One of the least understood aspects of the world-wide “greening of markets” is the emergence of local “ethical marketplaces” and the subset of alternative business models described as “ethical businesses.” But previous research has demonstrated the ability of local politicians to encourage their regions toward more ethical marketplaces. This paper explores the impact radical centrist third party representation has on the emergence of ethical businesses across Great Britain. To understand this relationship, we utilize a novel data set of organizations with (...) membership in Ethical Junction, the United Kingdom's largest network for ethical businesses. We use a zero-inflated Poisson regression to model the connection, and find a meaningful relationship, between third-party political representation on British local councils and the presence of ethical businesses within local authorities. This presents an example of the way in which radical political change may be part of a wider social movement toward greening markets. (shrink)

In response to its current crisis, scholars call for the revitalisation of democracy through democratic innovations. While they make ample use of life metaphors describing democracy as a living organism, no comprehensive understanding of ‘life’ has been established within democratic theory. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement articulates the urgency of refocusing on life and its meaning through radical democratic practice. This article employs a grounded theory approach, enriched with participatory methods, to develop a radical democratic concept of life in (...) conversation with BLM. It conceptualises life as the existence of a perspective that constantly transforms through its fundamental interconnectedness. Building on this concept, the article outlines four principles of a living democracy that go beyond the revitalisation discourse. A living democracy (1) safeguards the existence of all humans and nonhumans, (2) nurtures a diversity of perspectives, (3) fosters social and planetary connectivity, and (4) enables self- and collective transformation. (shrink)

This paper uses argumentation tools such as argument diagrams and argumentation schemes to analyze four examples of argument from analogy, and argues that to proceed from there to evaluating these arguments, features of the context of dialogue need to be taken into account. The evidence drawn from these examples is taken to support a pragmatic approach to studying argument from analogy, meaning that identifying the logical form of the argument by building an argument diagram of the premises and conclusion is (...) not by itself sufficient for argument evaluation. To get further, it is argued, the argument evaluator needs to take into account how this particular argument was used in context to support a conversational goal.Cet article utilise des outils d'argumentation tels que des diagrammes d'argument et des schèmes d'argumentation pour analyser trois exemples d'argument par analogie, et soutient que pour évaluer ces arguments de manière adéquate, il est nécessaire de tenir compte du contexte d'utilisation de l'argument. Ces exemples suggèrent que l’étude des arguments par analogie à partir de seulement l’identification de leur forme logique n'est pas adéquate. Pour aller plus loin, on avance que l'analyste d'argument doit prendre en compte comment un argument particulier a été utilisé dans un contexte pour soutenir un but conversationnel. (shrink)

Street art is an art form that entails creating public works incorporating the street physically and in their meaning. That physical property is employed as an artistic resource in street art raises two questions. Are street artworks necessarily illegal? Does being illegal change the nature of production and aesthetic appreciation? First, I argue street artworks must be in the street. On my view, both the physical and sociocultural senses of the street can be constitutive of meaning. Second, I argue that (...) illegality is a prototypical and paradigmatic feature of street art. While illegality alone does not make works better than sanctioned street art, it affects the production process and changes what is available to appreciate. (shrink)

To succeed in self-regulation, people need to believe that it is possible to change behaviour and they also need to use effective means to enable such a change. We propose that this also applies to emotion regulation. In two studies, we found that people were most successful in emotion regulation, the more they believed emotions can be controlled and the more they used an effective emotion regulation strategy – namely, cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive reappraisal moderated the link between beliefs about the (...) controllability of emotion and success in emotion regulation, when reappraisal was measured as a trait or manipulated. Such moderation was found when examining the regulation of disgust elicited by emotion-inducing films, and the regulation of anger elicited by real political events. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice in emotion regulation. (shrink)

In this essay I examine three different indexical processes that inform meaning during a mbira performance in Zimbabwe in order to clarify the nature of meaning in musical practice. I continue others’ efforts to provincialize language and correct the damage done by “symbolocentrism’s” continued reliance on post-Saussurian models of signification and structure by addressing processes of purpose, effect, and agency in meaning. Emphases on language and/or structure mislead explanations of musical meaning and compromise the understanding of meaning itself. By foregrounding (...) the unique properties of indexicality in musical practice, and highlighting three distinct indexical processes that drive music’s meaning (deictic, metonym, and replica), I help free meaning from language and offer an ethnomusicological counterpoint to multidisciplinary efforts that define meaning within linguistic and physiological paradigms. Indexical meaning is direct but unpredictable, rooted in experience, embodied habits, and the here and now. (shrink)

There has recently been a good deal of controversy about Landauer's Principle, which is often stated as follows: The erasure of one bit of information in a computational device is necessarily accompanied by a generation of kT ln 2 heat. This is often generalised to the claim that any logically irreversible operation cannot be implemented in a thermodynamically reversible way. John Norton (2005) and Owen Maroney (2005) both argue that Landauer's Principle has not been shown to hold in general, and (...) Maroney offers a method that he claims instantiates the operation reset in a thermodynamically reversible way. In this paper we defend the qualitative form of Landauer's Principle, and clarify its quantitative consequences (assuming the second law of thermodynamics). We analyse in detail what it means for a physical system to implement a logical transformation L, and we make this precise by defining the notion of an L-machine. Then we show that logical irreversibility of L implies thermodynamic irreversibility of every corresponding L-machine. We do this in two ways. First, by assuming the phenomenological validity of the Kelvin statement of the second law, and second, by using information-theoretic reasoning. We illustrate our results with the example of the logical transformation 'reset', and thereby recover the quantitative form of Landauer's Principle. (shrink)

The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) has recently issued a revised "Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants" (IFAC Code). As a requirement for membership in IFAC, a national accounting organization must either adopt the IFAC Code or adopt a code of conduct that is not "less stringent" than the IFAC Code. In this paper, we examine the extent to which 158 national accounting organizations have adopted the revised IFAC Code as their own. Our results indicate that 80 of our sample (...) organizations have adopted the IFAC Code (sometimes with minor modifications), while the remaining 78 opted not to utilize the model IFAC Code. We then test the hypothesis that national accounting organizations in lower income economies would be less likely to adopt the IFAC Code than those in high income economies. Our results do not support the hypothesis. We argue that one potential reason for such a finding is that adopting the IFAC Code may be a cost effective means of adopting a code of ethics for organizations in lower income economies. (shrink)

This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology – the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative.¹ At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?

Throughout his career, French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu sought to interrogate what he described as the 'social unconscious', the means by which power is held and transmitted across generations. Bourdieu's work has been hugely influential in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities for decades, yet Schirato and Roberts argue that few scholars are using his work to its full potential. Bourdieu's work is so wide-ranging that commentary tends to focus on specific theoretical concepts he developed or his books on particular (...) fields of inquiry. However he continued to develop these concepts in his work across his whole career, and much of the richness of his thinking is lost if this isn't taken into account. Drawing on recently released lectures, Schirato and Roberts offer a systematic account of Bourdieu's full body of work, from his early research in Algiers to his last lectures in Paris. They show how Bourdieu continued to develop his concepts of habitus, field, capital, power and socio-cultural reproduction well into his later years. They also offer a nuanced reading of Bourdieu's thinking about education, class, language, knowledge and culture beyond the individual books Bourdieu published on these topics. This critical introduction to Bourdieu is essential reading for all Bourdieu scholars, and for researchers and thinkers using Bourdieu's work in their own social and cultural analysis. 'A terrific book, which sets out a comprehensive overview of Bourdieu's oeuvre in a way that no other text I know has done' - Professor John Frow, University of Sydney. (shrink)

Animal Ethics has long been a highly contested area with debates driven by unease about various forms of animal harm, from the use of animals in scientific research to the farming of animals for consumption. Animal Ethics: The Basics is an essential introduction to the key considerations surrounding the ethical treatment of animals. Taking a thematic approach, it outlines the current arguments from animal agency to the emergence of the ‘political turn’. This book explores such questions as: Can animals think (...) and do they suffer? What do we mean by speciesism? Are humans special? Can animals be political or moral agents? Is animal rights protest ethical? Including outlines of the key arguments, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of key terms, this book is an essential read for philosophy students and readers approaching the contested field of Animal Ethics for the first time. (shrink)

Aristotle and Natural Law lays out a new theoretical approach which distinguishes between the notions of 'interpretation,' 'appropriation,' 'negotiation' and 'reconstruction' of the meaning of texts and their component concepts. These categories are then deployed in an examination of the role which the concept of natural law is used by Aristotle in a number of key texts. The book argues that Aristotle appropriated the concept of natural law, first formulated by the defenders of naturalism in the 'nature versus convention debate' (...) in classical Athens. Thereby he contributed to the emergence and historical evolution of the meaning of one of the most important concept in the lexicon of Western political thought. Aristotle and Natural Law argues that Aristotle's ethics is best seen as a certain type of natural law theory which does not allow for the possibility that individuals might appeal to natural law in order to criticize existing laws and institutions. Rather its function is to provide them with a philosophical justification from the standpoint of Aristotle's metaphysics. (shrink)

This book is an essential contribution to the transdisciplinary field of critical design studies. The essays in this collection locate design at the center of a series of interrelated planetary crises, from climate change, nuclear war, and racial and geopolitical violence to education, computational culture, and the loss of the commons. In doing so, the essays propose a range of needed interventions in order to transform design itself and its role within the shifting realities of a planetary crisis. It challenges (...) the widely popular view that design can contribute to solving world problems by exposing how this attitude only intensifies the problems we currently face. In this way, the essays critique the dominant modes of framing the meaning and scope of design as a largely Anglo-European "problem-solving" practice. By drawing on post-development theory, decolonial theory, black studies, continental philosophy, science and technology studies and more, the contributions envision a critical and speculative practice that problematizes both its engagement with planet and itself. The essays in this collection will appeal to design theorists and practitioners alike, but also to scholars and students generally concerned with how the past and future of design is implicated in the unfolding complexity of ecological devastation, racial and political violence, coloniality, technological futures, and the brutality of modern western culture generally. (shrink)

The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large. The authors make clear that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the complexity of the combined critical conditions that are now putting life on Earth at risk, and the divisions and theories (...) of knowledge that are dominantly and instrumentally trying to understand the situation. In response this work makes the case for the need for a new political imagination that rejects the sufficiency of existing political ideologies (including democracy) being the end point of politics. The book tackles the political underpinnings of social and economic life in a world still embedded in the inequities of the afterlife of colonialism and state socialism. Thereafter it engages narratives of change, rethinks imagination and critical practices, to finally present a relationally connected way to move forward. (shrink)

Antiques are undoubtedly objects worthy of aesthetic appreciation, but do they have a distinctive aesthetic value in virtue of being antiques? In this article we give an account of what it is to be an antique that gives the thesis that they do have a distinctive aesthetic value a chance of being true and suggests what that distinctive value consists in. After introducing our topic in Section I, in Section II we develop and defend the Adjectival Thesis: the thesis that (...) the concept of being an antique is an adjectival concept. This provides us with the means to formulate our definition, which we do in Section III. In Section IV we further explicate and defend our definition. In Section V we conclude by briefly saying where we think our definition could be improved, by making a few comments about the aesthetics of antiques and by stating an interesting consequence of our definition: that it is not analytic that antiques are old. (shrink)

Dance is proposed as the most representative of somaesthetic arts in Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics and other writings of Richard Shusterman. Shuster- man offers a useful, but incomplete approach to somaesthetics of dance. In the examples provided, dance appears as subordinate to another art form or as a means to achieving bodily excellence. Missing, for example, are accounts of the role of dance as an independent art form, how somaesthetics would address differences in varying approaches to dance, (...) and attention to the viewer’s somaesthetic dance experience. Three strategies for developing new directions for dance somaesthetics are offered here: identify a fuller range of applications of somaesthetics to dance as an independent art form ; develop somaesthetics for a wider range of theatre dance ; and relate somaesthetics to more general features of dance necessary for understanding the roles of the choreographer/dancer and the viewer. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study of a psychiatric intervention as an example of an institutional ethnography of psychiatric work. Institutional ethnography, a mode of inquiry outlined by Dorothy Smith (1987), is conceived here as an approach to the analysis of work in institutions as the contingent, local and context-bound insertion of a particular "case" - a patron, a pupil, a client, a patient - into both institutional and other social (e. g. gender, class) relations. The case presented in this (...) paper, shows how a psychiatric factual account is the outcome of a process of the recognition, and/or the production, of "mentionables," followed by the documentary interpretation of mentionables as symptoms. Subsequently it is demonstrated that, and how, the recognition of mentionables depends on non-professional interpretations which by their nature express other social (such as gender, class, etc.) relations. This description of psychiatric diagnostic work is produced by means of a method of discourse analysis that consists of the juxtaposition of the various institutional texts (the two reports) with the transcript of the interview. An analysis of only the interview data would undoubtedly have resulted in some insights about psychiatric interviewing but would have shown neither how the interview functioned as a stage in the institutional process of (re)writing reports nor how ideological evaluations entered the diagnostic process. On the other hand, an analysis of only the two reports would have resulted in some insights about psychiatric reporting but would not have shown how these reports were produced. (shrink)

The paper presents an interpretation of Aristotle's views on natural justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. It focuses, in particular, on Aristotle's understanding of the relationship which exists between natural justice and political justice, or between natural law and positive law. It is suggested that Aristotle's views on this subject are often misunderstood. It is also suggested that, contrary to what some commentators might think, Aristotle's comments on natural justice are actually central for our understanding of his political thought as a (...) whole. It is argued that Aristotle is, therefore, definitely a natural law theorist of some description. However, Aristotle's natural law theory is unconventional in certain respects. In particular, Aristotle does not consider natural law to be a critical standard by means of which positive law might be evaluated. This places Aristotle outside the mainstream of natural law theory as it has been traditionally understood. Aristotle is not, in this sense at least, the forerunner of the Stoic natural law tradition and of the individualistic, liberal natural law theory of the modern era. He is, rather, the founding father of what might best be described as the conservative natural law tradition, the most well known adherents of which in modern times are Montesquieu, Burke and Hegel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or RationalizationTony PreusRobert Mayhew. The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xi +136. Cloth, $28.00.Aristotle's views on the ethical, social, and political roles of women have repeatedly drawn the attention of scholars. Often, the central focus of the discussion is Politics I.13, 1260 a13, where Aristotle says that although women have a deliberative faculty, (...) it is akuron, "without authority." A charitable (from our point of view) interpretation of that word would have him mean that women are capable of ethical and political decision-making, but fourth-century BCE Athenian social arrangements prevent their exercising that capacity outside the home. However, many readers of Aristotle suppose that he means to indicate a natural difference between men and women, some mental or moral inferiority of women. A few passages in the Politics support that interpretation (e.g., Pol. I.2, 1254 b13, 12.1259 a40), but those do not provide a "scientific" or "biological" grounding of female inferiority. That sort of thing one would expect to find in the biological works. Mayhew's monograph is an exposition of the errors and exaggerations of some of those writers, from the usually careful Martha Nussbaum to the usually unreliable Luce Iragaray.The least cautious critics of Aristotle's views on women typically fasten on his views on sexual generation; as Mayhew shows (ch. 3), such critics either claim that Aristotle believed that women contribute only a place for generation to occur, or that women contribute totally passive matter. Mayhew is able to demonstrate, rather easily, that either claim depends on total ignorance or total misunderstanding of the actual contents of the Generation of Animals. In Aristotle's opinion, the female provides proximate matter for the offspring, something that is almost able to develop into a new individual and needing only the impetus and form provided by the male contribution. Having started with the "form/matter" distinction, it is pretty obvious that the female provides the matter (a bird egg is all of the matter that goes to make the chick), and the male is necessary for reproduction to [End Page 109] occur, so it must be a source of movement (at least) and some element of form (since the offspring partially resembles its male parent) that comes from that source. (For older discussions of this issue, see my Science and Philosophy in Aristotle's Biological Works [Hildesheim, 1975], ch. 2, and J. Morsink, "Was Aristotle's Biology Sexist?" J. Hist. Biol.12 [1979]:83-112, neither noted by Mayhew). But what would be the ethical or political implications of that distinction? Aristotle says that it is "better" to provide form, but there's no straightforward way to conclude from that difference that a woman's deliberative faculty is less authoritative than a man's, any more than there is any straightforward way to argue from the fact that a woman might spend some time pregnant that a permanent pay differential is justified. And Aristotle does not try to make that sort of argument, as a matter of fact.Mayhew deals with most of the other arguments that some have derived from the biological works to support their view that Aristotle's "science" is the foundation of his (supposed) sexism. For example, he points out that although Aristotle does call "kings" the bees that we call "queens," he also calls the analogue among wasps the "mothers" or "wombs"; Mayhew says that Aristotle seems to have thought that the king/queen bee was hermaphroditic and parthenogenetic. Mayhew also has an original and interesting chapter on Aristotle's comparisons between women and eunuchs; although he notes that Aristotle was friendly with at least one eunuch, Hermeias, the uncle of Aristotle's young wife, he leaves out Aristotle's poetic praise of Hermeias (see R. Renehan, in Greek, Roman, and Byz. Stud.23 [1982]: 251-74). Suppose women were "eunuchoid" according to Aristotle, it couldn't mean that they were consequently intellectually inferior, since at least one eunuch was, in Aristotle's opinion, intellectually superior.Mayhew also discusses, adequately enough, the issues of brain... (shrink)

In her paper ‘Cosmetic surgery and conscientious objection’, Minerva rightly identifies cosmetic surgery as an interesting test case for the question of conscientious objection in medicine. Her treatment of this important subject, however, seems problematic. It is argued that Minerva's suggestion that a doctor has a prima facie duty to satisfy patient preferences even against his better clinical judgment, which we call Patient Preference Absolutism, must be regarded with scepticism. This is because it overlooks an important distinction regarding autonomy's meaning (...) and place in clinical practice, and it makes obsolete the important concepts of expert clinical judgment and beneficence. Finally, we discuss two ideas which emerge from consideration of cosmetic surgery in relation to conscientious objection. These are the possible analogy between clinical judgment and conscientious objection, and the possible role the goals of medicine can play in defining the scope of conscientious objection. (shrink)

This book presents the concept of ‘unstaging’ war as a strategic response to the failure of the discourse and institutions of peace. This failure is explained by exploring the changing character of conflict in current and emergent global circumstances, such as asymmetrical conflicts, insurgencies, and terrorism. Fry argues that this pluralisation of war has broken the binary relation between war and peace: conflict is no longer self-evident, and consequentially the changes in the conditions, nature, systems, philosophies and technologies of war (...) must be addressed. Through a deep understanding of contemporary war, Fry explains why peace fails as both idea and process, before presenting ‘Unstaging War’ as a concept and nascent practice that acknowledges conflict as structurally present, and so is not able to be dealt with by attempts to create peace. Against a backdrop of increasingly tense relations between global power blocs, the beginnings of a new nuclear arms race, and the ever-increasing human and environmental impacts of climate change, a more viable alternative to war is urgently needed. Unstaging War is not claimed as a solution, but rather as an exploration of critical problems and an opening into the means of engaging with them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of Isocrates in Plato’s Euthydemus, with special attention given to M.M. McCabe’s defense of Socratic philosophy against the sophistic challenges of Euthydemus and Dionysodoros. I defend two main theses: (1) Isocratean philosophy refutes what McCabe calls ‘chopped logos’ (a sophistic theory of logic and meaning) and (2) Isocratean philosophy, like its Socratic rival, is committed to reflection and to the consistency of logoi but, unlike its Socratic rival, it is committed to them for strictly (...) pragmatic reasons. As support for these theses, I argue that Isocrates holds a pragmatic theory of truth, that Isocratean philosophy meets all the requirements of what McCabe calls a ‘reflective commitment,’ and that Isocrates’ particular brand of pragmatism avoids the unscrupulous opportunism that worries McCabe about pragmatism generally. I conclude with considerations about how Isocrates figures into the central themes and drama of the Euthydemus. (shrink)

As a study involving diabetes care demonstrates, children sometimes have a much more sophisticated capacity for taking charge of their own health care decisions than is usually recognized in bioethics. Protecting these children from their disease means involving them in their treatment as much as possible, helping them to understand it and take responsibility for it so that they can navigate the multitude of daily decisions that become part of the diabetes medical regimen.

Abstract: For William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can ‘generate’ the appropriate sequence of world-time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the ‘derivative’ status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world-time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is to (...) succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane ‘tasks’, the contents of world-time nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into world-time the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling-off. I argue, instead, that world-time nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite ‘irrational’ but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or ‘iterative’ I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the ‘existential’ level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling-off of the world-time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time. (shrink)

This study draws on semistructured interviews with 19 white, rural, straight-identified men who have sex with men to understand how they perceive their gender and sexuality. It is among the first to use straight men’s own narratives, and helps address the underrepresentation of rural masculinities research. Through complex interpretive processes, participants reworked non-normative sexual practices—those usually antithetical to rural masculinities—to construct normative masculinity. Most chose other masculine, white, and straight or secretly bisexual men as partners for secretive sex without romantic (...) involvement. By choosing these partners and having this type of sex, the participants normalized and authenticated their sexual encounters as straight and normatively masculine. The participants engaged in bud-sex, a specific type of male–male sex that reinforced their rural masculinity and heterosexuality. The married men framed sex with men as less threatening to marriage than extramarital sex with women, helping to preserve a part of their lives that they described as central to their straightness. The results highlight the flexibility of heterosexuality; the centrality of heterosexuality to normative rural masculinity; how similar sexual practices carry different meanings across contexts and populations; and the social construction of masculinities and sexualities by age, race, gender, time period, and place. (shrink)

Dune, released in 1984 and directed by David Lynch, from his own adaptedscreenplay of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel, provides a rich examplefor a reception study on ideas of authorship. On the one hand, Herbert’s 1960scult bestseller has evolved into a franchise and is thus regarded by Duneenthusiasts as a sacrosanct text. From a Lynch perspective, though, the film isusually seen as his least personal work – an event movie no less – and as such itholds the rank of the (...) most uncared for text in his filmic canon. It is the goal ofthis paper to analyse Dune’s meanings in relation to critical writings foundedupon the tenets of early auteurism so we might explore its function as areception preference for the predisposed reader. But rather than simply dismissauteurism as humanist idealism , the outcome of this paper seeks to also take account ofthe writing pleasures the author might bring to the interpretation of filmed texts. (shrink)

Aristotle’s distinction between phronesis (practical wisdom) and episteme (theory) has been centrally influential in the development of hermeneutics. Heidegger, initiating hermeneutic phenomenology, foregrounded practical understanding as foundational (or ‘ready-to-hand’): scientific theory was but secondary (‘presented-at-hand’). Gadamer subsequently emphasised understanding as primarily practical, as an applicative achievement, within broad assumptions, ‘horizons of understanding’, a metaphor signalling explicitly/implicitly represented surroundings. How should Aristotle’s idea of practical wisdom in human affairs articulated in phenomenology’s hermeneutic thought - principally Gadamer’s scholarship - inform researcher analyses? (...) Here an account of hermeneutic philosophy, with its core conceptual formations, is presented as concerning situated understanding in practice, phronesis. Multiple instances of this behavioural research focus from psychology’s Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis then receive reflection. Interviewing proceeds from ‘horizons of expectation’ (Jauss 1982). Themes are viewed as 'horizons of understanding’ (Gadamer 1975), interviewees’ perspectives on practices. A researcher may engage in resolving ‘indeterminacy’ (Iser 1978). Participants’ reflectively recounted meaning-making phronesis practices can be structured in their analyses by locating their a priori, universally discernible aspects. Thus phronesis is constituted by generic, care (Heidegger’s Sorge) embodying activity, ‘emplaced’ or understood from tacit representational affective ‘horizons of understanding’: participant bodies can become denoted ‘equipment’ (Heidegger’s Zeug). Keywords: caring, hermeneutic phronesis, interpretative horizons of understanding, phenomenology. (shrink)

Capitalism is not enough. It has brought us prosperity and no other economic system can match its energy and innovation, but it has a dark side of exploitation and instability. Capitalism needs to be bounded by values. But which values? What indeed are values anyway and how do we locate and share values strong enough to balance the power of capitalism in society? Relativism has swept away old certainties and we struggle to agree what should lie at the centre of (...) our lives. In this book we construct a foundation for values based on our common humanity and explore personal, social and political values from a fresh perspective. We show how with values placed on a strong foundation individual lives can reacquire meaning and purpose. Politics can be transformed from the half-corrupted subject of popular indifference it has become. Above all, capitalism can be a tool for good, a servant rather than a master. (shrink)

In a world of confrontations between numerous cultures, traditions, languages, and religions, the meaning of “human” and “humanism” reaches a higher level of “humanness.” The pluralism of cultural, political, and religious outlook creates new options and alternative interpretations of what constitutes the “human.” True humanness is always there, open and accessible to all, with nothing being hidden or obscured. At the same time, true humanness is also a matter of doing, not just being. To be “true” is to live the (...) truth, to be with it, and to be part of it. We exist inside this truth as a passion, which informs all the decisions we make in life. So true humanness is not something objective and static, something to be studied from a distance; true humanness is an up-close and personal way of living, a mode of existence, something that is relational. Our way toward a more complex understanding of humanness faces similar obstacles as a yogi encounters on his way to the final way of Yoga. Patañjali in his Yoga Sutras describes these obstacles—kleshas—as the afflictions of the human mind, or destructive and disturbing emotions: ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life. A higher understanding of “humanness” will not be reached without an ethical engagement of individuals, as well as formal and informal commitment of institutions and nations. Such an endeavor will consequently reveal yet-undiscovered human potential, leading to a renaissance of our acting, thinking, and believing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dialogic and the Aesthetic:Some Reflections on Theatre as a Learning MediumAnthony Jackson (bio)A Doll's House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night's Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.— George Bernard Shaw, "The Problem Play"1People have tried for centuries to use (...) drama to change people's lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn't work. It might be nice if it worked, but it doesn't. The only thing dramatic form is good for is telling a story.—David Mamet, A Whore's Profession2These two assertions, some 100 years apart, were of course meant to be contentious—but they do point to one of the recurring questions about the role that theatrical art plays in modern Western culture and nicely encapsulate the contrasting claims made by practitioners and critics alike for the "work in the world" that drama can do. On the one hand, it is argued that what is conventionally thought of as great dramatic art—while it may be imaginatively rich, aesthetically compelling, and "timeless" in its appeal—will not achieve the social impact that plays such as A Doll's House have done. Such plays have a different function. They can be directly useful to us in the "real world" beyond the theatre walls, perhaps capable of influencing that world or at least influencing the way we think about and operate in the world—but they may not, consequently, have much shelf life. A Doll's House, of course, obstinately refuses to leave both shelf and stage but in this respect may be an exception that proves the rule; the vast majority of "interventionist" dramas rarely outlive their historical moment. (A play such as Spirochete, a [End Page 104] living newspaper written in 1938 in Chicago with the aim of heightening public awareness of the widespread—but barely discussed—problem of syphilis and of the cures available, undoubtedly did much effective work in the world but remains of and for its time.3 )On the other hand, playwright David Mamet casts buckets of cold water over the whole notion of "useful" dramatic art. Let us not delude ourselves, he argues, into thinking drama is good for anything else than telling a story—the value of good dramatic storytelling is important enough as it is. It serves the art form—and possibly those we wish to influence—badly if we insist on trying to change the world using drama as our lever. A genuine work of art, it is often said, cannot be didactic or "instrumental." The novel, play, or poem that sets out to convey information or to preach a message risks surrendering those very qualities we usually value in art—complexity, multilayered meanings, richness of imagination. Jonathan Levy, in his A Theatre of the Imagination, argues that "the impulse to create theatre for children is the impulse to give a gift, without strings. It is this impulse... we should... call upon when we find ourselves in the theatre tempted to teach."4 Further, "when art is used to teach, either the teaching or the art must suffer."5 The implication is clearly that teaching and dramatic art make awkward bedfellows. It has to be one or the other, not both. The late, much missed, Lowell Swortzell took a not dissimilar line in his provocative essay on theatre-in-education, "Trying to like TIE,"6 and many practitioners of children's and young people's theatre have likewise resisted having their work categorized as educational or in any way curriculum driven. The work must have its own justification, as art, as storytelling, offering young people an experience that may complement but that is fundamentally different from anything else they get in school. Even Augusto Boal has at times appeared to reinforce the dichotomy. Arguing for a theatre that can serve the immediate needs of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the disadvantaged, he has negotiated a challenging and productive path through the artistic and socially responsive implications of... (shrink)

One of the most basic paradoxes of social life is that while we experience ourselves as individuals, we do so only in the context of the pre-existing social environment into which we were born. This environment existed before us and will exist after us . Given this, there are at least two logical ways to study the relationships between the social environment and the individual. On the one hand, you can start at the individual level and analyze how individuals become (...) aggregated to form a social group. But you can also proceed in the opposite direction by asking how the social group creates the individual. Both are valid approaches. The biological sciences .. (shrink)

The words ―Rights,‖ ―Trust,‖ ―Human Dignity,‖ and even ―Government‖ have widely varying meanings and connotations, differing across time, languages and cultures. Concepts of rights, trust, and human dignity have been examined for centuries in great depth by ethicists and other philosophers and by religious think-ers, and more recently by social scientists and, especially as related to information, by information scientists. Similarly, discussions of government are well documented in writings back to Plato and Aristotle, with investi-gations of electronic government dating back (...) only to the early 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web. At first e-government was described in glowing, positive terms. Little, if any, attention was paid to two critical questions: 1) Will people trust e-government? and 2) How will cultural differences affect individuals‘ trust in government and their perceptions of govern-ment‘s effect of their human dignity? Examinations of trust and distrust by individuals within organizations have addressed questions of motives and intentions, expectations of behavior, protection of interests, confi-dence in accuracy and reliability of information, vulnerability, and reciprocity, among other complex topics. Establishing e-government services often requires going through several phases: 1) publish , 2) interact transact transform . Building and maintaining trust in e-government require developing an understanding both of the many levels of interactions where trust must be earned and of cultural differences. Another challenge in developing such a framework is that e-government, itself, is very dynamic, changing rapidly over time. Trust in content or a system available one day may not carry over when the content and/or system changes dramatically. Components of a framework must include the follow-ing dimensions: conceptual domains, cultural dimensions, information content dimensions, and system di-mensions. Of course, these dimensions must be considered within the context of rapidly changing govern-ments, ICT services, the digital divide, and other factors. This paper provides a very brief overview of some of the notions of trust and distrust, concentrating on those concerning trust as it relates to notions of power, trust in organizations, and trust in information and information systems as one part of a framework to ad-dress the question of trust in e-government. It also makes a few recommendations for how to build citizen-centric e-government to ensure information rights through a focus on human dignity, fundamental human rights, and earning trust. (shrink)

This article examines the relations between methods used in both animal work and study and concepts of animal mind. By "animal work" the authors mean humans and animals working together, and by "animal study" they mean the discipline of ethology, especially the emerging area of cognitive ethology. Within these areas the wide range of conceptions of animal mind includes varying emphases on intelligence, forms of rationality and language, cognition, consciousness, and intentionality. The authors' central concern is to elucidate the vocabulary (...) and the concepts which seem necessary to establishing successful working relationships with sheepdogs and gundogs. Their argument moves toward an emphasis on the appreciation of particular intentional states and recognizes that they invariably deploy elements of a moral vocabulary in achieving creative teamwork performances with dogs and other animals. The article concludes by consid enng the relevance of accounts of work with animals for associated considerations of intentionality. (shrink)

Antonio Negri’s article explores the relationship between the juridical categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and the political concept of the common through the theme of the ‘material constitution’ defining actual relations of power which defy the crystallization of ‘formal constitutions’. The financial convention shaping the material constitution of contemporary capitalism refers to the rise of what Foucault called biopower, where value is no longer the expression of a mere quantity of commodities but of a set of activities and services, which (...) are immediately cooperative. In this context, any form of measure cannot but be political and hence it must be established through new forms of economic governance. The social relation of capital becomes immediately political once money displaces labour as rule, norm and measure of value. As a result, processes of political subjectivation within the Eurocrisis combine de-stituent and con-stituent movements: requests for insolvencies, social occupations, commoning and mutualization are the means through which social struggles formulate the multitudes’ demands for ‘equality as a condition of freedom’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 116-133 [Access article in PDF] Writing and the Disembodiment of Language Tony Jackson I AS IS WELL KNOWN, the study of writing in relation to speech played an important part in opening the door to poststructuralist theory, especially in the seminal works of Jacques Derrida. 1 Taking off from his rereading of Saussurean structuralism, Derrida famously made the deconstructive case that reversed and (...) then dissolved the ancient understanding of writing as the secondary, parasitic representation of the authentic signs of spoken language. But the question may well be asked: How will our understanding of writing and speech change if we take off from a nonrelativistic theory of representation? For it is from a thoroughly relativized theory of signs that poststructuralist theory and its derivatives all one way or the other begin. We will look at this in more detail below, but for now suffice it to say that this kind of theory always takes it that representation precedes the real in a fundamental way. No natural relationship exists between any sign and its referent. Given this fundamental disjunction as a foundation, the various theories lead to the practical work of explaining how signification does manage to occur. For example, meaning is a function of logocentrism in Derrida; desire in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory; discourse in theory after Foucault; ideology in the various new historicisms; and so on. In contrast to these understandings of representation, cognitive linguistics—I will use this broad term to include findings from the related but differentiated subfields of cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, cognitive rhetoric—claims that at least on a very fundamental level semantics always precedes any actual manifestation of language, which is to say meaning precedes representation. This is because a foundational [End Page 116] level of universal concepts arises from biologically determined percepts. According to this view, crucial, general kinds of meaning are a function not of discourse or power but of the evolution of the human organism in the ecosystem of the third planet from the sun. 2In order to see how the cognitive linguistic arguments run, we will take an example from George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Lakoff brings in the work of cognitive anthropologist Eleanor Rosch in order to explain the way categorization functions in our perceptual interaction with the world. Rosch's findings, obtained through empirical studies using standard scientific methods, strongly suggest that human experience in its most general sense is "preconceptually structured" by our innate ability to categorize according to base-level prototypes (p. 270). Humans, even children as young as two years old, have a kind of gestalt cognitive process that tends to be oriented toward certain objects and features of the world, such that these objects and features—called cognitive reference points or prototypes—are universally "known," apart from culture and language. An example of this would be the response to primary colors as opposed to secondary colors. Rosch showed that even members of cultures lacking words for the primary colors found it easier to learn names for those colors than for secondary colors (pp. 40-41). We are, it appears, cognitively attuned to the primary colors. Further, we are cognitively constructed so as to sort colors automatically by gradations away from or closer to the primary colors. Culture will of course teach us certain beliefs about colors, but we do not "learn" to respond and operate on this basic level of perception.In the next step of the argument, we find that our "basic-level concepts correspond to [this] preconceptual structure" (p. 270). That is, in considering ourselves as linguistic creatures, we find that thinking or conceptuality also operates according to prototypes. Again, this is held to be true only of specifiable basic-level concepts. Though concepts that arise in cultural life may possibly "impose further structuring on what we experience," nonetheless, "basic experiential structures are present regardless of any such imposition of [learned] concepts" (p. 271). Evolutionarily, language would have to emerge after these innate perceptual structures. Language as a representation would also depend heavily on prototype categorization, not... (shrink)

In the present article, I attempt to relate Saul Kripke's “sceptical paradox” to some issues about the self; specifically, the relation between the self and its mental states and episodes. I start with a brief reconstruction of the paradox, and venture to argue that it relies crucially on a Cartesian model of the self: the sceptic regards the Wittgensteinian “infinite regress of interpretation” as the foundation of his challenge, and this is where he commits the crucial mistake. After the diagnosis, (...) I attempt to sketch my own model of the self and its mental states and episodes. This tentative picture binds meaning and the self together, stressing the subjective aspect of meaning without committing the same fallacy. The solution ventured here is relatively independent of the secondary literatures on the sceptical paradox of following rules, for it aims to provide a new angle to understand and meet the challenge presented by the sceptic. (shrink)

Perry Hendricks has recently argued that endorsing the divine hiddenness objection to the existence of God ‘eliminates’ or ‘does away with’ all de jure objections to theism. So, he says, anyone who endorses the divine hiddenness objection must ‘reject’ any de jure objection. ‘And this,’ he says, ‘means that the argument from divine hiddenness is costly for atheists’. However, although Hendricks's argument is an interesting one, it does not establish any of these things, at least on any natural understanding of (...) his claims. (shrink)

Bernard Williams says that 'the characteristic and basic expression of a moral disposition in deliberation is not a premise which refers to that disposition'. If this means that we can never properly self-ascribe virtues and deliberate from this, then Williams is wrong. To deny this possibility is to be committed to either of two positions, neither of which is all that attractive (and certainly not attractive to Williams). The first position demands that virtue cannot know itself; while the second rests (...) on the pessimistic view that morality itself can demand of us our moral identity. (shrink)

This paper investigates the complicated relations between various versions of naturalism, behaviorism, and mentalism within the framework of W. V. O. Quine's thinking. It begins with Roger Gibson's reconstruction of Quine's behaviorisms and argues that it lacks a crucial ontological element and misconstrues the relation between philosophy and science. After getting clear of Quine's naturalism, the paper distinguishes between evidential, methodological, and ontological behaviorisms. The evidential and methodological versions are often conflated, but they need to be clearly distinguished in order (...) to see whether Quine's argument against mentalism is cogent. The paper argues that Quine's naturalism supports only the weakest version of behaviorism, that is, the evidential one, but this version is compatible with mentalistic semantics. Quine's opposition to mentalism is an overreaction from the behaviorist camp. By contrast, Jerry Fodor's objection to Jose Luis Bermudez is an overreaction from the opposite direction. (shrink)

This article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms and theories of affect for reframing how we might think about beauty and the body. Through an exploration of girls, beauty and the school ball, the article engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to conceptualise beauty as an affective-material process. This perspective involves an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about beauty and the human as discursively produced, towards a relational approach that conceptualises materiality (...) and affect as co-constitutive forces. The article is interested in how such a framing might invite ways of understanding beauty that avoid binary frameworks, such as good/bad, subject/object and discourse/matter. I consider the potential this might offer feminist analyses of beauty, where the focus is less on what beauty is or what it means, and more on how it comes to be. (shrink)

Regulatory authorities have advised smokers who would not or could not quit smoking to switch to lower tar cigarettes. Smoking such cigarettes was seen as a means of reducing the harm caused by smoking, but not as offering a ‘safe’ smoking option. Correspondingly manufacturers have been required to place tar and nicotine information on packet labels and/or advertisements. This paper explores the possibility that the conventional format for conveying tar and nicotine information could be responsible for the belief, held by (...) a significant proportion of smokers, that some brands of lower tar cigarettes are absolutely ‘safe’. To deal with this situation it is suggested that changes should be made to health warnings, and tar and nicotine communications. Proposed changes to the latter are evaluated in terms of their ethical and public health implications. The authors conclude that brand specific warnings and a classification of cigarettes as either ‘Very Dangerous’ or ‘Dangerous’, is best suited to reconciling consumer needs for information with the public health objectives of reducing the harm caused by smoking. (shrink)

Figure-Ground Duality in Humour: A Multi-Modal Perspective Creativity with words or pictures is not simply a matter of communicating a message, but of communicating it well, in a way that is effective, original and which defies convention. Effectiveness here pertains to the pragmatic goals of the communicator, and the extent to which these are achieved, while originality pertains to the manner in which the message is framed. Language, for instance, provides a wealth of conventions for framing a message; indeed, the (...) vast part of language is a solidified body of culturally received conventions, which fix the meaning of words and phrases and determine the contextual appropriateness of specific terms, topics and conversational strategies. To frame a message in a novel manner that stretches or even subverts these conventions, a communicator must imbue the elements of communication—whether words, gestures or pictorial elements—with additional meanings. This duality of meaning is not arbitrary, however, or communication cannot succeed. Rather, a creative communicator must draw out secondary meanings that are already implicit in the stock elements of communication, in a way that the audience can understand, appreciate and replicate. Duality thus lies at the heart of creative communication, allowing a communicator to say one thing and simultaneously convey another, secondary message that may augment or subvert the overt content of the communication. This mechanism, which draws out and gives prominence to that which is normally unseen or implicit, is Figure-Ground Reversal. (shrink)

When we design information technology we risk building specific metaphors and models of human activities into the technology itself and into the embodied activities, work practices, organisational cultures and social identities of those who use it. This paper is motivated by the recognition that the assumptions about human activity used to guide the design of particular technology are made active, in use, by the interaction design of that technology. A fragment of shared design work is used to ground an exploration (...) of different solutions to one of the technical problems that arise when technology is used to support similar work over distance. The argument is made that some solutions to design problems are better than others because they enable human interaction in different ways. Some solutions enhance the possibilities for human agency, others diminish it. This means that there can be a moral basis for choosing between alternative interaction design decisions that might otherwise be considered equivalent in terms of the functionality and usability of the technology. (shrink)

The essay is a study of phenomenal specificity. By ‘phenomenal’ here we mean conscious awareness, which needs to be cashed out in detail throughout the study. Intuitively, one dimension of phenomenology is along with specificity. For example it seems appropriate to say that one’s conscious awareness in the middle of the visual field is in some sense more specific than the awareness in the periphery under normal circumstances. However, it is difficult to characterise the nature of phenomenal specificity in an (...) accurate way. This essay seeks to do just that. In the introduction, I set up the discussion by invoking a threefold Campbellian framework. Chapter 1 introduces a key notion of the analogue, its roots in sciences, and its applications in philosophy. Chapter 2 focuses on the major case study – the Sperling iconic memory paradigm – and explains how the relevant notion of the analogue can be used to explain phenomenal specificity involved in the Sperling case. Chapter 3 discusses functions of attention, as it is a crucial element in the Sperling case. Chapter 4 extends the project by explaining how visual demonstratives fit into the present picture. Finally chapter 5 discusses several directions for future researches. This essay is not an attempt to discuss all the issues concerning the Sperling case, but to provide a new angle in seeing the issue: most people agree that visual phenomenology is in some sense specific, but there are not enough attempts to model phenomenal specificity explicitly. On this occasion we use a notion of the analogue and related ideas to understand phenomenal specificity and how it applies to certain empirical cases. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Abram Brummett argues that new and future assisted reproductive technologies will provide challenging ethical questions relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons. Brummett notes that it is likely that some clinicians may wish to conscientiously object to offering assisted reproductive technologies to LGBT couples on moral or religious grounds, and argues that such appeals to conscience should be constrained. We argue that Brummett's case is unsuccessful because he: does not adequately interact (...) with his opponents’ views; equivocates on the meaning of ‘natural’; fails to show that the practice he opposes is eugenic in any non‐trivial sense; and fails to justify and explicate the relevance of the naturalism he proposes. We do not argue that conscience protections should exist for those objecting to providing LGBT people with artificial reproductive technologies, but only show that Brummett's arguments are insufficient to prove that they should not. (shrink)

Our thesis is that the story of Onan in Genesis chapter 38 offers scriptural and logical grounds for believing that contraceptive acts are sinful. We set out a five-part modus ponens argument which considers the meaning and significance the story of Onan and, by showing that contraceptive acts are substantially similar to the act for which Onan is infamous, conclude that Christians ought not to practise contraception. We then respond to objections to this conclusion before finally and briefly touching upon (...) some of the implications of our thesis for Christian ethics, namely with reference to the perverted faculty argument and natural law. (shrink)

Modern comprehension of religion and violence, particularly modern attitudes toward religious violence, is the main topic of this paper. Mainstream secularization theory states that religion triggers conflict, tension, oppression, violence, and even war. As a continuation of this theory, the “myth of religious violence” assumes that religion is intrinsically connected with terror. These two narratives provide no sufficient proof for their claim about the irrelevance of religion; nonetheless, these narratives are expressions of the human agent’s struggle in his/her search for (...) meaning. Referring to Gianni Vattimo’s idea of weak thought, this writing proposes a narrative that treats religious and spiritual dimensions of human identity as essential for human life, as a source of remarkable consolation and hope in enduring the terror of violence, and as an opening to the new transcendental dimension of the ultimate meaning of human life. (shrink)

Although first published in 1969, the methodological views advanced in Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” remain relevant today. In his article Skinner suggests that it would be inappropriate to even attempt to write the history of any idea or concept. In support of this view, Skinner advances two arguments, one derived from the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the other from that of J. L. Austin. In this paper I focus on the first of (...) these arguments. I claim that the conclusion which Skinner draws from this particular argument does not necessarily follow and that an alternative assessment of the methodological significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for historians of ideas is possible. On this alternative view, far from ruling out conceptual history, an appeal to the view of meaning set out in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations leads to a quite different conclusion, namely that the writing of such a history is arguably a necessary precondition for the elucidation of the meaning of a number of the core concepts in the canon of the history of political thought. Skinner's views have changed somewhat since 1969. Indeed, from the mid 1970s onwards he came to relax the strict opposition to the idea of conceptual history to which he was then committed. The paper concludes by noting that this evolution in Skinner's thinking has made him much more sympathetic than anybody reading “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” would have imagined to the research project of the Begriffgeschichte School of conceptual history. (shrink)