At the end of the first hypothesis, Parmenides gets Aristotle to agree that being [οὐσίας] must be in time; that is, that being must partake in at least one of the temporal modes: either to have been in the past, to be in the present, or it will be in the future (140e-142a). If this is true, then “the one does not partake in being” (141e7-8), meaning temporal being—to which Aristotle agrees, saying “Apparently not” (141e9). Parmenides then gets Aristotle to (...) agree that “Therefore, ‘the one’ in no way is” (141e9-10). This, however, contradicts the very first premise that begins Parmenides’ entire gymnastic exercise, “if one is” (137c4). The problem with the previous conclusion—that to be is to be in time—is that in professing his assent to it, Aristotle, in fact, gainsays it. He performatively contradicts the very thing he wants to assert. Aristotle answers Parmenides question, “Therefore could something partake of being in any way other than in one of those ways?” (141e7-8) with a two-word answer in Greek: “οὐκ ἔστιν [It’s not possible].” We can, therefore, ask of the very claim Aristotle is making—that it is impossible for something to be and not be in time—when in time does it hold true? At what time is it “not possible [οὐκ ἔστιν]” for something to not partake of temporal being? Is it not possible only in the present moment, in the past, or in the future? If Aristotle’s assertion is to have any force it must hold always. It has the same tenselessness as mathematical propositions, like ‘1+1=2.’ Forms, like mathematical entities, must necessarily have atemporal existence. Accordingly, in atemporally maintaining that anything that is must be in time, Aristotle undermines his own assertion. He performatively contradicts the very thing that he wants to affirm. (shrink)

As a unique method of philosophical argument, performative contradiction attracted general attention after the change in direction of pragmatics in the twentieth century. Hintikka used this method to conduct an in-depth analysis of Descartes’ proposition “I think, therefore I am,” providing a proof which is a model in the philosophical history; Apel absorbed performative contradiction into his own framework of a priori pragmatics; and Habermas introduced it into the theory of formal pragmatics and rendered it an (...) effective weapon of debate. Wittgenstein, who had fallen into the trap of performative contradiction in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, later managed to extract himself from it and indeed used the methodology of performative contradiction to cure the ills of philosophy, making it a general philosophical method. Through analysis of its connotations and classic examples of its use we can see that it is crucial in refuting extreme relativism and skepticism, and hence provides methodological support for a new foundation for philosophical paradigms. (shrink)

This book explores the Romanian Revolution in relation to the ongoing questions around its authenticity. It offers a critical theoretical re-examination of the revolution using the concept of performative contradiction as an analytic tool.

In this paper we investigate the role of performative contradictions in legal discourse. First of all we identify the argumentative roles of performative contradictions and two possible interpretations of them. With this done, we show that one use of performative contradictions can be fruitfully applied in analysing normative speech acts implementing norm enactment, namely, those speech acts that are designed to produce new legal norms. We conclude the paper by showing that our analysis provides strong support for (...) Robert Alexy's claim-to-correctness thesis, according to which speech acts of the norm-enacting kind raise a claim to correctness. (shrink)

As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be sick. (...) This essay traces the intertwining of psychoanalytic and sociological methods that allowed Fromm to create such new ideas. At the same time, it highlights how Fromm’s sociology was hampered by an economistic Marxist approach to the institutions and culture of democratic capitalist societies. Such theoretical restriction prevented Fromm from conceptualizing how institutions like democracy, science, and psychotherapy can provide resources for widespread emotional recuperation and civil repair. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the divide that separates Heidegger and Sartre from Husserl. At issue is what Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence.” From Heidegger onward this has been characterized as an interpretation of both being and knowing in terms of presence. To exist is to be now, and to know is to make present the evidence for something’s existence. Husserl’s account of constitution assumes this interpretation. By contrast, Heidegger and Sartre see constitution in terms of our pragmatic engagements (...) with the world, engagements that they trace to the essential nothingness at our core. Who is correct: Husserl or those who give his phenomenology a negative basis? At issue is the nature of transcendence. Do we transcend ourselves toward the world by constituting both our own and the world’s presence or do we do so by virtue of an inner nothingness that allows us to assume various identities as a consequence of our pragmatic engagements? Husserl claims that to argue against presence is to argue... (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of digital modernity, the extension of narratives of modernity with the special affordances of digital networked technology. Digital modernity produces a new narrative which can be taken in many ways: to be descriptive of reality; a teleological account of an inexorable process; or a normative account of an ideal sociotechnical state. However, it is understood that narratives of digital modernity help shape reality via commercial and political decision-makers, and examples are given from the politics and (...) society of the United Kingdom. The paper argues that digital modernity has two dimensions, of progression through time and progression through space, and these two dimensions can be in contradiction. Contradictions can also be found between ideas of digital modernity and modernity itself, and also between digital modernity and some of the basic pre-modern concepts that underlie the whole technology industry. Therefore, digital modernity may not be a sustainable goal for technology development. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contradiction and Legislation Regarding the Right to LifeKevin L. Flannery, S.J.Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases under Scrutiny. Edited by Pilar Zambrano and William Saunders, with concluding reflections by John Finnis. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019.The most fundamental principle of law is the principle of non-contradiction. This is Thomas Aquinas's position in the seminal article on the natural law, Summa theologiae I-II, question 94, article (...) 2, where, citing Aristotle, he formulates the principle as, "One should not simultaneously affirm and negate." Lafter in the same article, Thomas offers a practical formulation of the same principle, "Good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided"; but in law, since it is contained in propositions (airmations and negations) as distinct from ideas regarding the pursuit of goods, the prior formulation is the more immediately relevant of the two.The book under review is important in that, by going through the legal history regarding abortion and related issues in a number of different countries—the United States, Canada, Italy, Spain, Poland, Ireland (Eire), Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru—it causes to emerge any number of times the realization that legislation and judicial decisions in favor of abortion "rights" invariably infect a legal system with contradictions and inconsistencies of various sorts. The present essay is, therefore, not your typical book review. Its objective is simply to list some of the legal contradictions and inconsistencies identified by the book's various authors as they describe the legal status of the unborn in their respective nations. [End Page 1323]William Saunders's very clear and comprehensive first chapter is entitled, "Judicial Interference in the Protection of Human Life in the United States: Actions and Consequences." In it, he describes, among other things, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003, which prohibited "any person or entity, public or private" from performing human cloning (23). He speaks also of a bill proposed in the U.S. Senate once the Human Cloning Prohibition Act had passed in the House of Representatives. This Senate bill (which was entitle, "The Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act") would have prohibited "any person or other legal entity" from conducting human cloning, even while allowing nuclear transplantation, which it defines as "transferring the nucleus of a human somatic cell into an oocyte from which the nucleus... ha[s] been... removed or rendered inert." The problem here, as Saunders explains, is that this latter definition "is the very definition of cloning" (25). In other words, in the same year, two pieces of legislation were considered in the Congress of the United States, both purporting to ban human cloning, one of which would have permitted what the other described (correctly) as human cloning and so prohibited.In the second chapter, "Whither United States Abortion Law?" by Gerard V. Bradley, discussed, among other things, is the inconsistency between the United States Supreme Court's pro-abortion decision Roe v. Wade and various laws, both state and federal, prohibiting feticide. Bradley says of the 2004 federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act that, "in pertinent part it says that 'whoever' 'causes the death of or bodily injury to,' a 'child who is in utero' is guilty of an offense apart from any accompanying offense against the woman carrying the child." The penalty for such an act is the same as would be imposed if the act were inflicted upon the unborn child's mother: if, for instance, the mother was killed. "A child in utero," reports Bradley, "is defined as a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb'" (37).The problem here is that prosecutable under this law are acts identical with those performed legally by abortionists. Bradley mentions two cases in which a woman's male partner—in one case the woman's husband—effected by stealth the abortion of her child. In one case, the male purchased abortion pills and affixed to their container a pharmacy label indicating that it contained a common antibiotic; in the other, the husband obtained the same type of... (shrink)

Against the well-established critical rejection of rights a growing literature in the tradition of agonistic democracy asserts their emancipatory role in the struggles for social change. However, agonistic theorists, invested as they are in the idea of democratic innovation as a process of gradual ‘augmentation’ of existing rules, institutions and practices, fail to account for the ruptural capacity, and hence for the full radical potential, of rights. Using the performative approach, I develop a conception of rights claiming as a (...) defiant practice to express the ruptural dimension of certain forms of rights politics. I demonstrate how defiant rights claiming articulates immanent critique by declaring the incapacity of putative duty-bearer institutions and governments to uphold the claimed right due to structural constraints, thereby generating inevitable contradictions within the extant order and creating the necessity for an alternative one. Moreover, in order to fully capture the emancipatory potential and creative capacity of rights, this article argues for understanding certain forms of rights politics both as augmentation and rupture, taking the two to be different dimensions of the same radical democratic practice. I present the creative use of rights discourse by the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the transnational network of agrarian movements, La Via Campesina, as precisely such a combination of the practice of augmentation and defiant claims, which has led to the transformation of the right to food and land into the right to food sovereignty, demonstration of the structural embeddedness of rights violations in the existing global regime of food production and distribution, and authorisation of an alternative vision of the future. (shrink)

This chapter interprets G. E. M. Anscombe’s discussion in §31 of Intention of the relationship between expressions of intention and descriptions of matters of fact. For Anscombe, a statement like “I’m raising my arm” or “I’m going to get up at 7:00”, which expresses an intention by saying what is happening or is going to happen, is contradicted only by an opposing command or the expression of an opposing intention. I first challenge an interpretation of this passage as claiming that (...) the truth of statements like these is somehow independent of whether the action they describe is actually performed. Against this reading, my preferred interpretation highlights the fact that Anscombe is speaking here only of what contradicts expressions of intention, while her position is that statements like these describe the world in ways that will be contrary to, and so truth-functionally incompatible with, any opposing statements of fact. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Søren Kierkegaard’s oeuvre can be seen as a theater of ideas. This argument is developed in three steps. First, I will briefly introduce a theoretical framework for addressing the theatrical dimension of Kierkegaard’s works. This framework is based on a distinction between“performative writing strategies” and “categories of performativity.” As a second step, I will focus on Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, by Constantin Constantius, one of the best examples of Kierkegaard’s innovative way (...) of doing philosophy. This strange and elusive book introduces the difficult and counter-intuitive notion of repetition. Repetition is a category of performativity that aims to activate the subjectivity of the reader. This performative effect is achieved by confronting the reader with an “unresolved”existential problem that is not yet drawn into clarity but is staged in all its confusions and contradictions. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantius relies here on a performative writing strategy that is animated by a dialectic of advance and withdrawal. In the last and third step, I will analyze Constantius’s own reflection on the performative dimension of his text. Constantius has left several clues behind, each of which suggests that he deliberately developed a performative writing strategy. (shrink)

The article is devoted to clarifying the significance of a political performance, which acts as a theatrical communication action designed to draw society’s attention to the important problems of certain social or political groups. The purpose of the research is to establish the peculiarities of the interpretation of political performance in the paradigmatic and methodological dimensions of modern discursive democracy. The development of political performance under the conditions of the modern Russian-Ukrainian war is characterized. It was found that an important (...) task of modern political science should be considered the identification of paradigmatic dimensions (or “poles”) of analytical judgments regarding the assessment of the significance of political performances. It was emphasized that political performance acts as a postmodern alternative to the realization of the unfinished project of political modernity. The importance of political performance for the discussion of society’s problems at the political level and its dependence on a specific topic and the subjects of its application are analyzed. The importance of public discussion and manifestation as signs of broad involvement of citizens in democratic political activity is revealed. It was found that the ability to express political meaning in a theatrical form is beyond the limits of rational planning and organization. It is revealed that the functionality of political performance stems from its connection with specific social groups. It has been proven that political performances are a form that contradicts the formal procedure of expressing the will and approving the results of the discussion. It has been established that, subject to regulatory support from the state, discussions require voluntary participation and a significant level of competence. It is assumed that political performance can provide certain advantages in political competition due to the imagery and emotionality of the political message. The limited suitability of performance for promoting the values of deliberative democracy has been established, since many cases of the use of performances in the modern period are related to the defense of the right to freedom of speech. It was concluded that in the conditions of political discussions, the importance of political performance consists in creating preliminary conditions for political dialogue. (shrink)

The present paper offers a sympathetic yet critical examination of Michel Foucault's discussion of the contradictions inherent in the self-consciousness of the modern or post-Kantian mind. Foucault's account of the “empirico-transcendental doublet” of modern thought is shown to provide a useful mapping of humanist, anti-humanist, and postmodern responses to the reflexivity of the modern “ episteme”. Foucault is criticized for his insufficiently critical treatment of structuralism . Foucault is also defended against the charge that he undermines his own position through (...) a form of performative self-contradiction. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

According to Kant’s Universal Law Formula, maxims that cannot be conceived as universal laws denote duties of perfect obligation. In the recent literature, two versions of the Contradiction in Conception test have received the most attention. When acting on a maxim would violate a perfect duty, according to the Logical Contradiction Interpretation (LCI), universalizing the maxim would make it literally impossible to perform the action as described in the original maxim. According to the Practical Contradiction Interpretation (PCI), (...) the locus of the contradiction is as follows: the agent acts on the maxim in order to achieve some purpose, but were the agent’s maxim universalized, the purpose would be unattainable. Having examined the most widely accepted versions of both interpretations, I argue that i) PCI cannot generate contradictions for the maxims of any actions that violate perfect duties beyond those generated by LCI, ii) despite claims of its proponents, PCI cannot solve the vexing problem of relevant descriptions that Kant’s account faces, and iii) other arguments in favor of PCI are at best inconclusive. I therefore conclude that since LCI better coheres with the text, sympathetic interpreters should focus their efforts on LCI, not PCI. (shrink)

According to Kant’s Universal Law Formula, maxims that cannot be conceived as universal laws denote duties of perfect obligation. In the recent literature, two versions of the Contradiction in Conception test have received the most attention. When acting on a maxim would violate a perfect duty, according to the Logical Contradiction Interpretation (LCI), universalizing the maxim would make it literally impossible to perform the action as described in the original maxim. According to the Practical Contradiction Interpretation (PCI), (...) the locus of the contradiction is as follows: the agent acts on the maxim in order to achieve some purpose, but were the agent’s maxim universalized, the purpose would be unattainable. Having examined the most widely accepted versions of both interpretations, I argue that i) PCI cannot generate contradictions for the maxims of any actions that violate perfect duties beyond those generated by LCI, ii) despite claims of its proponents, PCI cannot solve the vexing problem of relevant descriptions that Kant’s account faces, and iii) other arguments in favor of PCI are at best inconclusive. I therefore conclude that since LCI better coheres with the text, sympathetic interpreters should focus their efforts on LCI, not PCI. (shrink)

The impact of gender on assessments of leadership performance and leadership potential was examined through two clusters of leadership behaviors, one set related to traditional constructions of leadership labeled directing others and another associated with contemporary constructions of leadership labeled engaging others. Based on data collected from a sample of 91 senior leaders in one US financial services organization over a 3-year period prior to Covid-19, the results showed a negative relationship between directing others behaviors and leadership potential ratings for (...) females and a positive relationship between these variables for males. A negative relationship between engaging others behaviors and performance assessments was also found for females. This study highlights the continuing bias in leadership assessments of women and explores the contradictions between the perception and the reality of women's leadership. (shrink)

The article aims at addressing the question of representations of World War Two in Croatian and Serbian literature that were subversive in the sense that they queried the legend not simply by rejecting communism and affirming nationalism, but by emphasizing the uncertainty and sensibility of the human beings, a typical modern reaction to violence and, in general, modernist topoi. In this article I will focus on modernist novelistic representations of the 1960s in which the uncertainty and instability of collective warrants (...) are foregrounded. As a result a subversive meaning is produced which contradicts not only communism and revolution but more generally war as such, including the universal features of war such as confronting loneliness, love as an expression of an individual rather than a collective sense of existence, and the impossibility of a valid representation of past events. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as PerformanceMichael WehArt As Performance, by David Davies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 278 pp.If we accepted the claims that David Davies makes in his Art as Performance, we would have to rigorously revise our conception of what kinds of entities artworks are. Art as Performance is a study in the ontology of art, and whereas other well-known theories about the ontological status of artworks say that artworks are (...) to be identified with, forexample, types, classes, or kinds, Davies holds that they are performances that lead to the production of a "focus of appreciation" — the latter being the objects we usually take to be artworks. So according to Davies, a painting presented in a museum or a novel we can buy in a bookshop is in fact not the artwork x.The artwork is rather the performance that cumulated in bringing x into existence.Davies characterizes our "common sense theory" of art as including views about the epistemology, ontology,axiology, and definition of art. It maintains that in order to appreciate an artwork, a direct experiential encounter with it is sufficient; that artworks are those things that are exhibited in our museums or performed on stages; that the value of artworks lies in immediately experiencing them; and that artworks differ from other objects by virtue of possessing aesthetic properties. But the common sense theory conflicts with many, if not most, of the art phenomena of the twentieth century. The puzzlement of audiences in the face of certain contemporary pieces of art is caused by the incompatibility of the common sense theory with those artworks. A philosopher of art can try to solve this problem by either accommodating modern art to the common sense theory or by dismissing the theory as inappropriate. With his performance theory, Davies goes for the [End Page 114] second option, while at the same time constraining his theory to the principle that an ontology of art should not contradict our dealing with art — at least after we have critically revised it — too excessively.Davies's first major step in elaborating his theory is a discussion of whether it is necessary to take contextual properties of artworks into account in order to be able to appreciate and understand them. Defenders of "aesthetic empiricism" (a term coined by Gregory Currie) deny that an artwork's history of production is relevant and would be the philosophical business partners of the common sense theory. According to empiricism, only an artwork's manifest properties matter. The context of an artwork's making is at best of art-historical interest. Building upon the works of Currie, Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, and others, Davies forcefully argues against empiricism in defense of a contextualist epistemology of art. And since he takes an artwork's history of production to be epistemologically indispensable, Davies infers that it also has to be considered concerning the ontology of art.Davies's ontology of art is monistic. He claims that all artworks are not the products of creative activities, but rather "intentionally guided generative performances that eventuate in contextualized structures or objects...or events...performances completed by what I am terming a focus of appreciation" (p. 98). The focus of appreciation, in turn, is defined as "an artistic statement as articulated in an artistic medium realized in a vehicle" (p. 60). Davies understands an artistic medium as a set of social conventions or understandings of how to describe the way an artist articulated his statement — for example by manipulating a physical object. The vehicle can be — as in the case of painting — exactly that physical object, or, for example, an action in the case of conceptual art. The main point is that the focus of appreciation is not the artwork. The focus of appreciation — for example, the object Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — completes the performance that was carried out by the artist, and that performance is the artwork.If artworks are performances, it is clear that artworks possess the properties on whose existence contextualism insists and that are ignored by empiricism. But though Davies emphasizes the role of the properties an artwork has due to its provenance, he is also concerned about the weaknesses of... (shrink)

This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement. Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech (...) in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr. (shrink)

This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement. Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech (...) in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr. (shrink)

Most research studying the corporate social performance –corporate financial performance link has utilized developed country samples. Also, this literature has generally focused on a wide variety of industries, ignoring the fact that certain sectors – such as controversial industries – have graver social and environmental issues. Hence, a gap exists in this tradition when it comes to emerging markets and controversial industries. This paper attempts to fill this void by providing preliminary evidence and insight on the matter. Based on an (...) exploration in six Latin American countries and five controversial industries, we find a negative bidirectional association between CSP and CFP. These results tend to contradict the mainstream conclusion of a positive bidirectional link, suggesting that institutional and market-level forces play a major role in shaping this relationship. (shrink)

Paradoxes are an unavoidable part of work life. The unusualness of attempting to simultaneously satisfy contradictory imperatives can result in creative outcomes that simultaneously satisfy both imperatives by inducing search for, and selection of, novel and useful solutions. Likewise, extant research suggests that paradoxes can also result in anxiety, defensiveness, and persistence of old ways of doing things. However, there is little work attempting to describe how paradoxes affect cognition and when it results in higher or lower creativity. To tackle (...) this issue, a theory of paradoxical creativity is developed. Paradoxical creativity is the attempt by an individual to creatively resolve a contradiction by simultaneously achieving competing demands. The theory is implemented into a computational model and a simulation is used to describe how paradoxes affect creative cognitive process and how these processes in turn result in higher or lower degrees of creativity. The results show that creative output is enhanced when paradoxes have a balanced effect on the cognitive processes responsible for an individual’s capacity to search for new information and willingness to tolerate new ideas. Hence, individuals with high baseline levels of creative cognition are more likely to suffer negative creative performance consequences resulting from contradictory demands. For those individuals, contradictory demands may produce more alternatives, which increases uncertainty and time to insight (if insight is ever reached). This suggests that incentives or rewards to resolve contradictions may have the unintentional effect of reducing creative output in some circumstance. (shrink)

The enduring significance of gender and how it intersects with class in the organization of parenting, domestic and professional work has been obscured in contemporary neoliberal contexts. This article examines how Greek academic women conceptualize and enact motherhood and the classed and gendered strategies they adopt to reconcile ‘good’ motherhood with notions of the ‘good’ academic professional. It draws on semi-structured interviews about the career narratives of 15 women in Greek medical schools in the aftermath of the Greek recession. The (...) analysis presented in this article is informed by a feminist post-structuralist paradigm and an emic approach to intersectionality. Motherhood emerged in the data as a dynamic concept, and a network of practices both constrained and enabled by gendered and classed family and work cultures. Drawing on a neoliberal ‘DIY’ and ‘having it all’ discourse, Greek mothers claimed that they could achieve almost anything professionally, if they organized their private lives sensibly. They drew on idealized discourses of motherhood, but they also contradicted these notions by doing non-traditional forms of motherhood, such as remote or transnational motherhood, afforded by their privileged social positioning and academic careers. Further research is required to investigate configurations of classed motherhood in less prestigious professions. (shrink)

In our 2016 paper (Collins et al., 2016a), we proposed that superchamps (athletes who have achieved the highest level in their sport) were differentiated from their less successful counterparts by their use of positive proactive coping and a “learn from it” approach to challenge. This skill-based focus to talent development (TD) is supported extensively in the literature (e.g., MacNamara et al., 2010a, 2010b) and suggests that the differences between levels of adult achievement relate more to what performers bring to the (...) challenges than what they experience (Collins et al., 2016a). In this focused review we present and discuss a number of key concepts related to this paper and other parallel research in TD. We begin by presenting our pragmatic objectives and the importance of considering how we evaluate the research with an emphasis on its application to the applied setting. We then consider commonalities and differences in recent psychological approaches to TD, namely the experiential, attitudinal and skill-based. The paper then provides further exploration of the Psychological Characteristics of Developing Excellence and their role in TD processes. We conclude with a consideration of future research and the application of research in TD. Reflecting our pragmatic stance as researchers, we hope that this focused review provides suggestions for progress and stimulates critical debate amongst practitioners, researchers and policy makers. (shrink)

How individuals reason deductively has concerned researchers for many years. Yet, it is still unclear whether, and if so how, participants’ reasoning performance changes over time. In two test sessions one week apart, we examined how the syllogistic reasoning performance of 100 participants changed within and between sessions. Participants’ reasoning performance increased during the first session. A week later, they started off at the same level of reasoning performance but did not further improve. The reported performance gains were only found (...) for logically valid, but not for invalid syllogisms indicating a bias against responding that ‘no valid conclusion’ follows from the premises. Importantly, we demonstrate that participants substantially varied in the strength of the temporal performance changes and explored how individual characteristics, such as participants’ personality and cognitive ability, relate to these interindividual differences. Together, our findings contradict common assumptions that reasoning performance only reflects a stable inherent ability. (shrink)

In what follows, we revisit the most promising conceptions of “hope” while following Haraway’s admonition to “stay with the trouble.” Thirty-five years after Haraway’s opening to the Manifesto for Cyborgs where she states that “irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes”, we move with her ceaseless task to eschew resolution and certainty, urging instead a radical contingency that is fundamental to thought itself. The radical contingency recognizes the limits of what any one individual or one species (...) is capable of unto itself. Any such exceptionalism is spurned. The possibilities of thinking-with, and making-with, are the necessary path of the troubled present. And there is no escaping the present, a present that is thick with affliction but is still unfinished and ongoing. We enter into the thick presence of our ongoing conversation around hope by revisiting the concepts that help us to think our thoughts, exploring how these conceptions worked and did not work for our collective thinking. We then build on the concepts’ appendages, their attachments and detachments to our conversation around hope, by sketching Haraway’s materialist challenge to hope, and her refusal of futurism and contingency that raise some questions about the potentialities of “critical hope.” Finally, we situate our work within an understanding of the “pedagogical work of the concept,” drawing a line from Haraway to Stengers to Deleuze, which allows us to explore resonance between concepts and posit a “pedadogy of the concept” to situate the limits of hope and potentialities of “staying with the trouble.” To work towards a pedagogy that “stays with the trouble,” we extend Haraway’s critique that it matters “what thoughts think thoughts” by suggesting that it also matters which feelings we feel with, highlighting the vital necessity of feeling to the project of staying with the trouble. (shrink)

You 遊 is a crucial term for understanding the Zhuangzi . Translated as “play,” “free play,” and “wandering,” it is usually defined as an ideal, playful Zhuangzian way of being. There are two problems with this definition. The first is logical: the Zhuangzi cannot consistently recommend playfulness as an ideal, since doing so vitiates the essence of you —it becomes an ethical imperative instead of an activity freely undertaken for its own sake. The second problem is performative: arguments for (...) playful Zhuangzi as exemplar resemble those of the logicians and philosophers who appear to come in for Zhuangzian criticism. This essay addresses these tensions by demonstrating how the Zhuangzi ambiguates the nature and value of you . Apparent endorsements of you are not freestanding, instead occurring in grudging replies of teachers to overly zealous students. In light of this recontextualization, a new version of you is offered that accommodates “non-playful” ways of being. (shrink)

The word “hacker” has an interesting double meaning: one vastly more widespread connotation of technological mischief, even criminality, and an original meaning amongst the tech savvy as a term of highest approbation. Both meanings, however, share the idea that hackers possess a superior ability to manipulate technology according to their will (and, as with God, this superior ability to exercise will is a source of both mystifying admiration and fear). This book mainly concerns itself with the former meaning. To Thomas (...) this simultaneously mystified and vilified, elusive set of individuals exemplifies “the performance of technology” xx), showing the way in which “the cultural, social and political history of the computer...is fraught with complexity and contradictions” ix). In fact, he claims that hacking is more a cultural than technological phenomenon, citing Heidegger’s, “[t]he essence of technology is not anything technological” (56). (shrink)

Despite the unprecedented freedoms that decolonization has brought for many Black1 people – especially in specific regions of the African Diaspora – freedom and its fulfilment, adequate signs and contested meanings remain a preoccupation within Black cultural discourses and practices. At the same time, while political and cultural nationalisms have led to greater political and civil rights, racism has not been eradicated. Furthermore, the new postcolonial globalizations of capital, people and cultures have destabilized the collective identities that framed twentieth-century struggles (...) for national sovereignty and equal citizenship, without necessarily erasing them. Instead, they remain, no longer securely anchored in their old homogenous appearances, but re-configured through the inner differences and contradictions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion. This article addresses these internal differences and the ways in which they produce new contestations over race, the meaning of Black representation and postcolonial freedom, negotiations that are increasingly traced on the intimate contours of the body and the self, through practices of personal consumption, erotic hedonism and style as key performances of freedom. It achieves this through examining two localized moments in the transnational and diasporic circulation of Jamaican dancehall culture, understood as a privileged public space for the performance of Black identifications and personal freedom. It argues that the eroticized discourses of ethnicity, race and gender found in dancehall culture articulate the dominance of neo-liberal conceptions of freedom at the same time as they express, resist and comment on new cultural hegemonies not reducible to racism or the power of the West; that is how dancehall expresses the new problematizations of postcoloniality. 1Except when quoting other writers, I will capitalise the word Black, in order to recognise Black identity as a historically and politically constituted experience and representational category, and not solely denoting skin colour. (shrink)

The immediate purpose of this article is to examine Hannah Arendtʼs analysis of Adolf Eichmann in order to point out the groundlessness of her argument that evil, whether in the person of Eichmann himself or in general, can be treated as banal. The wider purpose of this article is to divest any argument that is based on the concept that evil is banal, ordinary, or trivial of any valid grounding. To develop the immediate purpose, the article begins with a close (...) analysis of the word ‘banal’ in the context of discussions of evil to highlight the immense (and dangerous) power of language. It discusses plausible reasons for Arendt’s choice of ‘The Banality of Evil’ as part of the subtitle of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. It then addresses two major questions: How did Arendt obtain the impression of the banality of Adolf Eichmann in the first place? What are the consequences of considering evil as trivial? The argument is made that Arendt communicated, regardless of her intention, that evil was trivial. Moreover, Arendt’s description of evil as banal and trivial directly contradicts evidence that Arendt presented in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The article then turns to address the widespread adoption of Arendt’s account in the prominent literature on Eichmann and the Holocaust as a ‘thoughtless’ move, pointing out that this is precisely the kind of perverse account of evil that such subtle and evil mind as Eichmann’s would want us to entertain. To introduce its wider purpose, the article concludes with a discussion of the pernicious consequences of equating evil with banality and of the need to abandon definitively this point of view. The argument is made that ordinariness is not and should never be an excuse for crime, for doing so is akin to inviting evil into our homes and shrugging our shoulders upon its entrance. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between Kierkegaard's theory of “indirect communication,” his employment of that method in the pseudonymous literature, and his explicit comments on the Teacher in Philosophical Fragments. My interest is principally in a pedagogical method able to serve as a solution to the problem of will formation, and so my assessment of Kierkegaard's theory and performance is essentially ethical in nature. I argue that there is at least an ambiguity, if not a contradiction, to be found (...) in the above relationship and that as a result, in its current form, Kierkegaardean pedagogical devices do not appear to be able to offer an adequate solution. (shrink)

In this chapter the debate between Habermas and Rorty on the issue of relativism is discussed critically. The developments in Rorty's position are pointed out, for example, his current acceptance of the epithet “relativist” against his earlier rejection of this self‐description in view of his denial that a pragmatist like himself has any, including a relativist, epistemology. Attention is also paid to Rorty's current denial of the relevance of the idea of “metaphors of making rather than finding” for this debate, (...) against his earlier espousal of this distinction. His main effort is to create a vocabulary that might transcend the obsolete distinctions of “Platonism” such as truth–falsity, rational–irrational and subjective–objective. In contrast to this effort lurks Habermas's unmasking of the undeniable and unavoidable performative contradiction in Rorty's work, as well as his argument that Rorty indeed fails to develop a “new vocabulary”: but rather succumbs to the well‐known social Darwinism of the nineteenth century. The author shows why Habermas comes out of this debate much better than Rorty. (shrink)

The principle of performative contradiction. On the epistemological significance of the dialogue form in Plato's "Euthydemus". - In this study, an analysis of the section 285d-288a of Plato's "Euthydemus" shall show two things: (1) The sophistic model of a world in which there is no contradiction, in which every linguistic utterance is true and every action correct, has no semantic inconsistencies, but can only be rejected with the help of the principle of performative contradictions. (2) It (...) is precisely these performative contradictions that make it necessary for Plato to philosophize not in treatises but in dialogues; in other words, that the philosophical relevance of the Platonic form of dialogue can be seen, among other things, in the fact that - in contrast to philosophical forms of representation such as the treatise, the essay, and a henology as reconstructed and represented by the Tübingen School - it permits the representation of performative reflections and performative contradictions. (shrink)

The acknowledgement that something is complex, it is argued, implies that our knowledge of it will always be limited. We cannot make complete, absolute or final claims about complex systems. Post-structuralism, and specifically deconstruction, make similar claims about knowledge in general. Arguments against deconstruction can, therefore, also be held against a critical form of complexity thinking and a defence of the view from complexity (as presented here) should take account of them. Three of these arguments are investigated: that deconstruction and (...) complexity-thinking lead to relativism, that they are subject to the performative contradiction and that their claims are vague. It is shown that these critiques are not really effective and it is suggested that a responsible approach to complexity has to be provisional, i.e. modest, without being vague or relativistic. (shrink)

This paper examines Plato’s views about the unity of argument and drama, and asks why Plato never made his views on this unity fully explicit. Taking the Gorgias as a case study it is argued that unity rests on the conception of refutative dialectic as justice and on the principle of self-consistency of thought and desire. As compared to the treatise, the dialogue form has the advantage of being able to defend these substantive views in action and thus to demonstrate (...) the performative contradictions in the ideas of one’s opponents. (shrink)

Habermas' claim to provide a critique of reification by means other than marxian ones requires him to transpose not only meaningful freedom, but also a dialectical view of social becoming, into terms com patible with linguistically mediated intersubjectivity. In order to remain critical of reification as colonization, he thus finds himself committed to the view that colonization is the outcome of the development of two perma nent and competing principles of sociation. Compelled to draw upon the resources both of the (...) dialectical tradition and of transcendental pragmat ics, the theory of communicative action is thereby constrained to remain both quasi-dialectical and quasi-transcendental. This founding gesture generates, in turn, at least two unavoidable aporias. The first can be under stood as a radical and structural deficit for critical judgement concerning the interplay among the decentered cognitive value spheres. The second is an inversion of the apparent claim of accessing a 'reason beyond reason' of which he accuses Horkheimer and Adorno. It shows up in the logical and epistemological problems surrounding the relation between performative contradiction and the status of his theory. Taken together, these theories signal that the theory of communicative action, rather than amounting to a transcendence of earlier approaches to reification, is simply a parallel, but one which becomes less than fully two-dimensional. Key Words: Adorno • .communicative action • .dialectic • .Habermas • . Horkheimer • . performative contradiction • . * reason • . reification. (shrink)