ABSTRACT Black feminist philosophers deserve to be included in philosophical discussions about universalism. In contrast to other approaches to universalism that seek to diminish the importance of identities such as race and gender, black feminist philosophers focus on them. This article argues that black feminist philosophers offer a universalist viewpoint, that is, a “black feminist universalism,” which asserts that a more inclusive world starts with a theory and praxis focused on those who are the most oppressed. The article shows that (...) the Combahee River Collective writers in their manifesto, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1995) demonstrate black feminist universalism. It argues that the Combahee River Collective writers’ emphasis on their own identity as black women is the foundation for their theory and praxis, which aims to include others. (shrink)

Este artigo tece considerações sobre antinegritude e a distingue do racismo, expondo a falsa universalidade do Social e do Humano: o racismo ocorre no Social entre os Humanos, enquanto a antinegritude continuamente expulsa os negros e a negritude dessas categorias modernas fundamentais cujas definições derivam da expulsão violenta. Para delinear a discussão, o artigo analisa dois textos paradigmáticos que se esforçam para lidar intransigentemente com a antinegritude, mas através da linguagem do racismo: George Yancey, Who Is White? e "The (...) class='Hi'>Combahee River Collective Statement." O artigo conclui sugerindo a necessidade de um salto de invenção fanoniano e uma abrangente abolição. (shrink)

The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”—a precursor to “intersectionality”— was introduced in a social movement context by the Combahee River Collective (CRC) in pamphlet form in 1977. Addressing Black lesbians’ and feminists’ experiences of invisibility within white male-dominated New Left and socialist politics, male-dominated civil rights, Black nationalist, and Black radical organizing, and white-dominated women’s liberation and lesbian feminist movements, the CRC argues for an “integrated analysis and practice” of struggle against “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class (...) oppression” (CRC 1977/1981/1983, 210). I argue the CRC articulates and problematizes sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows racialized lesbian visibility and resists the tendency to “heterosexualize” women of color feminisms. I delineate three aspects of the concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”: its attentiveness to the phenomenological simultaneity of multiple oppressions; its synthesis of identity politics and coalition politics; its immanent critique of socialist concepts of class and class struggle. While some accounts of “intersectionality”—the now-predominant way of referencing the multiplicity of identities and oppressions—tend to reproduce a race-gender dyad (or a race-gender-class triad), the CRC notably articulates sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows lesbian visibility and thereby enables contemporary readers to resist the tendency to “heterosexualise” intersectionality—and women of colour feminisms more generally. (shrink)

Joseph Priestley, the eighteenth-century scientist who discovered oxygen, was one of the most remarkable thinkers of his time. This collection of essays by a team of experts covers the full range of his work in the fields of education, politics, philosophy, and theology, and firmly re-establishes him as a major intellectual figure.

This article posits that Andy Clark’s model of distributed cognition manifests socially through the agonism of human activity, and that rhetorical theory offers an understanding of human conflicts as productive and necessary elements of collective response to situation rather than as problems to be solved or noise to be eliminated. To support this assertion, the paper aligns Clark’s argument that cognition responds to situated environmental conditions with the classical concept of kairos, it associates Clark’s assertion that language structures behavior (...) with the long-held rhetorical stance that language is constitutive, and it examines the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an enactment of what Clark and rhetorical theorists claim about productive agonism and the litigious nature of identity and cognition. (shrink)

En este trabajo proponemos mostrar que las múltiples experiencias de opresión –como efecto de las imbricaciones simultáneas entre instancias de diferenciación social y relaciones de poder- tienen como reverso experiencias de lucha, organización y resistencia colectiva como formas de participación política. Para el abordaje de las desigualdades entrecruzadas y diversas formas de violencia proponemos un enfoque interseccional por su carácter multidimensional y complejo, así como por sus raíces de lucha. Para ello, en primera instancia, trazaremos genealogías políticas que permitan historizar (...) la interseccionalidad y anudarla a sus luchas y demandas fundacionales. Analizaremos en esta dirección, las experiencias de la Combahee River Collective y de laThird World Women's Alliance, organizaciones feministas negras de la década del setenta en los Estados Unidos que buscaban enfrentar las desigualdades estructurales producidas por las articulaciones entre distintos sistemas de dominación y que direccionaron su participación política antiimperialista, anticapitalista, anticolonialista y antisexista. En un segundo momento, proponemos recuperar las genealogías críticas de la interseccionalidad para repolitizar y recomplejizar la perspectiva crítica. Finalmente, proponemos subvertir los binarismos dicotómicos y excluyentes bajo los cuales se han estructurado espacios de jerarquías y privilegios; que reproducen violencias y desigualdades. (shrink)

This book comprises forty-one essays, some of them about solar eclipses, space stations, mushrooms, and refugees, but the majority focus on animals, mostly birds. Macdonald starts each piece with a personal recollection from childhood or adulthood. “Vesper Flights,” for instance—the essay that gives the book its title—begins: “I found a dead swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames.... I picked it up, held it in my palm... and realised that I didn't know (...) what to do.” The author continues by setting out the little that she did know, before that encounter, about swifts—she knew only that they are very difficult to observe individually because of the velocity and the height of their flights. To her, the swifts had always been like “aliens on earth.”Those birds are known for their peculiar flights at dusk, when they go up almost vertically into the sky. Scientists used to believe that they went up to sleep; but, at the end of the 1970s, in order to study the interaction between birds and airplanes, Luit Buurma of the Netherlands made radar observations that showed the swifts do not sleep at high altitude. The hypothesis of Buurma and other scientists is that they go up to forecast the weather. In the convective boundary layer, the winds are unaffected by geographic components, and, at that altitude, the swifts may also orient themselves better, thanks in part to the polarized light that is clearest at twilight. “What they are doing,” Macdonald summarizes these findings, “is flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next.”Macdonald was trained in the history of science, which explains her taste for telling stories in which she explains how we come to know other animal species. She stresses the importance of technical devices in the construction of knowledge (without military radar, scientists would never have known where the swifts were flying). In each chapter, she also underscores the problem of what she aptly calls “multispecies social etiquette”: it is such a problem (how to avoid collisions with birds, a particular kind of social interaction) that moved scientists to study swifts in the first place. I much enjoyed reading these parts of each chapter. I was less convinced, however, by the morals that she draws from animal behaviors—for example: “Swifts are my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather, in the face of clouds that sit like dark rubble on our horizon.” What makes me uncomfortable with such general conclusions is that they could as well be reached without the birds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 51-56 [Access article in PDF] KarraKarrawirraparri-River Red Gum-Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Vivonne Thwaites [Figures]Karra was a visual arts project devised for the 2000 Adelaide Festival in Australia. Its focus was the River Red Gum, quite justifiably an Australian icon, and once the most widespread tree in south eastern Australia. The project comprised an installation by three artists and a forty-page publication with essays (...) and visual material from many contributors.The intention of the project (which I developed and oversaw as curator) was twofold. First, I hoped that an examination of the River Red Gum from a number of points of view might help people connect with the tree itself, and more broadly with this place non-Aboriginal Australians so uneasily inhabit. Second, given the tree's central place in Australia's inland waterways, I wanted the art to help people consider the urgent problems facing this ecosystem, such as increased salinity, diminished water flow and environmental degradation. This subject had particular relevance for South Australians, as our state is so dependent on the Murray-Darling River system. For example, in February 1999 the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation published a media release on "Salt: Australia's Greatest Battle," declaring that we stand to lose a large fraction of our native biodiversity to salinity, and that native tress "remain the front line answer." [End Page 51]Behind the Festival Centre lies the River Torrens and the Adelaide Plains. Along the river are several gnarled old trees, River Red Gums, some of them predating white settlement and bearing the scars of Aboriginal timber collecting activities. The media was full of stories about the way these trees were still being cut down along the Murray further out, regardless of their proven value in filtering water and reducing salinity. The theme of the 2000 Festival was "The New Out of the Old," and it seemed that a project about the relevance of these beautiful old trees would help educate and inspire. We found the subject for the Festival project right in our own backyard.Once committed to the subject, research could begin. First up was the tree's Aboriginal history. The Kaurna people, original inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains, called it Karra or more fully, Karrawirraparri (literally 'redgum-forest-river'). The tree was central to their lives as source of food and shelter, and supplier of timber for shields and other implements. There are incised shields of Red Gum in the South Australian Museum, and delicate drawings of the tree by Jim Kite. The tree's place in Australia's white history can be traced back to explorer's journals where, variously named, it was described as a welcome sign of the presence of a watercourse. More recently it appears in the natural history writing of Eric Rolls and others (Rolls 2002). Ironically the tree's botanical name, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, originated in 1832, when a botanist admired and named a single specimen grown by monks outside Naples, Italy. The eucalyptus was already spreading in 1832.Early in the research it became clear that the Red Gum tree, and the complex set of natural and cultural interactions it engendered, could be seen as a symbol of human interactions with the land in Australia. The tree was much discussed and much loved by Australians, but also much abused. It seemed that bringing together different systems of understanding and representation of the tree could help contemporary urban Australians begin to understand their own connections to it, and to the land as well. This was the broader cultural agenda of the project.Preparing the art exhibition required a wide reading of literature. Les Murray's poem, "The Gum Forest," one of the greatest 20th - century Australian poems, was inspirational: After the last gapped wire on a post, homecoming for me, to enter the gum forest. (1998, 33) [End Page 52] [Begin Page 54]So too was Murray Bail's book Eucalyptus: By sheer numbers there's always a bulky Red Gum here or somewhere else in the wide world, muscling into the... (shrink)

In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets to new arenas – to courts and government committees, in particular – and switched to (...) a techno-managerial discourse of maintaining river health. What accounts for this change? This article traces the trajectory of cultural politics around Indian rivers within the larger imagination of the nation, the rise of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism, and the emergence of environmental bureaucracies. It argues that, alongside being shaped by this context, current anti-dam campaigns also contend with the legacy of earlier social movements, their gains as well as losses. This political field has narrowed the potential for radical critique, large-scale collective mobilization and, ultimately, keeping rivers alive. (shrink)

One of the most predictable implications of photography consists of the ability to fix some images returning them in a variable timeframe for the observation. In all the major world cities, it is common to incur in some book where recent photos are compared to old ones searching the same point of view in order to make the comparison more accurate and stimulate the critical ability of the observer. An exercise that sometimes stimulates a sort of regret for the past, (...) pointing out a diffused excess of nostalgia for times gone by. Nevertheless, the reality and meaning of modern city images are not always so prosaic. What happens when photographs are evocative of a reality that is completely lost in the collective imaginary even though it still exists and functions, despite being forgotten and buried in the depths of the city? This is the case of very few pictures capable of telling the story of a city, Milan, and its only “real” river, the Olona, whose waters, humiliated and rejected, continue to flow in total amnesia. It is a different story when photography does not have the role of nourishing nostalgia, but the power to make visible and explain the variation of a presence and its progressive obliteration. Some pictures testify to the passage from the bucolic amenity of the river and its banks in a pre-urban context to a muscular urban infrastructure. A rigid channelized river, shown with confidence, is trying to keep its presence, until the moment of its inevitable decline and disappearance. It is in these images that the possibility of reconsidering the Olona as a part of the new project for the city lies. (shrink)

A woman’s lack of or limited reproductive autonomy could lead to adverse health effects, feeling of being inferior, and above all being unable to adequately care for her children. Little is known about the reproductive autonomy of married Ikwerre women of Rivers State, Nigeria. This study demonstrates how Ikwerre women understand the terms autonomy and reproductive rights and what affects the exercise of these rights. An exploratory research design was employed for this study. A semi-structured interview schedule was used to (...) conduct thirty-four in-depth interviews and six focus group discussions with purposively sampled educated, semi-educated, and uneducated Ikwerre women in monogamous or polygynous marriages. The collected data was analysed qualitatively with MAXQDA 11 using open and axial coding. The interviews and focus group responses reveal a low level of awareness of autonomy and reproductive rights amongst the Ikwerre women in Nigeria. While some educated women were aware of their reproductive rights, cultural practices were reported to limit the exercise of these rights. Participants reported that Ikwerre culture is a patriarchal one where married women are expected to submit and obey their husbands in all matters; and a good married woman according to Ikwerre standard is one who complies with this culture. Women’s refusal of sexual advances from their husbands is described as not being acceptable in this culture; and hence rape in marriage is not recognized in Ikwerre culture. Education and awareness creation on the importance of women’s reproductive autonomy could improve their reproductive rights and autonomy in marital settings. Overcoming the patriarchal aspects of Ikwerre culture—for example, the greater value placed on male children than female children and treating women as incompetent individuals—is necessary to promote gender equality as well as help improve women’s reproductive autonomy. (shrink)

Answering this special issue’s call to reckon, repair and reworld, and following an ethical imperative to re-think social and educational structures, I turn to the wisdom of rivers. In the current settler colonial climate of near inertia that we live in, there is an urgent need to reckon with ways of being and knowing that go beyond the mainstream taken-for-granted habits of conventional educational research. Thinking with Indigenous perspectives, I problematize the Eurocentric worldview I was raised in and consider, in (...) my capacity as a non-Indigenous educator and inquirer, some principles rivers can teach about educational inquiry. A series of photographs of the Chehalis River and personal vignettes allow me to trace and articulate a feminist and decolonial approach to my own inquiry. I consider how reciprocity, language and movement – three teachings gifted by the river – invite me to be, think, and act as an educator and an inquirer engaged in reconciliation. As many rich and diverse Indigenous perspectives have always reminded us, we have a responsibility to listen to and care for all our relatives, human and more-than-human. This is one important way we can work to transform our collective thinking, actions and future in education. (shrink)

The joint multifractal analysis is usually conducted in two different variables for their cross-correlations but rarely used for two records of one variable collected at two different places. It is important for the detection of change in multifractality in space. Besides, the cross-correlations in two analyzed series make the analysis of sources of joint multifractality difficult. There are few studies on the source of joint multifractality. We focus on the two issues for two level records at pairs of adjacent sites (...) along one river and carry out an extension of our previous work which is about the single multifractality of one record with the same data set. The data set is collected from 10 observation stations of a northern China river and contains about two million high-frequency river level records. Results of joint multifractal analysis via multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis show that the change in joint multifractality at pairs of adjacent sites caused by weak cross-correlations can be detected by comparing the single generalized Hurst exponent with the joint scaling exponent function and reveal the effects of human activities on joint multifractality. This analysis provides an approach for detecting the change in multifractality. Following the idea of our previous work, two robust hypothesis tests via a set of pairs of surrogate series are proposed for the source testing of joint multifractality. The analysis of the effects of cross-correlations is carried out via a proposed simultaneously half-shifting technique which can both minimize the cross-correlations between original series and make full use of records. Results of source analysis show not only the effects of autocorrelations in series and probability distribution of river levels but also the effects of cross-correlations between series. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

We describe our efforts to address theoretical opportunities and methodological challenges that arose in the context of our ethnographic investigation of research labs in four different fields of bioengineering science. The multiyear study compared the common and specific features of four sites of interdisciplinary practice and aimed to analyze personal and collective goals, problem formulations, methods, technologies, and social organization within each lab. In the second phase of the study we sought to inform curriculum development for biomedical engineering from (...) the ethnographic study, with the broader goal of positioning students to engage in the kind of thinking scientists actually do. Evaluating thinking in action posed considerable challenges, and required us to develop an approach to assessing the extent to which students enrolled in the new course were “thinking like a biomedical engineer.” Our principal point of emphasis for this chapter is that honest confrontation of the challenges of ethnographic study of science practice must lead to caution, yet that ethnographic study of science enables innovative adaptations of methods and can yield vital insights into psychological dimensions of science, including interdisciplinary science. (shrink)

Modern theorists often use Immanuel Kant's work to defend the normative primacy of human rights and the necessity of institutionally autonomous forms of global governance. However, properly understood, his law of nations describes a loose and noncoercive confederation of republican states. In this way, Kant steers a course between earlier natural lawyers such as Grotius, who defended just-war theory, and visions of a global unitary or federal state. This substantively mundane claim should not obscure a more profound contribution to the (...) science of international law. Kant demonstrates that his concept of law forms part of a logical framework by which to ascertain the necessary institutional characteristics of the international legal order. Specifically, his view is that the international legal order can only take a noncoercive confederated form as its subjects become republican states and that in these circumstances law can exist without a global state. Put another way, Kant argues that if we get state-building right, the law of nations follows. CN - 58005245. (shrink)

A series of cases, some of them with a high media profile, suggest that freedom of religion or belief in the United Kingdom is being undermined by the operation of new equality laws. This article outlines the constitutional context for liberty and equality rights as well as the main ways in which religious liberty is secured by and within equality law. However, British equality law puts pressure on religious liberty in four ways: (1) it confines the relevance of ‘religion’ to (...) limited social contexts; (2) it creates a priority for equality-perspectives over liberty-perspectives on social conflict; (3) it generates new social assumptions about what individuals have to believe and say (or refrain from saying) if they are to be trusted to uphold the law; (4) it provides legitimation for the imposition of contested comprehensive equality doctrines, some of which are inimical to civil liberty. In response, it is important to emphasise the role of equality law as a tool to secure mutual toleration and equal rights in the face of religious and ethical disagreement. (shrink)

This article argues that Wolterstorff’s concept of rights is ambiguous between the interest and will theories. It provides possible reconstructions and points towards a more suitable third concept theologically grounded in an account of humans as constituted relationally, juridically and eternally.

This book analyzes the general structure of constitutional rights reasoning under the Geman Basic Law. It deals with a wide range of problems common to all systems of constitutional rights review. In an extended introduction the translator argues for its applicability to the British Constitution, with particular reference to the Human Rights Act 1998.

This essay explores connections between bacteriology and the disciplinary evolution of biochemistry in this country during the 1930s. Many features of intermediary metabolism, a central component of biochemistry, originated as attempts to answer fundamental bacteriological questions. Thus, many bacteriologists altered their research programs to answer these questions. In so doing they changed their disciplinary focus from bacteriology to biochemistry. Chester Hamlin Werkman's (1893-1962) Iowa State career illustrates the research perspective that many bacteriologists adopted. As a junior faculty member in the (...) Bacteriology Department in the late 1920s, Werkman faced a powerful professional dilemma: establishing a research identity that distinguished him from his colleagues with flourishing national and international reputations. His solution was to radically alter his research program from traditional bacteriology to a biochemistry program, which reflected the influence of the Dutch microbiologist/biochemist, Albert Jan Kluyver (1888-1956). Werkman was extremely successful in this career change. His laboratory made significant contributions to biochemistry, and Werkman achieved a notable degree of personal success. His career began in the shadow of his departmental bacteriological colleagues; within a decade he became the department's dominant research figure, as a biochemist. Werkman's personal success, however, had profound consequences for the disciplinary future of bacteriology at Iowa State. (shrink)

This study investigates antecedents of corporate social responsibility in multinational corporations' subsidiaries. Using stakeholder theory and institutional theory that identify internal and external pressures for legitimacy in MNCs' subsidiaries, we integrate international business and CSR literatures to create a model depicting CSR practices in MNCs' subsidiaries. We propose that MNCs' subsidiaries will be likely to adapt to local practices to legitimize themselves if they operate in host countries with different institutional environments and demanding stakeholders. We also predict that MNCs' subsidiaries (...) will be likely to adapt to local practices to avoid spillover effects if their parent companies suffer major legitimacy problems at home or abroad. However, we speculate that MNCs' subsidiaries will be less likely to adapt to local practices if they are strongly annexed to their parent companies and the benefit to gain internal legitimacy outweighs external legitimacy. This article contributes to the discourse on CSR across borders by exploring the antecedents of CSR practices in MNCs' subsidiaries at social and organizational levels, and integrating institutional and stakeholder views. We provide a number of propositions for future studies and explore implications for practitioners. (shrink)

How educators and students process and respond to emotions can either enhance or impede the development of the whole child. Social and emotional learning (SEL) refers to the processes of developing social and emotional competencies, which depend on individuals’ capacity to recognize, understand, and manage emotions (i.e., emotional intelligence or EI). Consensus across disciplines about the importance of EI highlights the need to advance the science of how to teach SEL. RULER, an evidence-based approach to teaching EI, provides an educational (...) framework that encompasses a set of practices for comprehensive SEL integration across a school or district. In this article, we describe RULER, explain how it teaches EI, and summarize evidence of its effectiveness. (shrink)

The aim of this discussion paper is to explore factors and contexts that influence how nurses might conceptualise and assign personhood for people with altered consciousness, cognition and behaviours. While a biomedical framing is founded upon a dichotomy between the body and self, such that the body can be subjected to a medical and objectifying gaze, relational theories of self, multiculturalism and technological advances for life‐sustaining interventions present new dilemmas which necessitate discussion about what constitutes personhood. The concept of personhood (...) is dynamic and evolving: where historical constructs of rationality, agency, autonomy and a conscious mind once formed the basis for personhood, these ideas have been challenged to encompass embodied, relational, social and cultural paradigms of selfhood. Themes in this discussion include: the right to personhood, mind–body dualism versus the embodied self; personhood as consciousness, rationality and narratives of self; social relational contexts of personhood and cultural contexts of personhood. Patricia Benner's and Christine Tanner's clinical judgement model is then applied to consider the implications for nursing care that seeks to reflexively incorporate personhood. Nurse clinicians are able to move between conceptions of personhood and act to support the body, as well as presumed autonomy and relational, social and cultural personhood. In doing so, they use analytical, intuitive and narrative reasoning which prioritises autonomous constructions of self. They also incorporate relational and social contexts of the person receiving care within the possibilities of technological advances and constraints of contextual resources. (shrink)

Psychedelic ethics is at a crossroads. Confronted with the undeniable harm wrought by a widespread embrace of exceptionalism, many are approaching psychedelics not only in the context of urgent men...

There is a large literature on technology adoption and environmental management in agriculture. Included in this literature are debates about the role world view or attitudinal variables play in adoption decisions, and whether smaller farms or larger farms exhibit superior environmental performance or differ in commitment to environmental values. In this paper we attempt to extend the literature in this area by proposing and measuring discrete environmental management approaches among sixty-six farmers in Northern New York. Using key informants interviews, purposeful (...) sampling of farmers and a mail survey we find two environmental management types: (1) the larger-scale conservation farmer; and (2) the alternative/ecological farmer. (shrink)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy and twentieth-century thought. They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian (...) theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of _dynamis_ and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. (shrink)

Virgil has Evander trace the origins of the name of the river Tiber back to the death of a giant, called ‘Thybris’ (Aen. 8.330–2). This article argues that the reference to the violent (asper) giant can be understood as etymological wordplay on the Greek word hubris and as a potential allusion to the grammatical debate on the nature of aspiration. Varro's De gente populi Romani is identified as an important source for the characterization of the Tiber as a giant (...) in primeval times. The political implications of the word hubris are also briefly explored with reference to various identities to which Evander alludes. The final part of the article argues that Theocritus’ Idyll 1 and the scholiast to Theocritus may have also inspired Virgil's description of the Tiber in this passage. (shrink)

This entry surveys main accounts of collective intentions.

ArgumentThis paper examines the earthquake monitoring and prediction program, called “collective monitoring, collective defense,” in communist China during the Cultural Revolution, a period of political upheavals and natural disasters. Guided by their scientific and political ideas, the Chinese developed approaches to earthquake monitoring and prediction that emphasized mass participation, everyday knowledge, and observations of macro-seismic phenomena. The paper explains the ideas, practices, and epistemology of the program within the political context of the Cultural Revolution. It also suggests possibilities (...) for comparative analysis of science, state, and natural disasters. The paper redefines the concept of “citizen science” and argues that the concept provides a useful comparative perspective on the intimate relationship between science and the macropolitics of modern state and society. (shrink)

This paper offers some refinements to a particular objection to act consequentialism, the “causal impotence” objection. According to proponents of the objection, when we find circumstances in which severe, unnecessary harms result entirely from voluntary acts, it seems as if we should be able to indict at least one act among those acts, but act consequentialism appears to lack the resources to offer this indictment. Our aim is to show is that the most promising response on behalf of act consequentialism, (...) the threshold argument, cannot offer a fully general prescription about what to do in cases of collective action. (shrink)

This collection of Geoffrey Hill's criticism spans the length of his career as a pre-eminent poet-critic. Three previously published books of criticism are reprinted, sometimes with substantial revisions, and two new works added.

Group beliefs in social networks are often construed as arising from individual beliefs through processes of update and aggregation. In this paper, we explore an alternative ‘arational’ perspective. More specifically, we focus on group attitudes as neutral tendencies toward alignment of opinions driven by influence patterns among agents modeled in a Markov dynamics. In addition, we investigate logical patterns in the resulting potential group beliefs or, in more neutral arational terminology: collective opinion structures.