In his recent political writings, Habermas has opposed his cosmopolitan project to that of the Bushite neoconservatives. However, this article argues that in some respects Habermas's works come closer to the neoconservative agenda than he realizes and that this poses a potential danger of its being appropriated by precisely the camp he opposes. These problems particularly come to the fore in his analysis of Islamic fundamentalism, democracy and the Middle East, but also in his recommendations concerning UN-based internationalism and his (...) appeals to Woodrow Wilson. By tracking these problematic areas in Habermas's work, this article argues that Habermas needs to engage in a more carefully articulated, concrete and empirical analysis if he is to avoid these problems. (shrink)

We argue that multiple levels of trauma were present in Egypt before, during and after the 2011 revolution. Individual, social and political trauma constitute a triangle of traumatisation which was strategically employed by the Egyptian counter-revolutionary forces – primarily the army and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood – to maintain their political and economic power over and above the social, economic and political interests of others. Through the destruction of physical bodies, the fragmentation and polarisation of social relations and (...) the violent closure of the newly emerged political public sphere, these actors actively repressed the potential for creative and revolutionary transformation. To better understand this multi-layered notion of trauma, we turn to Habermas’ ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ thesis which offers a critical lens through which to examine the wider political and economic structures and context in which trauma occurred as well as its effects on the personal, social and po... (shrink)

In this article we, the authors, outline the thematic concerns of our special issue of the Journal of Global Ethics . We argue for a need to engage with notions of violence from an interdisciplinary and transformative perspective. The theoretical framework that provides such a perspective is critical theory, broadly construed. Critical theory has always been concerned with the relation between practice and theory, as well as notions of violence. It is therefore surprising to note that in the current critical (...) theoretical debates a sustained engagement with the theme of violence has largely been sidelined. We argue that critical theory is not only fruitful for the study of conflict and violence, but also that such practical issues can shed and help further develop critical theory itself. (shrink)

This article explores Habermas’s recent political writings in which he proposes a thin post-national model of political integration for Europe. Whilst sympathetic to Habermas’s undertakings, this article argues that there are certain unresolved tensions within these writings between his thin proceduralist model of European integration and his appeals to a thicker European self-understanding. The conclusion to be drawn from this, the author argues, is that Habermas should have remained faithful to his thin proceduralist account rather than turning to the question (...) of European identity. (shrink)

Using the example of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, and especially the writings of Sayyid Qutb, this article raises questions about discourse ethics as a mode of conflict resolution. It appears that discourse ethics is only relevant when all parties have already agreed to settle disputes deliberatively and already share the notions of rational deliberation and individual autonomy. This raises questions not only about the capability of discourse ethics to incorporate a deep plurality of worldviews, but also about its capability to successfully (...) solve disputes. When confronting situations where the willingness to deliberate is absent, discourse ethics is left standing empty handed. This, I argue, is due to both the conceptual distinction between communicative action and strategic action, as well as the abstracted nature of Habermas's discourse ethics. (shrink)

As late twentieth-century discourses of modernity and postmodernity invoke their Enlightenment heritage in a search for the origins of their present achievements and predicaments, Adam Smith's works are still seen as a canonic representative of that heritage. Smith has long been evoked as the ‘father’ of economics and the original proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, but the political changes in recent decades have reconstituted his iconic status. With the full range of Smith's published and unpublished writings and lectures now widely available, (...) there has been a huge growth in the scholarly literature on Smith which has subjected this traditional view to searching questions. The overwhelming conclusion to emerge is that Smith's works display a subtlety and complexity that is at odds with the received image of Smith as the spokesman of modernity, but the diversity of interpretation raises some difficult methodological issues. (shrink)

This paper adds to our understandings of women’s post-separation experiences of coercive control through the introduction of a new concept—custody stalking. It is defined as a malevolent course of conduct involving fathers’ use of custody and/or child protection proceedings to overturn historic patterns of care for children. The experience of custody stalking is explored through three composite narratives derived from twelve mothers who participated in an exploratory, qualitative study on the involuntary loss of maternal care time following separation. The losses (...) suffered caused these mothers tremendous grief, damaged their psychological wellbeing and had a detrimental effect on their mothering relationships. Yet custody stalking, as a form of malevolent attack, is not well recognised and mothers’ resultant losses are largely culturally invisible. This is in marked contrast to paternal filicides, another form of post-separation avenging attack committed by some fathers that also leads to maternal loss experiences, albeit more absolute. (shrink)

Aotearoa New Zealand is a small, island nation located on the rim of Oceania. Since colonisation by British settlers in the mid-1800s, the internationalisation of higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand has reflected shifting notions of nationhood – from an extension of Great Britain, to a bicultural nation, to a player in the global knowledge economy. Since the late 1980s, internationalisation policy has reflected the primacy of market concerns; the internationalisation of HE has been imagined primarily as a means to (...) attract export revenue and human capital to Aotearoa New Zealand, and to increase brand recognition. However, internationalisation, as the movement of people and knowledge between places, can also be seen as pre-dating the development of nations, particularly in the Oceania context.Within mātauranga Māori, or Māori epistemological traditions, place is central to identity. To be human is to be part of something bigger than oneself; care for the land is care both for ancestors and the wellbeing of future generations. In this paper, we consider internationalised HE in light of three questions that are central to mātauranga Māori: “Who am I? What is this world that I exist in? What am I to do?”. After tracing the connections between internationalisation, colonisation, and nationhood in Aotearoa New Zealand,we consider how attention to Māori place-based epistemologies and values drawn from mātauranga Māori might challenge, stretch and ground contemporary internationalisation policies and practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. (shrink)

This article is based on interviews with a small number of cohabitants who are critical of conventional marriage. It examines some of the ways in which the distinction between heterosexual cohabitation and marriage is rendered in the New Zealand context. Culturally available distinctions, like that between cohabitation and marriage, are used in the production of resistant counterdiscourses. However, difference can be rewritten as deviance and in this form is central to the exercise of disciplinary power. Contextual shifts in the assertion (...) of a cohabitational self and a marital self contribute to the blurring of the distinction, further exposing the dilemmas of resistance based on difference. (shrink)

The past twenty-five years have seen an explosion of interest in nationalism and nationality in the social sciences - the past ten also in cultural studies. These two disciplinary areas define their objects of study differently, but both have recently started to converge in the pervasive use of the term `national identity', which in turn relies on the term `cultural identity'. Although theoretical complications entailed by the use of `identity' as a concept have been noted, the theorization of identity as (...) culture has occurred almost by default, with the term `culture' merely designating what needs to be explained, and the inherent circularity of `cultural identity' as a category remaining unaddressed. The two approaches differ in their understanding of the crucial categories of `culture' and `politics' in their accounts of nation and national identity. Cultural studies accounts focus on politics in terms of cultural politics, and thus fail to take on board important aspects of the social science accounts which they take as standard reference points. Both approaches ultimately rely upon `culture' as an all-inclusive category of social subjectivity, which remains undertheorized in both approaches, albeit in significantly contrasting ways. The place of culture in recent work on European identity functions differently, and provides a useful counterpoint to these difficulties. (shrink)

In 1611 the King James Bible was printed with minimal annotations, as requested by King James. It was another of his attempts at political and religious reconciliation. Smaller, more affordable, versions quickly followed that competed with the highly popular and copiously annotated Bibles based on the 1560 Geneva version by the Marian exiles. By the nineteenth century the King James Bible had become very popular and innumerable editions were published, often with emendations, long prefaces, illustrations and, most importantly, copious annotations. (...) Annotated King James Bibles appeared to offer the best of both the Reformation Geneva and King James Bible in a Victorian context, but they also reignited old controversies about the use and abuse of paratext. Amid the numerous competing versions stood a group of Victorian scholars, theologians and translators, who understood the need to reclaim the King James Bible through its Reformation heritage; they monumentalized it. (shrink)

This study investigated the business ethics experiences of Australian managers in China, using qualitative methodology to identify themes. Thirty-one Australian managers who had spent on average 8.7 years working in business connected to China participated in in-depth interviews regarding their business ethics experiences in China. Commonly, managers identified issues relating to a broad spectrum which could be labelled "bribery and facilitation". Other repeated themes included requests for visa assistance, employee theft, nepotism and non-adherence to contractual obligations. This study has important (...) implications for helping Australian managers improve the way they approach potential ethical situations in China. Four key coping strategies can be identified from the data: managers spoke of not compromising their own morals, of attempting to understand the motivation of Chinese colleagues, of talking to others and of adhering to company policy. These strategies suggest practical steps may be taken by organisations when training managers for business activities in China. In particular, structuring of mentoring relationships between experienced and less experienced practitioners may be of assistance. Cultural training for managers and clear company policy on contentious issues such as bribery may also be of benefit. The themes identified in the study also have implications for academics researching expatriate business peoples' experiences in China. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has critiqued the tendency for separated mothers in custody disputes to be defined as hostile and alienating. Through the presentation of three case studies, drawn from an interview-based study with 21 women, we show how such pejorative constructions only arise when the conflicting gendered moral accountabilities of contemporary motherhood are overlooked. We found that mothers tend to believe that contact with non-resident fathers is generally in a child’s best interests. However, as a result of balancing complex moral obligations (...) for the care of their children, they may raise questions about particular kinds of arrangements for contact with particular fathers. We argue, therefore, that family law practice will lead to better outcomes for children when professionals listen to the history of, and reasons for, mothers’ positions. To enable family law professionals to undertake this task, we offer an alternative interpretive framework for making sense of women’s stories. Should family law professionals make use of this framework, it is likely that they will understand that the positions mothers adopt are often the outcome of the difficult moral dilemmas they encounter in caring for their children, and that the reductive rubric of the ‘hostile mother’ needs to be treated with scepticism. (shrink)

In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism is an accessible introduction to Karen Barad's agential realist philosophy. The authors take on a unique approach to involve the readers in in/formal conversations between Karen, postgraduates, and researchers at a research event held in 2017 at Cape Town, South Africa.

This article thinks with oceans and swimming, in dialogue with decolonial feminist materialist approaches and other current novel methodologies which foreground embodiment and relational ontologies, in order to consider the conceptual potential of such diffractions for the project of alternative scholarly practices. We focus on swimming in the sea as one form of wild methodology and Slow scholarship that draws on hauntology to think about the possibilities of such methodologies for troubling normative academic practices directed at different ways of being (...) and becoming. Located in the (post-)apartheid space of South African higher education, which continues to follow and reinstate colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist logics, we ask questions about the silences around material histories of subjugation and violence that are embedded in the institution and the lives of those who enter these spaces. Propositions are made about how a swimming methodology may inspire a consciousness and engagement with intersectional gender hauntings that permeate the material, curricula, relational and affective spaces of academia as part of disrupting and reimagining the university as a space of/for justice and flourishing. We explore the ways in which embodied, affective methodologies in or near the ocean/s may be deployed to subvert and reconfigure, to make and stay with trouble. We therefore propose sea swimming as a powerful way of thinking with the sea in productive and creative ways for scholarship towards a justice-to-come, to open up new imaginaries of scholarship that make a difference. (shrink)

Developmental origins of health and disease and epigenetics have expanded understanding of how the environment affects the health of women before and during pregnancy—with lifelong health consequences for the fetus. This has translated to a narrow focus on women’s lifestyle during pregnancy, especially for women classified as obese. In this study, we show that psychosocial harms such as distress or shame felt by pregnant women are rarely countenanced in these endeavors. To demonstrate this, we examine published documents about a large (...) set of trials of lifestyle interventions united through an international consortium. Yet there is now a literature in which pregnant women with large bodies report feeling humiliated and a wider literature on the stigma of obesity. We argue that shame is produced and reproduced through the discursive and material knowledge-making scientific practices of DOHaD translation. Interventions that intensify the shame of large body size in pregnancy may be stressful, and neurophysiological stress pathways are well-known within DOHaD to have consequences for fetal development, so these interventions potentially undermine the very processes they set out to protect. A feminist response may protect women from shame and redirect attention to the social and structural determinants of health. (shrink)

The work is proven to have a unified and sustained rhetorical argument. It imitates the philosophical process that it attributes to Socrates.

Our concern is in explaining how and why models give us useful knowledge. We argue that if we are to understand how models function in the actual scientific practice the representational approach to models proves either misleading or too minimal. We propose turning from the representational approach to the artefactual, which implies also a new unit of analysis: the activity of modelling. Modelling, we suggest, could be approached as a specific practice in which concrete artefacts, i.e., models, are constructed with (...) the help of specific representational means and used in various ways, for example, for the purposes of scientific reasoning, theory construction and design of experiments and other artefacts. Furthermore, in this activity of modelling the model construction is intertwined with the construction of new phenomena, theoretical principles and new scientific concepts. We will illustrate these claims by studying the construction of the ideal heat engine by Sadi Carnot. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 561-575 [Access article in PDF] Claude de Seyssel's Translations of Ancient Historians Rebecca Boone Through his seven translations of ancient history Claude de Seyssel played a major role in transmitting knowledge about antiquity to the French. Despite this fact he has received little attention from scholars of the French Renaissance. Perhaps the problem is that Seyssel does not seem to fit (...) neatly into any category. He was neither French nor Italian but a Savoyard, not truly noble but the illegitimate son of a noble family, not truly a historian but a writer of history-based propaganda and a translator of histories. He began his career as a jurist, became a royal councillor, then a bishop, and in the end died as the Archbishop of Turin. Before his death Seyssel left numerous works, his most famous being a political treatise entitled La Monarchie de France, a work contemporaneous with The Prince by Machiavelli, with whom he shared a similar view of the political world. 1Much like Seyssel himself the genre of history translation has been rather neglected by scholars. A notable exception is a recent article by A.C. Dionisotti, which also examines the translations of Seyssel. The article's intention is to continue a project proposed by Arnaldo Momigliano, to collect evidence that "would help us to understand where and on what occasions and by what people books of history were written and read." 2 This essay attempts to continue this project by asking the following questions: Why did Seyssel undertake the translations? For whom were they intended? How did Seyssel conceive his task as translator? Finally, what can be inferred from his technique of translation? [End Page 561]First, the translations must be put in the context of Seyssel's life. The translations were a sideline in his busy career as royal councillor. One of many itinerant scholar-diplomats hired by the states of Europe at that time, Seyssel had been teaching law at the University of Turin when he was called into the service of France by the newly crowned Louis XII in 1498. Seyssel was of value to the court because of his reputation as a jurist as well as his connections with the court of Savoy, the state which held the mountain passes leading to Italy. This was especially important because the conquest of Milan was the main goal of Louis XII throughout his reign. Seyssel played an active role in the French occupational government in several Italian cities. Although Seyssel spent much of his time in Italy, he often followed the king around France or was in transit on diplomatic missions to England, to Flanders, and to the Swiss cantons.It is amazing that Seyssel even found the time to write, but by the end of his life, he had left an astounding variety of written works: legal commentaries, translations, works of propaganda for the French monarchy, a political treatise, and at the end of his life several religious tracts. Despite the copiousness of his written works, however, Seyssel remained outside the circle of writers at the French court. He had no connections either with Budé or with the Grands Rhetoriqueurs, such as Jean Lemaire de Belges, nor did he leave any friendly and eloquent correspondence to other humanists. If Seyssel lived during the budding years of the French renaissance, he showed few signs of appreciating it. As a Savoyard educated in Italy he probably thought of the French in the same way as did many Italians of his age: they were militarily powerful but culturally backward. 3Undoubtedly, Seyssel believed the translations would serve his own interests at court. They were a way to cultivate patronage and to enhance his prestige by building up a reputation as an important scholar. But evidence suggests that their main purpose was to prove to the king, to whom all but one of his translations were dedicated, his utility as a councillor. This was the argument of Paul [End Page 562] Chavy in his study of Seyssel's... (shrink)

Xenophon of Athens was a pupil of Socrates and a philosopher in his own right. He wrote two of the texts included in this volume, the Hiero and the Constitution of the Spartans. The third, the Constitution of the Athenians, is found under Xenophon's name alongside the other two in the manuscripts. The works represent three distinct types of government, but there are common features throughout. This volume presents an introduction discussing Xenophon's views on government in the context of his (...) general political thought, drawing particularly on his Socratic work Memorabilia, and a commentary on the Greek text of each work aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new interpretation of non-cooperative games that shows why the unilateralism of best-reply reasoning fails to capture the mutuality of strategic interdependence. Drawing on an intersubjective approach to theorizing individual agency in shared context, including a non-individualistic model of common belief without infinite regress, the paper develops a general model of a 2 × 2 simultaneous one-shot non-cooperative game and applies it to games including Hi-Lo, Stag Hunt, Prisoners’ Dilemma, Chicken, BoS and Matching Pennies. Results include High (...) as the rational choice in Hi-Lo, and Cooperate as a possible rational choice in the Prisoners’ Dilemma. (shrink)

The “Adam Smith problem” has traditionally been concerned with the issue of authorial integrity: the issue of how a single author, Adam Smith, could have written two such apparently dissimilar, even contradictory, works as The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. As the problem to be resolved was the single authorial origin of two such works, the perceived incompatibilities between them were explained in terms of Smith's intellectual biography – for example, Smith's travels to France, Smith's meetings (...) with the physiocrats, or the mental incapacities of an aging man. The current consensus is that the Adam Smith problem is a “pseudo problem” and that Smith's works represent a unified project, but the same reference to authorial origins now provides thr opposite claim that “the same man” wrote both books. Here the postulate of authorial integrity, “of stable integrated character, not subject to deep intellectual doubts or fissures” provides an assurance that such a man is unlikely to have written two entirely different books, an assurance underwritten by a coherent authorial intentionality that guarantees the consistency of the two works. (shrink)

In science policy, it is generally acknowledged that science-based problem-solving requires interdisciplinary research. For example, policy makers invest in funding programs such as Horizon 2020 that aim to stimulate interdisciplinary research. Yet the epistemological processes that lead to effective interdisciplinary research are poorly understood. This article aims at an epistemology for interdisciplinary research, in particular, IDR for solving ‘real-world’ problems. Focus is on the question why researchers experience cognitive and epistemic difficulties in conducting IDR. Based on a study of educational (...) literature it is concluded that higher-education is missing clear ideas on the epistemology of IDR, and as a consequence, on how to teach it. It is conjectured that the lack of philosophical interest in the epistemology of IDR is due to a philosophical paradigm of science, which prevents recognizing severe epistemological challenges of IDR, both in the philosophy of science as well as in science education and research. The proposed alternative philosophical paradigm entails alternative philosophical presuppositions regarding aspects such as the aim of science, the character of knowledge, the epistemic and pragmatic criteria for accepting knowledge, and the role of technological instruments. This alternative philosophical paradigm assume the production of knowledge for epistemic functions as the aim of science, and interprets ‘knowledge’ as epistemic tools that must allow for conducting epistemic tasks by epistemic agents, rather than interpreting knowledge as representations that objectively represent aspects of the world independent of the way in which it was constructed. The engineering paradigm of science involves that knowledge is indelibly shaped by how it is constructed. Additionally, the way in which scientific disciplines construct knowledge is guided by the specificities of the discipline, which can be analyzed in terms of disciplinary perspectives. This implies that knowledge and the epistemic uses of knowledge cannot be understood without at least some understanding of how the knowledge is constructed. Accordingly, scientific researchers need so-called metacognitive scaffolds to assist in analyzing and reconstructing how ‘knowledge’ is constructed and how different disciplines do this differently. In an engineering paradigm of science, these metacognitive scaffolds can also be interpreted as epistemic tools, but in this case as tools that guide, enable and constrain analyzing and articulating how knowledge is produced. In interdisciplinary research, metacognitive scaffolds assist interdisciplinary communication aiming to analyze and articulate how the discipline constructs knowledge. (shrink)

Current debates as to whether “republican liberty” is a negative or a positive concept of liberty take as their starting point the distinction between these concepts as outlined in Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin’s essay has stimulated a considerable debate about the precise nature of the distinction between the two concepts, whether there are indeed two concepts of liberty or only one, the triadic concept, and whether the two concepts are systematically connected to the foundational assumptions of (...) different traditions of political philosophy. Republican liberty has traditionally been placed under the positive heading as one variant of positive liberty, but this has been challenged by the argument that republican liberty is a form of negative liberty which is more extensive than the liberal form of negative liberty in incorporating the notion of freedom from potential as well as actual interference or constraint. According to this interpretation, therefore, the main distinction between the political traditions of liberalism and republicanism is to be found not in the distinction between negative and positive liberty, but in a distinction within negative liberty. (shrink)

Is choice necessary for moral responsibility? And does choice imply alternative possibilities of some significant sort? This paper will relate these questions to the argument initiated by Harry Frankfurt that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility, and to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza's extension of that argument in terms of guidance control in a causally determined world. I argue that attending to Frankfurt's core conceptual distinction between the circumstances that make an action unavoidable and those that bring (...) it about that the action is performed – a distinction emphasised in his recent restatement – provides a new route into an analysis of Frankfurt's argument by showing how it depends on a person's ‘decision to act’ involving the exercise of choice. The implicit reliance of Frankfurt's argument on this notion of choice, however, undermines his claim that the example of the counterfactual intervener strengthens the compatibilist case by providing a counter-example to the principle of alternative possibilities. I also argue that Frankfurt's reliance on the exercise of choice for moral responsibility is also evident in the Fischer/Ravizza argument, and that a close analysis of both arguments shows that such exercise of choice is not available if causal determinism is true. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Adam Smith contains essays by some of the most prominent philosophers and scholars working on Adam Smith today. It is a special issue of The Adam Smith Review, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Introduction Part 1: Moral phenomenology 1. The virtue of TMS 1759 D.D. Raphael 2. The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the inner life Emma Rothschild 3. The standpoint of morality in Adam Smith and Hegel Angelica Nuzzo Part 2: Sympathy (...) and moral judgment 4. Smith and Rousseau in dialogue: sympathy, pitié, spectatorship and narrative Charles L. Griswold 5. Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy and its contemporary interpretations Bence Nanay 6. Smith’s ambivalence about honour Stephen Darwall 7. Sentiments and spectators: Adam Smith’s theory of moral judgment Geoffrey Sayre-McCord 8. Smith’s anti-cosmopolitanism Fonna Forman-Barzilai 9. Resentment and moral judgment in Smith and Butler Alice MacLachlan Part 3: Economics, religion, aesthetics and value theory 10. Adam Smith’s problems: individuality and the paradox of sympathy Robert Urquhart 11. Scepticism and naturalism in Adam Smith Ryan Patrick Hanley 12. Adam Smith’s solution to the paradox of tragedy Arby Ted Siraki 13. Smithian intrinsic value Patrick Frierson Memoir on Adam Smith’s life 14. Adam Smith’s smile: his years at Balliol College, 1740–6, in retrospect Ian Simpson Ross. (shrink)