Broken Theory is a jettisoned collection of fragmentary writing, collected and collaged by new media artist, writer, musician, and theorist Alan Sondheim. Folding theoretical musings, text experiments, and personal confessions into a single textual flow, it examines the somatic foundations of philosophical theory and theorizing, discussing their relationships to the writer and body, and to the phenomenology of failure and fragility of philosophy's production. Writing remains writing, undercuts and corrects itself, is always superseded, always produced within an untoward and bespoke (...) silo - not as an inconceivable last word, but instead a broken contribution to philosophical thinking. The book is based on fragmentation and collapse, displacing annihilation and wandering towards a form of "roiling" within which the text teeters on the verge of disintegration. In other words, the writing develops momentary scaffoldings - writing shored up by the very mechanisms that threaten its disappearance. Broken Theory is prefaced by a text from Maria Damon and followed by an extensive interview with art historian Ryan Whyte. Alan Sondheim is a new media artist, theorist, and writer concerned with the phenomenology of the virtual. He has collaborated with motion capture and virtual environment labs. His work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual; with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed reality and codework. His writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that partially appear within and determine the surface. This style embeds interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal systems. The textual body, body of text and writer, are deeply entangled. His current work is based on the psychogeography of real and virtual worlds and their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting" - the body behind the virtual/symbolic body - and modes of viral dispersion in a series of videos and texts. Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, attended Brown University, and has exhibited, taught, and lectured at a number of venues in the United States and abroad. (shrink)

In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric moods and/or attitudinal verbs.

Despite the economic relevance and distinctiveness of family firms, little attention has been devoted to researching their nature and functioning. Traditionally, family firms have been associated both to positive and negative features in their relationships with the stakeholders. This can be linked to different orientations toward corporate social responsibility. Thus, this research aims to identify the approaches that Spanish family firms maintain about social responsibility, based on the model developed by Quazi and O' Brien Journal of Business Ethics 25, 33-51 (...) (2000). An empirical study carried out for 112 Spanish family firms gives support to our initial assumption about these organizations not being a homogeneous group in terms of their orientation towards corporate social responsibility. The differences in perceptions do not seem to be associated to biographical characteristics. These results lead to some relevant academic and practical implications that suggest interesting lines for future research. (shrink)

Although no scholarly consensus exists on the issue, the claim that a substantive reconfiguration of the Internet has occurred in the beginning of the 2000s has settled firmly in public common sense. The label tentatively chosen for the new turn in the medium’s evolution is Web 2.0. The developments constituting this turn have been contemplated from different perspectives in technical and business publications (O’Reilly 2005), in treatises on convergence or participatory culture (Jenkins 2006; Jenkins et al. 2009), and could be (...) usefully interrogated by means of political economy concepts such as the social factory and free labor (Terranova 2004). Marked, or rather symbolically constructed, by these discursive pickets lies a field of practice that the members of the participatory culture, the produsers (Bruns 2008) of open journalism, blogs, social networking sites and other characteristic Web 2.0 applications inhabit and animate with their everyday thought, decision making and action. This paper undertakes a theoretical exploration of the user practices emerging and consolidating around the new technological and organizational models making up Web 2.0. It is informed by a qualitative study of bloggers and Facebook users conducted through focus group methodology, although the concrete empirical data are not presented here. Rather, the analysis employs the concept of technologies of the self by Foucault (1988) as a heuristic device in order to situate Web 2.0 use, first, in a long history of culturally evolved forms of self-constitution and, second, in a complex matrix of relationships with other types of technologies, namely, those of production, sign systems and power. This conceptual choice, we argue, furnishes a study of Web 2.0 use, which holds in balance its liberatory potential and its susceptibility to new forms of domination, rationalization and commodification. (shrink)

A range of themes—race and gender, sexuality, otherness, sisterhood, and agency—run throughout this collection, and the chapters constitute a collective discourse at the intersection of Black feminist thought and continental philosophy, converging on a similar set of questions and concerns. These convergences are not random or forced, but are in many ways natural and necessary: the same issues of agency, identity, alienation, and power inevitably are addressed by both camps. Never before has a group of scholars worked together to examine (...) the resources these two traditions can offer one another. By bringing the relationship between these two critical fields of thought to the forefront, the book will encourage scholars to engage in new dialogues about how each can inform the other. If contemporary philosophy is troubled by the fact that it can be too limited, too closed, too white, too male, then this groundbreaking book confronts and challenges these problems. -/- Table of Contents -/- Foreword Beverly Guy-Sheftall Acknowledgments Introduction: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano -/- 1. Black Feminism, Poststructuralism, and the Contested Character of Experience Diane Perpich -/- 2. Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy Kathryn T. Gines -/- 3. The Difference That Difference Makes: Black Feminism and Philosophy Donna-Dale L. Marcano -/- 4. Antigone’s Other Legacy: Slavery and Colonialism in Tègònni: An African Antigone Tina Chanter -/- 5. L Is for . . . : Longing and Becoming in The L-Word’s Racialized Erotic Aimee Carrillo Rowe -/- 6. Race and Feminist Standpoint Theory Anika Maaza Mann -/- 7. Rethinking Black Feminist Subjectivity: Ann duCille and Gilles Deleuze Maria del Guadalupe Davidson -/- 8. From Receptivity to Transformation: On the Intersection of Race, Gender, and the Aesthetic in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Robin M. James -/- 9. Extending Black Feminist Sisterhood in the Face of Violence: Fanon, White Women, and Veiled Muslim Women Traci C. West -/- 10. Madness and Judiciousness: A Phenomenological Reading of a Black Woman’s Encounter with a Saleschild Emily S. Lee -/- 11. Black American Sexuality and the Repressive Hypothesis: Reading Patricia Hill Collins with Michel Foucault Camisha Russell -/- 12. Calling All Sisters: Continental Philosophy and Black Feminist Thinkers Kathy Glass -/- Afterword: Philosophy and the Other of the Second Sex George Yancy Contributor Notes Index. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to argue for a position holding that epigenetic responsibility primarily should be a political and not an individual responsibility. Epigenetic is a rapidly growing research field studying regulations of gene expression that do not change the DNA sequence. Knowledge about these mechanisms is still uncertain in many respects, but main presumptions are that they are triggered by environmental factors and life style and, to a certain extent, heritable to subsequent generations, thereby reminding of aspects (...) of Lamarckism. Epigenetic research advances give rise to intriguing challenges for responsibility relations between the society and the individual. Responsibility is commonly understood in a backwards-looking manner, identifying causally responsible actors to blame for a bad outcome. If only a backwards-looking responsibility model is applied, epigenetics might give rise to arduous responsibility ascriptions to individuals for their health and the health of their future descendants. This would put heavy responsibility burdens on actors constrained by unequal social and economic structures. In contrast, a forward-looking responsibility notion takes account of structural conditions and pay attention to who is best placed to do something about conditions contributing to bad outcomes. A forward-looking responsibility notion would partly free disadvantaged individuals from responsibility, and identify actors with power and capacity to do something about structural factors constraining genuine choice. (shrink)

IN THE LAST PART of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith puts his theory in a class with those of his contemporaries Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, namely, the systems that make sentiments the principle of approbation. Despite recognizing important differences with both of them, he thinks that since he has placed the origin of moral sentiments in sympathy, and in particular the fact that we are able to enter into the motives of the agent and get pleasure from (...) finding them appropriate to their cause, sentiments are the foundation of his theory of morals. Many of Smith’s commentators, in fact almost all of the most important studies over the last few years, reaffirm the author’s self-description. However, my aim in this paper is to challenge this view by showing that Smith’s system can also be plausibly seen as a theory of practical reasoning, and in some important aspects very similar to Aristotelian ethics. Surprisingly few scholars have seen this parallel. Laurence Berns, Samuel Fleischacker, Charles Griswold, and Gloria Vivenza are the latest exceptions, identifying several points of coincidence between Adam Smith and Aristotle’s ethics. None of them, however, has tied all these similarities under a unified interpretation, such as the one I propose here: The basic analogy between these theories, and the source of those particular coincidences, is the operation of practical reason. Moreover, and besides the common elements with Aristotle’s ethics, Smith’s reconstruction of practical reason simultaneously announces some of the main features of modern accounts of ethics, such as impartiality and universality as preconditions of moral judgment. The integration of these ancient and modern elements in a single coherent theory allows Smith’s TMS to overcome the insufficiencies and paradoxes of both these traditions, and it constitutes one of the most interesting and challenging proposals of modern ethics. (shrink)

Der Begriff der Toleranz in der Moderne wurde erdacht mit dem Ziel, Gesellschaften zu organisieren, die sich im Umbruch befanden auf Grund des plötzlichen Eindringens von Glaubensunterschieden in die politische Raumordnung. Die Definition der Toleranz als Tugend, die auf der Nachgiebigkeit gegenüber dem Andersartigen basiert, ist ein Pseudobegriff. Die hermeneutische Veranlagung, die mit der Philosophie einhergeht, zeigt, dass die Toleranz keine schlichte moralische Tugend sein kann, sondern vielmehr eine der Beschaffenheiten der Möglichkeit rationaler Handlungen (die Arten des Seins und des (...) Sagens fallen in der Vielfältigkeit ihrer Formen zusammen). Die Geschichte der Hermeneutik zeigt seit ihren Anfängen – die exegetische Arbeit war hierbei grundlegend – die Zwickmühlen der Existenzformen der Rationalität und lässt nur ein Denken an der Grenze zu, welche ihre Grundlage ist: Es gibt keine Tatsachen, sondern Interpretationen. (shrink)

This book argues that we can find the resources to build a public perspective if we make two commitments: to respect people as autonomous agents and to endorse a shared ethics of beliefs.

Implikatura skalarna jest bardzo powszechnym typem wnioskowania pragmatycznego, które polega na uznaniu przez odbiorcę za nieprawdziwe zdań zawierających terminy bardziej informatywne niż termin użyty przez mówcę, kiedy wszystkie te terminy można umieścić na jednej skali. Pierwsza część tekstu stanowi przegląd podstawowych teoretycznych podejść do implikatur skalarnych. Druga część oferuje krótki przegląd badań empirycznych na temat rozwoju implikatur skalarnych u dzieci. Ostatnia część jest bazującą na przykładzie implikatur skalarnych próbą refleksji nad wzajemnymi stosunkami między pragmatyką teoretyczną a eksperymentalną.

So far, we have focused on discourse reference to atomic individuals and specific times, events, and states. The basic point of the argument was that all types of discourse reference involve attention-guided anaphora (in the sense of Bittner 2012: Ch. 2). We now turn to discourses involving anaphora to and by quantificational expressions. Today, we focus on quantification over individuals but the analysis we develop will directly generalize to other semantic types. The basic idea is that quantification is one more (...) species of top-level anaphora--to wit, anaphora to top-ranked sets. (shrink)

El presente trabajo gira en torno a dos lecturas realistas del "segundo Wittgenstein", una de carácter no metafísico surgida en The Realistic Spirit de Cora Diamond y otra lectura "realista metafísica", presentada a partir de la interpretación de H. Mounce en "Wittgenstein and Classical Realism". A partir de la confrontación de ambas posiciones, el hilo de lectura crítica que conducirá nuestro trabajo será que no podemos sostener ninguna posición realista "metafísica" en relación con las tesis del segundo Wittgenstein. El trasfondo (...) práctico sobre el que se apoyan las descripciones de este autor muestra ese fundamento no metafísico sino contingente sobre el que basamos nuestros hechos, conceptos y objetividad. Esto nos acerca a una noción de realismo en el que conceptos y realidad ya cuentan con significado de antemano en tanto la praxisen la que se enraízan garantiza nuestro trato con lo que nos rodea. El fundamento no es la razón, la conciencia, la correspondencia o adecuación a una realidad "desnuda"; es la praxis, el lugar común y el equilibrio entre los seres humanos y mundo. (shrink)

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic has broadly impacted university students’ customary life, resulting in remarkable levels of stress and psychological suffering. Although the acute phase of the crisis has been overcome, it does not imply that perceived stress related to the risk of contagion and to the changes in the relational life experienced over more than 1 year of the pandemic will promptly and abruptly decrease. This study aims at comparing university students’ psychological health conditions before and during the COVID-19 (...) pandemic, but also at providing information on how psychological health conditions evolved over the 1 year of the pandemic. We analyzed data from a repeated cross-sectional survey on different samples of university students before the pandemic in 2017 and during the pandemic. During the pandemic, data were collected at three stages. The COVID-19 Student Stress Questionnaire and the Symptom-Checklist-90-Revised were used to assess, respectively, COVID-19-related stressors and the presence of psychological symptoms. Psychological health conditions were compared at baseline and during the pandemic, whereas both psychological health conditions and perceived levels of COVID-19-related stressors were compared over the three pandemic stages. In addition, Logistic Regression was used to explore the associations between COVID-19-related stressors and psychological symptoms. Findings revealed a significant increase in symptoms of Depression, Phobic-Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive, and Psychoticism from pre to during the pandemic. Perceived levels of COVID-19-related stress and specific psychological symptoms significantly increased as the pandemic was progressing. COVID-19-related stressors emerged as significantly associated with several psychopathological symptoms. Findings are discussed with the aim of providing tailored interventions to prevent mental disease and promote psychological adjustment in this specific stage of transition within this exceptional global emergency. (shrink)

By this point, we have developed some articulated analyses of top-level temporal anaphora, including temporal quantification, in languages with grammatical tense and/or aspect systems, represented by English, Polish, and Mandarin. But it is still not clear how this approach might extend to temporal anaphora in a language such as Kalaallisut, which has neither grammatical tense nor grammatical aspect, but instead marks only grammatical mood and person. Most theories of mood and modal reference either ignore temporal reference or analyze modal and (...) temporal reference as unrelated phenomena. Such theories provide no inkling how temporal reference in a tenseless mood-based language can be as precise as in English. (shrink)

This is the last of three lectures on anaphoric parallels between individuals and possibilities across languages (IMS, Stuttgart, 2000).

This volume contains ten papers that have been collected by the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/Société canadienne d’histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques. It showcases rigorously-reviewed contemporary scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics from the seventeenth century to the modern era. -/- The volume begins with an exposition of the life and work of Professor Bolesław Sobociński. It then moves on to cover a collection of topics about twentieth-century philosophy (...) of mathematics, including Fred Sommers’s creation of Traditional Formal Logic and Alexander Grothendieck’s work as a starting point for discussing analogies between commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. Continuing the focus on the philosophy of mathematics, the next selections discuss the mathematization of biology and address the study of numerical cognition. The volume then moves to discussing various aspects of mathematics education, including Charles Davies’s early book on the teaching of mathematics and the use of Gaussian Lemniscates in the classroom. A collection of papers on the history of mathematics in the nineteenth century closes out the volume, presenting a discussion of Gauss’s “Allgemeine Theorie des Erdmagnetismus” and a comparison of the geometric works of Desargues and La Hire. Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible not only to mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also to anyone with a general interest in mathematics. (shrink)

The Civil Economy approach, as developed by Italian economists Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, aims at introducing reciprocity into the economy as a humanizing factor. Despite being presented as an innovative perspective, the CE approach shares many characteristics with the German model of Social Market Economy. The present paper compares both approaches, showing that they in fact share a normative basis and similar aims but address them from diverse points of view; namely, CE addresses them from a virtue ethics perspective (...) and SME from an institutional ethics one. This leads them to stress different aspects and to focus on diverse problems. Therefore, CE would not constitute an alternative to SME but a complement. Thus, a combination of both approaches should allow each to take advantage of their respective strengths and lead to a better result in terms of the common good. (shrink)

In this article we explore the relationship between semiotic analysis of images and quantitative analysis of vast image corpora, in particular the work produced by Lev Manovich and the Cultural Analytics Lab, called “Media Visualization.” Media Visualization has been chosen as corpus because of its metavisual operation (images are visualized and analyzed by images) and its innovating way of conceiving analysis: by visual instruments. In this paper semiotics is used as an approach to Media Visualization and taken as an object (...) of study as well, especially visual semiotics. In this sense, a comparison between visual semiotics (close reading of small corpora) and quantitative analyses of images (distant reading of vast collections) are conducted from a semiotic point of view. Post-Greimassian semiotics guides this study with respect to the issue of the image-within-an-image and metavisual visualization; Peircean semiotics is employed to explain and develop the notion of diagram. (shrink)

The concept of heterotopia challenges political theory, which has often focused on utopic thinking. Foucault describes a heterotopia as a heterogenous space that juxtaposes in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Streets, squares and parks form heterotopias when their utopic purity as public space is juxtaposed with the private spaces created by the cardboard boxes and other temporary shelters of homeless people. Since citizenship has traditionally been thought of as participation in a democratic (...) public sphere, how do heterotopias of homelessness challenge the ideas about citizenship? Based on narrative research with homeless people in Poland, I show how the homeless conceive of their marginality. Their participation or non-participation in democracy is not hidden but, on the contrary, very visible in public spaces where they are included as excluded. (shrink)

Most scholars of emotions concede that although cognitive evaluations are essential for emotion, they are not sufficient for it, and that other elements, such as bodily feelings, physiological sensations and behavioral expressions are also required. However, only a few discuss how these diverse aspects of emotion are related in order to form the unity of emotion. In this essay I examine the co-presence and the causal views, and I argue that neither view can account for the unity of emotions. In (...) particular, both views face the problem of fortuitous connection, and, as a result, they fail to identify and distinguish an emotion from other mental states. Consequently, they fail to account for our first person authority over our emotions. I finally argue that only an internal, conceptual relation between the cognitive/evaluative and affective/physiological aspects of emotion can avoid such problems, and suggest that the Aristotelian distinction of form and matter can provide such internal relation. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the contributions to natural history, particularly in methods of plant classification of the Portuguese botanist, man of letters, diplomat, and Freemason Abbé José Correia da Serra (1751-1823), placing them in their national and international political and social contexts. Correia da Serra adopted the natural method of classification championed by the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, and introduced refinements of his own that owe much to parallel developments in zoology. He endorsed the view that the classification of plants (...) should be based on the establishment of affinities rather than of differences. The emphasis on affinities went hand in hand with the development of the concept of symmetry. This idea was introduced by Correia da Serra in systematics and was adopted and further developed by his friend, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle. Correia da Serra also argued that Cryptogamia reproduce sexually, advocated extension of methods of comparative anatomy from zoology to botany, and applied them to the study of fruits. Correia da Serra was one among many of the estrangeirados, Portuguese "Europeanized" intellectuals who traveled extensively abroad in most cases to escape political or religious persecution at home. The estrangeirados were important contributors to 18th and 19th century European thinking. Most of the estrangeirados were pivotal in the introduction, dissemination and propagation of the new sciences in Portugal, but unlike most of his fellow estrangeirados, Correia da Serra was also an innovative man of science in his own right. (shrink)

In this article I analyze the connection between the concepts of “actuality”, “upcoming” and “origin” found in the early reflections of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno to expose some of the defining borders of the transposition of criticisms made by both philosophers. Through the identification of “actuality” as a reflection on the conditions in which philosophy is legitimate, “upcoming” as a requisite for self-justification of philosophical knowledge, and “origin” as the claim of the historically unfinished, I show in what (...) sense a critical horizon is recovered by Benjamin and Adorno as an inexorable exercise of philosophical praxis. (shrink)

The aim is to present a discussion on the origins of the German Enlightenment, comparing the advances made by Leibniz, Crusius and Wolff. The particular element of seventeenth and eighteenth century German society is highlighted, in order to understand the specificities of the Kantian proposal, which is shown to be a process in development and not finished of freedom and autonomy.

The article deals with the main apocalyptic themes and motives in the modern religious literature of Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day of Adventists. The relevance of the apocalyptic perspective in the light of the acute problems of the present, in particular, in the context of the global world situation, is indicated. Author analyzed global problems in accordance with certain Biblical signs of "time of the end", apocalyptic feelings and expectations in the religious literature of Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day of Adventists. A (...) comparative analysis reveals the common and distinctive features of apocalyptic themes, plots and moods in the religious literature of Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day of Adventists. In this research author used general scientific and special methods. The main research approach was the systematic approach, which allowed integrating the diversity of the investigated material into apocalyptic problems in the field of philosophy and theology in order to carry out a coherent definition of the main themes and motifs in the Protestant literature. A comparative method was also used in this research. The main ideas in the religious literature of Jehovah's Witnesses in this context are: the proclamation of the Second Coming of Christ on Earth during the crisis periods; emphasis on the Millennial Kingdom in the Sky, the opposition of secular power to the Divine Structure. Seventh-day Adventist сoncept: judgment, Second Coming of Jesus Christ, first resurrection and ascension of saints; Armageddon, the devastation of the earth and the destruction of the wicked; Millennial kingdom of the righteous in heaven; The second resurrection and the last judgment; New Land. (shrink)

Adolescence has been linked to an enhanced tolerance of uncertainty and risky behavior and is possibly connected to an increased response toward rewards. However, previous research has produced inconsistent findings. To investigate whether these findings are due to different reward probabilities used in the experimental design, we extended a monetary incentive delay task by including three different reward probabilities. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, 25 healthy adolescents and 22 adults were studied during anticipation of rewards in the VS. Differently colored (...) cue stimuli indicated either a monetary or verbal trial and symbolized different reward probabilities, to which the participants were blinded. Results demonstrated faster reaction times for lower reward probabilities in both age groups. Adolescents were slower through all conditions and had less activation on a neural level. Imaging results showed a three-way interaction between age group x condition x reward probability with differences in percent signal change between adolescents and adults for the high reward probabilities while adolescents demonstrated differences for the lowest. Therefore, previous inconsistent findings could be due to different reward probabilities, which makes examining these crucial for a better understanding of adolescent and adult behavior. (shrink)