The aim of this article is to investigate and discuss the notions of difference and representation in Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze, articulating such notions through the example of a university extension project involving the formation of a musical ensemble composed of autistic children. Our research involved a review of four major philosophical works—Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity; Among Us: Essays On Alterity; and “The Concept Of Difference In Bergson”; and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition--in addition to secondary references. The (...) main articulations of the investigation carried out in the project consist of aspects such as: taking responsibility for the autistic child through cultivating asymmetrical relationships, a process that takes place through sensibility, below any representation; and not totalizing the alterity involved while maintaining, at the same time, its radical difference. In addition, there is an emphasis in the work on the difference of each child, beyond his or her diagnostic identity, understanding that all participants are undergoing unique processes of differentiation, and that some differences are not more privileged than others, in that that such hierarchies are determined by power relations. Another contribution of this research is the emphasis on the intensive affective flows of children, and the construction of relationships of mutual affection, which increases the circulation of vital energy in each one. Finally, the results of the project are offered as guidelines for clinical practice, and for the cultivation of a politics of difference, as an alternative to hegemonic practices in autism studies in contemporary times. (shrink)

Research on the influence of industry on chemical regulation has mostly been conducted within the framework of the production of ignorance. This special issue extends this research by looking at how industry asserts its interests––not just in the scientific sphere but also at other stages of policy-making and regulatory process––with a specific focus on the types of tools or instruments industry has used. Bringing together sociologists and historians specialized in Science and Technology Studies, the articles of the special issue study (...) the arenas in which instruments and practical guidelines for public policy are negotiated or used. The aim is to observe the devices in the making or in action, from the selection of actors to the production of thresholds, criteria, and other technical regulations. The introduction highlights how industry influence on expertise and regulation is undoubtedly far more pervasive and multifarious than has been conceptualized to date by social scientists. Putting this issue back at the heart of both the STS and social sciences research agendas is increasingly urgent and could lead to new inquiries able to highlight these logics even more widely, using fresh empirical examples. (shrink)

Dans le cadre de divers contextes insulaires, les auteurs, adoptant des approches exploratoires et interdisciplinaires, analysent les processus de (re)médiation des apprenants au savoir, en situation d'interactions authentiques à l'école et hors de l'école, en intégrant la question des cultures plurielles.

This paper discusses the establishment of a governance framework to secure the development and deployment of “good AI”, and describes the quest for a morally objective compass to steer it. Asserting that human rights can provide such compass, this paper first examines what a human rights-based approach to AI governance entails, and sets out the promise it propagates. Subsequently, it examines the pitfalls associated with human rights, particularly focusing on the criticism that these rights may be too Western, too individualistic, (...) too narrow in scope and too abstract to form the basis of sound AI governance. After rebutting these reproaches, a plea is made to move beyond the calls for a human rights-based approach, and start taking the necessary steps to attain its realisation. It is argued that, without elucidating the applicability and enforceability of human rights in the context of AI; adopting legal rules that concretise those rights where appropriate; enhancing existing enforcement mechanisms and securing an underlying societal infrastructure that enables human rights in the first place, any human rights-based governance framework for AI risks falling short of its purpose. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to analyse the value-ladenness of technology in the context of medicine. To address this issue several characteristics of technology are investigated: i) its interventive capacity, ii) its expansiveness and iii) its influence on the concept of disease, iv) its generalising character, v) its independence of the subjective experience of the patient. By this analysis I hope to unveil the double face of technology: Technology has a Janus-face in modern medicine, and the opposite of its (...) factual face is evaluative. (shrink)

It is important to understand the drivers of green consumption, because of growing concern for the health of the planet. In this paper, the assumption that a virtue-green product relationship exists is tested. The objective is to understand how product morality can influence the valuation of green products. Relying on virtue theory and positive spillover as conceptual bases, the research implicitly and explicitly tests and confirms green product virtue. The results demonstrate that perceived green product virtue leads to positive emotions, (...) which explain heightened purchase intentions. In line with the conceptualization, I show that the effect is moderated by the importance consumers place on their own morality. Importantly, explicitly framing green products as virtuous activates positive spillover by consumers; when green products are branded with a virtue cue, they encourage consumers to be more virtuous. Beyond being perceived as better people, when consumers interact with green products they effectively engage in more moral acts, such as making donations. The results confirm the perception of green products as moral agents and provide marketers with insights into the marketing value of virtue cues in green product consumption. (shrink)

Like some ethical dilemmas, this question has an obvious answer that may not be right. On first reflection, it seems entirely unreasonable and inappropriate to expect staff members to withhold supportive care. Legally, a designated surrogate has the authority to refuse pain medication on the patient's behalf, but is it ethically defensible? A patient lacking decisionmaking capacity is crying out in pain; can we really imagine just closing the door? What do we say to other patients, visitors, and staff members, (...) such as physicians, nurses, housekeepers, and dietary workers, who might hear the patient? Do we place a sign on the door, one noting that the surrogate has refused, on behalf of the patient, to authorize the administration of pain medication and that the hospital or nursing home must comply with the surrogate's decision? (shrink)

The following description is based upon an actual case in which a patient initiated legal action after suffering a complication subsequent to an invasive diagnostic procedure performed by a senior fellow. Named as codefendants were the senior fellow, attending physician, and the hospital. Because any hospital with house staff is potentially vulnerable to similar litigation, Ethics Committees at Work is addressing the questions raised by this dilemma.

The belated but formal acknowledgment of medical errors and their impact has been well documented. Curiously, the topic of management or executive mistakes in healthcare is not raised in professional meetings nor, until recently, addressed by an article in health administration journals.

Our ethics committee is revising the organization's policy on forgoing life-sustaining treatment. The current policy now includes the statement, “When life-sustaining treatment is forgone, supportive care will be provided to relieve pain and ensure the patient's comfort, unless the patient or surrogate refuses those measures.” Is it reasonable, however, for the surrogate to have the authority to refuse consent for pain medication and/or other supportive care?

A number of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) and commodity roundtables have been created since the 1990s to respond to the growing criticism of agriculture’s environmental and social impacts. Driven by private and global-scale actors, these initiatives are setting global standards for sustainable agricultural practices. They claim to follow the new standard-making virtues of inclusiveness and consensus and base their legitimacy on their claim of balanced representation of, and participation by, all categories of stakeholders. This principle of representing a wide range of (...) interests with a balance of power is at the heart of a new type of action that forms part of a broader political liberal model for building coalitions of interest groups. The intention of this symposium is to assess the nature of processes and outcomes of this model while paying particular attention to the forms of inclusion and exclusion they generate. In this introduction, we highlight the differences in theoretical approaches to analyzing MSIs and the manifestation of power through them. We distinguish between more traditional political–economy approaches and approaches concerned with ideational and normative power, such as convention theory. We discuss some of the main paradoxes of MSIs related to their willingness to be “inclusive” and at the same time their exclusionary or “closure” effects due in part to interactions with existing political economic contexts and embedded power inequalities, as well as more subtle manifestations of power linked to the favoring of some forms of knowledge and engagement over others. (shrink)

While methodological individualism is a fundamental approach within the social sciences, it is often misunderstood. This highlights the need for a discursive and up-to-date reference work analyzing this approach’s classic arguments and assumptions in the light of contemporary issues in sociology, economics and philosophy. This two-volume handbook presents the first comprehensive overview of methodological individualism. Chapters discuss historical and contemporary debates surrounding this central approach within the social sciences, as well as cutting edge developments related to the individualist tradition with (...) philosophical and scientific implications. Bringing together multiple contributions from the world’s leading experts on this important tradition of theorizing, this collective endeavor provides teachers, researchers and students in sociology, economics, and philosophy with a reliable and critical understanding of the founding principles, key thinkers and intellectual development of MI since the late 19th century. ​. (shrink)

To see "democracy as a tragic regime", as Cornelius Castoriadis did, is to recognize the ever-present risk of democracy’s cancellation, but it also means to emphasize the anti-democratic nature of such cancellation, thus its incompatibility with democracy. In the context of this understanding of democracy, the article takes the political to consist of those relations among people and among institutions within the polis, which aim at deciding about the polis’ fate. It takes the social to be those relations among people (...) and among institutions within the polis, to whom such decisions about the polis’ fate apply and whom they create. If democracy is understood as tension between the two, then the relation between those who decide and those who are subject of the decision is never entirely pacified – hence, always contested and in need of specification. Using the examples of the state of exception and totalitarianism (temporary and permanent self-cancellation), the article argues that these situations are outside a linear continuation with the democratic phenomenon and are due to a displacement, which is akin to the hubristic displacement. (shrink)

The fundamental difference between Castoriadis' and Papaioannou's accounts of the link between tragedy and the political is that Castoriadis insists on a political form whilst Papaioannou insists on a social actor. The starting point for this essay, then, are two thinkers: one whose main interest was a political and philosophical reflection on the social-historical and one whose main interest was a philosophical reflection on the arts. Surprisingly, however, the end situation is one where Castoriadis gives us a political explanation of (...) the link between tragedy and the political whilst Papaioannou gives us a social explanation of the same phenomenon. How can this difference be accounted for? First, distinguishing their respective conceptualisations of the political allows us to see that where one thinker privileges restlessness and revolution, the other privileges law and regime. Second, looking at their depictions of the essential aspects of tragedy places them on opposing sides of the couple hubris- dike, in a way that leads to two radically different conceptualisations of the relation in question. (shrink)

Is technology value-free or is it value-laden? How does technology affect human autonomy? These questions, viewed within the context of medicine, are the focus of attention in this article. The central argument is that we need neither to subscribe to the value-neutrality dictum nor to the all-encompassing value-ladenness thesis to explain the pertinent position of technology in medicine. Technology is constitutive of and strongly implicated in difficult questions of value. This, however, does not mean that technology is identical to (or (...) neutral to) these value-laden questions. Technology poses issues of value, but only some of these relate to technology qua technology. Hence, it makes a difference whether we discuss general questions of value posed by technology or whether we discuss the value-ladenness of technology. Admitting technological value-ladenness does not imply that we are subject to a technological imperative that reduces our autonomy, on the contrary, it explains how technology increases our responsibility. This is particularly prominent in medicine. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1996) has exerted a profound influence on 20th-century continental philosophy. This anthology, including Levinas's key philosophical texts over a period of more than forty years, provides an ideal introduction to his thought and offers insights into his most innovative ideas. Five of the ten essays presented here appear in English for the first time. An introduction by Adriaan Peperzak outlines Levinas's philosophical development and the basic themes of his writings. Each essay is accompanied by a brief introduction and (...) notes. This collection is an ideal text for students of philosophy concerned with understanding and assessing the work of this major philosopher. (shrink)

In health care priority setting different criteria are used to reflect the relevant values that should guide decision-making. During recent years there has been a development of value frameworks implying the use of multiple criteria, a development that has not been accompanied by a structured conceptual and normative analysis of how different criteria relate to each other and to underlying normative considerations. Examples of such criteria are unmet need and severity. In this article these crucial criteria are conceptually clarified and (...) analyzed in relation to each other. We argue that disease-severity and condition-severity should be distinguished and we find the latter concept better reflects underlying normative values. We further argue that unmet need does not fulfil an independent and relevant role in relation to condition-severity except for in some limited situations when having to distinguish between conditions of equal severity. (shrink)

According to Ramsey and colleagues the main constituent psychological processes of innovation are response to novelty, exploration, and the ability to recognize a novel solution. I fully support this view but point out that novelty reactions are often context-specific. I will expand on this and discuss the possible consequences of context-specific novelty reactions on the emergence of innovations.

In this special issue, Steins and Edwards introduced the notion of nested platforms for resource use negotiation as a tool to facilitate collective action amongst multiple-users in complex common-pool resource management scenarios. Five discussion statements were put forward to aid the debate on multi-use platforms. This paper is a synthesis of the responses to these statements by the other contributors to this special issue. It aims to further stimulate the debate on the management of complex, multiple-use common-pool management scenarios.

--2. Bd. Des Sokrates Apologie. Kriton. Euthydemos. Menexenos. Gorgias. Menon. Bearb. von H. Hofmann.--3. Bd. Phaidon. Das Gastmahl. Kratylos. Bearb. von D. Kurz.--4. Bd. Politeia. Der Staat. Bearb. von D. Kurz.--5. Bd. Phaidros. Parmenides. Briefe. Bearb. von D. Kurz.--6. Bd. Theaitetos. Der Sophist. Der Staatsmann. Bearb. von P. Staudacher.--7. Bd. Timaios, Kritias. Philebos. Bearb. von K. Widdra.--8. Bd. Nomōn. Gesetze. Bearb. von K. Schöpsdau. 2 v.

Black Existential Freedom looks at the ways in which Black cultural productions reflect a constant struggle for freedom and a refusal to surrender to the destructive forces of dehumanization. This book offers a counter-narrative to current Afro-Pessimist theorizations of Blackness that choose the power of death and nihilism over life.

Inspired by Jane Gordon's book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon, this article examines the paradoxes of Creolization within the French context. How do post-colonial French identities of Maghrebi, Sub-Saharan African or Caribbean descent Creolize French society? Instead of being an opportunity that must be seized by the Nation, why is creolization perceived as an imminent threat to the Republic? How can one think of Creolizing politics in the former colonial power? How does Creolization compel us to rethink how (...) we live together? And how does it require us to rethink freedom and equality for all? These are the questions at the heart of this article. (shrink)

Melancholia Africana argues that in the African and Afro-diasporic context, melancholy is rooted in collective experiences such as slavery, colonization, and the post-colony.

La 4ème de couv. porte : "Depuis quelques années s'intensifient les rapports entre une société de l'information et une économie de l'attention : plus l'information est abondante, plus l'attention est rare. Alors que le travail se formule comme une lutte contre l'oisiveté et impose une certaine discipline de l'attention, la consommation, quant à elle, impose précisément de capter et perturber l'attention disciplinée. Progressivement, elle se monétise et progressivement, nous nous en sentons dépossédés. Pourquoi tenons-nous au concept d'attention? L'attention ne constitue (...) pas simplement un nouvel objet auquel l'éthique et la philosophie politique devraient s'intéresser. Loin de se limiter à développer une éthique appliquée de l'attention, problématiser l'attention nous amène à re-questionner les champs de l'éthique et de la philosophie politique. Pour répondre à ces questions, ce livre fait le pari de la pluridisciplinarité en rassemblant des travaux de différents horizons.". (shrink)

Many who evoke the term solidarity are influenced by an underlying sense of urgency and whether the use of the term plays upon an intellectual concept or harnesses solidarity’s more practical expressions, this political buzzword wields influence. _European Solidarity_ proposes a variety of sophisticated historical and theoretical conceptualizations of solidarity, while simultaneously exposing the practical implications of its contemporary expressions. An empirical investigation of solidarity’s crucial challenges in the EU today and a comprehensive consideration of the history of the term (...) in the context of changing social, religious, and political conditions within Europe, _European Solidarity_ will be required reading for scholars and students of social theory and European studies alike. (shrink)

The emerging concept of systems medicine (or ‘P4 medicine’—predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory) is at the vanguard of the post-genomic movement towards ‘precision medicine’. It is the medical application of systems biology, the biological study of wholes. Of particular interest, P4 systems medicine is currently promised as a revolutionary new biomedical approach that is holistic rather than reductionist. This article analyzes its concept of holism, both with regard to methods and conceptualization of health and disease. Rather than representing a medical (...) holism associated with basic humanistic ideas, we find a technoscientific holism resulting from altered technological and theoretical circumstances in biology. We argue that this holism, which is aimed at disease prevention and health optimization, points towards an expanded form of medicalization, which we call ‘holistic medicalization’: Each person’s whole life process is defined in biomedical, technoscientific terms as quantifiable and controllable and underlain a regime of medical control that is holistic in that it is all-encompassing. It is directed at all levels of functioning, from the molecular to the social, continual throughout life and aimed at managing the whole continuum from cure of disease to optimization of health. We argue that this medicalization is a very concrete materialization of a broader trend in medicine and society, which we call ‘the medicalization of health and life itself’. We explicate this holistic medicalization, discuss potential harms and conclude by calling for preventive measures aimed at avoiding eventual harmful effects of overmedicalization in systems medicine (quaternary prevention). (shrink)

The explanatory power of structures in analytical sociologists’ agent-based models brings into question methodological individualism. We defend that from an explanatory point of view, the syntactic properties of models require semantic conditions of interpretation drawn from a conceptual research framework; in such a framework, social/relational structures have only partial, explanatory power ; and taking the explanation further through generative mechanism modeling necessitates calling upon methodological individualism’s generic framework of interpretation that relies on social actors’ rational capacity. According to this interpretive (...) framework, forces in action in society are governed by the subjective meaning of/the reasons for individual actions. (shrink)

Human language, hominin tool production modes, and multimodal communications systems of primates and other animals are currently well-studied for how they display compositionality or combinatoriality. In all cases, the former is defined as a kind of hierarchical nesting and the latter as a lack thereof. In this article, I extend research on combinatoriality and compositionality further to investigations of everyday primate skills. Daily locomotion modes as well as behaviors associated with subsistence practices, hygiene, or body modification rely on the hierarchical (...) nesting of different behavioral and cognitive actions into complex skills. I introduce a scheme which uses hierarchical organization to differentiate combinatorial from compositional skills. Combinatorial skills are defined either as aggregational or linearly hierarchical depending on whether the skill occurs momentarily in space or unfolds sequentially over time. Compositional skills are defined either as nested or interactionally hierarchical depending on whether the skill results in new constructs or in new interactions between existing constructs. The methodology I propose combines epistemological hierarchy theory with data from primatological field research and experimental and comparative psychological research and provides a means to integrate current constructionist and extended views on cognition and action with older research on behavioral logics in psychology and operational chain thinking in anthropology. The approach furthermore synchronizes with ongoing research on teleonomy, intentionality, and creativity. -/- . (shrink)

Applied Evolutionary Epistemology is a scientific-philosophical theory that defines evolution as the set of phenomena whereby units evolve at levels of ontological hierarchies by mechanisms and processes. This theory also provides a methodology to study evolution, namely, studying evolution involves identifying the units that evolve, the levels at which they evolve, and the mechanisms and processes whereby they evolve. Identifying units and levels of evolution in turn requires the development of ontological hierarchy theories, and examining mechanisms and processes necessitates theorizing (...) about causality. Together, hierarchy and causality theories explain how biorealities form and diversify with time. This paper analyzes how Applied EE redefines both hierarchy and causality theories in the light of the recent explosion of network approaches to causal reasoning associated with studies on reticulate and macroevolution. Causality theories have often been framed from within a rigid, ladder-like hierarchy theory where the rungs of the ladder represent the different levels, and the elements on the rungs represent the evolving units. Causality then is either defined reductionistically as an upward movement along the strands of a singular hierarchy, or holistically as a downward movement along that same hierarchy. Upward causation theories thereby analyze causal processes in time, i.e. over the course of natural history or phylogenetically, as Darwin and the founders of the Modern Synthesis intended. Downward causation theories analyze causal processes in space, ontogenetically or ecologically, as the current eco-evo-devo schools are evidencing. This work demonstrates how macroevolution and reticulate evolution theories add to the complexity by examining reticulate causal processes in space–time, and the interactional hierarchies that such studies bring forth introduce a new form of causation that is here called reticulate causation. Reticulate causation occurs between units and levels belonging to different as well as to the same ontological hierarchies. This article concludes that beyond recognizing the existence of multiple units, levels, and mechanisms or processes of evolution, also the existence of multiple kinds of evolutionary causation as well as the existence of multiple evolutionary hierarchies needs to be acknowledged. This furthermore implies that evolution is a pluralistic process divisible into different kinds. (shrink)

It is a commonly held belief among many psychological scientists that the more plausible a hypothesis, the better it is scientifically. It is also often believed that if there are two alternative theories which are equally strong in terms of explanatory power, one should choose the plausible theory over the implausible one. The goal of this article is to challenge these assumptions. Based on Popper's philosophical views, it will be argued that psychological scientists should be encouraged to formulate implausible hypotheses (...) and theories. Examples from other scientific disciplines will be presented to illustrate this argument. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)