You know you should be staying positive, but how do you get back to your happy place after something sidetracks your thoughts? Whether you're having a bad day, are suddenly faced with a difficult situation, or you've found yourself in a bit of a rut, Whatever You Do, Be Happy is the perfect guide to getting back to a positive mindset. This book includes 400 totally manageable activities that will bring back your smile with ease! Try finding a quiet space (...) to help you reset from a stressful experience or take a few minutes to focus on your breathing when trying to solve a problem. You will discover that it doesn't take months of work or a total life overhaul to live a happy lifestyle. All it takes is the simple, actionable advice in this book to start changing your mindset immediately. Start your journey to optimism and happiness now! (shrink)

How should thinkers cope with uncertainty? Julia Staffel breaks new ground in the study of rationality by answering this question and many others. She also explains how it is better to be less irrational, because less irrational degrees of belief are generally more accurate and better at guiding our actions.

Assuming that there is moral progress, and assuming that the abolition of slavery is an example of it, how does moral progress occur? Is it mainly driven by specific individuals who have gained new moral insights, or by changes in the socio‐economic and epistemic conditions in which agents morally judge the norms and practices of their society, and act upon these judgements? In this paper, I argue that moral progress is a complex process in which changes at the level of (...) belief and changes at the level of institutions and social practices are deeply intertwined, and that changes in the socio‐economic and epistemic conditions of moral agency constitute the main motor of moral progress. I develop my view of moral progress by way of grappling with Michelle Moody‐Adams’ prominent philosophical account of it. My view is less intellectualistic and individualistic than hers, does not presuppose meta‐ethical moral realism, and blurs her distinction between moral progress in beliefs and moral progress in social practices. I point out the limits of humans to progress morally, which are partly grounded in our evolutionary history, and argue that moral progress is always of a ‘local’ nature. (shrink)

Tanney challenges not only the cognitivist approach that has dominated philosophy and the special sciences for fifty years, but metaphysical-empirical approaches to the mind in general. Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge advocates a return to the world-involving, circumstance-dependent, normative practices where the rational mind has its home.

This paper argues that we should distinguish two different kinds of imaginative vividness: vividness of mental images and vividness of imaginative experiences. Philosophy has focussed on mental images, but distinguishing more complex vivid imaginative experiences from vivid mental images can help us understand our intuitions concerning the notion as well as the explanatory power of vividness. In particular, it can help us understand the epistemic role imagination can play on the one hand and our emotional engagement with literary fiction on (...) the other hand. (shrink)

ObjectivesBuilding on what is known about the non-random nature of crime problems and the explanatory capacity of opportunity theories of crime, this study explores the utility of using existing university administrative data to detect unusual patterns of performance consistent with a student having engaged in contract cheating (paying a third-party to produce unsupervised work on their behalf).MethodsResults from an Australian university were analysed (N = 3798 results, N = 1459 students). Performances on unsupervised and supervised assessment items were converted to (...) percentages and percentage point differences analysed at the academic discipline-, unit-, and student-level, looking for non-random patterns of unusually large differences.ResultsNon-random, unusual patterns, consistent with contract cheating, were found at the academic discipline-, unit-, and student-level, with approximately 2.1% of students producing multiple unusual patterns.ConclusionsThese findings suggest it may be possible to use existing administrative data to identify assessment items that provide suitable opportunities for contract cheating. This approach could be used in conjunction with targeted problem-prevention strategies (based on situational crime prevention) to reduce the vulnerability of academic assessment items to contract cheating. This approach is worthy of additional research as it has the potential to help academic institutions around the world manage contract cheating; a problem that currently threatens the validity and integrity of tertiary qualifications. (shrink)

The effectiveness of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in tackling grand social and environmental challenges depends on productive dialogue among diverse parties. Facilitating such dialogue in turn entails building common ground in form of joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions. To explore how such common ground can be built, we study the role of different facilitators and their strategies for bridging the perspectives of competing stakeholder groups in two contrasting MSIs. The German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles was launched in an initially hostile communicative (...) environment, whereas the Fossil Free Sweden Initiative proceeded in a fertile communicative environment. We trace how the facilitators in these initiatives achieved common ground through three bridging strategies—communicative integration, temporal calibration, and process alignment—adapted to the communicative environments of these MSIs. In hostile communicative environments, facilitators achieve common ground by steering diverging stakeholder groups towards ‘reconciling’ their different language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems to ‘meet in the middle’ on points of agreement and shared interests. In fertile communicative environments characterised by greater mutual trust, facilitators can steer interactants to ‘strategically appropriate’ to the language, knowledge, and meaning system of a particular stakeholder group to win this group’s support. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of how productive multi-stakeholder dialogue can be facilitated. (shrink)

This paper considers Davidson's (1963) arguments for construing reasons as causes and attempts to show that he has failed to provide positive reasons for introducing causation into his analysis of rationalizing explanation. I consider various ways of spelling out his intuition that something is missing from explanation if we consider only the justificatory relation between reasons and action, and I argue that to the extent that there is anything missing, it should not be provided by construing reasons as causes. What (...) is ostensibly missing, and what I think Davidson is after, is some kind of determinate relation between explanans and explanandum. I argue that this is too strong a requirement to place on rationalizing explanation. (shrink)

Since 1983, legislators and advocates have introduced Land Access Policy Incentives in twenty of the fifty United States. These bills share a demographic goal: to fund land rental or purchase for young and beginning farmers and ranchers. States’ efforts to facilitate land access are part of a global movement to support farmers’ entry into agriculture and to resist farmers’ increasing exclusion from land. We examine the policy creation processes of nine states to describe how coalitions and government leaders are translating (...) their values around land access barriers into policy tools whose political appeal is broad. The bills often pass unanimously, and enrollments are strong: about 2,000 young and beginning US farmers and ranchers will purchase or rent farms this year through a few states’ land access policy programs. We trace the themes from interviews with 66 of the bills’ authors and advocates, and their documentation and media coverage, to demonstrate the values that bipartisan coalitions enlist to construct successful bills and the compromises that make them politically feasible. The coalitions’ values turn on the threats of rising land costs, farm expansion or consolidation, and land conversion out of agriculture. As a group, the policies serve broadacre farming operations while leaving specialty crop farms largely unserved. Two states have endeavored to include all farmers of color among their policies’ beneficiaries. Our findings demonstrate tradeoffs of states’ current Land Access Policy Incentives and suggest next steps for research and advocacy to inform policy development to support next generation farming opportunities. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a true polymath: he made substantial contributions to a host of different fields. Within the philosophy of mind, his chief innovations include his rejection of the Cartesian doctrines that all mental states are conscious and that non-human animals lack souls as well as sensation.

This paper traces back on a personal tone a provocative evocation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The author considers existentialism as a laboratory of existence that influenced a generation's manner of living and writing and made one's existential desires into historical and political acts. Its most representative mode of expression, literature, was as an indicator of the presence of the private throughout the public world and time. In this view, de Beauvoir's presence is approached both from the perspective (...) of her understanding of the female, and from the particular kind of couple she formed with Sartre. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher’s account of scientific realism in 'The Advancement of Science' (AS) differs from his account in 'Science, Truth and Democracy' (STD). We demonstrate that (1) contrary to appearance, Kitcher in AS proposes a so-called Kantian realism that is accompanied not by a correspondence theory, but by a hybrid conception of truth. (2) Also, we point out that Kitcher does not pertain to the “promiscuous realism” proposed in STD stringently, but falls back on his Kantian realism of AS at points. (...) Here, we question Kitcher’s claim that his promiscuous-realist conception stems initially from commonsensical be-liefs. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which data centre operators are currently reconfiguring the systems of energy and heat supply in European capitals, replacing conventional forms of heating with data-driven heat production, and becoming important energy suppliers. Taking as an empirical object the heat generated from server halls, the article traces the expanding phenomenon of ‘waste heat recycling’ and charts the ways in which data centre operators in Stockholm and Paris direct waste heat through metropolitan district heating systems and urban (...) homes, and valorise it. Drawing on new materialisms, infrastructure studies and classical theory of production and destruction of value in capitalism, the article outlines two modes in which this process happens, namely infrastructural convergence and decentralisation of the data centre. These modes arguably help data centre operators convert big data from a source of value online into a raw material that needs to flow in the network irrespective of meaning. In this conversion process, the article argues, a new commodity is in a process of formation, that of computation traffic. Altogether data-driven heat production is suggested to raise the importance of certain data processing nodes in Northern Europe, simultaneously intervening in the global politics of access, while neutralising external criticism towards big data by making urban life literally dependent on power from data streams. (shrink)

"In the aftermath of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, the field of Shakespeare Studies has been increasingly overrun by post-theoretical, phenomenological claims. Many of the critical tendencies that hold the field today--post-humanism, speculative realism, ecocriticism, historical phenomenology, new materialism, performance studies, animal studies, affect studies--are consciously or unwittingly informed by phenomenological assumptions. This book aims at uncovering and examining these claims, not only to assess their philosophical congruency but also to determine their hermeneutic relevance when applied to Shakespeare. More specifically, (...) Unphenomenal Shakespeare deploys resources of speculative critique to resist the moralistic and aestheticist phenomenalization of the Shakespeare playtexts across a variety of schools and scholars, a tendency best epitomized in Bruce Smith's Phenomenal Shakespeare "--. (shrink)

This article presents Mencius' concept of human dignity in the Chinese Confucian moral tradition, focused on the context of long-term care. The double nature of Mencius' notion of human dignity as an intrinsic quality of human beings qua being human is analyzed and contrasted with the dominant Western account of human dignity as grounded in personhood. Drawing on the heuristic force of an interview with an elder person in Hong Kong, the insights of the Mencian theory of human dignity are (...) used to provide a moral foundation for long-term care for elder persons in a context of diminishing personhood and shrinking autonomy. (shrink)

Reflective equilibrium has been considered a paradigm method involving intuitions. Some philosophers have recently claimed that it is trivial and can even accommodate the sort of scepticism about the reliability of intuitions advocated by experimental philosophers. I discuss several ways in which reflective equilibrium could be thought of as trivial and argue that it is inconsistent with scepticism about the reliability of intuitions.

This précis gives a brief summary of the key points of Julia Staffel’s book Unsettled Thoughts.

Bioethics has evolved from a non-institutional, ideal, and ahistorical model toward a more political, institutional, and historically anchored one. This change is healthy and has, in part, been a product of the devastating consequences of globalization. I illustrate the distinct moments in the evolution of bioethics with an analysis of three discussions within the discipline: the debate on autonomy and the right to health and some of the issues raised by biotechnology, especially by the patenting of genetic material.

This volume contains papers by a group of leading experts on Aristotle and the later Aristotelian tradition of Neoplatonism. The discussion ranges from Aristotle's treatment of Parmenides, the most important pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, to Neoplatonic and medieval use of Aristotle, for which Aristotle himself set guidelines in his discussions of his predecessors. Traces of these guidelines can be seen in the work of Plotinus, and that of the later Greek commentators on Aristotle. The study of these commentators, and the recognition (...) of the philosophical interest and importance of the ideas which they expressed in their commentaries, is an exciting new development in ancient philosophy to which this book makes a unique and distinguished contribution. (shrink)

Solidarität wird in Krisenzeiten sowie bei Ungerechtigkeit und Marginalisierung gefordert. Sie tritt dabei in unterschiedlichen Reichweiten und Akteurskonstellationen auf und basiert auf verschiedenen Motiven und Ausgangslagen. Julia Masurkewitz-Möller nimmt sich dieser Vielfalt an und erarbeitet eine Systematisierung der Solidarität, die Ordnung in den begrifflichen Dschungel des Konzepts bringt. Sie zeigt, dass verschiedene Solidaritätsformen trotz ihrer Unterschiede einen gemeinsamen Kern und eine Beziehung zueinander haben - und damit die Transformationen von Solidaritätsformen möglich machen.

El propósito de la “Dialéctica trascendental” es exponer cómo la razón es el origen de la ilusión trascendental, para prevenir los errores que puedan derivarse de ella. Sin embargo, en el “Apéndice”, Kant sostiene que la razón no sólo tiene este aspecto negativo o problemático, también es una facultad que le proporciona al entendimiento la meta de lograr una unidad sistemática de todo conocimiento. En el presente texto abordaré dos preocupaciones interpretativas en torno al “Apéndice”. La primera cuestiona si Kant (...) se contradice a sí mismo en esta sección al plantear que el principio de unidad sistemática es, simultáneamente, subjetivo y objetivo. La segunda reflexiona si se trata de una sección que contradice las tesis centrales de la “Analítica trascendental”, al presentar una nueva condición necesaria para el conocimiento, más allá de las establecidas por el entendimiento y la sensibilidad. (shrink)

As relações de poder em torno das questões de raça, classe e gênero dão lugar a uma combinação característica de opressões que atingem, de modo particular, as mulheres negras. A fim de refletir sobre o conceito de interseccionalidade na obra Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favelada, abordaremos a questão do contexto colonial no qual se enraízam os alicerces que têm mantido praticamente intactas as estruturas sociais das desigualdades de condições em meio à diversidade de indivíduos. Visamos a destacar no (...) artigo como a autora Carolina Maria de Jesus dialoga com a perspectiva interseccional desenvolvida dentro do feminismo negro, expondo as diferentes opressões e resistências que a obra permite analisar.Palavras-chave: Interseccionalidade. Feminismo negro. Filosofia. Literatura.AbstractThe power relations around the questions of race, class e gender cause a characteristic combination of oppressions that hits, in a particular way, the black women. In order to reflect about the concept of intersectionality in the book Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favela, we will approach the question of the colonial context in which the foundations that have maintained practically intact the social structures of inequalities of conditions among the diversity of individuals. We are looking to highlight in the article how the author Carolina Maria de Jesus dialogues with the intersectional perspective developed within black feminism, exposing the different oppressions and resistances that the book allows to analyze.Keywords: Intersectionality. Black feminism. Philosophy. Literature. (shrink)

One of the assumptions that impregnate academic discourse, even that of social scientists committed to the re-incorporation of their disciplines, is its extra-corporeal character. This article analyzes the scholastic construction of producing and perceiving oral, written or silent discourses as non-corporeal acts. First, it argues that there is a certain continuity between monastic rituals that build the spirit as something different from and higher than the body and academic rituals that train people to place the source of discourse in the (...) mind. Second, it explores how the separation of discourse from the discourse-producing body is currently built and reproduced through participation in university and academic rituals. It holds that such participation installs in the bodies of academics an identification with the habit of producing discourses. Finally, it suggests that the fact that attempts to re-incorporate body to social life are performed by academics who have been trained in disembodying their discourses conditions the results of such attempts. (shrink)

Habitat dioramas depicting ecological relations between organisms and their natural environments have become the preferred mode of museum display in most natural history museums in North America and Europe. Dioramas emerged in the late nineteenth century as an alternative mode of museum installation from taxonomically arranged cases. We suggest that this change was closely connected to the emergence of a biogeographical framework rooted in evolutionary theory and positing the existence of distinct biogeographical zones. We tie the history of dioramas to (...) earlier visual resources such as the thematic images that Wallace introduced to illustrate his 1876 Geographical Distribution of Animals. These images were unique in their time because each of them simultaneously depicted animals from several different taxa, rather than only one, as well as the ecological relations between animals and their habitats. Both, visually and with respect to their function within biogeography, these images presaged the habitat dioramas that came shortly afterwards. Not coincidentally, Wallace explicitly advocated the use of dioramas for museum display in ongoing debates on museum reform. Wallace 's suggestions were put into practice by committed evolutionists such as Gottlieb von Koch who pioneered the diorama installation in the Grand Ducal Museum in Darmstadt in 1906. As in Wallace 's illustrations, Koch's dioramas were designed to respresent biogeographical zones. This paper explores the function of these visual displays of biogeographical relations. It argues that, in both the scientific and public realms, biogeogaphical zones were defined and constructed by visual means; recourse to visual representation was more than a method of communication. (shrink)

This article seeks to examine the representation of Chinese Indonesians in New Media after the demise of Suharto’s New Order regimes. It takes root in the recent phenomenon in Indonesia as the “reappearance” of Chinese faces in popular Indonesian media by discussing the celebrities or public figures, and ordinary ‘man-on-the street’ of Chinese Indonesians, who are catapulted in the mainstream mass media and portrayed in popular television formats in particular such as reality-shows, talk-shows, news and variety shows. Based on participatory (...) observation and in-depth-interview to the producers of several popular TV shows casting Chinese figures, this article argues that the political changes from authoritarian Suharto’s regimes which marginalized Chinese ethnicity to democracy has re-identified the representation of Chineseness in public sphere which contributes to more reception of Chinese identity at large in the country. This representation intermingles to produce the debates on religiosity and nationalism. (shrink)

The majority of treatises on agriculture in al-Andalus can be found in miscellaneous codexes which are mainly attributed to only one author, which has brought about a number of false attributions of authorship we will analyse in this research. We then make a brief study of the different miscellaneous manuscripts, studying the different attributions to which they have been object more in detail so as to attempt to mark the boundaries of each one. This study is summarized in a table. (...) Finally, we discuss the more significant data from the previous information, adding some references about the influence the works of the agronomical school of al-Andalus had. (shrink)

L’article traite des discussions contemporaines autour du concept de totalité là où il est employé pour saisir la réalité sociale. À travers une reconstruction des positions de Durkheim et d’Althusser il s’intéresse aux différentes méthodes développées par ces théories pour justifier leur approche holiste du social. Il s’avère que le marxisme révolutionnaire et la sociologie non révolutionnaire se rencontrent en un point : les deux lisent des textes des sciences sociales pour accéder à ce qui produit la société sous forme (...) de tout. Notre article établit le statut de ces textes pour les deux approches et compare leurs méthodes de lecture, afin de dégager ce que, selon les deux, produit le lien social. (shrink)