Volume 20, No. 1, Spring 2025

FORTHCOMING

Responsibility in Politics, Science, and Philosophy

Approaches to Global Responsibility in Politics, Science, and Philosophy
Mats Andrén | University of Gothenburg, Sweden

This special issue departs from the conviction that the way to dissect the complexities and contradictions inherent in the concept of global responsibility is to unveil its historically defined contexts. The essays demonstrate how political thinkers, philosophers, and theologians have struggled since the postwar period with defining global responsibility, and to examine the specific possibilities and shortcomings of different philosophies and political ideas in this regard. In the introduction, the reader will find an exposition of some of these approaches. In addition, an attempt to outline the conceptual history of global responsibility as a research program is being presented. Next, I will introduce the themes of the subsequent essays.

Keywords: Historical contexts; ethics; history of concepts; the atomic bomb; environmental threats; temporalities; global threats.

Are We Creating a "World Without Us"? Global Responsibility and Annihilism in the Works of Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers, and Hans Jonas
Astrid Grelz | Lund University, Sweden

In this essay, the author suggests that the concept of global responsibility, as found in the works of Karl Jaspers and Hans Jonas, is already anticipated in Günther Anders' 1956 opus Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Navigating through the different phases of Anders' negative anthropology—from his pathology of freedom to the Promethean disjunction and his reluctance toward what he considered to be an annihilistic Western stance—I follow the development of his ethical imperative, and discuss its influence on Jaspers' 1956 radio lectures on the atomic bomb, and Jonas' 1974 Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man.

Keywords: Responsibility; negative anthropology; nuclear ethics; promethean shame; imagination; moral phantasy; annihilation; anxiety.

Fermi's Children: The Global Responsibilities of Italian Scientists after the Nuclear Bomb
Ettore Costa | Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples, Italy

This article examines the role of Italian scientists in shaping the concept of global responsibility during the Cold War, focusing on Edoardo Amaldi and Adriano Buzzati Traverso. Global responsibility emerged in response to the atomic bomb, which forced humanity to evaluate actions in terms of their consequences for all people across space and time, and was later extended to environmental risks and overpopulation. Scientists felt a special duty, both for their role in developing nuclear weapons and for their capacity to warn of their dangers, rooted in the rationalist and internationalist ethos of science. They organized through Pugwash and other transnational networks, which also took root in Italy. Amaldi, leader of postwar Italian science and a disciple of Enrico Fermi, mobilized scientific networks for peace and disarmament, while Buzzati regularly informed the public about global threats. The Italian case highlights the contested meanings of global responsibility in the nuclear age.

Keywords: Amaldi, Edoardo; Buzzati Traverso, Adriano; global responsibility; Pugwash; science and activism; anti-scientism; environmentalism; overpopulation; anti-nuclear movement; nuclear dissemination.

Colleagues with Conflicting Perspectives: Karl Barth and Karl Jaspers on Responsibility
Ola Sigurdson | University of Oslo, Norway

What does it mean to be a responsible subject, and what kind of subject would such a responsible subject be? These are philosophical questions highly pertinent to such global and planetary challenges of our time as the climate crisis, but they were also important for the philosophical and theological discussion on the reconstruction after the Second World War and the threat of the nuclear bomb. In this essay, I approach these philosophical questions through a historical exchange between two of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century who were colleagues at the University of Basel between 1948 and 1961: the philosopher Karl Jaspers and the theologian Karl Barth. Both were highly involved in the discussion of social and political issues of their time. Their starting points for their intellectual endeavors diverge, however: Jaspers departed from human experience, and Barth from the interruption of human experience through divine revelation. While Jaspers emphasized the universal dimension of this experience, Barth, for his part, accentuated the particular and concrete. The critical and cross-wise comparison of their understanding of responsibility is constructive—precisely because of their conflicting perspectives—in the search for a more complex understanding of who and what a responsible subject might be that could take on challenges that are both particular and universal in scope.

Keywords: Guilt and responsibility; philosophy and theology; configuration of a responsible subject; global responsibility.

Subjects, Worlds, and Ethics. A Phenomenology of Responsibility
Eddo Evink | Open University, Netherlands

The best known phenomenologist who has written much on the concept of responsibility is without any doubt Emmanuel Levinas. He has placed ethics and responsibility at the heart of phenomenology, namely as the main characteristic of human existence. His wide-ranging views on responsibility also lead beyond phenomenology. Levinas' approach is further radicalized by Jacques Derrida, who emphasizes the aporias that make responsibility infinite and even impossible yet inescapable at the same time. In this essay, both conceptualizations are criticized and replaced by a different phenomenology of responsibility that can be found in the work of Jan Patočka. His ideas on responsibility are more realistic, more practical, and can be better phenomenologically substantiated.

Keywords: Levinas, Emmanuel; Derrida, Jacques; Patočka, Jan; phenomenology; deconstruction.

Psychopathology at the Crossroads of Freedom and Responsibility
Alina Marin | Queen's University, Ontario, Canada

The philosophical concept of freedom is significantly linked to that of responsibility in Karl Jaspers' philosophy as the freedom for choice also implies accepting moral responsibility for both one's own existence and for others. Taking responsibility predicates that the choice that is made inherently limits unlimited freedom. Psychopathology as a science bears the responsibility of appraising an existential situation which subsequently may limit the understanding of possible further becoming. This essay addresses why such an appraisal needs to be unrestricted regarding possibilities of interpreting one's existence while respecting the hermeneutic circle within which a patient interprets reality. Paradoxically, psychopathology must remain inconclusive regarding making diagnosis provided it aims to respect existential freedom and maintain the ability to understand and appreciate an individual's autonomous selfhood, in its entirety. It bears the role of preserving a patient's freedom of becoming and to keep one's own vulnerability protected and safe.

Keywords: tba.