_The Poetry of the Possible _challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective self-organization. Establishing a conceptual continuum between modernism and contemporary theorists such as Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, Joel Nickels rediscovers modernism’s attempts to document the creative _potenza_ of the multitude. By examining scenes of collective life in works by William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura (...) Riding, and Wallace Stevens, Nickels resurrects modernism’s obsession with _constituent power_: the raw, indeterminate capacity for reciprocal counsel that continually constitutes and reconstitutes established political regimes. In doing so, he reminds us that our own attempts to imagine leaderless networks of collective initiative are not so much breaks with modernist forms of knowledge as restagings of some of modernism’s most radical moments of political speculation. Setting modernism’s individual and collective models of spontaneity in dialogue with theorists of political spontaneity such as Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, Nickels retells the story of modernism as the struggle to represent powers of collective self-organization that lie outside established regimes of political representation. (shrink)

I argue that emotions are belief/desire sets characterized by strong desire.

In this article, the authors bring two personal journeys together: one author’s liberationist journey, sparked by a search for justice and liberation in the slums of Guatemala City, and the other’s lifelong commitment to practical theology and spatial justice in South Africa. A practical theology of liberation is the result of life experiences in countries of the Global South amidst the search for justice and liberation. The worlds that come together in this article are René Girard’s mimetic theory, liberation theology (...) and practical theology. This article raises the question of the cross-contextuality of practical theology and the theological application of mimetic theory to develop innovative theological methodologies that respond to the collective woundedness of the urban context in the Global South.Contribution: The main contribution of this article is the use of three seemingly different theological approaches in conjunction. This article opens the door to inform practical theology with René Girard’s mimetic theory and liberation theology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in part due to its effective promotion (...) by The Philosophical Review’s editors. Our picture of mid-twentieth-century American philosophy is different from existing ones, including those according to which the prominence of analytic philosophy in America was basically a matter of the natural affinity between American philosophy and analytic philosophy and those according to which the political climate at the time was hostile towards non-analytic approaches. Furthermore, our reconstruction suggests a new perspective on the nature of 1950s analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that the political adage “Be ye prudent as serpents and guileless as doves” involves three different types of relation between prudence and morality, namely: unification (Vereinigung), subordination (Unterordnung), and association (Beigesellung). I maintain that these relations are set up according to the same principle that determines the relationship between mechanical and teleological causality in the third Critique. Thus, I argue that morality and prudence are much more systematically related within the system of critical philosophy than is normally (...) assumed in the literature and that this is made possible by way of an intimate relationship between prudence and teleological judgment. (shrink)

Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that (...) the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures. (shrink)

Vers la fin du XIVe siècle se fait jour une théorie du signe et de la signification qui, par une réélaboration des principaux concepts sémantiques, renouvelle toute l’analyse logique du langage.Partant de Guillaume d’Ockham, dont l’œuvre est ici décisive, cet ouvrage suit le développement d’une logique fondée sur des éléments de sémiologie, à travers différents auteurs du XIVe siècle tels que Gauthier Burley, Jean Buridan, Albert de Saxe, Marsile d’Inghen, Pierre d’Ailly...Une telle « logique du signe » prend place dans (...) toute une mutation du savoir, en ce siècle où la crise profonde du monde médiéval appelle une autre conception des rapports entre l’homme, les choses extérieures et le langage. (shrink)

This is a philosophical and historical investigation of the role of inconsistent representations of the same scientific phenomenon. The logical difficulties associated with the simultaneous application of inconsistent models are discussed. Internally inconsistent scientific proposals are characterized as structures whose application is necessarily tied to the confirming evidence that each of its components enjoys and to a vision of the general form of the theory that will resolve the inconsistency. Einstein's derivation of the black body radiation law is used as (...) an example application of such a strategy and is contrasted with planck's derivation. (shrink)

argues that ancient Greek medicine had a significant effect on the way in which Plato conceived of ethics, and (2) explores some ways in which Plato integrated medical concepts such as "health" into his ethics. Specific parallels between ancient medicine and such concepts as eudaimonia , soul, nature and convention, etc., are discussed, as is the relation between conceptions of health and medical treatment. Keywords: ancient medicine, ethics, health, Plato CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Many philosophers accept a nonreductive physicalist view of at least some special sciences, which is to say that while they assert that each particular referent of any special science term is identical to some referent of a physical term, or token physicalism, they deny that special science types are identical to physical types. The most commonly cited reason for this position is Jerry Fodor's antireductionist argument based on the multiple realizability of many special science terms. I argue that if token (...) physicalism is true, as nonreductive physicalists believe, then this multiple-realization argument fails to preclude reductive physicalism. (shrink)

In developing their policy on paediatric medical assistance in dying (MAID), DeMichelis, Shaul and Rapoport decide to treat euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide as ethically and practically equivalent to other end-of-life interventions, particularly palliative sedation and withdrawal of care (WOC). We highlight several flaws in the authors’ reasoning. Their argument depends on too cursory a dismissal of intention, which remains fundamental to medical ethics and law. Furthermore, they have not fairly presented the ethical analyses justifying other end-of-life decisions, analyses and decisions (...) that were generally accepted long before MAID was legal or considered ethical. Forgetting or misunderstanding the analyses would naturally lead one to think MAID and other end-of-life decisions are morally equivalent. Yet as we recall these well-developed analyses, it becomes clear that approving of some forms of sedation and WOC does not commit one to MAID. Paediatric patients and their families can rationally and coherently reject MAID while choosing palliative care and WOC. Finally, the authors do not substantiate their claim that MAID is like palliative care in that it alleviates suffering. It is thus unreasonable to use this supposition as a warrant for their proposed policy. (shrink)

I argue for the view that some we-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification (IEM) relative to the first-person plural pronoun. To prepare the ground for this argument I defend an account of the semantics of ‘we’ and note the variety of different uses of that term. I go on to defend the IEM of a certain range of we-thoughts against a number of objections.

The present paper draws on climate science and the philosophy of science in order to evaluate climate-model-based approaches to assessing climate projections. We analyze the difficulties that arise in such assessment and outline criteria of adequacy for approaches to it. In addition, we offer a critical overview of the approaches used in the IPCC working group one fourth report, including the confidence building, Bayesian and likelihood approaches. Finally, we consider approaches that do not feature in the IPCC reports, including three (...) approaches drawn from the philosophy of science. We find that all available approaches face substantial challenges, with IPCC approaches having as a primary source of difficulty their goal of providing probabilistic assessments. (shrink)

The ethics of long-term Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) use, especially when organ recovery appears highly unlikely and the patient does not qualify for organ transplantation, are compli...

The raison d’être of the humanities is widely held to reside in its unique ability to generate critical thinking and critical thinkers. But what is “critical thinking?” Is it a generalized mode of...

FIRST PARAGRAPH I have argued that dispositionalism is incompatible with the Principle of Least Action (PLA) (Katzav 2004). In ‘Katzav on the Limitations of Dispositionalism,’ Brian Ellis responds, arguing that while naïve dispositionalism is incompatible with the PLA, sophisticated dispositionalism is not. Naive dispositionalism, according to Ellis, is the view that the world is ultimately something like a conglomerate of objects and their dispositions, and that, therefore, dispositions are the ultimate ontological units that explain events. Sophisticated dispositionalism, according to Ellis, (...) supposes that, how things are disposed to behave depends also on what kinds of things they are, what kinds of property they have, and how these kinds of things and properties are placed in the natural kinds hierarchies to which they belong (Ellis 2005). Further, it supposes that at the top of each hierarchy of natural kinds there is a global kind. For example, ‘[t]he global natural kind in the category of substance is that of the physical system’ (Ellis 2005). Ellis continues, claiming that the PLA is of the essence of the global kind in the category of objects or substances. If this is so, then, of course, every continuing object must be Lagrangian, i.e. disposed to evolve in accordance with the principle of least action (Ellis 2005). Ellis concludes that, therefore, a sophisticated dispositionalist can accommodate the PLA and its metaphysical necessity. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith's On Reflection is a sustained and detailed criticism of philosophical appeals to reflection. Kornblith argues, on both conceptual and empirical grounds, that a large number of appeals to reflective belief and desire in philosophical theorizing about knowledge and justification, reasoning, free will and normativity are deeply flawed. In this paper, I discuss Kornblith's arguments, finding some quite compelling and some wanting. Moreover, I argue that an important ambiguity about the nature of reflection renders the book less clear than (...) it ought to be and undermines some of the book's criticisms. (shrink)

The Necessary Maximality Principle for c. c. c. forcing with real parameters is equiconsistent with the existence of a weakly compact cardinal. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim).

This article analyses occupational health and safety discourse, bringing special attention to dilemmas that emerge as employees name and negotiate particular risks and safety measures. The study is based on 46 interviews conducted with employees in three chemical factories, and combines Michel Foucault’s conception of governmentality with a discursive psychology approach. The study demonstrates how dilemmas emerge when 1) respondents make others responsible for health and safety risks; 2) they personally assume responsibility as ‘risky’ workers; and 3) different rationalities – (...) such as environmental and behavioural or hierarchical – appear in the same set of statements. Overall, occupational health and safety management tends to exclude egalitarian beliefs, which creates dilemmas that become visible as speakers find themselves compelled to excuse, ironize or systematically downplay discursive moves that may diminish or exclude themselves or others. Given that previous research suggests that behavioural approaches to health become increasingly widespread in working life, this article contributes by highlighting the presence of dilemmas that implies some flux and openness to change. (shrink)

If the Wholeness Axiom wa $_0$ is itself consistent, then it is consistent with v=hod. A consequence of the proof is that the various Wholeness Axioms are not all equivalent. Additionally, the theory zfc+wa $_0$ is finitely axiomatizable.

In Eastern Europe, when someone dies, the custom is to drape mirrors in the house with black muslin or a dark sheet. According to folklorists, this is done so that the deceased, who is believed to wander through his or her house for nine days saying goodbye to friends and family, will not be frightened when he or she cannot find his or her reflection in the mirror. While it is easy to scoff at such superstitious customs, there is much (...) to learn from them. The draping of the mirrors is a vivid metaphor, but it is also useful when it comes to making a counterintuitive point: namely, little systematic attention has been paid to the role of economic preferences, markets, and the pace of development in shaping Quebec's nationalist objectives and strategy. And it is this failure to comprehend the impact that economics, from a microscopic and macroscopic level, has had on ‘nation-building’ and, more concretely, on the October 30th referendum (where in answer to the question “Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new Economic and Political Partnership, within the scope of the Bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?”, 49.5 percent of Quebeckers voted ‘Yes’) that is tantamount to a ‘draping of the mirrors,’ of providing an incomplete explanation about the bases of Quebec's nationalism. (shrink)

Understanding the individual-level factors associated with sustainable behaviour in the workplace is important to advance corporate ethics and sustainability efforts. In two studies, we simultaneously assess the role of core values and personality traits in relation to a broad set of sustainability actions, both beneficial and harmful. Results from a student sample and then a national sample confirm that values and personality are distinct constructs that incrementally and differentially predict economic, social, and environmental outcomes. We successfully replicate previous findings pertaining (...) to values and find that, controlling for values, the personality dimension of Honesty–Humility is the strongest negative predictor of harmful actions. Our analyses highlight the unique characteristics of values and personality and their distinct implications for ethical and sustainable management practice. By assessing values and personality together, we also contribute to more general efforts within psychology to develop an integrative view of the person. (shrink)

Previous papers on ethics consultation in medicine have taken a positivistic approach and lack critical scrutiny of the psychosocial, political, and moral contexts in which consultations occur. This paper discusses some of the contextual factors that require more careful research. We need to know more about what prompts and inhibits consultation, especially what factors effectively prevent house officers and nonphysicians from requesting consultation despite perceived moral conflict in cases. The attitudes and institutional power of attending medical staff seem important, especially (...) where innovative interventions raise ethical questions. Ethics consultants also need to address the thorny problems of the origin(s) of the consultant's authority, whistleblowing, conflicts of interest that affect the consultant, persistently poor communications in hospitals, systemic inequity in the availability or quality of services for some, and the standing of the consultant's recommendations, including their appearance in the patient's medical record. (shrink)

Rereading Renée C. Fox's “A Sociological Perspective on Organ Transplantation and Hemodialysis,” published in 1970, one is likely to be struck more by continuity than by change. The most pressing of the social, policy, and ethical concerns that Fox raised remain problematic fifty years later. We still struggle with scientific and clinical uncertainty, with the boundary between experimentation and therapy, and with the cost of organ replacement therapies and disparities in how they are allocated. We still have an imperfect understanding (...) of transplant immune responses. We still debate when a potential donor “actually” dies, and we still seem to think better empirical criteria could harmonize the diverse religious, cultural, and socioeconomic values of patients, providers, third‐party payers, and policy‐makers. Organ transplantation was for Fox both a particular case unfolding in time and an entryway for discussing the difficult moral questions presented by many new medical technologies in a context of high demand and limited resources. (shrink)

Most historical Jesus scholars agree that Jesus was regarded by his contemporaries as a great miracle worker. However, many of these same scholars deny that they can pronounce on the truth of the miracle stories as historians. There are at least two arguments for this position. One is based on an alleged empirical constraint on historical practice, which excludes divine causation. The other argument is rooted in the presumption that it is anachronistic to impose modern understandings of miracles on ancient (...) authors. I argue that both objections are unsuccessful. (shrink)

The content of Christian spirituality that made waves since the inception of the early church soon took on different contours as the faith got adapted to different gentile contexts. The expression of this faith, along with its liturgical symbolism and sacramental observances, is still gaining momentum in African Christianity. The emerging practice of the use of ‘anointing oil’ in its religious expression is receiving more attention than the Christ of the Gospel. In this article, we argue that against its primitive (...) intent, the use of the ‘anointing oil’ by the African Church is a mere display of fetish ancestral religion that expresses its unique African traditional religious root rather than a true expression of Christian spirituality. Our thesis is framed on the basis that the manner in which some African churches apply the purported ‘anointing oil’ is discriminatory vis-à-vis its ancient understanding and purpose. In our attempt to address this damaging practice to true Christian spirituality, also standing as a huge challenge for pastoral theology, we undertook a careful historical–theological analysis of the extant biblical data and its contextual interpretation vis-à-vis its distortion today. We concluded that what pastoral theologians have to deal with within the Christian community in Africa is offering the right biblical perspective against the distorted mode of the application of the contemporary purported ‘anointing oil’ that is falsely projecting the Christian faith and belief in a bad light. Contribution: The application of the anointing oil in contemporary Christian religion in Africa is, to say the least, not an inherent textually prescribed requisite criterion for Christian spirituality, but merely an outburst of fetish ancestral religious worldview that stands contra the hermeneutics of the biblical text and its ancient tradition. That no Old Testament prophet, not even Jesus nor Paul, mentioned the subject, makes its contemporary application textually and theologically suspect, and therefore, heretically infectious for the spiritual health of the community of faith. These insights sit quite well with the textual hermeneutics within the mainline transdisciplinary religious and multidisplinary theological perspective of this journal. (shrink)

The consequences of taxation matter for the optimal design of the tax system. Those consequences depend on behavioral responses to taxation, as summarized by the elasticity of taxable income. Although this elasticity depends on characteristics of preferences, such as the elasticity of substitution between goods and leisure, it also depends on the avoidance technology, and on the response of government to avoidance behavior. It depends on the size of states, and the amount of tax coordination and harmonization. To some degree (...) the elasticity of response can be affected by government policies, and the government need not accept it passively, but rather should put in place policies that optimally determine it. (shrink)

Next SectionObjectives To evaluate the adequacy of paediatric informed consent and its augmentation by a supplemental computer-based module in paediatric endoscopy. Methods The Consent-20 instrument was developed and piloted on 47 subjects. Subsequently, parents of 101 children undergoing first-time, diagnostic upper endoscopy performed under moderate IV sedation were prospectively and consecutively, blinded, randomised and enrolled into two groups that received either standard form-based informed consent or standard form-based informed consent plus a commercial (Emmi Solutions, Inc, Chicago, Il), sixth grade level, (...) interactive learning module (electronic assisted consent). Anonymously and electronically, the subjects' anxiety (State Trait Anxiety Inventory), satisfaction (Modified Group Health Association of America), number of questions asked, and attainment of informed consent were assessed (Consent-20). Statistics were calculated using t test, paired t test, and Mann Whitney tests. Results The ability to achieve informed consent, as measured by the new instrument, was 10% in the control form-based consent group and 33% in the electronic assisted consent group (p<0.0001). Electronically assisting form-based informed consent did not alter secondary outcome measures of subject satisfaction, anxiety or number of questions asked in a paediatric endoscopy unit. Conclusions This study demonstrates the limitations of form-based informed consent methods for paediatric endoscopy. It also shows that even when necessary information was repeated electronically in a comprehensive and standardised video, informed consent as measured by our instrument was incompletely achieved. The supplemental information did, however, significantly improve understanding in a manner that did not negatively impact workflow, subject anxiety or subject satisfaction. Additional study of informed consent is required. Clinical trial registration number ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT00899392. (shrink)

In “The Search for Environmental Rights,” Joseph Sax argues that each individual should have, as a right, freedom from environmental hazards and access to environmental benefits, but he makes clear that environmental rights do not exist and their recognition would truly be a novel step. Sax states that environmental rights are different from existing human rights and argues that the closest analogy is welfare interests. In arguing for environmental rights, I follow Sax’s direction and draw from the work of those (...) who are the most relevant in establishing environmental rights. I consider Joel Feinberg’s notion of welfare interests, Henry Shue’s notion of basic rights, and James Nickel’s right to a safe environment. I draw from Mill’s harm principle, the superfund legislation, and the Clean Air Act to illustrate the existing ethical and legal bases for establishing environmental rights. Finally, I discuss positive and negative duties that such rights might carry. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that the spelling of the pre-exilic books of the Bible was generally defective like that of contemporary epigraphy, and that the matres lectionis were inserted into the original texts by scribes during the first half of the Second Temple period. This article argues that the orthography of the ancient books of the Bible was from its beginning similar to that of the MT. The difference between the current biblical spelling and the defective spelling of the inscriptions (...) should instead be understood as a matter of different registers. (shrink)

Le 14e siècle est une période où les débats sur l'infini se multiplient. Les mêmes doctrines se trouvent indifféremment développées dans les oeuvres théologiques, dans les commentaires sur la "Physique" d'Aristote voire dans des traités spécialement dévolus à la question du continu. Cet ouvrage révèle la place de ces doctrines dans la logique, les mathématiques, la philosophie naturelle.

In this article, I pursue two related goals. First, I aim to put theory back into our picture of the development of the American human sciences during the Cold War. While historians have rightly highlighted the empiricist methodologies employed by postwar human scientists, I show how an influential group of social scientists, led by the sociologist Talcott Parsons, attempted to establish theorizing as the primary means of interdisciplinary inquiry. My second goal is to show that the “abstract” theory envisioned by (...) Parsons and his followers can and should be studied as a material practice. (shrink)