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Articles by Gary Gutting
Pensando lo imposible: filosofía francesa desde 1960
Ayuda Buscar en la ayuda Buscar en la ayuda Pensando lo imposible: filosofía francesa desde 1960 Autores: Gary Gutting Editores: Avarigani Año de publicación: 2014 País: España Idioma: español ISBN: 978-84-941037-2-8 Títulos paralelos: Thinking the impossible Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
Turn to Ethics: Derrida, Levinas, and Foucault
Derrida, Levinas, and Foucault Chapter: (p.133) 7 The Turn to EthicsSource: Thinking the ImpossibleAuthor(s): Gary Gutting Publisher: Oxford University Press DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199227037.003.0008 This chapter initially looks at Derrida's deconstruction of ethical concepts like friendship, justice, and hospitality and its similarity to that of Levinas' as interpreted by Richard Rorty and Simon Critchley.
9. Modern sex
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7. Madness - Very Short Introductions
Access to the complete content on Very Short Introductions online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription. Please subscribe or login to access full text content. If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
Turn to Ethics: Derrida, Levinas, and Foucault
Derrida, Levinas, and Foucault Chapter: (p.133) 7 The Turn to EthicsSource: Thinking the ImpossibleAuthor(s): Gary Gutting Publisher: Oxford University Press DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199227037.003.0008 This chapter initially looks at Derrida's deconstruction of ethical concepts like friendship, justice, and hospitality and its similarity to that of Levinas' as interpreted by Richard Rorty and Simon Critchley.
9. Modern sex - Very Short Introductions
The irony … is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the balance. Because he was homosexual, writing a history of modern sexuality must have been a particularly personal enterprise for Foucault. His biographers suggest that as an adolescent he suffered from having sexual interests that French society of the 1940s and 1950s regarded mostly with shame or outrage. Even the generally tolerant milieu of the École normale was not entirely hospitable to homosexuality.
Gary Gutting at Commonweal
Steven Pinker argues that the Enlightenment is the best thing that ever happened to humankind, but has he really listened to its critics?
Opinion | Affirmative Action and College Admissions: ‘The Problem With Meritocracy Is That It Isn’t Meritocratic’
A professor responds to readers’ arguments against affirmative action. By Gary Gutting Mr. Gutting is a emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. Jan. 3, 2019 Editor’s note: In the essay “I’m for Affirmative Action. Can You Change My Mind?” Gary Gutting asked readers to argue against his stance in favor of affirmative action for minorities in college admissions. He received over 750 responses, many challenging his position.
Friends Without Brains
What I need, then, is to find out if my iPal is actually aware: whether it has the internal, subjective experiences that go on when we are thinking, perceiving with our five senses, or feeling emotions or pain. Here my question converges with a famous philosophical conundrum, the problem of other minds. This is the problem of how we can know whether other people do in fact have minds—or, to put it another way, whether other people have the internal subjective experiences we do.
Opinion | I’m for Affirmative Action. Can You Change My Mind?
Affirmative action for minorities in college admissions is once again under serious challenge. For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true — a repetition of the same claim in almost the same words, what logicians call a tautology, like a dog is a dog. Of course, the claim is not quite that simple.
Does Evolution Explain Religious Beliefs?
This is the eighth in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone.
What Makes Free Will Free?
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The Stone is featuring occasional posts by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to information and events that have appeared in the news. Could science prove that we don’t have free will? An article in Nature reports on recent experiments suggesting that our choices are not free.
The Virtues of Poetry
This week, while browsing at St. Mark's Bookshop, I picked up James Longenbach's The Virtues of Poetry, a book of criticism published by Graywolf Press in 2013. To call this a "book of criticism," however, is to make it sound stodgier and more specialized than it is.
The Virtue of Original Sin Liberalism
The searing political and social divides in our country encourage a search for the magic key. We want a Big Idea that will explain why we disagree so passionately—on gun control, abortion, taxes and lots of other things—and also why we seem to loathe those whose beliefs diverge from our own. A few weeks ago, Robert Leonard, a radio news director in Knoxville, Iowa, took a thoughtful crack at exploring why Americans in rural areas so often differ with their urban fellow citizens on gun control.
Sleepwalking into Disaster
One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1918, the Germans unleashed six-thousand artillery pieces and forty-four divisions of Stormtroopers on the British army in Belgium and France. The battle was General Erich Ludendorff’s desperate grasp for victory—“the last role of the dice,” as one historian calls it. At first, the attack succeeded. But then it didn’t.
The Church Bells of Easter
Most readers regard the sensibility of Anton Chekhov, the innovative Russian dramatist and modern master of the short story, as thoroughly secular, and the famous credo expounded in one of his letters seems to justify this view. “I would like to be a free artist and nothing else,” Chekhov wrote to the poet and critic, Alexei Pleshcheyev, in 1888.
Easter in Technicolor
On late winter evenings in Ukraine, women huddle in front of candle flames to recreate ancient designs on the most delicate of all canvases, a raw fertilized chicken egg. They are working to create pysanky (pee-SAHN-kee), finely decorated eggs for the celebration of Orthodox Easter, Pascha. These beautiful colored eggs have been crafted in Eastern Europe for centuries, but they reached their artistic culmination in Ukraine and are popularly referred to as Ukrainian Easter eggs.
None of Us Faces Judgment Alone
Such a view insists that Zurbarán must be either genuinely prayerful or commercially savvy, but not both. Yet we might wonder whether the artist and his contemporaries, whose Christian theology insisted that God became decisively involved in even the most mundane human affairs by becoming human Himself, would have recognized such a stark distinction between prayer and work.
On Easter Saturday Bells Whacked the Air
Pet dogs help children.
The Second Day
Lent, like Advent, is a season of preparation and expectation. Officially, it ends on Holy Thursday, but Holy Saturday—the day between Jesus' public defeat and his quiet triumph—is the greatest day of expectation in the Christian calendar. For the church, this expectation is full of gladness: we know how the story ends. For Christ's first followers, though, the day brought more despair than hope. If he was truly dead, they had been fools.
Easter in Baghdad
During Holy Week of 2004 I was in Baghdad, where I worked as coordinator of the Iraq program for the Mennonite Central Committee. That was the week that the stupidity of the Iraq war became unavoidably obvious, at least outside the Beltway.
A Visual Pilgrimage toward Easter
This Lent, Ahmed Mater’s exhibition challenges us to scrutinize our own cities: in what ways are they changing, and for whom are they being built?
Eleventh Station-Christ Nailed to the Cross
Behold, God is no longer with us. He is on the ground. The frenzied pack has taken him by the throat like a stag. So You have come! You are really with us, Lord! They have sat upon you, their knee upon your heart. This hand that the executioner twists is the right hand of the Almighty. They have bound the Lamb by the legs, they’re tying up the Omnipresent. They mark with chalk on the cross his height and armspan. And when he tastes of our nails, we’ll see his face.
Last Word | Unchosen Hardships
It was just after breakfast on Good Friday when I began eyeing the frosted bunny cookie on the kitchen counter. I could swear its googly eyes were peering back at me. “Come on, just a bite,” I could almost hear it say. For all the talk of Catholic guilt, American Catholics get off relatively easy when it comes to fasting. Growing up, I always admired my Jewish friends who fasted on Yom Kippur and Muslim friends who fasted during the whole month of Ramadan.
American Distrust
It’s hard when viewing the remnants of the steel industry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, not to be astounded by what once was. At its height, the eponymously named Bethlehem Steel Corporation was the second-largest producer of steel in the United States and the nation’s largest ship builder. From furnaces filled with ore, coke, and limestone came the materials for our bridges and battleships, our tallest skyscrapers and largest factories.
A Hollywood Book
“Showbiz,” filmmaker Kenneth Anger once said, “is a synonym for sin.” Stories of sexual harassment and abuse now arrive as weekly, even daily, revelations. The deluge of accusations reminds us that at least for some time, Hollywood knew how to keep secrets. Ross McMeekin’s debut novel The Hummingbirds is a Hollywood book.
The Courts v. Cheaters
Cheating isn’t winning. We try to teach this to our children, but politics provides the opposite lesson. Political cheating allows those who engage in it to amass far more power than they have a right to in a constitutional democracy. Its most sophisticated form isn’t ballot-box stuffing but the use of indirect means by those in authority to perpetuate themselves in office. Within forty-eight hours, Americans were offered two fast courses in the politics of cheating.
The Best Ideas that Ever Were
In any case, Pinker’s argument falters when he comes to the crucial question of happiness. What good are all our modern health, wealth, and safety if we aren’t living happier lives? Pinker is confident that psychologists can measure happiness just by asking people—either in surveys (“On a scale of 1-7, how satisfied are you with your life overall?”) or in real-time responses to a beeper signal (“How happy do feel right now?”).
Is Ours the Best World Ever?
In any case, Pinker’s argument falters when he comes to the crucial question of happiness. What good are all our modern health, wealth, and safety if we aren’t living happier lives? Pinker is confident that psychologists can measure happiness just by asking people—either in surveys (“On a scale of 1-7, how satisfied are you with your life overall?”) or in real-time responses to a beeper signal (“How happy do feel right now?”).
Holy Water, Holy Feet
One man was led to my chair—a gracious elder who approached unsteadily. He first set his hat on the ground, then reached down to undo his shoelaces. He kicked off his shoes but couldn’t manage to pull off his socks. In his lap, his hand trembled with palsy. I reached down to his socks, gently pulling them off. I took his bare feet and washed them. They quivered in my hands. Next an older woman slipped off her shoes—black velvet, well-worn.
Ethics as a Work of Charity
Building on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Joseph Pieper, and others, contemporary thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and Julia Annas have redirected moral theology toward the tradition of virtue and a focus on personal qualities. More recently, a second generation of scholars—Jean Porter and John Bowlin come to mind—has pushed this work further, offering a more technical analysis of virtue.
When Muse Becomes Mother
Nor is Alma able to stave off the withering judgments that accompany Reynolds’s imperious moods. Finally, hurt once too much, she takes drastic action that results in his incapacitation. She couldn’t care less about the impact on the business or his art; she’s happy only that she has Reynolds where she wants him: “flat on his back—helpless, tender, open, with only me to help.” Now it is Alma shutting doors in Cyril’s face, rather than the other way around.
Populism Isn’t the Villain
The shambles left by last weekend’s Italian election, the chaotic dysfunction of American government under President Trump, and the attack on liberal democratic institutions in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and elsewhere—all of these are being blamed on the haunting specter of “populism.“ But is populism the villain here? Do we even agree on what the word means? This is more than an abstract debate.
A Bishop Against Border Fences
As President Trump continues to demand billions for what he calls a “beautiful” border wall, a Catholic bishop from the United States–Mexico border and other immigration-reform advocates visited Washington, D.C. earlier this week to challenge what they described as persistent myths that lead to immoral and ineffective immigration policies.
Hunger for Home
Part of a visual pilgrimage toward Easter, this piece is the fourth in a series of spiritual meditations by Griffin Oleynick, who will visit a different art gallery each week through the season of Lent. Catch up on past installments here.
Who Should Teach Our Children?
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. As at most colleges, our semester at Notre Dame ends with student evaluations of their teachers. Each time I wonder what the students — and their parents — make of this exercise. “Wait,” I imagine them saying, “we’ve just paid you tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to take courses at your school, and now you’re asking us to tell you if the teachers you hired are any good?
Taking the Measure of #MeToo
But the Jewish law was, characteristically, interested in women’s motivations and self-determination. They could be victims or they could be agents. Their value didn’t consist wholly in their female bodies and instincts; they were people. In the story of David’s kingship, Tamara’s helpless suffering in the aftermath of an unpunished, publicly humiliating rape was a highly consequential issue in itself.
Poem | Wintry Gratitude, an Ode
First Triduum, the Long Gospel of John, you said you’d never heard me read that well, fourteen minutes, the church under John’s spell, the horror that prefigures Easter dawn. Cloaked in purple the crucifix of Christ, next night the Vigil, candles in the dark, then daybreak and the Gospel of St. Mark. The clothes for which the Roman soldiers diced cast off, the risen Lord in radiant white, the rock rolled from the tomb, angel on guard.
In the Presence of Mystery
A Nobel Prize–winning mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose challenges the confidence his fellow scientists have in Huck’s theory that the stars came into being through chance alone, that they “just happened”—and manages to do so without turning to Jim’s supernatural theory. Indeed, his reason for dismissing much of current thinking in physics is that it is too much like religious thinking, based more on faith than on observation.
Doubting Thomas | Commonweal Magazine
Not being a historian of medieval philosophy, I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of Denys Turner’s account of Thomas Aquinas’s thought. But as a philosopher appreciating careful and creative thinking about Christian teachings, I can and do recommend Turner’s book as an impressive achievement. His Aquinas is a lucid and rigorous philosopher, following every argument wherever it leads, showing enormous ingenuity and unflinching integrity.
Sex Is Not 'Fun'
For a long time, the problem was pregnancy, which set sharp limits to the idea of sex as unalloyed pleasure. But then came what John Updike labeled the “post-pill paradise” and, as Philip Larkin noted, sometime around 1963, “sexual intercourse began.” But the paradise—if it ever existed—is now long gone, and sex is once again a center of anxiety and accusation.
Feminism and the Future of Philosophy
Philosophers uneasy with strong feminist claims about the current poor treatment of women — or who just think it’s wrong to presuppose such claims in philosophical discussions — may feel that feminist philosophy has nothing to offer them. Even sympathetic male philosophers may see such philosophy as the province of women, particularly since most writing on feminist topics is by women and feminists sometimes seem not to welcome male contributions.
An Interview with Francis Spufford
There’s more life and variety in a single page of Francis Spufford’s prose than there is in many full-length books. Spufford is a writer of polymathic intelligence.
Signs of the Times
In reading the signs of his times, Bernardin was concerned about the futility of treating issues like abortion, capital punishment, nuclear proliferation, and the use of military force as discrete topics. He understood how these issues were divisive in themselves. But he was convinced that a comprehensive commitment to respecting life as a principle connecting these issues would benefit them all.
Disrupters and Rebuilders
“With all due respect to Archbishop Gomez and his work in LA, but we do not hear the Catholic church speaking out enough,” says Mercado, who was part of a 100-mile pilgrimage from an immigrant detention center in Pennsylvania to Washington when Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015. “Be bold! Take action! Offer sanctuary to immigrants!” The delegates are on their feet, cheering loudly.
Behold, the Jihad of Freedom
The wonderfully evocative title of this book does not accurately convey its actual contents. A more apt, if also far less graceful title might be something like this: “Manufacturing Knowledge: How U.S. Attempts to Understand the Middle East Yielded Bogus Conclusions and Ill-Advised Policies.” America’s Dream Palace describes a century-long collaboration between U.S. policymakers largely ignorant of the Middle East and the entities to which they turned for enlightenment. Osamah F.
More than Animals
“We human beings are animals, governed by the laws of biology.” So begins Roger Scruton’s new book, based on his Test Memorial Lectures at Princeton.
‘Easter Dinosaur Poem’
Boys like dinosaurs, the clerk says. Not everyone likes crosses, she almost says. The dinosaurs almost resemble crosses with their small arms out in front of them. Dinosaurs: the popular mascot of science, Science: the religion of abiding in things seen. A student of mine, writing about Christians who find dinosaur bones said the characters were in conflict of what to do with them, considering they don’t believe in dinosaurs.
Francis’s Words About Women
Francis, to his credit, says again and again that a “deeper theology of women” is needed. I take this to mean that at some level he knows that he doesn’t know what this “feminine genius” is—and nor does anybody else. Having a certain humility and realism—that is, a reflexive preference for evidence-based claims rather than deductions from a priori principles—Francis does not presume to have it all taped.
Rethinking Our Patriotism
In the broadest terms, those on the right cherish a nostalgic dream that hopes for a return to a golden past of traditional values and individual responsibility, whereas those on the left project a utopian future in which we reject our history of oppression and create new values of diversity and collective action.
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