ORIGINAL RESEARCH

 

On loneliness and the value of slow reflection

 

 

Karin van Marle

Department of Legal History, Comparative Law and Legal Philosophy, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Correspondence

 

 

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ABSTRACT

In this article, the author considers the relationship of law, morality and reconciliation. Intrigued by the political and ethical stances taken by Arendt and McCarthy, the author supports notions of detachment, slowness and social reconciliation concerning contemporary political and ethical questions.

Keywords: reconciliation; slowness; common sense; Arendt; transformation

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Full text available only in PDF format.

 

 

REFERENCES

Arendt, H., 1957, Rakel Varnhagen. The life of a Jewess, John Hopkins University Press, London.         [ Links ]

Arendt, H., 1958, The human condition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.         [ Links ]

Arendt, H., 1960, On revolution. Penguin Books, London.         [ Links ]

Arendt, H., 1963, Eichman in Jerusalem, Penguin Books, London.         [ Links ]

Arendt, H., 1978, Writing and difference, Routledge, London/New York.         [ Links ]

Cilliers, P., 2007, On the importance of a certain slowness. Stability, memory and hysteresis in complex systems 1-8, viewed 10 November 2007, from http://complexity.vub.ac.be/phil/drafts/Cilliers.pdf. Also published in C. Gershenson, D. Aerts & B. Edmonds (eds.), Worldviews, science and us: Philosophy and complexity, pp. 53-80, World Scientific, Singapore.         [ Links ]

Cornell, D., 2007, 'The shadow of heterosexuality', Hypathia 22, 229-242.         [ Links ]

Du Plessis, L.M., 2000, 'The South African constitution as memory and promise', in C. Villa-Vicencion (ed.), Transcending a century of injustice, pp. 63-94, Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Cape Town.         [ Links ]

Mamdani, M., 1998, When does reconciliation turn into a denial of justice? HSRC Press, Pretoria.         [ Links ]

McCarthy, M., 1961, On the contrary: Articles of belief, 1946-1961, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York.         [ Links ]

Nelson, D., 2006, American literary history 18, 86-101, viewed 15 July 2007, from http://allh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/18/1/86 1-14.         [ Links ]

Rose, G., 1992, In a broken middle, Blackwells, Oxford. Van Marle, K., 2003, 'Law's time, particularity and slowness' South African Journal on Human Rights 19, 239-255.         [ Links ]

 

 

Correspondence:
Karin van Marle
Department of Legal History
Comparative Law and Legal Philosophy
Faculty of Law
University of Pretoria
Pretoria, 0083
South Africa
E-mail: karin.vanmarle@up.ac.za

Received: 21 Aug. 2009
Accepted: 06 Oct. 2009
Published: 16 Dec. 2009

 

 

Note: This is a reworked version of a paper delivered at a conference What is law without morality? at the University of the Western Cape in August 2007 hosted by the Department of Religion and Theology and the Ecumenical Foundation of South Africa in consultation with the Faculty of Law. My gratitude to the organisers for the opportunity. My thanks also to the anonymous referees for their insightful comments. Any mistakes do, of course, remain my own.