Bernhard Waldenfels Research Articles

Statelessness and Bernhard Waldenfels' Phenomenology of the Alien

(2007). Statelessness and Bernhard Waldenfels' Phenomenology of the Alien. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 38, Identity, Guilt and Human Rights, pp. 280-296.

A Phenomenological Theory of the Human Rights of an Alien

International human rights law is profoundly oxymoronic. Certain well-known international treaties claim a universal character for human rights, but international tribunals often interpret and enforce these either narrowly or, if widely, they rely upon sovereign states to enforce the rights against themselves. International lawyers and diplomats have usually tried to resolve the apparent contradiction by pressing for more general rules in the form of treaties, legal doctrines, and institutional procedures. Despite such efforts, aliens remain who are neither legal nor illegal and who thereby slip through a discourse that claims universality. I ask: why does international legal discourse claim a universality of human rights enforceable by impartial. politically neutral tribunals when it also recognises that a state may refuse to recognise some groups as "persons?” I turn to the works of Bernhard Waldenfels for an explanation. To that end, I briefly outine two examples of state-centred human rights treaties. I then reconstruct Waldenfels' explanation as to how a territorial sense of space needs an alien exterior to the space. The territorial structure assumes time is frozen as of the date of the foundation of the structure. The body of the alien is taken as a biological body. The personality, motives, and actions of the alien are the consequence of the imagination of people inside the territorial boundary. The dominant international legal discourse reinforces and institutionalises such a territorial sense of space and frozen time because the territorial state is considered the primary legal subject of international law. I also retrieve, however, an experiential but concealed sense of space and time. To retrieve this sense of space and time requires that lawyers see the world through the twilight of legality heretofore ignored as pre-legal.

Achieving our world: toward a global and plural democracy

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Introduction Part 3 Globalization and Democracy Chapter 4 Globalization: Curse or Promise? Chapter 5 Global Governance and Cultural Diversity: Toward a Cosmopolitan Democracy Chapter 6 Asian Values and Global Human Rights: Tensions and Convergences Chapter 7 Beyond Fugitive Democracy: Some Modern and Postmodern Reflections Chapter 8 Achieving Our World Democratically: A Response to Richard Rorty Part 9 Variations on Self-Other Relations Chapter 10 Transversal Encounters: Calvin Schrag and Postmodernity Chapter 11 Border Crossings: Bernhard Waldenfels on Dialogue Chapter 12 Distancing the Other: Jacques Derrida on Friendship Chapter 13 Oneself as Another: Paul Ricoeur's Little Ethics Chapter 14 Resisting Totalizing Uniformity: Martin Heidegger on Machenshaft Chapter 15 Concluding Remarks

The Project of Ultimate Grounding and the Appeal to Intersubjectivity in Recent Transcendental Philosophy

Transcendental philosophy has traditionally sought to provide non-contingent grounds for (a 'rational' account of) certain aspects of cognitive, moral, and social life. Further, it has made a claim to being 'ultimately' grounded in the sense that its account of experience should provide a non-dogmatic account of its own possibility. Most current approaches to transcendental philosophy seek to do justice to these twin aspects of the project by making an 'intersubjective turn', taking the structure of dialogue or social practice rather than the 'I think' or consciousness as the locus of ultimate grounds. After examining the recent debate over transcendental arguments in order to illuminate the relations between two important versions of transcendental philosophy- the neo-Kantian version oriented toward justification of principles and the phenomenological version oriented toward clarification of meaning- this paper criticizes internally connected aspects of the intersubjective turn in K. O. Apel, Bernhard Waldenfels, and a recent 'practical' interpretation of Husserl. It is shown that the twin demands of the project can be redeemed only if ultimate grounding is seen first of all not as an epistemological or ontological question but (as Levinas suggests) as an ethical one. This requires modification of the appeal to intersubjectivity and a qualified return to the first-person perspective.

Order in the twilight

In this seminal work, acclaimed philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels deals with the problem of the nature of order after the shattering of the world, and the loss of the idea of a universal or fundamental order. Order in the Twilight unites phenomenological methodology with recent work on the theory of order, normativity, and dialogue, as well as structuralism and Gestalt theory. Philosophically stringent, it expresses a more optimistic attitude than much modern philosophy, especially deconstruction. Waldenfels passes the question of order through numerous defining aspects, and concludes that there is not one global order, but rather various conflicting domains of order. Whenever the boundary of a vital or experiential domain is crossed, a discourse speaks at the boundary, not about it, and across a threshold without abolishing it. The rest is rationalization, i.e., an attempt to find a place in the respective order for what is to-be-ordered. But why, the author concludes, should a theory be more unambiguous than reality? Order in the Twilight is an important book at this time, because it may help lift the humanities out of the skeptical, relativistic disarray in which they have been embroiled in recent decades. Waldenfels does not attempt to dictate what reality should be; rather, he is open to any valid evidences. His book offers a solid footing to the human and social sciences as they seek to escape from deconstructive irrationalism.