Friedrich Schleiermacher is among the philosophers who influenced Karoline von Günderrode's thought. Although this influence is relevant, it has received little attention. Both authors agree on distinguishing “spirit” and “body” or “the inner and the outer” in similar terms. However, there was a significant difference between them. In Schleiermacher's works that Günderrode considered (On Religion and Soliloquies), he conceives of the relationship as one in which the world or outer depends on the spirit or inner. For Günderrode, this relationship (...) is polar, as “spirit” and “world” form part of an original totality. This difference from the philosopher influences the issue that both raised of access to the “primordial ground.” For Schleiermacher, the world depends on spirit; the issue of access to that foundation is circumscribed to access to the spiritual dimension. In contrast, for Günderrode, “spirit” and “body” are poles of a previous original totality. Hence, access to the primordial ground does not coincide with the spirit's access to itself. Instead, access to unity is both spiritual and corporeal. Günderrode's differences from Schleiermacher are based on an argument we attempt to elucidate and evaluate in this article. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Agency and Access to the World Speaking and Seeing Imitation Some Resources of Narration The Varieties of Narrative Imitation.

Experience has recently reemerged as an important analytical category for historians of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. Reacting against the perceived excesses of discourse analysis, which made political language independent of any social determinants, certain post-revisionists are now seeking to contextualize political language by relating it to the experience of those who use it. Political agency, in these analyses, is understood to be the effect of particular formative experiences. This article suggests that the search for an experiential (...) antidote to discourse is misconceived because it perpetuates an untenable dichotomy between thought and reality. Access to the phenomenon of historical agency should be pursued not through experience or discourse but through the category of consciousness, since the make-up of the subject's consciousness determines how he/she engages the world and decides to attempt changing it. After a brief discussion of an important study that exemplifies both the allure and the functionality of the notion of experience, Timothy Tackett's Becoming a Revolutionary, the article focuses on the evolving political consciousness of a man who became a revolutionary agitator in 1789, J.-M.-A. Servan. Analysis of his writings between 1769 and 1789 shows that the way in which his perspective was constructed, rather than the lessons of experience per se, determined the shape of his revolutionary intentions in 1789. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that content externalism and privileged access are compatible, but that one can, in a sense, have privileged access to the world. The supposedly absurd conclusion should be embraced.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 17-19 [Access article in PDF] A Kleinian Contribution to the External World Robert D. Hinshelwood Radical feminism overstates its case and ignores the importance of individual psychology; at the same time, an individual psychology like psychoanalysis lacks a broader perspective that feminism might supply. Sarah Richmond's paper advocates a mutual enhancement of both psychoanalysis and feminism by combining the two perspectives. (...) It is a version of the old controversy over social influences versus innate influences--nature versus nurture.Richmond's thesis places a stress on the kind of psychoanalysis that might be most amenable to a reconciliation between social and psychological causations of individual attitudes. Interestingly, she argues that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which, by reputation, gives the greatest emphasis to the internal world of individuals, is the most suited for any reconciliation with the social--an argument that I would in fact endorse. It is simply because Kleinian psychoanalysis dwells on the internal world as a little society of internal beings that it may be most suited to bringing into contact with social explanations.One important dimension of this kind of reconciliation is that the world of internal objects (a kind of internal society) and the world of social persons could be seen in some correspondence, and indeed in the Kleinian view, there is a real correspondence between the two. That correspondence is actively and continuously mediated by phantasies of internalizing or externalizing persons and internal objects. The interchange can profoundly alter an individuals' internal objects, an influence determined by the external world of other persons and vice versa.This kind of correspondence between internal and external worlds (the individual and the social) can accomplish a mutual influencing of perceptions of other people and of the self. It can be the mechanism for the development of sets of attitudes on a social/cultural basis--including attitudes to gender. Similarly, the internalization of actual relations that exist between persons becomes the individual's accepted expectations of relationships, including sexual and erotic ones.The whole exchange process of internalization and externalization involves a primary evaluation of persons/objects and of the relations between them. Kleinian psychoanalysis argues that a primary function of the earliest ego in the individual is to evaluate objects as good or bad. Gendered persons are then internalized as objects having high or low values.Richmond exemplifies the necessary convergence of social and individual/personal points of view by considering the personal experiences that occur in anorexia. Clearly, the incidence of eating disorders varies between the genders, and the implication is that this is in part socially aroused--especially through the use of slender female bodies [End Page 17] in advertising and fashion. But also it is clearly mediated through individual agency (albeit probably the unconscious motivations known to psychoanalysts). Two Kleinian authors are examined to explore the possibilities of this kind of analysis.Richmond's thesis is applicable to gender relations in important ways, enriching both the psychoanalytic and socio-economic approaches that she is concerned with. However, where more work needs to be done, it seems to me, is in terms of power relations. Power relations are not theorized in psychoanalysis. There is thus little from the individual point of view that can contribute to a feminist analysis of power. And indeed this might be one significant point that Richmond refers to, where psychoanalysis can learn something from the social point of view.Elsewhere I have tried to conceptualize what a Kleinian view of power relations might be. 1 The account of Kleinian psychoanalysis above and in Richmond concerns the interchange of persons and internal objects, but we must also take account of Klein's descriptions of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein 1946). There, the exchange of parts of the self with other persons is central. As an example, the study of institutionalization as an interpersonal process indicates an exchange between certain sub-groups within an institution of active and powerful parts of the self, as well the interchange of weak and submissive parts of the self. In a mental hospital, for instance, this ends... (shrink)

BackgroundIn June 2019, the Australian state of Victoria joined the growing number of jurisdictions around the world to have legalised some form of voluntary assisted dying. A discourse of safety was prominent during the implementation of the Victorian legislation.Main textIn this paper, we analyse the ethical relationship between legislative “safeguards” and equal access. Drawing primarily on Ruger’s model of equal access to health care services, we analyse the Victorian approach to voluntary assisted dying in terms of four (...) dimensions: horizontal equity, patient agency, high quality care, and supportive social norms. We argue that some provisions framed as safeguards in the legislation create significant barriers to equal access for eligible patients.ConclusionsWhile safety is undoubtedly ethically important, we caution against an overemphasis on safeguarding in voluntary assisted dying legislation given the implications for equal access. (shrink)

RFID tags, small microchips no bigger than grains of rice, are currently being embedded in product labels, clothing, credit cards, and the environment, among other sites. Activated by the appropriate receiver, they transmit information ranging from product information such as manufacturing date, delivery route, and location where the item was purchased to (in the case of credit cards) the name, address, and credit history of the person holding the card. Active RFIDs have the capacity to transmit data without having to (...) be activated by a receiver; they can be linked with embedded sensors to allow continuous monitoring of environmental conditions, applications that interest both environmental groups and the US military. The amount of information accessible through and generated by RFIDs is so huge that it may well overwhelm all existing data sources and become, from the viewpoint of human time limitations, essentially infinite. What to make of these technologies will be interrogated through two contemporary fictions, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Cloud Atlas focuses on epistemological questions — who knows what about whom, in a futuristic society where all citizens wear embedded RFID tags and are subject to constant surveillance. Resistance takes the form not so much of evasion (tactical moves in a complex political Situation) but rather as a struggle to transmit information to present and future stakeholders in a world on the brink of catastrophe. Ubik, by contrast, focuses on deeper ontological questions about the nature of reality itself. Both texts point to the necessity to reconceptualize information as ethical action embedded in contexts and not merely as a quantitative measure of probabilities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 376-379 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, by Diana de Armas Wilson; 254 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, $74.00. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, Diana de Armas Wilson describes and analyzes the link between the birth of the New World in (...) European consciousness and the expression of that consciousness in the novels of Cervantes. Those of us whose teaching includes works from both Peninsular and Spanish American literature have long felt the need for a study that goes beyond a cataloging of Cervantes's references to the world beyond Europe, and those Cervantine scholars among us have variously hinted at and side-stepped the fullness of this issue. As it was with those exemplary figures of the age of exploration she examines, it is to Professor de Armas Wilson's great credit that she has risen to the challenge. Her analysis is well-organized, reasoned, thoughtful, and readable.De Armas Wilson's knowledge of previous and current research in Cervantine studies as well as genre, colonial and postcolonial, and gender studies is impressive. She also admits to participating "in the kinds of critique currently associated with cultural studies, although not without reservations regarding the alleged presentism of that discipline or its tendency to turn primary texts into commodities." I would respond that de Armas Wilson's concerns and techniques in this study are precisely the tools we need to help us define "cultural studies" to our students and to ourselves as scholars of various literatures and cultures.To begin her study, de Armas Wilson mentions many of Cervantes's literary and personal references to geographies, customs, and other contacts with the [End Page 376] world outside Spain. The first chapter, "The Americanist Cervantes," focuses on that material and includes a brief review of recent research--the latest "grande escrutinario" (Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter VI)--regarding what works might have been in Cervantes's library and/or the texts potentially available to him. Professor de Armas Wilson looks at Cervantes's references and the texts available to him through three lenses: imitation, influence, and intertextuality. She sees these methodologies as interdependent and argues that: "the intertextual practices in this book--based on a revised concept of intertextuality that includes the notion of agency and participates in a historical project--are as American as its central topic." (Finding myself in the process of completing this review on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I can only wonder what texts will not be influenced by the "historical project" of this day.)In the second chapter, "The Novel about the Novel," de Armas Wilson surveys Cervantes's status in Continental and Anglo-American criticism, reminding her readers of the polemic between scholars of the ancient novel and those who, bent on refusing to accept the Greco-Roman works as novels, designate them "romances." De Armas Wilson's contention that the Persiles is a "long exemplary novel," is convincingly depicted. Her arguments are based on the fact of the fictional time of the Persiles being within fifty years of the time when Cervantes wrote it, "its self-conscious theorizing, its rationalizing of 'miracles,' and its avowed imitation of Heliodorus' Aethiopica." She is not alone in arguing that Heliodorus' novel is the antithesis of a romance of chivalry. On these bases de Armas Wilson speaks not only to those who may not have recognized the importance of the Persiles because it has been called a romance (an often "despised or despicable" genre), but also to those of us who view consideration of the Persiles essential to an understanding of Don Quijote, if not a key to comprehending the major goals of all of Cervantes's works and his expression of the consciousness of his day.De Armas Wilson continues by arguing for "coevolutionary histories of the novel as alternatives to evolutionary ones." She bases her argument on echoes of widely disseminated accounts of happenings in the New World, (most significantly those of... (shrink)

According to Vázquez and Liz (Found Sci 16(4): 383–391, 2011), Points of View (PoV) can be considered in two different ways. On the one hand, they can be explained following the model of propositional attitudes. This model assumes that the internal structure of a PoV is constituted by a subject, a set of contents, and a set of relations between the subject and those contents. On the other hand, we can analyze points of view taking as a model the notions (...) of location and access. If we choose to follow the second approach, instead of the first one, the internal structure of a PoV is not directly addressed, and the emphasized features of PoV are related to the function that PoV are intended to have. That is, PoV are directly identified by their role and they can solely be understood as ways of accessing the world that bring some kind of perspective about it. Having this in mind, we would like to propose a notation that explains how to understand such access as a sort of models (that can allow the creation of concepts), independently of whether the precise PoV under consideration is impersonal or non-impersonal, its kind of content, and its subjective or objective character. First, we will present an account of some previous approaches to the study of points of view. Then, we will analyze what kind of structure the world is assumed to posses and how the access to it is possible. Third, we will develop a notation that explains PoV as qualitative dimensions by means of which it is possible to valuate objects and states of the world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Billionaires in World Politics Peter Hägel considers how the experience of wealth accumulation shapes billionaires’ political agency. To understand the agentic power billionaires exercise in world politics, he proposes that we should examine (1) personality traits that dispose people to participate in politics and (2) connections between capacity and intentions. In this paper, I argue that Hägel’s account of billionaires’ agency in world politics depends on two assumptions. The first is an implied meaning (...) of world politics and the second is the imagination that billionaires have equal access to social and cultural goods that guarantee meaningful engagement in world politics. I analyze these assumptions to argue that Hägel’s account of billionaire agency fails to take adequate notice of the dialectical relationship between corporate power and billionaire agency. A robust account of the agency of billionaires in world politics, I argue, must take this dialectical relationship as its foundation. (shrink)

There is an abiding scepticism in normative theory that individual responsibility for global injustice lies outside commonsense moral thought because it is not grounded in an intuitive conception of human agency. Despite the grim realities of injustice in an interconnected world, this scepticism holds that human beings cannot properly internalise a nonrestrictive view of responsibility because it cuts against their experience of agency in the world. Against this view, this article argues that individual responsibility for the (...) realisation of global justice is supported by a pervasive, and socio-politically influenced, feature of the phenomenology of agency: moral imagination. Moral imagination connects actions which are within the domain of an ordinary life to larger projects of social and political change. Since there is no compelling reason for the scope of those projects to be restricted, there is an accessible understanding and experience of the phenomenology of agency which grounds individual global responsibility in the real world. I call this a dynamic phenomenology of agency. (shrink)

Affordances are action-possibilities, ways of relating to and acting on things in our world. They help us understand how these things mean what they do and how we have bodily access to our world more generally. But what happens when this access is ruptured or impeded? I consider this question in the context of psychopathology and reports that describe this experience. I argue that thinking about the bodily consequences of losing access to everyday affordances can (...) help us better understand these reports. An affordance-based approach to psychopathology can illuminate some of the causes, as well as the experiential character and consequences, of affective disorders and diminished spatial agency in self-world disturbances. It also highlights some under-explored ethical and political dimensions of these issues that need further attention. (shrink)

... the topic of 'meaning' is the one topic discussed in philosophy in which there is literally nothing but 'theory' - literally nothing that can be labelled or even ridiculed as the 'common sense view'. Putnam, 'The Meaning of Meaning' This book explores some truths behind the truism that experimentation is a hallmark of scientific activity. Scientists' descriptions of nature result from two sorts of encounter: they interact with each other and with nature. Philosophy of science has, by and large, (...) failed to give an account of either sort of interaction. Philosophers typically imagine that scientists observe, theorize and experiment in order to produce general knowledge of natural laws, knowledge which can be applied to generate new theories and technologies. This view bifurcates the scientist's world into an empirical world of pre-articulate experience and know how and another world of talk, thought and argument. Most received philosophies of science focus so exclusively on the literary world of representations that they cannot begin to address the philosophical problems arising from the interaction of these worlds: empirical access as a source of knowledge, meaning and reference, and of course, realism. This has placed the epistemological burden entirely on the predictive role of experiment because, it is argued, testing predictions is all that could show that scientists' theorizing is constrained by nature. Here a purely literary approach contributes to its own demise. The epistemological significance of experiment turns out to be a theoretical matter: cruciality depends on argument, not experiment. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMore than a third of the world's population has no access to essential drugs. More than half of this group of people live in the poorest regions of Africa and Asia. Several factors determine the accessibility of drugs in developing countries. Hardly any medicines for tropical diseases are being developed, but even existing drugs are often not available to the patients who need them.One of the important determinants of access to drugs is the working of the patent (...) system. This paper first maps out some facts about the global patent regime that has emerged as a consequence of the conclusion of the WTO‐TRIPs Agreement in 1994. Attempts to construct a moral justification of the patent system have been based on three grounds: natural rights, distributive justice, and utilitarian arguments. This paper examines to what extent and on which grounds drug patents can be justified. The final section looks at the so‐called ‘Doha Declaration on the TRIPs Agreement and Public Health’, which was adopted by the WTO Ministerial Conference two years ago, recognising the primacy of public health over the interests of patent proprietors. (shrink)

Przypadek czy sprawczość? Odpowiedź na „Divine Providence and Chance in the World” Dariusz Łukasiewicz wyróżnia sześć pojęć przypadku, spośród których jedne są spójne z ludzką wolnością rozumianą po libertariańsku, a inne nie. W tym eseju argumentuję na dwa sposoby, że teiści powinni odrzucić przypadek ontologiczny i odwołać się zamiast tego do nieredukowalnej sprawczości w odniesieniu do zdarzeń, które nie są opatrznościowo wyznaczone przez Boga. Moje argumenty zależą od jednoznacznego rozumienia twierdzeń, że Bóg jest kochającym sprawcą oraz że istoty ludzkie, (...) w swoim najlepszym zachowaniu, są kochającymi sprawcami. Łukasiewicz zakłada milcząco, że takie twierdzenia cechuje niewłaściwy antropomorfizm. Opowiadam się za antropocentryzmem i będę bronić jednoznaczności. (shrink)

This volume of twenty-two original papers commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Arthur Prior’s death. Eight of the papers are based on presentations at a conference held in New Zealand to the same end. The contents testify to the range of Prior’s interests and influence. After an informative biographical sketch by Copeland, which emphasizes Prior’s early discovery of accessibility-relation semantics and its ability to prove the soundness of modal systems of various strengths, there follows a group of papers on temporal logic (...) by Prior, Copeland, Gabbay and Hodkinson, Rodriguez and Anger, and Sylvan; a group on modal logic by Meredith and Prior, van Benthem, Fine and Schurz, and Humberstone; a group on agency by Belnap, Oddie, and Segerberg; a group on proof theory by Bull, Bunder, and Tennant; a group on individuation and quantification by Harré, Lambert, Loptson, Richard, and R. Teichman; and two on the a priori, by. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to develop proposals for the liberalization of the financial services sector of the economy of Turkmenistan in the context of the country's potential accession to the World Trade Organization. The article considers the problems and challenges that Turkmenistan may face in the process of negotiations on the terms of accession to the WTO. The scientific novelty lies in the theoretical justification of the expediency of maintaining the status quo in trade in financial services (...) in the short and medium term within the initial list of specific obligations of the country provided for by the GATS. As a result, in the conditions of macroeconomy and its transitional nature, taking into account the unpredictable volatility of hydrocarbon prices, it is recommended to leave the existing restrictions on access to the financial services market and on the national regime unchanged in the context of a gradual process of lifting restrictions on the movement of capital and its complete liberalization. (shrink)

Abstract: How can the decisions of “autonomous” individuals provide a rationale for freedom and self-governance if a mechanical and causal sense of the self leads us to question the foundational nature of the individual? If most of our decisions originate in brain function below the level of consciousness, we live in a virtual world produced by mechanisms outside our control, arising from transparent self-models of which we are not aware. “Opacity,” the gift of not perceiving directly, of not automatically (...) believing what we are experiencing, is precisely what makes it possible for us to question our first-person perspectives. While we do not have direct access to the mechanisms that give rise to our sense of ourselves, our investigation can make it possible for us to analyze and understand those very mechanisms consciously. The deployment of that knowledge in the act of decision making and the infinite regress of interacting conscious individuals underlies our existential freedom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lermontov And The Omniscience Of NarratorsDavid A. GoldfarbGod and fictional narrators are the only beings who are sometimes considered omniscient. God, who is sometimes regarded as not fictional, is frequently also regarded as omnipotent. Narrators, who normally seem to have no sphere of action save for conveying information to readers, particularly when they speak omnisciently in the third person, are not considered to have “power” in any way, because (...) they are supposed to function outside the story. God always speaks in the first person, and is regarded as an all-powerful agent.But what happens when the narrator gets in on the action? First-person narrators can enter the plot, speaking in the voice of personal narrative, and sometimes “know” as much or more than some third-person narrators who are supposedly “omniscient.” The positivistic “third-person omniscient” narrator of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, for instance, knows only what he sees, and though his omnipresence allows him to see quite a bit, he has virtually no access to the minds of the characters, as do the psychologically omniscient third-person narrators of Tolstoy or Henry James. If knowledge were thus limited in the context of a novel to observables, a first-person narrator who gets around enough could appear much like an omniscient narrator, while also appearing to present a particular point of view. Conversely, the third-person narrator’s seeming objectivity is similarly illusory. Any narrator “chooses” what information to relay, and when and how to relay it. In a sense, third-person omniscient narrators fictionally determine what counts as “the story,” creating the fictional world with their godlike voice. Some overbearing narrators, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s anonymous first-person narrator in What Is To Be Done, adopt not only an omniscient and objective standpoint with regard to the actions and [End Page 61] thoughts of the characters, but even presume to tell readers how to interpret the events in the novel. Therefore, all narrators have varying amounts of both knowledge and power, and in some cases they may approach, within variously circumscribed spheres of knowledge and agency, omniscience and omnipotence.In this essay, I would like to explore the range of constraints and effects of the narrator’s fictional power and knowledge. As a test case, I have chosen Mikhail Lermontov’s novel, A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni). Writing between 1837 and 1840, Lermontov was one of the first Russian writers to experiment with the form of the novel, influenced primarily by contemporary English, French, and German examples, as well as the classical epic, making this work, like many of the early Russian novels of the 1820s and 1830s, a jumble of narrative styles interestingly layered on each other. It is a particularly fecund work for studies of narrative subjectivity, because characters shift from narrator to narratee across a variety of genres, all in one text.A Hero of Our Time is composed of five major chapters: “Bela,” “Maksim Maksimich,” “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” and “The Fatalist,” the last three of which comprise the journal of the main character, the officer Grigory Pechorin. The “journal” chapters are preceded by a brief section, set in 1838 or 1839, sometime after Pechorin’s death, called the “Introduction to Pechorin’s Journal.” In “Bela” an unnamed traveler gathering stories in the Caucasus during the year 1837 meets an older officer, Maksim Maksimich, who tells a yarn about the Byronic adventures of Pechorin in the spring of 1833 involving his abduction of a Circassian woman after whom the chapter is named. The second chapter is an interlude, which takes place in 1837, where Maksim and the first narrator actually meet Pechorin, whom Maksim has not seen for about five years, and Pechorin gives his diaries to the first narrator. “Taman” recounts, in the form of a diary, a strange incident in which Pechorin, around 1830, meets smugglers while stranded in the Crimea and is nearly drowned by a young girl. “Princess Mary,” the longest tale, takes place in May 1832—a love story modeled after Aleksander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, culminating in a duel in which Pechorin prevails over a certain Grushnitskij, his friend earlier in the... (shrink)

This book explores a vital but neglected element in the philosophy of social science - the complex nature of the social world. By a systematic philosophical engagement, it conceives the social world in terms of three basic concerns: epistemic, methodological and ethical. It examines how we cognize, study and ethically interact with the social world. As such, it demonstrates that a discussion of ethics is epistemically indispensable to the making of the social world. The book presents (...) a new interpretation of philosophy of social science and addresses a series of related topics, including the role of the human subject in the context of scientific knowledge, objectivity, historicity, meaning and nature of social reality, social and literary theory, scientific methodology and fact/value dichotomy, human and collective agency and the limits to relativism. Examining each in turn, it argues that the social world is constructed through human actions and becomes significant because we ascribe meaning to it. This is organized around discussions on the meaning, agency and the making of a social world. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of philosophy of social science, political philosophy and sociology. ficant because we ascribe meaning to it. This is organized around discussions on the meaning, agency and the making of a social world. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of philosophy of social science, political philosophy and sociology. (shrink)

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has attracted much attention recently from philosophers, but none of the existing English-language books on the text addresses one of the most difficult questions the book raises: Why does the Phenomenology make such rich and provocative use of literary works and genres? Allen Speight's bold contribution to the debate on the work of Hegel argues that behind Hegel's extraordinary appeal to literature in the Phenomenology lies a philosophical project concerned with understanding human agency in the (...) modern world. It shows that Hegel looked to three literary genres - tragedy, comedy, and the Romantic novel - as offering privileged access to three moments of human agency: retrospectivity, theatricality, and forgiveness. Taking full account of the authors whom Hegel himself refers to, Allen Speight has written a book with a broad appeal to both philosophers and literary theorists. (shrink)

Computer vision aims to produce an understanding of digital image’s content and the generation or transformation of images through software. Today, a significant amount of computer vision algorithms rely on techniques of machine learning which require large amounts of data assembled in collections, or named data sets. To build these data sets a large population of precarious workers label and classify photographs around the clock at high speed. For computers to learn how to see, a scale articulates macro and micro (...) dimensions: the millions of images culled from the internet with the few milliseconds given to the workers to perform a task for which they are paid a few cents. This paper engages in details with the production of this scale and the labour it relies on: its elaboration. This elaboration does not only require hands and retinas, it also crucially zes mobilises the photographic apparatus. To understand the specific character of the scale created by computer vision scientists, the paper compares it with a previous enterprise of scaling, Malraux’sLe Musée Imaginaire, where photography was used as a device to undo the boundaries of the museum’s collection and open it to an unlimited access to the world’s visual production. Drawing on Douglas Crimp’s argument that the “musée imaginaire”, a hyperbole of the museum, relied simultaneously on the active role of the photographic apparatus for its existence and on its negation, the paper identifies a similar problem in computer vision’s understanding of photography. The double dismissal of the role played by the workers and the agency of the photographic apparatus in the elaboration of computer vision foreground the inherent fragility of the edifice of machine vision and a necessary rethinking of its scale. (shrink)

There are two philosophical commitments requisite to Christian belief: that God is the ultimate mystery and that God is present and active in the world. Attempting to avoid the trappings of a radical distantiation and the immanent collapse of God and world, Frank Kirkpatrick argues for a theory of agency and action that preserves the mystery of God while providing a philosophically robust account of divine action in created time and space. Kirkpatrick proposes a way around the (...) stalemates that have stymied thought on divine agency and enters into conversation with significant figures in systematic theology."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

John McDowell and Hubert L. Dreyfus are philosophers of world renown, whose work has decisively shaped the fields of analytic philosophy and phenomenology respectively. Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate opens with their debate over one of the most important and controversial subjects of philosophy: is human experience pervaded by conceptual rationality, or does experience mark the limits of reason? Is all intelligibility rational, or is there a form of intelligibility at work in our skilful bodily rapport (...) with the world that eludes our intellectual capacities? McDowell and Dreyfus provide a fascinating insight into some fundamental differences between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, as well as areas where they may have something in common. Fifteen specially commissioned chapters by distinguished international contributors enrich the debate inaugurated by McDowell and Dreyfus, taking it in a number of different and important directions. Fundamental philosophical problems discussed include: the embodied mind, subjectivity and self-consciousness, intentionality, rationality, practical skills, human agency, and the history of philosophy from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty. With the addition of these outstanding contributions, Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World is essential reading for students and scholars of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. (shrink)

This chapter examines the role of the situation model in referential processing and how it can link what appear to be incompatible results from studies of monologue and dialogue as well as studies of reading and visual-world eye tracking. It shows that data from experiments on pronoun resolution in reading indicate a two-step model, in which candidate antecedents for an anaphor are first identified on the basis of gender matching and number matching, then evaluated with respect to the overall (...) situation model. In similar visual-world studies, these stages are seemingly collapsed together, which can be explained in terms of differences in how the situation model is related to the text versus the visual display of potential referents. The chapter suggests that comparing these different types of studies can elucidate the processes of reference resolution. (shrink)

Connecting human minds to various technological devices and applications through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) affords intriguingly novel ways for humans to engage and interact with the world. Not only do BCIs play an important role in restorative medicine, they are also increasingly used outside of medical or therapeutic contexts (e.g., gaming or mental state monitoring). A striking peculiarity of BCI technology is that the kind of actions it enables seems to differ from paradigmatic human actions, because, effects in the (...) class='Hi'>world are brought about by devices such as robotic arms, prosthesis, or other machines, and their execution runs through a computer directed by brain signals. In contrast to usual forms of action, the sequence does not need to involve bodily or muscle movements at all. A motionless body, the epitome of inaction, might be acting. How do theories of action relate to such BCI-mediated forms of changing the world? We wish to explore this question through the lenses of three perspectives on agency: subjective experience of agency, philosophical action theory, and legal concepts of action. Our analysis pursues three aims: First, we shall discuss whether and which BCI-mediated events qualify as actions, according to the main concepts of action in philosophy and law. Secondly, en passant, we wish to highlight the ten most interesting novelties or peculiarities of BCI-mediated movements. Thirdly, we seek to explore whether these novel forms of movement may have consequences for concepts of agency. More concretely, we think that convincing assessments of BCI-movements require more fine-grained accounts of agency and a distinction between various forms of control during movements. In addition, we show that the disembodied nature of BCI-mediated events causes troubles for the standard legal account of actions as bodily movements. In an exchange with views from philosophy, we wish to propose that the law ought to reform its concept of action to include some, but not all, BCI-mediated events and sketch some of the wider implications this may have, especially for the venerable legal idea of the right to freedom of thought. In this regard, BCIs are an example of the way in which technological access to yet largely sealed-off domains of the person may necessitate adjusting normative boundaries between the personal and the social sphere. (shrink)

Around the world, many schools were closed as one of the measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. School closure brought about important challenges to the students' learning process. This context requires strong self-regulatory competences and agency for autonomous learning. Moreover, online remote learning was the main alternative response to classroom learning, which increased the inequalities between students with and without access to technological resources or for those with low digital literacy. All considered, to level (...) the playing field for students without digital resources, there is an urgent need to promote self-regulatory competences through offline intervention solutions. The current paper describes a project with this purpose, using radio broadcasting and letters to reach elementary students without digital resources. Moreover, potential reach and participants' perspectives of the project implementation are presented and discussed. The project draws on a prior evidence-based story-tool intervention grounded on a self-regulated learning framework. The original intervention was set previous to the COVID-19 pandemic and was implemented in the classroom context (N= 1,103 students). Once the schools had been closed down, the mode of intervention was adapted with the collaboration of the community. Alternative solutions were developed as follows: (i) story chapters were read on the radio and students received to their homes a printed script, prompting reflection, and suggesting related activities; (ii) students were provided with the story-tool to read autonomously and received letters from the main characters of the story which included, for example, suggestions for activities and reflection. These two alternative modes of intervention delivery potentially reached 394 elementary students, including students with digital resources. Interviews conducted with a group of students were provided information about the positive aspects of these two modes of intervention delivery, perceived learning (e.g., planning), constraints, and suggestions to improve the project. The current work is likely to merit attention from researchers and educational practitioners, given the need to use offline alternatives to provide support for students without digital resources to engage in autonomous learning during the pandemic period. This project may also be used as an alternative or a complementary solution to online modality. (shrink)

This paper deploys Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory to examine the dispute over intellectual property protection and global HIV/aids medicines access. Over the 1980s and 1990s, major pharmaceutical companies and minority world governments successfully crafted a strong patent protection regime, institutionalized in the World Trade Organization's intellectual property rules. In the early 2000s, a transnational civil society campaign challenged this regime, positioning patents at the centre of a highly publicized dispute. This dispute has been retrospectively identified as (...) a turning point in medicines access discourse, with the 2001–2003 period dubbed the ‘golden window’ for expanded global HIV/aids medicines access. However, this ‘window’ has also been critiqued as an unsustainable aberration to a continuing hegemonic regime that prioritizes patent protection, to the detriment of equitable global medicines access. This paper draws on both political economy analyses and discourse theoretical concepts to examine the processes of rupture and suture in HIV/aids medicines access discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and the Democratic StateNicole Fermon (bio)Best known for her subtle interrogation of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray clearly also conducts a dialogue with the political, proposing that women’s erasure from culture and society invalidates all economies, sexual or political. Because woman has disappeared both figuratively and literally from society [see Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”], Irigaray conceives the contemporary ethical (...) project as a recall to difference rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference. She characterizes relations between men and women as market relations in which women are commodities, objects, but never subjects of exchange, objects to men but not to themselves: women do not belong to themselves but exist “to keep relationships among men running smoothly” [TS 192]. Women under these conditions require imaginative ways to reconfigure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would experience it as a positivity worth emulating.Irigaray contends that after the gains of egalitarian politics are carefully examined, the inclusion of women in the political arena has failed to take into account women’s distinct and different position from men, and from each other, as well as perpetuating the fiction of the “neutral” citizen, the ahistorical individual citizen of the nation-state. It is that fiction Irigaray dispels in her critique of liberal democratic politics and its creation, “citizens who are neuter in regard to familial singularity, its laws, and necessary sexual difference” [SG 112] in order to benefit the State and its laws. The subject is male; the citizen is neuter. Who is the female citizen in contemporary society? What is the ethical elaboration of the contractual relations between women and men, and between sexed individuals and the community? How do women imagine a distinct set of rights and responsibilities based on self-definition and autonomy, given the particular strictures of contemporary politics—that is, the market-driven, antidemocratic nature of the current economic national and global forces? Irigaray suggests that “the return of women to collective work, to public places, to social relations, demands linguistic mutations” and profound transformations, an embodied imagination with force and agency in civil life [TD 65].Irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial “circuits” alone, we overlook the symbolic organization of power—women risk losing “everything without even being acknowledged” [TD 56]. Instead an interval of recognition can expand the political to include the concerns and activities of real women, lest silence imply consent to sexual neutrality, or more likely, to women’s obliteration under men’s interests and concerns. Women’s insistence on self-definition and wage labor, on love and justly remunerated work, [End Page 120] testifies to the obduracy of women’s difference, one that is not likely to disappear. The patriarchal family is still the legal norm, even when certain exceptions are made, while enduring questions regarding women’s health and children’s physical welfare as priorities beyond market considerations are consigned to legislative obfuscation, still a political afterthought. Instead, in the US the liberal state removes the slender welfare net specific to women and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and fails to provide medical coverage to those who are among the most vulnerable of its citizens. Women without access to the legal protection of sex-neutral citizenship, poor working women without language (the money for an effective “mouthpiece” to represent their distress in a court of law), are further disempowered by liberal politics’ insistence on sexual neutrality—that is, on repression or amnesia regarding the lived experiences of women.Sexual difference is key to any project of self-definition by women. Irigaray insists on the sexual nature of this self-definition, not solely for its obvious procreative necessity, but because the natural world is a source of renewal and fecundity which requires attentive interrogation and respect [SG 15]. This rebirth seems alien to the structure of male politics, which instead seem to provoke disasters (Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the current runaway... (shrink)

While the human agent must have the capacity for reflexivity, intentionality and consciousness, the same agent must also be affected by the social world in which she lives: herein lies the essence of the structure and agency dialectic. This paper argues that while some realists are in principle committed to a dialectical relationship between structure and agency, there is some dissonance between this commitment and the concepts of agency that they develop. I highlight the exclusion of (...) the unconscious and habit from realist notions of agency and argue that this oversight serves to unbalance the dialectic between structure and agency thereby leading to the over-empowerment of agency. The concepts of agency developed by Margaret Archer, Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu are discussed in this paper. Archer's concept of agency is argued to focus exclusively on reflexivity whilst neglecting to include the unconscious and habit. Giddens is shown to develop a much improved concept of agency, which includes the unconscious, however, his rejection of the independent causal powers of structure and agency problematises his commitment to the dialectic. A much improved approach to theorising agency, developed within a critical realist framework, is offered drawing on Bourdieu's concept of habitus. The paper concludes with a discussion of gender, and considers how the unconscious and habit can help to better understand the myriad ways in which gender functions in society. (shrink)

This essay is my contribution to a symposium responding to several papers by Walter Benn Michaels that bring the work of Elizabeth Anscombe to bear on philosophical problems of artistic representation. In it, I take Benn Michaels's side in a dispute with Dominic McIver Lopes over the difference between Anscombe's view of intentional agency and that of Donald Davidson. I also critique Benn Michaels's reading of a difficult passage in section 29 of Anscombe's INTENTION, where she presents the famous (...) case in which "I shut my eyes and write something". There is also some discussion of the work of Robert Morris and the differing roles for intention in painting compared with photography. (Benn Michaels responds to my arguments elsewhere in the same issue.). (shrink)

In the corpus of phenomenological philosophy (as far as it is influenced by the works of Jacob von Uexküll and the debate of phenomenologists with philosophical anthropologists such as E. Cassirer, F. J. J. Buytendijk, and A. Portmann), we find the allegation that one of the fundamental differences between human and non-human animals is that while the non-human animal has a species-specific umwelt, humans have access to (a certain idea of) welt. In this sense, Heidegger speaks of the animal (...) as a being “poor-in-world” in contrast to man as a “world-making” being. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty states that language helps a human person step out of her umwelt into the idea of welt. In the present study, I proceed from the critical reflection of this umwelt–welt distinction, emphasizing the question of the status of this “world.” For a better understanding of this problem, I illustrate it by the example of sign language acquisition by congenitally deafblind people, using phenomenological analysis of intercorporeality and associated phenomena in combination with “dialogical epistemology” as an interpretive framework. Claude Romano’s thesis of “evential hermeneutics” can illuminate this situation, as it explains the vital role various events play in establishing the world through our experience. From this point of view, the “world” plays a role not as a sum of objects in a play of objective causes, but rather it is a transcendental field from which events arise. (shrink)

Being human while trying to scientifically study human nature confronts us with our most vexing problem. Efforts to explicate the human mind are thwarted by our cultural biases and entrenched infirmities; our first-person experiences as practical agents convince us that we have capacities beyond the reach of scientific explanation. What we need to move forward in our understanding of human agency, Paul Sheldon Davies argues, is a reform in the way we study ourselves and a long overdue break with (...) traditional humanist thinking. Davies locates a model for change in the rhetorical strategies employed by Charles Darwin in _On the Origin of Species_. Darwin worked hard to anticipate and diminish the anxieties and biases that his radically historical view of life was bound to provoke. Likewise, Davies draws from the history of science and contemporary psychology and neuroscience to build a framework for the study of human agency that identifies and diminishes outdated and limiting biases. The result is a heady, philosophically wide-ranging argument in favor of recognizing that humans are, like everything else, subjects of the natural world—an acknowledgement that may free us to see the world the way it actually is. (shrink)

In a context of rapid technological innovation and expensive new products, the paper calls for the generation of real-world data to inform decision-making and an international discussion on the affordability of new medicines, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. Without these, the challenges of health judicialization will continue to grow.

This book examines from different perspectives the moral significance of non-human members of the biotic community and their omission from climate ethics literature. The complexity of life in an age of rapid climate change demands the development of moral frameworks that recognize and respect the dignity and agency of both human and non-human organisms. Despite decades of careful work in non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics, recent anthologies on climate ethics have largely omitted non-anthropocentric approaches. This multidisciplinary volume of international (...) scholars tackles this lacuna by presenting novel work on non-anthropocentric approaches to climate ethics. Written in an accessible style, the text incorporates sentiocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric perspectives on climate change. With diverse perspectives from both leading and emerging scholars of environmental ethics, geography, religious studies, conservation ecology, and environmental studies, this book will offer a valuable reading for students and scholars of these fields. (shrink)

In this article, we will firstly explore the concept of connected design; secondly, we will explain how environments can be understood as interfaces for knowledge; and thirdly, we will expose the characteristics and objectives of the project Wired Book & Electronic Margin, which is part of a larger project called Universal Margin, as an example of connective design. Lastly, we will show the benefits of contextualizing information and transforming the world into a connected and lively real-time library, to underline (...) how connected design can facilitate a bottom-up construction of knowledge. (shrink)

This work serves as an introduction to both the theoretical and practical aspects of using computers to improve the delivery of social services. Though many practitioners believe that computerization dehumanizes clients and should be avoided, John Murphy and John Pardeck demonstrate how, through a holistic approach to computer use, this problem, and others like it, can be averted. By providing practitioners the opportunity to sharpen their conceptual skills in computer technology, this book promotes a rational understanding of the possible uses (...) and limitations of computers in social service agencies. Unlike other, technically-oriented works in this field, Murphy and Pardeck's work focuses on the philosophical justification of computer use, along with the conceptual or symbolic nature of computerization. They fully illustrate how to create the organizational conditions necessary for computers to improve social-service delivery, and they do so in a manner that is easily accessible for both general classroom and professional use. Among the topics addressed are the technological world-view, Western philosophy, and knowledge; computer mediated therapy; ethical issues related to computerized service delivery; and construction of a socially responsible technology. This work will be a unique and important resource for courses in computer applications, policy analysis, and social service administration, as well as a useful reference source for human service agencies and practitioners. Public and academic libraries will also find it to be a valuable addition to their collections. (shrink)

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can (...) only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘ Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness. (shrink)

I argue for constraining the nomological possibility space of temporal experiences and endorsing the Succession Requirement for agents. The Succession Requirement holds that the basic structure of temporal experience must be successive for agentive subjects, at least in worlds that are law-like in the same way as ours. I aim to establish the Succession Requirement by showing non-successively experiencing agents are not possible for three main reasons, namely that they (1) fail to stand in the right sort of causal relationship (...) to the outcomes of their actions, (2) exhibit the wrong sort of epistemic status for agency, and (3) lack the requisite agentive mental attitude of intentionality. I conclude that agency is incompatible with non-successive experience and therefore we should view the successive temporal structure of experience as a necessary condition for agency. I also suggest that the Succession Requirement may actually extend beyond my main focus on agency, offering preliminary considerations in favor of seeing successive experience as a precondition for selfhood as well. The consequences of the Succession Requirement are wide-ranging, and I discuss various implications for our understanding of agency, the self, time consciousness, and theology, among other things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.1 (2006) 72-84 [Access article in PDF] "The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene Dana L. Cloud Department of Communication Studies University of Texas, Austin Steve Macek Department of Speech Communication North Central College James Arnt Aune Department of Communication Texas A&M University In two recent articles, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," and "Rhetoric and Capitalism" (1998, 2004), Ronald Walter Greene pays considerable attention (...) to Marxist rhetorical theory, especially the work of Dana L. Cloud (1994, 2001a, 2001b, 2002) and James Arnt Aune (1994, 2001). These essays usefully point up what is at stake in the debate between poststructuralist theory and Marxism: whether an instrumental, class-based, socialist critical and political project is still feasible and necessary in today's world. Rejecting both Aune's Marxist-humanist approach and Cloud's more economic vision of agency, Greene claims that the changing character of global capitalism and recognition of the "constitutive power" of discourse render rhetorical criticism and practical politics on a Marxist basis untenable. Although we appreciate Greene's engagement with Marxism, we contend that the arguments sketched out in his essays are theoretically and politically flawed.First, Greene's criticisms are directed against a crude caricature of Marxist epistemology that obscures the complexity of theories of representation and ideology in the historical materialist tradition. Second, underwriting Greene's entire project are confused, and in some cases demonstrably false, assessments of the nature and historical trajectory of world capitalism and of the current prospects for class-based social movements. Finally, Greene endorses something like a democratic project but offers no normative criteria for such a project beyond the immanence of always-already present communicative agency and the excesses of joy afforded (to some) by the capitalist system. We will examine each of these shortcomings in turn. [End Page 72] Real Lies: The Complexity of Marxist Epistemology Greene and other poststructuralists charge Marxist theorists in the field of rhetorical studies with holding a dubious representational theory of truth.1 In contrast, Greene embraces a critical approach that examines "how rhetorical practices create the conditions of possibility for a governing apparatus to judge and program reality" and that views "what is in the true" as rhetorically produced (1998, 22). At odds with Greene's approach, Marxists claim that, in a range of ways, ideological discourses reflect, distort, and/or negotiate with the objective social realities, interests, and lived experiences of contending classes in capitalist society. Moreover, we believe that—by means of interpretive, historical, and empirical research—Marxist scholars and activists may develop fuller and more accurate theoretical "representations" of such realities and interests and of the various ways they shape our lives and our political struggles.2This is not to say, however, that the process is simple or mechanistic. Marxist critical practice retains the evaluative power of realism without laying claim to absolute or unmediated empirical knowledge; moreover, we do not believe that ideas are mechanistically generated epiphenomena of economic motive. Discourses, as any communication scholar would agree and as Greene points out, do have effects or "effectivities." Yet anyone interested in a normative political project (which Greene wishes to escape, a point to which we shall return) must recognize the possibility of falsehood. However, as Raymond Geuss (1981) argues, falsehood is not only a matter of empirical misrepresentation. In addition to epistemic falsehood, ideological discourses may exhibit both functional falsehood (referring to how even plausible ideas can bolster oppressive power) and genetic falsehood (ideas promulgated by those with ulterior motives, or intentional mystification).Similarly, analytic Marxist Jon Elster (1985) offers a view of ideology that regards discourses as more than simple epiphenomena of economic situations and struggles.3 Elster describes three overlapping forms of ideological production: the interest-based dissemination of distorted ideas, the failure of social imagination associated with widespread support for the capitalist system and U.S. imperialism, and the psychological comfort of palliative discourses such as religion and patriotism.4 Understanding how widespread adherence to common-sense ideas is accomplished is a project central to... (shrink)

Abstract:Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights—proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates—is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of these challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property (...) we will present another model. IP is almost always a result of a long history of scientific or technological development and numbers of networks of creativity, not the act of a single person or a group of people at one moment in time. Thus thinking about and evaluating IP requires thinking about IP as shared rights. A network approach to IP challenges a traditional model of IP. It follows that the owner of those rights has some obligations to share that information or its outcomes. If that conclusion is applied to the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, what pharmaceutical companies are ethically required to do to increase access to these medicines in the developing world will have to be reanalyzed from a more systemic perspective. (shrink)

Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as ‘dangerous’ – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, established frameworks that dangerously address praxis, agency and learning. Adopting a postabyssal approach, contributions from the (...) Global South and East are drawn on to develop an epistemologically plural basis for thinking differently about praxis, agency and learning. Recent Latin American scholarship reinvigorates Freirean ideas through connections with Fals Borda and contemporary feminist pedagogues, centred on a notion of feeling-thinking. Luitel’s interpretations of Vedic philosophy provide radically different ideas of negative dialectics, chaos, responsibility and liberation. An open-minded, open-hearted, open-ended approach is crucial to making these ideas more useful in the struggle over alternative, more equitable and just futures. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen was one of the world's leading political theorists. He was noted, in particular, for his contributions to the literature of egalitarian justice. Cohen's classic writings offer one of the most influential responses to the currency of the egalitarian justice question - the question, that is, of whether egalitarians should seek to equalize welfare, resources, opportunity, or some other indicator of well-being. Underlying Cohen's argument is the intuition that the purpose of egalitarianism is to eliminate disadvantage for (...) which it is inappropriate to hold the person responsible. His argument therefore focuses on the appropriate role of considerations regarding responsibility in egalitarian judgment. This volume comprises chapters by major scholars addressing and responding both to Cohen's account of the currency of egalitarian justice and its practical implications and to Cohen's arguments regarding the appropriate form of justificatory arguments about justice. (shrink)

Many contemporary thinkers seeking to integrate theistic belief and scientific thought reject what they regard as two extremes. They disavow deism in which God is understood simply to uphold the existence of the physical universe, and they exclude any view of divine influence that suggests the performance of physical work through an immaterial cause. Deism is viewed as theologically inadequate, and acceptance of direct immaterial causation of physical events is viewed as scientifically illegitimate. This desire to avoid both deism and (...) any positing of God as directly intervening in the physical order has led to models of divine agency that seek to defend the reality of divine causal power yet affirm the causal closure of the physical. I argue, negatively, that such models are unsuccessful in their attempts to affirm both the reality of divine causal power acting in the created world and the causal closure of the physical and, positively, that the assumption that underlies these models, namely that any genuine integration of theistic and scientific belief must posit the causal closure of the physical on pain of violating well-established conservation principles, is mistaken. (shrink)

Next SectionBiodefence, broadly understood as efforts to prevent or mitigate the damage of a bioterrorist attack, raises a number of ethical issues, from the allocation of scarce biomedical research and public health funds, to the use of coercion in quarantine and other containment measures in the event of an outbreak. In response to the US bioterrorist attacks following September 11, significant US policy decisions were made to spur scientific enquiry in the name of biodefence. These decisions led to a number (...) of critical institutional changes within the US federal government agencies governing scientific research. Subsequent science policy discussions have focused largely on ‘the dual use problem’: how to preserve the openness of scientific research while preventing research undertaken for the prevention or mitigation of biological threats from third parties. We join others in shifting the ethical debate over biodefence away from a simple framing of the problem as one of dual use, by demonstrating how a dual use framing distorts the debate about bioterrorism and truncates discussion of the moral issues. We offer an alternative framing rooted in social epistemology and institutional design theory, arguing that the ethical and policy debates regarding ‘dual use’ biomedical research ought to be reframed as a larger optimisation problem across a plurality of values including, among others: (1) the production of scientific knowledge; (2) the protection of human and animal subjects; (3) the promotion and protection of public health (national and global); (4) freedom of scientific enquiry; and (5) the constraint of government power. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of access in relation to globalization, feminism and information society. It argues that the virtual settings of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are beginning to place significant emphasis on sociospatial as well as geospatial understandings of the world and the interactions that take place within it. The article examines the extreme material and other associated inequalities of contemporary globalization, and the concentration of technological development and power in the rich economies. Historical developments related (...) to these factors are discussed, including the gendered nature of technologies and social processes shaping their production, application and use. It is argued that feminist theory and practice is relevant to broad debates about inequality of access in the information age, as well as to those concentrating specifically on gender and women. The tension between liberal/neoliberal focus on 'equality' and the 'grotesque' levels of contemporary inequality is raised. It is argued that feminism's long-standing and extensive critique of the problematic masculinist and partial nature of liberal/neoliberal theory, and its framing of agency, offers a major contribution in addressing this. Cyberfeminism works in theory and practice on horizontal networks and consciousness-raising about their potential, arguing that the era of the cybercitizen raises new and important risks of marginalization, on the basis of gender and other factors, and new forms of empowerment. (shrink)

Ethical research conduct is a cornerstone of research practice particularly when research participants include vulnerable populations. This study mapped the extent of reporting ethical research practices in studies conducted among refugees and war-affected populations in the Arab World, and assessed variations by time, country of study, and study characteristics. An electronic search of eight databases resulted in 5668 unique records published between 2000 and 2013. Scoping review yielded 164 eligible articles for analyses. Ethical research practices, including obtaining institutional approval, (...) access to the community/research site, and informed consent/assent from the research participants, were reported in 48.2, 54.9, and 53.7% of the publications, respectively. Institutional approval was significantly more likely to be reported when the research was biomedical in nature compared to public health and social, when the study employed quantitative compared to qualitative or mixed methodologies, and when the journal required a statement on ethical declarations. Institutional approval was least likely to be reported in papers that were sole-authored, when these did not mention a funding source, or when published in national journals. Similar results were obtained for access to the community site and for seeking informed consent/assent from study participants. The responsibility of inadequacies in adherence to ethical research conduct in crisis settings is born by a multitude of stakeholders including funding agencies, institutional research boards, researchers and international relief organizations involved in research, as well as journal editors, all of whom need to play a more proactive role for enhancing the practice of ethical research conduct in conflict settings. (shrink)

In Out of This World, Peter Hallward argues that Deleuze's philosophy is, in spite of its proclaimed Nietzscheanism, intrinsically nihilistic. This article defends Deleuze against this accusation by reassessing his relationship to Nietzsche. I argue that both thinkers pose a similar problem, that of agency, and that the modus operandi of both for solving it relies on viewing agency as experimentation. The paper highlights the strong pragmatic dimension at play in Deleuze's philosophy: Deleuze aims to penetrate increasingly (...) deeply into this very world and to provide us with tools for intensifying our sensitivity to and engagement with it. To bring this into view, I offer a parallel reading of Nietzsche's and Deleuze's account of the production of our empirical experience, their critical stance towards such experience, and their means of overcoming it by engaging fully with problematic aspects of reality. (shrink)

The global health crisis in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) reveals a deep global health inequity that lies at the heart of global justice concerns. Mirroring the HIV/AIDS epidemic, NCDs bring into stark relief once more the human consequences of trade policies that reinforce global inequities in treatment access. Recognising distributive justice issues in access to medicines for their populations, World Trade Organisation (WTO) members confirmed the primacy of access to medicines for all in trade and public health (...) in the landmark Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health of 2001. (shrink)