Prominence hierarchy effects such as the animacy hierarchy and definiteness hierarchy have been a puzzle for formal treatments of case since they were first described systematically in Silverstein 1976. Recently, these effects have received more sustained attention from generative linguists, who have sought to capture them in treatments grounded in well-understood mechanisms for case assignment cross-linguistically. These efforts have taken two broad directions. In the first, Aissen 1999, 2003 has integrated the effects elegantly into a competition model of grammar using (...) OT formalisms, where iconicity effects emerge from constraint conjunctions between constraints on fixed universal hierarchies (definiteness, animacy, person, grammatical role) and a constraint banning overt morphological expression of case. The second direction grows out of the work of Jelinek and Diesing, and is found most articulated in Jelinek 1993, Jelinek and Carnie 2003, and Carnie 2005. This work takes as its starting point the observation that word order is sometimes correlated with the hierarchies as well, and works backwards from that to conclusions about phrase structure geometries. In this paper, I propose a particular implementation of this latter direction, and explore its consequences for our understanding of the nature of case assignment. If hierarchy effects are due to positional differences in phrase structures, then, I argue, the attested cross-linguistic differences fall most naturally out if the grammars of these languages countenance polyvalent case—that is, assignment of more than one case value to a single nominal phrase. (shrink)

The ideas of a “Buddha” or of his “enlightenment” suggest a certain unity and coherence. In accord with the positivist and metaphysical realist attitudes of our times, many assume that a Buddha is defined by his awakening, which is conceived of as a definitive, clear-cut event with specific characteristics. Enlightenment is a “thing,” a recognizable state of mind or change of consciousness, or perhaps a similar kind of process, which may be beyond the grasp of words, but is nevertheless confidently (...) identifiable and ascertainable. Although this state of mind is generally portrayed as a negation—non-duality, non-attachment, the uprooting of ignorance, the realization of... (shrink)

In this paper, I address the problem wherein the same English word permits one of its complement positions to be satisfied by phrases of different categories. A well-known example of such an English word is the copula to be, whose complements include adjective phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases and adverbial phrases. I provide a way to treat such words, in particular verbs, as single lexical items through a conservative extension of the usual treatment of word classification as a pair comprising (...) a part of speech category and a complement list. I then show how a further conservative extension of complement lists permits a satisfactory formalization of doubly complemented English verbs which are synonymous under a permutation of their complements. These verbs include, but are not limited to, so-called double object constructions. (shrink)

This article argues that Proverbs 18:4 contains an exceptionally rich use of water as metaphors in sapiential literature. At the same time, the verse illustrates the multivalent applicability of a single proverb. Israel’s natural environment is shortly described as pictured in the biblical texts, suggesting the interplay of water and dry land in the ancient Near East. Water and dryness have ambivalent functions, as both are necessary and both can be dangerous. In order to understand Proverbs 18:4, a short overview (...) of water in ancient Near Eastern texts is generally given and the significance of the multivalent application of representative proverbs is illustrated. Coming to Proverbs 18:4, an interpretation is offered showing a potential of various differing understandings of the water metaphor concentrated in a single proverb. Although such a proverb now exists in a written literary context, it can be used in various contexts, and each time be applied differently in its own right, but with equal validity. Contribution: It is argued that the multifarious use of water as a literary motif in Proverbs entails that both its explicit and its implied use can function literally, metaphorically and even as metaphtonemy, with variegated valid meanings whether in individual proverbs by themselves or as part of larger literary contexts. (shrink)

This essay serves as an introduction to this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy on commodification and health care. The essay attempts to sharpen the articulation of generally expressed worries about the commodification of health care. It does so by defining commodification, analyzing three components of the good of health care, and attempting to assess how commodification might distort the shape of each of those components. Next, it explores how the good of health care might be distorted by (...) the market-based principle of distributive justice, "to each according to ability to pay." Finally, it identifies two basic questions about the relationship of medicine and the market that merit further exploration. How does the market-based language of "incentives" so pervasive in the world of managed care distort the complex patterns of virtue and vice that motivate actors in the health care arena? If we recognize that we cannot eliminate the influence of money from the health care system, how can we insure that the good of health care remains, in Radin's terms, "incompletely commodified"? (shrink)

Introducción: El consentimiento informado es un procedimiento que brinda oportunidad a los pacientes de disponer de información y participar en la toma de decisiones médicas. Sin embargo, existe el criterio de que el nivel de entendimiento de la información aportada por los facultativos al paciente, sus familiares o ambos, es bajo y además, muchos médicos lo consideran como una herramienta de trabajo secundaria o que no es necesario realizarla con inmediatez. Objetivo: Evaluar la percepción y experiencia del personal sanitario de (...) la unidad de terapia polivalente del Hospital Docente Clínico Quirúrgico "Joaquín Albarrán" acerca del consentimiento informado. Método: Estudio descriptivo realizado en la unidad de terapia polivalente del Hospital "Joaquín Albarrán" de enero a marzo del 2013. Se aplicó una encuesta a 67 trabajadores que accedieron voluntariamente a responderla. Resultados: El 60 % de los encuestados tenía menos de dos años de trabajo en la unidad y solo el 45 %, conocimientos básicos de ética médica. Únicamente el 50 % de los interrogados consideró que este procedimiento puede mejorar la relación médico-paciente. Conclusiones: Es necesario incrementar el conocimiento sobre la utilidad del consentimiento informado entre los trabajadores de la unidad para aprovechar al máximo sus beneficios. Introduction: Informed consent is a procedure that offers full opportunity for patients to have access to information and participate in medical decision-makings. However, it is believed that the information given by the doctors are not fully understood by the patients, their families or both, and besides that many doctors consider it as a second tool or something that doesn't have to be done right away. Objective: Evaluate the perception and experience of the health staff of the polyvalent unit of the surgical clinical teaching hospital Joaquin Albarrán about informed consent. Method: Descriptive study carried out in the polyvalent unit of Joaquin Albarrán Hospital from January to march 2013. A survey was given to 67 workers who voluntarily agreed to answer it. Results: The 60% of the participants had been working in the unit for less than 2 years and only 45% of them had basic knowledge of medical ethics. Only 50% of the participants considered that this procedure could help to improve doctor-patient relationship. Conclusions: It is necessary to increase the knowledge of the usefulness of the informed consent among the workers of the unit to have full profit from it. (shrink)

Polyvalent meanings behind naval ram displays were prevalent and ingrained in the Roman world, especially at Octavian’s Campsite Memorial for the Actian War. Naval rams and their display alluded to gender and power discourses within Roman society. These discourses included Roman notions of sex, penetration, domination, phallus size, and ideas of achieved hierarchies of masculinity. Analyzing ram displays through Roman perceptions of gender and sexuality, specifically concerning ancient masculinity, reveals that rams functioned not only as weapons of war but also (...) as metaphorical phalloi that embodied and projected immense power. Octavian’s ram display at Actium was used to effeminize Marc Antony through the successful defeat and figurative castration of his fleet, which was done by cutting off the rams from the bows of the warships. By exhibiting the rams as such, Octavian asserted his own impenetrability and masculine virtue, which simultaneously promoted Antony’s penetrability and lack of masculinity. In choosing the largest rams, Octavian implied that his masculine prowess was invincible. The ram display unveiled Octavian’s phallic dominion over all other Greeks and Romans. As Octavian’s naval ram display was the largest and most impressive of the ancient world, he effectively rendered all previous ram dedications subordinate to his own. (shrink)

A complex, polyvalent phenomenon, the kiss, once embedded in a literary text, is first and foremost a cipher to be decoded. Texts effectively expose its many-sidedness: not merely its potentially seductive power or ostensible expression of affection, but, no less compellingly, its risky demeanors, its capacity to establish dominance, to terrorize, to subdue, to belittle, to ingratiate, even to infuriate. Variously bestowed, retracted, avowed, disavowed, meaningful, meaningless, the kiss can become, as it does in the work so named by Kate (...) Chopin, a multi-layered form of contrivance, the incarnation of tempting, albeit ultimately invidious, non-realities. Though, perhaps, not manifest at first blush, a careful reading reveals that each occasion marked by the “joining of lips” yields an odd sequence of awkward and oft deleterious, consequences: motion is superseded by motive, candor by disingenuousness—all in an unending slew of backward and forward slippages. Thus is engendered the metaphorization of an altered reality—structured all but exclusively upon the relentless deceits it proffers. Jubilation and despair come and go, as though wholly inter-changeable; acceptance and rejection, promulgation and rescission are converted into mere variants of the same gestures of ambivalence, if not of travesty. One might thus conclude that the kiss adopts significance worthy of note only as a metonym for and of factitiousness, vacuity and thinly-veiled distortion. Chopin’s script adeptly explores the multifarious comportments and consequences of the kiss: an act fashioned as a “weapon” of dubious value, as a tactical strategy, as a play-act borne of ulterior objectives and, which, as such, deftly prostitutes itself, willingly, nefariously. In the given context, the kiss-act lays bare the heroine’s ostensible “liberation” to be more imagined than real. Her would-be triumph over gendered subjugation exists, if at all, as but an ill-conceived romantic daydream—destined to slake gradually into a woeful destiny of loneliness and imprisonment. Chopin’s brief narration center-stages betrayal, challenges authenticity and valorizes consummate illegitimacy. -/- . (shrink)

This research aims to identify the ethical issues perceived by intensive care nurses in their everyday practice. It also aims to understand why these situations were considered an ethical issue and what interventions/strategies have been or are expected to be developed so as to minimize them. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview with 15 nurses working at polyvalent intensive care units in 4 Portuguese hospitals, who were selected by the homogenization of multiple samples. The qualitative content analysis identified end-of-life (...) decisions, privacy, interaction, team work, and health-care access as emerging ethical issues. Personal, team, and institutional aspects emerge as reasons behind the experience of these issues. Personal and team resources are used in and for solving these issues. Moral development and training are the most significant strategies. (shrink)

This essay brings psychoanalytic theory on trauma together with film and television criticism on rape narrative in an analysis of Michael Coel’s 2020 series I May Destroy You. Beyond the limited carceral framework of the police procedural, which dislocates the act of violence from the survivor’s history and context, Coel’s polyvalent, looping narrative metabolizes rape television’s forms and genres in order to stage and restage both trauma and genre again and anew. Contesting common conceptions of vulnerability and susceptibility that prefigure (...) a violent breach of autonomy, Coel’s series and her interviews about it invite an ethics of looking that embraces a curiosity in the unknowable and untreatable kernel of subjective experience and defies and resists a policing of the survivor’s thoughts and emotions. By emphasizing and exploring what psychoanalysis calls the “afterwardness” of trauma, Coel foregrounds her main character’s subjectivity prior to her victimization, widens the sphere of consequence beyond the victim and criminal justice system to the survivor’s larger community, and entreats that community to preserve a space for her to look and look again at everything, without judgment. (shrink)

One of the key debates about applying virtue ethics to business is whether or not the aims and values of a business actually prevent the exercise of virtues. Some of the more interesting disagreement in this debate has arisen amongst proponents of virtue ethics. This article analyzes the central issues of this debate in order to advance an alternative way of thinking about how a business can be a form of virtuous practice. Instead of relying on the paired concepts of (...) internal and external goods that define what counts as virtuous, I offer a version of speech act theory taken from Paul Ricoeur to show how a business can satisfy several aims without compromising the exercise of the virtues. I refer to this as a polyvalent approach where a single task within a business can have instrumental, conventional, and imaginative effects. These effects correspond to the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions of meaning. I argue that perlocution provides a way in which the moral imagination can discover the moral significance of others that might have not been noticed before, and furthermore, that for such effects to be practiced, they require appropriate virtues. I look at two cases taken from consultation work to thresh out the theoretical and practical detail. (shrink)

To Bauman the incongruities of life are best reflected in an analytical effort that moves between perspectives without forcing them into a synthesis. He seems to arrogate the right to inconsistency when operating from points of view. This violates a curious requirement of scholarly discourse: an author is free to select his conceptual framework and method — but once they are selected, he must stick to them. This practically inviolable rule of consistency might come (as Bauman himself suggests) from the (...) juridical pretensions sociology had from its birth. Consistency gives an aura to academicians who feel called to legislate, judge and legitimize. To Bauman, however, truth in judgement, reality in empirical studies and responsibility in practical affairs are approached by a constant movement between incongruous points of view. These ambitions make heavy demands on the composition of his writing. In many stretches of linear argument, imagery is interjected, showing lateral connections and complications — conversely, in many pieces of interpretation causal explanations intrude. A discourse with all these boundary violations is rather suspect in modern eyes. When Bauman contaminates the purity of analytical lines with terminology from other branches, he is demonstrating in a stylistic way that our reality is multitudinous — be it premodern enchantment, ambivalence in modernity or liberated postmodern polyvalence. (shrink)

Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism. -/- The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone (...) far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the ‘lived’ body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body’s power to act and exist. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising (...) claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to show that the foundations of a dualistic theology of Christian roots are found in the point of connection between platonic metaphysics, gnostic myths and exegesis. It highlights the way in which platonic metaphysics was developed in a completely different way than what is known as “Metaphysics of Exodus”. It considers that myth ─as an expressive vehicle of religious experience and having a polyvalent logic─ was a decisive element for the transmission of gnostic tradition. (...) Thus, the article concentrates on the gnostic understanding of “The Prologue of John”, which focuses on the Christological function of Jesus, bearing in mind the difficulties involved in the indifference with which this tradition dealt with Incarnation. The tools for the exegesis are taken from Hellenic tradition as a form to clarify the gnostic intuition concerning the stages of the propagation of the divine, both before and after the Fall. (shrink)

In October 1917 Martin Buber published an animal story by Franz Kafka in his monthly review Der Jude. Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, recommended it, assuring Buber that Kafka's work was among the most Jewish documents of our time. Kafka wrote “Jackals and Arabs” during the war-induced hiatus in Jewish immigration to Palestine, only half a year before the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 committed the British government to support a Jewish national home in Palestine. The polyvalent (...) story and its multilayered context crystallize Kafka's relationship to Zionism and Palestine as well as his German, Jewish, and Arab scholarly reception. The current revolutionary moment in the Arab world allows us to rethink Kafka and Arabs and, at the same time, the Palestine conflict. As such, this essay contains an intellectual affinity with the revision of Kafka scholarship offered in Critical Inquiry following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as Achmat Dangor's haunting postapartheid novel Kafka's Curse. (shrink)

En parcourant les registres – Une étude en corpus des usages stylistiques des « Light Verb Constructions » Cette contribution est consacrée aux aspects stylistiques d’usage de ce que l’on appelle des « Light Verb Constructions » (LVC) ; des phrases verbales complexes en Anglais. Alors que la majorité d’études jusqu’à présent se mettent d’accord sur la « note familière » des LVCs, des données empiriques montrent une vision plus complexe et hétérogène. Nos résultats qui sont basés sur le Corpus (...) of Contemporary American English (COCA) montrent que l’usage des LVCs est loin d’être limité à la parole informelle ou aux contextes familiers, mais que leur diffusion et usage sont beaucoup plus polyvalents que remarqué par le passé. (shrink)

This essay calls attention to robust synergies between Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of dialectical critical realism and Terrence W. Deacon’s recent investigation of the geo-historical emergence of ententional or teleological phenomena, as well as important differences. Deacon has independently arrived at an understanding of absence as causally efficacious in the emergence of life and consciousness, and deploys a range of other concepts that resonate with DCR. He develops a critique both of eliminativist and monovalent approaches to ententionality, on the one hand, (...) and their panpsychist foil, on the other, and elaborates a polyvalent scientific alternative – the theory of emergent dynamics. Though this theory is not without problems, as its immanent critique reveals – and indeed in part because of these – it opens up the prospect of a mutually illuminating dialogue between DCR and metaRealism, on the one hand, and the life sciences, on the other, in which DCR/mr underlabours for these sciences, which in turn feed back into DCR/mr philosophy and social theory, thereby helping to actualize the possibility of non-positivist naturalism. (shrink)

How do teenage girls articulate sexism in an era where gender injustice has been constructed as a thing of the past? Our article addresses this question by qualitatively exploring Canadian girls’ experiences of being caught between the postfeminist belief that gender equality has been achieved and the realities of their lives in school, which include incidents of sexism in their classrooms, their social worlds, and their projected futures. This analysis takes place in relation to two celebratory postfeminist narratives: Girl Power, (...) where girls are told they can do, be, and have anything they want, and Successful Girls, where girls are told they are surpassing boys in schools and workplaces. We argue that these postfeminist narratives have made naming sexism in schools difficult for girls because they are now seen to “have it all.” Utilizing Foucault’s law of the tactical polyvalence of discourse, this article analyzes girls’ contradictory engagement with postfeminism in order to both show its importance in girls’ lives, and its instability as a narrative that can adequately explain gender injustice. (shrink)

Abstract:Critics often misinterpret Beckett’s Worstward Ho as being about the phenomenology of presence. The narrator, however, engages not with things that exist but, instead, the process of imaginative conjuring. The procedure resembles Sartre’s phenomenological method in The Imaginary and Beckett’s fictional depiction of the imagination serves as a corrective to Sartre’s “essential poverty” of the image—its lack of context. Worstward Ho demonstrates instead the image’s polyvalent contextual compatibility, which explains not only the referential ambivalence of Beckett’s work, but also the (...) truth function of fiction itself, wherein the imaginary particular is amenable to general insights into the real. (shrink)

Discourses of public education reform, like that exemplified within the Queensland Government's future vision document, Queensland State Education‐2010 , position schooling as a panacea to pervasive social instability and a means to achieve a new consensus. However, in unravelling the many conflicting statements that conjoin to form education policy and inform related literature , it becomes clear that education reform discourse is polyvalent . Alongside visionary statements that speak of public education as a vehicle for social justice are the visionary (...) or those reflecting neoliberal individualism and a conservative politics. In this paper, it is argued that the latter coagulate to form strategic discursive practices which work to secure dominant relations of power. Further, discussion of the characteristics needed by the ‘ideal’ future citizen of Queensland reflect efforts to ‘tame change through the making of the child’ . The casualties of this vision and the refusal to investigate the pathologies of ‘traditional’ schooling are the children who, for whatever reason, do not conform to the norm of the desired school child as an ‘ideal’ citizen‐in‐the‐making and who become relegated to alternative educational settings. (shrink)

Smart city discourses often invoke the Panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and popularly theorized by Michel Foucault, as a model for understanding the social impact of AI technologies. This framing focuses attention almost exclusively on the negative ramifications of Urban AI, correlating ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, and data consolidation with AI development, and positioning technologies themselves as the driving factor shaping privacy, sociality, equity, access, and autonomy in the city. This paper describes an alternative diagram for Urban AI—the (...) Polyopticon: a distributed, polyvalent, multi-modal network of synthetic intelligences. It posits that fourth industrial revolution technologies change the political, social, and psychodynamic relationships of sentience and witness in the city, shifting the effects of watching and watched beyond the exclusive domain of top-down surveillance and discipline. The Polyopticon poses a more expansive and ambivalent spectrum of possibilities for Urban AI scenarios, one that undermines the totalizing, singular, and cerebral notion of intelligence that so often characterizes Urban AI and smart city critiques. (shrink)

The random nature of immunoglobulin gene segment rearrangement inevitably leads to the generation of self‐reactive B cells. Avoidance of destructive autoimmune reactions is necessary in order to maintain physiological homeostasis. However, current central and peripheral tolerance concepts fail to explain the massive number of autoantibody‐borne autoimmune diseases. Moreover, recent studies have shown that in physiological mouse models autoreactive B cells were neither clonally deleted nor kept in an anergic state, but were instead able to mount autoantibody responses. We propose that (...) activation of autoreactive B cells is induced by polyvalent autoantigen complexes that can occur under physiological conditions. Repeated encounter of autoantigen complexes leads to the production of affinity‐matured autoreactive IgM that protects its respective self‐targets from degradation. We refer to this novel mechanism as adaptive tolerance. This article discusses the discovery of adaptive tolerance and the unexpected role of high affinity IgM autoantibodies. (shrink)

La noción de sujeto es un concepto polivalente, múltiple, sobredeterminado, en suma, problemático. Con tal de contribuir a su esclarecimiento, se discute el lugar y estatuto del sujeto a partir de sus respectivos procesos de constitución, tanto en Jürgen Habermas como en Michel Foucault. Se examina, fundamentalmente, la relación del sujeto con el lenguaje y con la historia. A propósito de la constitución subjetiva se distinguen modalidades productivas altamente diferentes, que, a su vez, ponen en juego conceptos teóricos divergentes, dando (...) origen a modalidades subjetivas contrastadas, con posibilidades y vías de acción sumamente discordantes. Recuperando ciertos conceptos de la Teoría Crítica, se propone pensar en un tipo de subjetividad dialógica que recoja estas diferencias sin anularlas o ignorarlas. The notion of subject is a multiple, polyvalent, overdetermined concept, in short, a problematic concept. Aiming at its clarification the place statute of the subject is discussed starting with the consideration of its respective processes of constitution in so much in Jürgen Habermas as in Michel Foucault. It is examined, fundamentally, the relation of the subject toward language and history. By the way of the subjective constitution highly different productive modalities are distinguished, that, at the same time, imply divergent theoretical concepts, causing contrasted subjective modalities, with extremely discordant possibilities and ways of action. Recovering certain concepts of the Critical Theory there is proposed a type of dialogical subjectivity, that collects these differences without annulling them or to ignore them. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

A special issue of_ New German Critique_ The posthumous publication of Theodor W. Adorno’s works on music continues to reveal the special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking. These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works, including the sociology of musical genre, the historical transformation of music from the "heroic" or high-bourgeois era to late (...) modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with renewed vigor, the question of Adorno’s _Aktualität_—his polyvalent, untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual relationship between the present and the past. Contributors Daniel K. L. Chua, Lydia Goehr, Peter E. Gordon, Martin Jay, Brian Kane, Max Paddison, Alexander Rehding, Fred Rush, Martin Scherzinger. (shrink)

Marking the 50th anniversary of one among this philosopher's most distinguished pieces, Blumenberg's Rhetoric proffers a decidedly dialogic and diversified interaction with the essay polyvalently entitled 'Anthropological Approach to the Actuality and Topicality (or Currency, Relevance) of Rhetoric' (Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik), first published in 1971. Following Blumenberg's lead, the contributors consider and tackle their topics rhetorically, 'in utramque partem vel in plures'--treating (inter alia) the variegated discourses of Phenomenology, the History of Philosophy, Anthropology, and the téchne (...) itself from a plurality of viewpoints. Quasi in actu--as a mise en abyme of this rhetorical method par excellence--said accent on approaching any matter polyperspectivally is reflected in the proceedings of the live(ly) discussions having taken place in preparation for the present volume. Along with the diachronically extensive, disciplinarily diverse essays, this publication of the actual academic interplay--notably in the current lingua franca--will facilitate, and is to conduce to, further scholarship with respect to Blumenberg and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

In this article, I will elucidate the Indian government’s two primary discourses concerning yoga since 2014 as right-wing Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu Nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have interacted with both international and domestic audiences. These discourses can be broadly grouped into two categories, or what I refer to as Modi and the BJP’s “double discourse”: Yoga as a global soft power solution to counter the Global North’s climate change privilege on the international (...) stage and Yoga as biopower for the advancement of India’s depressed economy on the domestic front. Relying on yoga’s polyvalent character, Modi and the BJP are able to frame yoga in these two particular ways—which together signal their commitment to neoliberal economic ideology—by drawing from historical and contemporaneous precedents which I also outline in the article. I conclude with a brief visit to the preparations for the BJP’s 2019 International Day of Yoga, where this double discourse becomes most evident in the two divergent themes announced for the event. (shrink)

This book is about the articulation of ethics in the Qur'an and the tafsir tradition. Based on an examination of several apparently problematic Qur'anic narrative pericopes and how the exegetes grappled with them, the book demonstrates that the moral world of the Qur'an is polyvalent and non-linear, owing, above all, to its intrinsic ethical antinomies and textual ambiguities. That is, the book contends that paradox and uncertainty are both constituents of the Qur'an's ethical architectonics, and that through these constituents the (...) Qur'an charts a system of ethics that seeks to tread in the midst of a non-ideal world rife with uncertainty. The book also argues that the tafsir tradition tends to erode the hermeneutical openness of the Qur'an and, thereby, limits the Qur'an's ethical potential. The book, thus, advances our understanding of Qur'anic ethics and contributes to the field of tafsir studies and to the scholarship on Qur'anic hermeneutics. (shrink)

Art education literature has not given great deal of attention to that which constitutes the very content of art education, i.e. art. This reluctance to deal with art seems justified, given that there exists no overall accepted definition or interpretation of what art actually is. In this paper, we argue that, despite the difficulty, it is absolutely necessary to try to understand and reflect on the multidimensional and polyvalent phenomenon of art. We claim that without a deep understanding of the (...) nature, the role and scope of art, the field of art education can not be adequately delineated. Without this understanding, questions about the kind of objects and values which should be studied within art education are held over, its content risks being hetero-defined and its special contribution underestimated. Beginning with an understanding of art as a complex phenomenon, deeply implicated in historical and cultural transformations and changes, this paper argues for the necessity of a critical rethinking of art. We try to show that the question “what is art?” is a key question in order to draw attention to the multiplicity and the open nature of the artistic phenomenon, upon which our educational choices will be found. Our object is not to impose one and only answer as a unique and unwavering option, but to describe an educational condition which recognizes the multiple practices and the many points of view as parts of the organized activity and knowledge about art, while putting them under critical examination . (shrink)

The German poet Barbara Köhler's 2007 poem-cycle Niemands Frau [Nobody's Wife] is more than a feminist response to Homer's Odyssey. In shifting the focus from the escapades of the hero Odysseus to the web of women characters that populates Homer's epic poem – Nausicaa, Circe, the Sirens, Helen, Ino Leucothea, the shades of the dead women whom Odysseus meets in Hades, and “Nobody’s wife” Penelope – Köhler also undertakes a grammatical shift: from the masculine singular pronoun “er” to the polyvalent (...) pronoun “sie” that denotes the feminine singular, the gender-unmarked plural and the formal “you.” “Sie” acts as the “quantum linguistic particle” that transports the reader from a world analogous to that conceived by Newtonian physics into a quantum universe of plural probabilities. Köhler's work explores the difference in power dynamics that results from this transformation, generating intriguing ways of reconceiving subjectivity, relationality, rationality, and authorship. Taken at their word, the poems open up a prospect of no longer insisting on the sovereign individual subject and his linear modes of narration, inheritance, calculation and grammatical proposition. (shrink)

This essay is based on two premises. The first concerns the vision of writing proposed by Plato in Phaedrus and especially the conception of philosophical writing as a maieutic game. The structurally polyvalent way in which Plato approaches philosophical issues also emerges in the dialogues. The second concerns the birth and the development of historical analysis in parallel with the birth of philosophy. On this basis the text investigates a series of data about the relationship between Plato and "the facts". (...) 1) If we compare the Apology of Socrates with other sources, we discover a series of important “games” that Plato performs to achieve the results he proposes. 2) The famous passage of Phaedo 96A-102A, which concludes with the Ideas and with a reference to the Principles, expresses definite judgments on the Presocratics. 3) In his works Plato attributes to the sophists some merits, even if the outcome of their contri-bution is overall negative. 4) However, in the fourth complicated diairesis of the Sophist, there is a "sophist of noble stock", an educator who can only be Socrates. 5) Plato in the Sophist shows the weakness of the Gigantomachy, and proposes an adequate definition of the beings: the power of undergoing or acting. This reveals, before the Philebus and the Timaeus, the dynamic and dialectical nature of his philosophy In summary, a multifocal vision emerges, adapted to an intrinsically complex reality. (shrink)

The presented study uses the Lukan parable of the Good Samaritan (10, 27-35) in order to present the shifts in the meaning depending on the reading contexts. After the basic structure of the original meaning is established, the pragmatic nuances of the parable are illustrated. The research subsequently throws light on the paradigmatic interpretations in both the medieval and the contemporary contexts. It concludes by exemplifying that the polyvalence of meaning is not only dependent upon the genuine literary structure (...) of the parable, but also on the innate ability of the Christian organism (Church) to actualize certain features of the sacred text in the concrete life-settings. (shrink)

Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit, and the Unspoken in Rousseau prend acte d'un grand nombre de publications ayant trait à l'analyse par Rousseau des langues et du langage, de la parole par rapport à l'écriture, de la voix (y compris la voix de la nature). Mais ce volume se consacre tout particulièrement au fonctionnement et aux effets du silence, de l'implicite et du non-dit dans la pensée de Rousseau. Son approche est à la fois polyvalente et cohérente, (...) et ses réflexions sur le silence sont associées à d'autres préoccupations esthétiques, politiques, et morales de son œuvre. Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit, and the Unspoken in Rousseau capitalizes on a great number of publications dealing with Rousseau's analysis of languages and language, speech versus writing, of voice (including the voice of nature). But this volume is particularly dedicated to the study of the functioning and the effects of silence, the implicit and the unspoken in Rousseau's thought. His approach is both polyvalent and consistent, and his reflections on silence are associated with other aesthetic, political, and moral concerns in his work. (shrink)

Fiction is an important tool in an artist/designer/developer’s vocabulary, but its usage is polyvalent. Speculative research in this article introduces the ‘rudiment’ to embrace the undeveloped and the improvisory phases of research practice. Fiction is used to reflect on the ways practicing designers and developers might already engage in misanthropic thinking – involving automated technologies. Tracing the misanthropic agencies in relation to automated technologies contributes to expanding the ways designers and developers reflect on the technical potential of their designs, with (...) whom they are designing (and for) and the way they understand their reflexive self. Bringing together Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist (1999) and its account of an elevator crash, their design and maintenance, with a narrative account of software agents enables an investigation into the promises made through a design-for-the-prevention-of-failure imperative. These examples highlight the relation between physical and non-physical failures such as failures to connect or to create intimacy. Those who contribute to designing in this article get caught up in configuring misanthropic agencies involving themselves, the designed artefact and the spaces they both inhabit be that an elevator in a housing block, or a sexbot in an online chat room. I will argue that the misanthropic agencies of automated technologies can have a confining impact on our emergent modes of design. Automated software operating in virtual spaces are confining in as much as they attempt to connect things to exploit the de-personalized aspects of automated, misanthropic agency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 42-71 [Access article in PDF] Narrative as Argument in Indian Philosophy: The Astavakra Gita as Multivalent Narrative Scott R. Stroud Department of Philosophy Temple University Indian philosophy has often been described as radically different in nature than Western philosophy due to its frequent use of narrative structure. By employing poetic elements in their use of language, such texts attempt to convey deep metaphysical truths (...) and philosophical positions about reality that are in many cases quite different from Western ideas (Babbili 1997). Often, these ways of conveying truths are an integral part of that truth. One particularly useful form is narrative, taking instantiations such as a dialogue between characters. Philosophical dialogues such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Astavakra Gita (also known as the Astavakra Samhita ) use a portrayed conversation involving a guru or deity to convey didactic lessons and values to the receptive audience, both ancient and modern. As texts such as the Bhagavad Gita gain in popularity and circulation in the Western world (Minor 1982; Paine 1998; Sharpe 1985), philosophical and rhetorical inquiry must be extended to explain how these texts function in an argumentative philosophical context.Stroud (2002a, 2002b) has advanced the idea that such ancient Indian narratives argue through the use of contradictions and conflicting value structures;1 he labels such texts as multivalent narratives since their use of contradictory value structures compel audience members to reconstruct the narrative's message and allow for the acceptance of novel views. Multivalent narratives are to be distinguished from polysemic narratives (Fiske 1986) in that the latter concern different audience members finding a preferred position from the ambiguous story. Polysemic narratives involve the difference in meaning of the same story to different auditors. Condit criticizes this notion of polysemic narratives and advances her own concept of polyvalent narratives. The concept of a polyvalent narrative involves different auditors understanding the same story in similar ways, but differing in how they evaluate its message. Condit's research with a popular television [End Page 42] show and two students from radically different backgrounds on abortion finds that they understood what occurred in a very similar fashion; they differed in that they "disagree[d] about the valuation of those denotations to such a degree that they produce[d] noticeably different interpretations" (1989, 106). Thus, the auditors differ as to their response to a certain story and how it treats their own cherished values. Stroud (2002a) provides a thorough justification as to why the concepts of polysemic and polyvalent narratives do not capture what can be called multivalent narratives. The important factor in distinguishing these three concepts is that the third involves contradictions at the level of values within a text and the reader's necessitated activity of trying to synthesize or reconcile such contradictions. It is this activity that is the hallmark of multivalent narratives.This employment of multivalent narrative offers a challenge to familiar Western conceptions of argumentative discourse and demands further investigation. This study explores the ways a particular text, the Astavakra Gita, argues its philosophical positions to its audience of potential "pupils."2 Using the insights provided by theories of narrative and reader-response theory, I will argue that this text advances its claims not through overt syllogism or validity claim redemption, but through textual indeterminacy between the audience's disposition and the foregrounded theme of non-individuation in the text. This tension, increased by certain textual devices, results in consistency building by the audience, which enables the transcendence of these two viewpoints (reader and text); it is this experience, not claim, that the Astavakra Gita seems to be advancing to any given audience.In order to explore this interpretation of this text and its argumentative relationship to an audience, insights from both literary studies and rhetorical theory must be used in laying a foundation. The work of Wolfgang Iser (1980, 1989, 1993) and Walter Fisher (1987) will assume roles of particular importance in this endeavor. Iser's theory of aesthetic response provides a useful description of the phenomenological process of reading such a... (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the philosophical apprehension of the face through art history in order to signal a moment of rupture in the contemporary times of the face and its signifying relationship to the subject. Drawing from Francis Galton’s nineteenth century photographic experiments on analytical portraiture, one sees how the face when conceived as an atlas, functions very differently for the subject and its recognition than when understood as a mere image. With the advent of futuristic technology like AI (...) and machine learning feeding in much of our technocratic imaginations, where does the face and its constituency lie? Modernist artists found in the face, various motivations of their own – it was a field to explore their own subjectivities and those inclined towards the transcendental managed to liberate the subject from its image i.e. the face. This manner of freeing the subject of its image and thinking of the face as a structure of the subject, has potential to help us imagine new kinds of polyvalent subjectivities, as can be seen in works of contemporary artist- philosophers like Hito Steyerl. This paper articulates this journey of the face which began its story as the constitutive technology of the subject in the 19th century but today find its best reckoning as an insufficient one, in our quest for understanding new post-humanist subjectivities. (shrink)

When assessing North American students' oral participation in classes, should all students be subject to the same evaluation criteria or should teachers make reasonable allowances for Asian students practicing humility? How do we weigh the promotion of 'courage' through character education initiatives with traditional Asian dispositions? Viewing Asian humility in Western classrooms and as it rubs up against liberal principles of equality or justice, and a virtue ethic raises a number of philosophical questions around authenticity, polyvalence, and relativity. I (...) approach first through the lens of liberal philosophy as the 'dilemma of diversity' meets a boundary with communitarianism, and then through the contextualist lenses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault. Drawing on Tully's political philosophy, I inspect humility as embedded in language-games and then open it to revision through comparative history, inviting participants in the teacher's game of assessment to renegotiate the rules: a process complicated by their reticence to speak up. I also use Medina and Scheman's political reading of Wittgenstein to discuss how teachers can discern humility as performative silence within the classroom, distinguishing between genealogical accounts that show how comportments could be otherwise from perspicuous inspection of interconnected language-games in current educational settings. (shrink)

In this article, I briefly sketch the “right to opacity” that Édouard Glissant details in Poetics of Relation and situate it as an ethical imperative with Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, contrasting the distinctive contributions of opacity and ambiguity toward ethical-political living. I apply the principles of opacity and ambiguity toward one of Beauvoir’s most political and only co-written works, Pour Djamila Boupacha. I argue that the polyvalent use of the Islamic veil during the Algerian War for Independence reveals (...) the ethical application of opacity and ambiguity. Additionally, the veil clarifies the political stakes of gendered assumptions and racial hierarchy across geographies, positing a false body neutrality that obfuscates the violent global War on Terror. (shrink)

The article presents the results of an analysis of the academic dispute about the scholarly ethos, conducted at the time of intense higher education reforms in Poland. Previous analyses of the academic debate on the change of the traditional university towards its entrepreneurial organization emphasize the polarization, that is, the criticism or affirmation of neoliberal reforms. The presented research proves that this discourse loses its dichotomous power when it focuses on ethical issues. The analysis shows the ‘polyvalence’ and ‘strategic (...) integration’ of discourse in the Foucauldian sense of the terms. Firstly, the issue of the traditional scholarly ethos is clearly present both among the opponents and supporters of the current changes in higher education. Secondly, both critical and affirmative discourses refer to the traditional ethos, i.e. they do not attempt to develop any new ethopoiesis, which may be surprising especially in the case of the latter. Instead, they use a ‘peculiar reversal’, pointing to factors located outside the university and yet affecting academic standards. Thirdly, individual attributes of the traditional ethos are taken over by neoliberal discourse, which modifies them and adjusts them to its own purposes. The term ‘ethicalization’ of higher education reform describes ethical problematizations of the contemporary university transformation. (shrink)

The theory of notitiae naturales or κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι was part of the ancient Stoic epistemology. It served as precondition of any knowledge. Within the framework of the humanist rediscovery of ancient sources this theory became an important aspect of Philipp Melanchthon’s theological anthropology. This paper examines the polyvalent perspectives of the theory of notitiae naturales in Melanchthon’s philosophy and the role it played among Lutheran and Calvinist scholars, particularly regarding Rom 1: 19, where Paul stated some kind of a natural (...) knowledge of God. The idea of notitiae communes or “common notions” as an a priori precondition of knowledge was widely spread both on the continent and in England in early modernity. It came to an end by John Locke’s critique in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (shrink)