We describe research carried out as part of a text summarisation project for the legal domain for which we use a new XML corpus of judgments of the UK House of Lords. These judgments represent a particularly important part of public discourse due to the role that precedents play in English law. We present experimental results using a range of features and machine learning techniques for the task of predicting the rhetorical status of sentences and for the task of selecting (...) the most summary-worthy sentences from a document. Results for these components are encouraging as they achieve state-of-the-art accuracy using robust, automatically generated cue phrase information. Sample output from the system illustrates the potential of summarisation technology for legal information management systems and highlights the utility of our rhetorical annotation scheme as a model of legal discourse, which provides a clear means for structuring summaries and tailoring them to different types of users. (shrink)

BackgroundImplementation science research, especially when using participatory and co-design approaches, raises unique challenges for research ethics committees. Such challenges may be poorly addressed by approval and governance mechanisms that were developed for more traditional research approaches such as randomised controlled trials.DiscussionImplementation science commonly involves the partnership of researchers and stakeholders, attempting to understand and encourage uptake of completed or piloted research. A co-creation approach involves collaboration between researchers and end users from the onset, in question framing, research design and delivery, (...) and influencing strategy, with implementation and broader dissemination strategies part of its design from gestation. A defining feature of co-creation is its emergent and adaptive nature, making detailed pre-specification of interventions and outcome measures impossible. This methodology sits oddly with ethics committee protocols that require precise pre-definition of interventions, mode of delivery, outcome measurements, and the role of study participants. But the strict requirements of ethics committees were developed for a purpose – to protect participants from harm and help ensure the rigour and transparency of studies. We propose some guiding principles to help square this circle. First, ethics committees should acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of research approaches, both formally and informally ; without active support, their members may not understand or value participatory designs. Second, ground rules should be established for co-design applications and communicated to committee members and stakeholders. Third, the benefits of power-sharing should be recognised and credit given to measures likely to support this important goal, especially in research with vulnerable communities. Co-design is considered best practice, for example, in research involving indigenous peoples in New Zealand, Australia and Canada. (shrink)

The well-known experiments of Nisbett and Wilson lead to the conclusion that we have no introspective access to our decision-making processes. Johansson et al. have recently developed an original protocol consisting in manipulating covertly the relationship between the subjects’ intended choice and the outcome they were presented with: in 79.6% of cases, they do not detect the manipulation and provide an explanation of the choice they did not make, confirming the findings of Nisbett and Wilson. We have reproduced this protocol, (...) while introducing for some choices an expert guidance to the description of this choice. The subjects who were assisted detected the manipulation in 80% of cases. Our experiment confirms Nisbett and Wilson’s findings that we are usually unaware of our decision processes, but goes further by showing that we can access them through specific mental acts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moments of Beating Addiction and Inscription in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”Barbara Claire Freeman (bio)My title, which alludes to the collection of autobiographical essays authored by Virginia Woolf and entitled Moments of Being, implies that being and beating are co-constitutive and that exploring their interdependence may shed light upon the logic that binds the one to the other. In particular, I want to examine the ways (...) in which Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”—it is the longest essay in the collection and presumably incomplete, since Woolf wrote the last entry shortly before killing herself in 1941—sets up a complex relationship between beating, writing, and compulsion. For the text in which the phrase “moment of being” first occurs also reveals that the activity of writing, to which Woolf was addicted, has the symbolic valence of beating and functions at the level of language in the same ways that beating functions on the body. I will begin to unpack this perhaps obscure equation by focusing upon the relationship between being and beating in the experiences that define Woolf’s “moments of being.” 1In the opening pages of “A Sketch,” Woolf describes the routine, eminently forgettable aspects of daily life as “a kind of nondescript cotton wool”; the phrase is her “private shorthand” for the general and diffuse “moments of non-being” that predominate in daily life and in which, by contrast, “moments of being” are “embedded” [70]. “Every day,” Woolf notes, “includes much more non-being than being”; and although “the real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being” [70], Woolf believes that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern” [72] and that her vocation as a writer is to discover and communicate it.Though occasionally “moments of being” produce the experience of rapture or ecstasy, an aspect of beating I will presently explore, most frequently they name moments that entail negation and self-shattering. “Moments of being” are moments of extreme violence that “remain interesting” [78] not because they lead to self-transcendence or discovery, but because they provoke a sense of utter helplessness and paralysis. With one exception, Woolf’s “moments” involve memories of being beaten up by life: “a sudden violent shock” occurs “when something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life” [71]. Woolf’s submission to her brother Thoby’s beating remains in her memory as inaugural:The first: I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of [End Page 65] something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed.[71]The shock of a beating occasions Woolf’s knowledge that rupture may function as a form of revelation; its reception initiates a drive to repeat in words the impact and imprint of the blows she has received. Being beaten not only provides her with a paradigm of being, but institutes a reciprocal and necessary relationship between beating and writing in which the one elicits and engenders the other. 2Another “moment” recounts the experience of being “dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape” upon hearing about the suicide of a family friend, a certain Mr. Valpy:I overheard my father or mother say that Mr. Valpy had killed himself. The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr. Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit night—in a trance of horror.... My body seemed paralysed.[71]As Woolf’s body received her brother’s blows, her consciousness receives the shock of overhearing news of a suicide. The memory of Mr... (shrink)

This article is devoted to the description of the experience associated with listening to a sound. In the first part, we describe the method we used to gather descriptions of auditory experience and to analyse these descriptions. This work of explicitation and analysis has enabled us to identify a threefold generic structure of this experience, depending on whether the attention of the subject is directed towards the event which is at the source of the sound, the sound in itself, considered (...) independently from its source, the felt sound. In the second part of the article, we describe this structure. The third part is devoted to a discussion of these results and the paths they open up in various fields of theoretical and applied research. (shrink)

My comments on this pioneering book by Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel do not focus on the descriptions of experiences that it includes, but on the very process of description, which seems to me insufficiently highlighted, described and called into question. First I will rely on a few indications given by Melanie herself, the subject interviewed by the authors, to highlight an essential difficulty which the authors only touch upon: the not immediately recognized charac-ter of lived experience. Then I will (...) look for clues about what Melanie does to come into contact with her experience and recognize it. These clues -- completed by elements of description of this act collected through explicitation interviews -- provide criteria enabling a more precise evaluation of what the authors do to guide Melanie in the real-ization of this act, and therefore the accuracy of Melanie's descrip-tions. I will defend the idea that the description of the very process of becoming aware and describing is an essential condition for the understanding, refinement, teaching, and evaluation of introspection methods, as well as for the reproducibility of their results. (shrink)

Indeterminate Bodies organizes a number of theoretical and empirical studies around the concept and actuality of indeterminacy, as it relates to body and society. Located within the struggle to apprehend different categories of ‘body’ in the volatile flows of late-capital, indeterminacy is considered through such multiple incarnations as economy, contingency, inheritance, question, force, uncertainty, materiality and affective resistance to determination. While indeterminacy is often positioned as the ‘trouble’ or friction in subject/object knowledge-formation (framed as ontological or empirical challenge), it also (...) engenders affects such that some subjects are both in and out of recognition. Questions of indeterminacy overlap with work on imperceptibility, giving rise to interlocked questions about the modes of representation, categorization, inclusion, exclusion and sensibility in the production of bodies. We address the hesitancies, difficulties and necessities of working with and through indeterminacy in order open up new descriptions, visions and modes of political work. (shrink)

Gender, Power and Sexuality is a collection of original and exciting articles by well-known feminists which makes a major contribution to our understanding of the ways in which men exercise control over girls and women in their daily lives, in the home, at school, at work and in the courts. Women are seen to resent and challenge male power, but, the institutionalisation of male power is shown to mitigate against women taking control over their own lives.

Around the world, unhealthy diets are a leading cause of disease. Shifting population diets in a healthier direction will require downstream policy interventions. This means changing the composition of the processed food supply, particularly reducing salt, sugar and fat. Mandatory nutrient limits imposed by government are one way of achieving this. However, they have been criticized as a particularly intrusive regulatory option, interfering with both free markets and free choices. At the same time, voluntary industry reformulation has become an intervention (...) favoured by national governments, the World Health Organization and the food industry. This article uses a comparison of the two interventions—which share a common public health goal, albeit achieved through different regulatory means—as a basis to evaluate the ethical charges against mandatory nutrient limits. It makes three main findings: that both affect free dietary choice in very similar ways; that dominant public health ethics frameworks are not well equipped to compare mandatory and voluntary forms of regulation; and that food governance is inherently multisectoral, involving markets, governments and the public. Taking these findings into account, the article calls for a more nuanced ethical evaluation of food reformulation policies. (shrink)

In french and english speaking countries, the articulation between epistemological beliefs, conceptions of teaching and learning and pedagogical practices of secondary school teachers in the natural sciences and humanities has been little studied (Araújo-Oliveira, 2012 ; Bartos et Lederman, 2014 ; Wanlin et al., 2019). Yet, while teachers display predominantly constructivist beliefs about teaching and learning, their teaching practices remain rather passive (OECD, 2019). Like in Therriault et al. (2018-2023), this article explores the characteristics of epistemological beliefs, conceptions of teaching (...) and learning, and teaching practices among a population of 112 secondary school teachers (beginners, intermediate and experienced) in the humanities and natural sciences in French-speaking Belgium. In a second step, we explore the articulations between these three theoretical constructs either from statistical analyses or from a more interpretative perspective. Quantitative analysis of the data (PCA, factorial ANOVA, correlations and Chi-square) show that teachers’ epistemological beliefs are rather refined, that there is an effect of professional seniority on these beliefs and that there is a link between refined epistemological beliefs and traditional conceptions of teaching and learning. Finally, teachers’ self-reported practices appear to be insensitive to the discipline being taught. (shrink)

Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance (...) to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged. (shrink)

By drawing attention to these facts and to the relationship between Cantor’s and Husserl's ideas, I have tried to contribute to putting Frege's attack on Husserl "in the proper light" by providing some insight into some of the issues underling criticisms which Frege himself suggested were not purely aimed at Husserl's book. I have tried to undermine the popular idea that Frege's review of the Philosophy of Arithmetic is a straightforward, objective assessment of Husserl’s book, and to give some specific (...) reasons for thinking that the uncritical reading of Frege's review has unfairly distorted philosophers' perception of a work they do not know very well. (shrink)

I argue that level-incoherence is epistemically valuable in a specific set of epistemic environments: those in which it is easy to acquire justified false beliefs about normative requirements of epistemic rationality. I argue that in these environments level-incoherence is the rationally dominant strategy. Nevertheless, level-incoherent combinations exhibit a distinctive tension, and this tension has been thought by many to indicate that level-incoherence is always irrational. Although this idea has proved resilient, I argue that it is incorrect. I evaluate three candidate (...) explanations for the distinctive tension exhibited by level-incoherent combinations, only one of which is the traditional view (which I call the ‘Prohibition View’) that epistemic level-incoherence is prohibited by epistemic rationality. I argue instead for the ‘Inquiry View’, according to which level-incoherence is not rationally criticisable but is a reason to undertake further inquiry. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews and observational work with practicing U.K. plant scientists, this article uses Michel Callon's work as a tool to explore the issue of collaboration between academic science and business, in particular, calls by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council for a return to “public good” plant science. In an article titled “Is Science a Public Good?” Callon contributed to the debate about the commercialization of science by suggesting that commercialization and the public good need not be incompatible. (...) Moving away from arguments that center on the effects of business involvement in science, he suggested that analysts use another model, centered on “diversity.” This model allows us to ask what society might want from science, what public good science might look like, and how public good science can be ensured while also recognizing that science cannot be easily separated from the market. (shrink)

Les situations de séparation conflictuelle entre parents peuvent provoquer une rupture du lien entre l’enfant et un de ses parents. L’espace de rencontre ( er ), en mettant en place des droits de visite encadrés, est alors le dernier recours de ces parents pour retisser un lien. Dans l’ er dont il est question dans cet article, les visites concernent principalement le père, la mère étant alors le parent gardien. Dans ce cadre ont été rencontrés des enfants qui affichaient une (...) volonté de rompre tout lien avec leur père, ce refus massif s’apparentant à un clivage de loyauté. Pour comprendre cette attitude, l’article interroge, à travers le cas de Marie, la dimension psychosociale de la fonction paternelle, la dimension intrapsychique et la dynamique relationnelle dans cette triade père-mère-enfant afin d’envisager le dispositif à mettre en place dans les situations de conflit de loyauté. (shrink)

Il y a deux types d'absence. S'ensuivant de quelque perte ou de quelque attente caractérisée, la première se rapporte à un objet déterminé. Tout à l'inverse, plus générale et plus fondamentale, la seconde est si indéterminée qu'elle nous laisse désemparés de ne pas même savoir ce qui nous manque. C'est elle qui est à l'origine aussi bien des désespoirs amoureux que de l'espérance philosophique, et qui explique qu'il y ait en nous, comme disait Malebranche, 'toujours du mouvement pour aller plus (...) loin'. C'est elle aussi qui suscite la question de Faust dans l'opéra de Berlioz, que nul ne peut s'empêcher de poser et qui sert de fil directeur au présent essai: 'où trouver ce qui manque à ma vie?'"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Née en 1943 à Alger, Andrée Job-Querzola poursuit des études de lettres à Aix-en-Provence puis à Paris dans les années 1960. Devenue enseignante, elle gravite dans la mouvance féministe et d’extrême gauche et participe activement aux événements de Mai. Marquée par les luttes féministes des années 1970, en particulier celles du MLF, du MLAC, du MFPF, elle souhaite rendre hommage aux femmes de sa génération – « une génération rebelle » qui, selon elle, sonne le glas de « générations de (...) femmes f... (shrink)

Discussions of the problem of emergency powers often assume that norms and exceptions constitute its conceptual structure. This perspective is both self-undermining and dangerous. Because even the critics of emergency powers often rely on this dichotomy, clarifying the conceptual terrain might contribute to the development of a safer approach to emergencies. Hence, this article explores the origins and logic of modern exceptionalism by examining instances of its careful articulation in the history of political thought: in the “republican” exceptionalism of Machiavelli (...) and Rousseau and the “decisionist” exceptionalism of Schmitt and Hobbes. (shrink)

"L'usage substantivé du mot 'soi' est intriguant. Le pronom tonique 'soi' ne pose pas de problème particulier dans les expressions comme 'prendre soin de soi', 'compter sur soi' ou 'être hors de soi'. Mais parler d'un 'soi', c'est aller au-delà de la réalité grammaticale et supposer une identité personnelle à travers la diversité des expériences. Or, l'idée de soi et la croyance en l'identité personnelle ont été mises en question par David Hume, dont les arguments résonnent toujours dans la philosophie (...) contemporaine. Le but de ce livre est double : montrer, en historiens de la philosophie, de quelle façon le philosophe britannique a répondu à ces problèmes, et évaluer la fécondité de ces résultats pour les sciences de l'esprit."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Papers presented to various conferences, 2003-2006.

In June 2016, Texas A&M University hosted its inaugural philosophy camp for teens. In this article, we address how running a philosophy camp for pre-college students can have a positive impact on both the campers and the staff, which included philosophy faculty, graduate students (Philosophy and English), and undergraduates. We designed the week-long (Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.) philosophy camp with three aims: to introduce pre-college students to philosophical thinking and dialogue; to develop an intellectual community among the campers; (...) and to provide a space in which young people could engage as equal partners in a series of spirited philosophical discussions. Drawing chiefly from our local community, we enrolled a diverse group of campers. We organized the week around themes that we thought would be of particular interest to pre-college students while also providing a broad view of the discipline. What we did not anticipate was the intense friendships that were formed, based on a shared love of philosophical ideas. (shrink)

History is familiar with great scientific traditions which have been substantial, effective, cumulative and progressive.* At the level of great eras of civilization, extensive and not episodic phenomena, very ancient Chinese science, Greek science and Arab science are objects of investigation for historical erudition, but also for the scientific historian and the philosopher of sciences. Many of the elements of these systems were the source of “modern science”, as it is called, or are integral parts ol’ this system of knowledge (...) and practice which has been constructed over a little more than three centuries. Diachronically, the “scientific revolution” of the classical age in Europe does not signify a total break with what preceded it: Chinese astronomy, Arab algebra and the hospital organization of the Islamic world were used, even if the ideology of scientists when they wrote their own history, particularly from the 19th century onward, tends to make of modern science a purely European phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper explores an approach to the implementation and evaluation of integrated health service delivery. It identifies the key issues involved in integration evaluation, provides a framework for assessment and identifies areas for the development of new tools and measures. A proactive role for evaluators in responding to health service reform is advocated.

Nursing education, as with professionalization projects, is fraught with epistemicide, false separations, and a focus on expertise over relations and accountability. This is a critical reflection of the first 5 years of a four‐semester prelicensure Community Engagement course series. As the course lead, I have consistently initiated adjustments, based on experiences teaching multiple sections and synthesizing comments and feedback from students and faculty, with an eye toward longstanding and pressing concerns in the world around us. Two broad epistemic arrangements emerge (...) from this critical excavation: (1) naturalized hierarchy, false separations, and appraisals of relevance and (2) relationality and reflection as unsettling. There is a need for sustained collective examination and shift in how the nursing education and healthcare industries curate the meanings and practice of “community,” “health,” and “nursing,” peering out from the regulatory oversight of neoliberal forces. How might we situate student progression, program implementation, institutional contracts, and curricular standards within the contexts of nursing programs' responsibilities to local communities in light of unfolding events locally and globally and their historical antecedents? How are we all, as faculty, disrupting siloes, false separations, and the contradictions of professionalism and the biomedical model to intentionally advance health equity? May we continue to illuminate the presence of community as being everywhere, not merely in juxtaposition to acute care. May we unsettle the prevailing theorization and practices of community throughout nursing education and commit to imagining and practicing relational praxis. (shrink)

The implicit activities of the living body in sports (such as heart rate, involuntary gestures, stress, reflex, emotional regulation and interaction expressions) emerge in the consciousness of the lived body without our voluntary control. We demonstrate physiological emersion, and how, including in dramaturgical perception, physiological flows and processes collide with the image of a whole body. In this paper, we introduce corporeal non-property as the missing (?) link between phenomenology and neuroscience, renewed by research on the cerebral unconscious and the (...) perception of their lived body. Rather than mindfulness, physical activity obliges the subject to learn the unconscious and his motor skills from his living body: a new psychoanalysis of sport is thus established by studying what emerges from the activity of the living body up to the level of the conscious description of motor action. In this paper, we explain why that awareness occurs, and why it matters for the understanding of unconscious activity of the athlete’s living body. This is potentially interesting, although it needs, as a theory, to overcome the obvious reliance of the body on unconscious or habitual/automated physiological processes. But the incorporation of body techniques forms a habitus. (shrink)

System-level change is crucial for solving society's most pressing problems. However, individual-level interventions may be useful for creating behavioral change before system-level change is in place and for increasing necessary public support for system-level solutions. Participating in individual-level solutions may increase support for system-level solutions – especially if the individual-level solutions are internalized as part of one's social identity.

This collection shows how Deleuze's ideas have influenced current thinking in legal philosophy. In particular, it explores the relations between law and life, addressing topics that are contested and controversial -- war, the right to life, genetic science, and security.

Au moment où paraît l’Anatomie de la Mélancolie de Robert Burton (1e édition en 1621), l’humorisme se trouve sérieusement remis en cause par les découvertes du contemporain de Burton, William Harvey, concernant la circulation du sang. Comment expliquer alors la parution de cet ouvrage qui se présente comme une somme de toutes les connaissances médicales, philosophiques ou historiques accumulées au sujet de la mélancolie depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à la fin de la Renaissance ? L’article se donne pour objectif de comprendre quel (...) peut être l’intérêt stratégique d’un recours au discours mélancolique et à la théorie des humeurs, lesquels deviennent sous la plume de Burton des instruments idéals permettant d’attirer l’attention sur la crise politique, sociale, économique et religieuse que traverse la monarchie anglaise de Jacques Ier. (shrink)

The literature on rights in both moral and legal philosophy is voluminous, so voluminous that there may seem to be little justification for one more symposium to swell its ranks. But the discussion of rights has been fairly tightly organized around several narrow topics of debate, among them whether rights should be explained in terms of interests or choices, 1 whether rights are strictly correlative with duties, 2 and the relation between rights and utility. 3 The inspiration for the present (...) symposium is the sense that one topic of central importance has generally been given short shrift: the question of whether rights can conflict. There is, of course, a perfectly good explanation for why this topic has received so little attention; namely that contemporary rights theorists have generally assumed that rights cannot conflict. 4 But this assumption seems to be out of keeping with the way people commonly speak about rights as well as the way in which rights are usually understood in our constitutional tradition. (shrink)