Jonathan Webber
Biographic Data
| ID | 95924 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Webber |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Webber |
| SIGNATURE | WEBBER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0529-5349 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Rethinking Existentialism
This article is a response to critiques of my book Rethinking Existentialism in this symposium. It begins with a reflection on the nature of this discussion. Then it reformulates Eshleman's ‘bridge problem’ to defend my view that eudaimonist arguments cannot establish that we ought to respect freedom. Next, it shows how my interpretation of Beauvoir's argument for authenticity can incorporate Kirkpatrick's reading of Beauvoir's ethics. Then it us…
Sartre's Critique of Patriarchy
Jean-Paul Sartre developed a sophisticated and insightful feminist critique of western society through two plays and two screenplays written between 1944 and 1946 –– Huis clos, Les Jeux sont faits, Typhus, and La Putain respectueuse . In these works, Sartre explores the relations between economic oppression, epistemic injustice, and misogynistic violence, diagnoses their root cause as the patriarchal norms of femininity and masculinity, and ascri…
Integrity as the Goal of Character Education
Schools and universities should equip students with the ability to deal with an unpredictable environment in ways that promote worthwhile and fulfilling lives. The world is rapidly changing and the contours of our ethical values have been shaped by the world we have lived in. Education therefore needs to cultivate in students the propensity to develop and refine ethical values that preserve important insights accrued through experience while resp…
Sociality, Seriousness, and Cynicism
This article is a clarification and development of my interpretation of Sartre’s theory of bad faith in response to Ronald Santoni’s sophisticated critique, published in this issue. It begins by clarifying Sartre’s conception of a project and explaining his claim that one project is fundamental, thereby elucidating the idea that bad faith is a fundamental project. This forms the groundwork of my responses to Santoni’s critique of my interpretatio…
Existential Flourishing
Ethics is the inquiry into how to live our lives well, yet anglophone ethical theory tends to operate with fairly thin conceptions of human life. We are indeed rational animals, social creatures, and capable of pleasure and pain. But we are much more than this. We have goals and projects. We care about the kind of people we are. We have a variety of different relationships with one another. We are raised through a long upbringing in a particular …
Rethinking Existentialism
Rethinking Existentialism argues that the core of existentialism is the theory that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre described when they popularized the term in 1945: the ethical theory that we ought to treat human freedom as intrinsically valuable and the foundation of all other value. The book argues that Beauvoir and Sartre disagreed over the structure of this freedom in 1943 but that Sartre came to accept Beauvoir’s view by 1952, that …
Black Skin, White Masks
This chapter argues that Frantz Fanon’s first book Black Skin, White Masks is unified by a profoundly existentialist conception of human being and psychological functioning. It argues against the prevailing reading of the book as a conceptually and methodologically eclectic analysis of various problems of colonialism that offers no prospect of a solution. Rather, the underlying argument of the book is that people become racialized through the col…
From Personality to Virtue
The idea that people have persisting character traits that explain their behaviour is woven throughout the fabric of our culture. These philosophical essays clarify this idea of character, analyse its relation with the findings of experimental psychology, and draw out the implications of this for education and criminal punishment. They bring together a range of issues in contemporary philosophy, including the nature of agency, the modelling of be…
A Law unto Oneself
We should understand the concept of self‐legislation that is central to Kant's moral philosophy not in terms of the enactment of statute, but in terms of the way in which judges make law, by setting down and refining precedent through particular judgements. This paper presents a descriptive model of agency based on self‐legislation so understood, and argues that we can read Kant's normative ethics as based on this view of agency. It is intended t…
Reading Sartre
Competing Rhetoric Over Time
Citizens' preferences form the foundation of democratic governance. When they form their preferences, they typically do so in the presence of various types of competing arguments that reach them at different times. Surprisingly, public opinion research offers little guidance on how competition and time affect preference formation. We fill this gap by exploring the relative influence of two prominent types of competing arguments, frames and cues, …
New Wine in Old Bottles? Reflections on the Scope for a Jewish Voice in a Humanist Intercultural Dialogue
The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre
Character, Global and Local
Philosophers have recently argued that we should revise our understanding of character. An individual's behaviour is governed not by a set of ‘global’ traits, each elicited by a certain kind of situational feature, they argue, but by a much larger array of ‘local’ traits, each elicited by a certain combination of situational features. But the data cited by these philosophers support their theory only if we conceive of traits purely in terms of st…
Jewish Identities in the Holocaust
Jews and Judaism in contemporary Europe
The Jewish experience in Europe over the past two hundred years offers much of interest to the student of ethnicity and the sociologist of religion because of the opportunity to undertake comparative work on a single group living in a range of diverse socio‐political environments. European Jews have been treated from the outside as constituting a religion and, more recently, as an ethnic group; both these models have been internalized by Jews the…
The future of Auschwitz
The future of Auschwitz' is a curious and perhaps provocative turn of phrase, but it summons up the realisation that the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945 by no means marked the end of their history. Holocaust remembrance, the religious and moral duty incumbent upon Jews to grieve for the victims of the Holocaust, will continue to endow the name of Auschwitz with a clear sense of the pastness of the event. But the significance of Ausc…
Modern Jewish Identities
Michael R. Weisser, A Brotherhood of Memory
Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without
Interpreting Japanese Society
Religions in the Holy Land
Resacralization of the Holy City
Competing Rhetoric Over Time
Citizens' preferences form the foundation of democratic governance. When they form their preferences, they typically do so in the presence of various types of competing arguments that reach them at different times. Surprisingly, public opinion research offers little guidance on how competition and time affect preference formation. We fill this gap by exploring the relative influence of two prominent types of competing arguments, frames and cues, …
Jews and Judaism in contemporary Europe
The Jewish experience in Europe over the past two hundred years offers much of interest to the student of ethnicity and the sociologist of religion because of the opportunity to undertake comparative work on a single group living in a range of diverse socio‐political environments. European Jews have been treated from the outside as constituting a religion and, more recently, as an ethnic group; both these models have been internalized by Jews the…
Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without
Existential Flourishing
Ethics is the inquiry into how to live our lives well, yet anglophone ethical theory tends to operate with fairly thin conceptions of human life. We are indeed rational animals, social creatures, and capable of pleasure and pain. But we are much more than this. We have goals and projects. We care about the kind of people we are. We have a variety of different relationships with one another. We are raised through a long upbringing in a particular …
The future of Auschwitz
The future of Auschwitz' is a curious and perhaps provocative turn of phrase, but it summons up the realisation that the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945 by no means marked the end of their history. Holocaust remembrance, the religious and moral duty incumbent upon Jews to grieve for the victims of the Holocaust, will continue to endow the name of Auschwitz with a clear sense of the pastness of the event. But the significance of Ausc…
Interpreting Japanese Society
Religions in the Holy Land
Resacralization of the Holy City
Religions in the Holy Land
Michael R. Weisser, A Brotherhood of Memory
Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without
Interpreting Japanese Society
The future of Auschwitz
The future of Auschwitz' is a curious and perhaps provocative turn of phrase, but it summons up the realisation that the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945 by no means marked the end of their history. Holocaust remembrance, the religious and moral duty incumbent upon Jews to grieve for the victims of the Holocaust, will continue to endow the name of Auschwitz with a clear sense of the pastness of the event. But the significance of Ausc…
Modern Jewish Identities
Jews and Judaism in contemporary Europe
The Jewish experience in Europe over the past two hundred years offers much of interest to the student of ethnicity and the sociologist of religion because of the opportunity to undertake comparative work on a single group living in a range of diverse socio‐political environments. European Jews have been treated from the outside as constituting a religion and, more recently, as an ethnic group; both these models have been internalized by Jews the…
Jewish Identities in the Holocaust
Character, Global and Local
Philosophers have recently argued that we should revise our understanding of character. An individual's behaviour is governed not by a set of ‘global’ traits, each elicited by a certain kind of situational feature, they argue, but by a much larger array of ‘local’ traits, each elicited by a certain combination of situational features. But the data cited by these philosophers support their theory only if we conceive of traits purely in terms of st…
New Wine in Old Bottles? Reflections on the Scope for a Jewish Voice in a Humanist Intercultural Dialogue
The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre
Reading Sartre
Competing Rhetoric Over Time
Citizens' preferences form the foundation of democratic governance. When they form their preferences, they typically do so in the presence of various types of competing arguments that reach them at different times. Surprisingly, public opinion research offers little guidance on how competition and time affect preference formation. We fill this gap by exploring the relative influence of two prominent types of competing arguments, frames and cues, …
A Law unto Oneself
We should understand the concept of self‐legislation that is central to Kant's moral philosophy not in terms of the enactment of statute, but in terms of the way in which judges make law, by setting down and refining precedent through particular judgements. This paper presents a descriptive model of agency based on self‐legislation so understood, and argues that we can read Kant's normative ethics as based on this view of agency. It is intended t…
From Personality to Virtue
The idea that people have persisting character traits that explain their behaviour is woven throughout the fabric of our culture. These philosophical essays clarify this idea of character, analyse its relation with the findings of experimental psychology, and draw out the implications of this for education and criminal punishment. They bring together a range of issues in contemporary philosophy, including the nature of agency, the modelling of be…
Rethinking Existentialism
Rethinking Existentialism argues that the core of existentialism is the theory that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre described when they popularized the term in 1945: the ethical theory that we ought to treat human freedom as intrinsically valuable and the foundation of all other value. The book argues that Beauvoir and Sartre disagreed over the structure of this freedom in 1943 but that Sartre came to accept Beauvoir’s view by 1952, that …
Black Skin, White Masks
This chapter argues that Frantz Fanon’s first book Black Skin, White Masks is unified by a profoundly existentialist conception of human being and psychological functioning. It argues against the prevailing reading of the book as a conceptually and methodologically eclectic analysis of various problems of colonialism that offers no prospect of a solution. Rather, the underlying argument of the book is that people become racialized through the col…
Sociality, Seriousness, and Cynicism
This article is a clarification and development of my interpretation of Sartre’s theory of bad faith in response to Ronald Santoni’s sophisticated critique, published in this issue. It begins by clarifying Sartre’s conception of a project and explaining his claim that one project is fundamental, thereby elucidating the idea that bad faith is a fundamental project. This forms the groundwork of my responses to Santoni’s critique of my interpretatio…
Existential Flourishing
Ethics is the inquiry into how to live our lives well, yet anglophone ethical theory tends to operate with fairly thin conceptions of human life. We are indeed rational animals, social creatures, and capable of pleasure and pain. But we are much more than this. We have goals and projects. We care about the kind of people we are. We have a variety of different relationships with one another. We are raised through a long upbringing in a particular …
Integrity as the Goal of Character Education
Schools and universities should equip students with the ability to deal with an unpredictable environment in ways that promote worthwhile and fulfilling lives. The world is rapidly changing and the contours of our ethical values have been shaped by the world we have lived in. Education therefore needs to cultivate in students the propensity to develop and refine ethical values that preserve important insights accrued through experience while resp…
Rethinking Existentialism
This article is a response to critiques of my book Rethinking Existentialism in this symposium. It begins with a reflection on the nature of this discussion. Then it reformulates Eshleman's ‘bridge problem’ to defend my view that eudaimonist arguments cannot establish that we ought to respect freedom. Next, it shows how my interpretation of Beauvoir's argument for authenticity can incorporate Kirkpatrick's reading of Beauvoir's ethics. Then it us…
Sartre's Critique of Patriarchy
Jean-Paul Sartre developed a sophisticated and insightful feminist critique of western society through two plays and two screenplays written between 1944 and 1946 –– Huis clos, Les Jeux sont faits, Typhus, and La Putain respectueuse . In these works, Sartre explores the relations between economic oppression, epistemic injustice, and misogynistic violence, diagnoses their root cause as the patriarchal norms of femininity and masculinity, and ascri…
Philosophy (17 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Judaism (7 works) · Art (6 works) · History (6 works)