This book contributes to the analysis of film from a multimodal and textual perspective by extending formal semantics into the realm of multimodal discourse analysis. It accounts for both the inferential as well as intersemiotic meaning making processes in filmic discourse and therefore addresses one of the main questions that have been asked within film theory and multimodal analysis: How do we understand film and multimodal texts? The book offers an analytical answer to this question by providing a systematic tool (...) for the description of this comprehension process. It aims to advance knowledge of the various resources in filmic texts, the ways the resources work together in constructing meaning and the ways people understand this meaning construction. This new approach to film interpretation is thus able to remodel and improve the classical paradigm of film text analysis. (shrink)

Recent discussions on corporate citizenship highlight the new political role of corporations in society by arguing that corporations increasingly act as quasi-governmental actors and take on what hitherto had originally been governmental tasks. By examining political and sociological citizenship theories, the authors show that such a corporate engagement can be explained by a changing conception of corporate citizens from corporate bourgeois to corporate citoyen. As an intermediate actor in society, the corporate citoyen assumes co-responsibilities for social and civic affairs and (...) actively collaborates with fellow citizens beyond governmental regulation. This change raises the question of how such corporate civic engagement can be aligned with public policy regulations and how corporate activities can be integrated into the democratic regime. To clarify the mode of CC contributions to society, the authors will apply the tenet of subsidiarity as a governing principle which allows for specifying corporations’ tasks as intermediate actors in society. By referring to the renewed European Union strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility, the authors show how such a subsidiary corporate-governmental task-sharing can be organized. (shrink)

Gender is a form of "divided reason" (la raison partagée) which, in its turn, is an instrument of hegemony. The paper redefines both the concept of gender and such concepts as reason, in that it sees them as normative. The hegemonic project of reason divided (le partage de la raison) aims to compensate for the unstable process of differentiation and sexuation. Similarly it reinterprets the often contested sex/gender divide beyond the impasse of the nature/culture distinction and analyses it instead as (...) dynamics between the différend (that which makes the difference) and hegemonic identity. The point to be made is a re-interrogation of the sex/gender essentialising distinction and taking it beyond the concepts of différend and hegemony. The dichotomy is inherent to the process of dividing reason and it is the very way of being of reason. It aims at comprehending & governing any pattern of hierarchy. The paper shows how the subordination of women, through the “sexuation”/”gendering” of all human institutions starting with language and thinking, is used as a means to legitimate and justify all other social and political inequalities and injustices. At the same time, violence is shown to arise from the rejection of the fact that we are born of the other. It is a desperate attempt at self-generation. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014) est reconnu aujourd'hui comme l'un des philosophes politiques principaux pour le XXIe siècle. Cet ouvrage poursuit les débats entrepris avec lui, et réunit quelques-uns de ses principaux interlocuteurs en France (Étienne Balibar, Toni Negri, Jacques Rancière), aux États-Unis (Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser) et en Argentine (Horacio González, Leonor Arfuch, Emilio de Ipola, Senda Sferco). Laclau a écrit des ouvrages devenus des références sur l'hégémonie, le populisme et l'émancipation. Longtemps ignorées par la philosophie institutionnelle et méconnues du grand (...) public, ses thèses originales ont su perturber la scène contemporaine de la pensée politique. Son activité citoyenne en Argentine a fait de lui un intellectuel familier du public hispanophone. Ce que disent ici les penseurs argentins éclaire d'un jour nouveau la contribution des épistémologies du Sud aux débats politiques français et européens, mais aussi au-delà, portant sur la question d'un populisme de gauche que Laclau appelait de ses voeux et qu'il nous laisse en héritage."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In response to stakeholder pressure, companies increasingly make ambitious forward-looking sustainability commitments. They then draw on corporate policies with varying degrees of alignment to disseminate and enforce corresponding behavioral rules among their suppliers and business partners. This goal-based turn in private sustainability governance has important implications for its likely environmental and social outcomes. Drawing on paradox theory, this article uses a case study of zero-deforestation commitments in the Indonesian palm oil sector to argue that goal-based private sustainability governance’s characteristics set (...) the stage for two types of paradoxes to emerge: performing paradoxes between environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals, and organizing paradoxes between cooperation and competition approaches. Companies’ responses to these paradoxes, in turn, can explain the lack of full goal attainment and differential rates of progress between actors. These results draw our attention to the complexities hidden behind governance through goal setting in the corporate space, and raise important questions about the viability of similar strategies such as science-based targets and net-zero goals. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Nothing Wants to Die An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth Solution 1: Keep Your Powder Dry Solution 2: Pretend It Wasn't You Solution 3: Give, and Ye Shall Receive Solution 4: Take Only What You Need Solution 5: Cheat Death The Keepers of the Game as a Moral Authority Notes.

How do civilians react to being harmed in war? Existing studies argue that civilian casualties are strategically costly because civilian populations punish a belligerent who kills civilians and support the latter's opponent. Relying on eighty-seven semi-structured interviews with victims of coalition attacks in Afghanistan, this article shows that moral principles inform civilians’ attitudes toward their own harming. Their attitudes may therefore vary with the perceived circumstances of an attack. Civilians’ perception of harm as unintended and necessary, in accordance with the (...) moral principles of distinction and necessity, was associated with narratives that cast an attack as relatively more legitimate and with a partial or full release of the coalition from blame. The principle of proportionality, which requires that civilian casualties are caused in pursuit of a legitimate war aim, informed their abstract attitudes toward civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Two rules of international law, which accord with the moral principles of distinction and necessity, were reflected in the civilians’ attitudes. The legal rule of proportionality, which diverges from the namesake moral principle, failed to resonate with the civilians. The article explores whether compliance with the legal rules of distinction and necessity can contribute to mitigating the strategic costs of civilian casualties. (shrink)

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need (...) to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots. (shrink)

Insight is a cognitive feature that is usually regarded as being generated by the neocortex and being present only in humans and possibly some closely related primates. In this essay we show that especially corvids display behavioral skills within the domains of object permanence, episodic memory, theory of mind, and tool use/causal reasoning that are insightful. These similarities between humans and corvids at the behavioral level are probably the result of a convergent evolution. Similarly, the telencephalic structures involved in higher (...) cognitive functions in both species show a high degree of similarity, although the forebrain of birds has no cortex-like lamination. The neural substrate for insight-related cognitive functions in mammals and birds is thus not necessarily based on a laminated cortical structure but can be generated by differently organized forebrains. Hence, neither is insight restricted to mammals, as predicted from a “scala naturae”, nor is the laminated cortex a prerequisite for the highest cognitive functions. (shrink)

For a long time the representatives of the social sciences had been passionately interested in whether certain identities in the moral aspect of different cultures, which are so numerous and different, can be found.

Since their arrival in Europe in the Middle Ages the Gypsies have suffered from discrimination on the grounds of racial prejudice. In the 20th century the NAZI doctrine lead to Porrajmos - the Gypsy Holocaust. In the post-war communist countries, Gypsies were forced to give up their traditional ways of life and become productive. Persecution of Gypsies - those who stayed in the post-communist countries and those who migrated to the West - continued in Europe after the big changes of (...) 1989 and up to the present time. (shrink)

BackgroundOrganizations worldwide increasingly adopt inclusive talent management, and this approach appears to rhyme particularly well with the Nordic welfare model. Questions about its value remain understudied, however. The inclusive approach is rooted in positive psychology and focuses on recognizing each employee's individual talents and assessing whether they fit the long-term needs of the organization, since a fit is assumed to be associated with employees' wellbeing. In the present study, we test this assumption focusing specifically on a key talent management practice, (...) talent identification, and the social dimension of employee wellbeing.MethodData were collected through an employee survey conducted within the Finnish units of four international manufacturing organizations and analyzed using logistic regression.ResultsWe found that the recognition of individual talents for long-term deployment by the organization is positively associated with social wellbeing in terms of supervisor support and social climate in the work unit, as perceived by the employees.ConclusionOur results tentatively suggest that inclusive talent management creates value through the identification of employees' individual talents as this practice can be associated with their enhanced wellbeing. (shrink)

This volume of essays studies the problem of transition in economics from a historical perspective. It uses historical ideas and theories in a modern context to examine economic thought. It aims to show that social and historical context are important when considering economic transitions.

The discussion around artificial empathy and its ethics is not a new one. This concept can be found in classic science fiction media such as Star Trek and Blade Runner and is also pondered on in more recent interactive media such as the video game Detroit: Become Human. In most depictions, emotions and empathy are presented as the key to being human. Misselhorn's new publication shows that these futuristic stories are becoming more and more relevant today. We must ask ourselves (...) whether we are socially responsible enough to deal with the consequences of artificial empathy/awareness. If we create artificial life, we should be prepared to treat them accordingly as living beings with respect and no longer categorize them as objects. The author does not rule out the idea that machines might one day become more human than humans themselves and that we humans might even lose our own specific cognitive, emotional and social abilities. (shrink)

Matthias Braun’s1 concise reflections on the ethical challenges posed by digital twins in medicine are briefly supplemented below by a thought that, in my view, seems to run through the text like a thread, but whose ethical implications are not explicitly stated. Braun states in the final paragraph that ‘digital twins do not fundamentally threaten the embodied person’, at least not as long as the person in question has ‘control over her simulated representation’. I agree with this, but would like (...) to point out that it is not just the embodied person who has control. Regardless of whether the person embodied by the digital twin has permanent control over it, which enables them to revoke their agreed representation at any time, the company that developed or uses the digital twin also has control over it. The control of the company or companies and other involved parties lies in the fact that data and information are …. (shrink)

This is a short introduction by the three authors, Gabriela Basterra, Rada Iveković and Boyan Manchev, to the issue of the French journal "Rue Descartes" (N. 67), titled "Quel sujet du politique?" or approximately, "Who is the subject (or Who is the agency) of the political [dimension]?". The question is posed in the specific political and philosophical context of 2008, and is dealt with through History and Political philosophy.

What is the nature of the compulsion to life writing? How does the elongated project of writing a life change as it shifts moments and locales, and why do others respond so directly as readers of stories that are so specific and particular? Janina Bauman is known in English-speaking cultures for two books, Winter in the Morning and A Dream of Belonging. The first covers her girlhood in the Warsaw ghetto, and escape; the second, more fictionalized, deals with the (...) period leading up to exile from Poland after 1968. Janina Bauman spent 20 years of her life working in Polish film. This article reflects on the process of coming to autobiography, and making sense of the writing process and the reception process. (shrink)

This study investigates the aptitude–treatment interaction between text modality and learners’ modality preference on learning outcomes and cognitive load, which is currently a point of controversy. The Meshing Hypothesis postulates there are better learning outcomes when the modality of a learning environment matches the learner´s preference. However, previous research supporting the Meshing Hypothesis shows methodological issues. Therefore, clear empirical support is needed. We tested 42 learners in a between-subject design: Their preferences were either auditive–ambiguous or visual, and half of each (...) preference group randomly learned either with an auditive or a visual text. As expected, we did not find any main effects, but a significant interaction between the text modality and the learner´s preference for comprehension outcomes, extraneous cognitive load, and germane cognitive load. Specifically, learners with a preference for visual texts benefit from learning with their preferred modality, they showed higher comprehension scores and less extraneous load when learning from a visual text. Auditive–ambiguous learners showed almost equal results with both text modalities. This might be explained by the fact that most texts in everyday life are presented visually, and therefore learners with an auditive preference needed to develop appropriate reading strategies. Thus, our results partly support the Meshing Hypothesis. (shrink)

How will the Holocaust be remembered as its survivors disappear? In this article Janina Bauman reflects upon her own work on the Holocaust in the context of the Holocaust's broader reception. She offers her own views about the genre with reference to contemporary documents and testimonials, secondary work, scholarly work, fiction and film. These observations and stories all circulate around her own 1986 landmark text, Winter in the Morning.

„Polyamorie“ ist die Bezeichnung für das explizite und konsensuelle Eingehen mehrerer Liebesbeziehungen zur selben Zeit. Mit polyamoren Konstellationen korreliert, dafür wird in diesem Beitrag argumentiert, eine Ethik der Beziehungsgestaltung und sie schließen darüber hinaus für gewöhnlich das Teilen äquivalenter gesellschaftspolitischer Prämissen ein, auf die im Folgenden an einigen Stellen hingewiesen wird. Eine Ethik der Polyamorie umfasst zwei Eigenschaften: Polyethiken brechen zum einen mit dem traditionellen Verständnis vom Individuum oder Handlungssubjekt. Ich werde zeigen, dass polyamoren Beziehungsnetzwerken und der Ethik, die in (...) ihnen idealiter gelebt wird, ein relationales Denken zugrunde liegt. Zum anderen zeichnen sich Polyethiken durch ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die Beziehungen, die als poly bezeichnet werden können, aus, in denen typischerweise eine Reihe von Werten realisiert werden. Zuvor gilt es allerdings, das Verständnis von Liebe zu definieren, das nach meinem Verständnis einem Polycule bzw. polyamoren Beziehungsnetzwerken im Allgemeinen zugrunde liegt. (shrink)

The transcription factor NF‐κB (p65/p50) plays a central role in the coordination of cellular responses by activating the transcription of numerous target genes. The precise role of the dynamics of NF‐κB signalling in regulating gene expression is still an open question. Here, we show that besides external stimulation intracellular parameters can influence the dynamics of NF‐κB. By applying mathematical modelling and bifurcation analyses, we show that NF‐κB is capable of exhibiting different types of dynamics in response to the same stimulus. (...) We identified the total NF‐κB concentration and the IκBα transcription rate constant as two critical parameters that modulate the dynamics and the fold change of NF‐κB. Both parameters might vary as a result of cell‐to‐cell variability. The regulation of the IκBα transcription rate constant, e.g. by co‐factors, provides the possibility of regulating the NF‐κB dynamics by crosstalk. (shrink)

The Almoravid and Almohad Empires. By Amira K. Bennison. The Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 382. $150, £90 ; $49.95, £29.99.

Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought. By Luke B. Yarbrough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 361. $120 ; $32.99.

Popular posthumanist theories are revealing a lot about their origin from enlightenment humanism. In this paper I will firstly have a closer look on the history of the enlightenment-humanistic concept of human nature and its roots in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Afterwards I will show how this notion of human nature will be broadened in transhumanist thinking, turned upside down as a modern enlightenment humanism, or even deformed and perverted in the popular posthumanist vision of the immortal and from (...) its body completely abstracted mind in the Singularity of a computer interface. (shrink)