O presente estudo tem o objetivo de estabelecer um paralelo entre o Direito e a linguagem com base em reflexões apontadas nos Ensaios de Michel de Montaigne, filósofo de influência cética que viveu no século XVI. O texto demonstra que os problemas de linguagem se estendem ao campo jurídico, uma vez que o Direito é constituído por enunciados linguísticos. A metodologia empregada foi a revisão bibliográfica, tendo como principal fonte os Ensaios no original em francês, além de bibliografia secundária formada (...) majoritariamente por comentadores contemporâneos da obra de Montaigne. (shrink)

In modern societies entrepreneurship and innovation are widely seen as key sources of economic growth and welfare increases. Yet entrepreneurial innovation has also meant losses and hardships for some members of society: it is destructive of some stakeholders’ wellbeing even as it creates new wellbeing among other stakeholders. Both the positive benefits and negative externalities of innovation are problematic because entrepreneurs initiate new ventures before their private profitability and/or social costs can be fully recognized. In this paper we consider three (...) analytical frameworks within which these issues might be examined: pre-commitments, contractarianism, and an entrepreneurial framework. We conclude that the intersection of stakeholder theory and entrepreneurial innovation is a potentially rich arena for research. (shrink)

The article explores Nietzsche’s view that the Greek agonistic impulse in sport led to an ancient culture that prized the dialectics of philosophy and its humane offspring. The Greeks did not invent physical contests, but the Olympics are unique in the ancient world for bringing together once and future enemies under formal terms of contest. What did this signify? And what were its consequences? In Nietzsche’s view, the ancient Greek obsession with agon (contest) led to the greatest civilization of the (...) western world. How so? The paper shows how the Greeks learned to “spiritualize” violence and redirect its otherwise destructive power. This aggressive but rule-bound ethos became the competitive force in Greek culture to which we owe the disciplines of philosophy, drama, history, and science,—because each was conceived as a new arena of intellectual or artistic competition on the model of competitive sport. (shrink)

Jeffrey Stout addresses two of the main criticisms of liberal democracy by its contemporary neotraditionalist Christian critics: that liberal democracy is destructive of social tradition, and thereby of virtue in the citizenry, and that liberal democracy is inherently secular, committed to expunging religious voices from the public arena. I judge that Stout effectively answers these charges: liberal democracy has its own tradition, it cultivates the virtues relevant to that, and it is not inherently hostile to piety. What Stout does (...) not do, I suggest, is take the next step of showing, positively, that Christianity can and should affirm the substance of liberal democratic society. This is due, in good measure, to the fact that Stout never tells us, except in off-hand comments, what he takes the substance of liberal democracy to be. And this, in turn, is due to his way of employing pragmatism: he uses pragmatism to give an account of human society generally, not of liberal democratic society. I raise some questions about the general account that pragmatism gives of human society, and thus about the account that it would give of liberal democracy. (shrink)

‘Harm reduction’ programs are usually justified on the utilitarian grounds that they aim to reduce the net harms of a behavior. In this paper, I contend that the historical genesis of harm reduction programs, and the crucial moral imperative that distinguishes these programs from other interventions and policies, are not utilitarian; the practical implementation of harm reduction programs is not, and probably cannot be, utilitarian; and the continued justification of harm reduction on utilitarian grounds is untenable and may itself cause (...) harm. Promoting harm reduction programs as utilitarian in the public arena disregards their deeper prioritarian impulses. ‘Harm reduction’ is a misnomer, and the name should be abandoned sooner rather than later. (shrink)

Beginning with his mancounters and exploring their temporality, materiality, and spatiality, the author explains in vivid detail how gaming as a gendered practice becomes possible. The author is interested in (and does really well) grounding gaming as gendered practice. Specifically, the author looks at gaming sites, humans and non-humans, infrastructures, power relations and the conditions that enables gaming a social activity. He is looking at the material conditions that make possible the phenomenological experiences and mobilities of certain kinds of subjects. (...) He connects home to gaming sites to colleges to clouds to gaming conventions and accomplishes this as a talented story-teller, which I appreciate as a scholar, reader, and teacher... Gender and the Grounds of Gaming is brilliant work, to begin with." - Ergin Bulut, author of A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry Places provided for digital game play like remote gaming setups, campus computer labs, esports arenas, and convention centers, the overall cultures of video game play, spectatorship, and production are characterized by stark gender disparities. Despite new franchises, platforms, and initiatives expanding games beyond their conventional audience of young, cis-het white men, gaming still feels off limits or unsafe for many. Gender and the Grounds of Gaming explores the physical places, any physical context in which games are played or observed, where games are played and how they contribute to the persistence of gaming's problematic gender politics. Through a series of case studies that document the gender dynamics of the various sites where video games literally take and make place, author Nicholas Taylor unpacks questions about how place matters to digital play, how issues in gaming cultures and politics are perpetuated through particular arrangements of bodies, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures. In charting the connections between place, masculinities, and play, Gender and the Grounds of Gaming makes space for marginalized perspectives, practices, and populations in gaming cultures. (shrink)

Rather than having been designed to function as a slave market, the Agora of the Italians appears to hâve functioned as a multifaceted recreational facility for the members of the Roman collegia of the island. That is, it functioned as a combined palaestra, bath, banquet hall, and gladiatorial arena, such as thèse probably existed at the turn of the second-first centuries B.C. Architecture lly, the building enjoys distinct similarities with the ludii gladiato- rii at Pompeii and at Rome.

This edited book considers the need for the continued dismantling of conceptual and cultural hegemonies of 'East' and 'West' in the humanities and social sciences. Cutting across a wide range of literature, film and art from different contexts and ages, this collection seeks out the interpenetrating dynamic between both terms. Highlighting the inherent instability of East and West as oppositional categories, it focuses on the 'crossings' between East and West and this nexus as a highly-charged arena of encounter and (...) collision. Drawing from varied literary contexts ranging from Victorian literature to Chinese literature and modern European literature, the book covers a diverse range of subject matter, including material drawn from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and studies related to race, religion, diaspora, and gender, and investigates topical social and political issues -including terrorism, nationalism, citizenship, the refugee crisis, xenophobia and otherness. Offering a framework to consider the salient questions of cultural, ideological and geographical change in our societies, this book is a key read for those working within world literary studies. (shrink)

To be a player in the international standards-setting arena of network industries, such as those dealing with information technology, reaching an early domestic consensus for a critical interoperable technology design is often essential. While in most cases efficient outcomes emerge through the market-driven, U.S. technology standards system, there have been situations where a timely consensus has failed to be attained with negative consequences for the international competitiveness of the U.S. economy (e.g., second generation of cellular telephony). An anticipatory policy (...) approach, based on a standards competition which takes into consideration antitrust and intellectual property rights, is proposed as a solution. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: Nicholas Humphrey offers a refreshingly progressive recipe for laying wide the doors of sensation: for understanding the peculiar features of qualitative or sensational experience in terms of the physical or functional facts about brains, bodies and environments. The key move in the treatment is the promotion of a kind of co- ordinated, double-sided tweaking: a careful restatement, with some amendments, of each side of the elusive identity statement ‘sensational property x = brain state y'. Only after such (...) restatements herd the two kinds of facts into a roughly common arena, Humphrey believes, can some kind of identity story be revealed as coherent, plausible, and explanatorily potent. (shrink)

An examination of philosophical realism from the standpoint of pragmatic epistemology, this book addresses the core idea of Rescher's work in epistemology: that functional and pragmatic concerns exert a controlling influence on the conduct ...

I want to thank all of those who have commented on my article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.1 The commentaries address a wide cross-section of the issues raised in my article. I have organised my responses thematically.The state of playAllen Buchanan's scepticism2 about moral statuses higher than personhood derives, in part, from our apparent inability to describe them. We seem to have little difficulty in imagining what it might be to have scientific understanding far beyond that of any human (...) scientist. By contrast, it is exceedingly difficult to describe moral statuses superior to that of any person. Boosting cognitive capacities seems to result in cognitively superior persons—not post-persons . I offer an explanation of our moral myopia.2 We are necessarily clueless in respect of moral statuses superior to our own. If mice understood practical reasons sufficiently well to truly understand why persons have a moral status superior to their own then they would be capable of the feats of practical reason constitutive of personhood—they would be persons. Our cluelessness about post-persons is compatible both with their possible existence and with their necessary non-existence. I propose an inductive argument for the existence of statuses superior to personhood. The observed existence of many moral statuses up to and including persons provides moderately strong inductive support for the possibility of post-persons.Who do we trust to make decisions about higher moral statuses?What precisely does the inductive argument predict? If my diagnosis of our moral myopia about post-personhood is correct, then mere persons cannot really understand what properties of post-persons give them a superior status. They will be able to infer their existence indirectly by an appeal to the predicted judgments of beings who lack our cognitive limitations. Wasserman3 questions my suggestion that we should defer to the sincere moral judgments of …. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ho, Ho, History Arius and Theological Controversy The Council of Nicaea – a Jolly Occasion Float like an Acolyte, Sting like the See Does Theology Really Matter? Here Comes Santa Claus – into the Twenty‐First Century The Nicholas of History and the Santa of Faith?

The philosopher Jerry Fodor was a key figure alongside Noam Chomsky in the revolution that led to the renaissance of the cognitive sciences from around 1960. This chapter describes key difference between Chomsky and Fodor. It focuses on Chomsky's and Fodor's conceptions of modularity. The chapter discusses two ways of understanding Chomsky's proposal, in particular how it claims an underlying faculty is related to processing and performance. Chomsky is largely agnostic on this question; the commitments of his programme are to (...) be found elsewhere. The most persuasive evidence for Fodorian modules, as for Chomskyan faculties, comes from dissociations. The chapter also reviews the evidential foundation of all versions of modularity: double dissociation (impairments of one or more mental abilities caused by accidents or other pathology which leave other abilities intact). (shrink)

This paper defends the idea that there might be vagueness or indeterminacy in the world itself--as opposed to merely in our representations of the world--against the charges of incoherence and unintelligibility. First we consider the idea that the world might contain vague properties and relations ; we show that this idea is already implied by certain well-understood views concerning the semantics of vague predicates (most notably the fuzzy view). Next we consider the idea that the world might contain vague objects (...) ; we argue that an object is indeterminate in a certain respect (colour, size, etc.) just in case it is a borderline case of a maximally specific colour (size, etc.) property. Finally we consider the idea that the world as a whole might be indeterminate; we argue that the world is indeterminate just in case it lacks a determinate division into determinate objects. (shrink)

Neste artigo, interessamo-‑nos pelo neologismo «perverformatif» [«performativo»] usado por Jacques Derrida em La Carte postale e em Marx & Sons. Se Derrida é um outro «mestre do performativo», título que ele reservava ao «Plato» de La Carte Postale não é por negar a Lei ou a sua «verdade», mas porque tem necessidade delas para assegurar a incidência de um desafio. O que performativamente se põe em obra e em abismo nos «Envios» passa assim por um desejo «perverso» de fazer advir (...) esta lei e de a desviar. A nossa hipótese é a de que é precisamente o que se performa no idioma daquele que não tem senão uma língua que não é a sua e para quem as palavras «contêm a sua própria perversidade». Interrogaremos, pois, os rastros deste vocábulo, a sua virtualidade a operar e o seu alcance – linguístico, mas também ético e político – no pensamento de Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

When two people engage in a conversation, knowingly or unknowingly, they are playing a game. Players of such games have diverse objectives, or winning conditions: an applicant trying to convince her potential employer of her eligibility over that of a competitor, a prosecutor trying to convict a defendant, a politician trying to convince an electorate in a political debate, and so on. We argue that infinitary games offer a natural model for many structural characteristics of such conversations. We call such (...) games message exchange games, and we compare them to existing game theoretic frameworks used in linguistics—for example, signaling games—and show that message exchange games are needed to handle non-cooperative conversation. In this paper, we concentrate on conversational games where players’ interests are opposed. We provide a taxonomy of conversations based on their winning conditions, and we investigate some essential features of winning conditions like consistency and what we call rhetorical cooperativity. We show that these features make our games decomposition sensitive, a property we define formally in the paper. We show that this property has far-reaching implications for the existence of winning strategies and their complexity. There is a class of winning conditions for which message exchange games are equivalent to Banach- Mazur games, which have been extensively studied and enjoy nice topological results. But decomposition sensitive goals are much more the norm and much more interesting linguistically and philosophically. (shrink)

The article urges a negative answer to the question if values merely lie ‘‘in the eyes of the beholder’’. It argues the objectivity of values via their status as tertiary properties that are neither on dispositionally inherent in their objects nor yet affective (dispositionally evoked in the interaction between objects and sense–observers), but rather reflective in being dispositionally evoked in suitably competent minds considering the matters involved.

Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend technological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'termninal' mass-cultural practices - without any relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virlio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century technological avant- gardes (such as Futurism and the (...) work of Stelarc) for their apparent eugenicist and fascist sympathies, but Virilios more recent interviews in Cyberrnonde and Voage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-technological avant-gardes (such as Impressionism) resist the realist perspective of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer similar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes that such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules. (shrink)

1. People standardly communicate by uttering phrases or sentences with certain intonation patterns, accompanied by facial expressions, eye contact and often a variety of gestures. If all goes well...

In this entertaining and provocative introduction, Royle offers lucid explanations of various key ideas, including deconstruction, undecidability, iterability, differance, aporia, the pharmakon, the supplement, a new enlightenment, and the democracy to come. He also gives attention, however, to a range of less obvious key ideas of Derrida, such as earthquakes, animals and animality, ghosts, monstrosity, the poematic, drugs, gifts, secrets, war, and mourning. Derrida is seen as an extraordinarily inventive thinker, as well as a brilliantly imaginative and often very funny (...) writer. Other critical introductions tend to highlight the specifically philosophical nature and genealogy of his work. Royle's book proceeds in a new and different way, in particular by focusing on the crucial but strange place of literature in Derrida's writings. He thus provides an appreciation and understanding based on detailed reference to Derrida's texts, interwoven with close readings of such writers as Shakespeare, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, Poe, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Bowen. In doing so, he explores Derrida's consistent view that deconstruction is "a coming-to-terms with literature". He emphasizes the ways in which "literature", for Derrida, is indissociably bound up with other concerns, such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, politics and ethics, responsibility and justice, law and democracy. (shrink)

IS THE REAL RATIONAL? Can we ever manage to explain the nature of reality—the make-up of the universe as a whole? Is there not an insuperable obstacle here—an infeasibility that was discerned already by Immanuel Kant who argued roughly as follows.