Suchergebnisse

In February of 2000, Stanley Cavell came to Amherst College to present two public lectures as the John C. McCloy '16 Professor of American Institutions. (I had nominated him for the lectureship the previous year, and he had been approved by a College committee and the president of the College at the time, Tom Gerety, who was himself a legal philosopher.) It was a big deal. In the fall, the lecturer had been Ronald Dworkin. Others who had lectured through these early years of the lecture included such luminaries as Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb. (The first McCloy lecturer had been Fred Korematsu, who had unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government during World War II to end the Japanese internment program. Korematsu's invitation had been a sort of historical reparation, since John McCloy, for whom the professorship had been named, had directed the internment camp program for FDR, famously saying, when asked about its constitutionality, "Compared to my country, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.")

The writing of the bios by the body that is its own subject must be partial and open. It remains open not simply because of the indeterminacy of writing, but also because all life stories are contestable (even if they are uncontested, destined to become part of the general obscurity into which most writing falls). After death, if done well, the autobiography yields further insights of a contested character. When considering Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who claims that Freud is a philosopher (albeit one who is in [Freudian] denial), it may be useful to think about how the struggle for meaning assumes a therapeutic role. That is, we might ask what role the act of writing in itself might play in philosophical autobiography. Adapted from the source document.

From the Publisher: "What does it mean to be lonely?" Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare's King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness-how it is a response to the problem of the "missing mother." Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience-Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts-Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson's "Experience," to name a few-with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare-an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us

This essay is a series of connected reflections on the fate of the wolf-man, suggesting from a variety of perspectives that democracy, thought of as an aspiration, cannot exist without the presence of this wild thing that exists by definition as a liminal figure, between animal and human. Wolf-man is beyond law, urging law on, in its futility.

The contemporary US legal culture's understanding of death is critiqued for attempting to not confront the reality of death & for recognizing this inadequacy. Existing philosophical treatments of death are reviewed to illustrate that death is conventionally interpreted as a marker of complete alterity & as a form of identity that is indeed a non-identity characterized by a connection to an unknown other. After examining how US legal culture has evaded this relationship with death, the thought of Stanley Cavell & William Connolly is used to suggest an alternative approach of establishment as a proper, ethical legal response to death. Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) is subsequently scrutinized to bolster this attempt to unwork the existing US legal culture's engagement with death. Specifically, it is stressed that the film's protagonist, William Munny, acknowledges the limits of human mortality & realizes the fallacy of perceiving death as the achievement of completion. The implications of US legal culture's inability to ultimately punish Munny for his transgressions for commencing a genuine unworking of the law of death are also pondered. 17 References. J. W. Parker