There seems little doubt that there are interesting and theoretically relevant distinctions to be made between different types of presuppositions within this heterogeneous set. But the study of these distinctions is of interest primarily in light of the intuition that the members of this set share some common feature: that there is some singular phenomenon of presupposition to be described and explained. This paper is concerned with what presuppositions have in common, and offers an alternative to the current standard view.

No detailed description available for "Écrits de jeunesse 1816-1828".

Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Robert Kane on 24 August 2017.

Of the many ideological blind spots that have afflicted US and, to a lesser extent, European, perceptions and analysis of the economic, political and social milieu, none have been more debilitating than the equation of democracy with political liberalism. Thus those who attempt to derive propaganda value from such an equation are vulnerable, as the US government has found, to the rhetorical counter attack that in opposing democratically elected governments, such as that of Hamas or Hugo Chavez, they are not (...) merely being anti-democratic, but are in illiberally opposition to human rights and civil liberties also; an argument quiteindependent of the same charges, emanating more legitimately, from their support of, for example, the Masharraf regime and the Saud dictatorship.Furthermore no less an august body than the Council of Europe has drawn attention to the US government’s inhumane, humiliating, degrading and cruel treatment, including torture, of prisoners, at Guantanamo, and, seemingly even more extreme treatment of prisoners in the supposedly secret or “black” prisons operated both by the CIA, and other countries, where the torture of prisoners, often illegally or extra judicially rendered to them, has been outsourced. In light of this the paper takes up a discussion of the nature of the relationship between Liberalism, Democracy and Torture as it is germane to the current legitimation crisisfacing liberal democracies. (shrink)

For philosophers familiar with the traditional interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir as a literary writer and philosophical follower of Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s 1926-27 student diary is a revelation. Inviting an exploration of Beauvoir’s early philosophy foreclosed by the traditional interpretation, the student diary reveals Beauvoir’s early dedication to becoming a philosopher and her early formulation of philosophical problems and positions usually attributed to Sartre’s influence, such as the central problem of “the opposition of self and other,” years before she first (...) met Sartre in 1929.… Reading the student diary within a larger historical context, we discover that it reflects Beauvoir’s experience as one of the first generation of French women to gain full access to the academic world of philosophy, an experience that problematizes her identity as a woman. The diary shows Beauvoir struggling to accommodate herself to the male world of philosophy while striving to make philosophy her own. For Beauvoir this means following Henri Bergson in rejecting a philosophy that engages only the abstract intelligence. Defining her own unique literary philosophical methodology, Beauvoir vows to create a philosophy that is able, like literature, to encompass emotion as well as reason. This creative process begins in her diary where Beauvoir describes the concrete realities of her own lived experience. Searching for a sense of self in the “nothingness of everything human,” Beauvoir grapples with the existential problem of despair and the temptations of bad faith. Celebrating her newly found freedom and academic achievements, Beauvoir still struggles with the masochistic asceticism of her Catholic upbringing and longs for love, fearing a solitary future bereft of the comforts of woman’s traditional role. Beauvoir’s student diary thus allows us to trace the development of her early philosophy within the context of her life, while providing as well an intimate view of an academic world in transformation…. When the diary opens, with an entry dated August 6, 1926 Beauvoir is grappling with a central problem of her early life and philosophy, the conflicting moral obligations to self and others. Recounting a pilgrimage to Lourdes with an aunt, Beauvoir recalls feeling “ashamed” when faced with the physical suffering of the invalids: “[O]nly a life which was a complete gift of oneself, a total self-abnegation seemed possible to me.” But then, anticipating her critique of self-abnegation in The Second Sex, Beauvoir rejects it, describing the “absolute gift” as “moral suicide.” She vows, instead, to achieve an “equilibrium” between the duty to self and the duty to others. In the August 12, 1926 diary entry, Beauvoir frames the problem in metaphysical terms, referring to one part of herself “made to be given away,” and another “made to be kept and cultivated.” Later, in the November 5, 1926 entry, Beauvoir returns to the problem, writing that she split her “existence into two parts”: one part “for myself” and the other part “for others,” that is “the bonds that unite me with all beings.” Beauvoir’s 1926 description of existence “for myself” and “for others” lays the ground for her later philosophical work on the problem of the Other, as in her 1943 metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay, where the main female protagonist struggles to reclaim an existence for herself instead of existing solely for others, and in The Second Sex (1949) where Beauvoir argues that women are forced to assume themselves not as they exist for themselves but solely as they exist for men, thus as the absolute Other. During the course of the 1926 diary, Beauvoir’s efforts to reconcile these two “parts” of her existence are complicated by various influences, including her reading of Henri Bergson, the leading French philosopher of the early twentieth century. Beauvoir quotes at length in her 1926 diary from Bergson’s Essay on the immediate data of consciousness, which she describes, on August 16, as “a great intellectual rapture.” This diary entry may surprise those who remember the reference to Bergson in Beauvoir’s Memoirs: “I would not have been at all pleased if someone had prophesized that I would become a kind of Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed to move me” (MJFR 288). In this case as in so many others, Beauvoir’s diaries present a very different picture. In the August 16 diary entry, Beauvoir is critical of Bergson’s “impersonal” philosophical voice. But she lauds his methodological “appeal to intuition," which brings philosophy in contact with the « palpable reality » of life, as more characteristic of literature than philosophy. Beauvoir quotes Bergson’s celebration of the « bold novelist » able to tear aside « the cleverly woven web of our conventional self, » and reveal the « fundamental absurdity » of impressions underneath. « Nobody has better than he … defined the art of the modern novelist » Beauvoir writes, suggesting Bergson’s influence on Beauvoir’s developing literary philosophical method. Beauvoir writes, in the August 16 entry, that she is “thrilled” by Bergson’s “analysis of the two aspects of the self,” the authentic inner self and the external social self. For Bergson, unlike Beauvoir who is concerned with serving others as well as the self, our responsibility is wholly to the self and its freedom, which we discover only by breaking through the superficial “crust” of the social self. If his ethic of individual freedom complicated Beauvoir’s search for an ethical “equilibrium,” Bergson’s methodological turn to intuition and rejection of philosophy’s sole reliance on reason might have appealed to a young women trying to enter the male world of philosophy and make it her own…. (shrink)

This article publishes the minutes of a conference held on February 26th, 1934 by prominent members of the German Lutheran churches. August Marahrens, Ernst Sommerlath, Werner Elert, Paul Fleisch, and others are discussing how to maintain the Lutheran position on conditions of the Third Reich and the Reichskirche.

During high summer 1721, while rioters and bankrupts gathered outside Parliament, Robert Walpole's new ministry forced through a bill to clear up the wreckage left by the stock-market crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the visionary projects swept away when it burst. In early August the President of the Royal Society Isaac Newton, a major investor in South Sea stock, and the Society's projectors, learned of a new commercial scheme promising apparently automatic profits, a project for a perpetual motion. (...) Their informants were a young Viennese courtier Joseph Emmanuel Fischer von Erlach, a contact of Desaguliers recently engaged in industrial espionage in northern England, and the Leiden physics professor Willem 'sGravesande, who had visited London five years earlier. They reported that they had been summoned to a remarkable series of demonstrations in the castle of Weissenstein, the seat of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. In a carefully guarded room of the castle there was set up a hollow wooden wheel covered in oilcloth, about 12 feet in diameter and 18 inches thick on an axle 6 feet in length. Its designer, a Saxon engineer and clockmaker Johann Bessler, who travelled Germany under the name Orffyreus, had been in Kassel for four years, published schemes for perpetual motion and been appointed commercial councillor. The Landgrave, well-known as a patron of advanced engineering schemes, commissioned him to build a new machine and put it on show before expert witnesses (Figure 1). (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page 1, August 2011.

BackgroundInvolvement of adolescent girls in biomedical HIV research is essential to better understand efficacy and safety of new prevention interventions in this key population at high risk of HIV infection. However, there are many ethical issues to consider prior to engaging them in pivotal biomedical research. In Uganda, 16–17-year-old adolescents can access sexual and reproductive health services including for HIV or other sexually transmitted infections, contraception, and antenatal care without parental consent. In contrast, participation in HIV prevention research involving investigational (...) new drugs requires adolescents to have parental or guardian consent. Thus, privacy and confidentiality concerns may deter adolescent participation. We describe community perspectives on ethical considerations for involving adolescent girls in the MTN 034 study in Uganda.MethodsFrom August 2017 to March 2018, we held five stakeholder engagement meetings in preparation for the MTN 034 study in Kampala, Uganda (NCT03593655): two with 140 community representatives, two with 125 adolescents, and one with 50 adolescents and parents. Discussions were moderated by the study team. Proceedings were documented by notetakers. Summary notes described community perspectives of adolescent participation in HIV research including convergent, divergent or minority views, challenges, and proposed solutions.ResultsMost community members perceived parental or guardian consent as a principal barrier to study participation due to concerns about adolescent disclosure of pre-marital sex, which is a cultural taboo. Of 125 adolescent participants, 119 (95%) feared inadvertent disclosure of sexual activity to their parents. Community stakeholders identified the following critical considerations for ethical involvement of adolescents in HIV biomedical research: (1) involving key stakeholders in recruitment, (2) ensuring confidentiality of sensitive information about adolescent sexual activity, (3) informing adolescents about information to be disclosed to parents or guardians, (4) offering youth friendly services by appropriately trained staff, and (5) partnering with community youth organizations to maximize recruitment and retention.ConclusionsStakeholder engagement with diverse community representatives prior to conducting adolescent HIV prevention research is critical to collectively shaping the research agenda, successfully recruiting and retaining adolescents in HIV clinical trials and identifying practical strategies to ensure high ethical standards during trial implementation. (shrink)

Appropriate language use is essential to ensure inclusion of diverse populations in research. We aimed to identify possible language-related barriers regarding the informed consent process and propose interventions to improve clarity and understanding of pregnant and breastfeeding women participating in research. A cross-sectional qualitative study employing focus group discussions (FGD) was conducted in Uganda from August 2023 to September 2023, involving a diverse group of stakeholders from the community, including community members, research participants, and Community Advisory Board members. 19 (...) FGD comprised adult participants representing at least six different mother tongues (Luganda, Acholi, Runyankole, Runyoro, Lugbara and English). An inductive thematic approach was utilized for data analysis using NVivo version 12 software to identify language factors that influence informed consent. A series of community validation workshops ensured concurrence. At the individual level, language barriers, and low levels of literacy contributed to poor comprehension, thus hindering ability to achieve genuine informed consent. At the health facility level, participants reported that there was use of inappropriate, unclear language including inaccurate translations, with poor and complicated grammar in some consent forms. Participants reported that complex medical terminologies are difficult to translate to local languages. Community members highlighted that social/cultural norms in language use affected cultural perceptions of informed consent. To enhance understanding for individuals without education in science, participants suggested simplification of terminologies and avoidance of complex medical jargon. Researchers should identify participants’ preferred languages and communicate in those languages whenever possible. If researchers are not fluent, trained interpreters should be identified. Informed consent documents must be translated into local languages to ensure participants comprehend the study’s purpose, procedures, risks, and benefits. Involving community members during development and translation of these documents can provide valuable insights into local dialects and culturally specific concepts, ensuring that study tools like surveys and consent forms are accurate and respectful. Language barriers influence the informed consent process within communities in Uganda. These can potentially be resolved at individual, health system and community levels. Consideration of locally understandable terms in community-facing study documentation is likely to enhance understanding and could improve research participation, although further studies are needed to assess these. The use of appropriate language ensures that informed consent is genuine in keeping with principles of Good Clinical Practice, and developing a research communication strategy should be part of inclusive research design. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded (...) in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political movement which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It sank into an almost complete oblivion during the twentieth, when it was eclipsed by neopositivism. However, Comte's decision to develop successively a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of chemistry and a philosophy of biology, makes him the first philosopher of science in the modern sense, and his constant attention (...) to the social dimension of science resonates in many respects with current points of view. His political philosophy, on the other hand, is even less known, because it differs substantially from the classical political philosophy we have inherited. -/- Comte's most important works are (1) the Course on Positive Philosophy (1830-1842, six volumes, translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte); (2) the System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, (1851-1854, four volumes); and (3) the Early Writings (1820-1829), where one can see the influence of Saint-Simon, for whom Comte served as secretary from 1817 to 1824. The Early Writings are still the best introduction to Comte's thought. In the Course, Comte said, science was transformed into philosophy; in the System, philosophy was transformed into religion. The second transformation met with strong opposition; as a result, it has become customary to distinguish, with Mill, between a “good Comte” (the author of the Course) and a “bad Comte” (the author of the System). Today's common conception of positivism corresponds mainly to what can be found in the Course. (shrink)

This book constitutes the first volume of a projected two-volume intellectual biography of Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology and a philosophical movement called positivism. Volume One offers a reinterpretation of Comte's "first career," (1798-1842) when he completed the scientific foundation of his philosophy. It describes the interplay between Comte's ideas and the historical context of postrevolutionary France, his struggles with poverty and mental illness, and his volatile relationships with friends, family, and colleagues, including such famous contemporaries as Saint- (...) class='Hi'>Simon, the Saint-Simonians, Guizot, and John Stuart Mill. Pickering shows that the man who called for a new social philosophy based on the sciences was not only ill at ease in the most basic human relationships, but also profoundly questioned the ability of the purely scientific spirit to regenerate the political and social world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154 BOOK REVIEWS Woznicki highlights his own interpretation of St. Thomas's view of being and order by comparing and contrasting it with the views of other thinkers, such as Duns Scotus and Ockham. Woznicki points out that Duns Scotus's insistance on the primacy of essence over exist· ence led to a metaphysics quite different from that of Saint Thomas, in which existence had priority over essence, Woznicki emphasizes that (...) Ockham's denial of the validity of analogy has bequeathed to us an instrumentalistic understanding of being as being; the real unity of being is replaced by a unity that is the product of our minds. What actually happens in Ockham is that metaphysics is subordinated to the demands of logic. Ockham's metaphysics also resembles the Heraclitean philosophy of becoming, and Woznicki points to Nietzsche as evidence that such a philosophy of becoming necessarily leads to nihilism. In his criticism of Ockham as well as in his criticism of Descartes, Kant, and Whitehead, Woznicki not only makes Thomas seem more attrac· tive but also, at least implicitly, reveals the deleterious effect that influential false philosophies can have on the human adventure. Woznicki 's explanation of Thomas's doctrine of esse does involve abstract thinking, but the result, the rooting of order in esse, is anything but irrelevant. Metaphysics does bury its undertakers; bad metaphysics creates victims. Father Woznicki has produced a fine work as the author of this first volume in the series Catholic Thought from Lublin. I hope that in his role as editor he will be able to present in the near future other volumes as good as Being and Order. Saint John's University Jamaica, New York ROBERT E. LAUDER An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge. By YVES R. SIMON. Translated by Vukan Kuic and Richard J. Thompson. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 180. Almost sixty years have passed between the first appearance of Jn. troduction al'ontologie du connaitre and its English translation. But even though we have had to wait so long, we now have this treasure in hand. An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge leaves no doubt that here is a thinker of the first water. Simon's writings never fail to exemplify the medieval fusion of the concepts " teacher " and " master " in the Latin " magister." As I observed when reviewing one of his posthumously published books, Work, Society, and Culture, BOOK REVIEWS 155 Simon had the knack for using concrete words and vivid imagery drawn from everyday life to carry the reader to the very heart of pro· found thoughts. That testifies to more than just a good prose style; the freedom from reliance on jargon and formalized academic language shows that Simon was neither a " scholastic" (in the pejorative sense of the word) nor a pedant or mere academician. His ready access to everyday language is simply one more indication that he was an independent philosophical thinker for whom reflective personal experience, not the text, was the ultimate court of appeal for arriving at the truth. A case in point is the book's structure. Flipping through its pages, one notices the frequent extended discussions in the footnotes and the abundant citation of classical texts, often leaving room for no more than three or four lines of Simon's own prose on a given page. This may well remind the reader of the musty pedantry of so many doctoral dissertations. But although Simon frequently cites the texts of Aristotle, St. Thomas, Cajetan, and John of St. Thomas, the arguments he advances clearly do not depend on any appeal to the authority of these authors. Although a Thomist, he assumes complete responsibility for his critique of knowledge; he is a thinker whose arguments stand on their own merit. All the references to the aforementioned authorities are truly footnotes; they are never an essential part of Simon's own text. (This bears mention for the benefit of the august members of "The Guardianship of the Undefiled Text of St. Thomas Aquinas," who can be counted upon to insist that commentators, such as John of St. Thomas, are unreliable interpreters of the master's texts.) The book sparkles as a... (shrink)

This paper re-examines the idea of political vanguardism—long consigned to the dustbin of defunct scientific socialist ideology—to shed light on the theory of democratic representation. The discussion connects the use of the term “vanguard” by two prominent early socialist thinkers to what it terms the “cosmological” dimension of their writings. It shows how each author figured vanguard agency as fomenting different visions of the intellectual progress required for representative government, and that these visions were sustained by analogies to the origin (...) and development of astronomical objects. The “utopian” socialist Henri Saint-Simon (1770–1825) first invoked the vanguard metaphor to describe a way of thinking about scientific progress that would naturalize a new governing elite. The revolutionary communist Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) then appropriated the vanguard idea to reimagine scientific authority in a way that would preserve and expand citizens’ capacities to hold their representatives accountable. The article pursues three goals. First, it provides a revisionist history of well-known scientistic attempts to stabilize mass democracy in the nineteenth century, revealing how claims to scientific authority were contested from within a socialist republican tradition usually seen as complicit in such agency-inhibiting ideologies. Second, the concept of vanguardism it reconstructs from this history, as a response to the “usurpation” of a vigilant attitude between citizens and office holders, offers new resources for theorizing democratic representation. Finally, it draws attention to the importance of cosmological rhetoric in the history of modern republican and socialist political thought. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 694-696, August 2012.

Émile-Auguste Chartier, dit Alain, a marqué de son intelligence, sa force et sa créativité la première moitié du XXe siècle. Mais qui était ce normalien, professeur de philosophie en khâgne au Lycée Henri-IV, lui-même philosophe, inventeur du ± Propos?, un genre littéraire jusque là inédit?00Que connaît-on de l'Alain engagé, militant républicain et radical, fervent défenseur de la laïcité, appelant à la paix au moment où l'Europe sombre dans le premier conflit mondial? Du pamphlétaire Alain? Et comment juger les polémiques récentes (...) à son sujet?00Alain, qui fut le maître de personnalités aussi diverses que Simone Weil, Raymond Aron, Georges Canguilhem, André Maurois et Julien Gracq, aura également été cet original, rebelle sauvage bousculant l'ordre établi et la pensée conforme. Tantôt admiré, tantôt critiqué, il fut un éveilleur d'esprits et un influenceur.00Thomas Chaline explore tout ce qui a forgé la pensée du philosophe et son tempérament dans son siècle, de sa vie personnelle à ses engagements et prises de position publiques ou privées. Enfin, cet ouvrage se plonge dans l'héritage intellectuel qu'a laissé Alain.00La biographie définitive du philosophe pour les 70 ans de sa disparition. (shrink)

This paper examines what agents should do when others fail to comply with their responsibilities to prevent dangerous climate change. It distinguishes between six different possible responses to noncompliance. These include what I term (1) 'target modification' (watering down the extent to which we seek to prevent climate change), (2) ‘responsibility reallocation’ (reassigning responsibilities to other duty bearers), (3) ‘burden shifting I’ (allowing duty bearers to implement policies which impose unjust burdens on others, (4) 'burden shifting II’ (allowing some to (...) protect peoples rights in ways which impose otherwise unjustified burdens on the duty bearers, (5) 'compromising moral ideals' (permitting agents to compromise non-justice ideals that they are otherwise bound by); and (6) ‘promoting compliance (implementing policies and creating institutions which reduce noncompliance). It concludes by outlining a methodological framework for evaluating these options, and by setting out my tentative and provisional evaluation of which responses are the least bad. (shrink)

Board books with padded covers Full-color 24 pages 6-1/2 (16.5 cm) square Ages 0+. - Adorable illustrated characters introduce important first concepts to your baby or toddler. - First concepts are reinforced with full-color photographs to provide real-world images and context. - Fosters image and word recognition as well as speaking and motor skills. Perfect primers for babies and toddlers! 20 pages.

How can we equalize opportunities while respecting people’s freedom? According to a view that I call libertarian resourcism, people’s fair shares of resources should normally take the form of uncon...

This best-selling dictionary is written by one of the most famous philosophers of our time, and it is widely recognized as the best dictionary of its kind. Comprehensive and authoritative, it covers every aspect of philosophy from Aristotle to Zen. With clear and concise definitions, it provides lively and accessible coverage of not only Western philosophical traditions, but also themes from Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy. Entries include over 500 biographies of famous and influential philosophers, in-depth analysis of philosophical (...) terms and concepts, and a chronology of philosophical events stretching from 10,000 BC to the present day. The first edition of this dictionary became a market-leader and a standard work of reference, selling over 100,000 copies. Now the author, Professor Simon Blackburn, has revised it to include web links which provide up-to-date and valuable extra information via the Dictionary of Philosophy companion website. Fully cross-referenced and containing over 3,000 alphabetical entries, it is the ideal introduction to philosophy for anyone with an interest in the subject, and it is an indispensable work of reference for students and teachers. (shrink)

The Born rule is derived from operational assumptions, together with assumptions of quantum mechanics that concern only the deterministic development of the state. Unlike Gleason’s theorem, the argument applies even if probabilities are de…ned for only a single resolution of the identity, so it applies to a variety of foundational approaches to quantum mechanics. It also provides a probability rule for state spaces that are not Hilbert spaces.

This book provides a definitive account of Jacques Derrida's involvement in debates about the university. Derrida was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (GREPH), an activist group that mobilized opposition to the Giscard government's proposals to "rationalize" the French educational system in 1975. He also helped to convene the Estates General of Philosophy, a vast gathering in 1979 of educators from across France. Furthermore, he was closely associated with the founding of the International College (...) of Philosophy in Paris, and his connection with the International Parliament of Writers during the 1990s also illustrates his continuing interest in the possibility of launching an array of literary and philosophical projects while experimenting with new kinds of institutions in which they might take their specific shape and direction. Derrida argues that the place of philosophy in the university should be explored as both a historical question and a philosophical problem in its own right. He argues that philosophy simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the university. In its founding role, it must come from "outside" the institution in which, nevertheless, it comes to define itself. The author asks whether this irresolvable tension between "belonging" and "not belonging" might not also form the basis of Derrida's political thinking and activism where wider issues of contemporary significance are concerned. Key questions today concerning citizenship, rights, the nation-state and Europe, asylum, immigration, terror, and the "return" of religion all involve assumptions and ideas about "belonging"; and they entail constitutional, legal, institutional and material constraints that take shape precisely on the basis of such ideas. This project will therefore open up a key question: Can deconstruction's insight into the paradoxical institutional standing of philosophy form the basis of a meaningful political response by "theory" to a number of contemporary international issues? (shrink)