Gordon K. Haist

What implications does globalism have for education? Marx wrote of human nature abstracted and money “alienated” through credit and exchange value, and Habermas noted that class antagonism has shifted to consumer fetishism. These are clues to broader axiological issues at play, and this paper argues that the qualitative nature of value calls for situational and creative approaches rather than objective and subjective theories. Jacques Derrida’s critique of globalization is examined because it requires scrutiny over the concept of hospitality and calls for a new media-informed public space. An inclusively-driven public space requires a rethinking of values across differences. Globalization above all requires an axiological framework which would provide education with an important public purpose. Following Calvin Schrag’s philosophy of communicative praxeology, that purpose would be to teach transversal reasoning to create situational values apart from the materially driven global expansionism and resulting natural and social crises that are now upon us.

The epochē, a term generally understood to mean suspension of judgment or ‘bracketing’ in phenomenology, is treated in this paper as an essential resource for global learning. Its ancient heritage and its modern uses are examined from Carvaka (6th century BCE India) to Husserl (20th century BC Europe). The ideal of globalization is found to be in tension with the reality it addresses, which includes global warming, mass immigration, war, poverty, etc. The argument of the paper is that global awareness and action requires clarity concerning what truly is fundamental and for that, learning to practice the epochē is critical.

Jacques Derrida held that globalization has resulted in worldlessness. The problem is how to work out of its ethnocentric and logocentric cults of power and positioning. Derrida coined the nonword/non-concept “trace” to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence and to assert the universalizing potential of pre-logical heterogeneities, necessary for undermining the binary structure of reasoning. This paper argues that his focus on saving the honor of reason relates across time to Gangesa’s counterfactual reasoning and Bartŗhari’s treatment of Brahman as the eternal word. Given this universalized context, overcoming worldlessness requires reasoning reasonably, not categorically. Reason, Derrida says, must be reasoned with.

Jacques Derrida’s use of “non-concepts” such as the trace and différance shifts the practice of philosophy away from the presuppositions of Western metaphysics, which he sought to deconstruct. This essay contends that this inspires a dialogue with ancient India’s skeptical tradition that flourished from Carvaka to Pyrrho. Following Heidegger’s question of being, Derrida’s deconstruction rethought time, consciousness, perception, etc., in ways that give it a secure footing in ancient skepticism’s usage of epochē, nominalism, etc., to steer between the extremes of nihilism and teleological overdetermination. In both, the meaning of being has to be understood through the “play of the trace,” not the reverse.

The twelve essays in this collection promote scholarship on the rich and diverse subject of mysticism by examining the nature of its thought both from Eastern and Western and from philosophical and religious perspectives. These include studies of specific mystics, including Teresa de Avila, Lady Nijo, Hiroshi Motoyama, and Mirabai, and thinkers about mysticism, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. The book opens with two descriptive studies of similarities in the life of Teresa de Avila and mystics of very different times and cultures. The issue of mysticism and ethics is addressed in three essays, and central concepts involving pure conscious events and primordial oneness in Nietzsche are addressed in two separate essays. Wittgenstein's comments on mysticism are examined in two essays, one that places them in the perspective of his overall development and the other that studies them in comparison with recent continental thought. The book concludes with two essays that look broadly at the supersensible, one from an examination of Kantian aesthetics and the other from quantum mechanical interpretations of reality. Taken together, these essays attest to the power of mysticism to provoke reasoned thought about ultimate matters.

Are human rights negotiable? Jacques Derrida argued that it is necessary to negotiate the nonnegotiable to save the nonnegotiable. This paper defends this claim while arguing for what Calvin Schrag called an ethics of the fitting response and finding such a response in Amartya Sen’s realization-focused comparative approach to justice. For Derrida, the aporetic character of urgency produces decisions which must be made outside the institutional limits of decision theory. That calls for a deconstruction of the axiomatics of rights in institutional settings. It also makes urgent the need for a deinstitutionalized ethics undeceived by the challenge of making judgments in aporias. Using Ted Honderich’s humanism as counterfoil, the argument moves through Derrida’s concept of "contradictory coherence" to Schrag’s transverse rationality, which thinks with deconstruction in order to think against its negative outcomes. The paper ends by suggesting that Schrag's communicative praxeology forges an ethics compatible with Sen’s threshold conditions to determine rights through freedoms.