The Entwining of Freedom and Intersubjective Sensibility: Levinas, Thinker of an Embodied Philosophy of the (ethico-political) Subject
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay traces the conception of the political subject, as inherited by most forms of liberalism. Its point of departure is Emmanuel Levinas's essay Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, published in 1934 in France. In that essay, Levinas is responding to what he perceives as the 'philosophical' challenge, as posed by *Lebensphilosophie* and the existentialism of Heidegger, to the political and philosophical underpinnings of Weimar parliamentarianism. He observes, above all, that a philosophy of the subject -- including the autonomous political subject of liberal theories -- requires a re-thinking of embodiment. The emphasis placed on abstract freedom may overlook the complexity of human life, which is invariably embodied and 'situational'. In this way, Levinas anticipates many critiques that arose, in phenomenology and French existentialism, after the War. More interesting, his recovery of the embodiment theme from philosophies of life allows him to merge elements of liberal theory with a richer conception of the subject, thereby deflecting the threat to liberalism that was coming out of the various strains of Neo-Nietzscheanism in the 1930s. I argue (with other commentators) that his strategy may prove useful to liberal thought in our time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".