Law's Indigenous Ethics examines the revitalization of Indigenous peoples' relationship to their own laws and, in so doing, attempts to enrich Canadian constitutional law more generally. Organized around the seven Anishinaabe grandmother and grandfather teachings of love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect, this book explores ethics in relation to Aboriginal issues including title, treaties, legal education, and residential schools. With characteristic depth and sensitivity, John Borrows brings insights drawn from philosophy, law, and political science to bear on some (...) of the most pressing issues that arise in contemplating the interaction between Canadian state law and Indigenous legal traditions. In the course of a wide-ranging but accessible inquiry, he discusses such topics as Indigenous agency, self-determination, legal pluralism, and power. In its use of Anishinaabe stories and methodologies drawn from the emerging field of Indigenous studies, Law's Indigenous Ethics makes a significant contribution to scholarly debate and is an essential resource for readers seeking a deeper understanding of Indigenous rights, societies, and cultures. (shrink)

The two major schools of thought in Indigenous−settler relations on the ground, in the courts, in public policy, and in research are resurgence and reconciliation. Resurgence refers to practices of Indigenous self- determination and cultural renewal. Reconciliation refers to practices of reconciliation between Indigenous and settler nations as well as efforts to strengthen the relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples with the living earth and making that relationship the basis for both resurgence and Indigenous−settler reconciliation. -/- Critically and constructively analyzing (...) these two schools from a variety of perspectives and lived experiences, this volume connects both discourses to the ecosystem dynamics that animate the living earth. Resurgence and Reconciliation is a truly multidisciplinary work, blending law, political science, political economy, women’s studies, history, anthropology, ecology, sustainability, and climate change. Its dialogic approach strives to put these fields in conversation and draw out the connections and tensions between them. -/- By using “earth teachings” to inform social practices, the editors and contributors offer a rich, innovative, and holistic way forward in response to the world’s most profound natural and social challenges. This timely volume shows how the complexities and interconnections of resurgence and reconciliation and the living earth are often overlooked in contemporary discourse and debate. (shrink)

Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. By Eric Reinders. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 283 pp, Bilbi. ISBN 0‐5202‐4171‐1. $40.95 (cloth).

What happens to scientific knowledge when researchers outside the natural sciences bring elements of the latest trend across disciplinary boundaries for their own purposes? Researchers in fields from anthropology to family therapy and traffic planning employ the concepts, methods, and results of chaos theory to harness the disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences, to motivate methodological change or conceptual reorganization within their home discipline, and to justify public policies and aesthetic judgments. Using the recent explosion in the use of chaos (...) theory, _Borrowed Knowledge and the Challenge of Learning across Disciplines _examines the relationship between science and other disciplines as well as the place of scientific knowledge within our broader culture. Stephen H. Kellert’s detailed investigation of the myriad uses of chaos theory reveals serious problems that can arise in the interchange between science and other knowledge-making pursuits, as well as opportunities for constructive interchange. By engaging with recent debates about interdisciplinary research, Kellert contributes a theoretical vocabulary and a set of critical frameworks for the rigorous examination of borrowing. (shrink)

A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition, _Borrowed Light_ makes the case that the 20th century is the "anticolonial century." The sparks of concerted resistance to colonial oppression were ignited in the gathering of intellectual malcontents from all over the world in interwar Europe. Many of this era's principal figures were formed by the experience of revolution on Europe's semi-developed Eastern periphery, making their ideas especially pertinent to current ideas about autonomy and sovereignty. Moreover, the debates most prominent then—human vs. (...) inhuman, religions of the book vs. oral cultures, the authoritarian state vs. the representative state and, above all, scientific rationality vs. humanist reason—remain central today. Timothy Brennan returns to the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th century and its legacies. In readings of the showdown between Spinoza and Vico, Hegel's critique of liberalism, and Nietzsche's antipathy towards the colonies and social democracy, Brennan identifies the divergent lines of the first anticolonial theory—a literary and philosophical project with strong ties to what we now call Marxism. Along the way, he assesses prospects for a renewal of the study of imperial culture. (shrink)

Some remarks on the possible methods of composing saṃhitās as hinted in chosen texts belonging to the Pāñcarātra school are presented in “Sect. 1”. In “Sect. 2,” the content and the structure of the Sātvatasaṃhitā and Īśvarasaṃhitā are compared. In fact, both texts are independent works even though in the light of some Pāñcarātrika texts they are considered to be mutually linked, the latter being considered a “commentary” of the former. In “Sect. 3,” the initiation as found in both texts (...) is outlined. In “Sect. 4”, I focus on the re-use of the portions concerning dīkṣā: although the redactor of the Īśvarasaṃhitā borrowed almost all the Sātvatasaṃhitā’s chapters on initiation, he dealt in a very different way with the practice called vaibhavīyanarasiṃhakalpa that in the context of the latter text plays the role of a unique preliminary purification. Strikingly, the Sātvatasaṃhitā’s redactor re-used the initial verses describing the vaibhavīyanarasiṃhakalpa, putting them into other contexts, not necessarily connected to the issue of initiation, whereas he totally omitted its impressive section concerning magical powers. (shrink)

Life is short. This indisputable fact of existence has driven human ingenuity since antiquity, whether through efforts to lengthen our lives with medicine or shorten the amount of time we spend on work using technology. Alongside this struggle to manage the pressure of life’s ultimate deadline, human perception of the passage and effects of time has also changed. In _On Borrowed Time_, Harald Weinrich examines an extraordinary range of materials—from Hippocrates to _Run Lola Run_—to put forth a new conception of (...) time and its limits that, unlike older models, is firmly grounded in human experience. Weinrich’s analysis of the roots of the word _time_ connects it to the temples of the skull, demonstrating that humans first experienced time in the beating of their pulses. Tracing this corporeal perception of time across literary, religious, and philosophical works, Weinrich concludes that time functions as a kind of sixth sense—the crucial sense that enables the other five. Written with Weinrich’s customary narrative elegance, _On Borrowed Time_ is an absorbing—and, fittingly, succinct—meditation on life’s inexorable brevity. (shrink)

Unlike most areas involving taboo, where language-internal innovations tend to dominate, homosexuality is characterized by a basic international vocabulary shared across multiple languages, notably English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. Historically, the lexis of nonnormative gender identity has shared space with that of sexual orientation. This lexicon includes (inexhaustively) the following series of internationalisms:sodomite, bugger, bardash, berdache, tribade, pederast, sapphist, lesbian, uranist, invert, homosexual, bisexual, trans, gay, queer. This common terminology has resulted from language contact in a broad sense, and (...) more specifically from lexical borrowing (loanwords). Several framing devices are expressed through the lexicon: religious censure, distancing in time and space, othering, medicalization or pathologizing, but also in recent decades LGBTQ self-assertion and demands for equality. Rather than necessarily being subject to taboo, then, queerness represents a pragmatically marked semantic field in which the lexicon is highly dependent upon social factors and the communicative context. (shrink)

Like biological species, languages change over time. As noted by Darwin, there are many parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. Insights into these parallels have also undergone change in the past 150 years. Just like genes, words change over time, and language evolution can be likened to genome evolution accordingly, but what kind of evolution? There are fundamental differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic evolution. In the former, natural variation entails the gradual accumulation of minor mutations in alleles. In the (...) latter, lateral gene transfer is an integral mechanism of natural variation. The study of language evolution using biological methods has attracted much interest of late, most approaches focusing on language tree construction. These approaches may underestimate the important role that borrowing plays in language evolution. Network approaches that were originally designed to study lateral gene transfer may provide more realistic insights into the complexities of language evolution.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssaysLinguistic evidence supports date for Homeric epics Abstract. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese ReligionWhalen LaiBorrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. By Eric Reinders. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 266 + xvi pp.For a long time, Sinology was dominated by scholars with direct or indirect missionary backgrounds, going all the way back to the founding of the discipline by James Legge. Legge occupied the first university chair in (...) the China field in Britain. Legge's vision of China has recently been placed into historical context by Norman Girardot (The Victorian Translation of China [2002]). There were other early figures whose records of Chinese beliefs and folk customs we still use. Beginning with Timothy Richard, more came around to seeing how China needed more than soul saving for the hereafter. China needed urgent sociopolitical reforms in the here and now. In time, the YMCA and the missionary schools would help chaperone in a whole generation of "modern Chinese"; some of them, though exposed to the Gospel, would, in the May Fourth Movement, pit science and democracy against any and all religions. For all that, scholars still do count on the missionary records for understanding the "old China." By exploring what the majority of these men of God saw in China—or thought they saw, since their perception could well be colored by cultural biases—this book by Eric Reinders proves quite refreshing. Instead of holding up those records as a mirror on a Chinese reality, Reinders (to wit) "reversed the light so that it would reflect upon" the Protestant missionaries themselves. For one thing, these Protestant evangelicals reported on China using rhetoric borrowed from their long-standing complaints against the Catholics. For another, they painted the Chinese "body language" in light of their own proud Victorian manners. These missionaries were no James Legge, who was tutored into classical Chinese by erudite Confucians and who then presented the Confucian Classics with appreciative classical (Latin and Greek) references. They were no Arthur Waley either, Waley being one who could "without leaving the door [as to live in China], know all the affairs of the (Chinese) world." By steeping himself in Chinese language and its written culture, Waley could render the Confucian "chun-tzu" into the familiar English "gentleman," and doing so with due sympathy for two land-owning gentry cultures. There is no such sympathy from the Protestant missionaries who lived among the common people. They purported to know the "real" (rural) China that was opened to the inland mission. The China they reported on was not found in library books, the Confucian classics, or some Mandarin's manicured garden. Theirs is not the Good Earth depicted later by Pearl Buck, either.These nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, flourishing in the heydays of the British Empire, held few illusions about the once fabled Cathay. Their reports sent home served, in the end, both God and country. As means for raising funds for their missionary efforts, the reports probably had to fan high hopes for the Gospel in relation to a very deprecating assessment of the pagan, heathen culture they encountered. The reports also reflected the hard times these zealous missionaries did have [End Page 226] to face. They were living in the backwater, among often illiterate peasants and in isolated enclaves surrounded by what they saw as a huddling mass of faceless humanity. Their frustration at learning the vernacular tongue well enough to communicate with the people led to the still popular joke about the inscrutable Chinese. But the conclusion the missionaries drew, about how the Chinese language is inherently "godless," is more theological than philological. That the many Chinese tongues (local dialects?) were deemed a living Babel assumes somehow that the Queen's English is divinely inspired. This book does not tell us often what China was really like, for so much of that reality is woefully "lost in translation."Above all, "Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies" is about how the Protestants transposed their endless bouts with Rome into seeing the errors of the Chinese way as copies of the Catholic way. The Chinese were mindless in their idolatry; they kept up blindly this ritualistic gesture with little or... (shrink)

Life is short. This indisputable fact of existence has driven human ingenuity since antiquity, whether through efforts to lengthen our lives with medicine or shorten the amount of time we spend on work using technology. Alongside this struggle to manage the pressure of life’s ultimate deadline, human perception of the passage and effects of time has also changed. In On Borrowed Time, Harald Weinrich examines an extraordinary range of materials—from Hippocrates to Run Lola Run—to put forth a new conception of (...) time and its limits that, unlike older models, is firmly grounded in human experience. Weinrich’s analysis of the roots of the word time connects it to the temples of the skull, demonstrating that humans first experienced time in the beating of their pulses. Tracing this corporeal perception of time across literary, religious, and philosophical works, Weinrich concludes that time functions as a kind of sixth sense—the crucial sense that enables the other five. Written with Weinrich’s customary narrative elegance, On Borrowed Time is an absorbing—and, fittingly, succinct—meditation on life’s inexorable brevity. (shrink)

Every science has its technical vocabulary, consisting in part of terms coined for explicit purposes and in part of words borrowed from ordinary discourse and used with greater or lesser degrees of precision. Words of the latter sort pose curious problems, some of them familiar to those historians of science concerned with, for example, what Galileo meant by forza and Newton by attraction. Indeed, analogous problems face any historian seeking to understand the older meanings of terms still in use today.

Seeking new language for the Divine has encouraged Christian and Jewish feminists to explore other religious traditions which are richer in feminine language for God, and in some cases to borrow parts of what they find for their own use. However, these other religious traditions are often socially and politically less powerful, and borrowing their language and practice has ethical implications. Especially because the ethical dimensions of liturgy are bound up with theological issues, religious feminists have a moral duty (...) to consider these questions in which there are rarely if ever any easy answers. (shrink)

This article examines online identity practices of Chinese doctors mediated through borrowed linguistic resources in a leading medical app. Setting against rapid societal changes in China which open up traditionally ‘powerful’ professions to market competition, and the development of a booming digital economy, this app and its semiotic work drawing on Chinese Internet vernacular, I will argue, offer a fascinating lens to probe into the highly dynamic online discursive practices in contemporary China. Drawing on the notions of entextualization and resemiotization, (...) I will trace and analyse the patterned ways in which pre-existing linguistic resources are creatively reworked by the app to achieve new identity-making purposes. Situating the changes of the field of healthcare in China within a worldwide shift towards neoliberal ideologies and practices, I will also briefly discuss how the emergence of such new social space in digital settings may impact the production and communication of health knowledge and services in China. (shrink)

In “Reference Borrowing and the Role of Descriptions,” Dunja Jutronić criticizes my view of the borrowing of names and natural kind terms. These terms should be treated, she argues, in the same way as I have tentatively suggested kind terms like ‘sloop’ should be: borrowers need to associate a categorial description that is true of the referent. I am not persuaded. Still, perhaps the suggestion should be extended to these terms anyway. I propose a way to test whether (...) it should that does not rest on intuitions about reference. (shrink)

Research shows people confront social marginalization through work, yet this scholarship largely ignores people working in illicit markets. We address this gap by investigating how and to what end men in street prostitution “borrow” privilege from their more structurally advantaged clients. Drawing from interviews with men of color in street sex work, we show how they “status maneuver” to offset stigmatized identities tied to prostitution and to construct a masculinity that offers a greater sense of social worth within constrained circumstances. (...) These men ironically rely on status differences between themselves and their white, wealthy men clients to undermine their own oppression and to create possibilities for momentary associations with hegemonic masculine privilege. This research shows how barriers between the powerful and powerless are permeable, and how social hierarchies serve as resources to cope with the inequitable conditions and stigma under which some people live and work. (shrink)

Jean Bodin’s analysis in Six Livres de la République is often understood as evidence of his alleged political absolutism. This article examines Bodin’s theory of offices to argue that this is a misguided view of Bodin’s political thought. I begin by revisiting Bodin’s distinction between the “sovereignty” and the “government” of the state. It is in the analysis of the latter that Bodin constructs a normative doctrine warning of the dangers of “seigneurial” rule. As I show, Bodin’s purpose was to (...) reject seigneurial rule by contrasting it with lawful rule, the mode of government in which public power was discharged according to law and custom, not by seigneurial will. Essential to Bodin’s analysis was a concept of public office that envisioned the officer as an independent intermediary “borrowing” public powers, not from higher magistrates or from the prince (as medieval lawyers traditionally argued), but only from the impersonal state. (shrink)

Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script. By Zev Handel. Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xiv + 369. $59.

The global financial crisis has shattered the illusion that all was well with capitalism and forced us to confront the great challenges we face today with a new sense of urgency. Few are better placed to do this than Zygmunt Bauman, a social thinker whose writings on liquid modernity have pioneered a new way of seeing the world in which we live at the dawn of the 21st Century. Our liquid modern world is characterized by the transition from a society (...) of producers to a society of consumers, the natural extension of which is the society of perpetual debtors. The ruling idea of the society of consumers is to prevent needs from being satisfied and to create demand; its natural extension is to enable consumers to consume more by borrowing. Debt was transformed into a crucial profit-earning asset of capitalism in liquid modern times. The present-day 'credit crunch' is not the outcome of the banks' failure but rather the fruit of their success in transforming the majority of men and women, young and old, into a race of debtors. They got what they were looking for: a society of debtors whose condition of being in debt was made self-perpetuating, with more debts being offered, and more undertaken, as the only way of escaping from the debts already incurred. Starting from this reflection on the current global financial crisis and prompted by the probing questions of his interlocutor, Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo, Bauman examines in an historical perspective some of the most pressing moral and political issues of our time, from international terrorism and the rise of religious and secular fundamentalism to the decline of the nation-state and the threats posed by global warming, issues whose seriousness and urgency attest to the fact that we are living today not only on borrowed money but also on borrowed time. (shrink)

In my first study of the borrowings from Athenian sacred treasure to finance the Archidamian War I assumed, in common with others, certain irregularities in the stoichedon order of IG. i. 324. The text has subsequently been amplified and improved by Tod, notably with the addition of one amount of interest due to Athena and of the total amounts of principal credited to the Other Gods and to all the gods . This further expansion, however, has introduced additional irregularities, the (...) restoration [τάδε τος λλοις θεος έλοσι τόκο ]ν νδεκα τεα[ιν:…] being too long by one letter in line 120 and the restoration [τάδε πασι τος θεος έλοσι τόκο ν] νδεκα τεσ[ιν:…] being likewise too long in line 123. (shrink)

‘Siberian hunters have never been able to get used to our insistence on pressing our God on everyone else, nor to our way of abasing ourselves before him when they see us as masters of all - conquering the bear and the elk with our rifles, using our knowledge and power to conquer the indigenous people, who have always been determined to hang on to what little they have. How crazy the shaman would be to put his penny in the (...) collection during mass without knowing whether it would be effective or not, whether the ritual would “work” this time - since only the result, here and now, matters to him. Why thank the priest and his God, why let them prosper, when in the end the famine did take hold and the sick did die?’. (shrink)

A recent article by Rao(1) exemplifies a number of new trends in developmental biology, both of technical strategy and approach to the problem of neural induction. Rao introduced into frog embryos a mutant form of a mesodermal gene, Brachyury, and caused ectopic neural differentiation. This essay traces the route from the original Brachyury mutation in mouse to the most likely conclusion of Rao's experiments — suggested previously(2) — that neural fate is a default pathway.

Since autumn 2012, higher education institutions in England have been able to charge undergraduate students up to £9,000 a year in tuition fees. Full-time students are expected to take out loans large enough to cover their tuition fees and living costs for the duration of their studies. They must start repaying these loans if and when their earnings reach £21,000 a year. In this bold and timely pamphlet, Christopher Martin argues that forcing students to borrow is a serious mistake. He (...) contends that higher education is a welfare good on a par with basic schooling and health care. To flourish in liberal democratic societies, citizens must be personally autonomous, and the educational demands of personal autonomy are too heavy to be met by compulsory schooling alone. To lead autonomous lives, adult citizens need ongoing educational support, support that the liberal democratic state has an obligation to provide. Higher education should therefore be a universal entitlement and free at the point of use. The global debate about who should pay for higher education is by no means settled. As England shifted the financial burden from taxpayers to students, Germany moved in the opposite direction: all German universities have offered free tuition since 2014. Christopher Martin's distinctive contribution to the debate is to lay out a principled argument, based on a plausible assessment of the purpose of higher education, for the view that students should not have to pay for their education. His argument is controversial, to be sure, but it represents a serious and considered attempt to set the question of higher education funding on sure normative foundations. (shrink)

This inquiry will be limited to an analysis of Turkic borrowings that have been attested in inscriptions found in Mongolia and southern Siberia in the period beginning around the year 700 A.D., as well as in Turkic-Uighur manuscripts, beginning around the year 900 A.D., conserved in northern Tarim (especially in the Turfan region) and in Dunhuang, which is a Chinese outpost on the main road of the silk trade. We will look only at borrowings that predate Islamization, a process that (...) developed rapidly during the eleventh century and of which some borrowings are still part of the language of the Islamic Turkish world. Although most of our study will concentrate on pre-Islamic borrowings that were fully assimilated into written words, we will will also investigate some transcriptions of foreign terms that are mentioned in various manuscripts of a theological bent (most notably of Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and Syriac origin and found in Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian texts) as well as words of a very technical nature. We will also look at more contemporary terms that are derived from several major semantic fields. (shrink)

Reinvention of the form of expression is a conceptual approach characteristic for the evolution of all arts. This research study provides one such step forward in the advancement of scientific paper, a standard form of expression in natural sciences, toward more progressive terrains. The paper adopts the form of a theatrical play where a scientific family of four attempts to find the way around a writer’s block (Act I). Their idealess sense of confinement is overcome through arts or, more specifically, (...) through scientific research implementing the aesthetics of music as its key element. The characters record compositions differing in the degrees of consonance, rhythmicity and tonality, and play them to birds to observe their vocal and behavioral responses (Act II). They note that the birdsong volume drops significantly when the piano tunes, especially the compositionally complex ones, are played to the birds and increases signifcantly when the white noise of ocean waves is played. The bird count experiment proves indirectly that the birdsong volume reduction is an auditory response of the birds to music rather than the effect of their migrating to or away from the sound source. This science with the flavor of art elevates the characters beyond the limits of their confinement and they, exalted and uplifted, gain ideas for creative research in their own disciplines of biomedical science (Act III). They relinquish the newly gained freedom in favor of embracing love for humanity that underlies medical research and return to their confinement, where they conduct, in the coda of the paper, a series of experiments that venture beyond musicology and ornithology and fall in the domains of tissue engineering and drug delivery, but also psychology (Act III). First, sparrow nests are used as templates for tissue engineering constructs, which facilitate the growth of human fibroblastic cells better than their artificial, gridded replicas. Next, the shell of an Easter egg, predominantly calcite in composition, is used with success as a drug delivery carrier. Lastly, the bird nest drawing experiment demonstrates a greater mental health of children than that of the adults, correlating with one of the overarching points of the paper, which is to present children as a model for grownups to follow rather than the other way around. Over the course of the play, the characters discuss the value of the various fusions between art and science, question the limits of human language and repeatedly go off-topic to celebrate the freeness of the creative thinking process. The play reports on real-life research methods and scientific results through a narrative, without diminishing their empirical rigor and analytical accuracy. (shrink)

In this exchange with Michael Devitt on reference borrowing I continue to challenge the idea that reference borrowing is a purely causal process and suggest instead that reference borrowing involves the borrowers having to associate the correct categorial term and have some true beliefs about the referent in the guise of some associate description. I strengthen my defense by suggesting that other kind terms form the core of our language and this is where we associate true categorial (...) descriptions and where error would matter. I also argue that in reference borrowing there is no need to posit a difference between proper names and natural kind terms on one hand and other kind terms on the other. If the traditional views of reference borrowing have demanded too much of individual speakers, the causal picture surely demands too little. Mere causal connection to some antecedent tradition of term use does not suffice for the preservation of reference. (shrink)

Enūma eliš exhibits a masterful array of intertextual borrowings that makes it exceptional among Akkadian literary texts. In this paper I discuss “intertextu- ity” as an analytical category and its suitability and limitations for the study of ancient compositions. I consider three different levels of intertextuality and present instances from an assorted group of texts. I finally show how a variety of intertextual types that are usually found in isolation are combined in Enūma eliš to create an original piece.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 239-242 [Access article in PDF] The Uses of Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and Antidepressants Stephen H. Kellert Keywords chaos, metaphor, rhetoric, values Ever since the popularization of chaos the-ory in the 1980s, there has been an explo-sion of interest in work in nonlinear dynamics generally and the study of strange attractors in particular. From law to economics to theology, researchers in the social (...) sciences and the humanities have sought to make use of the concepts, methods, and results of chaos theory. Previous generations have seen similar attempts to explore the consequences of relativity theory or quantum mechanics for their own areas of inquiry. In examining the implications of chaos for the treatment of mental illness, Douglas Heinrichs provides an example of this phenomenon, which I call "borrowed knowledge." Lacking expertise in the areas of psychotherapy or psychopharmacology, I view his suggestions as a case study in the ways that knowledge gets used across disciplinary boundaries. In these remarks, I examine some of the different functions that borrowed knowledge can serve in order to argue that although cross-disciplinary borrowing can be a fruitful source of new insights, it is not without its dangers. I look at the persuasive function that borrowed knowledge can serve in making one's ideas plausible candidates for further exploration, as well as in motivating methodological change. I look at the conceptual work performed by metaphors, paying special attention to the question of how we can judge whether or not a nonliteral use of knowledge from the natural sciences is fruitful. And finally, I look at the ways in which borrowed knowledge can be used to address evaluative questions—in this case, questions about autonomy and appropriate therapeutic practice. I do not mean for these various functions to be thought of as exclusive categories. Instead, they overlap, interact, and combine in various ways. Rhetorical Functions, Disciplinary Prestige, and Methodologic Change In examining the persuasive uses of chaos theory, I should make it clear that by "persuasive" I do not mean illegitimate or deceptive. When Heinrichs points out that what he calls the traditional model of brain function is used to [End Page 239] present and explain the use of antidepressants (ADs) to clinicians and the general public, it becomes clear that he believes an alternative model can be useful for explicating and justifying the use of ADs for clinicians and patients. This descriptive function of the metaphorical appeal to a chaotic "attractor landscape" shows up where Heinrichs discusses the use of the chaotic model for patient education and the "rationale for pharmacotherapy," giving patients "appropriate expectations."But the rhetorical functions of chaos theory also come into play with audiences other than patients; they apply to the audience for the scholarly article itself, perhaps attracting attention because of the novelty or promise of a new field of research, but also harnessing the considerable disciplinary prestige that the natural sciences wield in our culture. All of these functions are useful in directing attention to the author's suggestions for further research, especially where he suggests that it would provide the clinician with guidance in working with an individual patient. Here I take it that Heinrichs has made fruitful use of the work of Thelen and others on the variability of individual developmental trajectories. This proposal for methodological change suggests that focusing on the dynamics of system and its evolution through time may be important in addition to focusing on equilibrium states. The disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences can provide a valuable and legitimate resource for the persuasive task of encouraging one's colleagues to explore a new methodological approach.A further rhetorical use is found in the appeal to the unpredictability of chaotic systems to account for the variability of results in the application of ADs. We see this where Heinrichs says, "a meaningful science of persons is possible even in the face of their ultimate unpredictability" (2005, 221). The disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences, which in studying chaotic systems are able to achieve genuinely "scientific" status without being able... (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the role of government borrowing in the system of modern market relations, in which the search for tools to maintain or increase the social welfare of citizens is one of the urgent issues. In conditions of weak economic growth and a slow increase in the standard of living of the population, one of the most significant ways to activate economic growth is precisely the amount of funds raised by the state for (...) solving key social problems. As part of the study, an analysis of internal and external government borrowings of the Russian economic system was carried out, using the tools of the theory of probability and mathematical statistics, the degree of influence of government debt on macroeconomic development was revealed, and ways to optimize government borrowing were proposed. (shrink)

This chapter uses Marx’s credit theory in Comments on James Mill and Freire’s theory of the banking model of education from Pedagogy of the Oppressed to argue that the confluence of massive student debt and structures of “banking” pedagogy in contemporary American higher education places many university students in a unique position of dehumanization. The material limitations brought about by the loan are compounded by the social limitations of a resulting push toward productivity in education. Students with loan debt are (...) driven in the direction of business and pre-professional majors and away from the humanities and other fields which would facilitate students’ abilities to critically question the dehumanizing aspects of their situation. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of state borrowing to fulfil global responsibilities. Although borrowing may appear attractive in the face of budgetary pressures and an increased number of crises in a changing global order, the article argues that borrowing to fulfil global responsibilities is generally morally problematic. It presents two main objections to borrowing. First, borrowing is often likely to be unfair intergenerationally, violating the ‘Just Borrowing Principle’. Second, borrowing demonstrates a lack of (...) sufficient commitment, violating the ‘Taking a Stand Principle’, and therefore weakens the expressivist justification of measures to fulfil global responsibilities. (shrink)

Households and banks have increasingly displaced non-financial businesses and governments as the primary debtors in modern capitalist economies, resulting in more severe economic cycles, increased inequality, and external macroeconomic imbalances. Yet while the trend is nearly universal among developed economies, its intensity varies a great deal from country to country. This article highlights the common international causes behind the global expansion of household and financial sector debt; the divergent national approaches to household credit that cause household and financial sector indebtedness (...) to vary from country to country; and the likely causes of these disparate approaches. National approaches to interest rate restrictions, property transfer taxation, high loan-to-value mortgages, mortgage interest taxation, and secondary markets for consumer debt can either encourage or mitigate household and financial sector borrowing. Whether a country encourages or mitigates such credit is determined by an idiosyncratic mix of institutional, political, and ideational factors. Especially important are the size of domestic pension funds, banks’ preferred business models, the political power of financial firms, and whether policymakers are more sensitive to the gains promised by a credit-fueled expansion or to the risks posed by an overleveraged collapse. (shrink)

Banks play a unique role in society. They not only maximize profits but also consider the interests of stakeholders. We investigate whether banks consider firms’ pollution records in their lending decisions. The evidence shows that banks offer significantly higher loan spreads, higher total borrowing costs, shorter loan maturities, and greater collateral to firms with higher levels of chemical pollution. The costly effects are stronger for borrowers with greater risk and weaker corporate governance. Further, the results show that banks with (...) higher social responsibility account for their borrowers’ environmental performance and charge higher loan spreads to those with poor performance. These results support the idea that banks with higher social responsibility can promote the practice of business ethics in firms. (shrink)

Jean Bodin’s analysis in Six Livres de la République is often understood as evidence of his alleged political absolutism. This article examines Bodin’s theory of offices to argue that this is a misguided view of Bodin’s political thought. I begin by revisiting Bodin’s distinction between the “sovereignty” and the “government” of the state. It is in the analysis of the latter that Bodin constructs a normative doctrine warning of the dangers of “ seigneurial” rule. As I show, Bodin’s purpose was (...) to reject seigneurial rule by contrasting it with lawful rule, the mode of government in which public power was discharged according to law and custom, not by seigneurial will. Essential to Bodin’s analysis was a concept of public office that envisioned the officer as an independent intermediary “borrowing” public powers, not from higher magistrates or from the prince (as medieval lawyers traditionally argued), but only from the impersonal state. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, Europe’s immigration regulations have raised concerns regarding human rights and divided the public opinion on transnational movement, particularly with the ever-growi...