This commentary explains how the ecclesiological significance of charity is linked with the Christian option for the poor. It explores reasons for the obvious division of the church into two more or less isolated organizations (“pastoral church” and “caritas church”) and looks for ways of bringing these two parts closer together. Secondly, the text emphasizes why spiritual formation among people working for Christian charity organizations is so important, and it specifies under which conditions such a formation (formation of the heart) (...) probably can succeed. (shrink)

Il saggio, nato da una conferenza sul tema della democrazia organizzata da "Attac", č una trattazione della questione dei processi di individualizzazione e disindividualizzazione in relazione all'impegno politico che ripercorre la produzione sociologica recente e attraversa le analisi di autori come Norbert Elias, Jacques Derrida e Michel Foucault. Particolare attenzione č rivolta al problema dei presupposti impliciti operanti nell'analisi sociologica e a quanto da essi deriva sul piano valutativo. L'autore, che propone un recupero critico della nozione di individualitÀ, (...) class='Hi'>mette in guardia da un lato rispetto a una considerazione atemporale delle categorie sociologiche e politiche, dall'altro rispetto alle riduzioni semplificanti dell'individualismo di cui sottolinea invece l'irriducibile complessitÀ. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap’s mature work on the logical reconstruction of scientific theories consists of two components. The first is the elimination of the theoretical vocabulary of a theory in terms of its Ramsification. The second is the reintroduction of the theoretical terms through explicit definitions in a language containing an epsilon operator. This paper investigates Carnap’s epsilon-reconstruction of theories in the context of pure mathematics. The main objective here is twofold: first, to specify the epsilon logic underlying his suggested definition of (...) theoretical terms and a suitable choice semantics for it. Second, to analyze whether Carnap’s approach is compatible with a structuralist conception of mathematics. (shrink)

This article reviews De unitate intellectus – Über die Einzigkeit des Intellekts 84 Euro978-3-7728-2840-9.

Antonio Argandoña, Norbert Bilbeny, Victòria Camps, Miquel Calsina, Àngel Castiñeira, Cristian Palazzi, Ferran Requejo, Raimon Ribera, Begoña Román, Ferran Sàez, Miquel Seguró, Francesc Torralba, Josep Maria Vallès, Rosamund Thomas Ramon Llull Journal of Applied Ethics 2012 3(3):9-16.

Antonio Argandoña, Norbert Bilbeny, Victòria Camps, Miquel Calsina, Àngel Castiñeira, Cristian Palazzi, Ferran Requejo, Raimon Ribera, Begoña Román, Ferran Sàez, Miquel Seguró, Francesc Torralba, Josep Maria Vallès, Rosamund Thomas Ramon Llull Journal of Applied Ethics 2012 3(3):9-16.

Electricity is hidden within wires and networks only revealing its quantity and flow when metered. The making of its properties into data is therefore particularly important to the relations that are formed around electricity as a produced and managed phenomenon. We propose approaching all metering as a situated activity, a form of quantification work in which data is made and becomes mobile in particular spatial and temporal terms, enabling its entry into data infrastructures and schemes of evaluation and value production. (...) We interrogate the transition from the pre-digital into the making of bigger, more spatiotemporally granular electricity data, through focusing on those actors selling and materialising new metering technologies, data infrastructures and services for larger businesses and public sector organisations in the UK. We examine the claims of truth and visibility that accompany these shifts and their enrolment into management techniques that serve to more precisely apportion responsibility for, and evaluate the status of, particular patterns and instances of electricity use. We argue that whilst through becoming Big Data electricity flow is now able to be known and given identity in significantly new terms, enabling new relations to be formed with the many heterogeneous entities implicated in making and managing energy demand, it is necessary to sustain some ambivalence as to the performative consequences that follow for energy governance. We consider the wider application of our conceptualisation of metering, reflecting on comparisons with the introduction of new metering systems in domestic settings and as part of other infrastructural networks. (shrink)

This article reviews De vita et moribus Epicuri – Über Leben und Charakter Epikurs 42 Euro978-3-8260-7459-2.

While it is generally agreed that companies need to manage their relationships with their stakeholders, the way in which they choose to do so varies considerably. In this paper, it is argued that when companies want to communicate with stakeholders about their CSR initiatives, they need to involve those stakeholders in a two-way communication process, defined as an ongoing iterative sense-giving and sense-making process. The paper also argues that companies need to communicate through carefully crafted and increasingly sophisticated processes. Three (...) CSR communication strategies are developed. Based on empirical illustrations and prior research, the authors argue that managers need to move from ‘informing’ and ‘responding’ to ‘involving’ stakeholders in CSR communication itself. They conclude that managers need to expand the role of stakeholders in corporate CSR communication processes if they want to improve their efforts to build legitimacy, a positive reputation and lasting stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag diskutieren drei interdisziplinär ausgebildete Akademiker, die als klinisch tätige Ethiker auch viele Jahre Erfahrungen mit Gesundheitssystemen in verschiedenen Ländern haben, die Frage nach dem Kern klinisch-ethischer Expertise: der niederländische Mediziner und Philosoph Henk ten Have, Direktor des Center for Healthcare Ethics in Pittsburgh, USA, der deutsche Theologe und Philosoph Norbert Steinkamp, Professor für theologisch-ethische Grundlagen sozialprofessionellen Handelns an der katholischen Hochschule für Sozialwesen in Berlin, der 12 Jahre die klinische Ethik der Universitätsklinik Nijmegen, Niederlande, geleitet hat, (...) sowie der niederländische Philosoph und Historiker Bert Gordijn, Direktor des Institute of Ethics der Dublin City University, Irland, Präsident der International Association of Education in Ethics und u. a. Herausgeber von Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. (shrink)

As this book reveals, his vision was much more complex and interesting. He hoped that machines would release people from relentless and repetitive drudgery in order to achieve more creative pursuits.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

While it is generally agreed that companies need to manage their relationships with their stakeholders, the way in which they choose to do so varies considerably. In this paper, it is argued that when companies want to communicate with stakeholders about their CSR initiatives, they need to involve those stakeholders in a two-way communication process, defined as an ongoing iterative sense-giving and sense-making process. The paper also argues that companies need to communicate through carefully crafted and increasingly sophisticated processes. Three (...) CSR communication strategies are developed. Based on empirical illustrations and prior research, the authors argue that managers need to move from ‘informing’ and ‘responding’ to ‘involving’ stakeholders in CSR communication itself. They conclude that managers need to expand the role of stakeholders in corporate CSR communication processes if they want to improve their efforts to build legitimacy, a positive reputation and lasting stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

Both traditional and recent accounts of the beneficial and therapeutic effects of psychedelic experiences tie these effects to specifically epistemic changes, for example the enabling of spiritual or psychological insight, or disruption of problematic beliefs or thought patterns. While these alleged benefits have sometimes been thought to be facilitated by false or even delusional beliefs (e.g. Pollan 2015), recent philosophical discussion strikes a more optimistic tone, arguing that the epistemic risks involved with psychedelic drug use tend to be relatively benign (...) and outweighed by epistemic benefits (Letheby 2021). In this paper, we seek to nuance this picture by drawing attention to the crucial role played by social factors in determining the epistemic effects of psychedelic experiences. We argue that the very openness of mind and heightened sense of clarity and certainty that is often thought to facilitate the epistemic benefits of psychedelic drug use, also make the user more vulnerable to adverse epistemic influence from the social environment, to a degree not acknowledged in the current literature. Examining the epistemic influences of the social environment is thus important for understanding the necessary precautions of informed consent and overall safe drug use. (shrink)

Proponents of precision medicine envision that digital phenotyping can enable more individualized strategies to manage current and future health conditions. We problematize the interpretation of digital phenotypes as straightforward representations of individuals through examples of what we call data inheritance. Rather than being a digital copy of a presumed original, digital phenotypes are shaped by larger data collectives that precede and continuously change how the individual is represented. We contend that looking beyond the individual is crucial for understanding the factors (...) that can ‘bend’ digital mirrors in specific directions. Since algorithms used for digital profiling are based on historical data, their predictions often inherit and increase the values and perspectives of past data practices. Moreover, the data legacies we leave behind today may return as so-called ‘data phantoms’ that conflict with the interests of the individual and contest who and what the ‘original’ is. (shrink)

In 2005, The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) developed four new ethical principles of organic agriculture to guide its future development: the principles of health, ecology, care, and fairness. The key distinctive concept of animal welfare in organic agriculture combines naturalness and human care, and can be linked meaningfully with these principles. In practice, a number of challenges are connected with making organic livestock systems work. These challenges are particularly dominant in immature agro-ecological systems, for example those that (...) are characterized by industrialization and monoculture. Some of the current challenges are partly created by shortages of land and manure, which encourage zero-grazing and other confined systems. Other challenges are created in part by the conditions for farming and the way in which global food distribution systems are organized, e.g., how live animals are transported, how feed is traded and transported all over the globe, and the development of infrastructure and large herds. We find that the overall organic principles should be included when formulating guidelines for practical organic animal farming. This article explores how the special organic conceptions of animal welfare are related to the overall principles of organic agriculture. The aim is to identify potential routes for future development of organic livestock systems in different contexts and with reference to the specific understanding of animal welfare in organic agriculture. We include two contrasting cases represented by organic livestock systems in northwestern Europe and farming systems in tropical low-income countries; we use these cases to explore the widely different challenges of organic livestock systems in different parts of the world. (shrink)

Elias wrote in both English and German, and in all his work runs to 14 books and around 90 other essays, along with poems and numerous interviews. The 18 volumes of the collected works contain many writings not previously published in English, and a small number never published before. All of the texts have thoroughly checked and revised, by editors who have a deep knowledge of Elia's thinking; they have inserted many clarifications, cross-references and explanatory notes.

In this paper we argue that the collective grandness of small business is often underestimated in CSR research and policy‐making. We emphasize the importance of understanding the contexts and the ways in which small‐ and medium‐sized companies engage in CSR and how they differ from multinational companies. We suggest that it might be that researchers and practitioners are asking the wrong questions in their ambitions to prove ‘the business case for CSR’. Perhaps we should rather focus on the ‘how’ and (...) the ‘with what impact’ questions to understand better the SME engagement in CSR. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study presents an empirical investigation of the ethical reasoning and ethical issues at stake in the daily work of physicians and molecular biologists in Denmark. The aim of this study was to test empirically whether there is a difference in ethical considerations and principles between Danish physicians and Danish molecular biologists, and whether the bioethical principles of the American bioethicists Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress are applicable to these groups.MethodThis study is based on 12 semi-structured interviews with (...) three groups of respondents: a group of oncology physicians working in a clinic at a public hospital and two groups of molecular biologists conducting basic research, one group employed at a public university and the other in a private biopharmaceutical company.ResultsIn this sample, the authors found that oncology physicians and molecular biologists employed in a private biopharmaceutical company have the specific principle of beneficence in mind in their daily work. Both groups are motivated to help sick patients. According to the study, molecular biologists explicitly consider nonmaleficence in relation to the environment, the researchers' own health, and animal models; and only implicitly in relation to patients or human subjects. In contrast, considerations of nonmaleficence by oncology physicians relate to patients or human subjects. Physicians and molecular biologists both consider the principle of respect for autonomy as a negative obligation in the sense that informed consent of patients should be respected. However, in contrast to molecular biologists, physicians experience the principle of respect for autonomy as a positive obligation as the physician, in dialogue with the patient, offers a medical prognosis based upon the patients wishes and ideas, mutual understanding, and respect. Finally, this study discloses utilitarian characteristics in the overall conception of justice as conceived by oncology physicians and molecular biologists from the private biopharmaceutical company. Molecular biologists employed at a public university are, in this study, concerned with allocation, however, they do not propose a specific theory of justice.ConclusionThis study demonstrates that each of the four bioethical principles of the American bioethicists Tom L. Beauchamp & James F. Childress – respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence and justice – are reflected in the daily work of physicians and molecular biologists in Denmark. Consequently, these principles are applicable in the Danish biomedical setting. (shrink)

Beliefs about the importance of ethical behavior to competent practice have prompted major shifts in psychology ethics over time. Yet few studies examine ethical beliefs and behavior after training, and most comprehensive research is now 30 years old. As such, it is unclear whether shifts in the field have resulted in general improvements in ethical practice: Are we psychologists “ships in the rising sea,” lifted by changes in ethical codes and training over time? Participants completed a survey of ethical beliefs (...) and behaviors. Analyses examined group differences, consistency of frequency and ethicality ratings, and comparisons with past data. More than half of behaviors were rated as less ethical and occurring less frequently than in 1987, with early career psychologists generally reporting less ethically questionable behavior. Recommendations for enhancing ethics education are discussed. (shrink)

This article presents a case study of a facilitator-lead “shared reading” group with participants suffering from mental health problems. We argue that the text is the most important agent in creating a reading experience which is both subjective and shared. And we point to relatedness as a function of text agency, and to the role of facilitation in creating text-reader relations. The article also presents a new methodological framework combining physiological data of heart rate variability and linguistic, observational and subjective (...) data. By integrating these distinct data points in our analysis we demonstrate the ways in which the text functions as an agent driving processes of individuation and synchronization respectively. On the basis of linguistic analysis of readers’ responses and interactions we point to the cognitive process of mentalization underlying both individual readings and collective meaning making. At the end we discuss the relation of mentalization to diagnosis and argue that “shared reading” may function as an intervention form with a potential for modifying way of thinking; knowing when to read into and when not, and mode of thought; shifting from explanation to experience. (shrink)

Given the prevalence of emotional and psychological problems among professional psychologists, a primary concern to the field is impairment, or problems of professional competence. Graduate students, in particular, are an especially vulnerable subpopulation of mental health care professionals. Despite graduate students' heightened risk of impairment, relatively little attention has been paid in the literature to the handling of impairment in graduate students in academic training programs. Recommendations for a proactive approach to addressing impairment in trainees are discussed with respect to (...) students, supervisors, and training programs. As graduate school is the first major milestone in a therapist's development, psychologists as gatekeepers of the field of psychology must accept an ethical responsibility to appropriately monitor, acknowledge, and manage impairment among trainees. (shrink)

Carey's book on conceptual change and the accompanying argument that children's biology initially is organized in terms of naïve psychology has sparked a great detail of research and debate. This body of research on children's biology has, however, been almost exclusively been based on urban, majority culture children in the US or in other industrialized nations. The development of folkbiological knowledge may depend on cultural and experiential background. If this is the case, then urban majority culture children may prove to (...) be the exception rather than the rule, because plants and animals do not play a significant role in their everyday life. Urban majority culture children, rural majority culture children, and rural Native American children were given a property projection task based on Carey's original paradigm. Each group produced a unique profile of development. Only urban children showed evidence for early anthropocentrism, suggesting that the co-mingling of psychology and biology may be a product of an impoverished experience with nature. In comparison to urban majority culture children even the youngest rural children generalized in terms of biological affinity. In addition, all ages of Native American children and the older rural majority culture children gave clear evidence of ecological reasoning. These results show that both culture and expertise play a role in the development of folkbiological thought. (shrink)

Bioethical research has tended to focus on theoretical discussion of the principles on which the analysis of ethical issues in biomedicine should be based. But this discussion often seems remote from biomedical practice where researchers and physicians confront ethical problems. On the other hand, published empirical research on the ethical reasoning of health care professionals offer only descriptions of how physicians and nurses actually reason ethically. The question remains whether these descriptions have any normative implications for nurses and physicians? In (...) this article, we illustrate an approach that integrates empirical research into the formulation of normative ethical principles using the moral-philosophical method of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (WRE). The research method discussed in this article was developed in connection with the project ‘Bioethics in Theory and Practice’. The purpose of this project is to investigate ethical reasoning in biomedical practice in Denmark empirically. In this article, we take the research method as our point of departure, but we exclusively discuss the theoretical framework of the method, not its empirical results. We argue that the descriptive phenomenological hermeneutical method developed by Lindseth and Norberg (2004) and Pedersen (1999) can be combined with the theory of WRE to arrive at a decision procedure and thus a foundation for the formulation of normative ethical principles. This could provide health care professionals and biomedical researchers with normative principles about how to analyse, reason and act in ethically difficult situations in their practice. We also show how to use existing bioethical principles as inspiration for interpreting the empirical findings of qualitative studies. This may help researchers design their own empirical studies in the field of ethics. (shrink)

Dass sich Hegel und Hermann Cohen trotz scheinbarer Gegensatze miteinander versohnen lassen, ist eine Grunduberzeugung des Werkes von Myriam Bienenstock, welches sich stets durch die doppelte Ausrichtung auf Hegel und das judische Denken auszeichnete. Mit diesem Band wird Myriam Bienenstock, seit 1997 Professorin fur Philosophie an der Universitat Francois Rabelais in Tours, anlasslich ihres 70. Geburtstages geehrt. Mit Beitragen von Dominque Bourel, Bernard Bourgeois, Christophe Bouton, Pierfrancesco Fiorato, Jean-Francois Goubet, Dana Hollander, Helmut Holzhey, Gerhard Kurz, Claudia Melica, Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Ludwig (...) Siep, Guy Stroumsa und Norbert Waszek. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the collective grandness of small business is often underestimated in CSR research and policy-making. We emphasize the importance of understanding the contexts and the ways in which small- and medium-sized companies engage in CSR and how they differ from multinational companies. We suggest that it might be that researchers and practitioners are asking the wrong questions in their ambitions to prove 'the business case for CSR'. Perhaps we should rather focus on the 'how' and (...) the 'with what impact' questions to understand better the SME engagement in CSR. (shrink)

This is a biological approach to the philosophy of mind that feeds an investigation of the phenomena of “social” and “emotional”, both of which are widespread in nature. I scrutinize the non-dualistic Darwinian concept of the continuity of mind. For practical reasons, I address mind at different levels of organization: The systemic mind are the properties of which a common, coherent evolution works upon. Separated from this is “language-mind”: the crystallization of thought in words, which is a strictly human phenomenon. (...) As the phenomenology of the body is a theory of philosophy that lie beyond language it can—to a certain extent—be extrapolated across a species boundary. In the process the phenomenology of the body comes to resemble biosemiotics and with this tool, I investigate a field study of social play behavior in canids. This leads to a possibility to study the non-human experience of emotion as “locally meaningful phenomena”. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

Reflective equilibrium has been criticized for various reasons ever since the publication of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Recent empirical research into moral decision-making poses new challenges to RE because it questions the reliability of moral intuitions. This research might discredit moral intuitionism in general and RE in particular insofar as it ascribes epistemic value to moral intuitions. These findings suggest, for instance, that moral intuitions vary with cultural background, gender or framing. If it could be shown that all or (...) certain kinds of moral intuitions are unreliable, this would diminish the plausibility of the claim that they provide good reasons to believe in the truth of their content, especially given the growing evidence that professional philosophers are just as biased and susceptible to distorting factors as lay people. In this paper I critically discuss three recent defenses of RE against this unreliable intuitions objection. Two of these defenses argue that the UIO misses its target, because RE does not depend on intuitions, or because the relevant considered judgments in RE are not intuitions. The third defense grants that RE depends on intuitions and that some Rawlsian considered judgments are intuitions. But it argues that the notion of considered judgments can be revised, and that wide reflective equilibrium has the means to adopt the criticism because it can use information about unreliable intuitions and exclude those from further consideration. I argue that the first two defenses do not succeed. The third defense is the most promising one. However, I argue that this defense also fails. In this defense, RE is not a distinctive moral epistemic theory: different versions of RE would be conceivable, all of which are deeply problematic. I conclude with a discussion of the broader philosophical implications of the UIO, specifically whether or not accepting the UIO would warrant skepticism regarding moral knowledge. (shrink)

A growing body of evidence suggests that the informed consent process, in which patients are warned about potential side effects of a treatment, can trigger a nocebo effect where expectations about side effects increase side effect occurrence. This has sparked an ethical debate about how much information patients ought to receive before a treatment while trying to balance the moral principles of patient autonomy and nonmaleficence. In keeping with the principle of patient autonomy, the opinion of patients themselves in relation (...) to how much information they want about side effects is of utmost relevance in this debate. The literature was searched to identify surveys assessing patient attitudes towards side effect information. Across a broad variety of patient populations, treatment types, and countries, the majority of patients wished to be fully informed of potential side effects, particularly in relation to frequent and severe side effects, while only a small minority wanted minimal or no information at all. Results from this review suggest that nocebo research should focus on methods of avoiding nocebo effects of informed consent while ensuring that patients are well-informed about potential side effects. (shrink)

One of the key features of the contemporary data economy is the widespread circulation of data and its interoperability. Critical data scholars have analysed data repurposing practices and other factors facilitating the travelling of data. While this approach focused on flows provides great potential, in this article we argue that it tends to overlook questions of attachment and belonging. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork within a Danish data-linkage infrastructure, and building upon insights from archival science, we discuss the work of data (...) practitioners enabling the repurposing of pathology samples extracted from patients for the conduct of ‘personal medicine’ – our term to discuss the so-called old-fashioned treatment of patients – towards personalised medicine. This first involves ‘getting to know’ the tissues and unpacking their previous uses and meanings, then detaching them from their original source to extract data from such tissues and making them flow towards a new container where they can be worked on and connected with other data. As data practitioners make these tissues travel, transforming them into research data, they organise the attachments of data to new agendas, persons and places. Crucially, in our case, we observe the prominence of national attachments, whereby managing tissues and data in and out of containers involves tying them to the nation to serve its interests. We thus expose how the building of data linkage infrastructures entails more than the accumulation and curation of data, but also involves crafting meanings, futures and belonging to specific communities and territories. (shrink)

Chief executive officers (CEOs) engage in activism when they take public stances on sensitive socio-political issues. In this study, we address the less-explored activities that constitute CEO activism beyond single stances as the activism is maintained over time. The data cover 6 years of campaign and media materials from a case company with several CEO-initiated activist campaigns. Our findings from an inductive analysis contribute to CEO activism theorizing in three ways. First, we extend CEO activism conceptually by identifying five underlying (...) activities that support a public stance: anchoring motivations, modeling action, taking agency, enduring criticism, and normalizing activism. Second, we bridge individual- and organization-level analyses by depicting how a CEO involves a company in activism through activities that justify interrelated topic frame and role frame. Third, we develop a processual model that includes the pre-stance, stance-taking, and post-stance phases and explains how the underlying activities are interrelated and follow a pattern that serves to maintain CEO activism. Accordingly, CEO activism includes activities, through the pre-stance, stance-taking, and post-stance phases, whereby a CEO deliberately engages personally and through a company in public debate about sensitive socio-political issues and the role of businesses in addressing them. (shrink)