In this article, the author proposes a dynamic, interdisciplinary, network conception of expertise that differs from conventional static, linear conceptions. Using a range of graphic images, the author propose specific visualizations of this network conception of expertise. First, he discusses attempts to pin expertise down in a definition. Then he considers the network of notions from which expertise emerges. The author briefly describes representative nodes in the network, such as experience and excellence. He concludes with the view that there is (...) no need to compromise the many existing conceptions of expertise by forcing them into a false common ground. Instead, he shows that existing accounts of expertise can be better understood by viewing them as connected parts of a complex network. (shrink)

This book is part of the Critical Practitioner-Scholar series edited by Barry Down and Rob Hattam for DOI Press. It is, as the title implies, an edited collection of essays which first appeared in...

La théorie du langage adoptée par Latour dans ses enquêtes tourne le dos au « linguistic turn » et revient à une conception « descriptive » du langage. Cet article vise à questionner cette hypothèse à partir d’une enquête sur son rapport au langage. L’absence de référence à la théorie des actes de langage constitue un point d’entrée à ce questionnement.The theory of language adopted by Latour turns away from "linguistic turn" and comes down to a "descriptive" conception of language. (...) This article seeks to question this hypothesis from a survey of its relationship to language. The lack of reference to the theory of speech acts constitutes a starting point to the issue. (shrink)

This article addresses the impact of leader psychological need satisfaction on employees. We draw on the self-determination theory and leader-member exchange theory to investigate if and how leader psychological need satisfaction trickles down to employee psychological need satisfaction. Adopting a multi-actor, multilevel design, results from 1036 leader–employee dyads indicate that employee-rated LMX mediates the trickle-down effect of leader psychological need satisfaction. Additional analyses of leader psychological needs show that leader competence is the main psychological need that underlying this relationship. We (...) also found an unexpected negative association between leader autonomy need satisfaction and employee competence need satisfaction. Overall, this study shows the importance of both leaders’ psychological need satisfaction and employee perceptions of the relationship quality for employee psychological need satisfaction. (shrink)

Interviewet er lavet i juli 2021. Dets formål er at belyse emner, der er centrale i Celikates’ tænkning, f.eks. den voksende højrefløjspopulisme, migration, voldelige versus ikke-voldelige protester, civil ulydighed og den kritiske filosofis rolle i dag. -/- When Celikates and I sat down digitally in July 2021, the interview’s primary purpose was to examine topics central to Celikates’ thinking, such as the rise of right-wing populism, migration, violent versus non-violent protest, civil disobedience, and the role of critical philosophy today.

In this paper, I explore the ways that phenomenological concepts like intercorporeality and mutual incorporation offer new tools in trying to make sense of human experiences via mediating systems. In particular, I think about how the COVID-19 pandemic hastened a large population into mediated interactions, and what is lost, perhaps contingently or perhaps intrinsically, when human experiences are mediated in this way. I look to research in presence, skillful interaction, and enactive social cognition to argue that there remains something ineffable (...) or at least extremely hard to pin down about intercorporeality, and embodied togetherness has not yet been replicated in the mediating systems we currently embrace. (shrink)

Mechanisms are the how of chemical reactions. Substances are individuated by their structures at the molecular scale, so a chemical reaction is just the transformation of reagent structures into product structures. Explaining a chemical reaction must therefore involve different hypotheses about how this might happen: proposing, investigating and sometimes eliminating different possible pathways from reagents to products. One distinctive aspect of mechanisms in chemistry is that they are broken down into a few basic kinds of step involving the breaking and (...) making of bonds between atoms. This is necessary for chemical kinetics, the study of how fast reactions happen, and what affects it. It draws on G.N. Lewis’ identification of the chemical bond as involving shared electrons, which from the 1920s achieved the commensuration of chemistry and physics. The breaking or making of a bond just is the transfer of electrons, so a chemical bond on one side of an equation might be balanced on the other side by the appearance of a corresponding quantity of excess charge. A bond is understood to have been exchanged for a pair of electrons. Since reaction mechanisms rely on identities, doesn’t the establishment of a reaction mechanism explain away the chemical phenomena, showing that they are no more than the movement of charges and masses? In one sense yes: these mechanisms seem to involve a conserved-quantity conception of causation. But in another sense no: the ‘lower-level’ entities can do what they do only when embedded in higher-level organisation or structure. There need be no threat of reduction. (shrink)

Perhaps some simple change will do the trick, like relying less on insurance and employers as middlemen. But if we are willing to consider radical change, let me offer a different suggestion. We are buying the wrong thing. What we want is health, i.e., a long healthy life, but when we sit down and draw up a contract, what we buy is health care, i.e., a certain degree of attention from health care specialists.

Twice in the 2020 term, in Bostock and Comcast, the Supreme Court doubled down on the reasoning of “but-for causation” to interpret antidiscrimination statutes. According to this reasoning, an outcome is discriminatory because of some status—say, sex or race—just in case the outcome would not have occurred “but-for” the plaintiff’s status. We think this reasoning embeds profound conceptual errors that render the decisions deeply confused. Furthermore, those conceptual errors tend to limit the reach of antidiscrimination law. In this essay, we (...) first unpack the ambiguity of this but-for causal reasoning. We then show that this reasoning arises from a misapplication of tort law principles within antidiscrimination law, and that, as a result, it is both conceptually and normatively indeterminate. (shrink)

Nietzsche is usually presumed to be an atheist because of his proclaimation that God is dead. This dissertation argues, however, that the death of God is not atheistic but theistic, for Nietzsche's concept of Dionysus, Will to Power itself, entails an implicit commitment to theism. ;Chapter One indicates the enigmatic and nuanced quality of Nietzsche's style. Nietzsche wears masks. In order to decipher these masks with respect to the problem of God, six criteria of the traditional theistic understanding of God (...) are established. These six criteria are: Dionysus is eternal. He is the creative source of the world and man. The world and man exemplify the presence of Dionysus and yet they are not exhaustive of Him. Therefore Dionysus, as more than the world, can be spoken of as "other" than man and the world. This "otherness" entails a relationship between Dionysus and man/world. This relationship is not determinative of Dionysus. Man and world are an experiment on Dionysus' behalf; one that may "terminate," although Dionysus himself will not. ;Chapter Two sets out to formulate and expound upon the first four criteria of theism. This sets down the basic ontology. ;Chapter Three sets forth the problem of nihilism. Nihilism is the result of the death of God. ;Chapter Four discusses the relation of nihilism to morality. For Nietzsche, the moralization of life, and in particular the moralization of God, has led to God's death. Thus this chapter indicates the fifth criterion of theism, i.e., man's relation to God. ;Chapter Five sets out to decode hermeneutically the various masks that Nietzsche wears in reference to the problem of atheism. This chapter demonstrates how Nietzsche's own overt atheistic statements are proclaimations of iconotrophy, not godlessness. ;Chapter Six explicates Nietzsche's positive philosophy of God. This philosophy of God is formulated in terms of The Text of the Divine, God as Non-evaluatable, God and Eschatology, God and the Problem of Causality. Accordingly, this chapter deliniates the sixth criterion of theism, i.e., God's relationship to man. (shrink)

In the seventy years since AI became a field of study, the theoretical work of philosophers has played increasingly important roles in understanding many aspects of the AI project, from the metaphysics of mind and what kinds of systems can or cannot implement them, the epistemology of objectivity and algorithmic bias, the ethics of automation, drones, and specific implementations of AI, as well as analyses of AI embedded in social contexts (for example). Serious scholarship in AI ethics sometimes quotes Asimov’s (...) speculative laws of robotics as if they were genuine proposals, and yet Lem remains historically undervalued as a theorist who uses fiction as his vehicle. Here, I argue that Lem’s fiction (in particular his fiction about robots) is overlooked but highly nuanced philosophy of AI, and that we should recognize the lessons he tried to offer us, which focused on the human and social failures rather than technological breakdowns. Stories like “How the World Was Saved” and “Upside Down Evolution” ask serious philosophical questions about AI metaphysics and ethics, and offer insightful answers that deserve more attention. Highlighting some of this work from The Cyberiad and the stories in Mortal Engines in particular, I argue that the time has never been more appropriate to attend to his philosophy in light of the widespread technological and social failures brought about by the quest for artificial intelligence. In service of this argument, I discuss some of the history and philosophical debates around AI in the last decades, as well as contemporary events that illustrate Lem’s strongest claims in critique of the human side of AI. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s thoughts about becoming and being, and how these are at odds with both knowledge and life. It discusses how Nietzsche addresses this problem, beginning with its historical part: Nietzsche’s story of how the philosophical tradition first builds the concept of being, but then pulls it down by the stages described in the famous ‘history of an error’ chapter in Twilight of the Idols. This development culminates in the replacement of being with becoming. But understanding what Nietzsche (...) means by becoming requires an understanding of its relation to time. We arrive at a genuine sense of becoming only by stripping away our experience of time as succession. (shrink)

Are we the people we were? If we are continuants, then the answer to this question is an affirmative one. But it is a moot point whether anything is a continuant. The debate over this issue—of whether there are such things as continuants—is often conducted in the context of theories concerning the apparent passage of time. Thus it has been argued that the tenseless theory of time, according to which time does not really pass, forces us to tear down part (...) of the basis for the intuitive distinction between ordinary, reidentifiable objects on the one hand, and processes on the other, and to regard such objects as mountains as persisting through time in exactly the way that thunderstorms do: by having distinct temporal parts at different times. I confess that I am a tenseless theorist of time, and take that theory to entail such a conclusion about the persistence of objects. But it is not just a certain stance over time’s passage that motivates sympathy towards temporal parts and suspicion of continuants. Thinking of objects as having temporal parts sits more comfortably than does the rival view with two natural assumptions concerning continuity: that beginning and ceasing to exist, at least for most objects, involves underlying changes which are continuous in nature; and that objects exhibit continuity through time, in the sense of not having gaps in their existence. Or so I shall argue in what follows. (shrink)

We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and (...) how they then move across time and landscape. What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives. (shrink)

Judgement is traditionally seen as applicable in two spheres of human endeavour: the theoretical (or the sphere in which we consider both what must be the case and what is likely to be the case) and the practical (or the sphere in which we consider what we ought to do, either because it is in our interests or because morality requires it). Now insofar as we are speaking of ‘judgement’ two conceptual assumptions are being made. Firstly, we are assuming that (...) there are imponderables and complexity, and secondly, despite the imponderables and complexity, that there is still room for the exercise of reason. Granted this view of judgement we can state our two main theses. Firstly, we shall argue that, despite the pressures of market forces, employee needs, and shareholder interests, there is still room in business practice for judgements so understood. Secondly, we shall argue that these judgements need not inevitably be directed down the single track of the financial interests of the company and its shareholders. The second thesis can be understood as a moral thesis in either of two ways. Either it can be seen as the thesis that companies have broad social responsibilities extending well beyond the immediate interests of the company, or as the thesis that companies share the social interests of the communities to which they belong; they are citizens writ large, to gloss Plato. (shrink)

We describe an exploratory case study about the applicability of different robotic platforms in an educational context with a child with Down syndrome. The robotic platforms tested are the humanoid robot KASPAR and the mobile robotic platform IROMEC. During the study we observed the effects KASPAR and IROMEC had in helping the child with the development and improvement of her social skills while playing different interactive games with the robots. Conceptually similar play scenarios were performed with both robots and the (...) behaviour of the child was monitored during her interactions with them. (shrink)

Following a government campaign run by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1994, many Hong Kong companies and trade associations adopted written codes of conduct. The research study reported here examines how and why companies responded, and assesses the impact of code adoption on the moral climate of code adopters. The research involved (a) initial questionnaire surveys to which 184 organisations replied, (b) longitudinal questionnaire-based assessments of moral ethos and conduct in a focal sample of 17 code adopting companies, (...) (c) interviews with 33 managers in the focal companies examining the adoption and impact of the codes, and (d) content analysis of 41 company codes of conduct, including those of most focal companies, plus the ICAC model code.While a mixture of prudential and altruistic reasons were given for code adoption, content analysis suggested that the prime motive was corporate self-defence. The prevailing themes were bribery, conflict of interest, insider information, gambling, moonlighting, accuracy of records and misuse of corporate assets. Wider social responsibility tended to be neglected. Companies appeared to have imposed their codes top-down, emphasising disciplinary procedures rather than ethics training, and appointing neither ethics counsellors nor ombuds-people. The longitudinal study over a seven month period suggested that while moral ethos may have declined, overall standards of perceived conduct had not changed. (shrink)

Social interactions are essential aspects of social relationships. Despite their centrality, there is a lack of a standardized approach to systematize social interactions. The present research developed and tested a taxonomy of social interactions. In Study 1, we combined a bottom-up approach based on the grounded theory with a top-down approach integrating existing empirical and theoretical literature to develop the taxonomy. The resulting taxonomy comprises the components Actor, Partner, Relation, Activities, Context, and Evaluation, each specified by features on three levels (...) of abstraction. A social situation can be described by a combination of the components and their features on the respective abstraction level. Study 2 tested the APRACE using another dataset with 1,899 descriptions of social interactions. The index scores of the six components, the frequencies of the features on the most abstract level, and their correlations were largely consistent across both studies, which supports the generalizability of the APRACE. The APRACE offers a generalizable tool for the comprehensive, parsimonious, and systematic description of social interactions and, thus, enables networked research on social interactions and application in a number of practical fields. (shrink)

The central doctrine of traditional Christianity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, is that the Second Person of the Trinity lived a human existence on Earth as Jesus Christ for a finite period. In the words of the Nicene Creed, the Son is himwho for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

Everyone involved with the care and welfare of children and young adults is confronted with the issue of bullying. Bullying behaviors create an uncomfortable, threatening, and hostile environment that make it difficult for children to learn. 101 Facts about Bullying breaks down what the research says about bullying and its effects, offering ideas for what can and should be done to minimize or reduce it. Kevorkian systematically discusses topics ranging from relational bullying to cyber bullying to media and video violence (...) to the legal ramifications of bullying, debunking myth and uncloaking the facts about bullying and its prevention. (shrink)

Snake venoms are recognized here as a grossly under‐explored resource in pharmacological prospecting. Discoveries in snake systematics demonstrate that former taxonomic bias in research has led to the neglect of thousands of species of potential medical use. Recent discoveries reveal an unexpectedly vast degree of variation in venom composition among snakes, from different species down to litter mates. The molecular mechanisms underlying this diversity are only beginning to be understood. However, the enormous potential that this resource represents for pharmacological prospecting (...) is clear. New high‐throughput screening systems offer greatly increased speed and efficiency in identifying and extracting therapeutically useful molecules. At the same time a global biodiversity crisis is threatening the very snake populations on which hopes for new venom‐derived medications depend. Biomedical researchers, pharmacologists, clinicians, herpetologists, and conservation biologists must combine their efforts if the full potential of snake venom‐derived medications is to be realized. (shrink)

The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures. The temporal dynamics of social network connectivity, that is, the order in which individuals in a population interact with each other, has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate how, in a fully connected social network, connectivity dynamics, alone and in interaction with different cognitive biases, affect the evolution of cultural variants. Using agent‐based computer simulations, we manipulate population connectivity dynamics (...) (early, mid, and late full‐population connectivity); content bias, or a preference for high‐quality variants; coordination bias, or whether agents tend to use self‐produced variants (egocentric bias), or to switch to variants observed in others (allocentric bias); and memory size, or the number of items that agents can store in their memory. We show that connectivity dynamics affect the time‐course of variant spread, with lower connectivity slowing down convergence of the population onto a single cultural variant. We also show that, compared to a neutral evolutionary model, content bias accelerates convergence and amplifies the effects of connectivity dynamics, while larger memory size and coordination bias, especially egocentric bias, slow down convergence. Furthermore, connectivity dynamics affect the frequency of high‐quality variants (adaptiveness), with late connectivity populations showing bursts of rapid change in adaptiveness followed by periods of relatively slower change, and early connectivity populations following a single‐peak evolutionary dynamic. We evaluate our simulations against existing data collected from previous experiments and show how our model reproduces the empirical patterns of convergence. (shrink)

This book proceeds from a single and very simple observation: throughout history, and up to the present, women have received a clear message that we are not supposed to prioritize ourselves. Indeed, the whole question of "self" is a problem for women - and a problem that issues from a wide range of locations, including, in some cases, feminism itself. When women espouse discourses of self-interest, self-regard, and selfishness, they become illegible. This is complicated by the commodification of the self (...) in the recent Western mode of economic and political organization known as "neoliberalism," which encourages a focus on self-fashioning that may not be identical with self-regard or self-interest. Drawing on figures from French, US, and UK contexts, including Rachilde, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, and Lionel Shriver, and examining discourses from psychiatry, media, and feminism with the aim of reading against the grain of multiple orthodoxies, this book asks how revisiting the words and works of selfish women of modernity can assist us in understanding our fraught individual and collective identities as women in contemporary culture. And can women with politics that are contrary to the interests of the collective teach us anything about the value of rethinking the role of the individual? This book is an essential read for those with interests in cultural theory, feminist theory, and gender politics. iple orthodoxies, this book asks how revisiting the words and works of selfish women of modernity can assist us in understanding our fraught individual and collective identities as women in contemporary culture. And can women with politics that are contrary to the interests of the collective teach us anything about the value of rethinking the role of the individual? This book is an essential read for those with interests in cultural theory, feminist theory, and gender politics. (shrink)

Concern for global warming, climate change and pollution has grown in recent years, with countries across the world facing natural disasters on unprecedented scales. The communication of environmental protection is therefore a necessary area of enquiry, especially from a Conceptual Metaphor Theory perspective. The present article explores (1) how the themes of global warming, climate change, pollution and activism are conceptualized in a corpus of 51 noncommercial advertisements, (2) the interaction of metonymy with metaphor, (3) the distribution across verbal and (...) visual modes of metaphoric source and target domains, and (4) how value is evoked. Findings show that half of the corpus frames environmental themes through source domains such as weapons, predators and natural disasters. The other half triggers incongruous mappings, such as between concrete entities, and relies on metonymic processes of inference to access the main rhetorical message. Among the most frequent metonymies, CAUSE-EFFECT and CATEGORY FOR SALIENT PROPERTY highlight the negative effects of the represented phenomena. Multimodality usually occurs within source and/or target domains rather than across the metaphoric mapping. Most of the campaigns project mixed value, where a negative evaluation of a theme is accompanied by a positive message, inviting the audience to take action. (shrink)

This is the first study to recognise the broad impact of opera in early-modern French culture._Downing A. Thomas considers the use of operatic spectacle and music by Louis XIV as a vehicle for absolutism; the resistance of music to the aesthetic and political agendas of the time; and the long-term development of opera in eighteenth-century humanist culture. He argues that French opera moved away from the politics of the absolute monarchy in which it originated to address Enlightenment concerns with sensibility (...) and feeling. The book combines close readings of significant seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century operatic works, circumstantial writings and theoretical works on theatre and opera, together with a measure of reception history. Thomas examines key works by Lully, Rameau, and Charpentier, among others, and extends his reach from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. (shrink)

Film Ethics considers a range of films and texts of film criticism alongside disparate philosophical discourses of ethics by Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, ...

P. B. Downing; VII.—Subjunctive Conditionals, Time Order, and Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 125–140.

The prominent place 0f corpuscularizm mechanism in L0ckc`s Essay is nowadays universally acknowledged} Certainly, L0ckc’s discussions 0f the primary/secondary quality distinction and 0f real essences cannot be understood without reference to the corpuscularizm science 0f his day, which held that all macroscopic bodily phenomena should bc explained in terms 0f the motions and impacts 0f submicroscopic particles, 0r corpuscles, each of which can bc fully characterized in terms of 21 strictly limited range 0f (primary) properties: size, shape, motion (or mobility), (...) and, perhaps, solidity 0r impcnctrability.2 Indeed, L0ckc’s lists 0f primary quali-. (shrink)

One of the deepest tensions in Locke’s Essay, a work full of profound and productive conflicts, is one between Locke’s metaphysical tendencies—his inclination to presuppose or even to argue for substantive metaphysical positions—and his devout epistemic modesty, which seems to urge agnosticism about major metaphysical issues. Both tendencies are deeply rooted in the Essay. Locke is a theorist of substance, essence, quality. Yet, his favorite conclusions are epistemically pessimistic, even skeptical; when it comes to questions about how the world is (...) constituted, our understandings cannot penetrate very far. Locke seems torn between metaphysics and modesty, between dogmatism and skepticism. This chapter will consider two specific examples of this sort of tension. The first involves the ontology of body, and the second, the ontology of mind. The conflict concerning bodily natures looks like this: As is well-known, Locke typically describes bodies in the terms of the corpuscularian science of his day, as exemplified especially by the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Locke’s characterizations of the real essences of bodies are mechanist. He envisions them as corpuscularian textures-- spatial arrangements of particles possessing size. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Figures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism ed. by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. HananSavannah Greer DowningFigures of Entanglement: Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism. Edited by Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan. Routledge, 2021. xvi + 122 pp. $168 (hardcover), $47.16 (electronic book). ISBN: 9780367903794.Rhetorical scholars have turned to various new materialist frameworks (...) to shift the discipline's historically anthropocentric focus and fully engage matter's rhetoricity. While all such frameworks attempt to challenge "the anthropocentric assumption that nonhuman matter is intrinsically passive or non-agential and thus external to or separable from (human) meaning," Figures of Entanglement enters this burgeoning conversation by centering the unique contributions of Karen Barad (xi, x). Readers may recognize this collection from a 2016 special issue of Review of Communication. Yet, with a new foreword by editors Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan and an afterword by Laurie Gries, this collection makes Barad's distinct approach to matter's rhetoricity even more apparent, underscoring its fruitful potential for new materialist rhetorics invested in ethical, political transformation.In the book's foreword Gamble and Hanan differentiate Barad's per-formative new materialism from "vital" as well as what they refer to as "negative" new materialisms to show the generative potential of Barad's framework and the notion of entanglement (x). Other new materialisms tend to be "inclusionary"—add matter and stir—and fail to complicate "the human" itself and its differences (xiv, xi). First, vital and negative new materialisms maintain a distinction between being and knowing, allowing humans to emerge with a unique capacity to "objectively observe and know the existence of something essential, determinate, and unchanging about [End Page 395] reality that precedes and remains unaffected by both its own activities and our observations of it" (xi). On the contrary, Barad's performative approach suggests that "no aspect of reality—including human thought, meaning, and observation—is in any sense external to matter or ever remains entirely unchanged by matter's ongoing performances" (x). Here, humans are not "outside" of observation, but all observation "human or otherwise" co-constitutes what is observed (xi). Second, failing to interrogate "the human" in an attempt to observe matter's vitality is an ethical flaw that makes other approaches less capable of grappling with difference: they have been charged with "erasing associations between race, gender, and matter" and (re)producing a homogenizing, "Western-colonialist notion of humanness" (xiv). In contrast, Barad's is a "thoroughly relational," performative new materialism (1).Barad's concept of "entanglement" draws attention to the indeterminacy of matter and meaning, but it is accompanied by an ethical imperative to examine how difference, human or otherwise, is produced and the implications of power imbalances that arise through these enactments. For Barad, the notion of entanglement does not dissolve difference; difference is what matters. Indeed, they give us a way of thinking about how performative intra-actions produce difference through material-discursive practices, or apparatuses—differences that may be expected but are not inevitable. Rhetorical scholars are therefore invited to interrogate the production of boundaries that cause harm and reconfigure them, rather than assume the discreteness of boundaries from the start. Gamble and Hanan thus make a convincing case for how Barad's work may contribute to important scholarship in decolonial and critical rhetorics for which vital and negative new materialisms are less equipped.Gamble and Hanan utilize the introduction to show how Barad's per-formative new materialism both "supports and affirms" rhetorical materialism, or rhetoric's materiality, and enriches it (5). Ushered in by Michael Calvin McGee, "standard" rhetorical materialism worked to challenge the centuries-old debate about rhetoric's secondary, supplementary status vis-à-vis philosophy by recognizing rhetoric as part of a "shifting and dynamic material history" (6). Building upon this view, Ronald Walter Greene utilizes Foucault's notion of the apparatus to demonstrate how even the "material history" McGee called our attention to is itself "produced by apparatuses"—history is not "outside" of meaning (6). Instead, rhetoric's materiality is a "publicity effect" produced through technologies of rhetoric and intersecting power... (shrink)

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was one of the great philosophers of the early modern period. He was a brilliant critic of his predecessors, particularly Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. He was a talented metaphysician famous for defending idealism, that is, the view that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas. Berkeley's system, while it strikes many as counter intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections. His most studied works, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (...) Principles, for short) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous Dialogues), are beautifully written and dense with the sort of arguments that delight contemporary philosophers. He was also a wide ranging thinker with interests in religion (which were fundamental to his philosophical motivations), the psychology of vision, mathematics, physics, morals, economics, and medicine. Although many of Berkeley's first readers greeted him with incomprehension, he influenced both Hume and Kant, and is much read (if little followed) in our own day. (shrink)

One of the clearest examples of a technological system, in the sense that Ellul discussed it, is contemporary biomedical health care. The foundation of technological systems is technique: efficient methods for achieving isolated goals. However, the goal of health care should be to achieve health in the full sense of wholeness. Traditional healing systems addressed heath in this sense, but biomedicine cannot; attempting to use the techniques of traditional systems without the accompanying culture ruptures those systems. Using the contemporary epidemic (...) of chronic noncommunicable diseases as an example, this article attempts to exposes the limitations of a technical approach, as well as the limitations of the methodology of risk analysis. (shrink)