This interview with Jeremy Waldron covers three topics. Firstly, we dealt with the methodology debate, that is, the discussion about how to proceed in analyzing the nature of law. Does the question ‘What is law?’ require a descriptive analysis of the concept of law or, rather, a normative exercise in political philosophy? Secondly, we spoke about the role of law in response to historic injustice, especially in relation to the restitution of property rights. On this topic Waldron vindicates the ‘supersession-thesis’, (...) the idea that, due to changed circumstances and the passage of time, historic injustices become superseded. The third section of the interview is devoted to Waldron’s perspective on the citation of foreign law by national judges. (shrink)

This article explores the unusually high levels of cosmetic surgery in South Korea – for both women and men. We argue that existing explanations, which draw on feminist and postcolonial positions, presenting cosmetic surgery as pertinent only to female and non-western bodies found lacking by patriarchal and racist/imperialist economies, miss important cultural influences. In particular, focus on western cultural hegemony misses the influence in Korea of national identity discourses and traditional Korean beliefs and practices such as physiognomy. We show how (...) these beliefs provide a more ‘gendered’ as opposed to feminist analysis, which allows space for discussion of men’s surgeries. Finally, we critique the accepted notion of the ‘western body’, especially its position in some literature as a more unobtainable ideal for non-western than for western women. We argue that this body has little in common with actual western women’s bodies, and more in common with a globalized image, embodying idealized elements from many different cultures. (shrink)

In his writings around 1930, Wittgenstein relates his philosophy to the idea of phenomenology. He indicates that his main philosophical project had earlier been the construction of a purely phenomenological language, and even after having given up this project he believed that "the world we live in is the world of sense-data," that is, of phenomenological objects. However, a problem is posed by the fact that he does not appear to have given a full, explicit account of what he means (...) by his 'phenomenology', 'phenomenological language', or 'phenomenological problems'. The aim of this dissertation is to unravel the nature of Wittgenstein's phenomenology and to examine its importance for his entire work in philosophy. ;Phenomenology can be characterized as philosophy whose primary concern is what is immediately given in one's experience. This 'immediately given' is not merely impressions inside one's mind, but includes also the part of objective reality that impinges upon one's consciousness. Thus, an aim of phenomenological enterprise is to grasp this objective reality by attending to immediate experience. Husserl's phenomenology is in fact a case in point. ;Similarly, Wittgenstein's main attention is directed to one's immediate experience. However, the early Wittgenstein's phenomenology is unusual because of the way he views immediate experience. For him, the nature of the immediately given is unique in the sense that the possibility of logic is also based on it. Indeed, the fact that Wittgenstein sees the foundation of logic in immediate experience is what makes his philosophy a kind of phenomenology. In the Tractatus, all logical forms are combinations of the logical forms of immediately given objects of experience. Also, immediate experience can only be grasped and understood by means of language, because Wittgenstein views language as the ultimate medium through which we understand the world. Therefore, the important problem for him is the way we use language to describe immediate experience. In my study, I examine Wittgenstein's concern with immediate experience and the way we describe it, a concern which guides his philosophical journey through the phenomenological problems that pervade his work. (shrink)

Media in Question sets the agenda for a revitalized debate on the hybrid communicative practices that constitute the postmodern media landscape: practices that cross the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, public knowledge, and popular culture. In this challenging and provocative collection, the individual contributors rethink key issuesùthe meaning of the public interest, the quality of media performance, and deregulation. In the process they raise questions rarely addressed in normative media theories, for example, the ethics of sports reporting, (...) the moral reasoning in popular culture, and the required professional standards for infotainment genres such as reality television and gossip journalism. Accessible and wide-ranging, The Media in Question will be essential reading for students in mass communication and political communication studies. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

Wittgenstein frequently uses the word 'aspect' (Aspekt) in his writings from 1947 to 1949. There he uses the word along with aspect-seeing and aspect-change, so that readers are misled into thinking his primary concern in using the word is something like Gestalt psychology or philosophy of psychology per se. However, Wittgenstein's late treatment of aspect is only a special case of a more general problem, namely phenomenology. In the middle-period writings, the word 'aspect' refers to a phenomenological object. Basically, Wittgenstein's (...) aspect means the way an object appears to us. For him, an 'aspect' is a phenomenological object. (shrink)

This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker should (...) choose a vague expression when communicating with a hearer. While the former question is purely theoretical, the latter has practical implications for the computational generation of utterances in Natural Language Generation (NLG). (shrink)

Internet is often said to open up new avenues for a more direct and deliberative democracy. In this article, the notion of ‘deliberation’ will be problematized and a typology of political web sites will be developed. Next, three case studies of Dutch discussion sites are used to test the claim that the organizational structure, aim, control of content and kind of interactivity of political web sites can explain the level and quality of participation. Except for its mostly extreme elitist participation, (...) the research presented here gives a rather ambiguous picture of e-democracy at work. Not only are we confronted with more paradoxes than clear-cut answers, the question is raised whether notions such as the ‘public sphere’ are not more of a hindrance than a help in making sense of politics on the Internet. (shrink)

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.’s Letter to the Editor of Cognitive Science. We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from ‘‘normal” (i.e., non-semantically-balanced) corpora.

Recent findings necessitate revision of the traditional view of G protein‐coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling and expand the diversity of mechanisms by which receptor signaling influences cell behavior in general. GPCRs elicit signals at the plasma membrane and are then rapidly removed from the cell surface by endocytosis. Internalization of GPCRs has long been thought to serve as a mechanism to terminate the production of second messengers such as cAMP. However, recent studies show that internalized GPCRs can continue to either stimulate (...) or inhibit cAMP production in a sustained manner. They do so by remaining associated with their cognate G protein subunit and adenylyl cyclase at endosomal compartments. Once internalized, the GPCRs produce cellular responses distinct from those elicited at the cell surface. (shrink)

Dans cet article, composé en hommage aux travaux de Peter Sharratt, l’auteur examine l’attitude de Pierre de La Ramée (Ramus) et d’Omer Talon à l’égard de l’Éthique à Nicomaque. En tant qu’humanistes, ces derniers s’occupent intensément des arts du discours. Tout en reconnaissant la nécessité d’un fondement éthique dans tout discours, ils se montrent violemment hostiles au traité aristotélicien. Le traité posthume de théologie composé par Ramus propose le Décalogue comme source exclusive de la morale chrétienne. Ramus et Talon refusent (...) de la sorte de s’engager dans la voie ouverte quelques décennies plus tôt par Ph. Melanchthon, qui avait intégré de manière originale la morale antique, notamment celle d’Aristote, dans la théologie protestante. Toutefois, vers la fin du xvie siècle, le philosophe hollandais Rodolphe Snellius, père adoptif du théologien Arminius, composera un traité de morale dans lequel il tente de concilier la morale aristotélicienne avec la méthode développée par Ramus et son équipe. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

Where does Neo-Confucianismâe"a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to itâe"fit into our story of Chinaâe(tm)s history? This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in Chinaâe(tm)s history. The book argues that as (...) Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible. (shrink)

We review the concepts and the physics behind electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and lasing without inversion (LWI) for various models of the V-type configurations.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the current characteristics of organizational culture and climate in Kazakhstani higher educational institutions during the COVID-19 crisis. Materials for the study were collected from interviews and online discussions published on the website of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. In addition, results from the social monitoring systems of the university’s educational activities as well as an official survey have been used. The study offers details of how Kazakhstani universities dealt with the crisis by presenting (...) KazNU case study. The paper presents the responsible actions developed at the university as well as the problems faced by students and teachers. One important lesson to be learnt is that educational organization needs to be more comprehensive, caring for appropriate technical equipment, helping develop skills for staff and students, and include vulnerable groups of the population. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)