Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from traditional contemporary music by the conscious and strategic integration (...) of environmental impulses and natural processes. This book presents a current perspective on the environmental sound art movement through a collection of personal writings by important environmental sound artists. Dismayed by the limitations and gradual breakdown of contemporary compositional strategies, environmental sound artists have sought alternate venues, genres, technologies, and delivery methods for their creative expression. Environmental sound art is especially relevant because it addresses political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic issues. As a result, it has attracted the participation of artists internationally. Awareness and concern for the environment has connected and unified artists across the globe and has achieved a solidarity and clarity of purpose that is singularly unique and optimistic. The environmental sound art movement is borderless and thriving. (shrink)

A crise dos modelos de representação fundadas em unidades coerentes e ordenadas parece ter como um dos traços o que Bruno Latour (1993) chamou de “híbridos”(1). Os híbridos são a figura da multiplicidade que não cabe em categorias e que a modernidade “varia para baixo do tapete”. Atualmente, assistimos ao “retorno dos que nunca foram”, que interpelam de forma contundente nossas formas de vida, fortemente apoiadas na técnica. Mas como apreender os fluxos de discursos e práticas mediatizadas que nos atravessam (...) sem cair nas armadilhas do tecnicismo? Que configurações poderiam hoje assumir práticas e discursos críticos? Que agenciamentos propor? Tentar compreender o estatuto do tecnológico, do político, do artístico, do urbano e do banal como “artes do fazer” parece-nos uma tarefa urgente e necessária. Gilles Deleuze (1977), em “Kafka, por uma literatura menor” (2), deixa-nos uma importante pista, ao afirmar, em sua definição de agenciamento, que “a técnica é antes de tudo social”. A direção nos permite avançar para além das concepções instrumentalistas e dicotômicas da técnica e percebê-la enquanto processo complexo de mediação. De fato, como também afirmava Simondon (1989), os objetos técnicos sempre foram gerados por mediação e geradores de mediação(4). O presente número da Revista Logos traz justamente contribuições para fomentar esse debate e para compor o já vasto quadro das cartografias sobre tecnologia e sociabilidade no Brasil, no campo das possibilidades de mediação sociotécnica. Trata-se de um número especial, organizado dentro da parceria PPGC-Uerj e Centre d’Etudes sur l”Actuel et lê Quotidien (CEAQ) - Paris V, com a colaboração do Professor Stéphane Hugon, coordenador do GRETECH, grupo de pesquisa sobre Tecnologia e Quotidiano. Se, por um lado, o conjunto de artigos compartilha determinados referenciais teóricos, por outro, acolhe também visões próprias, forjadas a partir de diferentes experiências sociais e em distintos contextos culturais. Em comum, todos partem de certa forma da percepção de que as mediações presentes nos processos de sociabilidade podem colaborar nos processos de negociação com as regras e códigos sociais vigentes para inventar outros possíveis. Todos, de certa forma, dão a ver, em seu conjunto, que entramos numa arena onde os diversos elementos que constituem o social interagem e ganham novos contornos: o político não dialoga apenas com o “ideológico”, mas também com o cultural, o subjetivo, o artístico. Da mesma forma, a arte, por exemplo, não diz respeito apenas ao cânone, mas também ao político, ao urbano, ao sensual e ao banal. Com isso, também a noção de tecnologia se amplia e, entendida como “máquina social”, pode ajudar-nos a melhor apreender as dimensões dos fenômenos culturais e de comunicação hoje. Os onze textos reunidos neste número apontam exatamente para o momento singular em que vivemos sob alguns de seus mais diversos ângulos. Stéphane Hugon da Universidade René Decartes-Paris V/CEAQ discute a importância dos processos de apropriação da tecnologia no quotidiano; João Maia e Eduardo Bianchi, da UERJ, abordam a sociabilidade de jovens adolescentes de uma favela carioca como forma criativa de cidadania; Vicenzo Susca, da Universidade René Decartes-Paris V e da Università di Lingue e Comunicazione de Milão, aborda o aspecto subversivo das tecnologias, através de uma perspectiva transpolítica; Beatriz Bretas da UFMG apresenta estudos de caso sobre modos de organização de redes sociais virtuais no Brasil; Fabio Larocca discute como as tecnologias alteram nosso olhar sobre as dinâmicas sócio-espaciais no contexto das cidades; Florian Dauphin faz uma análise do sofware livre na França, país com uma das mais fortes tradições de organização social desse movimento na Europa; José Pinheiro Neves, da Universidade do Minho, recupera a contribuição de Simondon para uma análise da percepção das imagens nas telas dos computadores; Shangsub Choi, do Korea Information Society Development Institute, aborda as mudanças propiciadas pela internet no quotidiano de pessoas e empresas e as possibilidades de contra-poder; a arquiteta e urbanista Julieta Leite aposta na integração das tecnologias digitais aos tecidos da cidade para a construção de novas experiências espaciais coletivas; Maria da Luz Correia analisa a recuperação da comunicação por cartões postais nos dias atuais. Finalmente, Hedi Zamouri faz uma etnografia da Brigada Anti-Pub, movimento contra o abuso da publicidade nos espaços públicos de Paris e José Cláudio Castanheira resenha o último livro de Shetyl Turkle, “História íntima dos objetos”. A Logos 29, edição especial, chega assim aos leitores com uma gama variada de proposições e de lugares de observação, brindando-nos com novas pistas para a análise de questões que compõem a pesquisa atual no campo da comunicação. Desejamos a todos uma boa leitura. Fernando Gonçalves Editor temático desta edição especial da Logos. Professor adjunto da Faculdade de Comunicação Social da Uerj e membro do Grupo de pesquisa Comunicação, Arte e Cidade, do PPGC-Uerj, onde leciona a disciplina “Tecnologias e Formas de Vinculação Social”. Notas 1 Latour, Bruno. Jamais fomos modernos. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1994. 2 Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka, por uma literatura menor. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1977. 3 Simondon, Gilbert. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. 4eme Édition. Paris: Aubier, 1989. (shrink)

Martin Gustafsson and Richard Sørli. The Philosophy of J. L. Austin. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199219759 Reviewed by Claudia Bianchi.

Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The aim of my paper is to propose an account of appropriated uses of slurs – i.e. uses by targeted groups of their own slurs for non-derogatory purposes, as in the appropriation of ‘nigger’ by the African-American community, or the appropriation of ‘queer’ by the homosexual community. In my proposal appropriated uses are conceived as echoic, in Relevance Theory terms: (...) in-groups echo derogatory uses in ways and contexts that make manifest the dissociation from the offensive contents. I will show that the echoic strategy has interesting advantages over alternative theories, and especially over Anderson and Lepore’s deflationary strategy. (shrink)

This paper considers whether transgender women should be permitted to compete in female categories in sports. Trans* women are often criticized for competing in female categories because they are seen as having an unfair advantage. Specifically, they are seen as having high levels of testosterone that unfairly enhance their performance in comparison to cisgender competitors. In this paper, I argue that trans* women should be permitted to compete in female categories. I suggest that if we want to maintain the skill (...) thesis as a guiding principle of sports and allow trans* women to compete in female categories, then we need to take relevant genetic advantages into consideration by introducing a handicap system. I claim that a handicap system should consider both cisgender and transgender women’s effective testosterone levels. (shrink)

Eating disorders are mental illnesses that can have a significant and persistent physical impact, especially for those who are not treated early in their disease trajectory. Although many persons w...

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to (...) criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is (...) distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression. (shrink)

Around 1970, both Keith Donnellan and Saul Kripke produced powerful arguments against description theories of proper names. They also offered sketches of positive accounts of proper name reference, highlighting the crucial role played by historical facts that might be unknown to the speaker. Building on these sketches, in the following years Michael Devitt elaborated his well-known causal theory of proper names. As I have argued elsewhere, however, contrary to what is commonly assumed, Donnellan’s and Kripke’s sketches point in two rather (...) different directions, by appealing to historical or causal facts of different sorts. In this paper, I shall discuss and criticize Devitt’s causal theory, which confuses things, I shall argue, by mixing, so to speak, Donnellan’s and Kripke’s sketches. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction (...) to the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns. (shrink)

According to Mitchell Green, speech act theory traditionally idealizes away from crucial aspects of conversational contexts, including those in which the speaker’s social position affects the possibility of her performing certain speech acts. In recent times, asymmetries in communicative situations have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers: several scholars view hate speech itself in terms of speech acts, namely acts of subordination. The aim of this paper is to address one of the (...) main objections to accounts of hate speech in terms of illocutionary speech acts, that is the Authority Problem. While the social role of the speaker is the focus of several approaches, the social role of the audience has too often been neglected. The author will show that not only must the speaker have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to perform speech acts of subordination, but also the audience must typically have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to either license or object to the speaker’s authority, and her acts of subordination. (shrink)

Famously, both Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan opposed description theories and insisted on the role of history in determining the reference of a proper name token. No wonder, then, that their views on proper names have often been assimilated. By focusing on reference borrowing—an alleged phenomenon that Kripke takes to be fundamental—we argue that they should not be. In particular, we claim that according to Donnellan a proper name token never borrows its reference from preceding tokens which it is historically (...) connected to. On the contrary, its reference is always fixed anew on who or what the speaker has in mind when he or she produces it. In fact, what is important to realize is that Donnellan and Kripke took two different histories to be relevant: that of the proper name token produced by the speaker , and that of the cognitive status of the speaker when he or she produces it . We end by suggesting that this difference between Kripke’s and Donnellan’s accounts of proper names rests on a more general difference in their approach to language. (shrink)

Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on (...) Kripke’s and Putnam’s considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz’s arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too, or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary. (shrink)

Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to quantum mechanics, we use conventional macroscopic objects as guiding examples to clarify the content of two important results of the beginning of twentieth century: Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen’s reality criterion and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We then use them in combination to show that our widespread belief in the existence of microscopic particles is only the result of a cognitive illusion, as microscopic particles are not particles, but are instead the ephemeral spatial and local manifestations of (...) non-spatial and non-local entities. (shrink)

The question of whether transgender athletes should be permitted to compete in accordance with their gender identity is an evolving debate. Most competitive sports have male and female categories. One of the primary challenges with this categorization system, however, is that some transgender athletes (and especially transgender women) may be prevented from competing in accordance with their gender identity. The reason for this restriction is because of the idea that transgender women have an unfair advantage over their cisgender counterparts; this (...) is seen as a problem since sports are typically guided a principle called ‘the skill thesis’, which suggests that sports are supposed to determine who is most skillful by maintaining a fair starting point. In this paper, I argue that if the skill thesis ought to be maintained and there continues to exist no conclusive evidence in support of unfair advantages possessed by trans women, then we may want to re-consider the gender binary in sport. Rather than having male/female categories, it may make more sense to categorize athletes based other sport-specific factors (e.g., height, weight, etc.). This may help to maintain the skill thesis while at the same time removing potentially unfair and discriminatory barriers against transgender athletes. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinction between active and passive powers. Interest in the distinction has recently been revived in some quarters of the philosophy of action as some have sought to elucidate the distinction between action and passion (the changes that happen to a substance) in terms of the former (Hyman, 2015; Mayr, 2011; Lowe 2013). If there is a distinction between active and passive powers, parallel to the distinction between action and passion, what is it? In this paper, I (...) distinguish two ways of drawing it. According to the first one, active and passive powers are distinguished by the ways in which their manifestations come about. According to the second, they are distinguished by their directedness, i.e. what they are powers to do. Both accounts are examined and the latter is defended against the former. I argue that active powers are powers to alter, modify, corrupt or change something. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the alleged distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. I begin by discussing Saul Kripke’s notion of speaker’s reference and the theoretical roles it is supposed to play, arguing that they do not justify the claim that reference comes in two different sorts and highlighting that Kripke’s own definition makes the notion incompatible with the nowadays widely endorsed Gricean project, which aims at explaining semantic reference in terms of speaker’s reference. I then examine an (...) alternative account of speaker’s reference offered by Michael Devitt within his causal theory and express some doubts about its suitability for explaining proper name semantic reference. From all this, I conclude that there is at least some tension between Kripke’s chain of communication picture and the attempt to explain (Griceanly, so to say) semantic properties in terms of speakers’ mental states. (shrink)

Analyzes Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

While Eros has a central philosophical function in the dialogues of Plato, it all but disappears as a philosophical term in the thought of Aristotle, and is replaced by the more rational and reciprocal relation of friendship, φιλία. This essay asks what becomes of Eros in Aristotle’s thinking, whether as deity, natural or cosmic force, or mode of human relation. Drawing on the ancient epithet of Eros, Ἔρως λυσιµελής, unbinder of limbs, Aristotle’s usages of both ἔρως and λύσις (loosening, unbinding), (...) respectively are traced in their ambivalence for his fundamentally organismic philosophy, insofar as they disturb the organism’s ontological integrity. With the assistance of Kristeva’s notion of the abject, it is argued that while Aristotle’s overt stance is a polemic against eros, his principal metaphysical innovations – the recasting of ἀρχή as divine τέλος, and the separation of material and moving causes – are solutions (λύσεις) to aporias that may involve a traversal of the sublime that is also irreducibly corporeal and erotic. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in the ontology of action about whether actions are processes, events, relations, or sui generis entities. This paper focuses on the process view, the view that actions are processes. I challenge it in two ways. First, I argue that some actions are not processes because their performance need not be associated with or accompanied by a process. Second, I critically discuss three main arguments that have been advanced to support the process view. My view, the (...) pluralist view, is that process-theorists are right to hold that certain actions are processes, but wrong to maintain that every action is a process: activities are processes, acts are not, and some acts are composed of a process whereas others are not. (shrink)

Semantic theory in linguistics cannot retain its traditional purity, free of pragmatic contextual considerations. Agreement with the preceding claim, generally shared by this volume's contributors, provides the setting for a presentation of various provocative approaches toward a precise definition of pragmatics along with a reconciliation of pragmatics with semantics. Here is a collection of leading-edge work that examines the semantics/pragmatics dispute in terms of phenomena such as indexicals, proper names, conventional and conversational implicatures, procedural meaning, and semantic underdetermination. Examples show (...) how these phenomena reach from the linguistic realm to the fields of psychology, philosophy, literature, and anthropology. (shrink)

The view that to act is to cause change and that to be an agent is to be the causer of an action’s result has gained traction in the past twenty years or so. This view seems to have two significant corollaries. First, there is no distinction between doing an action and causing its result. Second, any two actions that have the same result will turn out to be identical. Ruben (2018) has recently used the first corollary to challenge the (...) view, and the second corollary raises further problems for the view. This article aims to refine this view and defend it against the challenges that arise out of its two corollaries. It is argued that being the cause of an action’s result is not the same as being its causer and that doing an action is not just causing its result but causing it in a specific way. (shrink)

Implicating, as it is conceived in recent pragmatics, amounts to conveying a (propositional) content without saying it – a content providing no contribution to the truth-conditions of the proposition expressed by the sentence uttered. In this sense, implicating is a notion closely related to the work of Paul Grice (1913-1988) and of his precursors, followers and critics. Hence, the task of this article is to introduce and critically examine the explicit/implicit distinction, the Gricean notion of implicature (conventional and conversational) and (...) its recent developments and connections with the speaker's intentions, communicative responsibility and rationality. (shrink)

The disappearing agent problem is traditionally cast as a tension between events and event-causation, on the one hand, and agents and agent-causation on the other. How- ever, as we show, the tension between events and agents can be recast as a tension between causation by agents and causation by parts of agents. If this is right, agent- causalists have their own disappearing agent problem to deal with. After setting out a version of this problem in the form of an overdetermination (...) argument, we present available responses to it. By examining these responses, our aim is to motivate the elaboration of an idea of derivative causation within agent-causal theories of action, whereby complex agents with parts cause whatever they must cause in order to act by way of their parts causing it. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction (...) to the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns. (shrink)

In the second lecture of "Naming and Necessity," Saul Kripke presented a new and quite convincing picture of the reference of proper names. At the same time, however, he expressed some skepticism towards the possibility of developing it into a full-blown theory by offering “more exact conditions for reference to take place.” In this paper, after discussing the reasons for his skepticism, I hint at how I think Kripke’s picture could be developed and offer an outline of a theory of (...) reference based on it. One of the key notions my ‘theory’ makes use of is that of repetition, which I take from Kaplan’s “Words.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to outline what I take to be Naming and Necessity’s fundamental legacy to my generation and those that follow, and the new perspectives it has opened up for twenty-first century philosophy. The discussion is subdivided into three sections, concerning respectively philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. The general unifying theme is that Naming and Necessity is helping philosophy to recover a Golden Age, by freeing it from the strictures coming from the empiricist and Kantian traditions (...) and reconnecting it to the world and the objects that populate it. Because of this, in the concluding paragraph I tentatively suggest that Kripke’s philosophy may be seen as a sui generis form of naturalism. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between archery and aesthetics, developing two central claims. First, in order to deliver successful results, the archer should attend not only to efficiency, technique and equipment tuning but also to the aesthetic experience; second, archery shooting methods embody and express ‘life-issue’ statements and desires concerning our relationship with the world. Depending on the archer’s shooting style, i.e., depending on the way in which a shot is executed and performed, the archer’s ‘sportive philosophy’ is, so to (...) speak, unfolded and made apparent. Specifically, I will argue that instinctive archery strives for flexibility and versatility toward the environment and with respect to one’s own body, whereas non-instinctive approaches sharpen effectuality and results by flattening the surroundings and limiting one’s own performative freedom. Exploring this idea, I will discuss the aesthetic underpinnings of archery, also showing in which ways different shooting methods lay the ground for irreducible aesthetic experiences of self-expression. (shrink)

Considérez les énoncés suivants : « La bombe a causé la destruction du pont » ; « L’explosion de la bombe a causé la destruction du pont » ; « Booth a causé la mort de Lincoln » ; et « Le tir de Booth a causé la mort de Lincoln ». Ces énoncés suggèrent que les objets, tels que les bombes ou les personnes, font partie de la catégorie ontologique des causes, au même titre que les évènements, comme le (...) tir de Booth et l’explosion de la bombe. À première vue, le fait que les objets et les personnes puissent être des causes n’a rien de particulièrement surprenant. Cependant, les philosophes du XXe siècle ont fait preuve d’une extrême méfiance à l’égard de cette idée. Une majorité de philosophes ont trouvé l’idée même de causalité par des objets ou des agents inintelligible, à tel point que les théories standards de la causalité présupposent que les entités reliées comme causes à effets sont des évènements, ou encore des faits, des propriétés ou des états. Pourtant, cette hostilité à l’égard de la causalité des objets est relativement récente ; la causalité agentive semble, au moins jusqu’à Thomas Reid (1710-1796), avoir été la norme, et non le mystère. La mise à l’écart des objets et des agents de la catégorie de cause est-elle justifiée ? Un nombre grandissant de philosophes, les agentialistes (agent-causalists), soutiennent que non et cherchent à réhabiliter l’idée de causalité agentive (par des agents) et/ou substantielle (par des substances), tandis que d’autres, les évènementialistes (event-causalists), défendent que celle-ci est au mieux réductible à la causalité entre évènements, ou au pire que l’idée est incohérente. L’importance de cette question n’est pas négligeable, car elle revient à demander quels sont les moteurs du changement. En effet, nous voulons savoir si certains objets tels que les couteaux, les bombes, les animaux et les personnes sont parfois à l’origine du changement, ou si tout effet procède uniquement de changements antérieurs, d’évènements. Existe-t-il une relation causale, la causalité agentive ou substantielle, reliant objets et changements, différente des relations causales habituellement traitées par les philosophes de la causalité ? Quelle est sa relation avec la causalité évènementielle ? Et comment fonctionne-t-elle ? (shrink)

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of contextual dependence: the one affecting pure indexicals, the one affecting demonstratives and "contextual expressions", and the one affecting all linguistic expressions. The third type of dependence (...) is top-down: context, and not only linguistic material, shows which variables must be instantiated, relying on context itself. The generalization of underdetermination to all linguistic expressions is in fact a kind of metadependence: the mode of dependence itself depends on context. (shrink)

Determining whether and/or how to enable older persons with disabilities to engage in sex raises several ethical considerations. With the goal of enabling the sexual functioning of older adults with disabilities, Jecker argues that sex robots could be used as a helpful tool. In her article, ‘Nothing to be Ashamed of: Sex Robots for Older Adults with Disabilities’, Jecker acknowledges the importance of sexual functioning and the fact that ageist assumptions incorrectly classify older persons as asexual. Additionally, older adults may (...) experience disabilities that negatively influence their sexual functioning, which is problematic since sex may be linked to the following capabilities: developing a meaningful life narrative; being healthy; experiencing bodily integrity; feeling and communicating emotions; affiliating with others and reflecting on and choosing a life plan.1 In accordance with Nussbaum’s capabilities approach,2 Jecker says that society has a duty to support these capabilities at a minimal threshold. And insofar as sexual functioning may be relevant to the capabilities for older adults with disabilities, then we need to respond accordingly. One way of achieving this aim is by providing access to sex robots. I agree that sex robots ought to be made available for older adults with disabilities. Nevertheless, the article inspires several areas for further exploration. As Jecker rightfully mentions, older adults are often incorrectly labelled as non-sexual. For instance, in their analysis of older individuals’ views on sex and quality of life, Gott …. (shrink)

Contextualism is a view about meaning, semantic content and truth-conditions, bearing significant consequences for the characterisation of explicit and implicit content, the decoding/inferring distinction and the semantics/pragmatics interface. According to the traditional perspective in semantics (called "literalism" or "semantic minimalism"), it is possible to attribute truth-conditions to a sentence independently of any context of utterance, i.e. in virtue of its meaning alone. We must then distinguish between the proposition literally expressed by a sentence ("what is said" by the sentence, its (...) literal truth-conditions) and the implicit meaning of the sentence ("what is implicated" by a speaker uttering the sentence). Over the past forty years, however, an increasing number of linguists and philosophers have begun to underline the phenomenon of semantic underdetermination: the encoded meaning of the sentence employed by a speaker underdetermines the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance of that sentence. According to the extreme version of this perspective – labelled "radical contextualism" - no sentence of a natural language expresses a complete proposition, or has fixed truth-conditions, even when unambiguous and devoid of indexicals. A sentence expresses a proposition only when completed and enriched with pragmatic constituents that do not correspond to any syntactic element of the sentence and yet are part of its semantic interpretation. More broadly, "contextualism" may be used to refer to a family of views which includes moderate contextualism (also called "indexicalism"), radical contextualism and non-indexical contextualism – and which contrasts with semantic minimalism. (shrink)

It has often been asserted that burnout is primarily linked to occupational-context factors, and only secondarily to individual-level (e.g., personality) and non-work (or general) factors. We evaluated the validity of this view by examining the links between burnout and an array of 22 work-situated (effort-reward imbalance, unreasonable work tasks, unnecessary work tasks, weekly working hours, job autonomy, skill development, performance feedback, and support in work life), work-unrelated (sentimental accomplishment, familial accomplishment, number of child[ren], leisure activities, residential satisfaction, environmental quality, security (...) in daily life, and support in personal life), dispositional (neuroticism, sex, age, and physical condition), and intersecting (work–non-work conflict and non-work–work conflict) variables. The study involved schoolteachers from three different countries: France (N= 4,395), Spain (N= 611), and Switzerland (N= 514). Burnout was assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventory for Educators. Most of our predictors were assessed based on widely used measures (e.g., neuroticism was assessed with the NEO-Five Factor Inventory). In order to assess sentimental accomplishment and familial accomplishment, we created two self-reported measures, namely, the Sentimental Accomplishment Inventory (SAI; 9 items) and the Familial Accomplishment Inventory (FAI; 9 items). The SAI and the FAI both showed strong reliability and high factorial validity. Exploratory structural equation modeling bifactor analysis and Mokken scaling suggested that both instruments could be considered essentially unidimensional. The study results showed that neuroticism, job strain, skill development, security in daily life, and work–non-work conflict were consistently associated with burnout across the three samples. Sample-specific predictors of burnout included sex, age, unreasonable work tasks, weekly working hours, job autonomy, support in work life, sentimental accomplishment, leisure activities, support in personal life, and non-work–work conflict. Relative weight analysis indicated that neuroticism was the best predictor of burnout in each sample. Our findings suggest that burnout’s nomological network may not be primarily job-related. We conclude that the tendency to de-emphasize individual-level and non-work factors in burnout research is unwise. This tendency may constitute a roadblock in the development of effective interventional strategies. The implications of our findings for burnout’s conceptual status are discussed. The neuroticism-burnout link should be further examined in longitudinal studies. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to evaluate which context determines the illocutionary force of written or recorded utterances—those involved in written texts, films and images, conceived as recordings that can be seen or heard in different occasions. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context—as opposed to its epistemic or evidential role: my goal is to determine which context is semantically relevant in order to fix the illocutionary force of a speech act, as distinct (...) from the information the addressee uses to ascertain the semantically relevant context. In particular I will try to assess two different perspectives on this problem, a Conventionalist Perspective and an Intentionalist Perspective. Drawing on the literature on indexicals in written texts and recorded messages, I will argue in favor of the Intentionalist Perspective: the relevant context is the one intended by the speaker. Bringing intentions into the picture, however, requires qualification; in particular, I will distinguish my Weak Intentionalist proposal from a Strong Intentionalist one. I will show that the Weak Intentionalist Perspective is flexible enough to deal with cases of delayed communication, but not so unrestricted as to yield counter-intuitive consequences. (shrink)

We consider the classical concept of time of permanence and observe that its quantum equivalent is described by a bona fide self-adjoint operator. Its interpretation, by means of the spectral theorem, reveals that we have to abandon not only the idea that quantum entities would be characterizable in terms of spatial trajectories but, more generally, that they would possess the very attribute of spatiality. Consequently, a permanence time shouldn’t be interpreted as a “time” in quantum mechanics, but as a measure (...) of the total availability of a quantum entity in participating to a process of creation of a spatial localization. (shrink)

In conceptual debates involving the quantum gravity community, the literature discusses the so-called “emergence of space–time”. However, which interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM) could be coherent with such claim? We show that a modification of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM is compatible with the claim that space–time is emergent for the macroscopic world of measurements. In other words, pure quantum states do not admit space–time properties until we measure them. We call this approach “Achronotopic” (ACT) Interpretation of QM, which yields (...) a simple and natural interpretation of the most puzzling aspects of QM, such as particle-wave duality, wave function collapse, entanglement, and quantum superposition. Our interpretation yields the same results in all measurements as the Copenhagen Interpretation, but provides clues toward the sub-Planckian physics. In particular, it suggests the non-existence of quantum gravity in the conventional sense understood as the quantization of a classical theory. (shrink)

Sex and dementia is becoming an increasingly important topic in applied ethics. By the year 2030, more than 74.7 million people are expected to be diagnosed with dementia worldwide; many of these people may want to engage in sex. The question of how to manage cases of sex and dementia is occurring more frequently in practical cases because of our aging population. The primary reason that sex and dementia is ethically complex is because sexual consent is both legally and morally (...) significant, yet many people with dementia may be unable to consent in accordance with current standards. In this dissertation, I introduce three frameworks that could be used to approach cases of sex and dementia. The first framework is that of relational autonomy and supported decision-making; this framework tries to enable people with dementia to make autonomous sexual decisions with support. The next approach is a framework of advance sexual consent, which considers the relevance of prior autonomous sexual decisions. The third framework focuses on prioritizing well-being above a person’s capacity to make autonomous decisions and to consent to sex. I assess each framework and consider their positive and negative nuances. The overall goal is to balance the right to sexuality while at the same time protecting people with dementia from undue harm. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that cases of sex and dementia ought to be managed on a case-by-case basis; one framework will not work for every context. In order to approach situations on a case-by-case basis, I contend that a process of weighing and balancing norms and principles is necessary. I use Beauchamp and Childress’s method of weighing and balancing to propose a systematic procedure. This process takes various factors into account in order to determine how to proceed in an ethically defensible manner. According to an approach of weighing and balancing, sexual acts would not be immediately barred based on a person’s inability to consent; rather, a person’s present convictions, the sexual activity to which they want to participate, the possibility of experiencing undue harm, their prior wishes and values, their capacity to make autonomous decisions with support, etc. would all be considered. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the complex topic of sex and dementia and offers a starting point for further discussion on how to approach these cases in practice. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Kant's account of physical geography and his theory of the Earth. In spelling out the epistemological foundations of Kant's physical geography, the paper examines 1) their connection to the mode of holding-to-be-true, mathematical construction and empirical certainty and 2) their implications for Kant's view of cosmopolitan right. Moreover, by showing the role played by the mathematical model of the Earth for the foundations of Kant's Doctrine of Right, the exact relationship between the latter and physical geography (...) is highlighted. Finally, this paper shows how, in Kant's view, the progress of physical geography can be assured if and only if the free circulation of human beings is established and regulated by law. Therefore, examining the mutual relationship between the theory of Earth and the foundations of right opens new perspectives on the relationship between epistemology and practical philosophy within Kant's system. (shrink)

In my paper, I present two competing perspectives on the foundational problem (as opposed to the descriptive problem) of quantifier domain restriction: the objective perspective on context (OPC) and the intentional perspective on context (IPC). According to OPC, the relevant domain for a quantified sentence is determined by objective facts of the context of utterance. In contrast, according to IPC, we must consider certain features of the speaker’s intention in order to determine the proposition expressed. My goal is to offer (...) a plausible and fair reconstruction of IPC. Drawing a parallel between quantifier domain restriction and standard cases of context dependence as indexicality, I argue that the speaker’s intentions can play a semantic role only if they satisfy an Availability Constraint: an intention must be made available or communicated to the addressee, and for that purpose the speaker can exploit any feature of the objective context (words, gestures, relevance or uniqueness of either the quantificational domain or of the referent in the context of utterance). An intention satisfying the Availability Constraint must be something that a hearer in normal circumstances is able to work out by relying on the physical surroundings of the utterance situation, on utterances exchanged during the previous conversation, and on background knowledge shared by speaker and addressee. (shrink)

Anerkennung ist ein schillernder Begriff, der erst seit wenigen Jahrzehnten Aufmerksamkeit findet, aber in Ethik, politischer Philosophie und Kritischer Theorie mit großen Erwartungen verbunden wird. Sein Ursprung in den Intersubjektivitätstheorien Fichtes und Hegels lässt hoffen, dass er von sich aus Impulse für Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit in sich trägt. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es eine Entdeckung ersten Ranges, dass ein Denker wie Nietzsche den Begriff der Anerkennung in durchaus grundlegender Weise verwendet, ohne den erst Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts mit ihm verknüpften (...) Hoffnungen zu widersprechen. Nietzsches Verständnis von Anerkennung zeigt sich in seiner Lebensphilosophie. Wie die Individuen konkret "einander nöthig" sind, arbeitet Sarah Bianchi anerkennungstheoretisch für das ganze menschliche Leben in seinen verschiedenen Dimensionen heraus. Qua Anerkennung sind die Individuen vom Selbstverhältnis, über zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen bis hin zum Recht und Staat existentiell verwoben. (shrink)

In The Explanatory Dispensability of Idealizations, Sam Baron suggests a possible strategy enabling the indispensability argument to break the symmetry between mathematical claims and idealization assumptions in scientific models. Baron’s distinction between mathematical and non-mathematical idealization, I claim, is in need of a more compelling criterion, because in scientific models idealization assumptions are expressed through mathematical claims. In this paper I argue that this mutual dependence of idealization and mathematics cannot be read in terms of symmetry and that Baron’s non-causal (...) notion of mathematical difference-making is not effective in justifying any symmetry-breaking between mathematics and idealization. The function of making a difference that Baron attributes to mathematics cannot be referred to physical facts, but to the features of quantities, such as step lengths or time intervals taken into account in the models. It appears, indeed, that it does not follow from Baron’s argument that idealizations do not help to carry the explanatory load at least for two reasons: mathematics is not independent of idealizations in modelling and idealizations help mathematics to carry the explanatory load of a model in different degrees. (shrink)