With a foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a chapter by Irigaray responding to her commentators, this book is an essential text for those in social ...

_A transdisciplinary reader on Luce Irigaray's reading and re-writing of Ancient Greek texts._.

Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach to exploring the limitations of (...) non-ideal theory in its ability to respond to and redress the continuing harms done to Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism, including by outlining non-ideal theory’s relationship to a colonial politics of recognition. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

The medical drama and its central character, the doctor-hero have been a mainstay of popular television. House M.D. offers a new (and problematic) iteration of the doctor-hero. House eschews the generic conventions of the “television doctor” by being neither the idealized television doctor of the past, nor the more recent competent but often fallible physicians in entertainment texts. Instead, his character is a fragmented text which privileges the biomedical over the personal or emotional with the ultimate goal of scientifically uncovering (...) and resolving instances of disease. This article examines the implicit and explicit messages in House M.D. and critically analyzes both the show and its lead character in relation to the traditional medical drama genre that highlights the “doctor-hero” as the central character. While at first House seems to completely violate narrative and generic norms, ultimately the program provides a new form that reinforces the presence of the doctor-hero, but highlights House’s character as the central figure who is personally and interpersonally problematic but biomedically effective. (shrink)

Articles on Buddism written by a wife of the famous Russian scholar Nicholas Roerich.

This article aims to analyze the manifestation of the universal axiological cultural category of sinfulness in the media space. The study's subject was this category's properties and functions, which are actualized when represented in digital media. In accordance with this goal, we used such methods as continuous sampling and observation of the facts of the representation of cultural categories, which allowed us to determine the linguistic material for analysis and a statistical method for quantitative analysis. The content analysis of the (...) units selected for the study was used to identify the role, properties, and main functions of the universal axiological category of sinfulness. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that, for the first time, the universal nature of the category of sinfulness, its functions and properties, represented in media publications, were considered. Main conclusions: the study of the facts of actualization of the category of sinfulness in the media space allowed us to assert that the phenomenon under study is associated with topics such as politics, crime (in news media), and the assessment of citizens' behavior and morality (in religious media). These facts indicate that the primary function of the category of sinfulness is regulatory, aimed at evaluating and correcting the actions of members of society, as well as creating public opinion. In addition, the article proves that the category of sinfulness has transcultural properties, penetrating and being realized in all cultural layers, from local to global. In these cultural layers, the nature of the category acquires a different shade. In particular, at the global level, the category of sinfulness acquires the meaning of guilt, which is a consequence of the significant influence of Western culture on the global culture. It seems that the revealed properties of the category indicate its high importance for modern Russian society. The established regulatory function will make it possible to apply this category, including within the framework of regulating and managing public opinion and promoting basic values. (shrink)

Italia no es recuerdo para mí, la tengo siempre presente. Y será siempre así". Con estas palabras la filósofa y exiliada española María Zambrano recordaba su paso por la ciudad eterna: tres estancias -la más larga, entre 1953 y 1964- que marcaron profundamente su vida y su pensamiento. Los años romanos fueron años de escritura y conversación, de encuentros con el mundo intelectual italiano y con otros exiliados españoles. En Italia Zambrano desarrolló gran parte de sus reflexiones sobre la persona, (...) los sueños y el tiempo: ¿cómo llegar a ser persona?, y, ¿qué papel juegan el tiempo y los sueños tanto en la creación literaria y artística como en la configuración de las sociedades humanas? Roma le ofreció tiempo para pensar y repensar el exilio, para pensar y repensar España: la España del pasado, pero también la España de los sueños fracasados y marginados. Roma fue, en definitiva, la ciudad de los sueños, de los tiempos pero también de los inevitables destiempos impuestos por el exilio. La ciudad de las ruinas y de la esperanza. Y de los gato. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

Das Verstehen legt Wittgenstein einem Ich bei: Einer versteht, indem er Zeichen anwendet. Anwendbare Zeichen sind Symbole: Sie werden bedeutsam, wenn sie in Zusammenhang mit anderen Zeichen gebracht werden und eine Funktion in der kognitiven oder praktischen Aneignung der Welt erfüllen. Symbole gehören zu Symbolsystemen und können als Vorschriften für symbolische, d.h. semiotische und insbesondere logische, Operationen mit Zeichen aufgefasst werden. Die Veränderung der Wittgensteinschen Auffassung des Verstehens besteht vor allem im Anerkennen der Erfahrung der Sozialisation als einer der wichtigsten (...) Voraussetzungen der sinnvollen Anwendung von Zeichen. Diese Veränderung, ihre Quellen und Wirkungen sind das Thema dieses Buches. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

Bare conditionals, I argue, exhibit Conditional Duality in that when they appear in downward entailing environments they differ from bare conditionals elsewhere in having existential rather than universal force. Two recalcitrant phenomena are shown to find a new explanation under this thesis: bare conditionals under only, and bare conditionals in the scope of negative nominal quantifiers, or what has come to be known as Higginbotham’s puzzle. I also consider how bare conditionals behave when embedded under negation, arguing that such conditionals (...) often involve denial negation. One important conclusion that emerges from the discussion is that an account of bare conditionals that validates Conditional Excluded Middle is not warranted. By limiting the scope of the strict analysis Conditional Duality is also a way of maintaining such an account. (shrink)

Enduring social inequalities in settler colonial societies are not an accident. They are produced and maintained by the self-repairing structural features and dynastic character of systemic racism and its intersecting oppressions. Using methods from diverse anticolonial liberation movements and systems theory, Structural Violence theorizes the existence of adaptive and self-replicating historical formations that underwrite cultures of violence in settler colonial societies. Corresponding epistemic forces tied to profit and wealth accumulation for beneficiary groups often go untracked. The account offered here argues (...) that these epistemic forces play a central role in producing and maintaining massive health inequalities and the maldistribution of disease burdens―including those associated with sexual violence―for marginalized populations. It upends the widespread view that structural racism can be dismantled without addressing gendered violence. It also advocates for a theory of change rooted in reparative action and models of structural competency that respond to the built-in design of structural violence and the ecosystems of impunity that allow it to thrive. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

It has been a long-standing puzzle that Negative Polarity Items appear to split into two subvarieties when their effect on the interpretation of questions is taken into account: while questions with any and ever can be used as unbiased requests of information, questions with so-called `minimizers', i.e. idioms like lift a finger and the faintest idea, are always biased towards a negative answer (cf. Ladusaw 1979). Focusing on yes/no questions, this paper presents a solution to this puzzle. Specifically it is (...) shown that in virtue of containing even (cf. Heim 1984), minimizers, unlike any, trigger a presupposition, which reduces the set of the possible answers to a question to the singleton containing the negative answer. (shrink)

While separate pieces of research found parents offer toddlers cues to express that they are joking and pretending, and that toddlers and preschoolers understand intentions to joke and pretend, it is not yet clear whether parents and toddlers consider joking and pretending to be distinct concepts. This is important as distinguishing these two forms of non-literal acts could open a gateway to understanding the complexities of the non-literal world, as well as the complexities of intentions in general. Two studies found (...) parents offer explicit cues to help 16- to 24-month-olds distinguish pretending and joking. Across an action play study and a verbal play study parents showed more disbelief and less belief through their actions and language when joking versus pretending. Similarly, toddlers showed less belief through their actions, and older toddlers showed less belief through their language. Toddlers' disbelief could be accounted for by their response to parents' language and actions. Thus, these studies reveal a mechanism by which toddlers learn to distinguish joking and pretending. Parents offer explicit cues to distinguish these intentions, and toddlers use these cues to guide their own behaviors, which in turn allows toddlers to distinguish these intentional contexts. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

Since March 2020, many countries throughout the world have been in lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Italy, the quarantine began on March 9, 2020, and containment measures were partially reduced only on May 4, 2020. The quarantine experience has a significant psychological impact at all ages but can have it above all on adolescents who cannot go to school, play sports, and meet friends. In this scenario, this study aimed to provide a general overview of the perceived (...) risk related to COVID-19 and the psychological experience of quarantine in a large sample of Italian adolescents. 978 adolescents (males = 339; females = 639) living in 13 Italian regions and attending upper secondary school (age range: 13–20, M = 16.57, SD = 1.20), responded to an internet-based questionnaire about perceived health risk related to COVID-19, knowledge and information on measures to control the pandemic, beliefs and opinions on stage two of the quarantine, and psychological experiences related to quarantine. 31.1% of the participants lived in "red zones," which are places where the government has imposed stricter measures of containment due to exponential and uncontrolled growth in contagion cases compared to other areas in Italy. According to our results, Italian adolescents had a low perception of risk of COVID-19. Perceived comparative susceptibility and perceived seriousness were also very low. However, they were aware of the restriction measures necessary to contain the spread of the virus, and they agreed with the limitations imposed by the government. Females and adolescents living in a “red zone” showed more significant psychological negative feelings about the quarantine experience. However, no significant differences were found about the regions where the teenagers of our sample live and the other variables related to the COVID-19 experience. This is very interesting data, leading us to hypothesize that the participants' negative feelings may be more related to the adolescent period than to the pandemic itself. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is remembered as a paramount example of the “cultural cold wars.” In this paper, I discuss the ways in which this powerful transnational organization sought to promote “science studies” as a distinct – and politically relevant – area of expertise, and part of the CCF broader agenda to offer a renewed framework for liberalism. By means of its Study Groups, international conferences and its periodicals, such as Minerva, the Congress developed into an influential forum for (...) examining the ways Big Science impacted the relations between science, society, and politics, thus constituting a semi-institutional niche for Science Studies before its professionalization within academia during the 1970s. I argue that the Congress contributed to the construction of public space in which the relations between science, society and politics were debated, and science was reconceptualized as a social activity. The vision of “science studies” the CCF-associated intellectuals promulgated was different from the science studies we know today. Yet, this alternative vision, in which the issues of science politics appeared inseparable from those of science policy, science organization, and science governance, constituted the “pre-history” of science studies today. (shrink)

Over the years, researchers of numerous fields have suggested different criteria and conventions for the transcription of oral samples. Current practice by workers who carry out transcriptions in the Spanish legal system is not standardized and does not follow any general criteria. Indeed, the standards followed by professionals in this context are characterized by their heterogeneity. This contribution highlights the benefits of adhering to a particular set of criteria and conventions agreed upon by 115 transcribers to make the transcription process (...) more efficient, improve its comprehension and add to the value of transcriptions as key documents within the legal system that may have a direct impact on the right of the parties involved. (shrink)