As a maverick philosopher unafraid of challenging the ideas and methods of his colleagues, Clément Rosset’s work attempts to connect sometimes-lofty academic philosophy with the concerns of everyday life. For decades, he has worked to illuminate some of the most obscure metaphysical issues, often using popular film, theatre, novels, and comic books to illustrate his ideas, and as a result he has gained a reputation as both a happy sage and a singular mind. In _The Real and Its Double,_ expertly (...) translated by Chris Turner, Rosset takes on the question of the Real and humanity’s natural ability to sidestep and bypass it. The key to this type of evasion, Rosset suggests, is a certain form of oracular thinking that lies buried in the origins of Western metaphysics and psychology. Here, Rosset eschews the prolix and paradoxical psychological theories of Derrida and Lacan in favor of an exceptional lucidity that speaks to his Nietzschean-tragic love of life. If good philosophy can be defined as expressing complicated things in a simple way, then here, in one of his best-known works, Rosset has proven himself a master. (shrink)

This article examines the prospects for an authentic regional architecture in the light of alternative development paradigms. It is argued that the failure of orthodox development strategies and the domination of western culture, including architecture, over non-Western cultures, is due to fundamental imbalances between northern and southern economic structures. By contrast, ecodevelopment, appropriate technology and regional architecture all represent significant devolutionary movements toward a global “eco-culture.” A cultural typology placing eco-culture in historical perspective is outlined. It is concluded that, to (...) be fully effective, changes in development patterns in the south have to be matched by equivalent cultural changes in the North. (shrink)

Concerns of intellectual property infringement in China slow the dissemination of clean technology (Cleantech) innovation that could help bring the pace of global warming under control. We use the U.S. post‐World War 2 policy decisions with respect to Japan and Europe (the Marshall Plan) to show how this problem can be addressed. To help Japan become a western style democracy and stem the tide of communism, the U.S. transferred much of its extant intellectual property to Japan with a promise to (...) open US markets to Japanese goods. The United States did not require Japan to open its markets to U.S. goods. As a result, Japan became a staunch U.S. political ally in Asia, but also a serious economic competitor to the United States. While the Marshall Plan deployed different resources, the political outcomes were similar to Japan: Western Europe was a bulwark against communism. As global warming has become a major strategic issue, we argue that a comparable IPR initiative is required for China. This is not just a matter of doing the right thing as members of global commons, but is also matter of national security. We propose that by facilitating and managing the flow and sharing of U.S., EU, and Japanese Cleantech intellectual property with China—through a Cleantech Marshall Plan—a positive strategic relationship may be built while helping to bring global warming under control. (shrink)

As a maverick philosopher unafraid of challenging the ideas and methods of his colleagues, Clément Rosset's work attempts to connect sometimes-lofty academic philosophy with the concerns of everyday life. For decades, he has worked to illuminate some of the most obscure metaphysical issues, often using popular film, theatre, novels, and comic books to illustrate his ideas, and as a result he has gained a reputation as both a happy sage and a singular mind. In The Real and Its Double, expertly (...) translated by Chris Turner, Rosset takes on the question of the Real and humanity's natural ability to sidestep and bypass it. The key to this type of evasion, Rosset suggests, is a certain form of oracular thinking that lies buried in the origins of Western metaphysics and psychology. Here, Rosset eschews the prolix and paradoxical psychological theories of Derrida and Lacan in favor of an exceptional lucidity that speaks to his Nietzschean-tragic love of life. If good philosophy can be defined as expressing complicated things in a simple way, then here, in one of his best-known works, Rosset has proven himself a master. (shrink)

The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical governance models, the promotion of entrepreneurial leadership cultures, and the promotion of a discourse of pursuing educational equity by (...) means of ‘achievement for all’. This paper explores the emergence of a mode of teacher professionalism characteristic of these quasi-autonomous schools, and conceptualises this as being ‘neo-performative’. The neo-performative profession is shaped by the shift in the focus of the regulation and management of schools from ‘governing to governance’, and the consequential rise of the ‘responsibilised profession’, and marked by the emergence of an entrepreneurial model of school leadership. The paper argues that this new conceptualisation of teacher professionalism requires further, more focused, empirical study in order to explore how neoperformative teachers and school leaders articulate their vision of educational equity and social justice, and how they enact this vision in an increasingly intensified high-stakes accountability culture. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have disagreed about whether "the folk" are intuitively incompatibilists or compatibilists, and they have disagreed about the role of abstraction in generating such intuitions. New experimental evidence using Construal Level Theory is presented. The experiments support the views that the folk are intuitively both incompatibilists and compatibilists, and that abstract mental representations do shift intuitions, but not in a univocal way.

Ethical or ‘socially sustainable’ sourcing mechanisms mandating labour standards among the suppliers and subcontractors that organisations source goods and services from are becoming more common. The issue of how labour activist groups such as trade unions can encourage organisations to adopt and strengthen these mechanisms within domestic production networks is largely unexplored. Using three cases of domestic sustainable sourcing campaigns developed by unions in Britain, the strategies used by labour activists, the characteristics of the organisations targeted and the motivations of (...) lead firms for improving sourcing practices are analysed. The article makes a significant contribution by demonstrating that organisational susceptibility to reputational risk is a key factor influencing the capacity of activist groups to convince and compel their targets to improve sourcing practices. It argues that different types of organisations are susceptible to reputational damage in different ways, that risk events provide opportunities for unions to strengthen their leverage against target organisations, and that the multidimensional nature of corporate reputation needs to be better considered for understanding how campaigns are framed and executed. (shrink)

Law and the Formation of Modern Europe explores processes of legal construction in both the national and supranational domains, and it provides an overview of the modern European legal order. In its supranational focus, it examines the sociological pressures which have given rise to European public law, the national origins of key transnational legal institutions and the elite motivations driving the formation of European law. In its national focus, it addresses legal questions and problems which have assumed importance in parallel (...) fashion in different national societies, and which have shaped European law more indirectly. Examples of this are the post-1914 transformation of classical private law, the rise of corporatism, the legal response to the post-1945 legacy of authoritarianism, the emergence of human rights law and the growth of judicial review. This two-level sociological approach to European law results in unique insights into the dynamics of national and supranational legal formation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A review of two of the strands of cultural studies that Mark Fenster contends are superior to Murray Edelman’s analysis of mass public opinion—Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and Bourdieu’s sociology—and a more general look at work in the field of cultural studies suggests that all of these alternatives suffer from severe theoretical and methodological limitations. Future studies of culture and politics need to pose questions similar to the ones that preoccupied Edelman, but they must move beyond the political and (...) interpretive biases that have dominated cultural studies (some of which Edelman shared), as well as the questionable view of “ideology” as a matter of elite domination of the masses, rather than as a mediating, constitutive force in the process of individual opinion formation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Habermasian ideal of deliberation has long been seen as an extension of, and complement to, political action. But Diana Mutz's empirical studies of face-to-face interactions reveal a conflict between political participation and political deliberation: The more likely people are to be exposed to diverse political opinions, the less likely they are to participate, and those who participate most tend to have the least exposure to diverse political opinions. She hypothesizes, however, that the infrastructure of the Internet might allow (...) for the creation of a forum for online political debate that is sufficiently generalizable to result in deliberation. Champions of the Internet's democratic potential similarly praise its diversifying influence on political discussion and the ways in which it lowers barriers to access. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that new technologies have truly transformed political action or produced meaningful deliberation at significant levels. It appears that many of the trends and behaviors Mutz identifies in face-to-face interaction apply to digital interaction as well. (shrink)

Many recent attacks on consequentialism and several defenses of pluralism have relied on arguments for the incommensurability of value. Such arguments have, generally, turned on empirical appeals to aspects of our everyday experience of value conflict. My intention, largely, is to bypass these arguments and turn instead to a discussion of the conceptual apparatus needed to make the claim that values are incommensurable. After delineating what it would mean for values to be incommensurable, I give an a priori argument that (...) such is impossible. It is widely accepted that value is conceptually tied to desire. I argue that, more specifically, it is proportional to merited desire strength. This connection gives one a metric of all value if there is any such thing. This metric entails that value is a complete ordering over all states of affairs, or, in other words, that value is commensurable. (shrink)

As the global prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease increases, the need to understand family caregiving becomes increasingly pressing. I argue that there is an under-recognized form of caregiving for people with early to mid-stage Alzheimer’s disease. This type of caregiving involves, roughly, helping people reason through their values. It arises along with the loss of the capacity for executive functioning. Moreover, it is prone to give rise to moral distress, which is an under-recognized vulnerability in family caregiving. Categories of family caregiving (...) thus need to be expanded, and moral distress needs to be recognized not only in the context of nursing. (shrink)

Judgments of character traits tend to be overcorrelated, a bias known as the halo effect. We conducted two studies to test an explanation of the effect based on shared lexical context and connotation. Study 1 tested whether the context similarity of trait names could explain 39 participants’ ratings of the probability that two traits would co-occur. Over 126 trait pairs, cosine similarity between the word2vec vectors of the two words was a reliable predictor of the human judgments of trait co-occurrence (...) probability (cross-validated r2 =.19, p <.001). Two measures related to word similarity increased the variation accounted for in the human judgments to 45%, cross-validated (p <.001). In Experiment 2, 40 different participants judged similarity of word meaning within the pairs, confirming that the word pairs were not simply synonymous (Average [SD] = 40.8/100 [13.1/100]). Shared lexical context and word connotation play a role in shaping the halo effect. (shrink)

The central focus of this article is to share several experiential activities we have designed in our teaching careers that we use to help education students, primarily undergraduates and teacher candidates, access philosophical ideas and enter philosophical discussions. The examples shared below come from our attempts to help students reach key concepts and abstract ideas in some well-known educational philosophical discussions, through engaging in experiences relating to them. They are based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, John Dewey’s scientific method, (...) and Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. The focus for this article is not so much on the specific content or philosophical interpretation of these works but instead on the activities themselves as a means towards better understanding the concept of experiential learning itself. The three examples we present serve to show ways in which well-designed and thoroughly-considered experiences can serve as a bridge to difficult and abstract material while also honoring a more expansive range of learning styles. (shrink)

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the (...) practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives. (shrink)

A letter to the editor from Françoise Baylis and Chris Kaposy concerning the recent commentary by Toby Schonfeld and colleagues , which was written in response to Baylis and Kaposy’s article.

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the concept of biopiracy, which initially emerged to challenge various aspects of the regime for intellectual property rights in living organisms, as well as related aspects pertaining to the ownership and apportioning of benefits from ‘genetic resources’ derived from the world’s biodiversity.This paper proposes that we take the allegation of biopiracy seriously due to the impact it has as an intervention which indexes a number of different, yet interrelated, problematizations of biodiversity, biotechnology and IPR. Using the neem (...) tree case as an example, it describes activists’ use of the term as one that involves a deliberate simplification of science and IPR. Additionally, it argues that in so doing, biopiracy is positioned as a touchstone that mobilizes actors and problems, and ultimately generates ‘solutions’ to the very challenges it creates.The paper will also encourage a view of biopiracy claims that does not always treat them simply as claims of theft, or as a misallocation of benefits, but rather as claims that are designed to raise broader questions about the IPR system itself. It concludes by advocating that, in order to properly understand how to address biopiracy, we must be prepared to move beyond the current narrow readings to develop a more complete picture of the term’s influence in challenging how, and by whom, the decisions about what is natural and what is invented come to be made. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is comprised of two broad projects, the negative project and the positive project, each of which is a response to a kind of armchair use of intuitions. I examine two examples of the negative project-the analysis of knowledge and the theory of reference-and two examples of the positive project-free will and intentional action-and review criticisms of each example. I show how the criticisms can be met and argue that even if they could not have been met, experimental philosophy (...) raises important questions about methodology, opening the door on new questions and new ways of looking at old questions. For that reason, experimental philosophy as a movement is robust and full of potential. (shrink)

Successor views in the free will literature are views that reject the assumption behind the compatibility question, the question of whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Specifically, they challenge the assumption that the compatibility question must be answered with either a yes or a no. One premise typically found in arguments for successor views is the premise that there are certain challenging cases where we have compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions within the same case. This paper gives empirical support (...) for that premise by presenting an experiment that yields an actor-observer asymmetry in intuitions about the compatibility questions. Given causal determinism, intuitions are incompatibilist when we think about someone else doing an action, but intuitions are compatibilist when we think about our own action as judged by someone else. (shrink)

This book is an excellent and accessible overview of the position that children learn the meanings of words by applying a variety of nonlinguistic cognitive tools to the problem. We take issue with Bloom's emphasis on Theory of Mind as an explanatory mechanism for language learning; and with his claim that only unitary objects are nameable.

Whatever else language may be, it is complex and multifaceted. Shanker & King (S&K) have tried to contrast a dynamic interactive view of language with an information processing view. I take issue with two main claims: first, that the dynamic interactive view of language is a “new paradigm” in either animal research or human language studies; and second, that the dynamic systems language-as-dance view of language is in any way incompatible with an information-processing view of language. That some information is (...) defined in coregulated social interaction guarantees the dancing. That all information is composed of relevant differences guarantees the information processing. (shrink)

Steels & Belpaeme (S&B) describe the role of genetic evolution in linguistic category sharing among a population of agents. We consider their methodology and conclude that, although it is plausible that genetic evolution is sufficient for such tasks, there is a bias in the presented work for such a conclusion to be reached. We suggest ways to eliminate this bias and make the model more convincingly relevant to the cognitive sciences.

This essay replies to the various criticisms made of Framing the Early Middle Ages. It concedes a number of points relating to the importance of ideologies, the distinction between élites and aristocracies, the issue of money, and the question of the importance of the productive forces. It defends the comparative method and defends the discussions of coloni and of the spatial limitations of the peasant-mode of production in Framing. It also explores the nature of the state and aristocracy in this (...) period. (shrink)

In the ongoing debate about the impact that studies of public ignorance should have on the study of culture, Mark Fenster and Bret Chandler assume that wider political participation must be our goal, because, to them, political ignorance is a culturally imposed, and therefore removable, obstacle—as if, without the baleful influence of culture, political participants would be well informed. Culture is indeed a primary influence on people's political opinions, so political scientists should indeed study the role it plays in the (...) formation of political beliefs. But such studies should begin with ignorance as people's default position, and should refrain from assuming that the source of ignorance is cultural domination or manipulation. (shrink)

Written in an engaging narrative style these philosophical investigations undermine racist hierarchies along with false natualistic conceptions of the meanings of race and universalistic understandings of gender, by considering whiteness as it shapes and is infused by gender, class, sexuality, and culture. Central to this project are questions about how it is that culture and the state create such a wide range of different people who understand themselves as white. The essays collected here discuss how one learns to be a (...) good white Southern woman, what it means to pass as white, and whether there really is a dilemma that accompanies white privilege. (shrink)

To build an argument--and particularly an argument presented as a monologue--a writer must assemble and marshal a battery of supports for a claim. Some of those supports will be arranged in convergent structures, some as linked; some will be expressed, some will be left implicit; sometimes a support will need further support of its own--and sometimes, not. This paper explores the factors which lead a writer to make particular choices, the interactions between those factors, and the constraints on a w (...) riter's freedom in exercising her power, drawing on recent findings in computational modelling of the generation process. (shrink)

Recent research by the author has established that boards have an important and significant role to play when it comes to their organisations' strategy and strategic planning process. But is there room for improvement? According to the directors that have participated in an ongoing research project, the answer is most definitely 'yes'. The current paper identifies and discusses the top 13 areas of improvement, which directors feel need to be addressed if their responsibility for strategy is to be exercised properly. (...) The author's findings point especially to the types of practices that modern boards need to follow if they are serious about getting the maximum benefit from their engagement with management in an organisation's strategic planning process. (shrink)

Many work on flushing out what our consciousness means in cognitive and phenomenological terms, but no one has yet connected the dots on how consciousness and truth intersect, much less how our phenomenal consciousness can form the ground for most of our models of truth. Here, I connect those dots and argue that the basic structure of our phenomenal consciousness grounds the nature of truth as concordance, to harmonize in agreement, and that most extant theories on truth are well explained (...) in that grounding. Said another way, the unifying and bifurcating intentional structure of phenomenal consciousness is the non-epistemic ground of truth, such that most theories of truth can be explained as particular expressions of concordance based upon the differing aspects of that ground. (shrink)

Introduction to the Routley/Sylvan Issue.

This paper explores the model theory of relevant arithmetic, emphasizing the structure of nonstandard natural numbers in the relevant arithmetic R#. In particular, the authors prove the “Alien Intruder Theorem” guaranteeing the existence of a model of R# including the rational numbers in which each rational acts as a nonstandard natural number. The authors conclude by considering some consequences of and open questions about the construction used in the theorem.

Le mot «milieu» est précieux pour souligner que les installations humaines – l’architecture, la ville – tiennent compte de leur environnement, naturel ou bâti. Avant de configurer «un monde», l’art humain configure un lieu et même l’élit et le transfigure en le métamorphosant, faisant de milieux donnés des «lieux» habitables voire mémorables aux multiples formes de délimitations, d’échanges et de devenir. La notion de milieu habité est mise en perspective et pensée en termes de limites, passages, liens et métamorphoses.