Although utopian and dystopian elements are a prominent characteristic of twenty-first-century British plays, there is still a significant research gap on these works, as the conference's organizers, Merle Tönnies and Eckart Voigts, pointed out in their introductory remarks. Bringing together drama and theatre studies, cultural studies, and political sciences/sociology, Tönnies and Voigts agreed to convene a conference to address this topic in an interdisciplinary and comprehensive manner. It was originally intended to take place at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at (...) the University of Bielefeld in April 2020, which would have provided a space to bring together not only different... (shrink)

What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, (...) we simply talk "as if" people had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour. This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. Featuring contributions from established authors as well as up-and-coming scholars in this burgeoning field, the book reveals the exciting potential of a fictionalist approach to the mind, as well as the challenges it faces. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on foundational debates in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics in the field, such as embodied cognition and mental representation. Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals alike. (shrink)

We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG ratings experience a (...) ratings increase after complying with the activist’s demands, whereas firms with high ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings decrease following the revelation of their ESG problems. Activism that is focused on environmental and social issues is more likely to succeed if targets are ESG-sensitive. Successful engagements boost targets’ sales. Risk-adjusted excess stock returns of successful engagements outperform those of unsuccessful engagements by 2.7%. Results are especially strong for firms with low ex ante ESG scores. Specifically, targeted firms in the lowest ex ante ESG quartile outperform matched peers by 7.5% in the year after the end of the engagement. Our results thus suggest that the activism regarding corporate social responsibility generally improves ESG practices and corporate sales and is profitable to the activist. Taken together, we provide direct evidence that ethical investing and strong financial performance, both from the activist’s and the targeted firm’s perspective, can go hand-in-hand together. (shrink)

Unethical behavior in organizations has garnered more and more attention in the last decades but most of the scholarly work has used a static approach relying on methodological individualism and a mechanistic worldview when studying this topic. The process of moral disengagement and organizational culture have been linked to the prevalence of unethical behavior earlier, but this paper uses a complexity-informed systems perspective to explore the dynamic relationship of these concepts and aims to improve our understanding of the often unnoticeable, (...) step-by-step process through which organizational cultures can become conducive to unethical behavior. Organizations are conceptualized as complex adaptive systems in which transformative and stabilizing processes based on feedback loops take place continuously. It is discussed how these processes can lead to a phase transition driving organizations towards a state where unethical behavior is the general norm. The process is illustrated through real-life examples. (shrink)

1. The fact that Brazil, land of parrots and coffee, is also, by antonomasia, that of cannibals, is a commonplace that we find in the writings of foreigners and natives from the early years of the conquest up until our era of advanced civilization, at the level of anthropological reality (we should like to say anthropophagic) and at that of metaphor. As though, forgetful of the general accusation of anthropophagy launched by the first explorers against the various indigenous peoples of (...) America, beginning with the Caribs/Cannibals of Columbus, the colonizing and evangelizing Old World wanted to transfer to Vera Cruz and its inhabitants the exclusive rights to these “savage customs of a people without justice and law” that the first Western ethnographer, Herodotus, had attributed, in the Eurasia of his time, to the peoples of the Far North, at the other side of the extensive desert lying beyond the land of the Scythians—those who were called the Androphagi. And as if, of all the peoples and communities accused, in various latitudes and epochs of history, of having anthropophagic practices, the Brazilians were the only ones to not just defend themselves against the infamous accusation but to flaunt it as a symbol of their autonomy and originality when confronted with the menace of religious and cultural colonization. (shrink)

The remarks which follow arise from the daily and simultaneous consulting of two literatures and, in a larger sense, of two cultures, Portuguese and Brazilian, both expressed in the same language, Portuguese. They also arise from an attempt to describe and define by categories which are “internal” to literature the differences which exist between the two bodies of writing under discussion. But they are equally inspired by a desire to isolate in the corpus of the texts which conventionally constitute a (...) national literature those thematic and stylistic recurrences which may serve as starting points for an attempt at formalization. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza las imágenes del espacio patagónico que pone a rodar la novela La costurera y el viento (1994) de César Aira, así como los procedimientos discursivos con que se construyen dichas imágenes. El libro exhibe a la Patagonia como un cuerpo textual y textualizado complejo, a través del cual se problematiza la construcción literaria de la región, como zona liminal profusa en ficciones de identidades. Desde una ostensible performatividad narrativa, la novela conjuga la invención del espacio con la (...) frecuente referencia a una cartografía histórica y literaria que se actualiza en una dispersión de afiliaciones intertextuales. This work analyzes the images of the Patagonian space putted on display in the novel La costurera y el viento (1994) by César Aira, as well as the discursive procedures with which these images are constructed. The book exhibits the Patagonia as a textual and textualized corpus complex, through which the literary construction of the region, as a liminal zone profuse in fictions of identities, is problematized. From an ostensible narrative performativity, the novel combines the invention of the space and the frequent reference to a historical and literary cartography updated in a dispersion of intertextual affiliations. (shrink)

This chapter introduces several versions of mental fictionalism, along with the main lines of objection and reply. It begins by considering the debate between eliminative materialism (“eliminativism”) versus realism about mental states as conceived in “folk psychology” (i.e., beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.). Mental fictionalism offers a way to transcend the debate by allowing talk of mental states without a commitment to realism. The idea is to treat folk psychology as a “story” and three different elaborations of this are reviewed. First, (...) prefix semantics paraphrases a sentence like ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’ as ‘According to folk psychology, Biden believes that Trump lost’, whereby ontological commitment to belief is avoided. Similarly, pretense theory suggests that we do not assert ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’, but only pretend to assert it. Third, affective theory proposes that such discourse is used in a metaphorical way to understand a person’s affective and dispositional states vis-a-vis the community. The main objections concern whether folk psychology has the features of storytelling, and whether mental fictionalism ends up being self-refuting. The chapter also recaps a less discussed fictionalist view about “qualia” or phenomenal states, and closes by summarizing the papers contained in the volume. (shrink)

Astract Sex investigates the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex. Evolutionary theory and the technologies of viral information transfer, cloning and genetic engineering are changing the way we think about human sex, reproduction and the communication of genetic information. Abstract Sex presents a philosophical exploration of this new world of sexual, informatic and capitalist multiplicity, of the accelerated mutation of nature and culture.

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This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

What is considered ugly, grotesque or unpleasant by the fashion world? The first collection presented by Rei Kawakubo in Paris was classified as offensive to Western aesthetic standards, for it questioned the French ideal of beauty and elegance. Through silhouettes covered in frayed, perforated and monochromatic fabrics, Kawakubo disrupted the established notion of the beautiful body, stripping it of the clichés of femininity, explicit sexuality and glamour. Under the lens of Vilém Flusser’s philosophy, the Japanese fashion designer created the new, (...) the beautiful, that which is capable of expanding the parameters of the real. (shrink)

Although in Italy there is currently no effective law on physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, Decision No. 242 issued by the Italian Constitutional Court on September 25, 2019 established that an individual who, under specific circumstances, has facilitated the implementation of an independent and freely-formed resolve to commit suicide by another individual is exempt from criminal liability. Following this ruling, some citizens have submitted requests for assisted suicide to the public health system, generating a situation of great uncertainty in the application (...) processes. As a matter of fact, shared and defined procedures are lacking as Decision 242/2019 merely added some principles on which the legislature will have to base its future intervention. This paper analyses the advisory role that the Decision attributes to territorial ethics committees with the aim of stimulating discussions on their role in oversight mechanisms. The proposed conclusion is that the envisaged role does not appear consistent with the functions of these bodies and is ultimately substantially undefined and unjustified. (shrink)