According to James R. Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity. To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both...

This study proposes a double thesis. The first concerns the Logische Untersuchungen itself. We will attempt to show that its statements about the nature of being are inconsistent and that this inconsis- tency is responsible for the failure of this work. The second con- cerns the Logische Untersuchungen's relation to the Ideen. The latter, we propose, is a response to the failure of the Logische Untersuchungen's ontology. It can thus be understood in terms of a shift in the ontology of the Logische Untersuchungen, a shift motivated by the attempt to overcome the contradictory assertions of the...