Reshaping our methodological research tools for adequately capturing injustice and domination has been a central aspiration of feminist philosophy and social epistemology in recent years. There has been an increasingly empirical turn in recent feminist and political theorization, engaging with case studies and the challenges arising from conducting research in solidarity with unequal partners. I argue that these challenges cannot be resolved by merely adopting a norm and stance of deference to those in the struggle for justice. To conduct philosophical (...) research in an engaged and solidaristic manner, I suggest that deference be supplemented by three methodological and normative principles: 1) epistemic humility, 2) accountability, and 3) co-producing knowledge. I situate these principles within contemporary philosophical work on solidarity, and show how they might help confront power imbalances and other methodological hazards that arise when conducting research in solidarity with others. I arrive at these principles in part by critically reflecting on my own attempt to conduct research in solidarity with women’s rights activists in Senegal. (shrink)

In psychiatry, the concept of “insight” commonly refers to a patient’s judgment that they have a mental illness and need clinical treatment. However, this concept has been criticized because it imposes psychiatric knowledge on the subjective experiences of mental illness and possible interventions. A significant body of literature is critical of mental health interventions; however, insight remains under-explored in this realm. This paper adds to critical analyses of insight by exploring how it is defined and deployed by mental health professionals (...) in an acute inpatient mental health unit in a Canadian general hospital and what disciplinary and epistemic effects it has on patients. To this end, I draw on Foucault’s theories of psychiatric power and Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice to analyze results from an ethnographic study conducted in an inpatient mental health unit. The results show how patients’ resistance to medical compliance is framed by staff as a lack of insight, which reinforces the psychiatric model of mental illness. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a descriptive and normative analysis of the requirements for effective transnational solidarity between southern NGOs and their northern partners. Drawing on interviews conducted with staff members of Senegalese women’s rights NGOs and a private international development foundation, I contend that existing theories of feminist transnational solidarity cannot allow us to properly acknowledge the power asymmetries and obstacles to solidarity that these NGOs are facing. After assessing the divisions related to gender interests and limited resources that (...) characterize this NGO-ized development landscape, I develop a partial theory of transnational solidarity that would center power asymmetries in order to address practical and political obstacles to solidarity. I argue that an effective account of transnational solidarity must include a commitment to disrupting global hierarchies of power as well as to building practices of accountability and attentiveness to power structures. (shrink)

Se situant au confluent du libéralisme politique rawlsien et de l’anthropologie néoaristotélicienne, l’approche des capabilités de Martha Nussbaum offre un cadre théorique permettant de répondre aux tensions multiculturelles. Cet article constitue une analyse détaillée de la réponse de Nussbaum à ces enjeux, qui prétend unir un pluralisme axiologique à un universalisme moral fort. Nous avancerons que la démarche entreprise par la philosophe porte une tension entre le libéralisme politique rawlsien et le cadre conceptuel apporté par la liste des capabilités. Cette (...) liste pose une difficulté par le déficit démocratique de ses fondements, n’intégrant pas suffisamment des normes d’inclusion et de représentation. Dans un dernier temps, nous tenterons de pallier ces problèmes en intégrant à l’approche de Nussbaum des exigences délibératives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. — This article examines the concept of adaptive preference as it has appeared in feminist political philosophy since the 2000’s. This concept refers to preferences shaped in compliance with an oppressive environment and that jeopardizes one’s well-being. In the first part, the two most influential conceptions of adaptive preference will be discussed : the ones provided by the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Serene Khader. Afterwards, I will assess these conceptions in the light of recent work by feminist anthropologists Saba (...) Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod, in which they revaluate the political project of feminist philosophy underlying adaptive preferences. -/- RÉSUMÉ. — Cet article porte sur le concept de préférence adaptative tel qu’il est apparu en philosophie féministe politique et anglophone depuis les années 2000. Ce concept désigne les préférences formées conformément à un milieu oppressif et qui vont à l’encontre du bien-être. Dans un premier temps, il sera question des deux théorisations les plus influentes à l’heure actuelle: celles développées par les philosophes Martha Nussbaum et Serene Khader. Ensuite, j’évaluerai ces positions à l’aune des récents travaux des anthropologues fémi- nistes Saba Mahmood et Lila Abu-Lughod, dans lesquels elles remettent en question le projet politique de la philosophie féministe sous-jacent aux préfé- rences adaptatives. (shrink)

Book review of Complicit Sisters: Gender and Women’s Issues across North-South Divides, by Sara de Jong.

According to the perceptual-attentional limitations hypothesis, the confusion between expressions of disgust and anger may be due to the difficulty in perceptually distinguishing the two, or insufficient attention to their distinctive cues. The objective of the current study was to test this hypothesis as an explanation for the confusion between expressions of disgust and anger in adults using eye-movements. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to identify each emotion in 96 trials composed of prototypes of anger and prototypes of disgust. (...) In Experiment 2, fixation points oriented participants’ attention toward the eyes, the nose, or the mouth of each prototype. Results revealed that disgust was less accurately recognised than anger (Experiment 1 and 2), especially when the mouth was open (Experiment 1 and 2), and even when attention was oriented toward the distinctive features of disgust (Experiment 2). Additionally, when attention was oriented toward certain zones, the eyes (which contain characteristics of anger) had the longest dwell times, followed by the nose (which contains characteristics of disgust; Experiment 2). Thus, although participants may attend to the distinguishing features of disgust and anger, these may not aid them in accurately recognising each prototype. (shrink)

L’antéposition d’un verbe non conjugué (participe passé, infinitif) en ancien et en moyen français a été assimilée à l’antéposition stylistique de l’islandais. Nous montrons que dans le cas du français, ces antépositions illustrent trois constructions différentes, toutes distinctes de l’antéposition stylistique de l’islandais. Dans la construction la plus fréquente, étiquetée déplacement stylistique à gauche, l’expression antéposée s’insère dans une position interne à la proposition plutôt que dans la périphérie gauche, à la droite immédiate de la position canonique du sujet, qui (...) peut y être réalisé, contrairement à ce que l’on observe en islandais. La même analyse est étendue aux cas où le sujet est nul ou déplacé plus à gauche. Les deux autres cas sont ceux où 1) l’expression antéposée est l’élément initial d’une construction V2, une situation rare, ou 2) il y a mise en relief du verbe non fini à la gauche immédiate de la position canonique du sujet. (shrink)

Les enjeux majeurs de l’éducation des adultes se résument en ces trois mots indissociables qu’éclaire ma théorie de la réciprocité éducative. S’éduquer, comme se nourrir, c’est à la fois recourir à l’action d’un autre et ne s’en remettre qu’à soi pour grandir, se conduire et s’épanouir. Le paradoxe de la mutualité réside en ce que j’adviens à ma singularité personnelle en voulant que tu sois toi-même par toi, et inversement. La transhumance est l’autre nom de l’éducabilité des personnes qui s’accomplissent (...) en parcourant ensemble leurs chemins, terrestres ou intérieurs. (shrink)

In recent debates on phenomenal consciousness, a distinction is sometimes made, after Levine (2001) and Kriegel (2009), between the “qualitative character” of an experience, i.e. the specific way it feels to the subject (e.g. blueish or sweetish or pleasant), and its “subjective character”, i.e. the fact that there is anything at all that it feels like to her. I argue that much discussion of subjective character is affected by a conflation between three different notions. I start by disentangling the three (...) notions in question, under the labels of “for-me-ness”, “me-ness” and “mineness”. Next, I argue that these notions are not equivalent; in particular, there is no conceptual implication from for-me-ness to me-ishness or mineness. Empirical considerations based on clinical cases additionally suggest that the three notions may also correspond to different properties (although the claim of conceptual non-equivalence does not depend on this further point). The aim is clarificatory, cautionary but also critical: I examine four existing arguments from subjective character that are fuelled by an undifferentiated use of the three notions, and find them to be flawed for this reason. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to define a λ-calculus typed in aMixed (commutative and non-commutative) Intuitionistic Linear Logic. The terms of such a calculus are the labelling of proofs of a linear intuitionistic mixed natural deduction NILL, which is based on the non-commutative linear multiplicative sequent calculus MNL [RuetAbrusci 99]. This linear λ-calculus involves three linear arrows: two directional arrows and a nondirectional one (the usual linear arrow). Moreover, the -terms are provided with seriesparallel orders on free variables. We (...) prove a normalization theorem which explicitly gives the behaviour of the order during the normalization procedure. (shrink)

Pindar, perhaps more than any other ancient poet, seems to demand from his interpreters declarations of their critical premises. In recent years scholars customarily have made initial acknowledgment to the work of E. R. Bundy, as psychoanalysts must to Freud, before they begin to offer their own modifications to and expansions of his fundamental work. Much contemporary scholarship has concentrated on the identification and classification in the odes of the elements whose function Bundy labelled and explained. But useful as this (...) type of analysis has been for exorcising the demon of biographical interpretation, it has, like all orthodoxies, prevented perception of other equally important truths. It constitutes no radical heterodoxy to try to account for the fact that each individual ode, for all its dependence on common conventions of structure and of content, makes a different impression. Nor is it unreasonable to try to explain what makes Pindar's style and approach distinctive.In my own work I have argued, though perhaps not always convincingly, that language as well as structure contributes to an ode's coherence. Scholars trained in America are more willing to assume that repetition of phrase or theme within a poem has significance, and that metaphors can simultaneously bear more than one connotation. The issues at stake have most recently been delineated by Michael Silk, in his discussion of the effect of metaphor in archaic poetry: ‘By “patent”, I mean effects whose existence is not in doubt, though their character may be disputed; by “latent”, those whose effective significance is so tenuous or marginal that one resents the impression of solidity that even mentioning them produces. Such insensitivity is more common than it should be among American classicists, many of whom have also been influenced by the “New Criticism”…’ As illustration of the erroneous American approach Silk cites Cedric Whitman's description of the thematic relation of fires in theIliad.Silk himself avoids the trap Whitman falls into by considering only ‘patent’ metaphors, and these consistentlyout of context, so that there is no necessity to comment on the existence or non-existence of thematic connections among them. But it is possible—at least logically—to frame the question differently, and to ask whether a metaphor cannot have patent and latent associations at the same time. (shrink)

The article proposes a framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction, based on the following principles: identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon; identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions; identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems; (...) identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/ delegitimacy; and identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others’ perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures. The principles are illustrated through examination of a variety of linguistic interactions. (shrink)

There is an increasing interest in how managers describe and respond to what they regard as moral versus nonmoral problems in organizations. In this study, forty managers described a moral problem and a nonmoral problem that they had encountered in their organization, each of which had been resolved. Analyses indicated that: (1) the two types of problems could be significantly differentiated using four of Jones' (1991) components of moral intensity; (2) the labels managers used to describe problems varied systematically between (...) the two types of problems and according to the problem's moral intensity; and (3) problem management processes varied according to the problem's type and moral intensity. (shrink)

Carl Becker's classic 1931 address "Everyman his own historian" holds lessons for historians of science today. Like the professional historians he spoke to, we are content to display the Ivory- Tower Syndrome, writing scholarly treatises only for one another, disdaining both the general reader and our natural readership, scientists. Following his rhetoric, I argue that scientists are well aware of their own historicity, and would be interested in lively and balanced histories of science. It is ironic that the very professionalism (...) that ought to equip us to write such histories has imposed on us a powerful taboo that renders us unable to do so. We who count ourselves sophisticated in describing the effects of social forces upon past scientists have been remarkably unconscious of the ways our own practices are being shaped by our need to distinguish ourselves from scientists who write history. Our fear of presentism in general and Whig history in particular is really a taboo, that is, an excessive avoidance enforced by social pressure. It succeeds at making our work distinct from histories written by scientists, but at the awful cost of blotting out the great fact of scientific progress. Scientists may be misguided in expecting us to celebrate great men, but they are right to demand from historians an analysis of the process of testing and improvement that is central to science. If progress in general is a problematic term, we could label the process "emendation.". (shrink)

Neurodiversity has remained a controversial concept over the last decade. In its broadest sense the concept of neurodiversity regards atypical neurological development as a normal human difference. The neurodiversity claim contains at least two different aspects. The first aspect is that autism, among other neurological conditions, is first and foremost a natural variation. The other aspect is about conferring rights and in particular value to the neurodiversity condition, demanding recognition and acceptance. Autism can be seen as a natural variation on (...) par with for example homosexuality. The broad version of the neurodiversity claim, covering low-functioning as well as high-functioning autism, is problematic. Only a narrow conception of neurodiversity, referring exclusively to high-functioning autists, is reasonable. We will discuss the effects of DSM categorization and the medical model for high functioning autists. After a discussion of autism as a culture we will analyze various possible strategies for the neurodiversity movement to claim extra resources for autists as members of an underprivileged culture without being labelled disabled or as having a disorder. We will discuss their vulnerable status as a group and what obligation that confers on the majority of neurotypicals. (shrink)

Consumers' concerns for the environment have led to the creation of niche markets, quality certifications and labelling systems. Built by activists and NGOs, these systems were adopted by agribusiness. Such firms try to capture consumers and react to opinion campaigns, whilst appropriating the conservation (or 'fair') discourse. This leads to the rise of new forms of third-party certifications of food production based on private standards and, hence, to new forms of contract relations between producers and buyers. The nature of these (...) relationships is not always evident in these new labels or in the discourse built to justify them. This is particularly so in the case of goods produced in the South to be traded and sold in the North, as the case of Starbucks illustrates. By the end of the 1990s, Starbucks, operating through an NGO called Conservation International (CI), arrived at the region of El Triunfo, in Chiapas, and contacted the producers' cooperatives that were trying to find a market for their product. CI promoted Starbucks standards to raise the coffee quality and won the control over the production system. Meanwhile, the producers forced to sell their coffee through the largest trade company (AMSA) against whom the cooperatives were created, lost the control over their own organization. When some cooperatives refused the deal, they suffered divisions but could survive thanks the Fair Trade (FT) network in Chiapas. (shrink)

In recent years, prevalent global societal issues related to fake news, fakery, misinformation, and disinformation were brought to the fore, leading to the construction of descriptive labels such as “post-truth” to refer to the supposedly new emerging era. Thereby, the (mis-)use of technologies such as AI and VR has been argued to potentially fuel this new loss of “ground-truth”, for instance, via the ethically relevant deepfakes phenomena and the creation of realistic fake worlds, presumably undermining experiential veracity. Indeed, _unethical_ and (...) malicious actors could harness tools at the intersection of AI and VR (AIVR) to craft what we call _immersive falsehood_, fake immersive reality landscapes deliberately constructed for malicious ends. This short paper analyzes the ethically relevant nature of the background against which such malicious designs in AIVR could exacerbate the intentional proliferation of deceptions and falsities. We offer a reappraisal expounding that while immersive falsehood could manipulate and severely jeopardize the inherently affective constructions of social reality and considerably complicate falsification processes, humans may neither inhabit a post-truth nor a post-falsification age. Finally, we provide incentives for future AIVR safety work, ideally contributing to a future era of _technology-augmented critical thinking_. (shrink)

As the term regenerative agriculture caught fire in public discourse around 2019, it was promptly labelled a buzzword. While the buzzword accusation tends to be regarded as negative, these widely used terms also reflect an important area of growing public interest. Exploring a buzzword can thus help us understand our current moment and offer insights to paths forward. In this study, we explored how and why different individuals and groups adopt certain key terms or buzzwords, in this case the term (...) “regenerative agriculture”. We used an interpretivist approach to understand how “regenerative agriculture” is being constructed, interpreted, understood, and employed, drawing from 19 semi-structured interviews conducted with farmers, researchers, private companies, and NGO/nonprofits. Several interviewees felt that regenerative agriculture is making an important societal shift in thinking towards addressing major issues like climate change and parity in our food and agricultural systems. However, farmers in particular felt that the term is being greenwashed, coopting the work they do, and even diluting the meaning. We also found that regenerative agriculture is being advanced as mobilizing “win-wins”—for farmers, for consumers, for society—but that this discourse may be veiling the political and economic agendas of the big companies using the term. Our findings further illustrated the debates over standardizing the term regenerative agriculture, with some contending that there should be room for “continuous improvement” but others felt it is meaningless without a definition. (shrink)

As the term regenerative agriculture caught fire in public discourse around 2019, it was promptly labelled a buzzword. While the buzzword accusation tends to be regarded as negative, these widely used terms also reflect an important area of growing public interest. Exploring a buzzword can thus help us understand our current moment and offer insights to paths forward. In this study, we explored how and why different individuals and groups adopt certain key terms or buzzwords, in this case the term (...) “regenerative agriculture”. We used an interpretivist approach to understand how “regenerative agriculture” is being constructed, interpreted, understood, and employed, drawing from 19 semi-structured interviews conducted with farmers, researchers, private companies, and NGO/nonprofits. Several interviewees felt that regenerative agriculture is making an important societal shift in thinking towards addressing major issues like climate change and parity in our food and agricultural systems. However, farmers in particular felt that the term is being greenwashed, coopting the work they do, and even diluting the meaning. We also found that regenerative agriculture is being advanced as mobilizing “win-wins”—for farmers, for consumers, for society—but that this discourse may be veiling the political and economic agendas of the big companies using the term. Our findings further illustrated the debates over standardizing the term regenerative agriculture, with some contending that there should be room for “continuous improvement” but others felt it is meaningless without a definition. (shrink)

In “The Mind Incarnate” Shapiro argues that research in the area of embodied, embedded mind and cognition undermines a functionalist program. In contrast Clark, in “Pressing the Flesh”, argues that embodied, embedded approaches can be viewed as extended functionalistic approaches. In the light of these arguments my thesis is devoted to elucidating the logical relation between functionalism and embodied, embedded approaches. I argue that the functionalist programme is not undermined by embodied and embedded approaches. Shapiro argues that research of embodied, (...) embedded cognition and mind shows that characteristics of embodiment determine characteristics of mind. I label this view the body-detail model. The consequence of this model is that the very same kind of mind cannot exist in bodies with different characteristics. Thus, having a humanlike mind requires a humanlike body. This conflicts with abstract versions of functionalism that endorse multiple realization: the idea that the same mind can exist in different kinds of bodies. I argue against the body-detail model, demonstrating that for each of the research projects presented by Shapiro the strong reading that one has to have a humanlike body to have a human mind is not justified. This paves the way for an alternative reading, represented by Clark, under which the body is recognized as being part of a larger system which overall operating profile determines mind. Arguments for this position involve argumentative extensions of functionalism. On this basis I conclude that functionalism is not undermined by embodied, embedded approaches. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 189-192 [Access article in PDF] The Responsibility of the Psychopathic Offender:Commentary on Ciocchetti Piers Benn Christopher Ciocchetti has valuable things to say in his article. He takes as his starting point some common ground between his views and my own, especially about the importance of Strawsonian participant reactive attitudes to our understanding of psychopathy. But he proceeds to claim that the distinguishing feature (...) of psychopaths is not their lack of such attitudes but their inability to understand how relationships are affected by their behavior—and indeed their inability, in some sense, to understand interpersonal relationships at all. He also takes me to task for claiming that the participant reactive attitudes (PRAs)—presumably he includes things like resentment, indignation, gratitude, and so on—are essentially communicative. For him, this is too strong a claim, because we can imagine cases when such attitudes are expressed, but without any communicative purpose.On the latter point, I concede that people often do express PRAs even though they know such expression will have no effect on those whose behavior or attitudes gave rise to them. Different things can explain this lack of effect. For example, imagine a normally responsive person who obstinately fails to see that a certain judgment applies to him or her in a particular case. Take a woman who repeatedly expresses frustration and anger toward her husband for failing to do any domestic chores, but without having the slightest effect on him. Eventually her expressions of anger serve more as an emotional release than as an attempt to get him to change. As in Ciocchetti's example of Mary's reaction to her calls not being returned, she gives up in the end, expressing anger but without any hope of getting through to the other person.But there is another possible explanation for her anger: suppose the husband's failure to contribute to the housework does not arise from his inability to respond to moral claims upon him, but because he thinks he is already doing his duty by being the sole wage earner, and is quite intransigent about this. In that case, the woman might still see him, in general, as a proper object of her PRAs. She sees his fault as local rather than general; a failure, or perhaps even an inability, to think properly about this particular issue rather than about moral demands in general. She might regard her angry outbursts as justified, not because they will have any effect on him now, [End Page 189] but because they are a proper participant response to some earlier failure, which he was then able to do something about—maybe he neglected to think properly about fairness when forming his moral outlook.Compare this case, though, with someone who just does not understand the nature of relationships and the obligations they impose. This is the sort of case Ciocchetti has in mind. Anger is, on his account, understandable, not because it is meant to communicate anything, but because it is "an expression with no further aim at all" (2003, p. 178). On this point, I agree that people sometimes do express anger (or other emotions) without trying to induce a response in someone. At the same time, there is a significant difference between times when we do hope to elicit an appropriate participant response like shame, and times when we do not. When we express such attitudes without any hope of a participant response, we miss something that is, if not essential to, at least typical of such expressions. Getting angry with the neighbor's aggressive dog or scrounging cat is understandable, but it is simply not the same kind of thing as getting angry with a normal, rational adult. The typical case, maybe the necessarily typical case, is when we experience or express such emotions toward, or at least concerning, beings capable of PRAs—and, again typically if not always, such beings are capable of understanding when and why the PRAs of others are directed toward them.But the thrust of Ciocchetti's paper lies not... (shrink)

While numerous studies show that brain signals contain information about an individual’s current state that are potentially valuable for smoothing man-machine interfaces, this has not yet lead to the use of brain computer interfaces (BCI) in daily life. One of the main challenges is the common requirement of personal data that is correctly labelled concerning the state of interest in order to train a model, where this trained model is not guaranteed to generalize across time and context. Another challenge is (...) the requirement to wear electrodes on the head. We here propose a BCI that can tackle these issues and may be a promising case for BCI research and application in everyday life. The BCI uses EEG signals to predict head rotation in order to improve images presented in a Virtual Reality (VR) headset. When presenting a 360° video to a headset, Field-of-View approaches only stream the content that is in the current field of view and leave out the rest. When the user rotates the head, other content parts need to be made available soon enough to go unnoticed by the user which is problematic given the available bandwidth. By predicting head rotation, the content parts adjacent to the currently viewed part could be retrieved in time for display when the rotation actually takes place. Eleven participants generated left- and rightward head rotations while head movements were recorded using the headsets motion sensing system and EEG sensors. We trained neural network models to distinguish EEG epochs preceding rightward, leftward and no rotation. Applying these models to streaming EEG data that was withheld from the training showed that 400 ms before rotation onset, the probability ‘no rotation’ started to decrease and the probabilities of an upcoming right- or leftward rotation started to diverge in the correct direction. In the proposed BCI scenario, users already wear a device on their head allowing for integrated sensors. Moreover, it is possible to acquire accurately labeled training data on the fly, and continuously monitor and improve the model’s performance. The BCI can be harnessed if it will improve imagery and therewith enhance immersive experience. (shrink)

Halford, Wilson & Phillips argue that cognitive development is driven by increases in processing capacity. We suggest that changes in relational knowledge are as important or more so. We present evidence that 3-year-olds' analogical abilities are sharply improved by teaching them relational labels; over a 30-minute experimental session children gained approximately 2 years in effective performance. These results mandate caution interpreting age-related change as indicating maturational change, and call for a deeper consideration of the role of epistemological change in cognitive (...) development. (shrink)

Alexandra Shuford's book is primarily designed to address the following question: "What can Deweyan pragmatism contribute to a feminist empiricist epistemology?" (viii). Her answer is Dewey's conception of habit, and in her final chapter, she illustrates the utility of this conception by comparing what she labels the "medicalized" model of labor and birth to that employed by practitioners of midwifery. Before looking at Shuford's reading of this contrast more closely, however, it needs to be noted at the outset that she (...) also regards her constructive project to be one of "augmenting" or "extending" the efforts of Lynn Hankinson Nelson to formulate a feminist empiricism derived from Quine's naturalized epistemology. .. (shrink)

Taking regular walks when living with Parkinson’s disease has beneficial effects on movement and quality of life. Yet, patients usually show reduced physical activity compared to healthy older adults. Using auditory stimulation such as music can facilitate walking but patients vary significantly in their response. An individualized approach adapting musical tempo to patients’ gait cadence, and capitalizing on these individual differences, is likely to provide a rewarding experience, increasing motivation for walk-in PD. We aim to evaluate the observance, safety, tolerance, (...) usability, and enjoyment of a new smartphone application. It was coupled with wearable sensors and delivered individualized musical stimulation for gait auto-rehabilitation at home. Forty-five patients with PD underwent a 1-month, outdoor, uncontrolled gait rehabilitation program, using the BeatWalk application. The music tempo was being aligned in real-time to patients’ gait cadence in a way that could foster an increase up to +10% of their spontaneous cadence. Open-label evaluation was based on BeatWalk use measures, questionnaires, and a six-minute walk test. Patients used the application 78.8% of the prescribed duration and enjoyed it throughout the program. The application was considered “easy to use” by 75% of the patients. Pain, fatigue, and falls did not increase. Fear of falling decreased and quality of life improved. After the program, patients improved their gait parameters in the six-minute walk test without musical stimulation. BeatWalk is an easy to use, safe, and enjoyable musical application for individualized gait rehabilitation in PD. It increases “walk for exercise” duration thanks to high observance.Clinical Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02647242. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J. B. LipscombAmy Gilbert RichardsLIPSCOMB, Benjamin J. B. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xxx + 326 pp. Cloth, $27.95In The Women Are Up to Something, Lipscomb demonstrates in form (...) and content the inextricable link between philosophical theory and personal story and character. The book tells two stories: "first, a story [End Page 148] about four women, their overlapping friendships, and their struggle to establish themselves as philosophers in an often-hostile context; second, a story about two conflicting approaches to ethics." These two stories connect through the role these women played in the development of the second of the conflicting approaches—a challenge to the mid-twentieth-century Oxbridge orthodoxy in metaethics, what Lipscomb later calls a "minority report."Chapter 1 centers on the fact–value divide. The consequence of this divide for ethics lies in its banishment of all evaluative terms from the realm of possible facts, thereby demoting them to matters of "opinion." Lipscomb here offers a genealogy of the divide. He also introduces the insight that will become the seed of the minority report: The picture of the world offered by the fact-value divide is just that, a picture. Bringing to light the deep background pictures that undergird our understanding of the world is one of the most difficult intellectual tasks. But the picture rooted in the fact–value divide includes the claim that the divide itself is simply a "fact"—not a picture at all, and therefore not contestable. Lipscomb labels this view "the Dawkins' sublime."The next three chapters continue the work of stage-setting. Chapter 2 immerses us in the Oxford of the women's undergraduate years—an Oxford temporarily but dramatically altered by World War II, where female students made up a much larger percentage of the undergraduate population than was usual, and where professors were in a new way open to mentoring women. Chapter 3 briefly recounts all four childhoods, lived in the aftermath of the first World War. Chapter 4 returns to Oxford and narrates the graduate degrees of the four women. It also offers a perceptive primer on the history of analytic ethics, culminating in the state of the field at the point when the women were on the cusp of entering it—the precise shape of the approach to ethics the women would eventually abjure.Each of the next four chapters traces the development of the mature philosophy of one of the four women—in order: Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley. Despite deep differences among their philosophical and theological outlooks, they all four came to defend a version of the thesis, commonplace in ancient and medieval philosophy, that there are things that are good for human beings qua human being, that our moral lives are largely a matter of seeing and responding—well or poorly—to these elements of the human good that are given as part of our nature. In other words, there are facts about values. We in crucial ways discover rather than invent morality.The last chapter serves as an epilogue to both stories: It traces the ways in which the writing and lives of these four women produced a decisive change in the landscape of Anglo-American philosophy. Lipscomb notes which strains in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy owe their existence to the minority report. Figures like Korsgaard feature as contemporary representatives of an ethics grounded in the fact–value [End Page 149] divide. Figures like MacIntyre and Hursthouse feature as inheritors of the philosophical legacy of the book's heroines.In this final chapter Lipscomb also offers brief portraits of the later life and death of each of the women in turn. At the end of the final portrait, the book rounds to a poetic close—not offering a final philosophical statement but reflecting on the fruits of friendship and the power of its legacy for those who come after.It is difficult to pin down Lipscomb's precise philosophical... (shrink)

In 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft's travels to Scandinavian cities gave her new perspectives on the English and Continental bourgeois cultures with which she was acquainted. Her notions of the city as a source of inspiration for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are echoed in the epistolary writings of the Norwegian author Camilla Collett (1813–1895) and the novels of her countrywoman Amalie Skram (1846–1905). Collett and Skram were both frequent visitors to different European capital cities, and incorporated their impressions and experiences (...) of these cities. This resulted in innovative texts, with the individual in a new, modern environment, the city, as one of the central themes. For Collett, who can be regarded as a city correspondent avant la lettre, the city was also a yardstick for cultural progress. In her novels, Skram used the European city as a sort of laboratory of the modern era. Nevertheless, Collett's and Skram's ‘city texts’ are not the ones that have ensured that these two authors found their way into the literary canon. Collett became famous as the author of the first Norwegian feminist novel, whereas Skram is known as a Norwegian naturalist. Until recently, the prose texts in which Collett and Skram processed their urban experiences were either not discussed in Norwegian literary historiography, or were labelled as contributions to the morality debate that raged in Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century. In this article, I shall propose that Collett and Skram contribute to a distinctive yet unrecognized genre – female urban prose – which proffers new modes of thinking and writing about women's experience of contemporaneous bourgeois culture. (shrink)

Wallace, Meg London's National Theatre recently hosted a debate about freedom of speech, multiculturalism and Islam called Can we talk about this? The opening line was a question to the audience, 'Are you morally superior to the Taliban?' Anne Marie Waters, who was present, wrote in her blog that 'very few people in the audience raised their hand to say they were.' This response demonstrates a misconceived attempt to be seen as tolerant and 'multiculturalist'. People could not bring themselves (...) to say their views are morally superior to a group that, Waters points out, 'denies women medical treatment, imprisons them in their homes, allows domestic violence, and executes people by stoning for having a private life or the audacity to not believe in God.' They fear being labelled, racist, 'Islamophobic', or discriminating against religion. Rather, they adopt a stance that treats all moral views generated by culture or religion as equally valid . They confuse the distinction between the right to think as you want, and the right to act as you want. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LUBLIN THOMISM 1 THE TEXTS of the philosophers associated with the Catholic University of Lublin, thanks to the tireless work and energy of an editorial board under bhe direction and support of Marie Lescoe, are at last appearing in English.2 'Dhe Lublin school is Thomist in inspiration and avowed adherence. It is Thomist, however, in a manner which makes liberal use of the works of Continental philosophers in (...) the phenomenological and "existentialist" traditions: hence the label, "existential personaiism." 3 A supplementary label of this sort is needed if we are to include within the Lublin school the work of one of its most iIIustrious members, Karol Wojtyia, whose writings employ the phenomenological method, eschew scholastic argument, and acknowledge a chief indebtedness to Max Scheler. Even the more recognizably scholastic Lublin philosophers, such as Mieczylaw Krapiec, O.P., President -Rector of the University, whose I-Man is the first complete book to be translated and printed in English, quote Roman Ingarden generously, speak familiarly about man as Being-towards-death, and discuss religion and culture in terms of intentionality. 1 Mieczylaw A. Krapiec, O.P., I-Man (New Britain: Mariel Press, 1983); (an abridged, student edition of I-11.fon-Mariel Press, 1985-is now available also); Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, (Boston: D. Reidel, 1979); Edmund Morawiec, "L'Objet et La Tache de la Philosophie Chretienne" in J. N. Zycinski, ed., The Human Person and Philosophy in the Contemporary World (Krakow: The Pontifical Faculty of Theology, 1980). 2 It may interest readers to know that a Chinese translation of I-Man is in preparation. The project is coordinated by Dr. Audrey Donnithorne involving the collaboration of Louis Chow and Matthias Lu. s Of. Andrew Woznicki, A Christian Humanism; Karol Wojtyla's Existential Personalism, and Ronald F. Lawler, The Christian Personalism of John Paul II (Fransciscan Herald Press, 1981). 307 308 ROGER DUNCAN Just because of their deep indebtedness to and immersion in Continental philosophy, it is important to begin by stating what the Lublin philosophers are not. They are not, first of all, phenomenologists or existentialists in the strict sense, by which I mean they do not hold the sceptical epistemological premises usually associated with these labels. Existentialists deny the classical doctrine of truth according to which truth is the adaequatio ad rern of the intellect. Instead they maintain that when I look at, say, an egg, and say to myself, " Here I am, one being among others like this egg here ", I am being naive because I have not yet seen that the distinction between myself and the egg arises within t:he phenomenal field and therefore cannot be uncritically assumed in an account of knowing. The subject-object distinction, they say, is not one more distinction between objects, like that between the egg and the chicken it came from; it cannot be understood as an intellectual grasp of one individual substance by another individual substance. For this reason, according to the existentialists, we must not think of knowledge as an overcoming of the isolation of self-consciousness, but rather as the origination of a distinction, a negative act identical with that of selfconsciousness in its self-transcendence. Awareness of the egg is not a grasp of the egg in itself so much as a self-conscious mitosis which incidentally constitutes the egg as object.4 The realist answer, as Chesterton said, is that eggs are eggs. The fact that the distinction between the egg and the chicken appears within consciousness, and that the subject can see a similarity with the distinction btween himself and the egg,.provides no argument for the unreality of either distinction unless you assume from the start that intentional objectification falsifies or fails to reach being " in itself". But this is a decision, not an a.rgument. Of course once you make it all kinds of curious and very deep condusions follow, conclusions which the Lublin Thomists deny. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 174; Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 75. LUBLIN THOMISM 309 Nevertheless, it does not seem advisable to have to... (shrink)

In her recent pamphlet Special Educational Needs: a new look (2005) Mary Warnock has called for a radical review of special needs education and a substantial reconsideration of the assumptions upon which the current educational framework is based. The latter, she maintains, is hindered by a contradiction between the intention to treat all learners as the same and that of responding adequately to the needs arising from their individual differences. The tension highlighted by Warnock, which is central to the debate (...) in special and inclusive education, is also referred to as the ‘dilemma of difference’. This consists in the seemingly unavoidable choice between, on the one hand, identifying children's differences in order to provide for them differentially, with the risk of labelling and dividing, and, on the other, accentuating the ‘sameness’ and offering common provision, with the risk of not making available what is relevant to, and needed by, individual children. In this paper, I argue that the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen provides an innovative and important perspective for re-examining the dilemma of difference in significant ways. In particular, I maintain that reconceptualising disability and special needs through the capability approach makes possible the overcoming of the tension at the core of the dilemma of difference, whilst at the same time inscribing the debate within an ethical, normative framework based upon justice and equality. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two theories of democracy that can be found in contemporary French philosophy. Both Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancière offer a critique of modern democracy with the purpose of refounding it. The ‘refoundation narratives’ they propose are both based on an account of the origins of democracy in ancient Greece. According to Castoriadis, ancient democracy is grounded in a ‘magma’ of ‘social imaginary significations’ in which ‘autonomy’ is considered the correct response to Being defined as an (...) insurmountable ‘Chaos’. On the contrary, modern democracy defines Being as a determinacy and consequently fails to grasp the notion of autonomy. According to Rancière, the origins of democracy are to be found in the invasion of the public space by ‘those without a part’ who consequently have no title to govern. The problem with the ‘domesticated’ modern democracy is that it denies the existence of Otherness; that is, of non-citizens excluded from the public space. Therefore it appears incapable of letting the ‘dis-agreement’ manifest itself and consequently incapable of transforming the ‘police’ order. After examining the meaning of both theories, I attempt to elucidate the difficulties encountered by each author in the attainment of his goal, which is that of refounding modern democracy. (shrink)

In the last few decades, the historiographical categories rationalism and empiricism have been criticized for their limitations to explain the complex positions and the links held by the philosophers tradiotnally attached to them. This narrative was firstly conceived by Kantian German historians and began to become standard at the turn of the twentieh century. Nonetheless, nineteenth-century French historiography developed other narratives by which early modern philosophers were classified according to alternative criteria. In the first edition of Histoire comparée des systémes (...) de philosophie (1804), Joseph-Marie Degérando distinguishes three first-order early modern schools founded by Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz, respectively. Degérando introduces the empiricism and rationalism distinction as one among others, and not as the fundamental one. In addition, he separates empiricism from experimental philosophy. The last one, along with speculative philosophy, is said to conciliate senses and reason. As a result, this account offers philosophical groupings different from those constructed by the standard narrative. Furthermore, it draws on labels and classification criteria which were part of the early modern philosophical discourse. (shrink)

“Art”—what is it? What sort of entities are artworks? “Art”—when is it? Normally, when we visit an art exhibition, when we listen to a concert or when we look at a performing art in a setting, we use to read the titles, the tags or something textual, a threshold not crafted by the author, about the exposed or executed artworks in order to grasp their subject, style, history, and author. But: how does a title, a non-fiction depiction or a pointing, (...) and different ways of para-textual activation, entitle and unable us to such an operation and to live an aesthetic relation? This issue of “Aisthesis” explores the conditions under which it could be useful to distinguish between aesthetic objects and artworks–visual, musical, literary, performing arts– and to admit that the existence of the latter depends on a marginal and basic component of them: tags. The issue contains articles by Jerrold Levinson, Bernard Sève, Filippo Focosi, Alberto Voltolini, Giulia Alberti, Pietro Kobau, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, Filippo Fimiani, Bertrand Rougé, Leardo Botti, Michel Déguy, Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Micla Petrelli, Andrea Olivieri, Alessandro Ottaviani. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 410-423 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reading Our Way To Democracy? Literature and Public EthicsSimon Stow The College of William and Mary"I believe," wrote Franz Kafka, "that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?" 1 Almost all of us who read (...) books for a living and/or pleasure have undoubtedly experienced that most delightfully troubling of phenomena: a novel that forces us to think differently about the world and the way that we live. In recent years, literature's capacity to generate in its readers "a rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by" 2 —what Stanley Fish calls its "dialectical" potential—has drawn the attention of a number of liberal-democratic theorists, most notably Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty. By "liberal-democratic" is meant here, of course, that system of government with popular rule, regular elections, a commitment to individual rights and the rule of law; one that draws on a tradition of political thought that includes the work of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. Although their exact formulations of the claim differ in important ways, Nussbaum and Rorty are united in the belief that reading can enhance the practice of liberal-democracy by expanding the moral imaginations of a citizenry. Such an expansion will, they believe, promote the values of tolerance, respect for other viewpoints, and a recognition of the contingency of one's own perspective, in short, the values of civil society. Whilst there is undoubtedly something intuitively appealing about their claim, there is much that is philosophically and politically problematic about their respective formulations of it. Both seem to rest for example upon an implausible theory of the impact of literature upon its readers, and an illiberal tendency to treat reader-citizens as means and not as ends. Attempting to capture what is of value [End Page 410] whilst jettisoning what is problematic, I will briefly set out their claims; identify the difficulties within them; and offer an account of how their project might be operationalized in a way that is both more philosophically plausible and more politically consistent with liberalism. My aim will not be to offer another detailed account of the connection between literature and democracy—not least because I believe that the current accounts are overly deterministic—but rather to suggest some ways in which we might nevertheless build upon the current work to capture the potential benefits of reading for liberal-democratic societies.Although Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty hold quite different views about the proper role of literature in philosophy—Nussbaum believes that literature is merely a valuable addition to philosophical Reason traditionally conceived, whereas for the postfoundational Rorty, the literariness goes all the way down—both suggest that reading will promote two values that they regard as essential to liberal-democratic practice. Following Rorty we might label these values contingency and solidarity. 3 Contingency arises from the recognition that even one's most deeply held beliefs are always only a perspective. It is connected to civility in that it serves, Nussbaum and Rorty believe, to undermine the vehemence of individual claims. Although this claim about the partiality of individual perspectives sounds dangerously postmodern for thinker such as Nussbaum—Rorty, who calls his political philosophy "postmodernist bourgeois liberalism," 4 has no such qualms—there are limits to this insight in her thought. Nussbaum is simply concerned to show that an excessive and over-confident reliance on philosophical Reason is likely to generate an incomplete understanding of a given situation. For this reason, she suggests, "storytelling and literary imagining are not opposed to... but can provide essential ingredients in a rational argument." 5 She argues, for example, that Hard Times by Charles Dickens will alert its readers—in particular "the person brought up solely on economic texts" who "has not been encouraged to think of workers (or indeed anybody else) as fully human... (shrink)

Two of the most influential arguments in favour of the permissibility of abortion were put forward in the latter half of the twentieth century by Judith Jarvis Thomson and Mary Anne Warren. The implications of these arguments for unwilling putative fathers have largely not been considered. Some have argued that Thomson's defence of abortion might allow a man under certain circumstances to terminate his parental responsibilities and rights. To my knowledge, nobody has considered the implications of Warren's argument for men. (...) I will consider the implications of both arguments for men. I will argue that if they are successful defences of abortion then they are also successful in justifying a male counterpart to abortion which I label ‘elective abandonment’. I will not be defending or attacking these arguments as defences of abortion, but will defend the claim that they apply as well to elective abandonment as they do to abortion. (shrink)

Il y a un peu plus de vingt ans, Marcel Gauchet livrait ses réflexions sur le long et lent processus de désenchantement du monde qui, de l’intérieur même de la compréhension religieuse du monde, a abouti à l’affirmation de l’autonomie humaine et à la prise en main par les hommes de leur destin collectif. Cette thèse a fait l’objet de nombreuses discussions et controverses qui portaient sur la validité de la reconstruction historique générale, sur la méthode guidant cette dernière, et (...) enfin sur la vérité du diagnostic final. Ces questions ont leur intérêt et ont été déjà vivement débattues. Ce livre sur et à partir de la pensée de Gauchet sera toutefois différemment orienté. Il porte davantage sur les effets du désenchantement sur la démocratie elle-même que sur l’origine du désenchantement du monde. Il semble en effet que la démocratie contemporaine, en gros la démocratie des individus et des identités, subisse à son tour les effets du désenchantement et qu’elle tende à devenir une démocratie "contre elle-même". C’est du moins dans ce sens que l’on pourrait lire les ouvrages plus récents de Gauchet, La religion dans la démocratie (1998), La démocratie contre elle-même (2002) et La condition politique (2007). L’avènement de cette démocratie désenchantée ouvre tout un ensemble d’interrogations qui seront au coeur de cet ouvrage : un tel diagnostic est-il juste? Jusqu’à quel point la démocratie peut-elle se retourner contre elle-même? Un régime politique qui effacerait toute trace de croyable est-il possible? Comment la démocratie doit-elle réagir devant les tentatives idéologiques de réenchantement du monde? Quelles seraient les ressources internes à la démocratie pour corriger les excès provoqués par son propre désenchantement? (shrink)

In an e-mail of June 2002, some women on Gender Link noticed that in Polish there is an expression, ‘husband of trust’, used to describe a person in the workplace appointed to represent workers’ interests. This role is more often than not given to women, and yet they are called ‘husbands of trust’. ‘Isn't that strange,’ they said. ‘Isn't it time to change this?’. It is. The change in gender role identities has started with questioning the language. It has started (...) with asking who has produced and is reproducing the language, and for whom. The journey has not stopped there. From looking at language it has continued through social stereotypes, work, labour, money and the division of power, and reached the law and legal system itself. In Poland, the path has been rather circuitous and uneasy for we are, more than many other countries, bound by Catholic tradition mingled with apparent freedom. We had the ethos of Solidarity, and Lech Wałęsa. Wałęsa had a badge of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus on his jacket, which somehow helped label all Polish women, even those still very young, a ‘Mother Pole’. To resist that identity one needed to look beneath the image and be brave enough to call oneself just a woman. This article will try to analyse that process. (shrink)