Freud's poster campaign inevitably evokes the past of a city where human plurality was repudiated, where to be wanted by the authorities was to be categorised as inhuman.
As Hannah Arendt (1958) emphasizes, Aristotle's understanding of civic unity insists on respect for human plurality as the condition of political action; in Book II, he criticizes Plato's Kallipolis for interpreting the requirement of civic unity in so extreme a fashion as to have obliterated the properly political domain altogether (Nussbaum 1980).
This "empathy" is universally shared not only because it is humanly recognizable but mainly because it constitutes a moral standpoint for human interactive plurality.
Whereas modernist cultural responses to the ephemeral character of modern life cling to ideas of unity, postmodernism accepts difference and irreducible conflict in human affairs, and plurality in ways of being and knowing.
Although he does not there say what this "twofold pillar" is, a few pages later (p. 9) he cites "the famosissimum binarium Augustinianum, namely, the hylomorphic composition of all created beings, not only corporeal but also spiritual substances, the angels and the human soul; and plurality of forms in one and the same individual".
The open and unpredictable nature of action is a consequence of human freedom and plurality: by acting we are free to start processes and bring about new events, but no actor has the power to control the consequences of his or her deeds.
How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.
While a majority of participants indicated that they accepted evolution, a slightly smaller plurality accepted human evolution.
Instead, plausibly, their theory is based on a loose notion of human welfare comprising a plurality of basic goods.
Taking seriously the striking plurality of human forms of religious life leads to a second significant question.
We suggest that the humility of religious minimalism is the right stance for everyone, believers and non-believers alike, to adopt -- especially in an age in which the rich plurality of human beliefs has never been more evident, more exciting... or more dangerous.
