Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

作为文化批评的人类学 : 一个人文学科的实验时代 = Anthropology as cultural critique

A Theory of Morality.

more persuasive and compelling once Couldry narrows his sights, as when he uses Nick Davies’ work on modern British journalism to question whether current routine may work against the journalists’ own value of fidelity to the truth (p.193). That said, while Couldry’s virtue-based approach may appeal to many readers, I wonder in the end whether it is really as inclusive as he seems to assume. To take one example: for many members of the modern world, I suspect that virtues like loyalty and piety might be far more important than the ones that Couldry raises. Yet even in those moments when I found myself disagreeing with Couldry, these disagreements were productive ones. The book throughout is marked by an ethical seriousness and a careful attention to empirical work, and Couldry’s ability to handle an amazingly diverse set of sources is truly impressive. All told, it strikes me as an honest accounting of where we stand at the present moment.

Misunderstanding the Internet

News: The Politics of Illusion, Tenth Edition

Inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this thesis develops an environmental ethic out of his work. While the main threads of Levinas' philosophy exclude nature from ethics, a deconstructive reading of his work finds that it remains open to the possibility of ethics beyond the interhuman. While for Levinas the other is always a human other, I contend that his ideas on thematization and totalization ultimately require us to refuse to apply the labels "human" or "nonhuman" before being obligated in ethics. We need an ethic that does not ask who the other is before hearing the other's calling of oneself to responsibility. Responding to Levinas' work, I endeavour to articulate such an ethic, adequate to all others in the more than human world, including nonhuman (and more than human) others. I call these ethics the ethics of being with/in. I write "with/in" to emphasize that we are always both with and in: with others, and within contexts of relations, embodied in the world. In addition, the conjunction "with/in" illustrates the interrupted nature of an ethical subjectivity envisioned as a decentred conjunction of relations, always interrupted by others. As Levinas teaches, in ethical subjectivity oneself is interrupted by another, torn out of one's concern for oneself, creating a sense of ethics that comes before one's own philosophy and interrupts one's own thinking.

Barbara Jane Davy

Papers

The ethics of being with/in