Despite increasing popularity and intensive worldwide use, few studies have assessed the validity and factorial structure of the Heartland Forgiveness Scale. However, scientific literature showed that the original factorial structure of the HFS was not fully replicated and—in addition—the Italian translation is still lacking. To fill this gap, this study aims to extend evidence about the original HFS factorial validity by analyzing the Italian version. The final sample was composed of 523 randomly enrolled participants [139 males, 384 females ] aged (...) from 18 to 82 years who completed the Italian version of the HFS. The confirmatory factor analysis showed good fit indices for the original hierarchical factor solution and a significant decrease in model fit was found for all of the competing models. Also, the Italian version of the HFS revealed good reliability and very good psychometrical properties. Findings suggest that the Italian version of the HFS can be considered a reliable and good psychometrically based instrument for the assessment of dispositional forgiveness of the Self, Other, and Situation. (shrink)

In this article, we articulate and defend a contextual approach to political theory. According to what we shall call ‘iterative contextualism’, context has two important roles to play in determining what is required by justice. First, it is through the exploration and evaluation of multiple contexts that general principles are devised, revised and refined. Second, significant weight should be given to the norms to be found in specific contexts because the people affected by those norms strongly identify with them. Having (...) said this, the application of general principles to particular contexts may still result in recommendations which deviate to some degree from the prevailing norms. In this case, we shall argue that although justice requires something other than what local norms say, what is required is likely to be intimated by the relevant context. Thus, whilst considerations of identification act as significant constraints on iterative contextualists’ thinking, the idea of intimations provides them with an important resource. (shrink)

It has been argued that, in political theory and political practice, a concern with the distribution of economic opportunities and resources has recently been displaced by a preoccupation with the acknowledgement of cultural identities and differences. In their jointly authored book, Redistribution or Recognition?, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth present their very different reactions to this development. While Fraser argues that redistribution and recognition are two mutually irreducible elements of an account of social justice, Honneth contends that a suitably differentiated (...) account of recognition can provide the basis of a theory of justice on its own. This article critically assesses the relative merits of these two positions by focusing on their accounts of the nature of capitalism, the sort of social theories that are needed in light of these accounts, and the moral philosophies associated with these social theories. This assessment leads to a number of conclusions about the proper relationship between recognition and redistribution in a theory of social justice. (shrink)

Richard Rorty is one of the most influential and provocative figures in contemporary intellectual life. He argues that many of philosophy's traditional concerns are redundant, and that the goal of inquiry should not be truth but human betterment. In this collection a distinguished team of scholars grapples with the implications of his writings for social and political thought. Avoiding mindless adulation or ritual denunciation, they offer careful but critical investigations of the meaning of Rorty's work for a range of important (...) issues. Topics explored include anti-foundationalism; irony and commitment; justice; liberalism and utopianism; reason and aesthetics; humanism and anti-humanism; the Holocaust; the theory of international relations; social democracy and the pragmatist tradition. Each essay is followed by a reply written for this volume by Rorty. The volume also includes a substantial essay by Rorty on 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty'. This volume is indispensable for any reader interested in Rorty's work, or in contemporary debates in social, political or ethical theory. Contributors: Molly Cochran; Daniel Conway; Matthew Festenstein; Norman Geras; John Horton; David Owen; Richard Rorty; Kate Soper; Simon Thompson. (shrink)

During the pandemic lockdown period, residents had to stay at home and increased stress and other mental health problems have been associated with the lockdown period. Since most public parks were closed, community parks within gated residential areas became the most important green space in Chinese cities, and the use of such space might help to reduce the residents’ stress levels. This study aimed to investigate to what extent urban residents in China used community parks, engaged in outdoor activity during (...) the lockdown period and if the use of such spaces helped to reduce their stress levels. An online questionnaire survey was carried out from 23 March to 23 April 2020. Ordinary Least Squares regression was used to analyse the association between community park use, outdoor activity, willingness to engage in outdoor activity, and stress level. All results have been further analysed by two-sampled t-test to explore the difference between young and old age groups. We found that the overall self-reported stress level of the respondents was relatively moderate during the lockdown period. Respondents had generally reduced their use of community parks and engagement in outdoor activity. There was no significant association between stress level and the use of community parks or the engagement in outdoor activities. However, we found that older people showed much lower stress levels, used community parks more frequently, and engaged in more outdoor activities than younger adults. The findings suggest that outdoor activities and spatial characteristics in urban China differ from Western studies and advance the need to integrate the stress management role of community parks with urban green space policy to optimise the use of community parks blended in with everyday life, particularly during the lockdown period. (shrink)

Theory and Practice in the Politics of Recognition and Misrecognition Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-9 DOI 10.1007/s11158-012-9181-7 Authors Wendy Martineau, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, 34 Tyndalls Park Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TY, UK Nasar Meer, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Lipman Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST UK Simon Thompson, Department of Arts, University of the West of England, Frenchay, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK Journal Res Publica Online ISSN (...) 1572-8692 Print ISSN 1356-4765 Journal Volume Volume 18 Journal Issue Volume 18, Number 1. (shrink)

In this article, my aim is to consider under what circumstances, and for what reasons, individuals may freely choose not to speak hatefully about others. Even if not threatened with legal sanction, why might they decide not to say something which they think they have good reason to say? My suggestion will be that there are various pro tanto reasons for individuals to restrain themselves from saying what they wanted to say. To be specific, I shall argue that such reasons (...) fall into three analytically distinct categories, which I shall describe as normative codes of civility, ethics and morality. Thus each of these codes may provide different sorts of reasons for not engaging in hate speech. My hope is that the results of this investigation may usefully inform a strategy which aims to combat such speech without resource to the law. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that justice and democracy stand in a circular relationship: just outcomes emerge from democratic deliberations, but only if such deliberations meet the standards of justice. I develop my argument by engaging in a critical dialogue with Nancy Fraser. Contending that she fails to deal with the danger that unfair deliberative procedures and inadequate norms of justice may reinforce one another, I show what a satisfactory account of democratic justice would look like. Going beyond Fraser’s theory, (...) I maintain that although justice and democracy do form a circular relationship, it is essential to give the former greater weight than the latter. I finesse my account by showing what this differential weighting would entail in practice. The result is an account of democratic justice that is significantly different from and a marked improvement on that of Fraser. (shrink)

Over the past decade, Nancy Fraser has developed a sophisticated theory of social justice. At its heart lies the principle of parity of participation, according to which all adult members of society must be in a position to interact with one another as peers. This article examines some obstacles to the implementation of that principle. Concentrating on the contemporary status order, it asks two specific questions. Is it possible to produce a precise account of how the status order might need (...) to be ordered for parity of participation to be realized? And is it possible to derive a detailed and coherent political strategy capable of achieving such parity within the status order? The argument of this article is that, while Fraser has recognized the difficulties that the complexity of the contemporary status order poses for achieving parity of participation, she has nevertheless underestimated those difficulties. If parity of participation requires status equality, important and difficult work remains to be done in delineating the nature, and demands, of equality in the contemporary status order. (shrink)

We define, in the spirit of Fenstad [2], a higher type computation theory, and show that countable recursion over the continuous functionals forms such a theory. We also discuss Hyland's proposal from [4] for a scheme with which to supplement S1-S9, and show that this augmented set of schemes fails to generate countable recursion. We make another proposal to which the methods of this section do not apply.

We show that at each type k ≥ 2, there exist c-irreducible functionals of c-r.e. degree, as defined in [Nor 1]. Our proofs are based on arguments due to Hinman, [Hin 1], and Dvornikov, [Dvo 1].

This article begins from the premise that, in contemporary conditions of immense cultural, social and ethnic diversity, a just and stable political order must be one in which all citizens are able to enjoy due recognition. In order to determine what form such a politics of recognition must take in practice, the article focuses on the case of Northern Ireland. More specifically, it examines the principle of ‘parity of esteem’ which forms the keystone of the Belfast Agreement of 1998. A (...) detailed examination of this idea is conducted by developing a contrast between it and an alternative principle of ‘due recognition’. It is contended that, despite initial impressions, parity of esteem and due recognition are not direct rivals since they aim to occupy different places in a politics of recognition. To be specific, while the former describes a vertical relationship between state and citizen, the latter depicts a horizontal relationship between citizens themselves. Building on this analysis, it is claimed that this examination of the principle of parity of esteem reveals something interesting and important both about the specific case of Northern Ireland and about the necessary features of a politics of recognition in general. (shrink)

In this article, we present a case for the recognition of multiple religions, arguing that states have a non-absolute duty to recognise religions which it is likely they should discharge along different dimensions and to different degrees. More concretely, we focus on several Western European states (or regions thereof), arguing that they would be more legitimate if they were to recognise an extensive range of faiths and ethno-religious groups. In order to make this argument, we deploy a method of iterative (...) contextualism, consisting of two interlocking steps which can be thought of as obverse halves of a hermeneutic circle. First we identify and describe two cross-contextual principles, which we call identification and discretionary recognition. Then we suggest how it may be shown that these principles are already present to a significant degree in Denmark, Finland and Alsace-Moselle – the three contexts with which we are particularly concerned here. This, then, is a normatively robust and contextually sensitive argument for the multidimensional recognition of religion by a state, and at the same time it explains how we apply the method of iterative contextualism. (shrink)

This paper responds to an article by Kevin Thompson (in the same volume) which argued that a systematic reading of the _Philosophy of Right requires that it be ontologically grounded. In response I argue that such an approach to the _Philosophy of Right is essentially based on a precritical metaphysics which Hegel could not support and that his "Logic" excludes as a viable interpretation of his thought.

This very long book sets out to track and trace the working-class men and, less commonly, women who, against the limited expectations of their social position, learned Greek and Latin as an aspiration for personal change. The ideology of the book is clear and welcome: these figures “offer us a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.” The book's twenty-five chapters explore how classics and class were linked in the educational system of Britain and (...) in its cultural performativity: Is he a gentleman? Does he have Greek? became the paradigmatic questions, as the study of classics became a sign of cultural attainment and social exclusion. This book sets out to explore the counterstory of the cobblers and shepherds who, like Jude the Obscure, fought against society's oppressiveness to access classical learning.The book's breadth is exemplary. It looks at the issue through genres and media, through different communities and national identities, through the prosopography of ragged-trousered philanthropists, beggar-lecturers, body-building performers, and through other institutions and people who helped, including adult-education teachers, kind bosses, supportive vicars, and fiery communists. This breadth, and the fascinating research that it encapsulates, will make this book a fantastic resource for future scholarship: it outlines the richness of a field that has been all too rarely explored properly. If you do not know Stephen Duck, “the thresher poet,” or Hawkie, the crutch-wielding beggar who performed from the books he sold on the streets of Glasgow, then this book is the place to the meet them. The cast list alone is worth the entrance ticket.Yet this very breadth is also the source of the book's limitations. The sheer number of cases listed, treated at similar length and depth, repeatedly conceals the complexity and even the interest of individual figures or events. So, the numerous representations of Vesuvius in shows around London in the first half of the nineteenth century—after the discoveries at Pompeii—are duly noted as a source of excitement and knowledge about antiquity, but against the recent treatment by Clare Pettitt in Serial Forms (which came out the same year) this mere noting looks desperately thin. There is little discussion of how the characters themselves talked about or negotiated class. This deficiency is particularly important for someone like Charles Kingsley, who was very active in the Chartist movement but also became Queen Victoria's chaplain and the professor of history at Cambridge. There are hilarious descriptions of Kingsley's stammering engagement with the working-class leaders he actively supported, which capture how awkward the interaction of classes could be even and especially when the participants shared a goal of transformation. (Ed Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in the Pursuit of Antiquity is good on these moments of awkwardness but is one of several books whose absence from the notes looks pointed.) The authors list cases of working men who were picked up by fashionable society as poets or scholars, many of whom were dropped almost as quickly back into penury—but the telling description of such a case in Kingsley's Alton Locke is passed over, although it reveals an acute self-consciousness about such narratives in a best-selling novel.The very structure of the book tends toward listing cases rather than analyzing them in depth. It is not clear why “Shoemaker classicists” should take up a chapter, bar there having been some. Nor is it clear why some figures are not included. John Brown was an uneducated Scottish shepherd who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was discovered by a professor, one John Pringle, when he went into a shop to buy a secondhand Greek Testament (though his own church thought this newfound and inexplicable linguistic brilliance suspicious or even satanic). Brown went on to write the wonderfully titled The Self-Interpreting Bible, which remained in print and sold very widely for more than a century after its publication in 1778—especially after it was championed by the evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. It is a pity that Brown escaped the authors’ net, but religion, one of the main reasons to learn the classical languages, is downplayed throughout this study, although its imbrication with classics is everywhere in evidence. The book, significantly enough, leads rather toward a rosy-eyed depiction of posh classical communists like Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and George Thompson, and other such heroes of the authors.The authors are much more at home in the years of ardent republicanism in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, when socialism and communism became embedded in British life. The last half of the nineteenth century, when classics really established itself institutionally as a discipline, and its revolutionary potential moved away from the zeal of the Romantic philhellenists into the artistic idealism of a Richard Wagner or the sexual freedom of an Oscar Wilde, are less adequately explored. The huge attendance at art galleries and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace as a route to encountering the past of antiquity in material form are barely addressed (Kate Nichols's Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace would have helped); nor do shows like Astley's Circus get air time (Rachel Bryant Davies's Troy, Carthage, and the Victorians is revealing). It is particularly noticeable in such a voluminous study that there is no discussion of how turning to Greek was a crucial route for the self-understanding of what was considered transgressive male sexuality—and for a particular engagement between the classes. To understand the social force of classics requires a deeper appreciation of the dynamics between conservatism and transformation, disciplinarity and self-discovery. The big picture of how classics matters is lost in the gems picked out by the authors. Gems they are, but their facets need more attention and their setting a broader perspective. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to (...) better understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

In cognitive psychology there appears to be a creative tension between models that use connections of a network, and models that use rules for symbol manipulation. The idea of a connectionist network goes back to McCulloch & Pitts [1943] and Hebb [1949], and finds recent revival in the `parallel distributed processing' (PDP) models that have been extensively examined in the last few years (see e.g. Rumelhart et al. [1986]). In the intervening years, however, the predominant explanations of psychology have been (...) in terms of rules for the manipulation of symbolic structures (e.g. since Newell & Simon [1963]). Because of the tension between these different approaches (see e.g. Fodor & Pylyshyn [1988]), there is great interest in the formulation of `hybrid systems' which combine connectionist components with traditional symbolic processing. I attempt below to outline the general architecture of such a hybrid system. (shrink)

Part I: The representation of life -- Can life be given a real definition? -- The representation of the living individual -- The representation of the life-form itself -- Part II: Naive action theory -- Types of practical explanation -- Naive explanation of action -- Action and time -- Part III: Practical generality -- Two tendencies in practical philosophy -- Practices and dispositions as sources of the goodness of individual actions -- Practice and disposition as sources of individual action.

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the cybernetic society, (...) a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization--such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego--in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712130; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 226-235.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 234-235.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

The article presents critical examination of theories about collective responsibility attempting to cover responsibility for historic injustices. The author will also try to establish the possibility of collective responsibility for the present members of the group to make recompense for the injustices committed by their ancestors depending on two factors expounded in the article.

This bestselling dictionary is written by one of the leading philosophers of our time, and it is widely recognized as the best dictionary of its kind. Comprehensive and authoritative, it covers every aspect of philosophy from Aristotle to Zen. With clear and concise definitions, it provides lively and accessible coverage of not only Western philosophical traditions, but also themes from Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy. New entries on philosophy of economics, social theory, neuroscience, philosophy of the mind, and moral (...) conceptions, bring this authoritative third edition up to date. It is the ideal introduction to philosophy for anyone with an interest in the subject, and it is an indispensable work of reference for students and teachers. (shrink)

Simon Critchley's first book, The Ethics of Deconstruction, was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. This edition contains three new appendices and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of The Ethics of Deconstruction.

The renaissance in Hegel scholarship over the past two decades has largely ignored or marginalized the metaphysical dimension of his thought, perhaps most vigorously when considering his social and political philosophy. Many scholars have consistently maintained that Hegel’s political philosophy must be reconstructed without the metaphysical structure that Hegel saw as his crowning philosophical achievement. This book brings together twelve original essays that explore the relation between Hegel’s metaphysics and his political, social, and practical philosophy. The essays seek to explore (...) what normative insights and positions can be obtained from examining Hegel’s distinctive view of the metaphysical dimensions of political philosophy. His ideas about the good, the universal, freedom, rationality, objectivity, self-determination, and self-development can be seen in a new context and with renewed understanding once their relation to his metaphysical project is considered. _Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics_ will be of great interest to scholars of Hegelian philosophy, German Idealism, nineteenth-century philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory. (shrink)

Adorno was deeply influenced by ideas about the rationalization of mass society and effects of commodification on consciousness. The work of Max Weber and Georg Lukács were dual influences that shaped much of Adorno's own work. He develops his critique of the “totally administered society” as a confluence of Weber's rationalization thesis as well as Lukács' theory of reification of consciousness due to the penetration of the commodity form into everyday life. But Adorno moves beyond these ideas by arguing that (...) the spread of exchange‐value and quantification, carried forth via the commodity form, collapses the modern individual and its consciousness into the prevailing forms of dominant rationality. I then show how his later projects of Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory seek to protect the subject from these trends and then reflect on how Adorno's ideas can be brought together with Lukács' later ideas about social ontology in order to glimpse a broader concept of Critical Theory. (shrink)

The enduring popularity of Star Wars has much to do with its mythic dimensions. However, there are problems with Joseph Campbell's work on myth and George Lucas's use of Campbell's ideas in Star Wars. Both Campbell and Lucas promote a simplistic view that encourages fans to avoid some darker, more unsettling ideas in Star Wars, which may obscure myth's true power. Campbell remains one of the most famous mythologists, but he was by no means the first. Campbell's influence on Star (...) Wars seems obvious, but the details are difficult to determine, partly because Lucas himself gives different accounts of it. Campbell's monomyth leads us to see similarities between tales and, in so doing, overlooks many significant differences. Tensions between mythos and logos date back to ancient Greek philosophers, if not earlier. The mythic structure of Star Wars has immense hidden power, and this power has a dark side. (shrink)