“Geometry in the colossal” (Geometrie in Ungeheurem) appears as pages 47–72 of the second volume of Peter Sloterdijk's Sphären—the volume is entitled Globen, ‘Globes’. The excerpt is a beginning of the history of the idea of the sphere or the globe. As claimed by Heidegger in the epigraph, the conquest of the world as picture is the fundamental event of modernity. The historical question that arises, then, is that of the rise of the globe as the fundamental picture of the world. Sloterdijk begins with remarks on what he calls a “treatise on the metaphysics of roundness”, Nicholas of Cusa's De Ludo Globi, set in a discussion concerning the movement of the notion of the globe from the Greek to the Roman world. The second half of the excerpt is devoted to a more focused analysis of the composition, history, and significance of the Farnese Atlas. In this work we see the world portrayed as a “poetic - scientific bastard heaven, a product of geometry as much as of mythology”, borne upon the shoulders of a titan - philosopher - athlete, images at once ancient and modern. The conquest of the world as picture thus transforms Atlas's punishment into a symbol of the greatest earthly power.

According to the picture of ancient Greece painted by Aristotle and Hannah Arendt, democracies were based on a model of a sort of exclusionary equality: equality was achieved in the public sphere, but it was achieved by excluding those who were unequal by whatever criteria seemed important.I take it that such a project is no longer tenable. We have given up on projects of exclusionary equality to attempt to establish political systems based on notions of inclusionary equality, and we have taken up the attempt to include in public discussions as many as possible of those who have a justifiable claim to inclusion and for whom discussion is or can be made accessible.A danger over the course of this transition is a loss of the sense of what it is that binds individuals together in the political sphere. A citizen in an ancient Greek polis had a fairly good idea of what it was that brought him together with his fellow citizens: they were members of the same culture, they shared many common ends and they (often) shared an income bracket. Part of their pursuit of the good life required the presence and cooperation of those with whom they maintained political relations.Many proponents of inclusionary equality are suspicious about these sorts of criteria. In the absence of such commonalities, however, it becomes a matter of some urgency for the inclusionary egalitarian to find a ground for equality. Some have proposed various structures of rights to a share of socially produced wealth 1 or to participation in public discourse. 2 One primary advantage of a liberal, rights-based approach-that it makes no commitment to a "comprehensive conception" of a good life-is precisely the point of its failure for thinkers like Aristotle and Arendt. "If the state isn't promoting the good life," we might imagine them asking, "then what exactly is it doing?"The good life, for Aristotle and Arendt, has very little to do with the questions of minima and maximinima that dominate discussion today. Rather, they argue for a notion of interpersonal flourishing as opposed to mere social survival. I, in turn, want to underscore the centrality of leisure, and thus of the production of surplus, to this notion of flourishing. The difficulty with leisure, particularly when it is characterized in such sharp contrast to material survival, is the way in which it entails the production and distribution of surplus. Questions of who is to produce the surplus, when and for the benefit of whom lead back to questions of social class and the division of labor that often get left behind when the talk turns to rights and equality.

Analyses of care work typically speak of three necessary roles of care: the care worker, the care recipient, and an economic provider who makes care materially possible. This model provides no place for addressing the difficult political questions care poses for liberal representative democracy. I propose to fill this space with a new caring role to connect the care unit to the political sphere, as the economic provider connects the care unit to the economic sphere. I call this role that of the “care claimant.” The labor of claiming care consists in the development, expression, and advancement of the interests of the care unit. The argument for employing this fourth care role begins by comparing Nel Noddings's phenomenological care unit to Sara Ruddick's family‐based analysis. It then moves to discuss the way Eva Kittay emphasizes the dependency of the charge and its political ramifications to illustrate the need for a care claimant. After distinguishing the care claimant from the other roles of care, I examine the power relationships in the care unit and the position of the care claimant in the public sphere.

The concept of solidarity has achieved relatively little attention from philosophers, in spite of its signal importance in a variety of social movements over the past 150 years. This means that there is a certain amount of preliminary philosophical work concerning the concept itself that must be undertaken before one can ask about its potential use in arguments concerning the provision of health care. In this paper, I begin with this work through a survey of some of the most prominent bioethical, political philosophical and intellectual historical literature concerned with the project of determining a philosophically specific and historically perspicacious meaning of the term 'solidarity'. This provides a conceptual foundation for a sketch of a four-tiered picture of social competition and cooperation within the nation-state. Corresponding to this picture is a four-tiered account of health care provision. These two models, taken together, provide a framework for articulating the conclusion that, while there are myriad examples of solidarity in claiming health care for some, or even many, the concept does not provide a basis for claiming health care for all.