Advocates for re-localizing food systems often encourage consumers to support local farmers and strengthen local food economies. Yet, local food systems hinge not only on consumers’ willingness to buy local food but also on whether farmers have the social support networks to address diverse challenges during food production and distribution. This study characterizes the challenges and support systems of farmers selling to local markets in Québec, Canada, across multiple growing seasons using a mixed-methods research design. We sent an online questionnaire (...) to 1046 farmers and conducted follow-up interviews with 15 of the 133 respondents. Our findings show that farmers relied on an average of four support actor groups, particularly employees, customers, and other farmers. Actors played distinct roles in terms of the importance, frequency, and formality of interactions, providing immediate and long-term support through formal and informal relationships across multiple spatial scales (farm, local community, and regional/international). Our thematic analysis showed that support actors helped farmers in four key domains: (1) Knowledge sharing and emotional support; (2) Labour and workforce; (3) Material and financial aid; and (4) Consumer education and business promotion. Farmer associations provided resources to tackle various challenges, acting as bridges across multiple support actor groups. Yet, our results suggest that political desires to encourage local food systems are in some cases poorly matched with resources to address specific types of challenges farmers face. Specifically, overlooking the role of diverse social support actors in helping farmers build food production and distribution capacity could undermine efforts to foster localization. (shrink)

Presenting the first book-length study in English of Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations, this work takes a fresh look at this seminal text on false reasoning.

This essay focuses on Günther Anders’s engagement with (political) poetry. I draw on published material and unpublished source texts from the Anders Nachlass to track how Anders arrives at his own writing style and mode of address through his sustained engagement with poetry. Anders’s philosophical prose and exoteric use of language is shaped by multifaceted reflections on (political) poetry and by the tension between ‘political poetry’ and ‘lyrical action’. I first elaborate on Anders's reading of Brecht in the early 1930s, (...) and then turn to the poetry and reflections on poetics that were written during his long exile in the US (1936–50). It is from this basis that I consider Anders’s categorical and programmatic turn away from poetry from the mid-1940s onwards. What emerges from my discussion is that engagements with literature, and with poetry in particular, were not a marginal activity for Anders but reflect a broad, life-long interest in (predominantly) classical and contemporary poetry, resulting in reflections on poetics and his own extensive poetic praxis. (shrink)

The paper discusses Kierkegaard’s account of faith as ‘the new immediacy’. After considering the term ‘immediacy’ with respect both to its ambiguity and to the different ways in which it can be used, i.e. as an epistemological assumption and as an ontological assumption, I will argue that this very distinction can provide a hermeneutic key for an understanding of Kierkegaard’s account of faith.

0 Introduction 0.1 Variation in nominal coreference Nominal coreference has received much interest in the field of text linguistics as an essential strategy ...

RÉSUMÉ La problématique de l’écriture et la vie sera abordée dans le présent article, où je soulignerai que, dès ses débuts, la position d’Hélène Cixous suppose une distanciation de l’auteure par rapport à l’écriture autobiographique. En centrant mon analyse sur une scène de Si près, je constate que l’expérience de la narratrice faite chez les écrivains publics à Oran démontre cette même position: c’est l’écrivain qui est l’inventeur de l’écriture et la fiction ne reproduit pas le réel. J’établis une comparaison (...) entre Cixous et Cervantes: dans Don Quichotte I, chapitre 9, il y a une scène métafictive qui, d’une manière semblable, nous incite à réfléchir sur « la vérité » de la fiction et sur le rôle de l’écrivain. Puisant l’énergie créatrice au rêve et à l’inconscient, Hélène Cixous crée à partir des traces autobiographiques qui parcourent son œuvre un « miracle littéraire ». Les fragments personnels, tirés de notre histoire commune, prennent une valeur universelle. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron introduced the notion of rights supersession into the philosophical discussion about restitutive justice in cases of historic injustices. He refers to land claims by indigenous peoples as a real-world example and as an application of his theory of rights supersession. He implies that the changes that have taken place in settler states since the first years of colonialism are the kind of changes that lead to a supersession of land rights. The article proposes to unbundle property rights into (...) rights of benefit, control, use, and access and to distinguish between different forms of attachment. This strategy allows for a third option of restitution and supersession, namely partial restitution. Partial restitution grants current land holders those rights that they need to satisfy their attachments and basic distributive justice claims. At the same time, rights that are not needed for either purpose will revert back to indigenous peoples as the original owners. The article argues that the notion of partial restitution allows for far more extensive land rights than a less nuanced application of the supersession thesis. (shrink)

Definitions vary according to context of use and target audience. They must be made relevant for each context to fulfill their cognitive and linguistic goals. This involves adapting their logical structure, type of content, and form to each context of use. We examine from these perspectives the case of definitions in ontologies.

The very name of Bihar, a district in the eastern part of India, evokes images of anarchy, banditry, and disarray. Already traversed by distinct cultural zones - Bhojpuri, Mithila, Magadha, and the tribal zone of Jharkhand - Bihari society is characterized by bloody clan conflict over territorial rights. The doggedness with which the region's protagonists form militias is a perpetual source of front-page news. Pitted against the Brahmans and Bhumihar Rajputs, the large landowners, are the herding and soldier castes such (...) as the livestock-herding Yadavas, the farming Kurmis, and the former saltpeter miners, the Noniyas, whose economic, social, and political growth has given them real power. And although Magadha's rich Buddhist past attracts pilgrims and tourists, and Mithila's beautiful painted murals and villages draw art connoisseurs, Bihar ranks as one of the least safe regions of India. The rate of banditry and other crime reaches surprising levels. (shrink)

Presents the basic words, definitions, and doctrinal systems of four wisdom teachings of the East.

In this paper, we analyze what effects indicators of a shared situation have on a speaker’s persuasiveness by investigating how a robot’s advice is received when it indicates that it is sharing the situational context with its user. In our experiment, 80 participants interacted with a robot that referred to aspects of the shared context: Face tracking indicated that the robot saw the participant, incremental feedback suggested that the robot was following their actions, and comments about, and gestures towards, the (...) shared physical situation and linguistic references to the dialog history indicated to participants that the robot had learned from the interaction and perceived its surroundings. The results show that especially the linguistic and gestural references to the shared context have a significant influence on participants’ compliance with the robot’s suggestions. Thus, indicating that it is ‘in the same boat’ with the user, i.e. that it is sharing the situational context, increases a robot’s persuasiveness during advice giving. (shrink)

The visual behaviour of consumers buying products in a supermarket was measured and used to analyse the stages of their decision process. Traditionally metrics used to trace decision-making processes are difficult to use in natural environments that often contain many options and unstructured information. Unlike previous attempts in this direction, our methodology reveals differences between a decision-making task and a search task. In particular the second stage of a decision task contains more re-dwells than the second stage of a comparable (...) search task. This study addresses the growing concern of taking eye movement research from the laboratory into the ‘real-world’, so findings can be better generalised to natural situations. (shrink)

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the (...) sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto. (shrink)

This paper argues that land and resource rights are often essential in overcoming colonial inequality and devaluation of indigenous populations and cultures. It thereby criticizes global welfare egalitarians that promote the abolition of national sovereignty over resources in the name of increased equality. The paper discusses two ways in which land and resource rights contribute to decolonization and the eradication of the associated inequality. First, it proposes that land and resource rights have acquired a status-conferring function for colonized peoples so (...) that possession of full personhood and relational equality is partially expressed through the possession of land and resource rights. Second, it suggests that successful internal decolonization depends on access to and control over land and resources, especially for indigenous peoples. (shrink)

We explore a network architecture introduced by Elman (1988) for predicting successive elements of a sequence. The network uses the pattern of activation over a set of hidden units from time-step 25-1, together with element t, to predict element t + 1. When the network is trained with strings from a particular finite-state grammar, it can learn to be a perfect finite-state recognizer for the grammar. When the network has a minimal number of hidden units, patterns on the hidden units (...) come to correspond to the nodes of the grammar, although this correspondence is not necessary for the network to act as a perfect finite-state recognizer. We explore the conditions under which the network can carry information about distant sequential contingencies across intervening elements. Such information is maintained with relative ease if it is.. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzscheforschung Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 133-138.

With the foundation of the journal,,Evrejskaja Starina" in 1909, the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society of St. Petersburg wanted to create a forum for the study of the history of Jews in Russia and Poland. This article investigates whether the journal was able to live up to its goal, and to which extent,,Evrejskaja Starina" served as a basis for the further development of a Russian-Jewish historiography.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have become a widely used tool to reconcile societies in the aftermath of widespread injustice or social and political conflict in a state. This article focuses on TRCs that take place in non-transitional societies in which the political and social structures, institutions, and power relations have largely remained in place since the time of injustice. Furthermore, it will focus on one particular injustice that TRCs try to address through the practice of truth-telling, namely the eradication (...) of epistemic injustice. The article takes the Canadian and Norwegian TRCs as two examples to show that under conditions of enduring injustice, willful ignorance of the majority, and power inequality, TRCs might create a double bind for victims which makes them choose between epistemic exploitation and continued injustices based on the majority's ignorance. The article argues that the set-up and accompanying measures of TRCs are of the utmost importance if TRCs in non-transitional societies are to overcome epistemic injustice, instead of creating new relations of exploitation. (shrink)

This paper describes the meaning of a father’s presence with a full-term healthy child delivered by caesarean section, as observed during the routine post-operative separation of mother and child. Videotaped observations recorded at a maternity clinic located in the metropolitan area of Stockholm, Sweden formed the basis for the study, in which fifteen fathers with their infants participated within two hours of elective caesarean delivery in the 37th - 40th week of pregnancy. A phenomenological analysis based on Giorgi’s method was (...) conducted on the data. The description of the new father’s experiences that emerged pointed to a process of being and becoming in taking the child to himself. Fatherhood developed gradually as a result of recurrent experiences of the child’s expressions. There was an ebb and flow between taking on the role of being a father and physical withdrawal from the role. The findings of this study not only confirm previous accounts of new fathers’ experiences, but go further in revealing an ebb and flow variation in the fathers’ involvement. What this indicates is that the process of transition to fatherhood requires not only presence but time. The period required for this process thus must not be disturbed, but supported, trusting in the father’s ability to assume his role as a father. It is suggested that, in addition to their relevance in guiding the attitudes and expectations of those professionally involved in postnatal care and community health, these findings could be useful in antenatal courses for parents, and especially in instances when caesarean birth is planned, to highlight the meaning of the role of fathers as caregivers. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006. (shrink)

Parcels, Sales and Gifts: Hans Sauter's Entomological Practices between Formosa and Europe, 1902–1914. The exploration of global biodiversity is a form of knowledge production that is necessarily specimen‐based. In the endeavor to chart the natural world, not only ideas and writings travelled across the oceans, but also a flood of scientific objects. The German entomologist Hans Sauter (1871–1943) spent most of his life in Formosa, then a Japanese colony. His pronounced aim was to complete an inventory of the entire fauna (...) of Formosa. He aimed for the mass production of knowledge, becoming a collecting‐entrepreneur who employed scores of local collectors. Between 1902 and 1914, they amassed large quantities of insects, which required specialized practices in collecting, preserving, documenting, and packaging. Sauter sent these insects, but also hundreds of reptiles, mammals, birds, fish etc., to zoologists all over Europe who identified and published hitherto undescribed species. At first, Sauter sold his finds. Later, he stopped asking for money – pushing instead for speed in publication and making demands about the content and naming of these articles. His demands were met, especially by the Deutsches Entomologisches Museum in Dahlem. Despite almost no publications to his name, Sauter quickly gained considerable influence in the world of entomological research. In this paper, the circulation of these scientific objects serves as a focal point in order to embed local circumstances in the process of knowledge production in a global context. The practices associated with the specimens illustrate the economic, political and social dimensions of the formation of knowledge. Hans Sauter's case defies traditional dichotomies as it illustrates the interdependence of practical and theoretical knowledge, of science and trade and of center and periphery. Practical knowledge gained in a local setting in Formosa allowed Sauter to amass large amounts of insect specimens, a resource he used to steer the course of scientific practice in Europe. (shrink)

This article will investigate Rawls's claim that his theory is Kantian in origin. In drawing on the Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, I will show that Rawls's claim to be Kantian cannot be conclusively explained and assessed without the Lectures. An investigation of the Lectures shows that Rawls forces onto Kant's theory a Rawlsian interpretation which crucially alters Kant's theory. So far the secondary literature has neglected to subject Rawls's Lectures to detailed philosophical scrutiny. This article aims to (...) fill this gap in the literature on Rawls's Kantianism. I will identify three points in Rawls's interpretation of Kant (need for CI-procedure, willing condition, true human needs) which are questionable. I argue that the similarities of Rawls's theory to Kant are due to these (mis)interpretations, which makes Rawls's claim to be Kantian ultimately not legitimate. (shrink)

Using a unique dataset provided by the international rating agency GES®, we investigate the effects of corporate sustainability and industry-related exposure to environmental and social risks on the market value of MSCI World firms. The results show a negative relationship in the earlier years of our sample period. However, the analysis reveals that the capital market perception of sustainability has changed owing to the financial crisis. Looking at the height of the crisis in September 2008, the month in which Lehman (...) Brothers shocked the world’s capital markets by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, we find that the previously negative perception of corporate sustainability across its various dimensions was positively affected and offset. In addition, as a moderated regression analysis shows, the crisis led to a positive perception of corporate sustainability in industries that are exposed to higher environmental and social risks. Our study has the practical implication that executives, in particular in industries with high environmental and social risks, should increase their commitment to corporate sustainability due to the changes in the institutional setting triggered by the financial crisis. (shrink)

Social robots serve people as tutors, caretakers, receptionists, companions, and other social agents. People know that the robots are mechanical artifacts, yet they interact with them as if they were actual agents. How is this possible? The proposal here is that people construe social robots not as social agents per se, but as depictions of social agents. They interpret them much as they interpret ventriloquist dummies, hand puppets, virtual assistants, and other interactive depictions of people and animals. Depictions as a (...) class consist of three physical scenes with part-by-part mappings between them: (a) a base scene (the raw physical artifact), (b) the depiction proper (the artifact construed as a depiction), and (c) the scene depicted (the scene people are to imagine). With social robots, evidence shows people form the same three scenes plus mappings: They perceive the raw machinery of a robot, construe it as a depiction of a character, and, using the depiction as a guide, engage in the pretense that they are interacting with the character depicted. With social robots, people also recognize three classes of agents – the characters depicted, the intended recipients of the depictions (those who view or interact with the robots), and the authorities responsible for the robots (the designers, makers, and owners). Construing social robots as depictions, we argue, accounts for many phenomena not covered by alternative models. (shrink)

BlOMQVIST K, THEANDER E, MOWIDE I and LARSSON V. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 317–323 What happens when you involve patients as experts? a participatory action research project at a renal failure unitAlthough there is a trend towards developing health care in a patient‐centred direction, changes are usually planned by the professionals without involving the patients. This paper presents an ongoing participatory action research project where patients with chronic renal failure, nurses at a specialist renal failure unit, a hospital manager and (...) a researcher worked together to develop patient‐centred care. The project combined the expertise of patients in their own experiences of living with a chronic condition with the professional expertise of nurses, the manager and the researcher. As the workload on the unit was uneven, the development work needed to be low in intensity but long‐term. Based on a number of dialogues in focus groups, four main development areas were identified; access to test results, prerequisites for postponing the progress of the illness, general awareness and understanding of living with chronic renal failure, and family‐focused care. A number of changes have been planned or implemented, such as developing a prototype for a web‐based feed‐back system, expanding patient education to newly diagnosed patients, steering the nurses' role towards a guiding and family‐focused function, and planning a digital story‐telling workshop. Involving committed people who have the mandate to change practices were prerequisites for success. (shrink)