The focus of this paper is two-fold. First, similarities generated from six semantic models were compared to human ratings of paragraph similarity on two datasets—23 World Entertainment News Network paragraphs and 50 ABC newswire paragraphs. Contrary to findings on smaller textual units such as word associations (Griffiths, Tenenbaum, & Steyvers, 2007), our results suggest that when single paragraphs are compared, simple nonreductive models (word overlap and vector space) can provide better similarity estimates than more complex models (LSA, Topic Model, SpNMF, (...) and CSM). Second, various methods of corpus creation were explored to facilitate the semantic models’ similarity estimates. Removing numeric and single characters, and also truncating document length improved performance. Automated construction of smaller Wikipedia-based corpora proved to be very effective, even improving upon the performance of corpora that had been chosen for the domain. Model performance was further improved by augmenting corpora with dataset paragraphs. (shrink)

This article revisits and further develops Mitchell et al.’s (Acad Manag Rev 22(4):853–886, 1997 ) theory of stakeholder identification and salience. Stakeholder salience holds considerable unrealized potential for understanding how organizations may best manage multiple stakeholder relationships. While the salience framework has been cited numerous times, attempts to develop it further have been relatively limited. We begin by reviewing the key contributions of other researchers. We then identify and seek to resolve three residual weaknesses in Mitchell et al.’s ( 1997 (...) ) framework, thereby strengthening its foundations for further development. We argue, first, that urgency is not relevant for identifying stakeholders; second, that it is primarily the moral legitimacy of the stakeholder’s claim that applies to stakeholder salience; and last, that the salience of stakeholders will vary as the degrees of the attributes vary. These insights inform revised definitions of stakeholder salience and legitimacy, and necessitate a new theoretical underpinning for the role of legitimacy. Finally, we present an extensive agenda for future research with the objective of refueling research in stakeholder salience. (shrink)

Davis demonstrates how Simone Weil's Marxism challenges current neoliberal understandings of the self and of human rights. Explaining her related critiques of colonialism and of political parties, it presents Weil as a twentieth-century political philosopher who anticipated and critically responded to the most contemporary political theory.

ABSTRACT I read a selection of Simone Weil’s political philosophy in the way that she reads Marx – as forming “not a doctrine but a method of understanding and action.” My claim is that Weil’s method is likewise twofold: she attempts to understand the world through inquiry, then she tests her understanding through action. First, I read “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934). In that essay, inquiry, exemplified by Weil’s calling into question the term “revolution,” is (...) her way of understanding reality around her, including forces of oppression and possibilities for liberation. Second, I read her “Factory Journal” (1934–1935), which records how she tested her theories from “Reflections” by placing herself in French factories. My conclusion states the fruits of Weil’s method for philosophy today: an interrogation of present political keywords (resistance, resilience) and a practice of philosophy as a way of life. (shrink)

The following thesis explores the notion of truth as developed in the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Contrary to the position adopted by many commentators, who seek to drive a wedge between Heidegger's unorthodox phenomenology and the resolutely non -phenomenological Benjamin, I shall want to show how both begin with a rigorously Husserlian conception of truth as an intuition of essence in order, finally, to deviate from it. I argue that, for neither one, can truth be (...) merely one problem or issue taken up by a thinking secure in itself. Rather, from its most classical determination in, for example, the Metaphysics as έπιστήμη της άληθείας, the way in which truth has been determined has itself determined the very project of philosophy. Yet whilst the trajectory of both Heidegger and Benjamin's work can thus be determined in large measure by the question of truth, both are also concerned to re-orient that question in a direction that renders problematic Aristotle's implicit connection of truth to knowledge and knowledge to intuition and presence. I argue that their respective challenges to the location of truth in the act of knowing -a challenge made each time by way of an analytical regression from a propositional understanding of truth to intuitive truth to, finally, its more original character as disclosedness - remain thoroughly phenomenological before showing how it is in the work of art, and in tragedy in particular, that each one finds the resources for a still more radical understanding of truth. Not in the cognitivist sense that art makes truth claims about the world, but in the sense that it is with the work of art that the historical act of disclosure and world -constitution that Benjamin and Heidegger call truth is most emphatically made. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin is a persistent but elusive presence in many of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s writings, and the relationship between Lacoue-Labarthe and Benjamin is accordingly both significan...

This essay examines Claudio Magris’s literary production from the point of view of European normative ethics by drawing on recently-proposed theories of negative empathy and the hybrid hero. A brief overview of Magris’s narratives and characters—from Illazioni su una sciabola (1985) (Inferences from a Sabre, 1991) to Croce del Sud) [Southern cross] (2020)—shows his peculiar interpretation of such theories and how he repurposes them for ethical goals. This is followed by a close reading of Un altro mare (1991) (A Different (...) Sea, 2017) which presents in detail the narrative and stylistic devices adopted by the author to establish an emotional connection with readers that can stimulate empathic identification together with critical thinking. Finally, the essay demonstrates the central role of Magris’s work in a European ethical framework with the support of empirical evidence in the study of reading experience, combined with theoretical claims of several modern philosophers and literary scholars, including, among others, Martha Nussbaum, Stefano Ercolino, Massimo Salgaro, and Benjamin van Tourhout. (shrink)

This article places Hannah Arendt’s fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate the importance for each of a notion of ‘mere life’ or ‘life itself’ to an understanding of the agency of violence in modernity. Arendt’s critique of vitalism is most fully developed in The Human Condition, where she describes an entanglement of the instrumental activity of homo faber with life and labour in the work of Bergson, (...) Nietzsche and Marx. I suggest that Bergson’s treatment of life as creative evolution unexpectedly yields an accurate description of politics as spontaneous, unpredictable motion that Arendt takes as typical of modernity. Since Arendt also credits Bergson with a decisive influence on what she takes to be a growing commitment to the life-enhancing, creative potential of violence in the oppositional movements of the 1960s, which she explores in her late essay, On Violence, I trace out the continuity between Arendt’s earlier account of homo faber and her later critique of postmodern oppositional violence. (shrink)

From Plato's _Republic_ and Aristotle's _Poetics_ to Nietzsche's _The Birth of Tragedy_, the theme of tragedy has been subject to radically conflicting philosophical interpretations. Despite being at the heart of philosophical debate from Ancient Greece to the Nineteenth Century, however, tragedy has yet to receive proper treatment as a philosophical tradition in its own right. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ is a compelling contribution to that oversight and the first book to address the topic in a major way. Eleven new essays by (...) internationally renowned philosophers clearly show how time and again, major thinkers have returned to tragedy in many of their key works. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ aks why it is that thinkers as far apart as Hegel and Benjamin should make tragedy such an important theme in their work, and why, after Kant, an important strand of philosophy should present itself tragically. From Heidegger's reading of Sophocles' Antigone to Nietzsche and Benjamin's book-length studies of tragedy, _Philosophy and Tragedy_ presents an outstanding and original study of this preoccupation. The five sections are organised clearly around five major philosophers: Hegel, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. (shrink)

Painting can only be thought in relation to the image. And yet, with (and within) painting what continues to endure is the image of painting. While this is staged explicitly in, for example, paintings of St. Luke by artists of the Northern Renaissance—e.g., Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Simon Marmion—the same concerns are also at work within both the practices as well as the contemporaneous writings that define central aspects of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of this (...) paper is to begin an investigation into the process by which painting stages the activity of painting. This forms part of a project whose aim is an investigation of the way philosophy should respond to the essential historicity of art (where the latter is understood philosophically). (shrink)

Comics have great potential to depict an almost infinite range of themes, questions and lives. But what about their ability to express and interpret philosophical concepts? How can we differentiate between the representation of theoretical concepts in and of themselves, and the impact of comics techniques on the legacy of philosophers, their lives and their thought? This book explores the historical and artistic value of representing lives through the medium of bande dessinée (BD), French-language comics. The text analyses three biographical (...) BDs dedicated to the lives of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus as well as a selection of print and online comics that extend the legacy of these philosophers and their historical movement. The work is the first to analyse biographical BD through the lens of Existentialism, offering a new theory of reading biographical comics. The research not only contributes a novel approach to comics but also an enhanced understanding of Existentialism and the Existentialists, including their enduring contemporary relevance. (shrink)

Recent interest in communism as an idea prompts reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s conception of a “communist” aesthetic politics. In spite of Benjamin’s categorical condemnation of aestheticized politics, his “artwork essay” is better read as both explicit condemnation of a particular type of aestheticized politics and implicit commendation of another type. Under the modern conditions of the technological reproducibility of art, and mass politics, the character of and relationship between the cultural value spheres of politics and aesthetics also changes. (...) Benjamin analyzes dialectically the actuality of the fascist response to modern mass arts and politics in which technology and society are misaligned, and the potentiality of a communist response that would bring about a collective interplay of humanity and technology. (shrink)

The Restoration (1814–1830) was a golden age for liberal philosophy in France, especially in the field of politics. The political thought of Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, two of the most well-known theorists of the representative regime, is today regarded as particularly useful for understanding the meaning of many of the institutions which post-revolutionary democracies inherited. However, this paper reveals the existence of another great theory of the representative regime in circulation during the French Restoration: that popularized in the (...) pages of Le Censeur (1814–1815), a major liberal newspaper of the time. Its editors, Charles Comte (1782–1837) and Charles Dunoyer (1786–1862), are today known for their important contribution to the rise of liberal political economy in France. Their earliest journalistic writings contrast with the rest of their work and predate their discovery of the Treatise on Political Economy by Jean-Baptiste Say. During the first Bourbon Restoration (1814), Comte and Dunoyer were concerned almost exclusively with political philosophy. Before adopting the doctrine of ‘industrialism’, they attempted to make a synthesis of the political thought of Rousseau and Montesquieu, in order to give a liberal form to the idea of popular sovereignty compatible with monarchical government. (shrink)

In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogates the concept of goodness, while arguing that it's always more interesting and radical than its opposite. With neither hubris nor reductionism, Furnace of this World speaks of what it means to pursue (...) justice in a fallen world."--Amazon.com. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) à travers son itinéraire semé d'embûches, a dû affronter l'arrivée au pouvoir des nazis. Amené à sillonner l'Europe il développe une activité de critique littéraire et une philosophie de l'histoire, notamment dans ses ultimes « thèses » de 1940. Ce testament philosophique est influencé par le messianisme juif et le marxisme. Décrit comme sentinelle messianique, l'œuvre de Walter Benjamin se déploie aux confins de la sociologie, de l'esthétique et de la théologie. Sa philosophie de l'histoire (...) contraste avec celle de Nietzsche, mais le rapproche de Simone Weil. Analyste privilégié des tourments de l'Europe, il participera indirectement à l'Ecole de Francfort. (shrink)

In his ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘educative violence’ as a contemporary manifestation of ‘divine violence’. In this paper, we aim to interpret ‘educative violence’ by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to Benjamin’s ideas of education in tradition and of the schooling of Geist, our goal is twofold: firstly, to comprehend the productive role that violence may play in the (...) pedagogical context, and secondly, to apply it to the conception of schooling presented by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons to highlight its relevance to school education. By linking scholastic violence to divine violence, we argue that schools must be defended not despite but because of the violence they inhere. In doing so, we contribute another layer to the defense of the school and offer fresh insights into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 291-293 [Access article in PDF] A Reply to Jessica Benjamin Lester C. Olson I am grateful to Jessica Benjamin for making the time to write a letter concerning her experiences in 1979 at "The Second Sex Conference," where Audre Lorde delivered her speech "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." The letter arrived on 4 March 2000, after I had (...) sent the final version of the essay on Lorde's speech to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Although the editor indicated that, despite the late date, it would be possible for me to revise the essay to account for Ms. Benjamin's statement, I instead asked the editor to publish the statement as a comment after the essay, because of the historical value of her firsthand experiences and understandings of the conference, and because her letter provides an opportunity to engage in a dialogue called for in the conclusion of my essay. In addition, the letter gives additional information about context, which impacts any interpretation of Lorde's speech. As such, it becomes an occasion to reflect on interpreting rhetorical texts in historical contexts.As a rhetorical critic, I have been working, periodically, on understanding the rhetoric of Lorde's speech for about three years now. During September 1997, I wrote to several scholar-activists who were well positioned to know about the audiences at the conference and whether there were audio or video recordings of the speech. I was anxious to secure a recording because I knew from my earlier experience in researching Lorde's other speeches that, at times, she revised the texts for printed versions of them. Except for archivists at New York University, nobody replied to my letters. In the meantime, I presented preliminary drafts of my interpretation of Lorde's speech at conferences of the National Communication Association--one paper analyzing the speech itself and a second on later critical commentaries on it. In addition, in undergraduate classes on rhetorical criticism, I used the speech as a sustained example during class discussions on doing rhetorical criticism. In addition to reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) because its publication was the basis for the entire [End Page 291] conference, I read some conference participants' later publications based on their conference papers. Having secured a formal acceptance of my essay, I decided to send a penultimate copy of it to the scholar-activists to whom I had written in 1997, hoping that it might elicit some replies. Two people sent letters during the last couple of months, one so brief that it would not have affected my interpretation of Lorde's speech. Ms. Benjamin's letter, however, mattered to me--both because of its historical importance in its own right and because of the ramifications it has for interpretations in the essay.My immediate response to the first paragraph of Ms. Benjamin's letter was defensiveness. It disturbed me to realize that Ms. Benjamin had experienced my essay as perpetuating the divisiveness and polarization at the time and as marginalizing her experiences. My intentions were not to continue a destructive practice, but rather to examine Lorde's rhetoric to identify pitfalls in coalition politics across multiple differences (both within and among social groups) to mitigate them to the extent possible. Subsequently, I realized that my own defensiveness exemplified one such pitfall. By asking the editor to publish Ms. Benjamin's letter, I could perhaps model a dialogue approach, which I had called for in the essay's conclusion; rectify in some measure the marginalization of Ms. Benjamin's account; and provide readers with additional information for their active reinterpreting of the speech, essay, and letter.Further, based upon Ms. Benjamin's letter, some aspects of the rhetorical context may merit attention in revising my essay. The comments about the organizer's efforts to include a range of social groups and about the resistance to those efforts deserve mention, because becoming audience members was already a rhetorical effect. If, as one black feminist suggested to Ms. Benjamin, "only white women" came to feminist... (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

La instauración de un vínculo entre historia y poder es uno de los aspectos más interesantes del pensamiento político de la filósofa francesa Simone Weil. Durante la primera mitad del siglo XX, Weil desarrolla unas reflexiones en torno al concepto de historia, desde la perspectiva de los vencidos, que aproximan su especulación a la de su contemporáneo Walter Benjamin. La comparación con Benjamin permite acercar el pensamiento weiliano a las recientes teorías de la justicia anamnética y, más en (...) general, a la exigencia actual de incorporar en el discurso político el punto de vista de las víctimas. (shrink)

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a defining figure of the twentieth century; a philosopher, Christian, resistance fighter, anarchist, feminist, labor activist and teacher. She was described by T. S. Eliot as "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints," and by Albert Camus as "the only great spirit of our time." Originally published posthumously in two volumes, these newly reissued notebooks, are among the very few unedited personal writings of Weil's that still survive today. (...) Containing her thoughts on art, love, science, God and the meaning of life, they give context and meaning to Weil's famous works, revealing a unique philosophy in development and offering a rare private glimpse of her singular personality. (shrink)

The right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) has been associated with two apparently disparate functional roles: in attention and in social cognition. According to one account, the rTPJ initiates a “circuit-breaking” signal that interrupts ongoing attentional processes, effectively reorienting attention. It is argued this primary function of the rTPJ has been extended beyond attention, through a process of evolutionarily cooption, to play a role in social cognition. We propose an alternative account, according to which the capacity for social cognition depends on a (...) network which is both distinct from and in tension with brain areas involved in focused attention and target detection: the default mode network. Theory characterizing the rTPJ based on the area’s purported role in reorienting may be falsely guided by the co-occurrence of two distinct effects in contiguous regions: activation of the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), associated with its functional role in target detection; and the transient release, during spatial reorienting, of suppression of the angular gyrus (AG) associated with focused attention. Findings based on meta-analysis and resting functional connectivity are presented which support this alternative account. We find distinct regions, possessing anti-correlated patterns of resting connectivity, associated with social reasoning (AG) and target detection (SMG) at the rTPJ. The locus for reorienting was spatially intermediate between the AG and SMG and showed a pattern of connectivity with similarities to social reasoning and target detection seeds. These findings highlight a general methodological concern for brain imaging. Given evidence that certain tasks not only activate some areas but also suppress activity in other areas, it is suggested that researchers need to distinguish two distinct putative mechanisms, either of which may produce an increase in activity in a brain area: functional engagement in the task versus release of suppression. (shrink)

Particle indistinguishability has always been considered a purely quantum mechanical concept. In parallel, indistinguishable particles have been thought to be entities that are not properly speaking objects at all. I argue, to the contrary, that the concept can equally be applied to classical particles, and that in either case particles may (with certain exceptions) be counted as objects even though they are indistinguishable. The exceptions are elementary bosons (for example photons).

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next twenty (...) or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Examines the development of the philosophy, culture, and civilization of ancient China and discusses the history of Taoism and Confucianism.

We demonstrate that the quantum-mechanical description of composite physical systems of an arbitrary number of similar fermions in all their admissible states, mixed or pure, for all finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, is not in conflict with Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII). We discern the fermions by means of physically meaningful, permutation-invariant categorical relations, i.e. relations independent of the quantum-mechanical probabilities. If, indeed, probabilistic relations are permitted as well, we argue that similar bosons can also be discerned in all (...) their admissible states; but their categorical discernibility turns out to be a state-dependent matter. In all demonstrated cases of discernibility, the fermions and the bosons are discerned (i) with only minimal assumptions on the interpretation of quantum mechanics; (ii) without appealing to metaphysical notions, such as Scotusian haecceitas, Lockean substrata, Postian transcendental individuality or Adamsian primitive thisness; and (iii) without revising the general framework of classical elementary predicate logic and standard set theory, thus without revising standard mathematics. This confutes: (a) the currently dominant view that, provided (i) and (ii), the quantum-mechanical description of such composite physical systems always conflicts with PII; and (b) that if PII can be saved at all, the only way to do it is by adopting one or other of the thick metaphysical notions mentioned above. Among the most general and influential arguments for the currently dominant view are those due to Schrodinger, Margenau, Cortes, Dalla Chiara, Di Francia, Redhead, French, Teller, Butterfield, Giuntini, Mittelstaedt, Castellani, Krause and Huggett. We review them succinctly and critically as well as related arguments by van Fraassen and Massimi. (shrink)

Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the priest to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals.

I show that frequentism, as an explanation of probability in classical statistical mechanics, can be extended in a natural way to a decoherent quantum history space, the analogue of a classical phase space. The result is a form of finite frequentism, in which Gibbs’ concept of an infinite ensemble of gases is replaced by the quantum state expressed as a superposition of a finite number of decohering microstates. It is a form of finite and actual frequentism (as opposed to hypothetical (...) frequentism) insofar as all the microstates exist, in keeping with the decoherence-based Everett interpretation, and some versions of pilot-wave theory. (shrink)

The central claim of this article is that post-truth requires a political and socio-economical perspective, rather than a moral or epistemological one. The article consists of two parts. The first part offers a critical examination of the dominant analyses of post-truth in terms of shifting standards of the origin and the evaluation of facts. Moreover, the claim that postmodernism is the cause of post-truth is examined and refuted. In the second part an alternative perspective is developed, centring around the notion (...) of gatekeepers. Rather than linking post-truth to bullshit and postmodernism, it should be understood as a symptom of a contemporary shift in the gatekeepers of truth and knowledge. Knowledge and truth are always mediated in society through the hands of gatekeeping institutions such as journalism or science. Post-truth is a symptom of a broader transformation of the gatekeeping institutions of our current society. It therefore requires a political philosophy of these institutional shifts and the new risks they involve. (shrink)

Into wrestling with that question, Simone Weil put the very substance of her mind and temperament.