Dans la deuxième moitié des années 1980 s’est développée, dans l’ensemble du champ de la culture, une véritable esthétique de la bêtise. Quelques jeunes critiques d’art se sont alors emparés du phénomène et ont tenté de le théoriser, entre 1994 et 1998, dans les revues les plus lues de l’époque : Flash Art International, Artpress, Frieze. L’étude de ce corpus d’articles (signés par Joshua Decter, Éric Troncy, Jon Savage, Andrew Hulktrans et Jean-Yves Jouannais) témoigne à la fois des mutations de (...) la critique d’art de l’époque et de l’enjeu que représente alors l’art délibérément bête. On remarquera que la critique d’art se fait alors critique culturelle : elle regarde peu les œuvres, réduites au statut d’illustrations et d’arguments visuels. On s’interrogera également sur la place que les revues d’art contemporain ont accordée à la culture populaire médiatique la plus régressive du temps. Beavis & Butt-Head, Melrose Place ou encore Alerte à Malibu ont été ainsi disséqués dans les colonnes d’ Artforum ou de Flash Art. Alors que les œuvres d’art estampillées « art contemporain » donnaient lieu à des analyses étonnamment sommaires, ce sont les séries télévisées et les dessins animés qui ont conduit aux analyses les plus stimulantes. Elles l’ont fait en recourant au paradigme de la méta-criticalité cher au modernisme, conférant aux œuvres les plus régressives le statut d’image spéculaire, à la fois duplice et critique, de la culture de la bêtise qui les générait. Pointe alors le paradoxe suivant : alternant entre l’enthousiasme forcené et la déploration, la critique d’art des années 1990 a intellectualisé l’anti-intellectualisme le plus radical. (shrink)

Passant du cinéma d’animation pour enfants (en suivant les exemples de films comme Chicken Run et Le monde de Nemo ) aux artistes queer contemporaines qui ont embrassé l’échec comme un style à part entière, Jack Halberstam part à la recherche de modèles de parentés, d’alliances et de communautés pour faire alternative au monde néo-libéral et à l’idéologie du succès qui en façonne les subjectivités. Cette idéologie se déploie notamment au travers des multiples injonctions à « réussir » dans les (...) différents aspects de la vie sociale : il faut produire, accumuler et se reproduire – autant de maillons dans la chaîne de (re)production du capital. Dans The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam propose une méthode de déviance joyeuse par rapport à cette idéologie du succès : « d’abord, résister à la maîtrise » ; « ensuite, privilégier la naïveté et l’absurdité (la stupidité) ». (shrink)

Objective: To assess the opinions and practice patterns of obstetrician-gynaecologists on acceptance and use of free drug samples and other incentive items from pharmaceutical representatives.Methods: A questionnaire was mailed in March 2003 to 397 members of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists who participate in the Collaborative Ambulatory Research Network.Results: The response rate was 55%. Most respondents thought it proper to accept drug samples , an informational lunch , an anatomical model or a well-paid consultantship from pharmaceutical representatives. A (...) third of the respondents thought that their own decision to prescribe a drug would probably be influenced by accepting drug samples. Respondents were more likely to think the average doctor’s prescribing would be influenced by acceptance of the items than theirs would be . Respondents who distributed drug samples to patients indicated doing so because of patients’ financial need and for their convenience and less so as a result of knowledge of the efficacy of the sample product . A third of respondents agreed that interactions with industry should be more strictly regulated.Conclusion: Obstetrician-gynaecologists largely indicated that they would act in accordance with what they think is proper regarding accepting incentive items from pharmaceutical representatives. Although accepting free drug samples was considered to be appropriate more often than any other item, samples were most commonly judged to be influential on prescribing practices. The widely accepted practice of receiving and distributing free drug samples needs to be examined more carefully. (shrink)

Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics (Global Political Economy) at the University of Helsinki.1 In Part 1 of this interview (Patomäki and Morgan 2023) he discussed his work and career up...

Are non-indexical action rationalizations necessarily incomplete because of a missing indexical component? Bermúdez argues that they are. Two things make the argument unpersuasive. First, it assumes that all action rationalizations involve attitudes that are about the agent. Second, it assumes that the attitudes expressible using ‘I’ are themselves indexical. Each is an assumption that believers in complete but non-indexical action rationalizations can and do reject. Surprisingly though, a more effective argument can be obtained by switching focus from indexical attitudes about (...) agents to indexical attitudes about times. The debate about the de se and the de nunc has much less in common than is standardly assumed. It is the de nunc not the de se which provides the knock-down case for essential indexicality. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and (...) his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers. (shrink)

How cautious should regulators be? A standard answer is consequentialist: regulators should be just cautious enough to maximize expected social value. This paper charts the prospects of a nonconsequentialist - and more precautionary - alternative. More specifically, it argues that a contractualism focused on ex ante consent can motivate the following regulatory criterion: regulators should permit a socially beneficial risky activity only if no one can be expected to be made worse off by it. Broadly speaking, there are two strategies (...) regulators can use to help risky activities satisfy this criterion: regulators can mandate strict safety standards that protect those who would otherwise stand to lose, and they can require that some of the benefits of the activity be redirected to them. In developing these themes, the paper aims to provide a theoretical grounding for those who oppose using risk-cost-benefit analysis as the primary regulatory standard, and in particular, for advocates of the precautionary principle. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Sport is a landmark publication in sport studies. It goes further than any book has before in tracing the contours of the discipline of the philosophy of sport and in surveying the core themes, approaches and theories that form its disciplinary fabric. The book explores the ways in which an understanding of philosophy can inform our understanding of important prevailing issues in sport. Edited by two of the most significant figures in the development (...) of the philosophy of sport, Mike McNamee and Bill Morgan, and with contributions from many of the world’s leading sport philosophers, this is an invaluable companion reference volume for any course in the social scientific study of sport, and an essential addition to the bookshelf of any serious scholar of the philosophy and/or ethics of sport. (shrink)

Levinas never engaged closely with Fichte’s work, but there are two places in the chapter “Substitution,” in Otherwise than Being (1974), where he mentions Fichte by name. The point that Levinas underscores in both of these passages is that the other’s encounter with the subject is not the outcome of the subject’s freedom; it is not posited by the subject, as Fichte has it, but is prior to any free activity. The aim of this paper is to deepen the comparison (...) between Levinas and Fichte, giving special attention to Fichte's own novel theory of intersubjectivity and the summons. One result that emerges from this treatment is that both Levinas and Fichte view the second person in a way that has no equivalent in the current philosophical landscape. On this reading, each thinker views responsibility to the other, not only as an immediate and particular obligation, but also as an asymmetrical relation that gives the other moral priority. (shrink)

I examine Beauvoir's moral assessment of Romantic Love in The Second Sex. I first set out Beauvoir's central philosophical assumptions concerning the nature and situations of women, setting the framework for her analysis of the intersubjective dynamic which constitutes the phenomenology of romantic loving. In this process four double-bind paradoxes are generated which can lead, ultimately, to servility in the woman who loves. In a separate analysis, I ask whether it is wrong for a woman to aspire to and/or choose (...) this form of servitude. I distinguish two kinds of considerations: (1) those having to do with the intrinsic moral nature of the commitment or decision, and (2) those based on considerations of harm: first, to the woman who loves; second, to the loved Other; third to the nature of the relationship; and fourth, to society in general. (shrink)

This study analyzes interview data from 37 science and engineering faculty involved in university-industry relations. Faculty are particularly concerned about how these relations affect their work with graduate students. Our analysis is guided by ritual exchange theory and network theory. First, we explore the ways faculty define and redefine what makes industrial or corporate research appropriate or inappropriate for training graduates. Second, we examine difficulties and tensions faculty face when they work with students on industrial or corporate projects. These difficulties (...) and tensions center on intellectual property and we look at how faculty negotiate with industry over restrictions on publication of graduate student and faculty research results, on faculty and graduate student involvement in start-up companies, and on faculty and graduate student ownership of intellectual property. (shrink)

Some recent version of mysticism -- Empty epiphanies in modernist and postmodernist theory -- The gender of human togetherness -- Histories of modern selfhood -- Meister Eckhart's anthropology -- Becoming God in fourteenth-century Europe -- The makings of the modern self -- Taking leave of Sigmund Freud -- Everyday acknowledgments.

Encountering Derrida explores the points of engagement between Jacques Derrida and a host of other European thinkers, past and present, in order to counter recent claims that the era of deconstruction is finally drawing to a close. The book rereads Derrida in order to renew deconstruction's various conceptions of language, poetry, philosophy, institutions, difference and the future. This impressive collection of essays from the world's leading Derrida scholars re-evaluates Derrida's legacy and looks forward to the possible futures of deconstruction by (...) confronting various challenges to Derrida's thought. Collectively, the essays argue that Derrida must be read alongside others , an approach that produces some surprising new accounts of this challenging critical thinker. _ _. (shrink)

... of them in the MORAL PHILOSOPHER. ...

This paper analyses three concepts of life in Adorno's philosophy and considers the relationship between these concepts and the idea of a speculative materialism. The paper is concerned with Adorno's late concept of metaphysical experience and articulates a response to two key problems for the interpretation of this concept. First, given Adorno's emphasis on a purely negative philosophy, how does transcendence arise? Second, how can we give an experiential content to this idea of transcendence? A response to these two questions (...) is configured through an analysis of three concepts of life; mere life, damaged life and ephemeral life. (shrink)

In his attempt at a renewal of the concept of reification, Axel Honneth has referred to reification as a kind of forgetting. He uses an epigraph from Adorno and Horkheimer’s work to introduce this theme. This article considers the different accounts that are given by Honneth, on the one hand, and Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other, as to the way that reification is a forgetting of core experiential capacities of intersubjective human relations. It argues that Honneth’s account relies too (...) much on a foundational and undifferentiated notion of ‘empathetic engagement’, and that in order to articulate the damage done by reification, we need to contend with the more radical notion of forgetting that is outlined in Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. (shrink)

Simone Weil wrote in her notebooks that “Friendship, like beauty, is a miracle.” This paper investigates her discussions of friendship in the larger context of her understanding of the mediation of opposites, modeled on the Pythagorean and Platonic models of mathematics. For Weil, friendship was not only miraculous, butalso a key to understanding the relationship of the divine to the human. Convinced that friendship and love create equality between parties where none exists naturally, Weil concluded that friendship “is full of (...) marvelous meanings with regard to God, with regard to the communion of God and man, and with regard to men.”. (shrink)

We show that a $$ -simplified morass can be added by a forcing with working parts of size smaller than $\kappa $. This answers affirmatively the question, asked independently by Shelah and Velleman in the early 1990s, of whether it is possible to do so.Our argument use a modification of a technique of Mitchell’s for adding objects of size $\omega _2$ in which collections of models – all of equal, countable size – are used as side conditions. In our modification, (...) whilst the individual models are, as in Mitchell’s technique, taken ad hoc from quite general classes, the collections of models are very highly structured, in a way that is somewhat different from, perhaps more stringent than, Mitchell’s original, arguably making the method more wieldy and giving the prospect of further uses with more delicate working parts. (shrink)

A significant number of inmates with mental illness reside within the New York State Department of Corrections (NYSDOCS). New York State has taken the initiative to provide mentally ill inmates with necessary services through a collaboration of the New York State Department of Correctional Services and the New York State Office of Mental Health (NYSOMH). The collaboration results in a mental health delivery system that provides many essential services to mentally ill inmates. This paper focuses on the organization of mental (...) health services within NYSDOCS, best practices, past and current litigation, and staff responsibilities. As the population of mentally ill inmates continues to grow, implications for the Human Services professions of OMH and DOCS needs to continue to address and provide adequate mental health care and resources for this special population. (shrink)

Catullus 6 is a short poem addressed to a certain Flavius, otherwise unknown. Flavius, so we are told, refuses to say anything about his girlfriend, and the poet can explain this only by assuming that he has taken up with a mistress who is singularly unrefined . It is certainly clear that Flavius is not spending his nights alone; the state of his bedroom proves that much . But, says Catullus, there is no reason for Flavius to remain silent, no (...) matter what folly he is engaging in. He should confide in the poet, whose only wish is to praise him and his mistress in witty verse. (shrink)

In the last fifty years there has been a surge of immigration to the Western Hemisphere on the part of Middle Eastern and South East Asian Muslim religious leaders who are responding to a call from Muslim communities for religious leadership. In the United States alone, there have been over 1,500 Muslim clergy in the Sunni Tradition immigrate to America within the last twenty years. What is strikingly absent is the training needed to be a clergy person as understood in (...) American society. There is no question that the imams are well trained in the teachings of Islam and the recitation of the Friday prayers. What quite clearly does not exist is an understanding of the concept of professional ministry on the part of these immigrant imams and this has lead to serious problems for the Muslim communities being served and for the imams who serve them. Based on my major data-base study and subsequent book, Muslim Clergy in America: Ministry as Profession in the Islamic Community (2010), I will explore the essential “components” of professional ministry as understood in American society and will illustrate their value and viability within the Islamic communities in America. (shrink)

In Process and Reality Professor A. N. Whitehead formulates a Cosmology which embodies a resolute attempt to combine in one philosophical synthesis a scientific account of Concrescence with a metaphysical explanation thereof in terms of Creativity.

John Perry offers an unusually substantive, and initially plausible, account of the conceptual role of first-person thought. This paper critiques Perry’s account, particularly in what it says about action explanation, and offers a partial alternative. It also identifies three high-level assumptions about what accounts of conceptual roles should look like that plausibly explain why Perry’s account goes off track in the ways that it does – this is the top-down distortion of the title. Identifying and arguing against the three assumptions (...) helps point in the direction of a better account. (shrink)

This book details the history of the concept of the beautiful, starting with a distinction between the 'warm' metaphysics of beauty and the 'cold' one modeled on Plato's Janus-faced relationship to beauty, and ending with a fragmented yet hopeful vision propagated by the likes of Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno. The most important intellectual figures to write about beauty in Western metaphysics and in the post-metaphysical age are examined in this book.

Descartes's comments concerning the legitimacy of political power have customarily been viewed as an expression of his agreement with the doctrine of "divine right" of rulers. I argue that Descartes' directives concerning the establishment of political legitimacy are best understood within the context of his larger ethical framework. This interpretation subjects political and social activity to the same moral demands as individual action, the demand that one always put one's best judgments into action "as if" these judgments were metaphysically certain, (...) even though only moral certainty is available in one's practical decisions and actions. (shrink)

In 1880 Spyridon Lambros discovered in the library of the Dionysiou monastery on Mount Athos a manuscript containing, among other things, the missing second book of a compilation of zoological lore made for the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos , generally referred to as the Sylloge Constantini. The first book, already known from a manuscript in Paris, proclaims in its heading that the compilation was based on the epitome of Aristotle's περ ζων by Aristophanes of Byzantium, with supplements from the writings (...) of Aelian, Timotheos and others. These supplements are found exclusively in the second book, which Lambros edited, along with the first, for the Supplementum Aristotelicum. They add greatly to our knowledge of the περ ζων by the fifth-century grammarian Timotheos of Gaza, a work hitherto known only from the so-called Epitome Augustana, a selection of 53 unconnected chapters made in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos. (shrink)

The fact of four different Gospels can be faced as a theological opportunity rather than as a merely historical problem by the hermeneutic of an understanding of Christianity as based upon the christological dogma.

The philosophy of religion is here presented from the viewpoint of a unitary conception of the universe, which it is hoped will do justice to the demands of the intellect and the needs of the heart. None is more conscious than the author of the difficulties confronting this notion. To grasp the psychological and neural processes, physical and chemical energies, social and individual principles, environment and heredity, historical and natural interpretations of human life; the ethical, aesthetical and intellectually verifiable, the (...) finite and infinite, the accidental and orderly, the permanent and evolving, - to mention only a few aspects, - under on comprehensive scheme, is a task which in its completeness is beyond present knowledge. There are, so it appears to our present vision, insuperable difficulties in the way of its realization. But it is an ideal worthy and persistent. Science and philosophy are converging to this end. And the ideal is particularly fascinating to religious thought. The writer holds it as a profound conviction, believing that the universe is such a whole that its divers phenomena may be most satisfactorily explained under the guidance of the principles of unity and continuity. He hopes this treatise may be a contribution to this end. (shrink)

The illuminated building is surrounded by nocturnal darkness. Visibly displayed are people working late at the office. The cover of Kathi Weeks’s excellent book clearly sets the scene for her analysis of the problems we might well have—or should have—with work in its current configuration. One apparently has to work, but it is also supposed to be “good” to work; one should always try to work more, be more performative, exert oneself more, put in the extra hours to become more (...) efficient. Drawing on Weber’s analysis of the Protestant work ethic and its constitutive contradictions, Weeks wants us to question this productivist model of the “ever more” that can cost us so dearly. She sets out to render strange our .. (shrink)