La famille a longtemps t considre comme une unit sociale compose de trois relations simples : mari-femme, parent-enfant et matre-serviteur. Mais la fin du dix-huitime sicle, la dimension affective de la famille devient prpondrante, ce qui en exclut progressivement les serviteurs. Cette tude se penche sur le moment crucial de l'histoire des ides ou le paradigme familial est en train de changer, en s'intressant aux discours sur la famille d'une srie de penseurs issus de la tradition du droit naturel moderne (...) et des Lumires cossaises. Dans un effort constant de replacer chaque relation analyse dans le cadre de la famille, et la famille dans l'argument politique et philosophique plus gnral dfendu par ces auteurs, cette tude montre que la famille, loin d'tre une question subsidiaire, joue un role important dans la comprhension des rapports sociaux cette poque. (shrink)

Peut-on comprendre la philosophie politique classique sans s’intéresser à la famille et à la place qu’elle tient entre les individus et l’État? Peut-on ignorer la manière dont les relations familiales et les relations politiques renvoient les unes aux autres? Justine Roulin répond par la négative dans cet ouvrage. Elle choisit un découpage historique particulièrement judicieux, qui s’étend de Thomas Hobbes à John Millar, et lui permet de considérer le passage des théories du droit naturel –...

Science is our best way of finding out about the natural world, and philosophers who write about that world ought to be sensitive to the claims of our best science. There are obstacles, however, to outsiders using science well. We think philosophers are prone to misuse science: to give undue weight to results that are untested; to highlight favorable and ignore unfavorable data; to give illegitimate weight to the authority of science; to leap from scientific premises to philosophical conclusions without (...) spelling out their relevance; to treat mere resonance between a scientific theory and a philosophical view as empirical evidence for the philosophical view. This article identifies and illustrates some of the ways in which philosophers misuse science, explains why these pitfalls are easy to fall into, and concludes with suggestions for avoiding them. (shrink)

It is no longer a revelation that companies have some responsibility to uphold human rights. However, delineating the boundaries of the relationship between business and human rights is more vexed. What is it that we are asking corporations to assume responsibility for and how far does that responsibility extend? This article focuses on the extent to which economic, social and cultural rights fall within a corporation's sphere of responsibility. It then analyses how corporations may be held accountable for violations of (...) such rights. Specifically, the article considers the use of soft law as a protective mechanism; it also details how victims of harmful corporate behaviour are using litigation (pursuant to ATCA and common law domestic causes of action) to seek redress and recognition of the harms they have directly or indirectly experienced. The article concludes with an analysis of Professor Ruggie's (the United Nations Special Representative on the issue of transnational corporations and human rights) 2008 and 2009 Reports in which it is suggested that a respect-based framework must be interpreted as imposing proactive requirements on companies to prevent the infringement of human rights. Future efforts must also be directed towards the recognition of a specialised complementary corporate responsibility to protect human rights. (shrink)

Drawing from contemporary blog data, this article examines an emerging project termed “neuroqueer.” Neuroqueer is a collaboration of activists, academics, and bloggers engaging in online community building. Neuroqueer requires those who engage in it to disidentify from both oppressive dominant and counterculture identities that perpetuate destructive medical model discourses of cure. It is a queer/crip response to discussions about gender, sexuality, and disability as pathology that works to deconstruct normative identity categories. Blog members employ neuroqueer practices to subversively combat exclusion (...) through rejection of able-hetero assimilation and counteridentification in favor of disidentification. Of particular interest for this special issue are the ways in which neuroqueer perspectives build more fluid conceptualizations of both gender and intersectionality through conscious disidentification from neurotypical norms and medical notions of cure on which they are often unconsciously based. (shrink)

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information-theoretic measures—ambiguity and distinctiveness—derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human (...) judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine-grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study of Gardens and Green Spaces (GGS), a resident-driven, grant-funded project in Cleveland, Ohio working toward community change. Through both placemaking and entrepreneurial strategies, the main grant objectives are to effect change at the intersection of food (and agriculture), arts, and culture in Kinsman, a 96% Black Neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. While community development (CD) projects are often designed by outside ‘experts’ who inform the scope and focus of grant-funded projects, this project is rooted (...) in the hypothesis that a resident-driven approach to CD will lead to increased community buy-in and participation, resulting in more lasting and substantive community change. GGS works across sectors, integrating arts, culture, and food to promote placemaking and community-based entrepreneurial engagement as a path towards greater health, equity, and economic resilience. This paper argues that community-based and resident-driven development—although not without its own challenges—can result in more holistic community transformation across sectors, with the potential for greater resident participation, sustainability, and equity. The case study presented in this paper, including in-depth interviews and neighborhood surveys, is an examination of the pilot phase of GGS, and argues that both placemaking and entrepreneurialism represent a negotiation between market driven community development and a solely philanthropic model. It provides insight into more equitable and sustainable change that has the potential to shift the traditional paradigm of expert driven, or “outside-in” community development. (shrink)

This article argues that there is a discrepancy between Jürgen Habermas's initial plea for critical and rational identities and his more recent glorification of the European model. Initially, Constitutional Patriotism could be apprehended as a critical standard for existing political practices. However, Habermas's recent political texts tend to lose all kind of reflexive distance in their apprehension of the European identity — which is presented as distinct and even superior to its counter-model, the US. Such a `Europatriotic' temptation should be (...) resisted. The `thick' European identity advocated by Habermas has no truly federative dimension and could undermine the unique normative potential of a political entity composed of distinct identities. Consequently, the article suggests an elucidation of liberal postnationalism with a view to explaining its refusal to tie Europe's legitimacy to an identification logic. (shrink)

The term “patent” is an abbreviation of “letters patent”, the open form of document historically issued by the Crown for the purpose of conferring a right or privilege or otherwise communicating the royal will. In contemporary law it denotes the species of intellectual property that is granted as an inducement for the creation and disclosure of novel, inventive and industrially applicable inventions. In the UK that property is conferred under the Patents Act 1977, or with similar effect the European Patent (...) Convention (EPC), and comprises the exclusive right to use and sell a protected invention for up to 20 years. A protected invention may be any subject matter having technical character; a definition derived from the Act’s express exclusion from patentability of (among other things) discoveries, scientific theories, business methods and computer programs “as such”. Also excluded are surgical, therapeutic and diagnostic methods (for lack of industrial applicability), and inventions the commercial exploitation of which would be contrary to public policy or morality. In these and other respects the Patents Act follows the EPC, which it was the explicit purpose of that Act to implement. Patents are territorial, and are thus only valid and infringed in their country of issue. For a UK inventor to obtain protection outside the UK s/he must therefore obtain a patent from that country, either directly by applying under its laws, or if it is a party to the EPC or other intergovernmental agreement, indirectly by applying under that agreement. Inventors seeking protection for an invention in more than one country will often do so by means of the Patent Cooperation Treaty. (shrink)

L’exercice artistique suppose un rapport au temps spécifique : l’homme s’exerçant à son art répète, reprend, corrige ses gestes. Mais en va-t-il de même concernant la réception des œuvres : la perception du spectateur s’exerce-t-elle par répétition et variation des expériences esthétiques? L’objet de cet article est de montrer qu’il existe un type d’exercice dont le mécanisme repose plutôt sur la déstabilisation des habitudes de perception. À partir des réflexions valéryennes sur l’informe dans l’_Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de (...) Vinci_ et _Degas, Danse, Dessin_, nous proposons de penser un exercice de la perception qui passe par la décomposition de ses mécanismes. Cette idée trouve sa réalisation dans des dispositifs artistiques labyrinthiques tels que l’exposition _Contact_ d’Olafur Eliasson qui, en perturbant les échelles d’espace et de temps, oblige le récepteur à produire consciemment le travail de cohérence de la synthèse perceptive. (shrink)

To have the burden of proof is to be rationally required to argue for or provide evidence for your position. To have a heavier burden than an opponent is to be rationally required to provide better evidence or better arguments than they are required to provide. Many commentators suggest that differential or uneven distribution of the burden of proof is ubiquitous. In reasoned discourse, the idea goes, it is almost always the case that one party must prove the claim at (...) issue to prevent the opposing view winning by default. The following passage is typical of the sort of thing one finds in critical thinking textbooks. (shrink)

The completion of the human genome project in 2000 dramatically emphasized the imminent success of the genetic revolution. The ethical and social consequences of this scientific development are immense. From human reproduction to life-extending therapies, from the impact on gender and race to public health and public safety, there is scarcely a part of our lives left unaffected by the impact of the new genetics. A Companion to Genethics is the first substantial study of the multifaceted dimensions of the genetic (...) revolution and its philosophical, ethical, social, and political significance. It brings together the best and most influential contemporary writing about genethics. Newly commissioned essays from prominent figures in the current debate provide a wide-ranging and fascinating scholarly analysis of all the issues that arise from this explosive science. (shrink)

Achieving genuine engagement and understanding between communities with radically divergent worldviews is challenging. If there is no common ground on which to stand and have a discussion, the likely outcomes of an apparent intercultural disagreement are a stalemate, or the (sometimes colonialist) imposition of a single worldview, or a kind of relativistic tolerance that falls short of genuine engagement. In this paper, we suggest a way forward that takes as its starting point the philosophical discussion of deep disagreement, using the (...) example of taniwha (powerful water beings that must be treated with respect) to outline a strategy for building intercultural understanding and enabling constructive intercultural dialogue. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the prospects for an account of good argument that takes the character of the arguer into consideration. We conclude that although there is much to be gained by identifying the virtues of the good arguer and by considering the ways in which these virtues can be developed in ourselves and in others, virtue argumentation theory does not offer a plausible alternative definition of good argument.

With an upsurge of interest and investment in new legal technologies comes consideration of who is making them and whether these individuals or entities should be subject to regulation. This article looks at how such regulation might function in light of the existing regulatory regimes governing lawyers and the capacities of legal regulators. It considers the ramifications both of maintaining the existing system, or in extending some form of regulation to these new entrants to the legal services market.

Depuis les années 2000, l’histoire des émotions, champ de recherche particulièrement fécond, tente de renouer des liens entre l’histoire et la psychologie, dont le divorce semblait jusque-là prononcé. Les émotions, longtemps considérées comme fugaces, irrationnelles, voire incommunicables, semblent à présent susceptibles d’être étudiées par l’historien. Aussi bien dans ses méthodes que dans les processus de légitimation auquel elle se confronte, elle entretient des liens étroits avec l’histoire des idées, qu’elle recoupe en partie. Cet article propose de dégager quelques enjeux épistémologiques (...) et méthodologiques communs à ces deux champs historiographiques. (shrink)

The concept of `the granny' is not uncommon in British media texts, in a range of stereotyped representations of older women and in (sometimes playful, sometimes serious) invocations of the grandmother role. `Granny parties' are one genre of recreational social event where young people dress up as grannies. In this paper I bring together data from the media and from an ethnographic study of granny parties in order to assess the age-political and ideological significance of `granny' in these very different (...) contexts. In both cases, representations and performances prove to be fashioned dialectically, in relation to normative assumptions about grannies as conservative, passive and out-dated characters. Despite the ludic frames of many representations, it isargued that the granny concept recycles restrictive ideological values for gendered ageing. (shrink)

_The Politics of Religious Literacy_ challenges popular understandings of religious literacy as an inclusive framework for navigating religious diversity in the public sphere. Offering a new model, this book provides insights into the often-overlooked feelings and practices informing our questionably secular age.

Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct succeeds admirably in showing that it is possible to think about art from a biological point of view, and this is a significant achievement, given that resistance to the idea that cultural phenomena have biological underpinnings remains widespread in many academic disciplines. However, his account of the origins of our artistic impulses and the far-reaching conclusions he draws from that account are not persuasive. This article points out a number of problems: in particular, problems with (...) Dutton’s appeal to sexual selection, with his discussion of the adaptation/by-product distinction and its significance, and with drawing normative conclusions from evolutionary hypotheses. (shrink)

This paper responds to an invitation by the editors to consider whether the intellectual property regime suggests an appropriate model for protecting interests in detached human body parts. It begins by outlining the extent of existing IP protection for body parts in Europe, and the relevant strengths and weaknesses of the patent system in that regard. It then considers two further species of IP right of less obvious relevance. The first are the statutory rights of ownership conferred by domestic UK (...) law in respect of employee inventions, and the second are the economic and moral rights recognised by European and international law in respect of authorial works. In the argument made, both of these species of IP right may suggest more appropriate models of sui generis protection for detached human body parts than patent rights because of their capacity better to accommodate the relevant public and private interests in respect of the same. (shrink)

M. B. Hintikka and J. Hintikka claimed that their reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ can “serve as an explication for the link between intelligence and memory”. The claim is vindicated, first for the single-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing the content of a distributed and associative memory; then, for the multi-agent case, where the reconstruction captures strategies for accessing knowledge distributed in a community. Moreover, the reconstruction of the ‘Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction’ allows (...) to conceptualize those strategies as belonging to a continuum of behavioral strategies. (shrink)

This paper aims to expose the potential for adapting Althusser’s theory of interpellation to a phenomenological framework, with the help of its recoveries by Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed. Not only do their writings help to address several criticisms of Althusser’s theory of ideology –notably its latent determinism and universalization of the subject– but they also help us better understand how ideology functions at the level of the marginalized body. Indeed, ideology acts as a discursive and corporeal orientation of the (...) subject in the world, and this by limiting its space, its temporality and the objects accessible to it. By linking interpellation and the body, it will also be possible to expand Butler’s theory of emancipation towards a bodily performativity having the lived body as its object. To this effect, we will point out that Ahmed’s writings on interpellation complement Butler’s, as they open the door to a resistance to ideology embedded in the body via the concept of disorientation. While disorientation can serve as a mechanism of subjugation, it can also, according to some phenomenologists, create new emancipatory paths and possibilities for the marginalised subject. (shrink)

Contemporary consumer culture sees the body as the crucial indicator of the self and apparent bodily ageing as problematic. All bodies age, but how is evidence of ageing culturally interpreted? This article develops a critical-pragmatic analysis of consumerized body discourses, with particular focus on the semiotics of the visibly ageing face, in the context of lifestyle magazine features and advertisements on skin care. Such texts work to equate ageing with the look of ageing, problematize ageing appearance, and offer marketized solutions (...) to the ‘problem’ of ageing, using markedly gendered strategies. Texts aimed at a female market project skin care as a serious issue, pathologize the look of ageing, offer highly technologized solutions, and naturalize surgical intervention. The male market is being discursively engaged by strategies designed to normalize male investment in products and processes traditionally seen as in the domain of female bodily grooming. Consumerized male narcissism is enabled by ironic, ‘uncommitted’ discourses, the use of highly masculinized images and text, and, more recently, discourses which draw attention to the salience of the female appraising gaze. (shrink)

The introduction of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Quebec and Canada raises the question of extending this service to minors. The constant presence of nurses at the patient’s bedside leads them to receive requests related to MAID. The aim of this study is to explore the perceptions of nurses working in paediatric oncology services concerning the possibility for adolescents over 14 years of age requesting MAID. Six nurses working in paediatric oncology or palliative care or in direct contact with (...) adolescents at the end of their lives as part of their nursing work took part in an individual semi-directed interview. The results of this research highlight that: 1) nurses recognise their supportive role in the care of patients at the end of life; 2) most have a professional opinion in favour of the MAID for adults and distinguish this from their personal opinion; 3) they value the discussions around the MAID and are concerned about the establishment of criteria for it; and 4) long experience as a nurse leads to more concerns about the expansion of the MAID, but at the same time makes nurses more comfortable providing information about this subject. In light of these findings, academic and paediatric health care institutions need to recognise and evaluate the need for training nurses on MAID to better equip them to deal with such situations and thus better meet the needs of their patients. (shrink)

In this essay I consider the role of authorship in balancing epistemological trust and skepticism in e-science. Drawing on studies of the diagnostic practices of doctors in British breast care units and the gate-keeping practices of a Californian publisher of horticultural works, I suggest that conventions of authorial designation have an important role to play in nurturing the skepticism essential for scientific rigor within the framework of epistemological trust that pragmatism and morality require. In so doing I question the assumption (...) of contemporary scholars that scientific works are determinate in fact, while nonetheless supporting the idea of semi-indeterminate authorship as a goal. I then consider the theoretical and practical consequences of that view with an analysis of the Anglo-American legal constraints on attributions of authorship, and the complex of other relevant interests and rights that may require different models of attribution oriented not around authors themselves, but rather their employer, their manager or supervisor, or some pseudonym deemed to be an appropriate organizing mechanism for the works in question. (shrink)

If semantic consequence is analyzed with extensive games, logical reasoning can be accounted for by looking at how players solve entailment games. However, earlier approaches to game semantics cannot achieve this reduction, by want of explicitly dened preferences for players. Moreover, although entailment games can naturally translate the idea of argumentation about a common ground, a cognitive interpretation is undermined by the complexity of strategic reasoning. We thus describe a class of semantic extensive entailment game with algorithmic players, who have (...) preferences for parsimonious spending of computational resources and thus compute partial strategies under qualitative uncertainty about future histories. We prove the existence of local preferences for moves and of strategic fixpoints that allow to map game-trees to tableaux proofs, and exhibit a strategy prole that solves the fixpoint selection problem, and can be mapped to systematic constructions of semantic trees, yielding a completeness result by translation. We then discuss the correspondence between proof heuristics and strategies in our games, the relations of our games to gts, and possible extensions to other entailment relations. We conclude that the main interest of our result lies in the possibility to bridge argumentative and cognitive models of logical reasoning, rather than in new meta-theoretic results. All proofs are given in appendix. (shrink)

The risk posed by anthropogenic climate change is generally accepted, and the challenge we face to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to a tolerable limit cannot be underestimated. Reducing GHG emissions can be achieved either by producing less GHG to begin with or by emitting less GHG into the atmosphere. One carbon mitigation technology with large potential for capturing carbon dioxide at the point source of emissions is carbon capture and storage (CCS). However, the merits of CCS have been questioned, (...) both on practical and ethical grounds. While the practical concerns have already received substantial attention, the ethical concerns still demand further consideration. This article aims to respond to this deficit by reviewing the critical ethical challenges raised by CCS as a possible tool in a climate mitigation strategy and argues that the urgency stemming from climate change underpins many of the concerns raised by CCS. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titles: Proper Functions Representations: The Basic Teleosemantic Framework Concepts Externalism, Language, and Meaning Rationalism.