Diogenes articles from September 2002

Diogenes archives from September 2002

Towards the dehumanization of the world?
September 22, 2002... Is it only yesterday's humanism, whether religious or secular in origin, that is dying--and is it really dying?--or is it more profoundly the very paradigm of humanity? At least it is worth asking the question. Do we not hear on every side...

Introduction.
September 22, 2002... We all share the contradictory feeling that something of what had hitherto been considered essential to humanity or the sense of being human is in the process of being irrevocably lost: that everywhere there is emerging a feeling of disgust or...

Definition of man: what is left of the Nuremberg Code?(Column)
September 22, 2002... All of us share the same feeling of being torn between two equally impossible attitudes, namely the absurdity of resistance and the abjectness of renunciation, that is to say a feeling of surrender to the course of events and I think that it is...

Man: natural or self-fabricated?
September 22, 2002... What is humanity? I do not claim to answer this question; more simply, I will seek to bring to light the now-problematic character of the very concept of humanity. I will start from a basic established fact: today we cannot conceive the notion...

The advent of the genetic quotient.(Column)
September 22, 2002... This article is intended to be both an analysis, and also an account: that of a generation of young citizens, to which I belong, which is both enthusiastic about and worried by recent advances in genetics. In the modern world mind set evolves...

The monstrous as the paradigm of modernity? Or Frankenstein, myth of the birth of the contemporary.
September 22, 2002... `Do you see this egg? It is with this that all the theological schools and all the churches of the Earth will be overturned.' Diderot, Entretien avec d'Alembert (Conversation with d'Alembert) About fifteen years ago I took a journey...

Dehumanization or the disappearance of pluralism?
September 22, 2002... The `dehuman' and the inhuman are not, even partially, exterior to the human, as are the material and the living, the animal and the bestial; they represent rather the extremes, the very limits of the human. The inhuman forms the interior facet...

What we have lost with religion.(Column)
September 22, 2002... My title is deliberately provocative. It is intended to give pause to all those--quite a few, I imagine--who are convinced that they owe nothing at all to religion in any shape or form and who, as a result, think they have lost nothing in the...

Modernization and gentle barbarism.(Column)
September 22, 2002... The notion of `gentle barbarism' was developed during our critical analysis of the discourses and mechanisms of `modernisation' that emerged in the context of the movement for permanent reform (in education, the public services and business...

Can democracy survive the disgust of man for man? From social Darwinism to eugenics.(Column)
September 22, 2002... In their major book devoted to the Herbert Spencer `affair', Daniel Becquemont and Laurent Mucchielli profess themselves to be quite ready to share the opinion of Georges Guille-Escuret (1): the 19th-century British thinker would appear to...

Are there democratic values?(Column)
September 22, 2002... My article has the title `Are there democratic values?' In one sense the question is ironic: there are democratic values. And new ones appear every day. Nevertheless the question has a literal sense if you consider certain aspects of the regime...

The paradigm of the human and modernity.(Column)
September 22, 2002... The most burning question we are faced with, in our anxiety about the possible dehumanization of the world, concerns the nature of modernity. Today's erasure of and uncertainty about norms relating to the definition of the human only go to...

Nature, norms and democracy.(Column)
September 22, 2002... I am quite prepared to admit that modern western thought is shot through with contradictions. For example, it is not coherent to think both that the idea of human nature is an illusion and that eugenics is an out-and-out evil; or to claim to be...

The temptation of the undifferentiated. from the world without qualities to the man without qualities.(Column)
September 22, 2002... My topic will be philosophical and, more precisely still, ontological. If we wish to conceive of what is at stake in the `dehumanization of the world' and if we want to oppose it, we need to widen our perspective and take in not only the...

Is the democratic ideal conceivable without the notion of human nature? On John Dewey's democratic humanism.(Column)
September 22, 2002... Does the existing order have any better justification than the argument that it is `natural'? In most of its guises the `nature' argument in fact arises more often than not from an argument whose authority is questionable, since it has been...

The gift as sufficient source of normativity.
September 22, 2002... Daniele Hervieu-Leger and Marcel Gauchet explain that today the hold that the religious dimension has always exerted over human societies is, of very recent date but definitely; slackening; that it is becoming `hollow' and ceases to inspire...

The gift as insufficient source of normativity.(response to article in this issue, p. 77)
September 22, 2002... To my mind, the most urgent current task in the social sciences is one in the context of which the unduly cut-and-dried distinctions between positive and normative, between sociology and ethics, between secular pluralism and religious...

Is homo donator a homo moralis?
September 22, 2002... Like many interested in the gift, I have to confess to having always experienced a certain attraction for methodological individualism. Through its way of approaching social actors, methodological individualism introduces the actor's concern:...

Wisdom in the virtual age.
September 22, 2002... There are at least two ways to dehumanize the world. The world can be dehumanized from the top or from the bottom. From the bottom up would mean letting a barbaric situation develop which would reduce us to an animal state. From the top down...