After the evacuation of a transcendental ethic as a universal yardstick or law for action, notions of justice, morality and the law nevertheless remain policed, and are still invested in by strong systems of belief and prejudice. This thesis sets out to analyse the tradition and prevalence of “idealising” moments of consequence, judgement and decision and their specific relation to a transcende...

While the Internet is often touted as a revolutionary technology, it might be noted that democratic institutions have witnessed no digital revolution through the Internet. This observation leads this chapter to argue that the field of e-democracy has generally failed to live up to its own reformist rhetoric. It argues that instead of reforming government processes through technology, e-democrac...

Scholarly inquiries into communalism in South Asia have often exclusively focused on politically constructed religious and ethnic identity categories. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that territoriality and the designation of homelands played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in developing social and political boundaries in the region. By analyzing the writings o...

A lot of discourses about the so-called « screen civilization » pay little attention to screens. They usually speculate about a supposed cyberspace instead of examining the visible forms of effective communication. This paper looks at what is visible or invisible on computer-supported medias. To do this, it considers both the semiotics of visible signs displayed on the screen and the metasemiot...

Hezbollah, which in Arabic stands for the “Party of God,” has over the last few decades grown into one of the most influential Lebanese political organizations and militias. Hezbollah was conceived in the midst of the violent civil War of Lebanon, and in its early stage it often resorted to terrorist acts. However, over the years it has gradually transformed into a legitimate political current....

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

In this article Paul’s argumentation is analysed from the perspective of sophistic rhetoric. In the first section the question is discussed what it means to label Paul’s rhetoric in his Letter to the Galatians ‘sophistic.’ To that end, an attempt is made to reconstruct the view of a contemporary critical reader who did not share Paul’s presuppositions and who was well acquainted with the discus...

In their article "Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Cultural Literacy" Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert start from concerns in contemporary educational debates about a growing lack of civic literacy. These complaints are raised both in the public sphere, in institutions of pedagogy, and in scholarship about the form, content, and function of civic literacy and civic education. Although there is an ongo...

In the first half of the twentieth century, dramatic developments in physics came to be viewed as revolutionary, apparently requiring a complete overthrow of previous theories. British physicists were keen to promote quantum physics and relativity theory as exciting and new, but the rhetoric of revolution threatened science’s claim to stability and its prestigious connections with Isaac Newton....