Dans cet article, il s’agira de questionner les affordances, autrement dit les « signes actanciels », les « valences » ou le « caractère de demande » d’objets numériques iconotextuels tels que l’échelle temporelle numérique dite ticker. Forme d’architexte, le ticker propose un modèle iconique et langagier qui simultanément incite à l’action tout en limitant ce champ d’action. La diversité d’affordances semble dépendre des potentialités intrinsèques à l’objet mais aussi de l’expérience de l’usager. Plus ce coefficient de diversité augmente, plus (...) la possibilité de dépasser le niveau injonctif de l’affordance augmente. En dépit des affordances prévues par les concepteurs et de leurs intentionnalités, les usagers « détournent » les fonctionnalités d’objets numériques en conservant le design initial mais en modifiant les éléments textuels qui l’accompagnent, créant ainsi une nouvelle catégorie, plus invisible, de produsage. (shrink)

Introduction: Platonic dramatology -- The political and philosophical problems. Using pre-Socratic philosophy to support political reform: the Athenian stranger ; Plato's Parmenides: Parmenides' critique of Socrates and Plato's critique of Parmenides ; Becoming Socrates ; Socrates interrogates his contemporaries about the noble and good -- Paradigms of philosophy. Socrates' positive teaching ; Timaeus-Critias: completing or challenging Socratic political philosophy? ; Socratic practice -- The trial and death of Socrates. The limits of human intelligence ; The Eleatic challenge ; The trial (...) and death of Socrates -- Conclusion: Why Plato made Socrates his hero. (shrink)

This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the (...) finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Science relies on models and idealizations that are known not to be true. Even so, science is epistemically reputable. To accommodate science, epistemology should focus on understanding rather than knowledge and should recognize that the understanding of a topic need not be factive. This requires reconfiguring the norms of epistemic acceptability. If epistemology has the resources to accommodate science, it will also have the resources to show that art too advances understanding.

The development of genomics has dramatically expanded the scope of genetic research, and collections of genetic biosamples have proliferated in countries with active genomics research programs. In this essay, we consider a particular kind of collection, national biobanks. National biobanks are often presented by advocates as an economic ‘‘resource’’ that will be used by both basic researchers and academic biologists, as well as by pharmaceutical diagnostic and clinical genomics companies. Although national biobanks have been the subject of intense interest in (...) recent social science literature, most prior work on this topic focuses either on bioethical issues related to biobanks, such as the question of informed consent, or on the possibilities for scientific citizenship that they make possible. We emphasize, by contrast, the economic aspect of biobanks, focusing specifically on the way in which national biobanks create biovalue. Our emphasis on the economic aspect of biobanks allows us to recognize the importance of what we call clinical labor—that is, the regularized, embodied work that members of the national population are expected to perform in their role as biobank participants—in the creation of biovalue through biobanks. Moreover, it allows us to understand how the technical way in which national biobanks link clinical labor to databases alters both medical and popular understandings of risk for common diseases and conditions. (shrink)

Confronting fundamentalism: the dangerous God of "control and condemn" -- 1967: What the cake said -- God-talk 101: The art that is Christianity -- The Copernican turn of Christian humanism -- Quantum theology: the symbolic character of God-talk -- Theological weirdness (1): the symbolic claim that God is a person -- Poets as theologians: the moral imagination of Christian Humanist tradition -- Moses debates with a burning bush -- I AM v. I WILL BE: translation and the authority of theologians (...) -- Theological weirdness (2): the symbolic claim that God is necessarily impersonal -- What, then, can be said about God? (shrink)

In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way ‘conversation’ in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the overlaps, similarities and disjunctures among the terms, and the article ends with how (...) each one understands the current mediated feminist landscape. (shrink)

The rapid growth of next-generation genetic sequencing has prompted debate about the responsibilities of researchers toward genetic incidental findings. Assuming there is a duty to disclose significant incidental findings, might there be an obligation for researchers to actively look for these findings? We present an ethical framework for analyzing whether there is a positive duty to look for genetic incidental findings. Using the ancillary care framework as a guide, we identify three main criteria that must be present to give rise (...) to an obligation to look: high benefit to participants, lack of alternative access for participants, and reasonable burden on researchers. Our analysis indicates that there is no obligation to look for incidental findings today, but during the ongoing translation of genomic analysis from research to clinical care, this obligation may arise. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have argued that the capacity for perseverance or “grit” depends both on willpower and on a kind of epistemic resilience. But can a form of hopefulness in one’s future success also constitute a source of grit? I argue that substantial practical hopefulness, as a hope to bring about a desired outcome through exercises of one’s agency, can serve as a distinctive ground for the capacity for perseverance. Gritty agents’ “practical hope” centrally involves an attention-fuelled, risk-inclined weighting of (...) two competing concerns over action: when facing the decision of whether to persevere, hopeful gritty agents prioritize the aim of choosing a course of action which might go very well over that of choosing a course of action which is very likely to go fairly well. By relying on the notion of a “risk-inclined attentional pattern” as a dimension of gritty agents’ practical hope, we can explain that form of hope’s contribution to their motivation and practical rationality, especially on a risk-weighted expected utility framework. The upshot is a more pluralistic view of the sources of grit. (shrink)

Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to “hope well,” and what does “hoping well” involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. (...) It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. (shrink)

This paper probes theories of justice underpinning the concept of equity to deconstruct the term and ascertain how best to equitably support refugee and asylum-seeking youth in U.S. schools. Building upon theories posited by John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and Amartya Sen, the paper aims to extend beyond ideal theory into a theoretical framework of equity with operationalizing potential. Recognizing refugee and asylum-seeking youth as part of the U.S. social contract and therefore bound to government support, the paper represents that equitable (...) education for these young people in our globalized world is essential from both a human rights and economic perspective. Such equitable education will only be achieved when universal minimum standards are offered to everyone and made inclusive, so that all are invited to fully participate as culturally respected learners and knowledge producers in academic spaces. (shrink)

Discussions of psychiatric nosology focus on a few popular examples of disorders, and on the validity of diagnostic criteria. Looking at Anorexia Nervosa, an example rarely mentioned in this literature, reveals a new problem: the DSM has a strict taxonomic structure, which assumes that disorders can only be located on one branch. This taxonomic assumption fails to fit the domain of psychopathology, resulting in obfuscation of cross-category connections. Poor outcomes for treatment of Anorexia may be due to it being pigeonholed (...) as an Eating Disorder, when a disturbance of body perception may be a more central symptom than food restriction. This paper explores the possibility of restructuring the DSM taxonomy to allow for a pluralist classification of disorders. This change could improve treatment and research without requiring any changes to diagnostic criteria. (shrink)

The origins and development of community of philosophical inquiry -- The theoretical landscape -- Philosophising with five year olds -- Creating a community of philosophical inquiry (CoPI) with all ages -- Different methods of group philosophical discussion -- What you need to know to chair a CoPI with six to sixteen year olds -- Implementing CoPI in primary and secondary schools -- CoPI, citizenship, moral virtue, and academic performance with primary and secondary children.

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose (...) a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties. (shrink)

This article argues that the study conducted by Facebook in conjunction with Cornell University did not have sufficient ethical oversight, and neglected in particular to obtain necessary informed consent from the participants in the study. It establishes the importance of informed consent in Internet research ethics and suggests that in Facebook’s case, a reasonable shift could be made from traditional medical ethics ‘effective consent’ to a ‘waiver of normative expectations’, although this would require much-needed change to the company’s standard practice. (...) Finally, it gives some practical recommendations for how to implement such consent strategies, and how the ethical oversight gap between university-led research and industry-led research can be bridged, potentially using emerging Responsible Research and Innovation frameworks which are currently gathering momentum in Europe. (shrink)

"Systematizes and develops in a comprehensive study Nelson Goodman's philosophy of language. The Goodman-Elgin point of view is important and sophisticated, and deals with a number of issues, such as metaphor, ignored by most other theories." --John R. Perry, Stanford University.

Stoic work on ambiguity represents one of the most innovative, sophisticated and rigorous contributions to philosophy and the study of language in western antiquity. This book is both a comprehensive survey of the often difficult and scattered sources, and an attempt to locate Stoic material in the rich array of contexts, ancient and modern, which alone can guarantee full appreciation of its subtlety, scope and complexity. The comparisons and contrasts which this book constructs will intrigue not just classical scholars, and (...) philosophers, but also logicians, theoretical linguists, communication theorists and historians of grammar and of literary theory. The Stoics on Ambiguity is designed to be intelligible to readers with no Greek or Latin. (shrink)

The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the (...) second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field. (shrink)

This volume brings together contributors from a wide variety of disciplines to take a critical, empirical look at bioethics around the globe, examining how it ...

The nursing profession has a responsibility to ensure that nursing goals and perspectives as these have developed over time remain the focus of its work. Explored in this paper is the potential problem for the nursing profession of recognizing both the promises and pitfalls of informational technologies so as to use them wisely in behalf of ethical patient care. We make a normative claim that maintaining a critical stance toward the use of informational technologies in practice and in influencing the (...) thought patterns of the younger generations of nurses is a moral imperative of the discipline, because without this practice can become subverted from professional goals in various ways. We use a synthesized concept we call “intentional authenticity” derived from the writing of Heidegger and Feminist care ethics to provide a foundation for the development of nurses who understand the importance of the nurse‐patient relationship and how the unthoughtful use of informational and other technologies can militate against effective or good nursing care. (shrink)

Recent extensions of mechanistic explanation into psychology suggest that cognitive models are only explanatory insofar as they map neatly onto, and serve as scaffolding for more detailed neural models. Filling in those neural details is what these accounts take the integration of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to mean, and they take this process to be seamless. Critics of this view have given up on cognitive models possibly explaining mechanistically in the course of arguing for cognitive models having explanatory value independent (...) of how well they align with neural mechanisms. We can have things both ways, however. The problem with seamless integration accounts is their seamlessness, not that they take cognitive models to be mechanistic. A non-componential view of mechanisms allows for cognitive and neural models that cross cut one another, and for cognitive models that don’t decompose into parts. I illustrate the inadequacy of seamless accounts of integration by contrasting how “filter” models of attention in psychology and of sodium channels in neuroscience developed; by questioning whether the mappings generated by neuroimaging subtraction studies achieve integration; and by reinterpreting the evidence for cognitive models of memory having been successfully integrated with neural models. I argue that the integrations we can realistically expect are more partial, patchy, and full of loose threads than the mosaic unity Craver describes. (shrink)

Issues in reproductive ethics, such as the capacity of parents to ‘choose children’, present challenges to philosophical ideas of freedom, responsibility and harm. This book responds to these challenges by proposing a new framework for thinking about the ethics of reproduction that emphasizes the ways that social norms affect decisions about who is born. The book provides clear and thorough discussions of some of the dominant problems in reproductive ethics - human enhancement and the notion of the normal, reproductive liberty (...) and procreative beneficence, the principle of harm and discrimination against disability - while also proposing new ways of addressing these. The author draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, especially his discussions of biopolitics and norms, and later work on ethics, alongside feminist theorists of embodiment to argue for a new bioethics that is responsive to social norms, human vulnerability and the relational context of freedom and responsibility. This is done through compelling discussions of new technologies and practices, including the debate on liberal eugenics and human enhancement, the deliberate selection of disabilities, PGD and obstetric ultrasound. (shrink)

This paper summarized the findings of a qualitative study that examines the perceptions of ethical leadership held by those who perceived themselves to be ethical leaders, and how life experiences shaped the values called upon when making ethical decisions. The experiences of 28 business executives were shared with the researcher, beginning with the recollection of a critical incident that detailed an ethical issue with which each executive had been involved. With the critical incident in mind, each executive told the personal (...) story that explained the development of the values he or she called upon when resolving the ethical issue described. The stories were analyzed through the use of constant comparison, which resulted in the development of two models: (1) a framework for ethical leadership illuminating valued aspects of ethical leaderships and the value perspectives called upon when making ethical decisions, and (2) a model explaining how the executives’ ethical frameworks developed. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on virtue ethics, experiential learning, and human resource development. (shrink)

What do pictures and mental images have in common? The contemporary tendency to reject mental picture theories of imagery suggests that the answer is: not much. We show that pictures and visual imagery have something important in common. They both contribute to mental simulations: pictures as inputs and mental images as outputs. But we reject the idea that mental images involve mental pictures, and we use simulation theory to strengthen the anti-pictorialist's case. Along the way we try to account for (...) caricature and for some basic features of pictorial representations. (shrink)

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Donation of Stem Cells and Reproductive Tissue Content Type Journal Article Category Symposium Pages 15-17 DOI 10.1007/s11673-011-9351-x Authors Catherine Waldby, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Ian Kerridge, Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Medical Foundation Building (K25), University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Loane Skene, Faculty of Law and Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VA, Australia Journal Journal of Bioethical (...) Inquiry Online ISSN 1872-4353 Print ISSN 1176-7529 Journal Volume Volume 9 Journal Issue Volume 9, Number 1. (shrink)

There is a vast literature within philosophy of mind that focuses on artificial intelligence, but hardly mentions methodological questions. There is also a growing body of work in philosophy of science about modeling methodology that hardly mentions examples from cognitive science. Here these discussions are connected. Insights developed in the philosophy of science literature about the importance of idealization provide a way of understanding the neural implausibility of connectionist networks. Insights from neurocognitive science illuminate how relevant similarities between models and (...) targets are picked out, how modeling inferences are justified, and the metaphysical status of models. (shrink)

In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's ...

In many diagrams one seems to perceive necessity – one sees not only that something is so, but that it must be so. That conflicts with a certain empiricism largely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, which believes perception is not capable of such feats. The reason for this belief is often thought well-summarized in Hume's maxim: ‘there are no necessary connections between distinct existences’. It is also thought that even if there were such necessities, perception is too passive or (...) localized a faculty to register them. We defend the perception of necessity against such Humeanism, drawing on examples from mathematics. (shrink)

Charles Peirce's diagrammatic logic — the Existential Graphs — is presented as a tool for illuminating how we know necessity, in answer to Benacerraf's famous challenge that most ‘semantics for mathematics’ do not ‘fit an acceptable epistemology’. It is suggested that necessary reasoning is in essence a recognition that a certain structure has the particular structure that it has. This means that, contra Hume and his contemporary heirs, necessity is observable. One just needs to pay attention, not merely to individual (...) things but to how those things are related in larger structures, certain aspects of which relations force certain other aspects to be a certain way. (shrink)