A one-of-a-kind reference to the international vocabulary of the humanities This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that (...) influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages—English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures Includes terms from more than a dozen languages Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities. (shrink)

Whistleblowers remain essential as complainants in allegations of research misconduct. Frequently internal to the research team, they are poorly protected from acts of retribution, which may deter the reporting of misconduct. In order to perform their important role, whistleblowers must be treated fairly. Draft regulations for whistleblower protection were published for public comment almost a decade ago but never issued. In the face of the growing challenge of research fraud, we suggest vigorous steps, to include: organizational responsibility to certify the (...) accuracy of research including audit, required whistleblower action in the face of imminent or grave harm to subjects, strengthened legal protections against retaliation including prompt enactment of Federal whistleblower protections and consideration of criminalizing the most egregious cases of research misconduct. (shrink)

This would have been a better book if Sampson had argued his main point, the usefulness of the Simonian principle as an explanation of the evolution, structure, and acquisition of language, on its own merits, instead of making it subsidiary to his attack on ‘limited-minders’ (e.g., Noam Chomsky). The energy he has spent on the attack he might then have been willing and able to employ in developing his argument at reasonable length and detail. He might then have found that (...) argument faulty, or even wrong. Underdeveloped as it is, however, his point about the Simonian principle does seem to have thepossibility of some significance in understanding the empirical issues of this book (and the dichotomy of ‘limited’ and ‘creative’ minds is certainly not one of these).What Sampson has done inMaking Sense has the appearance of science, and theoretical linguistics, and therefore it is somewhat puzzling to find the conclusions that the human mind cannot be scientifically studied (p. 10), and that theoretical linguistics is a “mirage” (p. 210). His statement that It may still seem worthwhile to some to work out the exact implications for present-day linguistic structure of the fact that languages are evolved systems, but I cannot see that there is much glamour or, indeed, much substance in this task (p. 210) would surely be surprising to a geneticist or ethologist. We hope his apparent misunderstanding on this point will not lead him to give up his profession, in which he seems willing and able to make a significant contribution.What in particular is required is a clear indication of how the Simonian principle imposes itself in the ontogenesis of language. Consider Chomsky's example of the rule for forming questions in English. For sentence (1) below, children able to deal with such examples would give (2) but not (3) as the corresponding question (Chomsky, 1975, p. 31).The man who is tall is in the room.Is the man who is tall in the room?*Is the man who tall is in the room?Now compare Sampson's evolutionary explanation for the structure-dependence of rules which is illustrated in (1)-(3): “once a behavior-pattern has become thoroughly established, it will tend to be treated as a fixed given when used as a constituent of a more complex, later-learned behavior-pattern” (p. 183). In order for this to account for Chomsky's example it would have to be the case that children learn relative clauses before they learn questions, which simply isn't true.In conclusion, we wish not to seem unaware of the problems with the position Sampson is attacking, or unaware of the sometimes dogmatic way it too has been presented. Chomsky's hypothesis of innate linguistic ideas seems, fundamentally, to derive from the claimed rapidity and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of limited and degenerate data. Chomsky appears to have been unwilling to argue these points directly or to show their relation to others, for which he has argued, for example, the implausibility of some abstract constraint's having been learned (cf. 1971, pp. 22–44; 1975, pp. 30–33; 1980, pp. 35–52). And almost from his first invoking of rationalism in support of his linguistic method, Chomsky has himself resorted to an unnecessarily polemical attack on empiricism (cf. 1965, p. 58, n. 33). The innateness issue is just not clear or simple enough to justify so much animus, or even conviction. (shrink)

We investigated the interface between biomedia and humans by inviting participants to interact with biometric devices that measured and visualized their body data. At first, they struggled with the alienating and disembodying nature of the devices and the constrained, reductionist representation of data. Through their bodily interactions with these devices, however, participants reframed the data and inserted their bodies into the process of data collection. Drawing on the ideas of Bergson, Grosz, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, we argue that by working with (...) their subjectivity in a mediated process of becoming, participants ‘filled in the intervals’ of the visual representations of their bodies to interpret them in ways that marked the duration and meaning of their selves. We conclude that even when presented with artificial representations, individuals convert the representation of the data into narratives inspired by their embodied experience, and the ‘virtual’ pasts of their own lives. (shrink)

The controversies related to John Taurek’s rescue case concern the importance of numbers in deciding about whom to help in situations in which there is a shortage of means. Taurek thinks that the number of the needy does not matter; we can save one person rather than many people. Since both common sense and the duty to responsibly administer help make us approve the decision to help those who are more in number, Taurek’s thesis seems counterintuitive. The majority of authors (...) discussing Taurek’s thesis defend the importance of numbers in such decisions, and few are inclined to accept some of his intuitions, recognizing the counting of people who need help as morally problematic. However, the authors who defend the importance of numbers reject a simple utilitarian approach and try to justify the claim that the majority should have priority in such a way that no person involved in the conflict of distribution could charge the rescuer with not having taken his or her claims into account. (shrink)

Every day we are confronted with numerous alienating phenomena and equally alienating ways of dealing with them. The question is: How we can deal with them in a positive way? In his latest book, Bernhard Waldenfels powerfully demonstrates that it is not enough to only examine the otherness of the other if we disregard the stranger in ourselves. He argues for a responsive stance that dares to confront the uncanniness of our experience. How valuable this is—for psychiatric contexts, sociopolitical challenges (...) and also for philosophy itself—clearly shows in the contributions to this discursive volume, which attempt a response from their own perspectives. (shrink)

I consider the contrast between Leibniz's relational concept of spacetime and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. I suggest that there are two interpretations of Leibniz's view, which I call L1 and L2. L1 amounts to saying that there is no real inertial structure to spacetime, whereas in general relativity the inertial structure is dynamical or real in Lande's sense ; i.e., it can be ‘kicked’ and ‘kicks back,’ causing gravitational effects. If there is no real inertial structure to (...) space-time then, as Weyl points out, the concept of the relative motive of several bodies has no more foundation than the concept of absolute motion for a single body. Thus, L1 seems to be untenable. L2 is a more sophisticated view which rejects the geometrical aspect of Newtonian space-time as a container for events, but accepts the existence of a real structure which determines the inertial properties of matter. (shrink)

Grounded theory has become an established approach in (applied) qualitative research. Researchers could have an on-going, relative freedom when using this research strategy but their creativity will have been limited by the number of participants and interviews, and by the methodology that they have declared in their research ethics committee application. Since no robust evidence exists about potential harm in qualitative research in general and grounded theory in particular, we should rethink whether a greater freedom might be allowed to researchers (...) when using a grounded theory approach. It is concluded that a greater freedom should be allowed, but only to skilled researchers as those with less experience might use less rigid rules to cover their lack of skills and research experience, potentially burdening the study participants unnecessarily. (shrink)

While public health ethics typically deals with issues wherein individual well-being competes with the population’s wellbeing, it also deals with competing groups’ well-being. Public health responses to the Chicago heat wave and Hurricane Katrina were strongly criticized, in part, because certain groups of people experienced far greater and longer-lasting losses compared to others. Diff erences in experience were largely due to socio-economic-political disadvantages or vulnerabilities. This article is written in light of the recent fi rst and second “waves” of the (...) H1N1 pandemic in Canada. Its focus is on people living in the community with a mental health or addiction problem during the pandemic and, more specifi cally, in the context of supplies of anti-viral medications and vaccines being limited. The article explores how certain social justice concerns may increase the risks of serious illness or death for these people and the kinds of compensatory responses that might be implemented. (shrink)

The passion narratives have often been read in ways that reinforce victimization of abused persons, particularly women, who accept any kind of suffering as their way of “carrying the cross” in the footsteps of Jesus. Yet these narratives can also help to galvanize communities of believers toward transformative change. The Johannine Jesus, who goes to calamity's depths for his friends, is one image that offers liberative possibilities.

Gerade in Ausnahmesituationen rücken Menschen zusammen – eigentlich. Das ist in Zeiten des Coronavirus anders, denn hier gilt das Gebot des „Social Distancing“. Ich möchte die Ambivalenz, die nicht nur in dieser paradoxen Wortkombination zum Ausdruck kommt, sondern auch in der Erfahrung von vielen Menschen, mit Hilfe eines leibphänomenologischen Zugangs näher beleuchten. Dabei untersuche ich, wie sich das spannungsreiche Verhältnis von Nähe und Distanz in Zeiten der Corona-Pandemie in Alltagssituationen sowie in Bildungskontexten zeigt. Darüber hinaus gehe ich der Frage nach, (...) was die Erfahrung des „Social Distancing“ für die Philosophie – nicht nur in Ausnahmesituationen – bedeuten kann, und plädiere dafür, sie als eine Übungsmöglichkeit des Philosophierens zwischen Nähe und Distanz, Körper und Geist, Eigenem und Fremdem sowie Natur und Kultur zu sehen, um auf diese Weise problematischen Extremen auf beiden Seiten zu entgehen. (shrink)

Background Citizen science and models for public participation in health research share normative ideals of participation, inclusion, and public and patient engagement. Academic researchers collaborate in research with members of the public involved in an issue, maximizing all involved assets, competencies, and knowledge. In citizen science new ethical issues arise, such as who decides, who participates, who is excluded, what it means to share power equally, or whose knowledge counts. This article aims to present an ethics framework that offers a (...) lens of understanding and heuristic guidelines to deal with ethical issues in citizen science. -/- Methods We conducted seven case studies between 2015 and 2021 to attune and validate the ethics framework for the context of citizen science. The cases related to studies with older adults, people with a psychiatric vulnerability, people dependent on community care, people who are unemployed or living in poverty or both, and young adults with respiratory disease. -/- Results Ethics in citizen science reaches beyond the ethical issues in traditional biomedical and health research. It entails more than following procedures about informed consent and privacy and submitting a proposal to a Medical Research Ethics Committee. Ethics in citizen science relates to everyday ethical issues during the study, including relational and moral complexities concerning collaboration, sharing power, and democratic decision-making. Dealing with these issues requires ethics work of researchers. This entails seeing ethically salient issues and reflecting on everyday ethical issues. Ethics work consists of seven features: framing work, role work, emotion work, identity work, reason work, relationship work, and performance work. All are relevant for researchers in citizen science. -/- Conclusions Ethical issues in citizen science often relate to power differentials, partnership, and collaboration between academics and non-academics. The ethics framework prepares researchers for the work needed in citizen science to act responsibly and offers a heuristic guide to reflect on ethics. Reflection on ethics is a pathway towards ethical citizen science, especially if researchers collaboratively reflect in partnership with non-academics who are subject to the moral issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Innova dies nostros, sicut a principio:Novelty and Nostalgia in Thomas of Celano's First and Second Lives of St. FrancisBarbara Newman (bio)IntroductionIn his sixth-century compendium of hagiography, Gregory of Tours argued that one should always speak of the vita patrum or vita sanctorum in the singular. According to Pliny, he noted, grammarians did not believe the noun vita had a plural. More to the point, although "there is a diversity (...) of merits and virtues among [the saints], … the one life of the body sustains them all in this world."1 Just as the Church, the body of Christ, is one, so too the saints. Their project of imitatio Christi re-presents the one and only life of Christ for each new generation. As a literary genre, hagiography fleshes out this insight, for no other genre is so steeped in self-citation. Every vita is such a tissue of biblical verses that, to edit a saint's Life before Google, one had to know Scripture by heart or spend endless hours with a concordance. After the Bible, quotations from a few classic vitae were constantly recycled: Athanasius' Life of St. Antony, Sulpicius Severus' Life of St. Martin, Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. With the passage of time, newer classics joined older ones to produce one vast, self-referential monument, incarnate in the Acta Sanctorum: Gregory's vita sanctorum multiplied ad infinitum. So deep did this tendency run that, when an obscure saint needed a vita to justify a cult, shameless hagiographers would plagiarize whole paragraphs, plundering stories and miracles from earlier vitae to serve their turn.2 [End Page 169]It is small wonder, then, that the hagiographic genre is so often characterized as "traditional" or "conservative." It is nostalgic, too, in the sense that each saint's words and deeds bring a glorious Golden Age back to life—most often the apostolic age or the time of the Desert Fathers, but sometimes the graced beginnings of a religious order. Such memorials enabled later generations to idealize their glorious founders. This tendency to exalt the new as a renovation of the old has deep roots in Christianity; even the evangelist Matthew systematically represents Jesus as a new Moses. In the same vein, it is not unusual to find a saint identified as a new Jacob or a second David. On the other hand, many saints' Lives make an insistent claim to newness, renovatio. For the saints were, and are, extraordinary—not merely good men and women, but radical figures whose words and deeds shocked those around them, beginning with their parents. Like Jesus, they had not only admirers, but detractors in plenty. If their publicists held them up as exemplars of virtue, theirs was no ordinary kind, for the heroic virtue that gave saints their charisma could look much like madness. Despite the precedents of earlier vitae, their ascetic feats and challenging behavior often struck observers as new and unheard-of. In hagiography, therefore, claims of novelty play a key role that balances the familiar topoi. Sometimes the newness of a saint's charism is cause for joyful celebration. Jesus, after all, had declared ecce nova facio omnia (Rev 21:5). But "novelties" also had to be handled with care, for they could easily be condemned as heresies or extreme practices deviating from the tradition of the elders.This tension between novelty and nostalgia emerges most clearly in the vitae of saints who founded genuinely new forms of religious life. In this paper I will explore the way it plays out in two early Lives of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most popular saint of all time. After his death in 1226, Francis set a speed record for canonization—one that would be surpassed in the Middle Ages only by his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua, and by the Dominican martyr Peter of Verona.3 Aside from his charisma and the exponential growth of the Franciscan Order, the fast-track canonization is due to Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Hugolino had been personally close to Francis and supported his movement. For the ceremony in July 1228, less than two years after the... (shrink)

This article argues that individuals paradigms have predominated social scientific explanations for gendered behavior in intimate relationships but that a microstructural paradigm adds necessary additional information. The results of a study designed to test the relative strengths of individualist and microstructural explanations for “mothering behavior” are presented. The microstructural hypothesis is that single fathers will adopt parental behavior that more closely resembles that of women who mother than that of married fathers. Parenting behaviors of single fathers, single mothers, married parents (...) with mothers at home, and married two-paycheck couples are compared. Overall, the hypothesis is supported. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of the microstructural perspective for social change in a feminist direction. (shrink)

Further proof of Professor Kenney's assertion that in the case of prodelided est the syncopated form was written by Ovid as well as spoken is provided by Metamorphoses 15.426ff.

Featuring the biographies of leading feminists of the era - Emily Davies, Frances Power Cobbe, Josephine Butler and Millicent Garrett Fawcett - this study explores feminist ideas and strategies of the late 19th century, analyzing the tensions which arose as feminism sought to achieve its aims.

This paper compares Tocqueville's concept of democracy to the social and political evolution of Brazil. It draws attention to the different points of departure which marked the establishment of American and Brazilian societies, through the works of authors such as Laura de Mello e Souza, Gilberto Freyre, Florestan Fernandes, Celso Furtado, and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. It notes that, despite conditions being more favourable for the formation of a democratic society in the United States than in Brazil, subsequent to the (...) founding periods a certain coming together occurred in the process of formation of the two societies. The 'similarity of differences' between American and Brazilian societies becomes clear as soon as one brings together the roles played by the three constituent ethnic groups of these societies, which, by their simple existence, link difference to inequality. (shrink)

Mark Greenberg has made a transcendental attack on a metaphysical position that some notable legal positivists have held -- namely, that law is ultimately grounded in social facts. He has also pressed legal positivism at a point of perceived vulnerability – the failure of such positivists to develop and defend a compelling theory of legal content. Moreover, in his Moral Impact Theory of law, he preserves a necessary connection between legal obligations and good reasons for action that is absent in (...) legal positivism. One of his arguments against legal positivism relies heavily on what he calls "the bindingness hypothesis"—namely, the claim that it is part of the “nature of law” that it is “supposed to operate” so as to “arrange matters” to “reliably ensure” that its legal obligations are genuinely, all-things-considered, binding. I argue that Greenberg’s defense of the bindingness hypothesis fails, and with it, one of his defenses of his Moral Impact Theory of Law. I attack two other defenses: the assertion that the Moral Impact Theory makes it easy to account for our concern with law, with the implication that legal positivism cannot so easily account for that concern; and the claim that his Moral Impact Theory fits appellate practice better than some views. I show that these the arguments for the Moral Impact Theory are inadequate. In response to Greenberg’s further argument that the Moral Impact Theory rescues the idea of legal obligation as genuine obligation, I argue that the Moral Impact Theory does so at a very steep price – one that is not worth paying. (shrink)

In the early 12th century, a Jewish community first settled in the medieval city of Erfurt (Thuringia). The synagogue, the mikvah (ritual bath), and several private dwellings of this community are preserved until today. A room in one of the private houses formerly inhabited by Jews has a wooden beam ceiling, dating from 1244, which is colourfully painted with tendrils, leaves and blossoms. This ceiling was added to the room together with other extensive refurbishments: the former door in the eastern (...) wall was replaced with a built-in cupboard, a new door as well as a recess for an oil lamp were added to the northern wall, and the room received an oriel window. Furthermore, the ceiling shows the remains of suspensions for lamps, and traces of shelves are still visible on the walls. As an ensemble, these alterations suggest that the chamber was converted into a prayer room in the mid-13th century. As the only preserved example of a medieval Jewish private room for prayer, it constitutes an important source for understanding Jewish piety in the German-speaking lands. (shrink)

Landau introduces the volume with a selective review of Lila R. Gleitman’s intellectual history, emphasizing the theoretical roots of her research. These include influences of Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky, her creation of “The Great Verb Game” (which paved the way for the theory of syntactic bootstrapping), the importance of natural “deprivation” experiments, and how they shed light on understanding what the data for learning really might be, and her life as an empiricist, driven by data to nativist conclusions. The (...) introduction also provides brief summaries of each contributed paper. (shrink)

In a provocative book, Andrew Carstairs- McCarthy argues that the apparently universal distinction in human languages between sentences and noun phrases cannot be assumed to be inevitable for languages with the expressive power of human languages, but needs explaining. His work suggests, but does not explicitly state, that there is also no conceptual necessity for the distinction between basic types e and t, a distinction argued for by Frege and carried into formal semantics through the work of Montague. Pragmatic distinctions (...) among various kinds of speech acts, including asserting, questioning, commanding, and pointing things out are assumed in Carstairs- McCarthy ’s work, as are expressions of functional types; what is questioned is whether a syntacticized sentence-NP distinction is essential. (shrink)

Although patient education is central to the ethical practice of nursing, it can be practiced in an ethically contested or unethical way. It is sometimes used to: forward a societal goal the individual might not have chosen; assume that patients should learn to accommodate unjust treatment; exclude the views of all except the dominant health care provider group; limit the knowledge a patient can receive; make invalid or unreliable judgments about what a patient can learn; or require a patient to (...) change his or her identity to meet a medical ideal. Both health promotion education and manipulating patient beliefs in situations of uncertainty are ethically contested. Nussbaum's capabilities approach is used here as a moral framework through which to view the goals and practice of patient education. This provides better guidance than the current conception of patient education as an instrument to carry out the directives of medical practice. (shrink)

This volume examines 'domestic colonialism' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and analyzes domestic colonies empirically - across several countries using primary, archival, and secondary sources - and theoretically, through the writings of leading thinkers of the period.