Down syndrome (DS) is the most common developmental disorder characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Several studies have reported poor language and prosodic skills and contradictory results regarding individuals’ with DS socio-cognitive skills, whereas most of them have focused on children with DS. The present study attempts to explore adults’ with DS language, socio-cognitive and prosodic abilities via the use of story-retellings. Twenty adults with DS and two groups of TD children, one matched to their expressive vocabulary (TD-EVT) and (...) the other matched to their non-verbal mental age (TD-RCPM), took part in the present study. Participants listened to a story while viewing a wordless picture PowerPoint presentation on a computer screen, and then, they were instructed to retell the story while viewing the pictures for a second time. Each participant listened to two stories, one with “lively” and one with “flat” prosody. Results revealed that adults’ with DS performance was comparable with the one presented by the TD-RCPM group, whereas the TD-EVT group performed significantly better in almost all variables. Individuals’ with DS re-narrations, however, contained significantly less complement clauses and internal state terms (related or not related to Theory of Mind–ToM) compared to the re-narrations of both control groups. In contrast, the group with DS performed similarly to both control groups in comprehension questions related to main characters’ internal state terms and significantly better compared to the TD-RCPM group in questions related to ToM. In terms of prosody, all three groups performed significantly better on story structure and comprehension questions when prosody was “lively” compared “flat” prosody. DS group’s re-narrations did not contain enough internal state terms, not due to their inability in recognizing them, but due to their poor morphosyntactic abilities, which did not allow them to find the proper means to express the main characters’ internal states. Prosody facilitated participants with DS in the comprehension and re-narration. This suggests that intervention programs based on prosody could support the language skills of adults with DS. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the topics of trust and expertise from the perspective of political epistemology. In particular, it addresses four main questions: (§1) How should we characterise experts and their expertise? (§2) How can non-experts recognize a reliable expert? (§3) What does it take for non-experts to trust experts? (§4) What problems impede trust in experts?

This paper focuses on negative exemplarity-related emotions (NEREs) and on their educational implications. In this paper, we will first argue for the nonexpendability of negative emotions broadly conceived (section 2) by defending their instrumental and intrinsic role in a good and flourishing life. In section 3, we will make the claim more specific by focusing on the narrower domain of NEREs and argue for their moral and educational significance by evaluating whether they fit the arguments provided in the previous section. (...) In section 4, we will propose three educational strategies to foster NEREs’ positive moral role. In conclusion, we will point out that an exemplarist approach to character education would greatly benefit from a more fine-grained account of the emotions involved in the educational process and from a broader perspective on which of these emotions should be taken as valuable for educational purposes. (shrink)

The current “exemplarist turn” within virtue ethics is increasingly shedding light on the importance of exemplars both as enabling one to identify the virtues and for the importance they bear for orienting one’s conduct, as well as for educating the novice. However, even if categorizations of exemplars have already been proposed, there seems to be a lack of discussion on the kind of imitation different exemplars are supposed to elicit. In order to offer a preliminary answer to this question, in (...) this paper I present three paths to flourishing via imitation of exemplary individuals: The Platonic, the Stoic, and the Aristotelian. Then, I sketch an attempt to reconcile these models. In conclusion, I suggest that, when it comes to education, this reconciliation becomes necessary. Along these lines, I recommend that a multi-step educational program is elaborated. (shrink)

Once upon a time, Aesop says, there was a donkey who wanted to be a pet dog. The pet dog was given many treats by the master and the household servants, and the donkey was envious of him. Hence, the donkey began emulating the pet dog. What happened next? The story ends up with the donkey beaten senseless, chased off to the stables, exhausted and barely alive. Who is to blame for the poor donkey’s unfortunate fate? Well, there could be (...) disagreement upon this, but we think emulation is to blame. And it’s on the kinds of envy-related emulation that we focus in this chapter. More analytically, we aim at vindicating the role of envy for moral exemplars within an exemplarist character educational framework. In the first section, we recall the central tenets of an exemplarist account of moral progress, and highlight how negative emotions, in general, have suffered a bad press within character education, with exemplarism being no exception. Then we provide a brief outline of standard strategies of defending envy by appealing to useful taxonomies of envy (e.g., Taylor 1988; Protasi 2016; Fussi 2018). After that, we put forward our 'Donkey Objection' by recalling Aesop’s fable on "foolish imitation", so as to show that when envy triggers mere emulation, it can bear devastating effects such as conformism and a lack of self-worth and personal integrity. In response to this objection, we bring into play a distinction between two rival forms of imitation—emulation and inspiration—and we coin the label of "inspired envy" for those forms of imitation by inspiration triggered by envy that lead to self-improvement avoiding morally detrimental consequences. (shrink)

This paper investigates civility from an Aristotelian perspective and has two objectives. The first is to offer a novel account of this virtue based on Aristotle’s remarks about civic friendship. The proposed account distinguishes two main components of civility—civic benevolence and civil deliberation—and shows how Aristotle’s insights can speak to the needs of our communities today. The notion of civil deliberation is then unpacked into three main dimensions: motivational, inquiry-related, and ethical. The second objective is to illustrate how the post-truth (...) condition—in particular, the spread of misinformation typical of the digital environments we inhabit—obstructs our capacity to cultivate the virtue of civility by impairing every component of civil deliberation. The paper hopes to direct virtue theorists’ attention to the need to foster civic virtues as a means of counteracting the negative aspects of the post-truth age. (shrink)

Phronesis is essential for good decision‐making and actions. This literature review shows how phronesis has been discussed and related to elements of the field of administration and organizations. A search in the database systems Scopus, EBSCO, Web of Science, and Scielo, based on eligibility criteria, resulted in 43 theoretical and 14 empirical works. The analysis of these studies showed the most significant empirical contributions, the most cited authors, methods, journals, and central themes addressed in studies on phronesis to understand ethics (...) in business. From a virtue ethics perspective, we discuss the major theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as the implications of a restricted understanding of phronesis when it is treated apart from other elements of the virtue ethics framework. We present a synthesis of the concepts of phronesis, based on dimensions of magnitude and amplitude of the conceptions, ranging from formal to substantive phronesis, and covering individual, organizational, or societal levels of analysis. We argue that a substantive conception of phronesis within virtue ethics may improve our understanding of ethics because it assumes the interdependence of phronesis and moral virtues, integral anthropology, and the common good. We present a future research agenda, considering the study's limitations and findings. (shrink)

In the face of causal complexity, scientists reconstitute phenomena in order to arrive at a more simplified and partial picture that ignores most of the 'bigger picture.' This paper will distinguish between two modes of reconstituting phenomena: one moving down to a level of greater decomposition (toward organizational parts of the original phenomenon), and one moving up to a level of greater abstraction (toward different differences regarding the phenomenon). The first aim of the paper is to illustrate that phenomena are (...) moving targets, i.e., they are not fixed once and for all, but are adapted, if necessary, on the basis of the preferred perspective adopted for pragmatic reasons. The second aim is to analyze in detail the second mode of reconstituting phenomena. This includes an exposition of the kind of pragmatic-pluralistic picture resulting from the fact that phenomena are reconstituted by a move up to a level of greater abstraction. (shrink)

In this paper, I will account for the importance of the notion of exemplarity within the contemporary virtue-ethical debate, both in its classic formulation (e.g., Hursthouse 1999) and in the recent exemplarist moral theory advanced by Linda T. Zagzebski (2015; 2017). Despite their differences, which I will discuss extensively, both theories are centered on a characterization of an exemplary virtuous agent that serves as a standard for determining what, in a given situation, is right, wrong, dutiful and forbidden. The first (...) two sections will be devoted to an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches. In the third, I will propose a different role of radical (i.e., exceptional) individuals, i.e., saints and heroes, within a virtue-ethical theory of right action. (shrink)

Human nature is a concept that transgresses the boundary between science and society and between fact and value. It is as much a political concept as it is a scientific one. This chapter will cover the politics of human nature by using evidence from history, anthropology and social psychology. The aim is to show that an important political function of the vernacular concept of human nature is social demarcation (inclusion/exclusion): it is involved in regulating who is ‘us’ and who is (...) ‘them.’ It is a folk concept that is used for dehumanization, for denying (a) membership in humankind or (b) full humanness to certain people in order to include or exclude them from various forms of politically relevant aspects of human life, such as rights, power, etc. (shrink)

The article addresses the question whether culture evolves in a Lamarckian manner. I highlight three central aspects of a Lamarckian concept of evolution: the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the transformational pattern of evolution, and the concept of directed changes. A clear exposition of these aspects shows that a system can be a Darwinian variational system instead of a Lamarckian transformational one, even if it is based on inheritance of acquired characteristics and/or on Lamarckian directed changes. On this basis, I apply (...) the three aspects to culture. Taking for granted that culture is a variational system, based on selection processes, I discuss in detail the senses in which cultural inheritance can be said to be Lamarckian and in which sense problem solving, a major factor in cultural change, leads to directed variation. (shrink)

This article offers a decolonial methodology that questions the universality tied to the concept of gender. While not questioning that the modern/colonial capitalist gender system is an oppressive, variable, systemic organization of power, it argues that it is not universal; that is, that not all peoples organize their relations in terms of and on the grounds of gender. Its aim is to offer a decolonial methodology to both study colonized people who live at the colonial difference, but also to engage (...) in decolonial coalition. To see the colonial difference is to see coloniality/modernity as the place the colonized inhabit and the situation of oppression from which the colonized create meanings that are not assimilated. (shrink)

We apply some tools developed in categorical logic to give an abstract description of constructions used to formalize constructive mathematics in foundations based on intensional type theory. The key concept we employ is that of a Lawvere hyperdoctrine for which we describe a notion of quotient completion. That notion includes the exact completion on a category with weak finite limits as an instance as well as examples from type theory that fall apart from this.

Over the last three quarters of a century, international guidelines and regulations have undergone significant changes in how children are problematised as participants in biomedical research. While early guidelines enacted children as vulnerable subjects with diminished autonomy and in need of special protection, beginning in the early 2000s, international regulatory frameworks defined the paediatric population as vulnerable due to unaddressed public health needs. More recently, ethical recommendations have promoted the active engagement of minors as research partners. In this paper, I (...) adopt a post-structuralist approach to policy analysis to examine deep-seated assumptions and presuppositions underlying the changes in the problematisation of children as biomedical research participants over time. While biomedical research ethics focuses on the autonomy and vulnerability of minors, ethical guidelines are situated in specific sociocultural contexts, shaped, among other things, by contingent public health needs and changing conceptions of the value of research and science for society. In the process, I demonstrate the challenge of moving away from an approach that in taking adults as the model overshadows the complexity of children’s lived experiences as well as their personal, cultural, and social lives. The lack of acknowledgement of this complexity makes children vulnerable to epistemic injustice, which is particularly crucial to address in public involvement initiatives. (shrink)

Nursing, or caring science, is mainly concerned with developing knowledge of what constitutes ideal, good health care for patients as whole persons, and how to achieve this. The aim of this study was to find clinical empirical indications of good ethical care and to investigate the substance of ideal nursing care in praxis. A hermeneutic method was employed in this clinical study, assuming the theoretical perspective of caritative caring and ethics of the understanding of life. The data consisted of two (...) Socratic dialogues: one with nurses and one with nursing students, and interviews with two former patients. The empirical data are first described from a phenomenological approach. Observations of caregivers offering `the little extra' were taken to confirm that patients were `being seen', not from the perspective of an ideal nursing model, but from that of interaction as a fellow human being. The study provides clinical evidence that, as an ontological response to suffering, 'symbolic acts' such as giving the `little extra' may work to bridge gaps in human interaction. The fact that `little things' have the power to preserve dignity and make patients feel they are valued offers hope. Witnessing benevolent acts also paves the way for both patients and caregivers to increase their understanding of life. (shrink)

In this paper I want to leave behind the failed attempts to think about populism as ideology, strategy, style, or even discourse. I will focus on the ‘conceptual battles of politics’ and their potential to influence actors to pursue and effect specific ends. Reinhart Koselleck and his ideas about conceptual history will figure prominently in my discussion, as will his concept of asymmetrical combat-concept as a means of unleashing a theoretical and political war. The goal is to demonstrate that concepts (...) have taken the place of weapons of war among political actors. (shrink)

Featuring original essays from leading scholars in philosophy and psychology, this volume investigates and rethinks the role of practical wisdom in light of the most recent developments in virtue theory and moral, social and developmental psychology. The concept of phronesis has long held a prominent place in the development of Aristotelian virtue ethics and moral education. However, the nature and development of phronesis is still in need of investigation, especially because of the new insights that in recent years have come (...) from both philosophy and science. The essays in this volume contribute to the debate about practical wisdom by elucidating its role in empirical psychology and advancing important new research questions. They address various topics related to practical wisdom and its development, including honesty, ecocentric phronesis, social cognitive theory, practical wisdom in limited-information contexts, Whole Trait Theory, skill models, the reciprocity of virtue, and challenges from situationism. Practical Wisdom will interest researchers and advanced students working in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and moral education. (shrink)

Our evaluation of questions and knowledge attributions may vary relative to the way in which the relevant objects are identified. In the first part, the article proposes a theory that represents different methods of trans-world identification and is able to account for their impact on interpretation. In the second part, the same theory is used to account for the meaning of concealed questions. On the proposed account, the interpretation of a concealed question results from the application of a type-shifting operation (...) mapping an individual denoting expression into an identity question interpreted relative to a contextually selected identification method. (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.

Two conceptions of motivating reasons, i.e. the reasons for which we act, can be found in the literature: (1) the dominant 'psychological conception', which says that motivating reasons are an agent's believing something; and (2) the 'non-psychological' conception, the minority view, which says that they are what the agent believes, i.e. his beliefs. In this paper I outline a version of the minority view, and defend it against what have been thought to be insuperable difficulties - in particular, difficulties concerning (...) 'error cases' (cases where what the agent believes is false); and difficulties concerning the explanation of action. Concerning error cases, I argue that if we are motivated by something believed that is true, what motivates us to act is a motivating reason. By contrast, if we are motivated by something believed that is false, then what motivates us to act is merely an apparent motivating reason. Either way, what motivates us is, as the non-psychological conception says, what we believe and not our believing it. I offer an account of the relation between motivating reasons and the explanation of action, and argue that this account helps bring out two important points. One is that the fact that we often do, and indeed sometimes must, use explanations such as 'He did it because he believed that p' does not vindicate the psychological conception of motivating reasons. The other is that endorsing the non-psychological conception of motivating reasons does not commit one to a non-factive view of explanations of action. (shrink)

Recent improvements in virtual reality allow for the representation of authentic environments and multiple users in a shared complex virtual world in real time. These advances have fostered clinical applications including in psychiatry. However, although VR is already used in clinical settings to help people with mental disorders, the related ethical issues require greater attention. Based on a thematic literature search the authors identified five themes that raise ethical concerns related to the clinical use of VR: reality and its representation, (...) autonomy, privacy, self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and expectation bias. Reality and its representation is a theme that lies at the heart of VR, but is also of specific significance in a clinical context when perceptions of reality are concerned, for example, during psychosis. Closely associated is the autonomy of VR users. Although autonomy is a much-considered topic in biomedical ethics, it has not been sufficiently discussed when it comes to applications of VR in psychiatry. In this review, the authors address the different themes and recommend the development of an ethical framework for the clinical use of VR. (shrink)

This paper spells out the ways in which we need to be pluralists about “human nature”. It discusses a conceptual pluralism about the concept of “human nature”, stemming from post-essentialist ontology and the semantic complexity of the term “nature”; a descriptive pluralism about the “descriptive nature” of human beings, which is a pluralism regarding our self-understanding as human beings that stems from the long list of typical features of, and relations between, human beings; a natural kind term pluralism, which is (...) a pluralism that concerns the choices we have in deciding how to apply the kind term “human”; and an explanatory pluralism that results from the causal complexity of life. Because of the complexity of being human, which gives rise to these pluralisms, being human is, the paper claims, a kaleidoscopic affair, and one far from concerning the life sciences only. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Aristotelian phronesis and aims at highlighting its nature as an eye on particulars with general ends in sight. More specifically, it challenges the particularistic interpretation of phronesis and Aristotelian ethics in order to argue for a “qualified generalism.” After sketching a radical Particularistic Reading (PR), the paper defends an interpretation it calls the Priority of Particulars Reading (PPR). First, it shows how PPR effectively accounts for the Aristotelian priority assigned to practical perception while at the same (...) time counterbalancing that priority by means of two interpretive strategies. Then it offers further support to PPR by appealing to its own reading of Aristotle's phronesis. It aims to show that it is possible to defend a legitimate form of PPR without ending in holding PR, and that Aristotle's own theory and work ground the moderate reading. Finally, it draws some implications by analyzing educational practice. (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)

In this paper, I show that the conception of a virtue in positive psychology is a mishmash of two competing accounts of what virtues are: a Common Sense View and an Aristotelian View. Distinguishing the strengths and weaknesses of these two frameworks leads also to a reconsideration of an old debate, namely, that concerning the Unity of the Virtues thesis. Such thesis is rejected by positive psychologist, as well as by some philosophers among the virtue-ethical field, on the basis, I (...) argue, of a lack of accuracy in defining the very meaning of the concept of what virtues are, before examining the issues at stake. In the first part of the paper, I show to what extent the conceptions of virtue employed by the different voices diverge and the consequences of this divergence for the UV problem. Then, I go on by arguing for one of the two competing accounts, namely, the Aristotelian View, over the other, that is, the Common Sense View. Finally, I show to which of CSV theses positive psychologists are committed, so to explain their rejection of the UV thesis, and to highlight their need for a clearer account of what a virtue is. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. First, to bring together the models of temporal phenomenology on offer and to present these using a consistent set of distinctions and terminologies. Second, to examine the methodologies currently practiced in the development of these models. To that end we present an abstract characterisation in which we catalogue all extant models. We then argue that neither of the two extreme methodologies currently discussed is suitable to the task of developing a model of temporal phenomenology. An (...) entirely top-down methodology is largely insensitive to empirical findings, while one that is entirely bottom-up is insensitive to both introspective evidence and more general philosophical considerations. We recommend a methodology that falls between these two extremes. (shrink)

In this article, I will draw on my own work and related publications to present some intuitions and hypotheses about the nature of the self and the mechanisms that lead to the development of consciousness or self awareness in human infants during the first 6 months of life. My main purpose is to show that the origins of a concept of self include the physical and the mental selves. I believe that it is essential when trying to understand what a (...) mental state is, that one identifies the social and physical aspects of the person to whom the mental state belongs. How can one identify a mental state or thought without making reference to a subject who experiences it (Hobson, 1990)? The other important feature of the self is that it is distinguished from other people and inanimate objects. ‘One's concept of self is a concept of a person; one's concept of persons cannot be a concept applicable only to a single individual (oneself), for the reason that in this case it would no longer constitute a concept'(Hobson, 1990, p. 165). I would like to argue that infants must be able to represent their physical and social selves in order to recognize that they are similar and different from other people, and to develop expectations and predictions about the behaviour of others (theory of mind). Unlike Strawson, I do not believe that the social and physical aspects of the self are, or become redundant to the nature of the self. I posit that the mature conscious self is a unique mythical and constantly changing entity, the formation of which is created not by the individual alone, but through continuous dialectical inquiry with other people. (shrink)

The placenta’s role as a mediating passage between bodies has been a conceptual resource for feminist theorists and philosophers interested in developing more nuanced explanations of the maternal–fetal relation, a relation that has tended to be identified with maternal and fetal bodies rather than with the placenta between them. I draw on efforts by philosopher Luce Irigaray and her readers to theorise placental relations as a model for the negotiation of differences. In her more recent work, Irigaray figures the placenta (...) as an enveloping space of metaphorical enclosure. The placental relation in Irigaray’s work thus offers insights into the temporal structure of her theory of becoming and can inform a more ‘materialist’ account of pregnancy. I then consider how placental relations are conceptual resources for re-imagining relations of self–other in pregnancy, and for addressing emergent ethical concerns over the transformation of the placenta into a scientific object. (shrink)

In this article we aim to reconstruct some aspects of Davidson's idea of triangulation, and against this reconstruction, ask whether the idea is viciously circular. We begin by looking at the claim that without a triangularn setting, there is no saying what the cause of a being's responses is. In the first section we discuss the notion of relevant similarity, and what difference the presence of a second non‐linguistic being could make for the individuation of a common focus of attention. (...) In the second section we look at the role of a second person in language‐acquisition. It is important that being corrected to ‘go on as others do’ does not yet presuppose thought, and similarity standards can be applied to a learner's reactions even before she is aware of these standards. We also show why Davidson is not committed to any consensus view of correctness. In the last section we discern three charges of circularity that can be levelled against the idea of triangulation. We argue that Davidson can respond to the first two charges, and point to a way of answering the third. But the response we propound raises a new question, namely, why does the second being have to be a speaker or thinker even before the learner is aware of the three points of the triangle? (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the role played by the emotion of admiration in formulating moral judgments. First, I discuss whether and when admiration is a reliable source of moral knowledge, or, on the contrary, it misleads the subject, leaving her prey to forms of uncritical devotion to unworthy objects of admiration. To do so, I try to elucidate which underlying theory of emotions best allows one to characterize admiration as a reliable source of moral knowledge. Second, I introduce the (...) notion of transformative moral experience, understood as a subclass of transformative experiences, and I argue that it is precisely admiration that ensures the rationality of the choices made in such experiences. Finally, in light of this analysis, I show how admiration—together with the constellation of positive and negative emotions connected to the perception of moral exemplarity—acts as a central element for the maintenance of moral integrity. I defend, in particular, the idea that integrity should not be understood as mere coherence, nor as a static maintenance of the moral status quo, but as being firmly rooted in one’s own identity yet open to novelty and especially to the novelty represented by transformative moral experiences. (shrink)

In this study, we tested the linguistic relativity hypothesis by studying the effect of grammatical gender (feminine vs. masculine) on affective judgments of conceptual representation in Italian and German. In particular, we examined the within- and cross-language grammatical gender effect and its interaction with participants’ demographic characteristics (such as, the raters’ age and sex) on semantic differential scales (affective ratings of valence, arousal and dominance) in Italian and German speakers. We selected the stimuli and the relative affective measures from Italian (...) and German adaptations of the ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words). Bayesian and frequentist analyses yielded evidence for the absence of within- and cross-languages effects of grammatical gender and sex- and age-dependent interactions. These results suggest that grammatical gender does not affect judgments of affective features of semantic representation in Italian and German speakers, since an overt coding of word grammar is not required. Although further research is recommended to refine the impact of the grammatical gender on properties of semantic representation, these results have implications for any strong view of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. (shrink)

Although the STS literature on boundary-work recognizes that such work unfolds within a “terrain of uneven advantage” vis-à-vis gender, race, and other inequalities, reflection about that uneven advantage has been strikingly underdeveloped. This article calls for a retheorizing of boundary-work that engages more actively with feminist, critical race, and postcolonial scholarship and examines more systematically the relation between scientific boundary-work, broader structures of sociopolitical inequality, and boundary-workers’ positionality. To demonstrate the need for this retheorization, I analyze ethnographic and interview data (...) on scientific boundary-work in the natural and social sciences in Portugal, showing that scholars’ gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality affect the success of their boundary-work. I suggest, therefore, that in unequal societies where credibility is unevenly distributed, the conditions are not in place for some scholars’ boundary-work to work. I draw on Sara Ahmed to argue that we must conceptualize scientific boundary-work as always potentially performative, but not always successfully so, and explicitly interrogate the actual conditions of performativity. Recognizing the links between inequality, embodiment, and non-performativity in scientific boundary-work will enable STS to better understand, and hopefully transform, the relations between contingent struggles over scientificity and entrenched structures of power. (shrink)

Dieses Buch ist eine bewusst systematisch orientierte Einführung in die grundlegendsten Fragen der philosophischen Ästhetik. Es richtet sich in erster Linie an Studierende der Philosophie, aber auch an interessierte Laien und Vertreter/innen anderer Disziplinen. Zusammenfassungen, Übungsaufgaben und Literaturhinweise am Ende jedes Kapitels machen es auch für das Selbststudium geeignet. Aus dem Inhalt: I. Was ist philosophische Ästhetik? – Auf der Suche nach einer Definition der philosophischen Ästhetik – Die Gegenstände der philosophischen Ästhetik – Die Fragen der philosophischen Ästhetik – Die (...) Methoden der philosophischen Ästhetik II. Das ästhetische Erlebnis und die ästhetische Einstellung – Die Bestandteile ästhetischer Erlebnisse – Die subjektive und die objektive Erklärung der ästhetischen Erfahrung – Interesselosigkeit und psychische Distanz – Einwände gegen die Theorie der Interesselosigkeit und der psychischen Distanz III. Ästhetische Eigenschaften, ästhetische Werturteile und ästhetische Gegenstände – Ästhetische Eigenschaften und ästhetische Prädikate – Ästhetischer Realismus versus ästhetischer Anti-Realismus – Nonkognitivismus, Subjektivismus, Naturalismus – Das Erkennen ästhetischer Wertqualitäten IV. Die Ontologie des Kunstwerks – Was für eine Art von Gegenständen sind Kunstwerke? – Die Abstraktheit literarischer und musikalischer Werke – Sind Werke der bildenden Kunst materielle Gegenstände? – Fiktive Gegenstände und dargestellte Welten V. Was ist Kunst? – Die Darstellungstheorie – Die Ausdruckstheorie – Der kunstästhetische Formalismus – Die Institutionstheorie – Die Theorie der Familienähnlichkeit – Kunst als ästhetische Kommunikation. (shrink)

This paper examines Bohdan Boichuk’s poetry by looking into the role his childhood memories played in forming his poetic imagination. Displaced by World War II, the poet displays a unique capacity to transcend his traumatic experiences by engaging in creative writing. Eyewitnessing war atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis does not destroy his belief in the healing power of poetry; on the contrary, it makes him appreciate poetry as the only existentially worthy enterprise. Invoking Gaston Bachelard’s classic work The Poetics of (...) Reveries: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, I argue that Boichuk’s vivid childhood memories, however painful they might be, helped him poetically recreate and reimagine fateful moments of his migrant life. (shrink)

This article makes the case for a symmetry between the form and content of Lacan's 1964 seminars on vision in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. As well as theorizing anamorphosis, or visual resistance, as a model of the dialectic between the eye and the gaze, the seminars function to lure and frustrate their auditor-readers. This reading, supported by Lacan's references to his own discourse as a labyrinth and network of threads, shows how a policy of syntactic ambiguity and apparent (...) contradiction seems to inform the logic of the seminars on vision, such that the gaze defies understanding as surely as it resists the eye. The article proposes that this structure of mise-en-abyme, discussed as hypnotic even within the discourse on the gaze, is designed to captivate auditor-readers. Elements within the seminars, as well as Lacan's ‘post-face’ to the published edition, suggest that the discourse is addressed to our unconscious. (shrink)

How do we perceive the agency of others? Do the same rules apply when interacting with others who are radically different from ourselves, like other species or robots? We typically perceive other people and animals through their embodied behavior, as they dynamically engage various aspects of their affordance field. In second personal perception we also perceive social or interactional affordances of others. I discuss various aspects of perceptible agency, which might begin to give us some tools to understand interactions also (...) with agents truly other than ourselves or “perhaps agents” like present and future social robots. Robots have various kinds of physical and behavioral presence and thus make their agency—if we want to call it that—perceptible in ways that computers and other forms of AI do not. The largely dualist assumptions pertaining to the hidden bodies of traditional Turing tests are discussed, as well as the social affordance effects of such indirect interactions as opposed to interactions in physically shared space. The question is what role various abilities to reveal, hide and dynamically control the body and broader behavior plays in heterogeneous tech or machine mediated interactions. I argue that the specifics and richness of perceptible agency matters to the kind of reciprocity we can obtain. (shrink)