Scholars like Asani, Boivin, Mukherjee, Purohit, and Shodhan have exten¬sively discussed the identity formation of Satpanthi (followers of the true path) Ismaili groups over the last 150–170 years. Many accounts begin with the arrival of the Ismaili Imām, Āgā Khān I, in Mumbai in the late 1840s. Most scholars view the Aga Khan Case (1866) as the start of Satpanthi Ismailis acquiring a new ‘Islamic identity’, which, many claim, further solidified with the Hāji Bibi Case (1905–1908), marking the emergence of a Shi`a Imāmi Ismaili Nizārī identity.

This chapter questions the above-stated assumptions and raises some criti¬cal questions. What did it mean to be Satpanthi Shia in the early modern period? How appropriate is it to claim that the newly initiated (‘converts’) were not aware of their ‘Islamic’ affiliation before the nineteenth-century/modern period? Can communities like the Satpanthis be categorised as ‘syn¬cretistic’ or ‘standing on the threshold’? The chapter argues that though the newly initiated community was aware of the Islamic affiliation of some of their practices, beliefs, and vocabulary for centuries before the court cases of the nineteenth century, this awareness did not imply identifying with a specific religion called ‘Islam’ or not identifying with ‘Hinduism’ as these cat¬egories did not exist. I argue that the ‘British colonial rule compelled’ or colo¬nial apparatus like a census and administrative systems ‘forced’ Satpanthis to rethink/re-articulate their identities, expediting the process of identity forma¬tion. The chapter attempts to construct an alternate narrative of the process of identity formation over multiple centuries.

This book deals with the morality, honour, prestige and self-conception of states, all of which goes well beyond the narrow, rationalist defence of national interests, which dominates most International Relations (IR) studies. The honour of states – which is most clearly seen in situations of war – rests on the idealised conception of ‘all of us’, which includes all citizens, all classes and all generations, set against their opposite numbers outside of ‘our’ imme¬diate sphere of domination. This state-based image of itself and its existential teleology constitutes its very essence, notwithstanding that it is often seen as a deviation (‘exception’) from the normal state of affairs, where the state is ‘just’ there to serve and support the economy and its principal actors.

The volume, which is particularly topical given the current belligerent state of Europe and the global struggle for hegemony, pursues this line of thinking along three different but interconnected routes. The first chapter delves into the morality question itself, tackling the complex relationship between poli¬tics, law and morals and between states and citizens. The universe of moral judgements feeds off rigid distinctions between good and bad, I/we and the Other, liberty and restraint. Political actors support it, law legitimates it and citizens enact it.

The second chapter deals with the question of the honour and prestige of states, historically and conceptually. This is a question that has mostly been ignored, downplayed or misconceived by international relations theories, but which has now shown its renewed relevance and cries out for an explanation.

1. Introduction

• A. Different kinds of question

  • 1. The problem of how to discriminate

  • 2. Wording not infallible guide

  • 3. Look at how people look for the answer and what implications they see in that answer.

    • (a) This works O.K. in some cases.

      • 1. Examples.

    • (b) But not in others.

      • 1. People may have been confused about what they are asking.

        • a. Examples

  • 4. There is no formula: judgement necessary. But one can be self-conscious about one's own inquiry.

  • 5. Such inquiries not necessarily trivial, peripheral or merely preliminary; they may uncover quite substantive issues.

    • (a) Examples.

• B. Application to ‘what is political authority’?

  • 1. Consider Hume's ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, which opens with the well-known observation:

  • Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.

  • 2. This may be understood

    • a. Sociologically

    • b. Morally [?]

    • c. Philosophically [conceptually]

  • 3. These (and other) aspects may be combined.

    • a. Such combinations may be symptom of, or lead to, confusion

    • b. But we should not assume this must be so in all cases.

  • 4. Example: their combination in Hume

• C. Conceptual questions

  • 1. Their relation to philosophical puzzlement

  • 2. ‘Grammar’

    • a. Wittgenstein's use of this term

    • b. Don't assume it's trivial

      • 1. Cf. Guess's irritation about my speaking thus of St. John in the SW book.

      • 2. N.B. the mingling with ‘ethics’

There is little doubt that urban planning has failed women (Pojani et al. 2018). A series of feminist planners, architects, and human geographers have elucidated the ways in which contemporary cities favour the male gender. Recent books on this topic include What If Women Designed the City (East 2024), She City (Kalms 2024), Gendered City (Bassam 2023), Trophy Cities (Pojani 2021), Feminist City (Kern 2020), Engendering Cities (Sánchez de Madariaga and Neuman 2020), and Where Are the Women Architects? (Stratigakos 2016), not to mention a myriad of articles, reports, special issues, and blogs. Similar literature has been produced since the 1970s, as the second wave of the feminist movement gained momentum, and some classic readings have been featured in Gender and Planning (Fainstein and Servon 2005).

However, sexism in urban planning was cemented much earlier than sec¬ond-wave feminism. The urban environments we experience today have been shaped by long-standing systems of gender inequality. In fact, patriarchy has accompanied human civilisation all along, and as such, it has likely affected city planning since antiquity. But during the so-called Second Industrial Revolution – which stretches from the mid- to late 1800s, through the interwar period – patriarchal regimes fused with industrial capitalism to produce a particularly pernicious version of urbanism.

The patriarchy is defined as a social system in which men hold primary power and dominance, systematically oppressing and marginalising women and feminised “others.” Meanwhile, industrial capitalism is an economic system where private individuals or corporations own and control the means of production and distribution of goods, driven by the goal of profit. This system became widespread throughout the North Atlantic during the Second Industrial Revolution. It was characterised by large-scale industrial produc¬tion, technological innovation, and the accumulation of capital through investments and market competition.

Introduction

The triumphalist argument of a sweeping project of modernity, anchored in a predominantly Enlightenment-driven European imagination seen almost exclusively as Europe's very own hallmark accomplishment, did not always go entirely unnoticed or uncritiqued in parts of the non-West. Indeed, in recent times, it has been critically interrogated even in scholarship on the European experience, resulting, at times, in a rebuttal of the very thesis of modernity and the Weberian discourse of disenchantment (Entzauberung). Bruno Latour thus sees the thesis of disenchantment emanating from certain Western arrogance as well as a sense of despair that came to the fore through the recurrent and myriad juxtapositions of the Western superior ‘self’ contra the non-Western infantile ‘other’.1 As we shall see, in the process, Latour inspired a whole generation of scholars who have come to revisit the very epistemic bases of modernity in Europe vis-à-vis developments elsewhere in the world. Indeed, in large parts of the nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial world, scholars, religious figures, and public intellectuals – it is conventionally understood – were typically torn between the two ends of this spectrum. At one level, there would be a tacit acceptance of the hegemony of Eurocentric agendas and aspirations or even striving in some cases to emulate them in the name of a ‘modernity’ that they thought held a key to their progress. At another level, they often went to the other end of the pole by turning to an indigenist discourse, inward-looking at best but frequently dubbed as an enterprise tantamount to unqualified ‘traditionalism’.

Climate, Priorities, and Responses

With cities and towns in the process of developing strategies in response to current and future urban environmental and cultural issues, the potential responses, at best, would provide outcomes for positive livability in the con¬text of climate change, including livability and equitable access in future urban contexts. This focus began with the first phase of current responses to climate change generally appearing after the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Cities and towns continued to produce key initiatives in response to climate change and the need for equitable access, with an emphasis on climate mitigation, urban greening, walkability, and access. The results are potential planning and design approaches needed to advance the prospects of climate mitigation and equity as influences for viable livability in future urban contexts, including connections and urban landscapes. A prime chal¬lenge is the need for communities to produce resources derived from public and private entities for the current and future community adaptation to cli¬mate change mitigation. Ultimately, the potential quality of urban livability relative to climate and equity management will depend on the availability of such resources as cities respond to current and future climate issues.

Urban livability can be influenced by a range of factors, including walk¬ability. Conditions that influence walkability include connection qualities in the hierarchy of connections and places along boulevards, avenues, and local streets. The hierarchy of the streets is a common feature in most urban and suburban contexts due to the efficiency required for optimal pedestrian and vehicular function. The use of the urban grid in cities has furnished a logi¬cal pattern of urban connections in urban contexts for many centuries. The hierarchical street function continues to contribute to pedestrian experience in urban landscape contexts, with positive effects on the livability of cities and towns.

Lecture 17

We were discussing Locke's views on ‘natural rights’. – The force of calling them ‘natural’ etc. and some comments on liberty and equality.

Property

Connected with 1688 revolution. – Whig land-owning aristocracy the most important political class: protection of their economic interests.

But it is paradoxical that the form of argument which Locke used to justify this protection was later taken over by Marx precisely to attack the interests of seated property.

What sort of an undertaking is a ‘justification of property’?

Suppose you see me in possession of a motorcar which you thought to be the property of the Principal: you might require me to ‘justify’ my possession of it. I might do so by telling you that the Principal had given it to me. This, if true, would be a perfectly good justification. But what sort of justification is it? It is not a ‘justification of property’ (in general), but a justification of my possession of a particular object by pointing out the fact that it is my property, and this is done by referring to certain procedures, which we use as criteria for deciding what is my property and what isn’t.

Most of us are trying to forget COVID-19 and its trail of devastation.

We seem to have a collective amnesia that has set in, and yet, as the essays in this book edited by Ananta Kumar Giri and Saji Verghese remind us, we are only at the beginning of a series of profound traumas waiting to happen. The immense waves of heat washing over the planet in the 2020s can only mean disaster and destruction, at least in the near term. The very real possibility of another new pandemic seems closer and closer: H5N1, aka the “Bird Flu,” is spreading and appears about to erupt catastrophically, just as mystery diseases have begun appearing in Africa and elsewhere as well.

What shall we make of the world in this first quarter of the twenty-first century?

Just as these traumas are upon us, beginning with the Great Black Swan of COVID-19, the possibility of real transformations are also beckoning. Massive technological innovations spell the end of the fossil fuel economy and even a possible de-growth movement. Already, young people around the planet are less likely to follow the path of rampant consumerism, explicitly rejecting ownership of cars, homes, and appliances. Well, maybe not some appliances. The ubiquitous presence of Smart Phones, at our bedsides and in our hands morning to night make for potential manipulations at a grand scale, as we have witnessed in recent elections in developed countries. “So-called developed” is perhaps the more apt term for these countries. The scale of savagery inflicted by these “developed” nations on others, especially by the United States and its allies and including their own citizens, has been normalized in a world that has shifted to being even more transactional, chasing the almighty profit over personal relationships. For what ends, we have to ask ourselves? COVID-19 and its aftermath exposed the fault lines of upheavals to come, as the chapters in this book so well document in their deep explorations.

The Context

The first COVID-19 death in Brazil occurred on March 12, 2020. More than 275,000 people have officially died in one year. The slope of the curve has since then increased until it stabilized at the current figure of 700,000 deaths. We are the second country in the total number of deaths, just behind the United States. Brazilian pandemic management has been considered the worst worldwide and has produced terrible economic and social results. It is still worth considering why and how Brazilians have chosen such a strange destiny and why this situation has not triggered any more genuine astonishment in this society.

In truth, texts from philosophers like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Franco Berardi, Judith Butler, Byung-Chul Han, and Paul Preciado have circulated in Brazil very promptly. Some were pessimistic. Others flirted with a kind of turning point in the history of techno-capitalism. Brazilian scholars like Andre Duarte, Pedro Duarte, Vladimir Safatle, Eduardo Jardim, Márcia Cavalcanti, Maria Cristina Franco Ferraz, and Tito Palmeiro have also written valuable papers and books about the issue. Yet, even recognizing the importance of producing more immediate interpretations of the pandemic events, we decided not to follow this path or hurry up to meet such demands. We have kept instead, since 2021, insisting on a challenging effort to address a phenomenology of breathing.

The reason for this approach is the insight that this pandemic is not an isolated phenomenon and demands a new perspective of analysis, to the point of reconsidering our present civilizational basis in its roots.

Introduction

The year 2020 has been deeply marked by an irreversible global event. Thinking about the extreme impact of the pandemic has been the task undertaken by practically all the great specialists worldwide, in their most diverse areas of activity. It is interesting to observe how certain regions of knowledge constitute spaces of thought more directly related to the problems we are facing, such as the biological sciences, medicine, and pharmaceuticals. However, in the face of a problem of such wide proportions, why not question the role of philosophy in the context of the current crisis that everyone is going through due to COVID? Why cannot the philosophical approach occupy a prominent place in the investigation of possible damage caused by the pandemic crisis? Firstly, it is worth recalling the meaning of the term pandemic. According to a recently published article by Heath Kelly on the World Health Organization Website, “a pandemic is defined as ‘an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people.’ “ Although this definition is not elusive, it includes, however, “nothing about population immunity, virology or disease severity”.1 It means that a pandemic consists of a peculiar situation in which all the different aspects of life are damaged, not restricted, nevertheless, to a biological, or even medical, menace.

As it does not mean only a disease severity caused by the circulation of a virus around the world, but all the problems that come into the comprehensive area of human life, a pandemic is not only a subject concerning biological research or other related areas, but also the human sciences in general, that is, a philosophical approach allows us to see aspects that are commonly neglected when dealing with the problem.

Carl Plantinga illuminates the fact that the Western offers a platform by which the great experiment that is the formation of America offers us a canvas where the nature of the imposition of forms of ‘civility’ with complications can be explored, and that the interstitial figure of the gunfighter intensifies the notion of the price of social order, where violence, death and its consequences can be approached, contemplated and complicated. He states that traditionally:

With the gunfighter comes fighting, and this more often than not means death, with violence being the propellent of this character trope. Screen violence too is pleasurable to those who enjoy the Western narrative, and however much it may be shrouded in notions of heroism, justice and corrective retribution, it is woven into this the enjoyment of death and dying in dramatic forms. Plantinga continues: ‘Rationalizations of just retribution often cover darker motivations which are disguised or displaced in tales of skilful gunplay and heroic action. All of this helps us justify our allegiance with and pleasure in the protagonist's violence’ (75). This chapter will explore some of the ways in which the Western has approached the gunfighter's introduction into a social grouping as a deathly pleasure-dome and uses the example of selected works of Clint Eastwood as a stage by which to investigate these issues.

Introduction

Sorrow or suffering is a part of life and they occur and reoccur in different stages of life. Buddha is the prominent figure in religious circles who spoke and treated pain as the most common feature of human life. While there is no need for mentioning about pain and suffering as a common factor a pandemic situation, in the larger category of life, the role of pain and suffering is a relevant chapter. The concept of seva (service) is another important aspect that comes into prominence in the case of a such pandemic situation.

The unprecedented phase that humanity had faced during 2020–2022 in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the response towards it make us go a step closer to an attitude of ‘technocentricism’. This further entangles us with philosophical issues based on the ethical predicament of a technological era. Thus, the simple slogan, at present, ought to be ‘fight the virus, not the carriers’. The Anthropocene is leading a way to ‘technopocene’ where science and technology would reign supreme. The ethical paradigm of the humans would be changing its course to accommodate the concerns of the scientists and technical innovators. Posthumanism originated in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art and philosophy, which means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human. The shift challenges us to address issues of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, the post-social systems, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. Further, is there scope for ethics if all are programmed to act in a particular, specific way with no choice of free action?