justice as particular || law as the abstract >> Caputo reflects on Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’. I really like this line of thought, after I really have started to understand it. Justice is always deconstructing the law b/c law are abstracted from particulars–each case is always unique & requires a unique ruling. To be a [...]

Emmanuel Levinas on holiness: [T]o the questin “What is the ethical?” Levinas answered: “It is the recognition of holiness.” And what is holiness? When “the fundamental trait of being is the preoccupation that each particualr being has with his being”—when “plants, animals, all living thing strive to exist,” when for each one “it is the [...]

Responsibility is at least the acknowledgment of a fractured relation between humanity—specifically each persons human soul—and the rest of creation, a fracture for which human beings have to take the blame. (165) The decision for beliefs is clearly, for Dostoevsky, a matter of deciding for a structure of moral life authoritatively shaped by the central [...]

Obama will be signing a bill today to over turn what the previous president did early in his first term. I am speaking of hotly debated question of stem cell research. I don’t really care about the issue in its self. What is interesting is how the issue has been framed. Obama will in so [...]

This continues my recent thoughts about jobs and intellectual culture. There is a front page article in the New York Times today about a creationist scientist who has recently finished his doctoral work in geosciences from U of Rhode Island. The catcher is that he doesn’t really believe in the work that he did. The [...]