Conveners: Carmen Dege, Lisa Gilson, Paul Linden-Retek, Samuel Loncar, Becca Traber
Dec 6: Robert Bernasconi
Posted on December 1, 2013 by Carmen
Dear all,
The year is coming to a close and we have had a fantastic set of meetings and fruitful discussions. Before we end this term, however, I am extremely delighted to announce our final meeting, which will help us bring the central themes of our discussions together: This coming Friday, December 6, 1.30-3.20pm, ISPS A001, Professor Robert Bernasconi (Pennsylvania State University, Philosophy and African American Studies) will talk to us about a shift in the treatment of poverty in post-war French philosophy, mainly presented through the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas.
In “Globalization and World Hunger – Levinas and Kant”, Bernasconi introduces Levinas as an extension and critique of Kant’s notion of property, and offers an interpretation of ways in which Levinas’s integration of secular and Jewish ethics can contribute to political and social understandings of poverty today. In relation to this, we will be reading a short piece by Levinas, “Hunger and Secularization”, which forms an important reference point for Bernasconi’s chapter. [15 and 11 pages]
Finally, we will continue our discussion of poverty in Augustine, the medievals and the moderns, specifically the changes in the concepts of charity and almsgiving, with Robert Bernasconi’s paper “On Giving What Is Not Mine to Give: A Critique of John Locke’s Displacement of the Rights of the Poor to Charity”. [11 pages]
For those of you less familiar with Levinas, I attached an interview he gave in 1986 to François Poirié. It is printed in Is It Righteous to Be? – Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Essential passages are marked [about 25 pages] in case you do not have the time to read the interview in its entirety.
Looking forward to seeing you on Friday!
Best,
Carmen
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Nov 15, Poverty in the Christian Tradition: A Medieval Take
Posted on November 11, 2013 by Carmen
Dear All,
We are delighted to announce our next session with Jennifer Herdt, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, to discuss poverty in the context of the Roman empire and early Christianity, specifically in the thought of Augustine.
Our readings come from two books:
Professor Herdt’s Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago, 2008), chapter 2, giving us her general view of Augustine. [27 pages]
The second book is four chapters from the recent work of Peter Brown, Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, The Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West (Princeton, 2012). The first two chapters (3 and 4) provide an overview of wealth in the Roman empire and Christian churches, respectively. The next two chapters (21-22) then examine Augustine’s view of poverty and wealth in the context of the Roman city and populus and more radical Christian thinkers (Pelagius). [67 pages]
We will be meeting this Friday, November 15, 1.30-3.20pm, in ISPS, A001.
Looking forward to seeing you there.
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Nov 8, Rethinking the Political: Poverty in Post-Structuralist Thought
Posted on November 4, 2013 by Carmen
Dear All,
This week we will broach a discussion on various post-structuralist and post-Marxist texts and their relevance to how we understand poverty. Please note that we will be meeting at our normal time this week: Friday, November 8, 1.30-3.30pm, in ISPS A001. Moira Fradinger, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale, will help orient us in the discussion.
1. Moira Fradinger, Binding Violence, Introduction [26 pages]
2. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” [18 pages]
3. Jacques Ranciere, The Philosopher and His Poor, Afterword to the English-Language Edition (2002). [8 pages]
4. Jacques Ranciere, “Ten Theses on Politics” [11 pages]
5. Slavoj Zizek, Violence, selections. [21 (very short) pages]
(Optional)
a. Jacques Ranciere, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” [7 pages]
b. Lakshman Yapa, “What Causes Poverty? A Postmodern View,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers
These readings confront what forms of power create practices of injustice and deprivation, the terms of reference, and associated discourses and their abstractions. In particular, they focus on the symbolic political space in which poverty exists, how political discourse includes the poor within the social fabric only to erase their significance, or how various moves to inclusion of the poor never fail to reproduce their exclusion.
We look forward to seeing you there.
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Nov. 1: Vittorio Hösle
Posted on October 29, 2013 by Carmen
Dear All,
I am delighted to announce the next session of the Politics of Time and Value reading group. On Friday, November 1st, Professor Vittorio Hösle will join us from Notre Dame University (Philosophy) and discuss his work with us. In preparation for the discussion we will be reading two pieces: a commentary on Mandeville, Machiavelli and Malthus as well as a chapter on the historical evolution of “ethics” and the concept of goodness.
1. “Can a plausible story be told of the history of ethics? An alternative to MacIntyre’s After Virtue,” in Dimensions of Goodness, ed. Vittorio Hösle, Newcastle upon Tyne 2013, 113-148.
2. “Ethics and Economics, or How Much Egoism Does Modern Capitalism Need? Machiavelli’s, Mandeville’s, and Malthus’s New Insight and Its Challenge,” in Crisis in a Global Economy. Re-planning the Journey, ed. J.T. Raga/M.A. Glendon, Vatican City 2011, 491-513.
The session takes place next Friday, Nov. 1, 1.30-3.20pm, in ISPS A001.
Looking forward to seeing you,
Carmen
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Oct. 18, Poverty and Wealth in Civil Society
Posted on October 14, 2013 by Carmen
Dear All,
Sorry for the flood of emails today.
Please find attached both readings for our reading group meeting this week. Since more people will be able to make it to our usual time, we decided to switch back to Friday, Oct. 18, 1.30-3.20pm, ISPS A001. Apologies for any inconvenience this might have caused.
This week we will follow up on our readings of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx with two recent complementary secondary texts. Stefan Eich, graduate student in Political Science, is going to guide our discussion.
1. First, we will be reading a chapter from Isaac Nakhimovsky’s Fichte book, The Closed Commercial State – Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (2011), to contextualize the debate. Like Hegel, Fichte is preoccupied with the possibilities and difficulties in trying to impose order on the spontaneously generated economic forces which, in producing both wealth and poverty, have come to characterize civil society. Nakhimovsky offers a reading of Fichte’s Closed Commercial State as an attempt to spell out a vision of Rousseau’s political economy from the vantage point of German Idealism. The dilemmas of necessity and autonomy, already implicit in Rousseau, here lead to an argument for economic self-sufficiency and a break with certain forms of trade. [27 pages]
2. Second, following up on our discussion of Marx and Hegel, we will discuss some selections from Frank Ruda’s recent book on Hegel’s concept of the rabble (2011) in which the rabble emerges as the central aporia of the Philosophy of Right, a fully-acknowledged unresolved residue of Hegel’s dialectical embrace of political economy in civil society. [Chapter 1, Luther and the Transfiguration of Poverty; chapter 2, Pauper-Rabble: The Question of Poverty; chapter 3, The Emergence of the Rabble from the Un-Estate of Poverty; chapter 4, Transition: From the Poor to the Rabble; Coda: Preliminary Notes concerning the Angelo-Humanism and the Conception
of the Proletariat in Early Marx — 40 pages total]
Looking forward to seeing you Friday.
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Oct. 11, Alienation and Recognition: An Alternative Account of Poverty?
Posted on October 6, 2013 by Carmen
Dear All,
Please find attached below the readings for this week’s session on poverty, treating the subject of alienation and recognition. We will be reading Rousseau (“On Wealth”, p. 8-17); Orwell (Down and Out in London and Paris, Ch. 16, p. 104-107); Hegel (Philosophy of Right, sections 230-256, p. 145-155); and Marx (“Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood”, p. 1-20).
Each of these thinkers sought to understand the ramifications of the industrial revolution and the explosion of global commerce on a level of human to human contact — how we view ourselves and others, and how we act and react to difference and suffering. The themes of “alienation” and “recognition” connect these thinkers, but they also divide them — we hope we can explore how and why this is the case.
With best wishes,
Lisa and Carmen
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Reminder: Tomorrow, Thomas Pogge, First Reading Group Session
Posted on September 26, 2013 by Martin
Dear all,
This is a reminder that we will be meeting tomorrow, 1:30pm-3:20pm in ISPS, Room A001 for our first session this term with Thomas Pogge (Philosophy, Yale University). Professor Pogge has just emailed me the latest version of a field report about a three-year project on measuring poverty and gender disparities. Please feel free to read it, if time permits, but note that it is not yet published and finalized and should not be circulated without the author’s permission.
We will be discussing two main readings:
1. “‘Assisting’ the Global Poor” in Deen K. Chatterjee, ed.: The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, 2004, 260-288.
2. “Are We Violating the Human Rights of the World’s Poor?,” in Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal 14:2 (2011), 1–33.
Looking forward to seeing you there.
Best,
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Sep 27: Thomas Pogge, First Reading Group Session, Fall 2013
Posted on September 21, 2013 by Carmen
Dear colleagues,
I am delighted to announce the first session of the Politics of Time and Value reading group on Friday, September 27, 1:30-3:20pm in ISPS, A001. This term we will engage the topic of poverty and Thomas Pogge has kindly agreed to start us off. We will be reading three pieces of his numerous publications on world poverty in order to become acquainted with the contemporary debates in public policy and moral philosophy about the causes, definitions and cures of poverty.
1. “‘Assisting’ the Global Poor” in Deen K. Chatterjee, ed.: The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, 2004, 260-288.
2. “Are We Violating the Human Rights of the World’s Poor?,” in Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal 14:2 (2011), 1–33.
3. A report of a three-year project on measuring poverty and gender disparities with field work in 6 countries, which Professor Pogge is concluding as I write. I will send out the report in a second email prior to our session.
This session is the first of four sessions on contemporary discourses of poverty. For more details about our schedule and invited speakers, please check the respective sections of this website.
Looking forward to seeing many of you on Friday.
Best,
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Fall Schedule: The Politics and Metaphysics of Poverty
Posted on September 17, 2013 by Carmen
Dear all,
Welcome back!
We are pleased to announce the fall schedule of The Politics of Time and Value graduate student reading group. As last year, we hope to come to new perspectives on the role of metaphysics in contemporary political and social thought. This semester we plan to engage the topic of poverty. Our guiding questions are: What are the religious, moral, and ideological grounds that shape the modern discourse on poverty? How do these fundamental assumptions affect concrete economic and political responses to poverty, or the lack thereof? Are there ways to reconsider, expand, and criticize the modern discourse through an engagement with ancient, medieval, and early modern texts?
Our investigation of these questions will take the following course: We first explore the response of different traditions of contemporary thought to the problem of poverty, focusing on the liberal, communitarian, socialist, Marxist, and post-structuralist conceptions of and attitudes toward poverty. We then turn to reflections in ancient and medieval texts on the nature of human poverty and what it entails to discover what, if anything, the contemporary traditions are lacking in their discourses on poverty.
Please find our (preliminary) schedule here.
Due to scheduling conflicts, we had to move our meetings to Friday, 1.30-3.20pm, and hope that you will be able to participate at this time. If you have any further questions about the mailing list or the schedule, don’t hesitate to contact me at carmen.dege@yale.edu. Also, please feel free to forward this message to other interested people.
We are excited that Professor Thomas Pogge (Yale University, Philosophy) has agreed to start us off on September 27. I will be sending out an email this weekend with the readings.
Looking forward to seeing you soon!
Carmen Dege
Lisa Gilson
Paul Linden-Retek
Samuel Loncar
Becca Traber
The Politics of Time and Value Reading Group is generously supported by the MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society.
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