Kirjahaku

How are the numerous member states of the European Union today to reach proper consensus on an eventual common EU social model? In this meditative and reflective philosophical, literary, and social inquiry, first presented as invited lectures at the Institute for European Studies of the Jagiellonian University, Peter McCormick highlights the still largely overlooked conceptual and linguistic resources of the distinctive European high modernist poetry of suffering for freshly rearticulating some of the most basic moral and ethical values at the historical roots of European civilization. Against contrasted readings of modernity in the works of both analytic and hermeneutic philosophers, successive studies investigate the figures of moral discourse, moral perception, and both moral motivation and ethical emancipation in the poetry of the Nobel Laureats, T.S. Eliot, Paul Valery, and Eugenio Montale. The result is the renewed availability of richly resourceful formulations of fundamental European values for stimulating the ongoing work of achieving appropriate political consensus for a future harmonized European Union social policy.

How is the ethically unacceptable persistence of the unnecessary suffering of extraordinarily poor street children in extraordinarily rich European Union capital cities to be durably remedied? Perhaps centrally, this philosophical essay argues, by re-articulating current inadequate understandings in the European Union of social injustice not as an absence of solidarity but as the failure to imagine and to act on "mutualities." First presented in 2011 as invited lectures for the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, this extended reflection explores four central elements of the empirical situations of such extreme child poverty amid great affluence in the contexts of a progressively developed case study of destitute street children in Paris. The essay focuses successively on such utterly destitute children's poor health, poor housing, poor food, and poor education. In each case, outstanding contemporary philosophical reflections on violations of social justice -- those of J. Rawls, A. Sen, R. Dworkin, and J. Habermas -- are found to be deeply suggestive but finally insufficient for understanding such legally and morally intolerable situations. Yet each may be interpreted as contributing substantively to a progressive re-articulation of at least four critical elements of what a renewed idea of social justice in the European Union tomorrow must involve -- "mutualizations" of fairness, understanding, respect, and articulacy.