The intellectual legacy of Confucianism has loomed large in efforts to understand China's past, present, and future. While Confucian ethics has been thoroughly explored, the question remains: what exactly is Confucian political thought? Classical Confucian Political Thought returns to the classical texts of the Confucian tradition to answer this vital question. Showing how Confucian ethics and politics diverge, Loubna El Amine argues that Confucian political thought is not a direct application of Confucian moral philosophy. Instead, contrary to the conventional view (...) that Confucian rule aims to instill virtue in all members of society, El Amine demonstrates that its main aim is to promote political order. El Amine analyzes key aspects of the Confucian political vision, including the relationship between the ruler and the people, the typology of rulers, and the role of ministers and government officials. She also looks at Confucianism’s account of the mechanisms through which society is to be regulated, from welfare policies to rituals. She explains that the Confucian conception of the political leaves space open for the rule of those who are not virtuous if these rulers establish and maintain political order. She also contends that Confucians defend the duty to take part in government based on the benefits that such participation can bring to society. Classical Confucian Political Thought brings a new understanding to Confucian political theory by illustrating that it is not chiefly idealistic and centered on virtue, but rather realistic and driven by political concerns. (shrink)

Sociological studies of culture have made significant progress on conceptual clarification of the concept, while remaining comparatively quiescent on questions of measurement. This study empirically examines internal conflicts (or “infighting”), a ubiquitous phenomenon in political organizing, to propose a “resinous culture framework” that holds promise for redirection. The data comprise 674 newspaper articles and more than 100 archival documents that compare internal dissent across two previously unstudied lesbian and gay Marches on Washington. Analyses reveal that activists use infighting as a (...) vehicle to engage in otherwise abstract definitional debates that provide concrete answers to questions such as who are we and what do we want. The mechanism that enables infighting to concretize these cultural concerns is its coupling with fairly mundane and routine organizational tasks. This mechanism affords one way to release the culture concept, understood here as collective self-definitions, from being “an amorphous, indescribable mist which swirls around society members,” as it was once provocatively described. (shrink)

In the 1940s, Georges Canguilhem has established the concept of biological normativity on the level of the organism in his key work on “ The Normal and the Pathological ”. We would like to present a contemporary analysis of Canguilhem’s work, set it in context with more recent results from the field of complexity and immunology, and evaluate the problematic whether normativity is a genuine capacity of the organism. Based on Canguilhem’s conditions of the definition of biological normativity, we show (...) that the immune system as one of the complex systems of the living equally shares the capacity to be normative. We will then conclude that normativity can also be conceptually independently displayed on the level of complex systems of the living. (shrink)

Peace, the article shows, is achieved by culturally evolved institutions that incentivize positive-sum relationships. We propose that this insight has important consequences for the design of human social cognition. Cues that signal the existence of such institutions should play a prominent role in detecting group membership. We show how this accounts for previous findings and suggest avenues for future research.

I argue in this essay that the past holds the potential for liberating us from modern categories and thus for helping us envision alternative political futures. More specifically, I show how China’s non-feudal past offers resources for a future model of governance based on unity and social mobility.

In his review of my book, Classical Confucian Political Thought, David Elstein argues that my interpretation of Classical Confucian political thought draws too sharp a distinction between Confucians’ ethical standards and their political standards, thus veering perhaps a bit too far from the “conventional wisdom” that views Confucian politics as an extension of Confucian ethics. As I write in the book, “To the extent that the political standard is a normative standard, it is difficult to insist that it has nothing (...) to do with morality”. My aim in the book is thus not to posit a complete break between ethics and politics. Rather, my aim is to show where the two intersect and... (shrink)

Plus d’une trentaine d’années après la création des premières structures dédiées à sa promotion, l’intégrité scientifique s’est progressivement constituée en tant que thématique de recherche à part entière. Aujourd’hui, une communauté scientifique et académique est réunie autour de cet objet, comme en témoignent la publication d’un nombre croissant d’articles, la création de revues spécialisées ou encore l’organisation de conférences spécifiquement dédiées. Néanmoins, rares sont les travaux qui ont cherché à proposer une vue d’ensemble de la littérature académique relative à l’intégrité (...) scientifique. C’est dans cette perspective que cet état de l’art s’inscrit et entend apporter une contribution. Avec la volonté de rendre compte des principales tendances de la recherche en la matière, nous avons principalement ciblé dans ce travail des articles, des commentaires ou encore quelques documents institutionnels qui ont cherché à approfondir la compréhension que l’on a de l’intégrité scientifique, à explorer les diverses façons de la promouvoir, à mieux cerner l’occurrence des manquements qui y sont liés, ou encore à proposer une lecture de ces questions sous un angle spécifique. Certaines des thématiques qui sont abordées dans cet état de l’art sont incontournables dans le paysage de la recherche et font l’objet d’une attention marquée depuis longtemps, à l’image de l’étude des manquements à l’intégrité scientifique. D’autres, à l’instar des études historiques de l’intégrité scientifique, représentent des pistes de recherche un peu moins explorées mais dont l’intérêt nous semble assez important pour appeler à davantage de développements. (shrink)

The commentaries addressed various aspects of our account of historical myths. We respond by clarifying the evolutionary theory of coalitional psychology that underlies our claims (R1). This addresses concerns about the role of fitness interdependence in large groups (R2), cultural transmission processes (R3), alternative routes to nation-building (R4) and the role of proximal mechanisms (R5). Finally, we evaluate alternative theories (R6) and discuss directions for future research (R7).

The rich evade conviction more often in criminal trials than the poor. They also win more often in civil cases against the poor. Given that money buys better lawyers and better lawyers are instrumental in winning in adversarial trials, the rich have a structural advantage in laissez-faire trial systems. Such inequality is concerning. In a landmark article, Alan Wertheimer argues that we should level down legal resources in civil cases on the basis that doing so increases the adversarial system’s accuracy—that (...) is, its chance of reaching correct decisions. In a more recent article, along similar lines, Shai Agmon also advocates that, given some constraints of adequacy, legal resources should be leveled down in both civil and criminal cases. This article aims to show that such arguments fail because leveling down legal resources could decrease a trial system’s accuracy, making it worse by Wertheimer’s or Agmon’s own criteria. (shrink)

Rivals in the Gulf is a tale of two men in two cities—and much more. David H. Warren skillfully probes and answers questions about geopolitics and the nature of.

Apocalyptic thinking has a long religious and political tradition, but what place does it occupy within the temporal universe of contemporary capitalism? In this essay, we use the figure of the eschaton to draw out the loaded and ambiguous character of the future as it emerges through the condition of indebtedness. This entails a departure from political economy accounts of capitalist futurity, which stress the structural logic of financial speculation, in favour of an existential account that begins instead with the (...) cosmology of money and debt. We argue that finance capital’s fixation on the future has produced a very specific form of apocalyptic imagination, characteristic of financial society and built on a libidinal economy of leverage. Rather than offering an ecstatic end to the global process of financialization, financial eschatologies bind the contemporary subject to debt and indebtedness to the very end: an endless apocalypse, premised on the ends of finance itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe issue of soli or content-influencing gifts and its relations to the professional practice of journalist and other media workers has become a subject of discussion among academic researchers and general audiences. It is against this background that this article examines media practitioners’ understanding of the culture and moral implications of soli and its effects on professional journalism in the northern region of Ghana. Using qualitative approaches, the study revealed that in Ghana, soli is both a moral and cultural problem, (...) and when accepted, it undermines objective, balanced, and independent news reportage. This project concludes that any discourse on soli must take into consideration the cultural and philosophical foundations of journalism within a developmental context, as well as the various global socio-cultural insti... (shrink)

L'Occident n'a jamais paru aussi vulnérable à la critique. On lui impute notamment l'humiliation infligée par des siècles de colonisation. Même en son propre sein il est contesté, accusé d'avoir assuré au mâle hétérosexuel blanc des privilèges indus ou encore jugé responsable du saccage de la planète. Pourtant, l'Occident continue de fasciner ceux-là mêmes qui le contestent. Le sens des flux migratoires en est la preuve : ce ne sont pas les Occidentaux qui fuient leurs pays au risque de leur (...) vie, même quand ils sont en désaccord avec leurs gouvernants. Ces quatre derniers siècles, l'Occident a toujours été à la pointe, en politique, morale, esthétique, science, technologie, philosophie, etc. Les bienfaits planétaires de ses progrès justifient, à ses yeux, son universalisme messianique. Cependant, la liste est longue de ceux qui refusent de suivre aveuglément les valeurs 'universelles' de l'Occident. Mais que lui reprochent-ils précisément? (shrink)

Based on the distinction between global and local levels of visual perception, here we studied different levels of reasoning in visual analogies. Specifically, we created problems that could be solved by inferring relations either between the global shapes (global path) or the underlying objects (object path). The problems varied in the saliency of the global shape, in the colour and familiarity of the objects, and in the presentation of the visual problem (simultaneous or sequential). The results of three studies showed (...) that the global path was used more frequently than the object path, particularly for images with salient global shapes such as objects placed in a circle. However, neither colour nor object familiarity affected the tendency to use the object path. Importantly, the tendency to use the global path correlated with analogical problem-solving in other visual and verbal tasks. Overall, these findings suggest that the global precedence observed in image perception also applies to visual analogical reasoning. Furthermore, the tendency to use the global path can be regarded as an informative measure of individual differences. (shrink)

This study investigated various manifestations of gravestone inscriptions to find different types of moves in the formation of such inscriptions in two Iranian social classes. The sample of the study included forty epitaphs in two shrines in the north and west of Tehran. Each epitaph was then photographed for analysis. Swales’ genre move model was used to analyze the data. The moves involved word choice, content, graphics, socio-cultural values, and written communicative practices. Considering socio-cultural factors characterizing the social classes, the (...) results revealed four moves in the epitaphs in the Shrine located in north of Tehran, and eight moves in the Shrine located in west of Tehran. Out of the total of eight moves observed, three were different in the two classes. Comparing these patterns of moves and their frequencies, various emotional, structural, lexical, gender-specific, and age-specific differences were observed. (shrink)

The UNESCO research projects focusing on The Silk Routes and The Slave Routes were launched at just the right time to remind us that globalization is not a novel dimension of the history of humanity. Not only am I among those who analyze capitalism as a worldwide system from its very inception, but I have also found it pertinent to recall that prior to the sixteenth century, societies were not at all isolated from one another but rather competing within regional (...) systems (and perhaps within one global system). To underestimate this fact is to condemn ourselves to a misunderstanding of the very dynamics of change within societies. At the same time, I maintain that in the history of the world, capitalism represents a qualitative rupture that had its beginnings around 1500. Accordingly I emphasize the distinction that must be made between the integrated structure of the worldwide capitalist system and the protocapitalist elements that are to be found in earlier societies; I also underline the specificity of the contrast between centers and peripheries, which is unique to global capitalism and which differs from previous forms of polarization. (shrink)

Developing World Bioethics, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 76-85, June 2022.

The aim of the present paper was to introduce some online-based approaches to evaluate scientific journals and publishers and to differentiate them from the hijacked ones, regardless of their disciplines. With the advent of open-access journals, many hijacked journals and publishers have deceitfully assumed the mantle of authenticity in order to take advantage of researchers and students. Although these hijacked journals and publishers can be identified through checking their advertisement techniques and their websites, these ways do not always result in (...) their identification. There exist certain online-based approaches, such as using Master Journal List provided by Thomson Reuters, and Scopus database, and using the DOI of a paper, to certify the realness of a journal or publisher. It is indispensable that inexperienced students and researchers know these methods so as to identify hijacked journals and publishers with a higher level of probability. (shrink)

Migrant workers in dormitories are an attractive source of clinical trial participants. However, they are a vulnerable population that has been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Guidelines on recruiting vulnerable populations for clinical trials have long been established, but ethical considerations for migrant workers have been neglected. This article aims to highlight and explain what researchers recruiting migrant workers must be cognizant of, and offers recommendations to address potential concerns. The considerations raised in this article include: three types of (...) illiteracy, power dynamics, the risks associated with communal living and potential benefits to the migrant workers as well as researchers. No data are available. This article does not include original data. (shrink)

Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the (...) ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before! (shrink)

This paper argues that an AI judge is conceptually undesirable and not just something that lies beyond the state of the art in computer science. In a nutshell, even if an AI system could accurately predict how a good human judge would decide a particular case, its prediction would be the product of correlations between such factors as patterns of syntax in bodies of legal texts. This approach of AI systems is insufficient for basing their output on the sort of (...) rationales that are expected of valid judicial decisions in any desirable legal system. Thus, by their very nature, AI systems are incapable of providing valid legal decisions in any such system. (shrink)

Prompted by the speed with which, in certain historical moments, the hard-won achievements of anti-racism can be comprehensively undone, this article reflects on the mechanisms that keep racial coding and judgement close to the surface, ready to spring into action. It reads the intensity of race in a given present in terms of the play between vernacular legacies of race-coded reception of visible difference and the conjunctural mobilizations of race by biopolitical regimes — state-regulated systems of governing populations — to (...) maintain collective order. The article explains the contemporary trend in the West towards the ‘racialization of everything’ as the product of mutually reinforcing mischief between vernacular and biopolitical racism. It closes with a discussion of the implications of such conjunctural tightness, one which questions the effectiveness of humanist arguments that have come to the fore in recent years focusing on practices of recognition and reconciliation. (shrink)

This article explores the meaning and relevance of the ‘Idea of Europe’ in the context of a multicultural and multi-ethnic continent that increasingly draws on the presence and practices of people from non-European backgrounds. The Idea of Europe, even in its contemporary use, remains an ideal based on a Christian-Enlightenment-Romantic heritage, mobilized by supporters of European integration as the bridge between diverse European national cultures. In a Europe of extraordinary cultural interchange and immigration from all corners of the world, the (...) classical Idea of Europe is strikingly exclusionary and backward looking – a poor motif for the future. The article tries to develop an alternative Idea of Europe, one based on a particular politics of the public domain and a particular ethos of belonging in Europe seen as a migrant space, rather than one based on the enduring cultural values of a body of people called Europeans. It outlines a commons, protected by appropriate EU-level rights, that can both support and bind cultural pluralism and difference, and it proposes democratic vitalism as Europe’s core political project, an idea of becoming European, read as the process of never-settled cultural invention resulting from the vibrant clashes of an equal and empowered multiple public. No myth of origin, no myth of destination, only the commitment to a plural demos. (shrink)

Samir Amin depicts a world in which NATO has taken over the role of the United Nations, in which US hegemony is more or less complete, in which millions are condemned to die in order to preserve the social order of the US, Europe and Japan. Amin's analyses of the Gulf War, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the war in Central Asia reveal the scope of US strategic aims. He argues that the political and military dimension of (...) US dominance is as significant as US economic preponderance in determining the future of capitalist development. (shrink)

This study uses a qualitative discourse analysis approach to investigate Pakistani female politicians' discursive representation in print and electronic media. Specifically, the research focuses on the narratives and framing strategies employed by the media to construct and portray the public image of these political figures. By employing Corpus-Assisted Diachronic Discourse Analysis (CADDA), the study traces the changes in media discourse over time, uncovering how gender biases, societal norms, and power dynamics shape the representation of women in Pakistani politics. The findings (...) reveal significant trends in gendered framing, highlighting how media portrayal fluctuates between marginalization and recognition of female politicians' contributions, though gender stereotypes remain deeply embedded in these narratives. The findings of this study have important implications for future media reform initiatives, advocating for a more equitable and balanced representation of women in politics. The insights gained can also inform gender advocacy strategies and policy efforts to enhance women's visibility and leadership roles in traditional and digital media. (shrink)

Background Home care nurses are central in providing holistic and compassionate care to patients in home-based palliative care. Ethical caring competency is essential for home care to sustain nurses’ integrity in the face of moral adversity. Interprofessional collaboration is vital for ensuring ethical decision-making and providing patient-centered care in home-based palliative care settings. Aim This study explored the predictive roles of interprofessional collaboration and moral resilience on ethical caring competency among home care nurses in home-based palliative care. Methods A cross-sectional (...) survey of 400 nurses was conducted from October to December 2023, utilizing standardized scales to measure interprofessional collaboration, moral resilience, and ethical caring competency. A convenience sample of 400 home care nurses was also included in this study. Correlation and linear regression analysis were used to clarify the associative and predictive findings. Ethical Considerations Ethical approval from the ethics committee, institutional permission, and informed consent from the participants were obtained for data collection. Results Correlation analysis showed significant positive correlations between the ethical caring competency, interprofessional collaboration, and moral resilience constructs, with coefficients ranging from 0.482 to 0.967. Linear regression revealed that management of collaborative systems and total moral resilience significantly predict ethical caring competency, explaining 14.6% and 36.6% of its variance, respectively. Other variables, such as the effects of collaboration and communication, did not significantly influence ethical caring competency. Conclusion The study highlights the significant impact of interprofessional collaboration, particularly the management of collaborative systems and moral resilience, on enhancing ethical caring competency among nurses. Implications Enhancing interprofessional collaboration and moral resilience through targeted strategies in nursing practice and education can significantly improve ethical caring competencies. These efforts are essential for delivering high-quality, patient-centered care and for fostering a healthcare environment that respects the ethical principles guiding nursing practice. (shrink)

In the West, "the Left," understood as a loose conglomeration of interests centered around the goal of a fairer and more equal society, still struggles to make its voice heard and its influence felt, even amid an overwhelming global recession. In _Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left_, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue that only by broadening the domain of what is considered political and what can be made into politics will the Left be able to (...) respond forcefully to injustice and inequality. In particular, the Left requires a more imaginative and experimental approach to the politics of creating a better society. The authors propose three political arts that they consider crucial to transforming the Left: boosting invention, leveraging organization, and mobilizing affect. They maintain that successful Left political movements tend to surpass traditional notions of politics and open up political agency to these kinds of considerations. In other words, rather than providing another blueprint for the future, Amin and Thrift concentrate their attention on a more modest examination of the conduct of politics itself and the ways that it can be made more effective. (shrink)

The main objective of the present paper is to introduce some features of fake/bogus conferences and some viable approaches to differentiate them from the real ones. These fake/bogus conferences introduce themselves as international conferences, which are multidisciplinary and indexed in major scientific digital libraries. Furthermore, most of the fake/bogus conference holders offer publishing the accepted papers in ISI journals and use other techniques in their advertisement e-mails.

This paper examines the social life and sociality of urban infrastructure. Drawing on a case study of land occupations and informal settlements in the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, where the staples of life such as water, electricity, shelter and sanitation are co-constructed by the poor, the paper argues that infrastructures – visible and invisible – are deeply implicated in not only the making and unmaking of individual lives, but also in the experience of community, solidarity and struggle for (...) recognition. Infrastructure is proposed as a gathering force and political intermediary of considerable significance in shaping the rights of the poor to the city and their capacity to claim those rights. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)