Recent years have seen a substantial increase in alternative agrifood initiatives that attempt to use the market to curtail the negative social and environmental effects of production and trade in a globalized food system. These alternatives pose a challenge to capital accumulation and the externalization of environmental costs by large agribusiness, trading and retail firms. Yet the success of these alternatives also makes them an inviting target for corporate participation. This article examines these dynamics through a case study of the (...) two most significant such food system alternatives—organics and fair trade—focusing on corporate involvement in establishing and renegotiating the standards undergirding these initiatives. We compare the development of and contestation over the standards for both certified organic and certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. We provide a brief history of their parallel processes of rapid growth and market mainstreaming. We examine claims of cooptation by movement participants, as well as the divergences and similarities between the organic and fair trade cases. Analyzing these two cases provides useful insights into the strategic approaches that corporate firms have deployed to further capital accumulation and to defuse threats to their profit margins and to status quo production, pricing, labor, trading and retailing practices. It can also offer valuable lessons regarding the most effective means of responding to such counter-reforms and of protecting or reasserting the more transformative elements at the heart of these alternative systems. (shrink)

This article examines the development of and contestation over the standards for certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. It charts fair trade's rapid growth in the United States since the 1999 advent of formal certification, explores the controversies generated by the strategy of market mainstreaming in the sector, and focuses on five key issues that have generated particularly heated contention within the U.S. fair trade movement. It offers a theoretical framework based in the literatures on agrifood (...) systems, social movements, and public-choice economics, for understanding the corporate response to alternative markets such as fair trade. The article suggests a typology of responses by social movement actors to this increased corporate participation, and assesses the relevance of the U.S. case for the future prospects of fair trade, both in other national contexts and as an international movement. (shrink)

In recent years, consumers in the United States have been confronted by no fewer than four competing fair-trade labels, each grounded in a separate certification system and widely differing standards. This fracturing is partly a response to the recent split by the U.S. certifier Fair Trade USA from the international fair trade system, but also illustrates longstanding divisions within the fair trade movement. This article explores the dynamics of competition among nonstate standards through content analyses of fair trade standards documents (...) from the four U.S. fair-trade certifications for agrifood products. It analyzes the differences among them, asking what kinds of social and labor relations are facilitated by each, and identifies how closely they correspond with key fair trade principles. We make two primary arguments. First, we contend that the case of fair trade challenges the dominant conceptual model used to analyze competition among multiple private standards in a single arena, in which newer challengers lower the rigor of standards. Second, we argue that the current fractured U.S. certification landscape illuminates divisions among different interest groups over which principles—and which labor and production forms—should be privileged under the banner of fair trade. (shrink)

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek‐speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these (...) events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer distance, or a longer time?). Results showed a reliable cross‐dimensional asymmetry. For the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of linguistic framing used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space‐time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation. (shrink)

In two experiments, Brookshire, Ivry, and Casasanto showed that words with positive and negative emotional valence can activate spatial representations with a high degree of automaticity, but also that this activation is highly context dependent. Lebois, Wilson-Mendenhall, and Barsalou reported that they “aimed to replicate” our study but found only null results in the “Brookshire et al. replication” conditions. Here we express concerns about three aspects of this paper. First, the study was not an attempt to replicate ours; it was (...) a different study that adapted our method. Second, Lebois et al. did not accurately represent our theoretical position. Third, Lebois et al.’s main conclusion, that spatial congruity effects depend on the task context, was not supported by their data. Despite these concerns, we agree with Lebois et al.'s overall message that spatial aspects of words' meanings are activated differently in different contexts. This was a main conclusion of our study as well. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 224 Seiten: 111-134.

While there are interesting connections between literature and evil, there is as of yet no systematic collection of models of evil to study literature. This is problematic, since literature is among other things an evaluative discourse and the most basic evaluative category is the polarity of good versus evil. In addition, evil shows important affinities with basic narratological principles. To initiate a discussion of models of evil for the analysis of literature, this article organizes a dozen models of evil into (...) four groups. The first consists of a core model which coincides with basic narratological elements in character analysis and narrative tension. The second group contains two pre-modern models of evil, defilement and moral-natural evil. The third group takes its cue from personality theory and proposes the five-factor model of personality and an enriched “dark triad,” and, to balance description against narration, a model which categorizes kinds of murder. The last group organizes six models around the thematic opposition between nature and society, an opposition which forms the backbone of Western philosophy and narrative. To test their validity, the models are applied to a series of literary examples/characters, above all Grendel, Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Carol Oates’ short story “Heat.”. (shrink)

This study employs ethnographic field data to trace a dialogue between the self-psychological concept of the self object and experiences regarding the concept of “interbeing” at a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery in the United States. The dialogue develops an understanding of human experiences with the nonhuman natural world which are tensive, liminal, and nondual. From the dialogue I find that the self object concept, when applied to this form of Buddhism, must be inclusive enough to embrace relationships with animals, stones, and (...) other natural forms. The dialogue further delineates a self-psychological methodology for examining religions in their interactions with natural forms. (shrink)

A persistent feature in Jesuit reports about the late Ming and early Qing was the notion that an enduring peace and concord pervaded the Chinese political system. Although the Jesuits did not invent this association, which was rooted in Greco-Roman historiography, the Jesuit encyclopaedist Antonio Possevino was the first to link the ‘perpetual peace’ and ‘supreme concord’ of the Chinese state to the Confucian intellectual tradition. As the Jesuits’ missionary strategy developed under the tutelage of Matteo Ricci, ‘public peace’ and (...) ‘the calm of the Republic’ came to be perceived as the ultimate purpose of the Confucian precepts and one of the hinges on which the aims of Christianity, Confucianism and natural law can be reconciled. The supreme expression of the link between Confucianism and peace can be found in the Confucius Sinarum philosophus, which presented for the first time an accessible translation of three of the four Confucian classics. Yet while retaining the view that pre-Qin Confucianism espoused peace as a central political aim, the Confucius Sinarum philosophus challenged the view that contemporary China could be regarded as a utopic actualization of Confucian peace. This paper will discuss this shift as an attempt to coopt the Chinese political experience as an argument against the pragmatic political philosophy known as ‘reason of state’, which was perceived by Jesuit thinkers as atheistic and immoral. (shrink)

Moral philosophy is often said to be about what we owe to each other. Do we owe anything to ourselves?

This article seeks to illuminate the figure of the child in democratic politics by arguing that children play a constitutive role as temporary outsiders who present both renewal and risk to the demos. Using Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, we begin with an ontological account of children as new individuals that are central to renewing democratic freedom and plurality. In the second section, we explore how children can be conceived in terms of political risk by focussing on Arendt’s debate with (...) Ralph Ellison concerning the desegregation of American schools in the 1960s. Their arguments about whether children should appear in politics underscores the constitutive role that child–adult relationships play in debates about the normative fabric of democratic society. Finally, we use the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe to argue that children can be characterised as an excluded group of potential adversaries that appear in political contests over claims to represent the demos. From this perspective, the article reveals that children are central figures in democratic politics because they are constituents of an unknown future polity. (shrink)

"This book is a very impressive achievement. Kennefick skillfully introduces readers to some of the most abstruse yet fascinating concepts in modern physics stemming from Einstein's gravitational theory.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 218 Seiten: 91-117.

Transparency requires more than disclosure of data. It requires a mechanism and policy for conveying information to the public. In order for the aims of the excellent report of the FDA Transparency Working Group to be realized, a publicity initiative will need to accompany the plan of action. The FDA will need to actively convey information about the evidence concerning benefit-risk profiles of drugs, sometimes pointing out misleading claims by manufacturers or sponsors. In other cases, the FDA will need to (...) make available its procedures, including possible conflicts of interest, not only in drug approval, but also in guidance documents and in rulemaking. Transparency as a process of letting the public see into the agency should be accompanied by a proactive strategy of distributing information about the products regulated by the agency. (shrink)

Philosophical antagonism and dispute — by no means confined to the early modern period — nonetheless enjoyed a moment of particular ferment as new methods and orientations on questions of epistemology and ethics developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke played a key part in them with controversies initiated by the Essay concerning Human Understanding. This essay develops a wider typology of modes of philosophical quarrelling by focusing on a key debate — the issue of whether human nature (...) came pre-endowed with innate ideas and principles, resulting in a moral consensus across mankind, or remained, on the contrary, dependent on reason to achieve moral insight, and, in practice, divided by diverse and irreconcilable cultural practices as a result of the force of custom and the limited purchase of reason. The essay ultimately concludes on the idea that we should not only attend to the genealogy of disputes but also to the morphology of disputation as a practice. (shrink)

Faith plays a valuable role in sustaining relationships through various kinds of challenges, including through evidentially unfavorable circumstances and periods of significant doubt. But if, as is widely assumed, both faith in God and faith that God exists require belief that God exists, and if one’s beliefs are properly responsive to one’s evidence, the capacity for faith to persevere amidst significant and well-grounded doubt will be fairly limited. Taking Mother Teresa as an exemplar of Christian faith and exploring the close (...) connection between faith and faithfulness in the context of committed covenantal relationships, I set out a view of Relational Faith that does not assume that faith requires belief and allows wide room for honestly wrestling with doubt from within the Judeo-Christian tradition. (shrink)

I contend that scientific realism and realism about natural kinds should be given separate treatment because a person could be a scientific realist in general without having key realist commitments about natural kinds. I utilize Chakravartty’s three dimensions of commitment for scientific realism to create three key conditions for realism regarding natural kinds in particular. I find that Dupré’s promiscuous realism fails at least one these conditions, and therefore, for the sake of terminological consistency and clarity, we should classify promiscuous (...) realism as an antirealist view of natural kinds. (shrink)

New products and services that tackle grand societal challenges often require changes in societal norms, values, and expectations. This research investigates the question of how innovating actors shape these informal institutions throughout the innovation process by drawing on the literature on social innovation and institutional theory. In a comparison of four case studies, we observe that all innovating actors under study engage in a diverse set of practices to challenge and shape societal norms and expectations as well as user habits (...) and routines throughout the innovation process. These activities can be clustered into unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral change processes, depending on the number of actors involved. Our findings highlight how different types of direct and indirect interactions between innovating actors and users along the innovation process shape the understanding of social innovation, and stress the central role of physical experiences and positive emotions among (future) users. Thereby, we provide for a more nuanced view of how companies that aim to bring technologies with different characteristics of innovativeness to the market shape the informal institutional environment throughout the different phases of the innovation process. (shrink)

Can Rawls’s theory provide a framework for assessing obligations to future generations? Extending the veil of ignorance so that participants in the original position do not know to which generation they belong appears to fail in this endeavour. Earlier generations cannot improve their situation by “cooperating” with later generations. Such circumstances, lacking mutuality, leave no room for an agreement or contract. Nevertheless, the original position can be reconstructed so as to model relations of mutuality between generations even if these are (...) absent from the real world. This chapter assesses earlier attempts to do this and provides a rationale for viewing the just savings principle as a clause in the full formulation of the difference principle. (shrink)

I address the philosophical debate over whether the mathematical theory of probability arose on the basis of empirical observations or of purely theoretical speculations. The debate tends to pose a strict dichotomy between empirical problem-solving and pure theorizing. I alternatively suggest that, in the case of mathematical probability, an empirical problem-context acted as an enabling condition for the possibility of mathematical innovation, but that the activity of the early mathematical probabilists gradually became the study of a theoretical system of ideas. (...) This case has some implications for a more general philosophical view on the context of mathematical discovery. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------. (shrink)

Groundhog Day animal weather forecasting ceremonies continue to proliferate around the United States despite a lack of public confidence in the oracles. This essay probes religio-historical and original ethnographic perspectives to offer a psychological argument for why these ceremonies exist. Employing Paul Shepard's notion of a felt loss of sacred, intimate relationships with nonhuman nature, as well as Peter Homans's concept of the monument that enables mourning, this essay argues that groundhog oracles serve as monuments that allow humans experientially to (...) attempt to heal lost sacred relationships with animals like weather forecasting bears, hedgehogs, and badgers. (shrink)

A 2020 scientific report indicated the presence of phosphine, a potential biosignature chemical, in the atmosphere of Venus. As a result, Venus instantly became a global cultural celebrity. How did Venus become so fashionable, so cool in colloquial language, so quickly? I contend that Venus became the center of attention at least temporarily because Venus became moral. Since life at present is a concept that is as much moral as it is scientific, I explain this point by offering a geographically (...) broad sampling of world philosophies that show that secular and religious Western forms of thought strongly value life over nonlife as do many Asian traditions. These cultural valuations of life over nonlife become infused in human psychologies globally and astonish us at the discovery of extraterrestrial life. This essay's substantial culture sample thereby demonstrates that Venus became revered because of deep‐seated but also widespread attitudes of special moral attendance to the presence of life especially in extraterrestrial settings. (shrink)

(1997). Method, moral sense, and the problem of diversity: Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish enlightenment. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 275-296.

BackgroundThe positive component of Mental Health Literacy refers to a person’s awareness of how to achieve and maintain good mental health. Although explored recently, the term still lacks a clear definition among healthcare practitioners.AimTo identify the attributes and characteristics of PMeHL, as well as its theoretical and practical applications.MethodsLiterature search and review, covering the last 21 years, followed by concept analysis according to the steps described by Walker and Avant approach.ResultsPositive component of Mental Health Literacy is considered one component of (...) MHL, integrating positive mental health. The concept’s attributes include: competence in problem-solving and self-actualization; personal satisfaction; autonomy; relatedness and interpersonal relationship skills; self-control; and prosocial attitude. Four case scenarios were used to clarify the antecedents and consequences of PMeHL.ConclusionPositive component of Mental Health Literacy is considered a component of MHL, which deserves attention throughout the lifespan, in different contexts and intervention levels. Considering PMeHL as a multi-faceted and dynamic construct will help understand the mechanisms that improve mental health and promote healthy behaviors. Priority should be given to robust primary research focused on nursing interventions that enhance and sustain PMeHL in people and families. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 52 Heft: 1 Seiten: 119-155.