Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 193-234.

In a number of papers, Kit Fine introduced a theory of embodiment which distinguishes between rigid and variable embodiments, and has been successfully applied to clarify the ontological nature of entities whose parts may or may not vary in time. In particular, he has applied this theory to describe a process such as the erosion of a cliff, which would be a variable embodiment whose manifestations are the different states of erosion of the cliff. We find this theory very powerful, (...) and especially appropriate to capture the intuition that the same process may go on at different times. However, its formal principles have been subject to some criticisms, mainly concerning the mereological structure of a variable embodiment. Moreover, since the notion of variable embodiment is very general, simply saying that processes are variable embodiments is not enough to understand their ontological nature. To address these concerns, in this paper we proceed in two phases: first, we propose a revised version of Fine’s original theory adapted to the case of processes, which adopts a classical mereology instead of Fine’s hylomorphic mereology, and a temporalized constitution relation in place of Fine’s function of variable embodiment; second, we go deeper into the ontological nature of processes by revisiting the notions of homogeneity, intentionality, and telicity discussed in the literature, and propose an account based on ontological principles and not on semantic properties of predicates. This allows us to organize processes into a novel taxonomy based exclusively on their unity and individuation principles. (shrink)

Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to “speak” of indeterminism, its inability to present us a worldview in which new information is created as time passes. In such a case, scientific determinism would only be an illusion due to the timeless mathematical language scientists use. To investigate this possibility it is necessary (...) to develop an alternative mathematical language that is both powerful enough to allow scientists to compute predictions and compatible with indeterminism and the passage of time. We suggest that intuitionistic mathematics provides such a language and we illustrate it in simple terms. (shrink)

This article is a critical and appreciative interaction with Christopher Southgate's theodicy and theology of glory. I critique in particular his rejection of all dualist moves in theodicy. I question why Southgate can ascribe evil to some human actions, many of which are automatic and unconscious, but not to any other level or form of consciousness. I argue that he may rely too heavily on rational scientific categories, which are not sufficient in themselves to carry the weight of key theological (...) concepts. His use of poetry is powerful and suggestive, but in the end, he may not give it enough epistemic weight. (shrink)

Soon after December 1989, the Romanian political power and the Romanian Orthodox Church have established that they had common interests regarding the preservation of several elements of the old leadership structures. A radical severance with the past has never been accomplished, for, a certain fear for a complete unbalance and of an uncontrollable evolution of the State’s institutions and of the Church’s hierarchy became manifest at that time. Thus, the Orthodox Church and the leading political post-communist party have made (...) a series of mutual good turns, with a view to maintaining the status-quo. At the same time, the political leadership manifested occult trends in order to control the Orthodox Church and to monopolize its huge sphere of influence for political purposes, since the State had no interest in the existence of a very strong and independent Church. This article shortly analyzes some of these cases. (shrink)

We argue that two powerful error-theoretic concepts provide a general framework that satisfactorily accounts for key aspects of the explanation of physical patterns. This method gives an objective criterion to determine which mathematical models in a class of neighboring models are just as good as the exact one. The method also emphasizes that abstraction is essential for explanation and provides a precise conceptual framework that determines whether a given abstraction is explanatorily relevant and justified. Hence, it increases our epistemological understanding (...) of how one should go about reconstructing scientific practices by making clear that, at a fundamental level, a key aspect of mathematical modeling consists in exactly solving nearby problems. (shrink)

Fichte’s essay about Machiavelli was published in 1807 in Vesta journal with the declared aim to contribute to the »defence of a formidable man’s honour«. A year later some fragments from this essay were republished at the beginning of Fichte’s celebre writing: Addresses to the German Nation. Fichte’s declared admiration for Machiavelli as political thinker is difficult to understand, as the two men had very different political conceptions. The present study demonstrates that there is no difference between Fichte’s eulogy for (...) the man who discovered the demonic nature of power and his own political theory, which contains exactly an attempt to de-demonize this power. For Fichte The Prince contains a perfect political theory useful for the past of the humanity, but his theory, based on a new form of education, addresses the problems of the future. That is why he considered Machiavelli a good specialist of the human nature who, as a real physician of culture, made a very precise diagnosis of humanity’s moral maladies.Fichtes Essai über Machiavelli wurde 1807 in der Zeitschrift Vesta veröffentlicht, um zur »Ehrenrettung eines braves Mannes« beizutragen. Ein Jahr später wurden einige Passagen am Anfang seiner Reden an die deutsche Nation neu aufgelegt. Fichtes Bewunderung für Machiavelli als politischen Denker scheint schwer erklären zu sein, weil es um zwei entgegengesetzte politische Konzeptionen geht. Es gibt jedoch keinen Widerspruch zwischen Fichtes Lobrede auf Machiavelli als politischen Denker, der die Dämonie der Macht entdeckt hat, und seiner eigenen entgegengesetzten Lehre von der Entdämonisierung der Macht. Für Fichte enthält das Buch Vom Fürsten eine politische Theorie, die für die Vergangenheit der Menschheit vollkommen gültig ist, während er durch seine Lehre von der Entdämonisierung der Macht durch eine neue Art der Erziehung die Zukunft im Auge hat. Für ihn ist Machiavelli ein tiefgründiger Kenner des Menschen und der Gesellschaft, der wie ein Arzt der Kultur alle moralischen Krankheiten der Menscheit sehr genau diagnostiziert hat. (shrink)

Power demonism - or the demonic nature of power - is a phenomenon found everywhere one can identify a political power center. Niccolo Machiavelli is the person who revealed clearly for the first time the nature of power demonism. Paradoxically, far from being himself a demonic being-- a description which Goethe ascribed to the meaning of this term - the author of The Prince was just a realistic theoretician of his time. Power demonism is the (...) ability of the politician to create the general conditions to achieve political power from the dark side of the individual. This phenomenon evidently has a destructive potential. (shrink)

This chapter deals with one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, inappropriate appeal to authority (IAA). IAA has many different facets. At its core, it is a fallacy that assumes that because someone is an authority, we should listen to that person. The problem with IAA is that it ignores content in favor of credentials and power. There are a few different ways in which IAA can occur. IAA seems to be the result of a flaw in human (...) thinking. Social cognitive theory, a theory that helps explain human action, notes that humans tend to act like each other. The tendency to listen to authorities who are not authorities explains why celebrities are able to sell us stuff. The important thing to remember about IAA is that it is not just a fallacy that comes up in arguments that do not matter. (shrink)

This case study provides a multi-perspective view on the power of political events as a strategy to influence public opinion-building regarding the European Union and the European Idea. To achieve this purpose, it examines one prominent political issue of 2007, namely the German Presidency of the Council of the EU. Looking at three different groups of actors, the German Government, the media, and the audience, the public perception of events is analyzed according to their varying degree of mediatization. The (...) case study compares the three main objectives of the German Presidency on the actors' agendas and describes how issues were framed during three different time periods. The findings suggest that the media agenda was heavily influenced by the government's scheduled events. Regarding the frames identified in the public sphere, the media offered different interpretations, somewhat varying from the political leaders' intentions and from the citizens' perceptions. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss how we used institutional ethnography (Institutional ethnography as practice, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD and 2006) to map out powerful ruling relations that organize nurses’ wound care work. In recent years, the growing number of people living with wounds that heal slowly or not at all has presented substantial challenges for those managing the demands on Canada's publicly insured health‐care system. In efforts to address this burden, Canadian health‐care administrators and policy‐makers rely on scientific evidence (...) about how wounds heal and what treatments are most effective. Advanced wound care exemplifies the growing authorization of particular forms of evidence that change the ways in which nurses come to know about and conduct their work. The focus of this paper's nursing inquiry is a critique of registered nurses’ wound work as it arises within the established uptake of scientific evidence. (shrink)

The paper purports to show that truth-atemporalism, the thesis that truth is timeless, is incompatible with power to do otherwise. Since a parallel and simpler argument can be run to the effect that truth-omnitemporalism, the thesis that truth is sempiternal, is incompatible with power to do otherwise, our conclusion achieves greater generality, and the possible shift from the claim that truth is omnitemporal to the claim that it is atemporal becomes useless for the purpose to resist it. On (...) the other hand, our argument for the conclusion that both Atemporalism and Omnitemporalism are incompatible with power to do otherwise will be shown independent of the debated assumption that the past is inalterable. So our argument goes through independently of whether Ockhamists are right in insisting that the soft facts about the past are alterable. (shrink)

Résister n'est pas seulement, pour les individus, un acte exceptionnel réservé aux temps de tragédies. Et, s'il peut prendre une tournure plus nettement politique, plus clairement dissidente, dans ces moments de crises sociales, il n'en existe pas moins une foule de menues résistances quotidiennes à l'ordre du monde. Résistances politiques, résistances du quotidien, ce livre n'a pas voulu choisir entre les unes et les autres. Les frontières peuvent être floues, quand on y regarde de prêt, entre les engagements suscités par (...) des situations dramatiques, qui ressortent souvent de décisions très intimes, et les refus du sort plus banals, qui mettent toujours en question, même sur un mode assourdi, le fonctionnement de la cité. Les contributions rassemblées dans ces pages présentent une série de cas de résistance, plus ou moins spectaculaires, qu'opposent des individus ou des groupes sociaux aux pouvoirs et aux hiérarchies qui structurent leur environnement. Appartenant à des contextes historiques et sociaux contrastés, exposées par des spécialistes de disciplines différentes, elles ont en commun d'interroger, chacune à leur manière, les raisons qui poussent les acteurs à résister, les modes de leur résistance, et finalement leur prix et leurs conséquences pour ces acteurs. Au-delà de cette réflexion croisée sur l'acte de résistance apparaît un monde social tissé de normes et de contraintes dans lequel ils luttent pour se ménager encore, même en bout de course, un espace de liberté, pour affirmer et faire reconnaître une existence et une personnalité, ou pour se conformer à des valeurs. Et c'est, en se confrontant à la conscience sociale et à la geste de ces individus résistants, à une réflexion éthique que ce livre invite son lecteur. (shrink)

Jar Jar Binks might be the most hated individual in the Star Wars universe. He should feel a great deal of guilt over his actions in the Senate, though well meaning, because they caused so much strife. This chapter considers how Darth Vader would reflect on his own actions: it is unlikely that he feels particularly good about inadvertently provoking Leia's confession of love. The chapter now talks about Immanuel Kant. Kant's ethics are focused on intentions, the reasons why people (...) choose to act as they do. Jar Jar was, like most of the Senate, a victim of Palpatine's deceptions. The author highlights that it is fair to say that Jar Jar did not make the choice to grant Palpatine emergency powers because he could not do otherwise. So, even though the consequences were grave, and Jar Jar's decision hasty, he can be absolved for what he did. (shrink)

El presente texto busca desarrollar una reflexión filosófica respecto de las posibles relaciones entre la noción de identidad y las formas de gobierno contemporáneas. A partir de un breve análisis sobre los principales desarrollos de la noción, se busca tensionar el campo de comprensión habitual y plantear un determinado modo en que esta puede pensarse como un engranaje epistemológico-ético respecto de los modos en que los individuos son llamados a nombrarse y reconocerse dentro de los límites impuestos por una cartografía (...) política. La tesis que sostiene este escrito dice relación con que la categoría de individuo moderno no es sostenible sin una adscripción a un orden de los nombres que tiende al autogobierno en base a la apelación de un ideal ético de correspondencia consigo mismo. (shrink)

Information about the powers and abilities of acting entities is used to coordinate their actions in societies, either physical or digital. Yet, the commonsensical meaning of an acting entity being deemed able to do something is still missing from the existing specification languages for the web or for multi-agent systems. We advance a general purpose abstract logical account of evidence-based ability. A basic model can be thought of as the ongoing trace of a multi-agent system. Every state records systemic confirmations (...) and disconfirmations of whether an acting entity is able to bring about something. Qualitative inductive reasoning is then used in order to infer what acting entities are deemed able to bring about in the multi-agent system. A temporalised modal language is used to talk about deemed ability, actual agency, and confirmation and disconfirmation of deemed ability. What constitutes a confirmation and a disconfirmation is left to the modeller as in general it depends on the application at hand. So to illustrate the methodology we propose two extended examples, one in practical philosophy, the other in system engineering. We first use a logic of agency and ability to obtain a version of Mele’s general practical abilities. Then, we look at the management of abilities in a supervised system. (shrink)

In this paper, we advance a novel conception of normative ethics and draw out its implications within the domain of professional ethics. We argue that all moral agents, and thus professionals, share a fundamental and constitutive normative interest in correctly conceiving of their ends. All professionals, we claim, by virtue of their positions of social power, have special role responsibilities in cultivating and sustaining societies oriented by this shared ideal of practically oriented ethical understanding. We defend this conception against (...) a familiar opponent of a philosophical approach to professional ethics: the morally skeptical student. By taking the skeptic’s challenge seriously, we clarify the conditions for a sound account of normative ethics and then provide a response that meets this test. Against this type of skeptic, we claim that a fundamental commitment to the ideal of understanding our ends ought to be included within any curriculum of professional et... (shrink)

This book presents a new translation of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius de Loyola, of his Spiritual Diary, of his Autobiography, and some of his letters.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across three cultural (...) capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini, referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way... (shrink)

We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become epistemically consequential. This article examines how two of its varieties, viewpoint diversity and educational diversity, have come (...) to transform the moral economy of science. Both aim at multiplying perspectives on a given subject, but their political subtexts differ markedly. The valorization of educational diversity followed a US Supreme Court decision in 1978 that enabled universities to advance social justice, if they justified race-conscious admissions in terms of the pedagogic benefits of a more diverse student body for all. By contrast, the proponents of viewpoint diversity aim at the reform of scientific knowledge production and distribution rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. We examine the political epistemology of viewpoint diversity by analyzing a controversy between social psychologists who, amid the American culture wars of the 2010s, debated how to rein in their political biases in a scientific field supposedly lacking political diversity. Out of this scientific controversy grew Heterodox Academy, an activist organization promoting viewpoint diversity in higher education. By relating and comparing viewpoint and educational diversity, we clarify what is at stake epistemically in the US-centric moral economy of diversity. (shrink)

Public interest is intended to mean a consolidation of the prevailing ends of the legal and political order of a democratic state. This is a vague legal concept that generally carries the risks of confusion and manipulation. The undoubted difficulties involved in its determination often lead to it being credited (or discredited) as an ideological concept. Administrative doctrine holds that vague legal concepts do not widen administrative discretion and do not open up a route to arbitrariness. However, neither the legislator (...) nor the administration nor the judiciary have managed to avoid the risks of indeterminacy. Perhaps the best guarantee for achieving a reasonable validation of this concept is to establish a strong relationship between public interest and democracy. Public interest as distinguished from the metaphysical idea of natural law and the common good, must be above all a democratic value, in that its definition should be in the hands of democratically legitimated power and its implementation must involve the protection and realization of a greater number of private interests. From another perspective, the crisis that always grip the concept requires us to emphasize the need for public interest to be a matter for eachs citizen, that is, the pursuit of general interest involves the ability of every citizen to put a distance between it and their private interests. (shrink)

W illia m o f Ockha m w a s a F rancisca n fria r , a theol o gia n an d a v e r y singula r philo sophe r . H e l i v e d a t a tim e o f crisi s an d durin g th e transitio n o f philosop h y an d theol o g y . Hi s secularis m i s manifeste d i n (...) th e defens e o f a radica l separatio n bet w ee n th e religious an d secula r p ow ers . Assigne d t o th e philosophica l cu r ren t o f nominalism , h e deal t a s e v ere b l o w t o th e metap h ysica l realis m o f Aristotl e an d Thoma s Aquina s an d h e ad v ocate d the separatio n o f reaso n an d f aith , bet w ee n philosop h y an d theol o g y an d thu s h e unde r mined th e ideol o gica l foundation s o f th e churc h o f hi s time . H e w a s accuse d o f heres y because o f hi s nominalism , althoug h h e himsel f condemne d P op e Joh n XXI I a s heretica l fo r his conceptio n o f p o v e r t y , a concep t f a r rem o v e d fro m ev angelica l principle s an d especial ly fro m th e notio n o f th e F rancisca n orde r . H e defende d th e separatio n o f churc h an d stat e and h e denie d th e P ope ’ s authorit y i n secula r matters . H e flat ly asse r te d freedo m o f conscience an d Luthe r too k hi m a s a teache r. (shrink)

Many of the most virulent and problematic eukaryotic pathogens have evolved from photosynthetic ancestors, such as apicomplexans, which are responsible for a wide range of diseases including malaria and toxoplasmosis. The primary barrier to understanding the early stages of evolution of these parasites has been the difficulty in finding parasites with closely related free‐living lineages with which to make comparisons. Parasites found throughout the florideophyte red algal lineage, however, provide a unique and powerful model to investigate the genetic origins of (...) a parasitic lifestyle. This is because they share a recent common ancestor with an extant free‐living red algal species and parasitism has independently arisen over 100 times within this group. Here, we synthesize the relevant hypotheses with respect to how these parasites have proliferated. We also place red algal research in the context of recent developments in understanding the genome evolution of other eukaryotic photosynthesizers turned parasites. (shrink)

One of the high-points of Italian Renaissance humanism, Machiavelli's The Prince immediately transcended the time and culture from which it had sprung, circulating throughout Europe and paving the road to an astonishing variety of discussions on power and liberty for centuries to come. Indeed, one could hardly think of a literary work whose reception has been more controversial and arguably more crucial to the fashioning of modernity. This volume gathers together the proceedings of a conference held in Oxford, in (...) November 2013, to mark the 500th anniversary of the composition of The Prince. It explores pivotal aspects of the text's complex identity, focusing on three interrelated areas: 1. The Prince's own ways of appropriating ancient and modern traditions of political thought and ethics; 2. the textual history and interpretive details of the work; 3. translations of the treatise into foreign languages (including English and other translations), with their cultural adaptations and reconceptualizations of the original. All chapters offer highly original insights by leading experts on The Prince, shedding light on hitherto neglected topics and locating Machiavelli's masterpiece in an intriguing network of intersecting perspectives. (shrink)

Les politiques et l’administration sont les maîtres de la langue de bois. C’est pour eux une question de survie avec les risques que cela implique : la démocratie est dévoyée, les électeurs sont souvent trompés et le fonctionnement de l’État en pâtit. Pour remédier à cela, les think tanks – des organismes privés de recherche représentant la société civile – ont été créés. Leur rôle : dévoiler les discours ambigus des politiques, dénoncer la démagogie et les abus de l’État et (...) de l’administration, critiquer les mauvaises politiques publiques, proposer des solutions. Financés uniquement grâce à des dons privés, les think tanks se sont imposés dans la société américaine comme une force presque aussi importante que les médias.Politicians and bureaucrats are masters of doublespeak. To them, it is a matter of survival with all the risks this implies: democracy has gone astray, voters are frequently misled and the functions of the State are being corroded as a result. Think tanks – which are private research organisations representing civil society – have been set up in an attempt to remedy the situation. Their role is to reveal the ambiguity of political discourse, denounce demagoguery and the misuse of power by the State and its bureaucracy, criticise bad public policy and propose solutions. In the US, these think tanks are funded exclusively by private donations and have become, in American society, almost as powerful as the media. (shrink)

For Nicolas Auray, works relationships in an information society would recover, an illusion, pleasure would obliterate an exploitation of resources. So informatics which creates a mutant humanity ends, actually, to a pastoral govermentality. As far as he thinks hacker’s ethics by analogy with the University, Pekka Himanen does not propose any perspective of transformation. The understanding of the freedom of hackers, is a vision which protect their sovereign power with regard to the users, but which not allows them to (...) play role, in moral regulation of the city, for which Nicolas Auray waits. (shrink)

La cyberdépendance est un phénomène dont l’étude relève, encore aujourd’hui, largement de la psychologie. En abordant cette problématique sous l’angle pluridisciplinaire des sciences de l’information et de la communication, ce nouvel objet peut permettre la mise à distance de discours convenus sur la technophilie, mais également, sur une certaine technophobie. Ainsi, en abordant l’univers des jeux vidéo et d’Internet, il est désormais possible de prendre la mesure de la croissance multiforme des mondes virtuels, mais aussi et surtout, des risques inhérents (...) de dépendance, liés à ces pratiques et, plus largement, aux usages des techniques de l’information et de la communication. L’intérêt de notre démarche serait donc de relativiser, d’une part, un discours particulièrement élogieux à l’égard des nouvelles technologies, mais dans le même temps, montrer que la technique, aussi puissante soit-elle, reste tributaire de variables culturelles fortes. Les résultats d’une enquête empirique permettront alors de mieux comprendre comment s’articulent les relations entre l’individu, la technique et la culture, en montrant comment cette dernière parvient finalement à canaliser la technique.Studies on Internet addiction are still largely confined to the field of psychology. However, addressing this new object from the multidisciplinary angle of the information and communication sciences can help to step back from conventional discourses on technophilia, but also on some instances of technophobia. Investigating the world of video and Internet games makes it possible to take stock of the many-faceted growth of virtual worlds, but also, and especially, of the inherent addictiveness of game playing and the use of information and communication technologies in general. The value of our approach lies therefore in taking an objective view of the consistently eulogistic discourse on new technologies while showing at the same time that technology, for all its power, will always be dependent on strongly marked cultural variables. The results of our empirical investigation shed light on the interaction of relationships between people, technology and culture, to show that, ultimately, it is culture that channels technology and not the reverse. (shrink)

The theoretical literature on vertical relationships usually assumes that beliefs about secret contracts take specific forms. In a recent paper, Eguia et al. (Games Econ Behav 109:465–483,2018) propose a new selection criterion that does not impose any restriction on beliefs. In this article, we extend their criterion by generalizing it to risk-averse retailers, and we show that risk aversion modifies the size of the belief subsets that support each equilibrium. We conduct an experiment which revisits that of Eguia et al. (...) (Games Econ Behav 109:465–483,2018). We design a new treatment effect on equilibrium selection depending on the retailers’ risk sensitivity. Experimental results confirm the treatment effect: the more sensitivity there is towards risk, the more the equilibrium played is consistent with passive beliefs. In addition, extending Eguia et al.’s (Games Econ Behav 109:465–483,2018) criterion to risk-averse retailers improves its predictive power on the equilibria played, especially for a population of retailers with moderate to extreme risk aversion. (shrink)

The view we defend is that in virtue of its nature, disgust is not fit to do any moral or social work whatsoever, and that there are no defensible uses for disgust in legal or political institutions. We first describe our favoured empirical theory of the nature of disgust. Turning from descriptive to normative issues, we address the best arguments in favour of granting disgust the power to justify certain judgements, and to serve as a social tool, respectively. Daniel (...) Kahan advances a pair of theses that suggest disgust is indispensable (Moral Indispensability Thesis), and so has an important part to play in the functioning of a just, well-ordered society (Conservation Thesis). We develop responses and show how they rebut the arguments given in support of each thesis. We conclude that any society free of social disgust would be more just, reasonable and compassionate. (shrink)

Role distribution is a central issue for parents in the transition to parenthood, but little is known about the motivations in fathers to assume a specific role. Differences in work-family balance in each parent may be motivated by an individual choice mutually shared by both partners; however, in many couples, the parents may feel forced to adopt a traditional role distribution, either for financial reasons, or to comply with social expectations about what men and women should do when they are (...) parents. This feeling of being socially constrained to adopt a role distribution that is not congruent with intrinsic motivations can generate dissatisfaction and may jeopardize the development of the interparental relationship. Coparenting refers to the emotional and instrumental support parents bring to each other in their parental tasks. It has been shown to be central in family functioning and a powerful predictor of children’s emotional and cognitive development. In this study, we aimed to assess the extent to which different motivations for role distribution in fathers are predictive of the quality of the coparental relationship. A convenience sample of 144 fathers from the French-speaking part of Switzerland completed online questionnaires about their motivations, coparental relationship, and sociodemographic characteristics. Results showed that the reasons for role distribution were mainly economical, practical, and in order to meet personal expectations. Multivariate general linear modeling showed that role distribution that is constrained to meet social expectations and age were predictive of a less cohesive coparental relationship, whereas a deliberate choice in role distribution was linked to a more cohesive coparental relationship. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, despite his remarks to the effect that freedom consists in the ‘movement’ away from nature, Hegel conceives of the will as a natural power or capacity of sorts. I articulate and defend this thesis in two steps. In section I of the paper, I sketch a reading of Hegel’s account of practical freedom in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right as a capacity to respond to ethical requirements or duties. In section II, (...) I argue that the will, on that account, qualifies for Hegel as natural in the following two respects: First, in the good or virtuous case, our responsiveness to ethical requirements exhibits features similar to the lawlike behavior of subhuman denizens of the natural world and other law-governed natural processes. Second, our capacity for practical freedom emerges through processes of habituation from the exercises of capacities that we share with other animals. Although the second thesis is the more important of the two for the purposes of naturalizing Hegel’s account of the will, I believe it has not yet been the focus of satisfactory scholarly attention. I thus hope to help remedy what I take to be a gap in the recent literature. Published on 2022-10-14 10:55:29. (shrink)

After giving some examples of the links between astral magic and the political sphere or model (political goals of certain talismans, therapeutic astral magic at the service of powerful people, use of hierarchies of demonic powers), the article focuses on William of Auvergne’s analysis of the stakes of power in the magic art. The Bishop of Paris underlines the logical impasse to which the political power attributed to a magician would lead, and he shows the insuitability of the (...) comparison between the astrological talisman and the royal seal that supporters of this practice could put forward. (shrink)

Bien que couramment utilisée dans les discours médiatiques, la notion d’« arrogance » reste pourtant peu étudiée. L’analyse de discours réalisée à partir d’une revue de presse nous permet ici d’éclairer les mécanismes de l’arrogance et la manière dont s’articulent précisément incommunication et imposture stratégique, qu’il convient dès lors de considérer conjointement. Car en niant l’interaction et en entremêlant méprise et mépris, l’arrogance éclaire négativement la force du lien qui existe entre information, communication et stratégie.Although the word is often used (...) in media discourse, “arrogance” in itself has rarely been studied. Our analysis of discourses taken from a press review highlights the mechanisms of arrogance and the interplay of un-communication and strategic deception, which must therefore be considered together. By negating this interplay and by interweaving misconception and contempt, arrogance negatively highlights the powerful link between information, communication and strategy. (shrink)

The paper challenges mainstream theories of Latin American development, showing their theoretical weaknesses and pointing to their role in ideologically mediating the region’s ‘truncated’ capitalism. To that end, the paper presents an alternative view of Latin American development that starts by considering capitalist social reproduction as a worldwide process and regional/national politico-economic development as mediations in the structuring of global capital accumulation. Latin America’s specific variety of capitalism is understood to have emerged from its original transformation by expanding European capital (...) into a place to produce raw materials under favourable natural conditions. On the one hand, this has reduced their price and that of the labour-power directly or indirectly consuming them; on the other, it has resulted in a flow of surplus-value towards the owners of those natural conditions of production. The historical development of Latin American societies has expressed the partial overcoming of that antagonistic relationship between rent-paying capital and rent-appropriating landed property. (shrink)

The small-improvement argument is usually considered the most powerful argument against comparability, viz the view that for any two alternatives an agent is rationally required either to prefer one of the alternatives to the other or to be indifferent between them. We argue that while there might be reasons to believe each of the premises in the small-improvement argument, there is a conflict between these reasons. As a result, the reasons do not provide support for believing the conjunction of the (...) premises. Without support for the conjunction of the premises, the small-improvement argument for incomparability fails. (shrink)

This article is a critical investigation of the buildings and writings of Étienne-Joseph Gaboury, a prolific French Canadian architect who, in the 1960s, designed several modern parish churches and engaged with various liturgical documents issued in the context of the Second Vatican Council. How have the various calls of priests and theologians advocating for artistic and liturgical renewal—calls which became increasingly frequent in the North Atlantic world after World War II—been adapted and implemented in specific architectural landmarks by Gaboury, such (...) as his famous Précieux-Sang Church and Blessed Sacrament Church in Manitoba? I argue that Gaboury’s account of the origins of Christianity and his description of religious experience in both embodied and spiritual terms, found in his essay “Design for Worship”, can be understood not simply as an aggiornamento, or bringing the Church “up to date,” but also as echoes, in aesthetic and architectural terms, of some of the key tenets of the “new theology,” which were central to the changes put forth by the Second Vatican Council. I also argue that Gaboury’s interests in materiality and in the evocative power of light need to be read through the rise of phenomenology in postwar North American architecture. By looking at various archival documents, I propose that Vatican II was not a unilateral, top-down paradigm shift, or a rupture with tradition, but rather a complex and ongoing negotiation between the architect, ecclesial authorities and lay people. (shrink)

This article discusses the integrative function frequently assigned to festive events by scholars. This function can be summed up in a proposition: experiencing similar emotions during collective gatherings is a powerful element of socialization. The article rejects this oft-developed idea according to which popular fervor could be an efficient tool to measure civic engagement. It raises the following question: what makes enthusiasm “civic”, “patriotic”, “republican” or simply “political”? Based on a study of French presidential tours in France from 1888 to (...) 2007, this article casts a different light on the topic. The enthusiasm of the crowds interacting with the successive French presidents is not civic because an inquiry may find “patriotism” into participants’ minds. It can be called civic simply because the forms and meaning of the festive jubilation, which may be summarized into the formula: “if spectators applaud, it means they support,” necessarily preexist its multiple manifestations. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the heuristic power of the theoretical distinction between framework and interaction theories applied to the case of General Relativity. According to the distinction, theories and theoretical elements can be classified into two different groups, each with clear ontological, epistemic and functional content. Being so, to identify the group to which a theory belongs would suffice to know a priori its prospects and limitations in these areas without going into a detailed technical analysis. We make (...) the exercise here with General Relativity, anticipate its ontological, epistemic and functional content and show afterwords that such expectations are justified in this case, being consistent with formal issues of General Relativity. With this, we attempt to make a case for the use of the distinction as a powerful tool for scientific and philosophical analysis. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the (...) many theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances. Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics. (shrink)

Mischievous, beguiling, seductive, lascivious, unruly, carping, vengeful and manipulative – from the Disney princess to the murderous Medea, the articles in _Re-visiting Female Evil_ grapple with our understanding of what it is to be and do evil femininities.

This paper puts the famous story of Jekyll and Hyde to work for a specific analytic purpose. The question of responsibility for crime, complicated by the divided subjectivity implicit in Mr. Hyde’s appearance, and illuminated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grasp of contemporary psychiatric, evolutionary and medical thought as promising new technologies for effecting a distinction between criminality and innocence, is key to the interest of the story. I argue that Jekyll and Hyde serves as a powerful metaphor both for specifically (...) late Victorian perplexities about criminality and criminal responsibility, and for more persistently troubling questions about the legitimacy of and practical basis for criminalization. A close reading of the story illustrates the complex mix of elements bearing on criminal responsibility-attribution, and—incidentally—helps to explain what is wrong with the influential argument that, by the end of the nineteenth Century, attributions of responsibility in English criminal law already rested primarily and unambiguously on factual findings about the defendant’s state of mind. Far from representing the triumph of a practice of responsibility-attribution grounded in the assessment of whether the defendant’s capacities were fully engaged, I argue that the terrain of mental derangement defences in late nineteenth Century England helps us to understand that longer-standing patterns of moral evaluation of character remained central to the criminal process. And precisely because ‘character’ remained key to the institutional effort to distinguish criminality and innocence, the ‘terror’ of Stevenson’s story resides in its questioning of whether either scientific knowledge or moral evaluation of character can provide a stable basis for attributions of responsibility. In conclusion, I will also suggest that Stevenson’s tale can help us to make sense of the resurgence of overtly ‘character-based’ practices of responsibility attribution in contemporary Britain and the United States, which themselves reflect a renewed crisis of confidence in our ability to effect a ‘dissociation’ between criminality and innocence. (shrink)

A partir de la divergencia de M. Foucault con Th. Hobbes con respecto a la guerra como principio y fundamento del poder, se muestra la importancia de esa diferencia conceptual para los análisis políticos contemporáneos. Foucault sostiene que, en las sociedades modernas de Occidente, la comunidad política, y más precisamente la política misma, ha sido el terreno de la guerra librada por otros medios. Por extensión, esta tesis significa invertir el principio de von Clausewitz; a saber, que la guerra es (...) la continuación de la política por otros medios. On the basis of the difference between M. Foucault and Th. Hobbes regarding war as a principle and foundation of power, the article shows the importance of this conceptual difference for contemporary political analyses. Foucault argues that in modern Western societies, the political community and, more specifically, politics itself, has been the space of a war waged by other means. By extension, this thesis entails the inversion of von Clausewitz's principle, namely, that war is the continuation of politics by other means. A partir da divergência de M. Foucault com Th. Hobbes sobre a guerra como princípio e fundamento do poder, mostra-se a importância dessa diferença conceitual para as análises políticas contemporâneas. Foucault sustenta que, nas sociedades modernas do Ocidente, a comunidade política, e mais precisamente a política em si, tem sido o terreno da guerra travada por outros meios. Por extensão, esta tese significa inverter o princípio de von Clausewitz; a saber, que a guerra é a continuação da política por outros meios. (shrink)