Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability

The dominant landscape of knowledge and policy rests on a fundamental inequality: bodies who are seen as hungry are assumed to be available for the interventions of experts, but those experts often obliterate the ways that the hungry actively create politics and knowledge by living a dynamic vision of what is ethical and what makes the good life. Such living frequently involves a creative praxis of refusal against imposed frameworks. Learning from such refusals requires hungry translations that are open and flowing and that are embedded in embodied solidarities that require radical vulnerability. Such translations strive to converse across incommensurable landscapes of struggles and meanings in order to co‐agitate against universalised languages that erase the vocabularies and visions of those who are reduced to hungry bodies. In reconceptualising politics as a shared and unending labour on an uneven terrain that makes perfect translation or retelling impossible, hungry translation becomes a continuous collective praxis of troubling inherited meanings of the social, and of making our knowledges more alive to the creativity of socio‐political struggle. Such hungry translations must fearlessly move between worlds in search of poetic justice and social justice without defining an origin or destination and without compromising the singularities that constitute each community of struggle.     

Conflict,Order, Harmony: The Modern Meaning of the Confucian Tradition

An examination of how a focus on the reading of traditional Confucian texts as a spiritual exercise can enable us to deal productively with modern understandings of the divergences among different ideals of human excellence.An investigation of such ideals has often focused on virtue discourse,but that discourse generates understandable suspicions in many people.A productive approach to these suspicions is to examine both the idea that new virtues (such as spiritual regret) are needed,and the notion that three distinctive modern emphases must play a central role in any contemporary consideration of the relationships among diverse ideals.After considering two kinds of principled opposition to this approach,we turn to Walter Benjamin's exemplary account of the huge gulf between modern and traditional understandings,and the possible aid some texts may offer in bridging it.Focusing on the distinctive operation of specific forms of presentation in the Confucian tradition,we conclude by investigating the idea that reading Confucian texts can be seen even today as an illuminating kind of spiritual exercise.     

Accountability without democracy: evidence from Confucian accountability

This article argues that the dominant democratic model of political accountability is shown to have been unduly centred on rights, institutionalisation, and punishment. Drawing inspiration from Confucian classics, this article proposes an alternative model of political accountability in which ethical norms and moral sentiments play crucial roles. Based on a structural analysis of accountability, the comparison between democratic accountability and Confucian accountability demonstrates two implications: first, recognition of the ample resource of accountability in Confucian tradition challenges the idea that the notion of accountability is simply a Western or democratic concept which has no root in Confucian societies; second, as an intellectual tradition and practical wisdom, some of the Confucian insights, reconstructed and applied to modern society, may well have the capacity to address contemporary issues more productively, especially in the domain of democratic deficits, than the dominant liberal approach.     

Historical Epistemology: On the Diversity and Change of Epistemic Values in Science

Historical Epistemology: On the Diversity and Change of Epistemic Values in Science. Historical epistemology involves the claim that the system of scientific knowledge is not determined by the observations but is also subject to epistemic requirements that may change in the historical process of doing research. As a result, the system of knowledge is path‐dependent in that its shape is contingent on epistemic choices made at certain historical points. I attempt to elaborate this approach by drawing attention to the double role of epistemic values. First, such values create relations of significance and thereby contribute to directing research into certain avenues. Second, they are also important in the process of confirmation in that they entail that certain forms of agreement with the facts are superior and preferable to other such forms. Some epistemic orientations and reorientations can be reconstructed as arising from an interaction with nature, but others are based on commitments to the kind of knowledge we appreciate. The epistemic authority of science is created in large measure by rules of the scientific community that express how to deal with knowledge claims.     

Natural Law and Our Contemporary Institutions

Abstract

Extending recent directions in the field and informed by a renewed reading of Aquinas, we argue for a broadened sense of the natural law that radiates to social and political life, not only in the narrow form of positive law but in the life of our institutions that necessarily presume an ordering to the common good. While increasingly under the threat of privatization or bureaucratization in individualistic cultures, institutions can and do function as sites where gifts are freely given and received, shared goods articulated and debated, and friendships formed.     

The practice and circulation of biodiversity assessment in tropical Mexico

Biodiversity assessment is considered a necessary activity in the planning of nature conservation. This activity is shown to gain authority by accessing an epistemic community of scientists and institutions. This is done through a process of socialization that includes the production of immutable mobiles and their circulation in networks only accessible through scientific practice. Local (non-scientific) modes of describing nature are shown to be capable of circulating in far-reaching but different networks. It is argued that the concept of biodiversity is culturally situated and yet the purpose of biodiversity assessment is to define territorialities across cultural divides. It can therefore be considered a post-colonial enterprise. It is suggested that a more hybrid view of nature is required and that biodiversity scientists have to be prepared to negotiate their representations of nature with those of other social groups.

La pratique et la diffusion de l'évaluation de la biodiversité dans le Mexique tropical

conservation, réseau, autorité épistémique, Oaxaca

L'évaluation de la biodiversité est reconnue comme une activité essentielle à la planification de la conservation de la nature. Il est établi que cette activité, en accédant à une communauté épistémique composée de scientifiques et d'institutions, jouit d'une plus grande autorité. Cela se produit par un processus de socialisation comprenant, entre autres, la production de mobiles immuables et leur diffusion à travers des réseaux accessible uniquement par la pratique scientifique. Il est démontré que les procédés locaux (non scientifiques) utilisés pour décrire la nature peuvent être diffusés à travers des réseaux vastes mais différents. Si le concept de la biodiversité est culturellement déterminé alors que le but de l'évaluation de la biodiversité est de définir des territoires au-delà des divisions culturelles, il est soutenu qu'il peut donc être considéré comme une démarche postcoloniale. Une perspective plus hybride sur la nature est proposée et les experts scientifiques en biodiversité doivent être disposés à négocier leurs représentations de la nature avec les membres d'autres groupes sociaux.

La práctica y circulación de la evaluación de biodiversidad en el trópico Mexicano

conservación, redes, autoridad epistémica, Oaxaca

La evaluación de biodiversidad se considera una actividad necesaria en la conservación de la naturaleza. Esta actividad gana autoridad por obtener acceso a una comunidad epistémica de científicos e instituciones. Lo hace mediante un proceso de socialización que incluye la producción de móviles inmutables y la circulación de ellos en redes accesibles exclusivamente por la práctica científica. Se demuestra que modos locales (no científicos) de describir la naturaleza son capazes de circular en redes distintas pero de gran alcance. Se sugiere que la noción de biodiversidad es cultural y, sin embargo, el objetivo de la evaluación de biodiversidad es el de definir características territoriales que cruzan líneas divisorias culturales. Por lo tanto, puede ser considerado una iniciativa pos-colonial. Se sugiere que hace falta una concepción más híbrida de la naturaleza y que los científicos en el campo de biodiversidad deberían estar preparados a negociar sus representaciones de la naturaleza con las de otros grupos sociales.     

The Political Style of Hubert H. Humphrey

Abstract

Political philosophy has a “curious” place in intellectual affairs. It wants to know whether philosophy has a place in the city. It also is aware that once political things have accomplished their purpose, the major issues of what-it-is-to-be-a-human-being remain. Aristotle warned that politics was not the highest science as such, but an understanding of politics that saw no place for anything but the political would end in a tyrannical exclusion of the human good from public life. Politics would claim that its definition of the good was the only definition. This exclusion meant that there was no natural or transcendent order to which man was open. The discipline of political philosophy, at its best, is open both to human and, indirectly, to divine things, as Artistotle intimated.     

Intellectual Humility and the Ends of the Virtues: Conflicting Aretaic Desiderata

This essay demonstrates that disagreement about how to characterize intellectual humility masks deeper disagreement about the ends the intellectual virtues are meant to serve. This has been largely unacknowledged in discussions of intellectual humility, and of the intellectual virtues generally. Despite disclaimers, contestants often proceed as though there is an available unified account of the virtue that, with enough persuasion, all could be brought to accept. This essay contends a shared account is unlikely and therefore such persuasive efforts miss the point. What is needed, rather, is more attention to the kinds of desiderata that are being privileged in the various accounts: what are the conceptions of human nature and human flourishing driving different accounts? I use a simple method to make my case. I begin with the two best contemporary efforts to characterize intellectual humility. I show why each side's attempts to persuade the other are likely to fail. I then show that even if some unified account of intellectual humility could be cobbled together from these two proposals, it could not capture at least one historically influential account of intellectual humility, one found in the writings of Augustine. In a concluding section, I offer an interpretation of why the project of finding a shared account of intellectual humility seems sure to fail. I argue that liberal political commitments drive much of the contemporary discussion of the intellectual virtues, and the extent to which agreement seems attainable is correlative to the extent we are willing to allow liberalism to determine the desiderata for an account of the virtues.     

The Virtue of Democratic Faith: A Recovery for Difficult Times

Democratic faith may seem like an ill-advised concept when the ills of democratic life are so glaring. This article claims that it is possible, even necessary, to recover and reinvigorate a notion of democratic faith that grapples with the flaws and intractabilities of the democratic condition. Conceived of as a virtue that inhabits uncertainty, I argue that democratic faith is well-tailored for democratic exchanges — particularly those involved in the risky business of building trust among citizens. Democratic faith's temporal orientation in the present girds the activist for the spade-work of democratic life, where future success often seems unlikely. On these terms, democratic faith can be distinguished from democratic hope. Jeffrey Stout's recent work exemplifies both hope and faith as democratic virtues, however Stout neglects the language of faith in favor of hope. I argue that Stout and other activists should consider the ways that democratic faith speaks to the dogged persistence required to face the dispiriting conditions of democratic life.