Domains Of Freedom Research Articles

How the Cognitive Sciences Might Contribute to the Theological Debate about Free Will

AbstractThis article argues that recent results of the cognitive sciences could make significant contributions to theological debates about free will, but they have been largely ignored by contemporary systematic and philosophical theologians. Recent work in cognitive psychology and moral psychology has to do with our intuitive and automatic patterns of reasoning in the domains of freedom and responsibility. This research will be relevant for many theological domains and has the potential to raise new issues and problems. The essay examines three such domains. First, the debate between intellectualist and voluntarist accounts of the will have been central in theology. Recent findings suggest that intellectualist accounts of the will have more intuitions on their side than has been previously assumed. Second, theologians have debated whether belief in free will is central for moral and political life. This question was pertinent during the Reformation when many of the reformers either rejected free will or presented truncated accounts of it. Recent results from moral psychology suggest that belief in free will has significant pro‐social and altruistic effects. Finally, the possible compatibility of divine determinism and free will is crucial for theological debates about sin, grace and God’s providence. Recent psychological results point in the direction of affirming that while most humans have strong intuitions about the incompatibility of free will and divine determinism, these might be based on a false inference. Finally, some new counterintuitive challenges about the manipulativeness of God are raised against the divine determinist position.

THE TIME, SPACE AND MATTER OF LEADING: AN ARENDTIAN FRAMEWORK FOR LEADERSHIP LEARNING

This paper develops an ethical framework of leadership learning from Hannah Arendt’s writing. The intention is to identify important principles of a framework of leadership leading that help empower actors to lead themselves and to engage, interact, influence and inspire others through their appearances. It is argued that true leadership learning is directed initiating new beginnings through political actions. Such actions rely on spaces of freedom, which are spaces where people in organizations are answerable to each other and oneself. Three dimensions in this “spacing” are considered important: spaces of thinking, spaces of acting and spaces of judging They constitute three domains of freedom, which may help organizing and guiding leadership learning activities.

Resistance and radical democracy: freedom, power and institutions

ABSTRACTIn this article, I argue that resistance and radical democracy can be used to the good of representative democracy. I submit that resistance is about the popular power – the freedom as power – to create better institutions. I argue that the conflict and resistance that is at the core of radical democracy enables freedom and democracy and resists domination best if it is institutionalized. This counterintuitive claim is substantiated by an argument for freedom as power through representation and how the power to resist is linked to at least four domains of freedom. This builds on the work of Machiavelli, Marx and Foucault, amongst others, and insights drawn from resistance struggles across the globe. I end by proposing institutional changes to representative democracy that, I suggest, would allow us to conceive of democracy as both a form of government and a constantly destabilizing transgressive practice.

The Iconoclastic Imagination and the Meaning of Rhetorical Criticism

<i>The Iconoclastic Imagination</i> and the Meaning of Rhetorical Criticism

Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice.

The Question of Man-Citizen Cooperation in the Declaration of Rights of 1789 from a Marxian Perspective

The Declaration of Rights of 1789 has been always regarded as a gain of “rights” in the domains of freedom, equality and right of property in the history of man. While we find within it “Man” and “Citizen” as the keywords we usually ignore what these are actually standing for. In fact this division of “Man” and “Citizen” is nothing but an affirmation of capitalism offering people to lead two separate lives in two distinct realms. This in turn gives us the possibility to come across the abstract “Man” covering up its being the bourgeois himself in reality along with the legal term “Citizen” infused with morality, introduced as if in a justification of his demand for the rights. And just there we find Marx who in his way puts an end to the dissimulation in question. So this work aims, in the line of Marx, an uncovering of the identities of the “Man” and “Citizen” in the declaration.

Design and Democracy

I shall present a few thoughts about the relationship between democracy and design, and about the relationship between critical humanism and operational humanism. This issue leads to the question of the role of technology and industrialization as a procedure for democratizing the consumption of goods and services, and finally to the ambivalent role of esthetics as the domain of freedom and manipulation. The main theme of my lecture is the relationship between design—in the sense of projecting—and autonomy. My reflections are open-ended, and do not pretend to give quick and immediate answers. The university still offers a place to pursue these questions that normally will not be addressed in professional practice, with its pressures and contingencies. Looking at the present design discourse, one notes a surprising—and I would say alarming—absence of questioning design activities. Concepts such as branding, competitiveness, globalization, comparative advantages, lifestyle design, differentiation, strategic design, fun design, emotion design, experience design, and smart design prevail in design magazines and the all too few books about design. Sometimes, one gets the impression that a designer aspiring to two minutes of fame feels obliged to invent a new label for setting herself or himself apart from the rest of what professional service offers. I leave aside “coffee table” books on design that abound in pictures and exempt the reader from intellectual efforts. The issue of design and democracy doesn’t enjoy popularity—apart from a few laudable exceptions. If we look at the social history of the meaning of the term “design,” we note on the one side a popularization that is a horizontal extension, and on the other side a contraction that is a vertical reduction. The architectural critic Witold Rybczynski recently commented on this phenomenon: “Not so long ago, the term ‘designer’ described someone such as Eliot Noyes, who was responsible for the IBM Selectric typewriter in the 1960s, or Henry Dreyfuss, whose clients included Lockheed Aircraft and the Bell Telephone Company ... or Dieter Rams, who created a range of austere-looking, but very practical, products for the German company Braun. Today, ‘designer’ is more likely to bring to mind Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani, that is, a fashion designer. While fashion designers usually start as couturiers, they—or at least their names—often are associated with a wide variety of consumer products including cosmetics, perfume, luggage, home furnishings, and even house

The Nature of Rights

[FIRST PARAGRAPHS] The twentieth century saw a vigorous debate over the nature of rights. Will theorists argued that the function of rights is to allocate domains of freedom. Interest theorists portrayed rights as defenders of well-being. Each side declared its conceptual analysis to be closer to an ordinary understanding of what rights there are, and to an ordinary understanding of what rights do for rightholders. Neither side could win a decisive victory, and the debate ended in a standoff.1 This article offers a new analysis of rights. The first half of the article sets out an analytical framework adequate for explicating all assertions of rights. This framework is an elaboration of Hohfeld’s, designed around a template for displaying the often complex internal structures of rights. Those unfamiliar with Hohfeld’s work should find that the exposition here presumes no prior knowledge of it. Those who know Hohfeld will find innovations in how the system is defined and presented. Any theorist wishing to specify precisely what is at stake within a controversy over some particular right may find this framework useful.

The politics of ‘uncivil’ society in Egypt

This article investigates the concept of civil society. It argues that the recent celebration of the concept as the domain of freedom and justice and as a panacea for the ills of state‐led development models has underestimated its inherent weaknesses and limitations. The portrayal of the concept in both academic and policy circles is often based on ideological convictions and uncritical adulation rather than empirical evidence and rigorous analysis. Tracing the historical development of the concept, the article provides an alternative view of the conflictual, often reactionary nature of civil society organisations. The Egyptian case offers empirical demonstration of how the state is no longer the prime authoritarian force in repressing civil society organisation. Instead, civil society has become an arena for political conflict and its organisations have been seized by representatives of contending political programmes that often resort to violence and repression to suppress other groups within civil society.

The Religious and Moral Foundations of Civil Society and Free Market Economy

This essay proposes that a healthy civil society and a fair and effective free market economy constitute the bases of a well-functioning democratic polity. For civil society and free market economy to function well requires citizens with good moral character. Religious beliefs and practices provide the best foundation for the development and maintenance of the moral norms, virtues, motivations, tendencies, and habits essential for open, pluralistic, liberal societies. Yet liberalism has effectively undermined religious claims to the public domains of freedom and the goals of society. The separation of church and state was extended to an even deeper separation of secular, public thought, from religious thought and influence. This has contributed to the weakening of families, churches, schools, and communities, and their interest in and ability to train virtuous and responsible citizens, which a free society needs to sustain itself.

Governing aboriginal justice in Canada: Constructing responsible individuals and communities through ‘tradition’

In recent years, Aboriginal justice projects have gained in popularity in such places as Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. However, these programs have remained relatively insulated from external critique, particularly as it relates to the problem of grafting “traditional” principles onto non-traditional forms of social organization. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this shortcoming in the context of examining the relationship between newly emerging neo-liberal discourses about personal responsibility and the function of “community” as a domain of freedom, in Aboriginal restorative justice programs in Canada.

Toward the Domain of Freedom

Toward the Domain of Freedom