We invited five Cavell scholars to write on this topic. What follows is a vibrant exchange among Paola Marrati, Andrew Norris, Jörg Volbers, Cary Wolfe and Thomas Dumm addressing the question whether, in the contemporary political context, Cavell’s skepticism and his Emersonian perfectionism amount to a politics at all.

How much do animals matter--morally? Can we keep considering them as second class beings, to be used merely for our benefit? Or, should we offer them some form of moral egalitarianism? Inserting itself into the passionate debate over animal rights, this fascinating, provocative work by renowned scholar Paola Cavalieri advances a radical proposal: that we extend basic human rights to the nonhuman animals we currently treat as "things." Cavalieri first goes back in time, tracing the roots of the debate (...) from the 1970s, then explores not only the ethical but also the scientific viewpoints, examining the debate's precedents in mainstream Western philosophy. She considers the main proposals of reform that recently have been advanced within the framework of today's prevailing ethical perspectives. Are these proposals satisfying? Cavalieri says no, claiming that it is necessary to go beyond the traditional opposition between utilitarianism and Kantianism and focus on the question of fundamental moral protection. In the case of human beings, such protection is granted within the widely shared moral doctrine of universal human rights' theory. Cavalieri argues that if we examine closely this theory, we will discover that its very logic extends to nonhuman animals as beings who are owed basic moral and legal rights and that, as a result, human rights are not human after all. (shrink)

Although remote working can involve positive outcomes both for employees and organizations, in the case of the sudden and forced remote working situation that came into place during the COVID-19 crisis there have also been reports of negative aspects, one of which is technostress. In this context of crisis, leadership is crucial in sustainably managing and supporting employees, especially employees with workaholic tendencies who are more prone to developing negative work and health outcomes. However, while research on the role of (...) the positive aspects of leadership during crises does exist, the negative aspects of leadership during the COVID-19 crisis have not yet been studied. The present study aimed to explore the role of authoritarian leadership in a sample of 339 administrative university employees who worked either completely from home or from home and the workplace. The study examined the moderating effect of a manager on this relationship and the connections between workaholism and technostress through conditional process analysis. Results pointed out that high authoritarian leadership had an enhancing effect, whereas low authoritarian leadership had a protective effect on the relationship between workaholism and technostress, only in the group of complete remote workers. Thus, authoritarian leadership should be avoided and training leaders to be aware of its effect appears to be essential. Limitations, future directions for the study, and practical implications are also discussed. (shrink)

While moral perfectionists rank conscious beings according to their cognitive abilities, Paola Cavalieri launches a more inclusive defense of all forms of subjectivity. In concert with Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee, Harlan B. Miller, and other leading animal studies scholars, she expands our understanding of the nonhuman in such a way that the derogatory category of "the animal" becomes meaningless. In so doing, she presents a nonhierachical approach to ethics that better respects the value of the conscious self. Cavalieri (...) opens with a dialogue between two imagined philosophers, laying out her challenge to moral perfectionism and tracing its influence on our attitudes toward the "unworthy." She then follows with a roundtable "multilogue" which takes on the role of reason in ethics and the boundaries of moral status. Coetzee, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and author of _The Lives of Animals_, emphasizes the animality of human beings; Miller, a prominent analytic philosopher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, dismantles the rationalizations of human bias; Cary Wolfe, professor of English at Rice University, advocates an active exposure to other worlds and beings; and Matthew Calarco, author of _Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida_, extends ethical consideration to entities that traditionally have little or no moral status, such as plants and ecosystems. As Peter Singer writes in his foreword, the implications of this conversation extend far beyond the issue of the moral status of animals. They "get to the heart of some important differences about how we should do philosophy, and how philosophy can relate to our everyday life." From the divergences between analytical and continental approaches to the relevance of posthumanist thinking in contemporary ethics, the psychology of speciesism, and the practical consequences of an antiperfectionist stance, _The Death of the Animal_ confronts issues that will concern anyone interested in a serious study of morality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Present Trends of French Philosophical ThoughtAlexandre Koyré and Paola ZambelliThe paper that is published here for the first time was read to the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research by Alexandre Koyré, probably during one of his first trips to the United States as a visiting professor in the fall of 1946 or in the fall of 1950. 1 Given its content and the secondary (...) literature he quoted, the paper seems to go back to the end of 1946, when eight lectures were announced in the Bulletin of the New School, 2 but Koyré probably read only the first of them, deciding to postpone the later ones, because the other subject chosen for his 1946 seminars at the New School (“Les philosophes et la machine”) gained more interest and grew longer. He came back to the New School in 1950 to give some lectures on existentialism [End Page 521] in France, but this time he was the guest of Horace Kallen. 3 But we read in this paper that Koyré had spoken in a series of seminars organized by Albert Salomon. It was determined that Koyré should speak on a broad subject—not only on Sartre’s existentialism, but also on French philosophical trends in general in the first year after the Second World War. His American listeners were obviously interested in hearing about Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and the development of the new existentialist school in France.The result was that Koyré prepared a long paper—one that began by mentioning philosophers who had died in the War and the Resistance and concluded with an analysis of Sartre’s ontology and ethics. In the archives of the Centre Koyré in Paris there are three originals of this paper: a longer manuscript which, though earlier in date than the other two, is more complete and provides the basis of my edition, and two shorter typescripts, possibly prepared by the author’s typist with a view to publishing the piece in an American journal. In the first of the two typed versions several sentences, names, and words are missing in the typescript but were inserted into the text by an unknown hand. The second of the typescripts is complete in these points, but its preparation was interrupted for unknown reasons, and the copies (an original and two carbons) bear a final handwritten note: “Le texte s’arrête là.” Happily, the present manuscript version continues to the paper’s original conclusion.Perhaps Koyré, having temporarily mislaid the last pages of the manuscript among his many notes, decided not to publish the paper. 4 The omission from the [End Page 522] body of his published work is regrettable, since this is one of the few papers in which Koyré took a position on contemporary philosophical problems. On the basis of his deep knowledge of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophies, he was able to give a serious interpretation of Sartre. In discussing Sartre, Koyré predominantly used Sartre’s polemical lecture L’exis-tentialisme est un humanisme, read, and published in 1946 as a response to Catholic and Marxist critiques. This was certainly a simpler text than the bulky but more authoritative L’être et le néant. And perhaps it was to avoid taking this latter work in his suitcase that Koyré—as he often did—prepared a selection of fundamental passages for his American trip, copying them first in French and then making what was their first translation into English (published below in an appendix).No doubt, after five years of exile, Koyré wished to familiarize himself with the work of contemporary thinkers, both French and German. Indeed, he had already been doing this, since just before the lecture in New York, Koyré took part in a private debate with Jean Wahl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Blin, Maurice de Gandillac, and Gabriel Marcel on the subject of Heidegger’s philosophy. The last two speakers, together with Koyré himself, published their papers from the exchange in a journal and later in a volume introduced by Wahl. In his contribution Koyré emphasized Heidegger’s ideas of “concern [Sorge, souci]” and of “being unto death [zum Tode sein],” writing... (shrink)

We asked a series of questions to Luca Cobbe and Paola Rudan, authors of two books foregrounding the turning point of the 18th century by which, moving from the experience of the revolution, the structure of the constitution and configuration of government were deeply rethought. The two works, respectively about David Hume and Jeremy Bentham, contribute significantly to illuminate the way by which obedience has been reconsidered when society and opinion became the sources of political legitimation. This dialogue at (...) distance clearly shows the presence of a plurality of constitutional registers which were necessary for the affirmation of the centrality of government in the era of the rising popular sovereignty. (shrink)

R. M. Friedberg demonstrated the existence of a recursive functional that agrees with no Banach-Mazur functional on the class of recursive functions. In this paper Friedberg's result is generalized to both α-recursive functionals and weak α-recursive functionals for all admissible ordinals α such that $\lambda , where α * is the Σ 1 -projectum of α and λ is the Σ 2 -cofinality of α. The theorem is also established for the metarecursive case, α = ω 1 , where α (...) * = λ = ω. (shrink)

There is something frustrating in the concept of algorithm that can even worry: its limitations. An algorithm does not need the time to define itself, it possesses in its structure everything that defines it and can work exclusively in a site, such as a computer, which is itself another finite system. Whenever a particular algorithm will be executed it will always be inexorably equal to itself because the number of possible states is finite. A logical­mathematical algorithm is essentially very different (...) from a living being that reveals its being only in the passage of time, in the relationship with the environment, in the happening of events. On the contrary there is a strong relationship between living things and the art, since art essentially needs time to express itself. The art has a time dimension, if for no other reason, because the purpose of art is reaching human beings. But art, through technology, can also broaden its horizons. Art can make use of the technology and can do exactly as the man whose expression is, to grow, to expand, to discover new identities, to conduct an investigation in those distant places, on the border with the irrational. (shrink)

This text was first published in Theory, Culture & Society, May 13, 2015. For a special issue of Body & Society on ‘Rhythm, Movement, Embodiment', Paola Crespi presents two previously untranslated texts, Rudolf Bode's ‘Rhythm and its Importance for Education' and Rudolf Laban's ‘Eurhythmy and Kakorhythmy'. In the following interview she uncovers further unpublished and untranslated sources and she discusses some of the main themes of these texts in relation to the more widely known text - Danse, théâtre et (...) spectacle vivant – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

In this study, Paola Marrati approaches—in an extremely insightful, rigorous, and well-argued way—the question of the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through a consideration of his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. A central focus of the book is the analysis of the concepts of genesis and trace as they define Derrida's thinking of historicity, time, and subjectivity. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as key categories establishing a guiding (...) thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works. Whereas in his discussion of Husserl Derrida problematizes the relationship between the ideality of meaning and the singularity of its historical production, in his interpretation of Heidegger he challenges the very idea of the originary finitude of temporality. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in the philosophical roots of deconstruction, but for all those interested in the central questions of history and temporality, subjectivity and language, that pervade contemporary debates in cultural, literary, and visual theory alike. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the nature of trust in others. First, we argue that the feeling of trust is an important phenomenon of human existence, but it is not the true root of trust in others. Trust is above all an intentional response of the person, one that must be motivated and adequate to its object. When we trust, we entrust a good that is important to another person so that he or she can take care of it. For (...) trust to be authentic, the other must be trustworthy. The feeling of trust, then, arises as a spontaneous response when we are aware that our trust is properly placed. When we have understood that trust is a response, it is possible to examine the ethical relevance of trust in others: trust fulfils morally relevant values, is the source of moral duties, introduces the person in the logic of self-giving and is nourished by a variety of moral virtues. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the problems facing a policy maker who observes inconsistent choices made by agents who are boundedly rational. We contrast a model-less and a model-based approach to welfare economics. We make the case for the model-based approach and examine its advantages as well as some problematic issues associated with it.

This article aims to confront the principal arguments of the concept of critique in sociology and to demonstrate the emergence in recent years of a re-dimensioned conception of critique, on the one hand, of a pragmatic, pluralistic and contingent nature, and, on the other, show how the need for a strong and transcendental concept of critique that does not renounce the possibility of individual and collective emancipation is still present. This article argues that the analytic and empirical space in which (...) we can better observe the meeting between the contingent and normative aspects of critique is that of the social movements, that unsurprisingly have been important reference points for many of the different sociological traditions of critique. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose meaningfulness as one important evaluative criterion in individual climate ethics and suggest that most of our greenhouse gas emitting actions, behaviours, and lives are the opposite of meaningful: anti-meaningful. We explain why such actions etc. score negatively on three important dimensions of the meaningfulness scale, which we call the agential, narrative, and generative dimensions. We suggest that thinking about individual climate ethics also in terms of (anti-) meaningfulness illuminates important aspects of our troubled ethical involvement (...) with CC and can make a fresh and fruitful contribution to existing discussions, which tend to focus on moral responsibility and obligations. (shrink)

Localized mRNA translation is a biological process that allows mRNA to be translated on‐site, which is proposed to provide fine control in protein regulation, both spatially and temporally within a cell. We recently reported that Vasa, an RNA‐helicase, is a promising factor that appears to regulate this process on the spindle during the embryonic development of the sea urchin, yet the detailed roles and functional mechanisms of Vasa in this process are still largely unknown. In this review article, to elucidate (...) these remaining questions, we first summarize the prior knowledge and our recent findings in the area of Vasa research and further discuss how Vasa may function in localized mRNA translation, contributing to efficient protein regulation during rapid embryogenesis and cancer cell regulation. (shrink)

An alchemical Arabic treatise alternatively entitled Miftāḥ al-ḥikma, Miftāḥ jannāt al-khuld, Sirr al-asrār and Sirr al-sārr wa-sirr al-asrār is attributed in its manuscripts to two different authors: al-Iznīqī and Jābir b. Ḥayyān. In this article I briefly discuss some characteristic aspects of the treatise and its significance for the history of alchemy. These aspects include its ancient and important sources, such as the Muṣḥaf al-jamā‛a and the Kitāb al-Ḥabīb, and its connection with the tradition of the artists and the activity (...) of the workshop and laboratory, which first comes to the fore in Greek alchemy and later in Islamic alchemy. Furthermore, the work includes references to alchemical physical theories in which the influence of Islamic theology may perhaps be traced. This article, which summarises the results of investigations carried out over the last few years, could be considered as a kind of introduction to the edition and translation of the text currently in progress. (shrink)

No detailed description available for ""Astrologi hallucinati"".

This paper describes the disorienting aesthetics of some environments that are characteristic of the Anthropocene. We refer to these environments as ‘mashed-up’ and present three dimensions – phenomenological, epistemological and narrative – of the aesthetic disorientation they can trigger. We then advance the suggestion that a rich, nuanced and meaningful aesthetic experience of mashed-up Anthropocene environments (MAEs) calls for a mode of appreciation grounded on performative practices of aesthetic familiarisation with particular MAEs and entities and processes thereof. Familiarisation with MAEs, (...) we further note, can have disorienting codas of its own. It can reveal and highlight, rather than eliminate or alleviate, the solid strangeness of Earth even in the systemically humanised world of the Anthropocene, and it can expose and tie at least some of our agency, identity and sources of meaning in life to the same unstable evolvability of particular MAEs. (shrink)

A pesar de los innumerables beneficios, hay varias críticas y preocupaciones en relación con el uso de la Inteligencia Artificial (IA), especialmente en Brasil, donde no hay ninguna legislación federal en vigor hasta el momento. Las legislaciones estatales existentes y los proyectos de ley que se están votando en el Congreso, como el PL 21/20, son defectuosos e incompletos, especialmente en lo que respecta a algunas aplicaciones de la IA que implican altos riesgos para los derechos y libertades fundamentales, además (...) de traer a menudo un sesgo potencial, duplicando o potenciando el racismo institucionalizado existente en la sociedad u otras formas de discriminación. Existe una inequidad codificada que propicia infraestructuras injustas, sinembargo, donde hay poder hay resistencia, y en este sentido es necesario señalar la importancia de las contra codificaciones basadas en la solidaridad y que repiensan la justicia, es decir, un enfoque emancipador de la tecnología. Este es el cambio paradigmático necesario, y siendo necesario, tiene que ser posible y debe buscarse con el máximo esfuerzo. Se trata de verdaderas formas de resistencia, como instrumentos abolicionistas para el “Nuevo Código Jim”, nuevas formas de discriminación de raza, género y clase existentes a través del uso de las nuevas tecnologías, en el sentido de prácticas de diseño orientadas a la justicia. (shrink)

The ArgumentAlexandre Koyré is one of the most important historians of philosophic and scientific though since the thirties. Research on the Scientific Revolution, on Galileo, Descartes, Newton, as well as on Paracelsus and Boehme has deeply changed under his influential method: it has been a model for Kuhn's methodology of paradigms and revolutions in the histroy of science. Whereas Koyré used to be considered opposed in his ideology and method to sociological approaches, he has recently been characterized by Yehuda Elkana (...) as a sociologist of knowledge. In fact, until now one of the main sources of his method had not been identified: it is only by acknowledging the influence of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on Koyré that it is possible to explain how the latter wrote his thesis on Boehme's mystical thought just before his Etudes galiléennes. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was teaching history of philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Koyré was strongly influenced by his idea of “prelogical thinking” as a universel phenomenon and in a general way by the sociological school of Durkheim. Conceptual analysis deriving from Husserl, collective representations and attitude mentale, came together in Alexandre Koyrè's method. (shrink)

This book takes the reader on a philosophical quest to understand the dark side of emotions. The chapters are devoted to the analysis of negative emotions and are organized in a historical manner, spanning the period from ancient Greece to the present time. Each chapter addresses analytical questions about specific emotions generally considered to be unfavorable and classified as negative. The general aim of the volume is to describe the polymorphous and context-sensitive nature of negative emotions as well as changes (...) in the ways people have interpreted these emotions across different epochs. The editors speak of ‘the dark side of the emotions’ because their goal is to capture the ambivalent – unstable and shadowy – aspects of emotions. A number of studies have taken the categorial distinction between positive and negative emotions for granted, suggesting that negative emotions are especially significant for our psychological experience because they signal difficult situations. For this reason, the editors stress the importance of raising analytical questions about the valence of particular emotions and focussing on the features that make these emotions ambivalent: how – despite their negativity – such emotions may turn out to be positive. This opens up a perspective in which each emotion can be understood as a complex interlacing of negative and positive properties. The collection presents a thoughtful dialogue between philosophy and contemporary scientific research. It offers the reader insight by illuminating the dark side of the emotions. (shrink)

Il saggio mette a confronto tre fra le traduzioni più importanti della Commedia curate da poeti americani negli anni 2000, prendendo in analisi le loro strategie e tecniche traduttive e i conseguenti risultati estetici. La base del confronto sono le intenzioni traduttive dichiarate dai poeti-traduttori, il modo in cui hanno cercato di porle in pratica, e l’interpretazione dei loro risultati alla luce della teoria dei translation studies recente. Le idee di Lawrence Venuti sulle «versioni dei poeti» e su come leggere (...) una traduzione, specialmente in un contesto di world literature, sono risultate particolarmente utili nel caso dei tentativi di questi poeti-traduttori di riscrivere un testo poetico autonomo, e di trasportare la complessità della poesia di Dante, potentemente padroneggiata, attraverso due tradizioni letterarie diverse. (shrink)