In recent years, the biological inheritance of what has been traditionally known as original sin has come more clearly to the fore. Examining the genetic forebears of Homo sapiens has allowed for a richer understanding of what exactly the "propagation" of original sin might really mean. The wounded imperfection of the human biological inheritance has clarified matters concerning the question of where exactly original sin comes from. Since the human experience of sentience and agency is built biologically upon the shoulders (...) of its ancestors, the human experience of being always-already bound by sin—an essential component of the meaning of original sin—comes into clearer relief. At the same time, a much richer... (shrink)

The thought of G. W. F. Hegel has had a deep and lasting influence on a wide range of philosophical, political, religious, aesthetic, cultural and scientific movements. But, despite the far-reaching importance of Hegel's thought, there is often a great deal of confusion about what he actually said or believed. This is an invaluable introduction for philosophical beginners and a useful reference source for more advanced scholars and researchers.

This paper focuses on an explanation in a newspaper article: why new European Union citizens will come to the UK from Eastern Europe (e.g., because of available jobs). Using a corpus-based method of analysis, I show how regular target readers have been positioned to generate premises in dialogue with the explanation propositions, and thus into an understanding of the explanation as an argument, one which contains a biased conclusion not apparent in the text. Employing this method, and in particular ‘corpus (...) comparative statistical keywords’, I show how two issues can be freshly looked at: implicit premise recovery; the argument/explanation distinction. (shrink)

Michel Foucault, one of the most cited scholars in the social sciences, devoted his last three lectures to a study of leader development. Going back to pagan sources, Foucault found a persistent theme in Hellenistic antiquity that, in order to qualify for leadership, a person must undergo processes of subjectivation, which is simply the way that a person becomes a Subject. From this perspective, an aspiring leader first becomes a Subject who happens to lead. These processes depend on a condition (...) of _parresia_, which is truth-telling at great risk that is for the edification of the other person. A leader requires a mentor and advisors in order to lead successfully, while also developing the capacity in one’s own mind to heed the truth. In other words, a leader must learn how to guide oneself. A valuable contribution to the field of leadership studies, this book summarizes these last lectures as they pertain to the study and practice of leadership, emphasizing the role of ethics and truth-telling as a check on power. It then presents several other contexts where these same lessons can be seen in practice, including in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose career as a writer epitomized speaking truth to power, and somewhat surprisingly in the United States military, in response to its twenty-first century mission of counterinsurgency. (shrink)

As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thus, an approach is required that is capable of relating detailed, complex multimodal discourse analyses to broader sociocultural perspectives to account for the complex meaning-making practices that operate in online leadership discourses. For (...) this purpose, a digital multimodal discourse approach is proposed and illustrated via a small-scale case study of the online leadership discourse of an Australian university. The analysis of two short video texts demonstrates how a digital multimodal discourse perspective facilitates the identification of key multimodal systems used for meaning-making in online communication, how meaning arises through combinations of semiotic choices, and how the results of multimodal discourse analysis using digital technology can reveal larger sociocultural patterns – in this case, divergent leadership styles and approaches as reflected in online discourse, at a time of immense change within the higher education sector. (shrink)

International education is impacted by multiple discourses, in particular the discourse of university as an educational institution responsible for producing and curating knowledge for the public good, pursuing truth and transforming student life, and the neoliberal marketing discourse which portrays the university as a business organization providing a service for international students as customers/consumers. Following a multimodal discourse analytic perspective, this study examines ‘Why Choose’ webpages of one British and two Australian universities to identify how the apparently conflicting higher education (...) and neoliberal marketing discourses are managed in the interdiscursive space using language, images and videos. The results reveal that ‘Why Choose’ webpages are hybrid texts where the discourse of higher education is upheld in relation to the neoliberal marketing discourse through multimodal strategies of accentuation, infusion and progression. The study argues for the necessity of undertaking a multimodal discourse approach to understand how various positions are negotiated interdiscursively in online media. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 5, November 2019, Page 514-521.

This paper investigates the determinants of cost-(in)effective giving to public goods. We conduct a pre-registered experiment to elucidate how factors at the institutional and individual levels shape individual contributions and the cost-effectiveness of those contributions in a novel public good game. In particular, we examine the role of consequential uncertainty over the value of public good contributions (institutional level) as well as individual characteristics like risk and ambiguity attitudes, giving type, and demographics (individual level). We find cost-ineffective contributions in all (...) institutions, but total contribution levels and the degree of cost-ineffectiveness are similar across institutions. Meanwhile, cost-effectiveness varies by giving type—which is a novel result that is consistent with hypotheses we generate from theory—but other individual characteristics have little influence on the cost-effectiveness of contributions. Our work has important positive and normative implications for charitable giving and public good provision in the real world, and it is particularly germane to emerging online crowdfunding and patronage platforms that confront users with a multitude of competing opportunities for giving. (shrink)

One Dream or Two? is a critical historical, constitutional, and philosophical examination of Martin Luther King Jr's understanding of justice—his "Dream"—from within the context of the American political tradition.

My focus is the ‘logico-rhetorical module’. This mental module, Sperber hypothesizes, is an evolved ability of human beings to examine critically what someone is saying, for example, to detect inconsistency or inadequate evidence in an argument. On the assumption that we have this natural ability, Chilton questions the need for Critical Discourse Analysis; in contrast, on his reading of Sperber’s work, Hart argues the opposite. In this article, I agree with Chilton’s stance to the extent that the competence of the (...) logico-rhetorical module is, generally speaking, adequate for enabling critical engagement with verbal input. That said, I highlight two limitations of the logico-rhetorical module for detecting inconsistency in arguments. To address these limitations, I hold a new approach is needed in Critical Discourse Analysis. This is one which draws on the corpus linguistic method; I refer to it as Electronic Deconstruction. (shrink)

This article models a software-based pedagogy, targetted at undergraduates, for assisting with detection and deconstruction of straw man arguments. The pedagogy is useful particularly where the stu...

I argue that intentionalism in aesthetics and in legal interpretation is vulnerable to a different sort of criticism than is found in the voluminous literature on the topic. Specifically, a kind of paradox arises for the intentionalist out of recognition of a second-order intention embedded in the social practices that characterize both art and law. The paper shows how this second-order intention manifests itself in each of the two enterprises, and argues that its presence entails the overriding centrality of the (...) public text, and hence a rejection of the interpretive stance distinctive of intentionalism itself. (shrink)

This paper uses a social semiotic perspective to analyze Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage of the US presidential campaign from 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy for nomination as the Republican candidate until 8 November 2016, when he was elected as President of the United States. The paper argues that one of the keys to Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage was that, in presenting himself and his agenda, he foregrounded interpersonal meaning by making himself the focus (...) of attention of the campaign through strategies that invaded various semiotic spaces to form a “sub-semiosphere” of Trump dogma. The effects of this were that what he did and what he said captured the majority of media attention at the expense of his opponents, enabling him to win the election, despite his complete lack of background experience as a politician. (shrink)

PORTER S and O’HALLORAN P. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 18–28 The use and limitation of realistic evaluation as a tool for evidence‐based practice: a critical realist perspectiveIn this paper, we assess realistic evaluation’s articulation with evidence‐based practice (EBP) from the perspective of critical realism. We argue that the adoption by realistic evaluation of a realist causal ontology means that it is better placed to explain complex healthcare interventions than the traditional method used by EBP, the randomized controlled trial (RCT). (...) However, we do not conclude from this that the use of RCTs is without merit, arguing that it is possible to use both methods in combination under the rubric of realist theory. More negatively, we contend that the rejection of critical theory and utopianism by realistic evaluation in favour of the pragmatism of piecemeal social engineering means that it is vulnerable to accusations that it promotes technocratic interpretations of human problems. We conclude that, insofar as realistic evaluation adheres to the ontology of critical realism, it provides a sound contribution to EBP, but insofar as it rejects the critical turn of Bhaskar’s realism, it replicates the technocratic tendencies inherent in EBP. (shrink)

Pornography is no longer an activity confined to a small group of individuals or the privacy of one’s home. Rather, it has permeated modern culture, including the work environment. Given the pervasive nature of pornography, we study how viewing pornography affects unethical behavior at work. Using survey data from a sample that approximates a nationally representative sample in terms of demographics, we find a positive correlation between viewing pornography and intended unethical behavior. We then conduct an experiment to provide causal (...) evidence. The experiment confirms the survey—consuming pornography causes individuals to be less ethical. We find that this relationship is mediated by increased moral disengagement from dehumanization of others due to viewing pornography. Combined, our results suggest that choosing to consume pornography causes individuals to behave less ethically. Because unethical employee behavior has been linked to numerous negative organization outcomes including fraud, collusion, and other self-serving behaviors, our results have implications for most societal organizations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study examines the types of verbal, pictorial, and multimodal metaphors in the genre of sex education picture books for young children in Mainland China. Although being an educational discourse genre that is essentially concerned with transmitting scientific facts, sex education picture books employ a range of metaphors that categorize and construe the biological knowledge of human reproduction in a way that not only facilitates young children’s understanding of scientific concepts but also instills in them particular values and moralities that (...) are socioculturally conditioned. An examination of the source domains from which the metaphors are drawn and the target domains onto which the metaphors are mapped reveals three types of metaphor, namely, personification, domestication, and cross-experience metaphors. The analysis of seven sex education picture books for pre-school children suggests that these types of metaphor are used purposefully for addressing pedagogical as well as ideological con... (shrink)

People are often responsible for what they do, but they also often possess an excuse. One of the most common excuses is ignorance. Not all ignorance constitutes an excuse, however, for some ignorance is culpable and culpable ignorance is no excuse. But what about group agents? In our everyday practices, we blame group agents constantly. But if groups can be blameworthy, they plausibly can also be excused. Surely one such excuse is ignorance. But, as with individual agents, some group ignorance (...) is also surely culpable. How should we understand the culpable ignorance of group agents? In this paper, I argue for two conditional claims that together constitute what I call the Group Justification Thesis, which is a group-agent adaptation of the Justification Thesis put forth by Biebel [(2018). ‘Epistemic Justification and the Ignorance Excuse.’ Philosophical Studies 175 (12): 3005–3028]: (i) A group agent is excused because of ignorance only if that ignorance is justified, and (ii) a group agent is culpable despite being ignorant only if that ignorance is not justified. One interesting upshot of this view is that a group agent can be culpably ignorant even though none of the members are culpable for their ignorance. (shrink)

Richard Rorty does have something ‘to say to [Black Americans]’ and to their racially conscious nonblack allies in the sense that his understanding of liberalism, his prophecies about the future and his urgent appeals to the American Left all paint a picture of a white middle class fully prepared to make life increasingly miserable for Black Americans unless it is ‘protected from catastrophe’. Rorty hopes that this group will undergo a moral transformation that enables it to see past its narrow (...) group interests, but doubts that it will. He, nevertheless, prescribes a politics of hope and appeasement as a hedge against both despair and backsliding. In so doing, he fails to appreciate the availability and the suitability of an alternative ‘racial realist’ (and tragicomic) posture vis-à-vis American liberalism inspired by thinkers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Derrick Bell. This alternative enables racially conscious Americans to respond to the intransigence of (certain) white Americans with cunning rather than by escaping into fantasies of a ‘dream country’ unmarked by the damage caused by racism and its long-lingering effects. I uncover and explore this alternative through Rorty’s warnings regarding the white middle class, a somewhat surprising consistency between Rorty’s brand of class politics and Bell’s understanding of ‘racial fortuity’, and, finally, through a development of Bell’s ‘racial realist’ posture combined with Baldwin’s ‘uses of the blues’ resulting in a ‘hard-eyed’ tragicomic sensibility sufficient to effectively pair continued struggle with creative consolation and resilience. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 197 Seiten: 79-100.

Daily rhythms in the rate and specificity of protein synthesis occur in most mammalian cells through an interaction between cell‐autonomous circadian regulation and daily cycles of systemic cues. However, the overall protein content of a typical cell changes little over 24 h. For most proteins, translation appears to be coordinated with protein degradation, producing phases of proteomic renewal that maximize energy efficiency while broadly maintaining proteostasis across the solar cycle. We propose that a major function of this temporal compartmentalization—and of (...) circadian rhythmicity in general—is to optimize the energy efficiency of protein synthesis and associated processes such as complex assembly. We further propose that much of this temporal compartmentalization is achieved at the level of translational initiation, such that the translational machinery alternates between distinct translational mechanisms, each using a distinct toolkit of phosphoproteins to preferentially recognize and translate different classes of mRNA. (shrink)