This paper seeks to analyse the proposals and assumptions in the Consultation Paper: Teachers Meeting the Challenge of Change (DfEE, 1998a). Although the Consultation Paper claims to be about the modernising of the teaching profession, it is argued here that it is a deeply conservative paper written with the economic and employment legacy of the New Right. The proposals are considered in relation to the tradition of teacher criticism and blame. The conceptual framework of post-fordism and neo-fordism is used to (...) explore the form of modernisation proposed for teachers' work and conditions. (shrink)

Research has shown that individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits are likely to cause harm to others in the workplace. However, there is little academic literature on the potentially adaptive outcomes of corporate psychopathy, particularly because the “boldness” psychopathy domain has largely been under-acknowledged in this literature. This study aimed to elaborate on past findings by examining the associations between psychopathy, as operationalized using scales from the relatively new triarchic model of psychopathy, and both adaptive and maladaptive workplace (...) behaviors. Participants were 343 working community adults who completed a series of self-report questionnaires that measured psychopathy and various workplace behaviors, including counterproductive work behaviors, tactics of influence, unethical decision-making, leadership strategies, team play, and creativity. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the associations between latent constructs of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, and the eight different constructs related to workplace behaviors. It was found that boldness preferentially predicted the use of soft tactics of influence, adaptive leadership, and team play, and negatively predicted passive leadership. Meanness predicted unethical decision-making, poor team play, and hard tactics of influence. Disinhibition positively predicted CWB and passive leadership. Meanness also moderated the association between disinhibition and CWB, in that greater scores on both psychopathy domains indicated greater levels of CWB. These findings provide conceptual support for the triarchic model, including the “boldness” domain, which measures adaptive aspects of psychopathy in addition to maladaptive ones, as well as suggest that not all individuals high on psychopathy would be an overt menace to the workplace. The different psychopathy traits may also interact with each other to predict different types or levels of workplace behaviors. (shrink)

The administration or recognition of religious courts is a form of religious accommodation present in many constitutional states today commonly analysed in legal pluralism terms. This article contributes to the further analysis of the relationship between legal pluralism and rights in religiously diverse societies by examining the status of state religious courts and their interaction with state non-religious courts. In particular, I examine what Cover calls “jurisdictional redundancies” between the courts and conceptualize the allocation of power between religious and non-religious (...) courts as a potentially productive site of interlegality. In doing so, I support concurrent jurisdictional allocations, arguing that exclusive jurisdiction could result in what I call an interlegal gap, whereby instead of inter-penetration of norms and production of reconciliatory principles, there is a justice gap whereby litigants may find themselves unable to obtain appropriate legal recourse including when neither court is willing to assume jurisdiction over the matter. This requires us to see the relationship between religious courts and non-religious courts through the more mundane but more practical lens of jurisdictional overlaps and competition, rather than through the more abstract framing of normative or even civilizational clashes. Accordingly, I argue that concurrent jurisdiction and interlegality have greater potential to strike a balance between individual and group rights and could be more protective of religious diversity. In other words, I argue for a closer, rather than a more separate, relationship between religious and non-religious courts, while denying that a hierarchical relationship where religious courts are subordinated to non-religious courts is the only way to protect rights. (shrink)

Facing the possibility of a surge of COVID-19-infected patients requiring ventilatory support in Intensive Care Units, the Singapore Hospice Council and the Chapter of Palliative Medicine Physicians forward its position on the guiding principles that ought to drive the allocation of ICU beds and its role in care of these patients and their families.

Guided by Basic Psychological Need Theory, we investigated the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration and their relations with theoretically relevant correlates including mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and physical activity. The participants were Singapore-based school students who completed a cross-sectional survey. The results of the latent profile analysis identified four distinct need profiles: profile 1–average satisfaction and frustration ; profile 2–low satisfaction, above average frustration; profile 3–very high satisfaction, very low frustration ; and profile 4–high satisfaction, (...) very high frustration. Among these, profile 3 was the most adaptive one; it had the highest levels of mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Experiences of need satisfaction countered the negative effects of need frustration on these correlates. These findings enhance our understanding of students’ psychological need experiences and highlight the need for investigating the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration. (shrink)

The concept of abolition of labour ( Aufhebung der Arbeit) appeared in some of Marx’s posthumously published works. Few of his notable successors highlighted this concept as key to opposing the Fordist stage of capitalism. Marcuse viewed this stage as a new peak in the repression of imagination and free instincts, bound to ‘the performance principle’. However, the rise of neo-liberalism presents unforeseen challenges to the criticism of labour. While the Keynesian welfare state is collapsing, its universal services are commodified (...) and inequality rates are skyrocketing – some factors of the abolition of labour are surprisingly uplifted. This article will examine the evolution of some factors of abolition of labour that thrive with the spread of neo-liberalism and the erosion of other vital factors; we will elucidate the diminishing role of Marcuse’s performance principle, unravel the reality principle replacing it and discuss the relevance of the concept ‘abolition of labour’ today. (shrink)

L’histoire économique nous enseigne que si le progrès technique ne profite pas à tous les travailleurs lorsqu’il apparaît, à long terme il est le facteur principal de la hausse extraordinaire des salaires et du niveau de vie que l’économie mondiale a connue depuis la révolution industrielle. Pourtant, les progrès de la robotique pourraient bien remettre en question cet optimisme et donner raison aux Cassandre qui prophétisaient la fin du travail. En effet, le champ de ces technologies ne cesse de progresser, (...) au point où la totalité des tâches effectuées par les humains serait robotisable. Si c’est le cas, l’économie et la société en seraient profondément transformées. On considère six scénarios. Dans trois d’entre eux, une classe humaine quasi-oisive se maintient grâce à des transferts prélevés sur la production effectuée par les robots. Ces transferts peuvent s’effectuer à travers l’État-Providence, le clientélisme d’une oligarchie possédant les robots, ou le maintien néo-fordiste d’emplois tertiaires dont la fonction essentielle serait le versement d’un salaire qui permettrait le maintien du pouvoir d’achat. En l’absence de mécanismes redistributifs, on envisage trois autres scénarios. Selon le scénario des rentiers, une classe de propriétaires de robots émerge, suffisamment nombreuse pour s'opposer politiquement à des transferts redistributifs. Selon le scénario malthusien, le salaire tombe au niveau du salaire de subsistance et la population humaine diminue, ne laissant subsister qu’une classe de rentiers vivant de la possession de robots. Selon le scénario virtuel, le salaire de subsistance lui-même baisse considérablement sous l’effet des nouvelles technologies : la population se maintient en dépit des baisses de salaire. (shrink)

This article responds to Lash and Thoburn's articles in this volume by arguing for the value of Gramsci's strategic concept of hegemony today. It places post-hegemony theories as replicating one particular reading of Gramsci as a theorist of ideology and politics only, a reading that was deepened by certain appropriations of post-structuralist theory in the 1980s. It argues that the Prison Notebooks contain a richer legacy of concepts and historical methods, many of which are applicable to today's global reach of (...) power and communication. In particular, Gramsci was concerned with the relations between Fordist innovation and changes in state, civil society, intellectual formations and ways of living. He was especially interested in popular 'common sense', which, in his view, was the starting point of political work and could be the product of a renovative political activism. His ideas remain relevant to understanding recent transitions, especially since 11 September 2001, and the reach and limits of global neo-liberal hegemonies today, including the role of neo-liberal intellectuals and of a deepened individualism in everyday life. They also offer resources for counter-hegemonic strategies. Although Lash and Thoburn grasp a crucial coagulation of power today, their superseding of hegemony is based on an impoverished reading of the history of Gramscianism in cultural studies, and on a collapse of key complexities and local differences which is typical of some versions of social theory. (shrink)

Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at the time in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of Autonomia. The survival of the last politically creative movement in the West was at stake, but no one in the United States seemed to realize that, or be willing to listen. Put together as events in Italy were unfolding, the Autonomia issue--which has (...) no equivalent in Italy, or anywhere for that matter--arrived too late, but it remains an energizing account of a movement that disappeared without bearing a trace, but with a big future still ahead of it.--Sylvère LotringerSemiotext is reissuing in book form its legendary magazine issue Italy: Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomist movement, this volume is the only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West. The movement itself was broken when Autonomia members were falsely accused of being the intellectual masterminds of the Red Brigades; but even after the end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucial testimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire. In the next two years, Semiotext will publish eight books by such Italian "Post-Fordist" intellectuals as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, and Bifo, as they update the theories of Autonomia for the new century.Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext, lives in New York and Baja California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions, 2007). Christian Marazzi, an Italian economist, lives in Switzerland. He is the author of Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy and Sock's Place, both forthcoming from Semiotext. (shrink)

This article contrasts Marx’s critical appropriation of Hegel in his mature works with Georg Lukács’s brilliant interpretation of the relation of Marx and Hegel. Hegel and the Hegelian turn in Marxism, as powerfully represented by Lukács, however, have been strongly criticized in recent decades by structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers for whom concepts central to Lukács’s project, such as totality and the historical Subject, are anti-emancipatory, expressions of domination. Nevertheless, the global historical transformations of recent decades – including the crisis of (...) the Fordist/Keynesian welfare state, the collapse of Soviet Communism, and the emergence of a neo-liberal capitalist global order – have called into question the post-Marxist turn. These historical changes, then, suggest the need for a renewed theoretical concern with capitalism. Marx’s critical appropriation of Hegel provides the basis for a critique both of Lukács as well as of post-structuralism in ways that can avoid the weaknesses of each while incorporating their strengths. (shrink)

This article looks at the history of the stem cell as an experimental life-form and situates it within the context of biological theories of cellular ageing which emerged in the 1960s, under the banner of ‘biogerontology’. The field of biogerontology, I argue, is crucially concerned not only with the internal limits to a cell's lifespan, but also with the possibility of overcoming limits. Hence, the sense of ‘revolution’ that has surrounded the isolation of human embryonic stem cells. The article goes (...) on to situate the problematic of cellular ageing within the larger historical transition from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production – a transition whose effects on the life sciences have been insufficiently theorized – and points to resonances between the concerns of biogerontology and an emerging political rhetoric on the crisis of ageing and limits to growth. Having surfaced in parallel with the neo-liberal euphoria of the 1990s, the field of regenerative medicine presents itself as a biomedical solution to the problem of limits to growth. What is at stake in the contemporary biosciences, I suggest, is not so much the mass commodification of life itself as its transformation into a source of speculative surplus value. (shrink)

In this article I explore the relatively neglected usage of conceptions of balance and equilibrium in Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony by adopting a contextual approach to his writings that situates them in an intellectual and historical milieu in which the quest for 'equilibrium' had become one of the most important issues of the day. In the first part of the article I show how ideas of balance and equilibrium were developing among sources familiar to Gramsci, including Italian Fordism, the (...) theorists of the Russian Revolution and neo-classical economics. The second part demonstrates how Gramsci developed these ideas within the framework of his theory of hegemony. My aim is not only to provide a new perspective on Gramsci's hegemony, but also to suggest that incorporating notions of balance and equilibrium into the theory will render it more coherent and realistic for its contemporary deployment in political and ideological analysis. (shrink)

The financial crisis which recently occurred is the epiphenomenon of a structural crisis of advanced capitalism. Although it referred to a very different context the diagnosis made by Habermas in his work Legitimationsprobleme des Spätkapitalismus , published in 1973, remains a very useful key in order to understand the irreducibility of social policy and the way the post-Fordist capitalism assumes the mediation between the economic and the social sphere — that is, how it deals with both the deficit of rationality (...) and the deficit of legitimacy. Instead of being the political expression of social relations the neo-liberal system decouples labour and capital and, governed by financial markets, disconnects the social and the political rights and undermines the possibility of a true foundation of citizenship. In other words, the ‘refeudalization’ Habermas had reported as early as in Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (1962) remains quite topical. (shrink)

Turkey has passed the import substitution economic model to a new model of the economy called open out since 1980. Along with the neoliberal policies implemented, the process of integration with the global economy has begun. The incomes of the religious people who cannot be excluded from the effects of this articulation also increased and their consumption behaviors has changed. On the other hand, some transport elements, especially the media, have enabled consumption codes to reach different segments. The new values (...) emerged in this process also caused transformations in individual consumption trends. In this study, the "Scale of Consumption Dynamics" (SCD) was developed in order to identify the trends of consumption of devotees and to find out how they changed. Quantitative research approach was adopted in the study and the datas were collected by face-to-face survey technique. The individuals included in our sample were selected by quota sampling. In this study, an expression pool was created as a result of literature review, expert opinion consultation, brainstorming with academicians and observations. The validity and reliability analysis of the scale was made using different statistics through the SPSS program. As a result of these steps, the dimensions of the scale consisting of 16 items and 3 dimensions are called "showy consumption", "wasteful consumption" and "religious priority consumption". Summary: The first studies on consumption history and sociology belong to Marx, Weber, Veblen and Simmel. In these studies consumption is examined as a part of production process and consumption forms were investigated as a social class aspect. Consumption phenomenon was later studied under critical approach (Frankfurt School) with Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm’s theories. Theorists at Frankfurt School study how social structure steers individuals to consumption. After the 1970’s, the meaning of consumption phenomenon has changed. There are studies by Jean Baudrillard, Mike Featherstone, George Ritzer, and Zygmunt Bauman on changing phenomenon of consumption. It is widely believed that modern consumption phenomenon was originated in the USA after the World War II. After the war Keynesian economic policies and Fordist consumption forms later influenced other Western nations. After 1950’s and 1960’s mass consumption was initiated in the USA and except very poor sections of the nations, other social classes, it started to spread out in Europe, the USA, and other countries. In 1970’s and 1980’s, it has merged with individuals’ identity definitions. After 1980’s in Turkey a new economic policy instead of import substitution was adopted. In application along with neo liberal policies, Turkey started to integrate to the rest of the World. Religious people as well influenced these changes and their incomes have increased along with their consumption habits. In addition to media, some other forms of communication channels have carried new consumption habits to other sections of the society. With the increased effects of mass communication media, new social sections have emerged and their cultural characteristics have become the norms of the whole society. A new values created in this process also transformed the consumption habits. In this article, in order to assess consumption habits of religious people as it is now and to understand which direction these habits evolve, Consumption Dynamics Scale (CDS) has been developed. Scales are widely used when a researcher tries to identify and measure respondents’ feelings and ideas on a subject matter. There are different scales used in social sciences such as Thurstone, Likert, Guttman, and Bogardus that are among the most widely used ones. A Likert Type scale has been used in this study. In the first phase of the study and pilot study 5 point Likert scale and in the second phase of the study 10 point Likert scales was used to collect the data. We could not come across with any study in the literature on investigating consumption characteristics Dynamics of individuals with a formal religious education. In the study, quantitative research method has been adopted and the research data has been collected with face to face administration of the survey instrument. The scale development phase lasted about 6 months from August, 2016. Based on 3% error rate, we determined to sufficient sample size as 516, yet we reached 600 individuals and end up with 563 usable responses. Sample has been determined with quota sampling methodology. We formed a pool of statements based on literature review, expert opinion, brain storming with academicians. 49 questions have been selected from the question pool where 93 questions were found, then they are merged, some questions are changed or totally eliminated and final 30 questioned questionnaires made ready for pilot study. Two pilot studies have been carried out. In the first pilot study, 47 people are reached and 30 questions with Likert scales have been administered. In the second phase of the study, 10 point Likert scales with 57 questions has been given to 54 individuals. After pilot studies, data was analyzed with SPSS 20 version and 32 questioned final survey instrument has been formed. In order to check sufficiency of data set for Factor Analysis Kaisser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and the relationships among variables Bartlett test were used. Sample composed of 563 responses revealed significant results (3358,808, p=0,000) and KMO test revealed (KMO=0,812) value. After expletory factor analysis, factor loading less than 0,40 were deleted from the scale. Hence the final structure is composed of 29 questions with 8 different factors. The reliability of scales were calculated with Cronbach Alfa analysis separately for each dimension. After reliability analysis, items with 0,60 and less reliability score were taken out from the scales. Finally 16 items were made up 3 dimensions namely “ostentatious consumption”, “wasteful consumption”, and “religious priority consumption”. The items in Factor 1 are related with luxury, fashion and statue, in Factor 2 desire to make more shopping, purchase without need, advertisement and showcase, and factor 3 religious sensitive reference focus and religion first purchasing are decided as appropriate names. Based on the analysis, measurement was decided valid and sound. Therefore, this study is believed to contribute significantly to the existing literature. (shrink)

La conjoncture historique qui a vu naître le capitalisme cognitif trouve son origine dans une transformation radicale du rapport capital/travail. À la suite de cette transformation, l'ensemble des normes fordistes-industrielles qui ont structuré l'organisation sociale de la production, la valorisation du capital ainsi que la répartition du revenu entre salaire, rente et profit, en sont sorties profondément modifiées. C'est pourquoi, dans cette majeure, nous avons tenté d'établir un état des lieux de l'avancement de la recherche autour de questions cruciales, celles (...) en particulier qui nous mènent à nous interroger sur les relations entre la montée de la dimension cognitive et immatérielle du travail, d'une part, et l'essor d'une économie de rente, d'autre part. Le développement du capitalisme cognitif est en fait allé de pair avec un puissant processus de financiarisation de l'économie ; il s'est aussi, plus généralement, accompagné d'une multiplication des formes de la rente. Cette évolution du capitalisme contemporain est souvent interprétée à travers une grille de lecture de type néo-ricardien qui tend à opposer le ' bon ' capitalisme productif de l'âge d'or du fordisme au ' mauvais ' capitalisme rentier de ' l'actuel régime de croissance financiarisé '. Selon cette approche, c'est notamment le pouvoir de la finance qui, en établissant de nouvelles règles de gouvernance des firmes, aurait été le facteur premier de la crise de la régulation fordiste du rapport salarial et de la fin des politiques de plein-emploi. Aussi dans ce numéro l'idée est-elle de prendre à contre-pied ce schéma d'analyse en partant du rôle moteur des transformations de l'organisation sociale du travail, pour comprendre, à la lumière de la thèse du capitalisme cognitif, l'essor de la finance et le retour en force de la rente. Nous essaierons aussi d'identifier sur cette base les processus de recomposition sociale susceptibles d'entraver la logique de la rente et d'impulser un processus de réappropriation du commun. (shrink)

In liberal thought, democracy is guaranteed by the unity of community and government. The community of citizens elects its government according to political preferences. The government rules over the community with powers that are limited by unalienable human, civil, and political rights. These assumptions have characterized Classical Liberalism, Revisionist Liberalism, and contemporary Neo-Liberal theories. However, the assumed unity of community and government becomes problematic in Global Post-Fordism. Recent research on the globalization of the economy and society has underscored the increasing (...) inability of nation-states to exercise power over their communities, which, in turn, limits the ability of communities to express their will at the nation-state level. The current phase of capitalism is characterized by socio-economic relations that transcend the jurisdictions of nation-states and local spaces. By introducing features characteristic of Classical Liberalism, Revisionist Liberalism and Neo-liberalism, and the contribution of the theory of Reflexive Modernization, which represents a novel attempt to rethink democracy within the liberal tradition, the issue of the fracture of the unity of community and government can be addressed. The inability of governments to control economic and non-economic environments creates a crisis of representation that implies serious limits to liberal democracy. This situation is particularly important for the agricultural and food sector since its development and programs for its democratization have been historically based on the intervention of agencies of and control by the nation-state. (shrink)

The evidence today is practically uncontested: about thirty years ago we left Fordism behind and entered a new phase of capitalism. That the structures of the post-Fordist social order call for new modes of social critique is also a prevalent idea. The category of alienation continues, however, to be discredited. Nevertheless it is not clear that the categories of democracy (as apparatuses of non-domination), justice and the good life are capable of bringing about the political effects that may be expected (...) today from the concept of alienation. For these reasons, not only the historical diagnostic that appears to have authorized jettisoning the problematic of alienation but also the model of critique used to replace it demand critical scrutiny. (shrink)

There is debate about whether the post-Fordist or high-performance work organization can overcome the disadvantages women encounter in traditional gendered organizations. Some authors argue that substituting a performance logic for control by the clock offers opportunities for combining work and family life in a more natural way. Critics respond that these organizational reforms do not address the nonresponsibility of firms for caring duties at a more fundamental level. The authors address this debate through an analysis of overtime work, using data (...) from a survey of 1,114 employees in 30 Dutch organizations. The findings reveal that post-Fordist work is associated with more overtime hours than traditional forms of work and that far from challenging gendered organization, it reproduces and exacerbates the traditional male model of work. (shrink)

This essay investigates the political economy of sexuality through an interpretation of sex shows for foreigners in Bangkok, Thailand. Reading these performances as both symptoms of, and analytical commentaries on, Western consumer desire, the essay suggests the ‘pussy shows’ parody the mass production that was a hallmark of Western masculine identity under Fordism. This reading makes a case for the erotic generativity of capitalism, illuminating how Western, post-Fordist political economy of the post-1970s generated demand for these erotic services in Asia (...) and how Western, heterosexual masculine desire is integrated into global capitalist circuits. (shrink)

In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments. This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as "analytical Thomism," though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the (...) twentieth. Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser's academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas's Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional "perverted faculty argument.". (shrink)

Neo-Confucianism is a philosophically sophisticated tradition weaving classical Confucianism together with themes from Buddhism and Daoism. It began in China around the eleventh century CE, played a leading role in East Asian cultures over the last millennium, and has had a profound influence on modern Chinese society. -/- Based on the latest scholarship but presented in accessible language, Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction is organized around themes that are central in Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the structure of the cosmos, human nature, ways (...) of knowing, personal cultivation, and approaches to governance. The authors thus accomplish two things at once: they present the Neo-Confucians in their own, distinctive terms; and they enable contemporary readers to grasp what is at stake in the great Neo-Confucian debates. (shrink)

Addresses Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi’s neo-Confucianism from the perspective of contemporary ecological humanism. In this novel engagement with Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), Nicholas S. Brasovan presents Wang’s neo-Confucianism as an important theoretical resource for engaging with contemporary ecological humanism. Brasovan coins the term “person-in-the-world” to capture ecological humanism’s fundamental premise that humans and nature are inextricably bound together, and argues that Wang’s cosmology of energy (qi) gives us a rich conceptual vocabulary for understanding the continuity that exists (...) between persons and the natural world. The book makes a significant contribution to English-language scholarship on Wang Fuzhi and to Chinese intellectual history, with new English translations of classical Chinese, Mandarin, and French texts in Chinese philosophy and culture. This innovative work of comparative philosophy not only presents a systematic and comprehensive interpretation of Wang’s thought but also shows its relevance to contemporary discussions in the philosophy of ecology. “This is a fine study of Wang Fuzhi’s complex and fascinating neo-Confucian cosmology. I learned an immense amount about one of China’s last great Confucian intellectuals.” — John Berthrong, author of Expanding Process: Exploring Philosophical and Theological Transformations in China and the West. (shrink)

This volume re-examines some of the major themes at the intersection of traditional and contemporary metaphysics. The book uses as a point of departure Francisco Suárez’s _Metaphysical Disputations_ published in 1597. Minimalist metaphysics in empiricist/pragmatist clothing have today become mainstream in analytic philosophy. Independently of this development, the progress of scholarship in ancient and medieval philosophy makes clear that traditional forms of metaphysics have affinities with some of the streams in contemporary analytic metaphysics. The book brings together leading contemporary metaphysicians (...) to investigate the viability of a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics. (shrink)

This book provides a unique, cogent, engaging account of environmental determinism that has long been much needed in the classroom and beyond." -- Andrew Sluyter, Associate Professor, Louisiana State University, USA This book pulls together major critiques of contemporary attempts to explain nature-society relations in an environmentally deterministic way. After defining key terms, it reviews the history of environmental determinism's rise and fall within geography in the early twentieth century. It discusses the key reasons for the doctrine's rejection and presents (...) alternative, non-deterministic frameworks developed within geography for analyzing the roles played by the environment in human affairs. The authors examine the rise in recent decades of neo-deterministic approaches to such issues as the demarcation of regions, the causes of civilizational collapse in prehistory, today's globally uneven patterns of human well-being, and the consequences of human-induced climate change. In each case, the authors draw on the insights and approaches of geography, the academic discipline most conversant with the interactions of society and environment, to challenge the widespread acceptance that such approaches have won. The book will appeal to those working on human-environmental research, international development and global policy initiatives. William B. Meyer is Associate Professor of Geography at Colgate University, USA. He is the author of several previous books, including Human Impact on the Earth, Americans and Their Weather: A History, and The Progressive Environmental Prometheans. His research interests include urban geography, environmental history, and the history of environmental thought. Dylan M.T. Guss works in the technology investment sector. (shrink)

Neo-Fregeanism in the philosophy of mathematics consists of two main parts: the logicist thesis, that mathematics (or at least branches thereof, like arithmetic) all but reduce to logic, and the platonist thesis, that there are abstract, mathematical objects. I will here focus on the ontological thesis, platonism. Neo-Fregeanism has been widely discussed in recent years. Mostly the discussion has focused on issues specific to mathematics. I will here single out for special attention the view on ontology which underlies the neo-Fregeans’ (...) claims about mathematical objects, and discuss this view in a broader setting. (shrink)

The rather unrestrained use of second-order logic in the neo-logicist program is critically examined. It is argued in some detail that it brings with it genuine set-theoretical existence assumptions and that the mathematical power that Hume’s Principle seems to provide, in the derivation of Frege’s Theorem, comes largely from the ‘logic’ assumed rather than from Hume’s Principle. It is shown that Hume’s Principle is in reality not stronger than the very weak Robinson Arithmetic Q. Consequently, only a few rudimentary facts (...) of arithmetic are logically derivable from Hume’s Principle. And that hardly counts as a vindication of logicism. (shrink)

Neo-picturesque landscapes are former industrial sites redeveloped as parks in a way that preserves, maintains, and shapes memory of the materials, mechanics, and scale of the industrial age. This paper presents case studies of Duisburg Nord, the High Line, and Evergreen Brick Works. It distinguishes neo-picturesque ruins from archaeological ruins on the one hand and mere redevelopment projects on the other hand; traces a continuity between the eighteenth-century picturesque and the neo-picturesque; pinpoints the distinctive form of memory that the neo-picturesque (...) engages; and defends the importance of the neo-picturesque in contemporary life. (shrink)

A number of commentators have suggested that the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist regime of political economy has had positive consequences for sociology, including the reinforcement of critical sociologies (Burawoy, 2005; Steinmetz, 2005). This article argues that, although disciplinary hierarchies have been destabilized, what is emerging is a new form of instrumental knowledge, that of applied interdisciplinary social studies. This development has had a particular impact upon sociology. Savage and Burrows (2007), for example, argue that sociological knowledge no (...) longer has a privileged claim to authority and is increasingly in competition with social knowledge produced by the private sector and agencies of the public sector. The response of many sociologists to such claims has been to reassert the importance of the discipline as the purveyor of critically relevant knowledge about society. The article traces how the idea of internal critique within sociology has developed to embrace ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005), at the same time as declaring the impossibility of sociological knowledge. The critique of sociology also becomes the critique of critique and what remains is the instrumentalization of knowledge. Where many sociologists continue to claim a special interest in critical knowledge, the article suggests that, in contrast, we potentially confront the problem that such knowledge may itself be facing a crisis of reproduction. (shrink)