ABSTRACT

If people are not to bog down in endless discussion of what counts as a philosophical account or contribution, the only practical criterion seems to be an ostensive definition; that is, a definition constituted by naming the philosophers of philosophy with claims on the universe of discourse of Holocaust Studies. The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, however important symbolically, left virtually all the basic questions about the structural and moral character of genocide unsettled: the definition of the groups and types of action to which the term genocide is applicable; the role of intention in those actions; the place of genocide in moral history. Although the heat of conflict surrounding the intentionalist and functionalist interpretations of the Final Solution and the related Historikerstreit has diminished, the conceptual issues in those disagreements have arguably remained unsettled. Whether an event with the dimensions of the Holocaust entails revision in considering the nature of ethical values as such is itself a pertinent question.