Sovereign is he who provides the exception.…The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.In spring 2020, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, world leaders imposed severe restrictions on citizens’ civil, political, and economic liberties. These restrictions went beyond less controversial and less demanding social distancing measures seen in past epidemics. Many states (...) and countries imposed universal lockdowns. Lockdowns, as we define them here, require people to stay home; in some countries and places, citizens must have ad hoc licenses to... (shrink)

Recent attempts to define being moved have difficulties agreeing on its eliciting conditions. The status quaestionis is often summarized as a question of whether the emotion is evoked by exemplifications of a wide range of positive core values or a more restricted set of values associated with attachment. This conclusion is premature. Study participants associate being moved with interactions with their loved ones not merely for what they exemplify but also for their affective bond to them. Being moved is elicited (...) when we apprehend the value of entities to which we are connected through basic as well as extended forms of affiliative attachment. These comprise people, certain objects, and even abstract entities, including the unshakable life-guiding ideas we call “core values.”. (shrink)

One potentially ethically relevant feature of an utterance is that utterance's influence on the likelihoods that our future discourses wind up with one Stalnakerian ‘common ground’ or body of shared information rather than another. Such likelihoods matter ethically, so the ways our utterances influence them can matter ethically, despite the fact that such influences are often unintended, and often hard to see. By offering a relatively neutral descriptive framework that can enhance our collective sensitivity to and discussion of ethically, socially, (...) and politically important features of language use, this paper contributes to the ethics of language use. It discusses ways in which utterances can influence the likelihoods of future common grounds by deploying one system of categorization rather than another, and argues that language’s effects on the evolution of discourse can affect the paths to and probabilities of different sorts of consensus. (shrink)

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

Differing views on reduction are briefly reviewed and a suggestion is made for a working definition of 'approximate reduction'. Ab initio studies in quantum chemistry are then considered, including the issues of convergence and error bounds. This includes an examination of the classic studies on CH2 and the recent work on the Si2C molecule. I conclude that chemistry has not even been approximately reduced.

Avons-nous une bioéthique véritablement canadienne – et pas seulement une pratique de la bioéthique au Canada? Cette question, et le présent article, portent sur le lien entre la bioéthique et les expériences réelles des Canadiens en matière de soins de santé, de recherche et de santé publique. En l’abordant, je m’inspire du pragmatisme philosophique qui souligne l’importance de l’expérience quotidienne comme point de départ de l’éthique, et de l’épanouissement humain comme objectif de l’éthique. À travers cette optique, un idéal bioéthique (...) canadien est un idéal qui s’enracine dans les expériences vécues par les Canadiens ; il reflète l’idéal d’épanouissement projeté par les individus canadiens, y compris leurs opinions sur leurs communautés politiques. Toutefois, il n’est pas certain qu’une bioéthique canadienne à part entière ait pris forme, étant donné l’uniformisation croissante des recherches dans le monde entier, qui crée des attentes quant aux types de problèmes moraux qui méritent d’être étudiés et aux types de solutions à adopter. Dans un esprit de réflexion sur cette question, j’aborde les aspects de la société canadienne qui pourraient façonner le développement d’une bioéthique canadienne : (a) l’existence de récits politiques canadiens concurrents, (b) le caractère distinct des systèmes de santé et des expériences en matière de soins de santé au Canada, (c) l’engagement des Canadiens envers certaines valeurs et aspirations, (d) les aspects institutionnels et procéduraux de la sphère publique canadienne, (e) les défis posés par l’uniformisation croissante de l’enseignement dans les différents contextes géographiques et nationaux, et (f) les obstacles pratiques au développement d’une bioéthique canadienne. Ces défis auxquels la bioéthique canadienne fait face sont probablement pertinents à l’échelle internationale pour tous les contextes dans lesquels des problèmes moraux d’origine sociale sont discutés et des solutions envisagées. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: they (...) are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

The introduction considers the state of scholarship on empiricism as a philosophical and historical category, particularly as it pertains to experimental philosophy. It concludes that empiricism properly understood is a rich category encompassing epistemic, semantic, methodological, experimental, and moral elements. Its richness makes it a suitable lens through which to account for actual historical complexity. The introduction relates the category to the work of Sir Isaac Newton, who influenced all of empiricism’s elements.

In this article I report findings from interviews with 26 openly gay male athletes who came out between 2008 and 2010. I compare their experiences to those of 26 gay male athletes who came out between 2000 and 2002. The athletes in the 2010 cohort have had better experiences after coming out than those in the earlier cohort, experiencing less heterosexism and maintaining better support among their teammates. I place these results in the context of inclusive masculinity theory, suggesting that (...) local cultures of decreased homophobia created more positive experiences for the 2010 group. (shrink)

This study explores linguistic variation in outsourced call centers involving Filipino call-takers and American callers engaged in various types of customer service transactions. The specific goals of this study are: 1) to establish the statistical co-occurrence of linguistic features in outsourced call center discourse; and 2) to examine how the speakers use these features and patterns of speech based on role, gender, and the types of service transactions. The data for analysis come from a corpus of call center texts collected (...) in the Philippines. The research design follows a quantitative multi-dimensional framework developed by Biber for the extraction and interpretation of linguistic co-occurrence in the corpus. Three linguistic dimensions are extracted and interpreted microanalytically: 1) Addressee-Focused, Polite, and Elaborated Information vs Involved and Simplified Narrative; 2) Planned, Procedural Talk; and 3) Managed Information Flow. Results show that the discourse of agents and callers are different in linguistic and textual composition across these extracted dimensions. Similarly, accounts and participants' gender are both found to affect linguistic choices in the transactions. (shrink)

This article first summarizes research regarding the relationship between sports that intentionally structure multiple types of brain trauma into their practice, such as rugby and boxing, and the range of negative health outcomes that flow from participation in such sports. The resultant brain injuries are described as ‘now’ and ‘later’ diseases, being those that affect the child immediately and then across their lifetime. After highlighting how these sports can permanently injure children, it examines this harm in relation to existing British (...) laws and policies concerning child abuse. The conclusion drawn is that neither children nor adults on their behalf are legally able to give informed consent for participation, and that impact sport organisations effectively groom children into sustaining and accepting brain trauma. Adults providing brain-traumatizing versions of these sports are thus described as being complicit in a form of child abuse that we term brain abuse. The contradictions in existing sports policy are highlighted, where policy describes that children are to be protected from harm, and yet the very practice of such sports creates harm by design. Implications of the argument are that children should be prohibited from partaking in impact sports. (shrink)

[1] The Western World.--[2] The Eastern World.

The prosaic content of these sayings is that events change from future to present and from present to past. Your next birthday is in the future, but with the passage of time it draws nearer and nearer until it is present. 24 hours later it will be in the past, and then lapse forever deeper into history. And things get older: even if they don’t wear out or lose their hair or change in any other way, their chronological age is (...) always increasing. These changes are universal and inescapable: no event could ever fail to be first future, then present, then past, and no persisting thing can avoid growing older. We call this process time’s passage. (shrink)

Totalitarianism Totalitarianism is best understood as any system of political ideas that is both thoroughly dictatorial and utopian. It is an ideal type of governing notion, and as such, it cannot be realised perfectly. Faced with the brutal reality of paradigmatic cases like Stalin’s USSR and Nazi Germany, philosophers, political theorists and social scientists have … Continue reading Totalitarianism →.

The Material Culture of the Northern Sea Peoples in Israel. By Ephraim Stern. Harvard Semitic Museum Publications, Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, vol. 5. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2013. Pp. ix + 74, illus. $29.50.

This essay examines the connection between the concept of autonomy and the concept of an ideal, moral self in Kant’s practical philosophy. Its central thesis is that self-legislation does not rest on the capacity to exempt oneself from nature’s causal network. Instead, it rests on the practical capacity for identification with what Kant calls an individual’s “moral personality.” A person’s ability to identify with this morally ideal version of himself gives shape to his will, enabling him to decide how to (...) act on the basis of reasons that do not stem from desires or inclinations. It thus makes possible a form of volition that is autonomous rather than heteronomous. (shrink)

Showing remarkable insight into the relationship between language and thought, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed the Imitation Game as a proxy for the question “Can machines think?” and its meaning and practicality have been debated hotly ever since. The Imitation Game has come under criticism within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence communities with leading scientists proposing alternatives, revisions, or even that the Game be abandoned entirely. Yet Turing’s imagined conversational fragments between human and machine are rich with complex instances (...) of inference of implied information, reasoning from generalizations, and meta-reasoning, challenges AI practitioners have wrestled with since at least 1980 and continue to study. We argue that the very fact the Imitation Game is so difficult may be the very reason it shouldn’t be changed or abandoned. The semi-decidability of the game at this point hints at the possibility of a hard limit to the powers of technology. (shrink)

Ernesto Neto's installation at the Panthéon in Paris, Leviathan Toth (2006), brings us into a semiotics of intensities that does not belong to the ‘aesthetic regime’ as described by Jacques Rancière but rather to a Diagrammatic Agency of Contemporary Art. In this case study, the latter is constructed after Deleuze and Guattari – from a politics of the Body without Organs critically and clinically identified to a Body without Image.

Theistic religions are not the only religions in the West. Many nontheistic religions are religions of energy. This energy is ultimate, optimizing, impersonal, and natural. Although it cannot be worshiped, this energy can be aroused, directed, and shaped. Hence the energy religions involve tools and techniques for the therapeutic application of the ultimate energy to the self. They are technologies of the self. Attention is focused here on four new types of energy religion. These include the religions of consciousness (e.g. (...) the New Stoicism, Westernized Buddhism); the religions of vision (involving the ethical use of entheogens); the religions of dance (e.g. religious raves); and the religions of beauty (e.g. Burning Man). (shrink)

E. J. Lowe and others argue that there can be 'uncountable' things admitting of no numerical description. This implies that there can be something without there being at least one such thing, and that things can be identical without being one or nonidentical without being two. The clearest putative example of uncountable things is portions of homogeneous stuff or 'gunk'. The paper argues that there is a number of portions of gunk if there is any gunk at all, and that (...) the possibility of uncountable things is inadequately supported. (shrink)

Proves Completeness for the Evidential Conditional.

This article describes the development and validation of a scale specifically designed to measure one's propensity for Objectivism. The scale developed in this article assesses metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. A three-stage process of scale development results in a multidimensional scale that largely supports Rand's original conception of the construct in the United States and Lithuania. Several challenges are identified, including problems with select items referencing specific political preferences and addressing notions of a higher being. Prospects for future research are (...) identified, including tests for associations between Objectivism and individual factors such as leadership style, organizational commitment, and job performance. (shrink)

By employing binary committee choice problems, this paper investigates how varying or eliminating feedback about payoffs affects: subjects’ learning about the underlying relationship between their nominal voting weights and their expected payoffs in weighted voting games; the transfer of acquired learning from one committee choice problem to a similar but different problem. In the experiment, subjects choose to join one of two committees and obtain a payoff stochastically determined by a voting theory. We found that: subjects learned to choose the (...) committee that generates a higher expected payoff even without feedback about the payoffs they received; there was statistically significant evidence of “meaningful learning” only for the treatment with no payoff-related feedback. This finding calls for re-thinking existing models of learning to incorporate some type of introspection. (shrink)