions to one of the fundamental questions of contemporary politics: the question of the nature of the welfare state.

In final chapter of Philosophy and Mirror of Nature Rorty worried - presciently we might now add - that edifying philosopher sympathetically depicted in those pages will be treated as a relativist, or who lacks moral senousness, for failing to recognize the attainment of truth as a matter of necessity.''1 The thought he leaves us with in closing sentence of that book reaffirms tliis wony: the only point on winch I would insist is that philosophers' moral concern should be with continuing of West, rather than with insisting upon a place for traditional problems of modem philosophy within that conversation (PMN 394). A decade and a half later Rorty responded to wony more directly, offering a conception of moral senousness fitting for pragmatists who seek to replace objectivity-as-accuraterepresentation with objectivity-as-intersubjectivity and abjure realist senousness: other human beings (TP 83).This essay aims to give an account of underlying moral concerns animating Rorty's thought, of which tliis notion of moral senousness is an expression. These concerns, which are present from Ins earliest published work to lus last volume of essays, center on a conception of ethical responsibility, both toward others and for our choices and commitments as philosophers. To make taking other human beings seriously highest priority of democratic mquiiy is to situate social practice of justification in a sociopolitical context that subordinates nonnative, in Sellarsian and Brandomian sense, to moral in order to introduce into game of giving and asking for reasons a conception of ethical responsibility. Bringing these neglected moral concerns into view sheds new light on seemingly problematic stances Rorty adopted with regard to truth as goal of inquiry, warranted assertibility and constraints on inquiry, availability of entena of judgment, possibility of rational critique, and society lets us say. Indeed, a common thread of Rorty criticism, whether from analytic philosophers, Deweyan pragmatists, or 'new pragmatists', is fundamental inadequacy and even inesponsibility of lus positions on these topics. The charge that he lacked seriousness also is one Rorty himself confessed hurt most (PSH 5). While to a certain extent my account is meant to serve as a corrective, my aim is less to defend Roily from criticism than to show how introducing tlus largely neglected concern with taking other human beings seriously alters received picture and adds coherence to his stance.In all commentary sparked by Mirror and subsequent writings, little attention has been paid to fundamental moral concerns that animate Rorty's work.' In his post -Mirror writings this dimension emerges more explicitly in lus effort to modulate philosophical debate from a methodologico-ontological into an etluco-political key (ORT 110). Yet it is present even in Ins earliest published essays on metaphilosophy where Rorty already was calling attention to questions that are a matter of moral choice and cannot be decided by theoretical reflection or philosophical argumentation. On interpretation I shall offer idea of philosophy as a form of cultural politics in Roily's later work is his most explicit attempt to call attention to moral and political space within which choice occurs, and to locate philosophers, and their commitments to what count as problems, in tlus space.4 Tins interpretation extends BjOm Ramberg's insight that Rorty's attempt to take philosophical questions as questions of cultural politics is best understood as a project of directly confronting ourselves and our practices in ethical and political terms.5 What Ramberg grasps in context of Rorty's use of Davidson is that understanding Rorty's position entails need to reverse direction of support between his moral and philosophical commitments. …

This article critically explores the essence of colonial terrorism and its consequences on the indigenous people of Australia during their colonization and incorporation into the European-dominated racialized capitalist world system in the late 18th century. It uses multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terror to explain the connection between terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist world system or globalization. Raising complex moral, intellectual, philosophical, ethical, and political questions, this article explores the essence, roles, and impacts of colonial terrorism on the indigenous Australians. First, the article provides background historical and cultural information. Second, it conceptualizes and theorizes colonial terrorism as an integral part of the capitalist world system. Specifically, it links capitalist incorporation and colonialism and various forms of violence to terrorism. Third, the article examines the structural aspects of colonial terrorism by connecting it to some specific colonial policies and practices. Finally, it identifies and explains different kinds of ideological justifications that the English colonial settlers and their descendants used in committing crimes against humanity.

Indubitably, Ibn Taymiyya is among those medieval Muslim theologians who have aroused the most interest in modern Western and Arab scholarship. This interest in Ibn Taymiyya has led to the production of a considerable number of academic works. While his fatwas and positions on dogmatic, legal, philosophical, and political questions are beginning to become well‑known, his position and vision concerning Mamluk power have been less frequently investigated. Paradoxically, close reading of the Mamluk sources shows that the authors of the period provided a fairly accurate account of the variable relations maintained by Ibn Taymiyya with certain great figures of the sultanate. However, his considerations of Mamluk power remain poorly understood. Based on an examination of the writings of Ibn Taymiyya and his contemporaries, this article attempts to shed light on the position of the famous Ḥanbalī theologian vis‑à‑vis the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mamluks in relation to religion and governance.

The issue of what it means to be critical is an important philosophical, epistemological, and political question that has been addressed by many academics exploring scholarship and social activism....

Jules de la Gournerie was one of Gaspard Monge’s successors in the teaching of Descriptive geometry and its applications, and both dealt with similar matters. La Gournerie’s writings criticized Monge’s ideas with detailed observations. In this article we go over all the issues on which there was a marked divergence, from the stereotomy of stones to the conical perspective or the organization of teaching. It also show how the constant opposition between the two men, even not explicitly focused on philosophical and political questions, represents two radically different ways to understand the world, each solid by itself.

Mostly dismissed as a trivial entertainment, Frederick Kohner’s Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas (1957) is in fact a telling aesthetic and cultural document. University of Vienna PhD, Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, and successful Hollywood screenwriter Kohner empathetically fictionalized his teenage daughter’s adventures with the original Malibu surf crew and in the process vividly signaled the emergence of a rebellious postwar youth culture. Just as interesting is the way Kohner’s entertaining comic drama of feminist awakening plays out through an intriguingly complex narrative voice, one blurring distinctions between its California teen daughter-protagonist-narrator and the father-author, both learned European exile and savvy Tinseltown operator. In subtly decisive ways, Kohner intervenes allusively and intertextually in the central narrative to anchor buoyant personal history in larger philosophical and political questions, in a cosmopolitan resistance to American puritanical norms, and in knowing reflection on contemporary discussions of representation and image. Gidget is a surprisingly postmodern textual space of disruption and juxtaposition that compellingly addresses its stealth core subject, a postwar America with its Western philosophical baggage and political and historical burden fumbling awkwardly forward toward new social and gender models.

Commentary: In the shadow of liberalism? Comments on Neil Smith's “The Endgame of Globalization”

This article seeks to explore some of the more salient issues associated with correctional privatisation. It is important to state that it does not attempt to address the numerous important philosophical, social and political questions which relate to the practices of modern day penology and correctional methods in general. These are expansive issues which warrant separate analysis. Instead, this treatment is a focused one, addressing the specific concerns, effects and history of correctional privatisation in Australia and the United States.

Speaking for Lions Gillian Adams Until the lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter. African Proverb In his last editorial, Rod McGillis reminds us that "'children's literature' refers as much to the literature children make as to the literature they may or may not read" and that we need to pay more attention to "the texts that children fashion out of themselves" (230). McGillis notes that no matter how "constructed" by adults the childhood that exists in children's books may be, "it [is] difficult to accept the notion that children don't exist outside of our linguistic notion of children." One way that children do manifest their existence is through the literature that they create. In this issue we begin to explore what children have to say for themselves. Given all the critical ink that has been expended on the subject of children's responses to literature, one would think that the subject of juvenilia would have been extensively addressed before. It has in the sense that there are an increasing number of articles, particularly in journals devoted to the education of children, on children's writing. Nevertheless, this writing occurs in structured situations, no matter how "free" and how "creative" the circumstances. In addition, researchers like Gareth Mathews and Robert Coles have documented responses by children to major philosophical, religious, social, and political questions. And it is true that of late there has been an increasing interest in earlier journals that published some juvenilia; for example, a collection of essays centered on St. Nicholas now being edited by Susan Gannon, Suzanne Rahn, and Ruth Anne Thompson. But a trip to the library demonstrates how little is readily available on the subject of juvenilia itself. The catalogue for the extensive collection of the University of Texas library system produced two books under the subject heading juvenilia: one is a collection of juvenilia by an obscure eighteenth-century writer which is in the rare book library; the other, edited by Neville Braybrooke, is a collection of some 100 items, mostly nonsense verse and parody, by English writers aged 16 and under. The library does not possess Jon Stallworthy's anthology of pieces by fifty-eight well-known poets from George Herbert to Seamus Heaney. Also disappointing are the 52 items in the MLA data base under "juvenilia." There one finds single essays on George Mackey Brown, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Alfred Jarry, D.G. Rossetti, and Tennyson; the remaining roughly 45 works cited are about evenly divided between Jane Austen's Lady Susan and her other juvenilia and Charlotte Bronte's Angria. One essay of interest not listed is A.O.J. Cockshutt's "Children's Diaries," not to mention other articles that address diaries and journals. Perhaps such works are not considered true juvenilia, although a standard dictionary definition runs: "writings, paintings, etc. done in childhood or youth" (Webster's). This issue of the Quarterly, then, should add significantly to the scholarship on the subject. Jan Susina and Daniel Shealy document the significance of Lewis Carroll's and Louisa May Alcott's juvenilia as a source for their adult writing. Marjorie Fleming will be familiar to some; Judith Plotz points out the ways in which, as the ideal creative child for the Romantics, she is an exemplar of importance. Greta little discusses the standards of the editors of St. Nicholas and Our Young Folks for their aspiring child writers, some of whom became famous. David Sadler's article about a generation of young American writers introduces us to some published, and arguably exploited, child writers who are now forgotten. A related piece by Miriam Bat-Ami concerns the oral literature of children and its implications. And in the two Carol Gay Award essays, we have some actual juvenilia. The contents of this issue raise some interesting questions about juvenilia which might well be explored by future writers on the subject. The questions fall into three categories: the authors, the contexts in which their work was written, and the actual and potential audience. First, what kind of children are most likely to produce juvenilia that survives? Cockshutt concludes that the best milieu for...