Christopher Hamilton

The nature of evil a reply to Garrard

Abstract In this article I explore Eve Garrards recent account of evil and some work of Colin McGinns on the same topic. I argue that neither provides a satisfactory account of evil. In doing so, I discuss the role of conscience, sadism and indifference to the suffering of others in evil‐doing. I argue that the evil‐doer can be admirable and I explore the relation between agent and action in the evil deed.The idea that evil is mysterious is considered and I conclude with some comments on the relation between evil and the idea of a fellowship amongst human beings.

Kierkegaard on truth as subjectivity: Christianity, ethics and asceticism

This paper is an exploration and interpretation of Kierkegaards account of Christian belief. I argue that Kierkegaard believed that the Christian metaphysical tradition was exhausted and hence that there could be no defence of belief in God in purely rational terms. I defend this interpretation against objections, going on to argue that Kierkegaard thought it possible to defend a post-metaphysical conception of religious belief. I argue that Kierkegaard thought that such a defence was available if we understand correctly what it is to speak with ethico-religious authority. I argue that, when interpreted in the way I outline, Kierkegaards notion of ethico-religious authority shows his conception of religious belief to have great plausibility. However, Kierkegaard goes on to argue that an individuals true relationship with God is constituted through the cultivation of guilt and the sense of himself as a sinner, and I give reasons for rejecting this claim, arguing that such cultivation is a form of asceticism.

Revisiting relaxation in globular clusters

The classical theory of cluster relaxation is unsatisfactory because it involves the Coulomb logarithm. The Balescu-Lenard (BL) equation provides a rigorous alternative that has no ill-defined parameter. Moreover, the BL equation, unlike classical theory, includes the clusters self-gravity. A heuristic argument is given that indicates that relaxation does not occur predominantly through two-particle scattering and is enhanced by self-gravity. The BL equation is adapted to a spherical system and used to estimate the flux through the action space of isochrone clusters with different velocity anisotropies. A range of fairly different secular behaviours is found depending on the fraction of radial orbits. Classical theory is also used to compute the corresponding classical fluxes. The BL and classical fluxes are very different because (a) the classical theory materially under-estimates the impact of large-scale collectively amplified fluctuations and (b) only the leading terms in an infinite sum for the BL flux are computed. A complete theory of cluster relaxation likely requires that the sum in the BL equation be decomposed into a sum over a finite number of small wave numbers complemented by an integral over large wave numbers analogous to classical theory.

Nietzsche and the murder of God

Nietzsches tortured relationship to the Christian God has received scant attention from commentators. In this paper I seek to map out the central lines a proper understanding of Nietzsche in this regard might take. I argue that fundamental in such an understanding is Nietzsches profoundly corporeal moral vocabulary, and I trace connections between this vocabulary and Nietzsches concern with cleanliness, his asceticism, and the notion of a sense of common humanity with others.

Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um 1900: Longing, Enchantment and the Material Subject

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to offer an interpretation of Walter Benjamins Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood Around 1900). Exploring the style and the content of Benjamins text, both of which portray the world of his childhood as a place of enchantment, I suggest that Benjamin creates in this text a conception of the self as displaced into the surrounding material world. I argue that, in doing this, Benjamin seeks to explore the materiality of the subject and erase its subjection to time, creating a self that is constituted only by space. I seek to show that this is part of Benjamins strategy of exploring a decentred conception of agency. In all this, I suggest, Benjamin converts his own childhood into a work of art in which there is a longing for redemption that cannot finally be achieved but that expresses an important understanding of the truth of a human life.

'This damnable, disgusting old age': Ageing and (being) one's body

The aim of this chapter is to explore the way in which, in ageing, the body reclaims one. Drawing principally on the work of Jean Amery, I explore this notion, developing it in the context of the mystery of one’s relation to one’s body: one is one’s body, but one has one’s body, or so I suggest, and this fractured and puzzling relation we have to ourselves is part of what ageing makes us realize and acknowledge. I further relate ageing to our mortality, and close by exploring it in the context of the ageing of the face, drawing on some reflections on self-portraiture to help clarify the sense in which the ageing body demands a certain redemption which we can seek to respond to or refuse.

'Humanity, Animality, and Philosophy in Primo Levi'

Since at least Socrates, reflection on human mortality has been central in philosophy. It has been taken as virtually axiomatic that death is the worst that can befall us and that if we are not to die ignominiously we must prepare ourselves for death. Hence it is that philosophy has long seen itself as telling us that we should seek to develop the kind of attitude toward death that allows us to do that. Indeed, philosophy has often seen itself as a form of this preparation: the act of philosophizing, so the thought goes, is itself a kind of dying, since it involves a withdrawal of the thinking self from world and body, and thus mirrors or models death in some way. At another level, philosophy might help with preparing us for death by offering concrete suggestions for thinking about it less fearfully. Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Lucretius, Montaigne, Spinoza, Heidegger, and countless others repeat this sense of the relation between philosophy and death, inflected in numerous different forms and styles.

'Religion, Forgiveness and Humanity'

There are many ways of doing philosophy of religion. No doubt all of them have need of abstract concepts and passages where reflection is more technical than it usually is, say in everyday thought and reflection. But it is well known that, in this area of philosophy, and not only in this area of philosophy, abstract reflection can run the risk of losing contact with the ins and outs, the finer-grained details, of the lived experience of reality. One way to seek to reduce this risk is to approach abstract or general reflection through philosophical reflection on specific cases. This is what I intend to do in this paper. My aim is to explore in detail a specific and, in my view, extraordinarily striking example, in this case, an example of forgiveness in a religious, indeed, Christian context, drawing out where possible general or abstract conclusions, but seeking always to root reflection in the specific case in order to understand better from a philosophical point of view what is at stake, what is important, when thinking about the issue in question. Of course, I shall be seeking primarily to elucidate philosophically the example I shall discuss, but, by implication, I hope that the kinds of questions, worries and concerns I discuss might raise consciousness – philosophical consciousness – of the kinds of questions that we might explore in other examples, specifically those which involve forgiveness in a religious context.

Enjoyment: The Moral Significance of Styles of Life

611 philosophy of science. It will also engender a substantial and prolonged secondary literature, examining and building on its central claims. Altogether, it is a fitting testimony to the lasting importance of Martin’s contribution to philosophical thought and will enable that contribution to receive its proper recognition and achieve its deserved influence in the years to come. The Mind in Nature is beautifully written, in Martin’s inimitably sharp and spare style, which will immediately call to mind his speech and conversation in those who have had the good fortune to have encountered them. Although it deals in places with some very complex and difficult problems, it is never cluttered with technical verbiage or unnecessary formal symbolism. Indeed, it is a perfect model of philosophical clarity. Martin has a knack of anticipating the questions that will come into his readers’ minds as they progress through the book and almost always supplies a compelling response to them. The overall organization of the book could not be improved upon, with successive chapters building only on material that appears beforehand so as to progress from very general issues in fundamental ontology, stage by stage, to very specific ones in the philosophy of mind and language. No better example of how to write a work of philosophy in the analytic tradition could be imagined. With Martin’s death that tradition has lost one of its greatest exponents, but thanks very largely to Heil’s unstinting and selfless editorial labours, Martin’s voice and thought live on in the pages of this book for new generations of philosophers to admire and ponder over.

The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil

[1] This is a book of essays by different authors – some principally scholars of the work of Simone Weil, others philosophers of religion and theologians – whose general area is indicated by the title. It is a book to be welcomed, if only because Weil’s work is important and interesting, but, with one or two notable exceptions, is little discussed in mainstream English-speaking philosophy of religion. There are many reasons for this lack of attention to Weil: the scattered, note-book form of much of her writing; the aphoristic style she often adopts; the difficulty of properly capturing her sense of things in English; the mystical strain in her work; there are no doubt others. Indeed, one of these other reasons is pointed out by David Tracy: there is a sense in which Weil is an impossible figure because she was herself so keenly aware of the sense, or senses, in which Christianity – by which I mean, leading a life that genuinely seeks to be Christ-like (as Weil herself did), not that other thing, membership of a kind of club – is impossible. I am not, however, entirely clear what Tracy means by ‘impossible’ here: I myself, as I have intimated, would see it in the demand to love all human beings, in the requirement of infinite forgiveness, in the injunction never to judge and so on. Tracy, however, relates it to the notion of the tragic, claiming that ‘Weil. . . restored tragedy to a [his emphasis] prominent place in both the reading of Plato and the reading of Christianity’ (240). There is something in this, but it would have been good to have a more detailed discussion: Tracy, for example, sees clearly that Weil’s readings are often wilful – he is especially critical of her understanding of Judaism – and one might wonder whether she is just as wilful (as I suspect she is) in her reading of, for example, Plato, to whom a tragic vision seems in so many ways deeply alien. Or again, Tracy refers to Weil’s sense of fate and our being cursed, and I would very much have liked to see these extremely interesting notions dealt with in more detail in his otherwise very suggestive paper. [2] Cyril O’Regan explores Weil’s understanding of evil and violence. He helpfully traces her thinking here to certain Platonic and Parmenidean ideas, arguing that Weil had a conception of evil as non-being, a thought we most naturally associate with Augustine. However, I am not entirely clear what O’Regan wants to do with this thought. There is something in the idea that evil must be understood in privative terms, but it is far from clear just what that is, despite the efforts of many. O’Regan links Weil’s claim to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil (192), but this is not entirely illuminating since it is far from clear that Arendt’s