Suchergebnisse

Recently, British Prime Minister Theresa May made a bold anti-cosmopolitan claim: 'If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what citizenship means'. Given that many have never found nationalism particularly appealing, some have been moved to become citizens of the world after hearing these lines. But how is one to become a cosmopolitan? The answer is found in the history of philosophy. Cosmopolitanism has taken many forms. There are moral, political, legal, economic and cultural cosmopolitanisms. A form that has not received much attention is therapeutic cosmopolitanism. The focus of this form is on how being a world-citizen entails certain health benefits. I argue that therapeutic cosmopolitanism is both the original and best way of being a world-citizen. To do so, I summarize the present taxonomy of cosmopolitanisms and show how therapeutic cosmopolitanism contrasts with these options. I use classical Cynicism as the primary example of therapeutic cosmopolitanism. Instead of the universalist humanism and supranational communitarianism that characterizes cosmopolitan options, Cynic cosmopolitanism employs extreme naturalism. I show how being a Cynic cosmopolitan is the preferable way of rejecting nationalists of all stripes.

Recently, some have read Turkish political developments from the perspective of Carl Schmitt's political theory. This paper aims to modify aspects of these readings and offer in response a Schmittian answer to the Kurdish question. By applying Schmitt's conceptual framework, this paper argues that the Kurds, especially in their struggles for autonomy and independence, can be viewed as fulfilling Schmitt's criterion for tellurian partisanship and forming an at least nascent constituent power. We argue that Turks and Kurds are enemies in Schmitt's explicitly political sense. They constitute a threat to each other's political existence. The Kurds exhibit the behavior of a Schmittian people or nation. They fight, against Turks, for their political existence. They aim to govern themselves, and so instantiate the de facto attributes of state sovereignty. They thus seek to constitute themselves as a free and independent people, thereby achieving a genuine political existence in the Schmittian sense.