Philosophy Commons^™

Political Realism In Apocalyptic Times, Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel

International Dialogue

Alison McQueen’s book is a significant contribution to political theory and to the use of the history of political thought as a source of categories for thinking about current problems. Her central thesis revolves around three assumptions. First, the existence of “political realism” understood as a particular approach to evaluating politics—characterized by a defense of its own autonomy,1 political agonism,2 the rejection of both utopia and moralization in politics, and the preeminence of order and stability over any other criterion, including justice, in political decisions (10–12). This definition of “political realism” allows the author to group other writers who, though …

Art As A Political Witness, Lenore Metrick-Chen

International Dialogue

Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller, the editors of this volume, raise a serious question: Can art increase political awareness either through witnessing itself or by creating witnesses in its audience? Wisely, the book does not attempt to provide a single, definitive answer to these questions; instead, the editors explain that they selected authors who examine aesthetic forms of expression, with the intention of an inquiry into an expanded idea of who is a witness. Beginning with the definition of witness from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles as someone “who is or was present, and is able to …

Panel Discussion: Are Reparations Possible? Lessons To The United States From South Africa, Richard Goldstone, Lewis Gordon, Alecia Anderson

International Dialogue

Introduction: On September 25, 2019, the Honorable Richard Goldstone joined Dr. Lewis Gordon f or a conversation about reparations at the University of Nebraska at Omaha ( The public discussion was offered as part of a series of events for Human Rights Week. It was co sponsored by the Goldstein Community Chair for Human Rights, the Schwalb Cent er for Israel and Jewish Studies, and the UNO Department of Black Studies. Goldstone and Gordon were brought to the University of Nebraska at Omaha by the Leonard and Shirley Goldstein Center for Human Rights.

The Honorable Richard Goldstone, Dr. Lewis Gordon, …

The Omnibus Homo Sacer; What Is Philosophy?, Sotiris Mitralexis

International Dialogue

The Omnibus Homo Sacer brings together in 1336 pages all volumes of the twenty-year Homo Sacer project by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, written between 1990 and 2015, starting with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and concluding with The Use of Bodies. In line with Agamben’s division of the project, the Omnibus edition is divided into four parts (Part 1: Homo Sacer; Part 2: State of Exception, Stasis, The Sacrament of Language, The Kingdom and the Glory & Opus Dei; Part 3: Remnants of Auschwitz; and Part 4: The Highest Poverty & The Use of Bodies). Since the volumes …

Restating Orientalism: A Critique Of Modern Knowledge, Katlin Marisol Sweeney

International Dialogue

Wael B. Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge interrogates what he proposes are canonized misconceptions of Orientalism by examining the trends in discourse that have emerged since the publication of Edward Said’s seminal work in 1978. It builds on Hallaq’s other contributions to the field on the topics of modernity, politics, and Islamic law over the last forty years, most notably Sharī’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2013). In the paratextual material, Hallaq advises readers to treat Sharī’a and The Impossible State as …

The Nature Of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn About Legal Interpretation From Linguistics And Philosophy, Triantafyllos Gkouvas

International Dialogue

Brian G. Slocum’s The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn about Legal Interpretation from Linguistics and Philosophy is a formidable addition to an evolving trend in analytical jurisprudence that invites insights from jurisprudentially “extraneous” domains such as linguistics, philosophy of language and mind, metaethics and philosophy of action. A praiseworthy feature of this trend is the importance it attaches to keeping these insights as free as possible of prior translation in the occasionally cryptic or unnecessarily insular language of analytical jurisprudence and legal doctrine. It is precisely thanks to this feature that recent discussions on the relevance of …

Is There A Crisis Of Sustainable Development?, Edward Sandowski, Betty J. Harris

International Dialogue

This article argues that there is a crisis of sustainable development. Sustainable development may mean a value system, but also may mean a set of societal development processes, manifested in political economy and culture. One crisis of sustainable development in either meaning arises from a combination of elements under neoliberalism. We stress three. (1) Sustainable development includes complex demands about justice. These involve conflicts among neoliberal justice and rival more philosophically plausible concepts of justice. (2) Care for the environment (basic to sustainable development) is complex, and generates multiple sometimes, conflicting demands on decision-making. (3)

The Roots Of Ethnic Cleansing In Europe, Andy Aydin-Aitchison

International Dialogue

H. Zeynep Bulutgil’s monograph, available now in paperback, has already received high praise and recognition, winning the American Political Science Association European Politics and Society Section book award in 2017. In this review, I set out what the book offers in terms of argument and evidence, and so outline its contribution to understanding ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing. In the spirit of cross-disciplinary dialogue, I consider how Bulutgil’s approach and insights can contribute to developments in the criminology of atrocity. Taken together the political science approach exemplified by Bulutgil, and criminological approaches characterized by disciplinary openness, complement each other in …

Citizenship, Insurrection, And Recognition: European Critical Theory Before The Biopolitical Threshold: Citizenship; Violence And Civility: On The Limits Of Political Philosophy; Recognition Or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter On The Politics Of Freedom, Equality, And Identify, Miguel Vatter

International Dialogue

Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth are representative figures of a generation of political theorists who stand under the shooting star of May 1968, the high season of insurrectionary politics in the last half century. The books under review offer a welcome opportunity to consider the lessons they draw from this event and its aftermath at the twilight of their careers. However, taken as a whole these books also reveal the limits of this style of radical democratic theory that only in a very approximate way has registered the passing of the baton, which occurred roughly during the same …

The Iranian Metaphysicals, Elise K. Burton

International Dialogue

Anthropologist Alireza Doostdar’s first book, The Iranian Metaphysicals, is a well-written and theoretically sophisticated contribution to scholarship on modern Iranian history and society. Combining vividly portrayed ethnography with archival research and textual analysis, he offers an unprecedented account of Iranians’ experiences with and beliefs about the supernatural. The term ‘metaphysical’ emerges directly from his Iranian interlocutors, who use the Persian equivalents metafiziki or mavara’i to describe paranormal practices and phenomena ranging from sorcery and traditional occult sciences, to spirit possession and séances, to clairvoyance and teleportation. Although many elite Iranians, secularist and orthodox Shi‘i alike, have condemned interest in the …

Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination, Eric A. Heinze

International Dialogue

Alexander Brown writes as an inter-disciplinary scholar at the intersections of law, ethics, philosophy, and politics. With Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination he justly claims to have explored “numerous principled arguments for and against hate speech law by articulating a collection of key normative principles” (316). This ambitious book identifies and organizes conflicting values within the hate speech controversies. It aims to synthesize deeper questions about core concepts of liberalism, democracy, personhood, dignity, and tolerance with policy concerns about pragmatics and effectiveness. The most seasoned free speech scholars will find points and angles they had not previously considered.

Humanity Without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, And Human Rights, David Jason Karp

International Dialogue

This book aims to reject theoretical approaches that ground human rights in a notion of dignity, understood in terms of an equal rank, transcendental/spiritual quality and/or human capacity for rational agency. It argues instead that the idea of human rights should be grounded in a fundamental moral right of each person not to be treated as inferior. It defends this argument with reference to a substantive account of what it means to be treated as inferior in the relevant sense—dehumanization, instrumentalization, infantilization, objectification and stigmatization—combined with an account of when and why these are wrong. The book says that they …

Heat, Greed And Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism And Sustainable Wellbeing, Gillian Brock

International Dialogue

In this wonderful book, Ian Gough shows how we can deal with climate change sensibly, by developing eco-social policy that promotes human wellbeing. The result is a tour de force. Demonstrating sophisticated knowledge of several relevant fields, Gough combines important multidisciplinary insights with his previous groundbreaking research on human needs. The result is a coherent, usable framework that has considerable value in guiding policy discussions. This impressive work is bound to become essential reading for anyone working on policy, climate change and sustainable human well-being.

Famine, Affluence And Morality, Owen G. Mordaunt

International Dialogue

The foreword of this text is significant because Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, make reference to the fact that in more than forty years the world has seen much improvement in curbing poverty. Less than half the world’s population lives in poverty and the proportion of children who die before the age of five has dropped even more. By 1990, it was around 10%, and now it is closer to 5%, even though 5% is still too many when you consider 6.3 million child deaths per year. Most of the deaths, however, are …

The Color Of Modernity: São Paulo And The Making Of Race And Nation In Brazil, Maria S. Arbeláez

International Dialogue

This The Color of Modernity is an outstanding examination of the role of race, regional, and nationalistic ideologies in the creation of modern-day Brazil. Barbara Weinstein focuses on the rise of the mainly white elite of the State of São Paulo as the prominent economic, political, and intellectual leader of the region and the country. The analysis articulates methodical theoretical approaches of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and politics of identity. It investigates the intricacies of how the coffee barons and intellectual Paulistanos managed to construct an image of modernity, entrepreneurship, and success as the paradigm of a new Brazil.What appears …

Heidegger And Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, David A. White

International Dialogue

This work is an anthology of fourteen articles on various aspects of Heidegger’s relation to the Jews and, more abstractly, what it means to be Jewish. The essays are arranged under three headings—Heidegger Thinks the Jews, Heidegger and Jewish Thinkers, Heidegger and Jewish Thought. The work also includes an introduction by Elad Lapidot and, as an appendix, Thomas Sheehan’s bibliography of Heidegger’s works (including English translations as of 2017). Lapidot’s introduction highlights the stimulus for the anthology, the publication of Heidegger’s “so-called Black Notebooks,” notes for the years 1931 to 1948. For Lapidot, “about a dozen passages” contain “strong anti-Jewish …

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 8.

The Life Of The Law In Palestine: The Abc Of The Opt: A Legal Lexicon Of The Israeli Control Over The Occupied Palestinian Territory Orna Ben-Naftali,, John Reynolds

International Dialogue

Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood. (Cole 2015: 19) In September 2018, Israel’s Supreme Court confirmed that the planned eviction and demolition of the small West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar, originally authorized by the Court earlier in the year, should go ahead. The residents of that village are Palestinian Bedouin who had been expelled by the Israeli state in 1952 from their original lands in the

Naqab desert. Six …

Not Enough: Human Rights In An Unequal World, Andrew Fagan

International Dialogue

These are troubling times, in which we appear to be facing an ever-expanding litany of harms and injustices entirely of our own making. Our awareness of these pathological conditions is expressed through various critical perspectives and platforms, which together reinforce a pervasive sense of crisis. We all contribute to the making of our world in a variety of ways. Few of us can claim to possess entirely clean hands when it comes to accounting for how the world could have become so disenchanted and so unpleasant for so many. However, some may wish to claim that the very purity of …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 8

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’T Talk About It), Uğur Aytaç

International Dialogue

The demise of organized labor, the internationalization of capital movements, and technological changes are often believed to contribute to the decline in the bargaining power of employees vis-à-vis their bosses in the age of globalization. According to many, these radical socio-economic transformations are one of the explanatory factors behind the expanding income and wealth inequalities across societies. The emergence of these vast economic inequalities led social scientists to study the nature of these trends and search for possible institutional solutions. Similarly, the normative-philosophical discussions on the contemporary labor-capital relations have predominantly focused on the inequalities of economic resources such as …

Evidence For Hope: Making Human Rights Work In The 21st Century, Brett J. Kyle

International Dialogue

In Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century, Kathryn Sikkink delivers a timely defense of the promise and progress of human rights movements, ideas, and institutions. Amid a seemingly ever-growing body of scholarship on the shortcomings of human rights, Sikkink contends that the human rights movement has helped to improve the human condition over the long term. As the title promises, there is much we should regard as progress in human rights and reason to be hopeful for the future. Sikkink was motivated to write this book for human rights activists “who say they have lost …

The Glocal Hiv/Aids Epidemic And The Need For An Extended Theory Of Power In International Relations, Annika Hughes

International Dialogue

This paper argues for an extended theory of power in International Relations (IR), using the example of the glocal HIV/AIDS epidemic. It will argue that world power relations depend not only on military, economic, social and cultural power, but also on the power of the human body itself. This argument builds on the author’s own theory of glocalised world power, which combines a Foucaultian with a structurationist approach to argue for the existence of four-faced power relationships across the following twelve interdependent sites of power: 1) time; 2) space; 3) knowledge and aesthetics; 4) morality and emotion; 5) identities; 6) …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 7

Agamben’S Comic Messianism: Giorgio Agamben: Beyond The Threshold Of Deconstruction; Agamben And Politics: A Critical Introduction, Anthony Curtis Adler

International Dialogue

The publication of Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies in 2014, followed the next year by Adam Kotsko’s English translation, marked a momentous event in the history of more recent continental thought, bringing to a close one of the most far reaching and ambitious scholarly and philosophical labors of the twentieth century. Initiated in 1995 with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben’s project, named after the first volume, would come to comprise nine separate books, published at fairly regular intervals over the course of twenty years. While neither Kevin Attell’s Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (BTD) …

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 7.

Bosnia’S Paralyzed Peace, Oliver P. Richmond

International Dialogue

This study offers a powerful blow by blow analysis of the attempts to create peace in BiH since the Dayton Agreement. According to Christopher Bennett, Dayton provided a “balance of terror,” was full of unrealistic deadlines, and aimed at providing internationals with an exit strategy (81) and international involvement constantly suffered from an “enforcement gap” (110) derived from the contradiction between trusteeship and democracy as well as limited resources (114). It has even reinforced existing power structures (the ethnos rather than the demos (116, 182), connected to para-states, and undermined democracy. A “new ethno-national reality now exists” even extending to …

War And Individual Rights: The Foundation Of Just War Theory, Nathan Wood

International Dialogue

Rights are a cornerstone of much contemporary moral and political philosophy. They tell us what we are owed by others, what protections we enjoy against both private citizens and against the state, and they inform us of the restrictions on our freedom that morality and law demand.

Adam Smith: His Life, Thought And Legacy, Sarah Otten

International Dialogue

Since the publication of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith by Oxford University Press in the 1970s and 80s, there has been increasing interest in the philosophical aspects of Smith’s writings. While in the public mind, he is associated with economics through his second book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (Wealth of Nations) Adam Smith was a professional philosopher, holding the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University for eleven years. It was a period he regarded as “the most useful, and, therefore, as by far the happiest” …

The Legacy Of Iraq: From The 2003 War To The “Islamic State”, Kieran Mcconaghy

International Dialogue

Benjamin Isakhan’s The Legacy of Iraq attempts to take a holistic look at the totality of political developments and relationships in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The book has contributions from more than a dozen experts in aspects of Iraq’s history and politics.