En los últimos años ha crecido el interés -tanto en la academía como en las distintas formas de activismo ambiental, social y político- por el fenómeno de la espiritualización de la ecología y la ecologización de lo religioso. En contexto francófono, la ecoespiritualidad se ha convertido en un tema abordado por estudios en teología contemporánea, así como en investigaciones sociológicas y antropológicas. Este artículo realiza un análisis de las implicaciones teológicas del concepto de ecoespiritualidad desarrollado por Michel Maxime (...) Egger. Para ello, se abordarán brevemente las principales bases epistemológicas y ontológicas sobre las cuales esta concepción se sustenta: la trinidad de Raimon Panikkar, la teología mística de los padres de la Iglesia ortodoxa, el pantenteísmo y la ecopsicología. (shrink)

This present book explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, in particular, new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia. The contributors examine the modeling paradigm of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics and logic while providing overlapping links with other fields such as philosophy of language and cognitive psychology. This book is based on results presented during the series of workshops on Coherence and Discourse organized by SLAM, a project developed to systemize (...) the study of pathological language processing by taking an overarching interdisciplinary approach combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. The principle focus is on conversations produced by people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The contributions come from young and experienced researchers, and invited speakers. The book appeals to likeminded students and researchers. (shrink)

The present volume explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, particularly new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia.

This article contributes to governmentality studies and state theory by discussing how to understand the centrality and importance of the state from a governmentality perspective. It uses Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Michel Foucault’s governmentality approach as a point of departure for re-investigating Foucault as a thinker of the state. It focuses on Foucault’s notion of the state as a process of ‘statification’ which emphasizes the state as something constantly produced and reproduced by processes and practices of government, administration and (...) acclamation. As a result of this, the state appears as a given entity which is necessary for the multiplicity of governmental technologies and practices in modern society to function. Only by reference to the state can governmental practices be effective and legitimized. Finally, the article conceptualizes the centrality of the state through Foucault’s notions of the state as a ‘practico-reflexive prism’ and a ‘principle of intelligibility’. (shrink)

Le structuralisme a été le grand espoir de modernisation des sciences humaines. Sous la houlette, principalement, de Claude Lévi-Strauss en ethnologie, de Jacques Lacan en psychanalyse, de Roland Barthes en sémiologie, de Louis Althusser en sociologie et de Michel Foucault en histoire et en philosophie, ce mouvement intellectuel prend, dans la France des années 1950-1960, une ampleur telle qu'il bouleverse le paysage intellectuel et remanie en profondeur l'Université française. Puis, à partir des années 1970, l'ambitieux programme s'effondre, plus rapidement (...) encore qu'il ne s'était imposé, et nourrit au passage une position hypercritique à l'égard de la modernité. Un demi-siècle après, il est temps de revenir sur cette aventure intellectuelle pour en comprendre l'engouement ainsi que les raisons de l'échec ; mais également pour expliquer sous et angle la singularité française et ses conséquences, puisqu'elles trouvent des prolongements jusqu'à aujourd'hui. (shrink)

This article examines the normative force of consent, explaining how consent works its “moral magic” in transforming the moral quality of conduct that would otherwise constitute a wrong against the consenting person. Dempsey offers an original account of the normative force of consent, according to which consent (when valid) creates an exclusionary permission . When this permission is taken up, the moral quality of the consented-to conduct is transformed, such that it no longer constitutes a wrong against the consenting person. (...) Building on this account of how consent works, Dempsey identifies two sets of cases in which consent fails to transform the moral quality of one’s conduct: cases in which one is consent-insensitive to the rational force of another’s consent, and cases in which one acts for sadistic reasons. (shrink)

War is being privatized at an accelerating rate. This paper suggests that the benefits from privatizing war accrue to the political and economic elite in thatprivatization reduces the political costs of war, allows for state crimes to be committed by proxy, turns war into a free crime zone, and has created new opportunities for war profiteering. However, the benefits to the political and economic elite are not without their costs to the remainder of the population. The capital accumulation process impels (...) companies to expand their markets in order to survive and grow, focus on efficiency in order to maximize profits, and concentrate on fulfilling the contract terms in order to acquire more business. The paper demonstrates how the introduction of these motives has negatively impacted the war in Iraq and foreign affairs. (shrink)

Despite all controversies that might otherwise divide them, most phenomenologists agree that consciousness entails some form of self-consciousness. In fact, they go even further, as they virtually all agree on the necessity of fleshing out this insight in bodily terms: from the phenomenological point of view, self-consciousness is primarily experienced as a form of bodily self-consciousness (or self-awareness). Following Edmund Husserl's insight that the lived body (Leib), i.e. the body as it is subjectively felt or experienced, must necessarily be presupposed (...) by all object consciousness, including the thematic consciousness of me as a body, there is a long-standing discussion within the phenomenological movement on how to conceive of this self-relation. This entry focuses on the French reception of Husserl and highlights the distinctive ways in which French phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida have elaborated on and disputed this key insight. It will be shown that discussions on this question have open onto two further debates: one revolves around the paradigmatic role Husserl grants to touch in the analysis of consciousness, while the other concerns the differences between the experience of one's own body and the experience of the body of others. Finally, we point to the fact that one's body can be experienced and evaluated as other, as is shown in the critical analyses of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and recent critical phenomenology. Here, it becomes clear that the bodily self-awareness of concrete subjects is shaped by the material conditions, norms, and discourses of their respective situation. (shrink)

The recently published Guidelines on Disorders of Consciousness by the European Academy of Neurology and by the American Academy of Neurology in collaboration with the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research stand as the most ambitious international attempts to provide clear and standardized recommendations to clinicians working with patients with DoCs. They offer an updated, timely, and wide-ranging list of recommendations for the diagnosis, prognosis, and clinical care of affected patients. (...) However, while commendable, the guidelines pose a number of questions including some related to the practical implementation of their recommendations. The paper introduces the Distributed Responsibility Model as a tool for maximizing the impact of recommendations in clinical practice. (shrink)

In early 1927, Pascual Jordan published his version of what came to be known as the Dirac-Jordan statistical transformation theory. Later that year and partly in response to Jordan, John von Neumann published the modern Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics. Central to both formalisms are expressions for conditional probabilities of finding some value for one quantity given the value of another. Beyond that Jordan and von Neumann had very different views about the appropriate formulation of problems in the new (...) theory. For Jordan, unable to let go of the analogy to classical mechanics, the solution of such problems required the identification of sets of canonically conjugate variables, i.e., p’s and q’s. Jordan ran into serious difficulties when he tried to extend his approach from quantities with fully continuous spectra to those with wholly or partly discrete spectra. For von Neumann, not constrained by the analogy to classical physics and aware of the daunting mathematical difficulties facing the approach of Jordan ), the solution of a problem in the new quantum mechanics required only the identification of a maximal set of commuting operators with simultaneous eigenstates. He had no need for p’s and q’s. Related to their disagreement about the appropriate general formalism for the new theory, Jordan and von Neumann stated the characteristic new rules for probabilities in quantum mechanics somewhat differently. Jordan was the first to state those rules in full generality, von Neumann rephrased them and then sought to derive them from more basic considerations. In this paper we reconstruct the central arguments of these 1927 papers by Jordan and von Neumann and of a paper on Jordan’s approach by Hilbert, von Neumann, and Nordheim. We highlight those elements in these papers that bring out the gradual loosening of the ties between the new quantum formalism and classical mechanics. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new framework supporting the claim that some elements in science play a constitutive function, with the aim of overcoming some limitations of Friedman's (2001) account. More precisely, I focus on what I consider to be the gradualism implicit in Friedman's interpretation of the constitutive a priori, that is, the fact that it seems to allow for degrees of 'constitutivity'. I tease out such gradualism by showing that the constitutive character Friedman aims to track can (...) be captured by three features - namely, quasi-axiomaticity (QA), generative potential (GP), and empirical shielding (ES) - which are exhibited to a maximal degree by the examples Friedman deploys, particularly in his analysis of Newtonian mechanics. I argue that not all varieties of 'constitutivity' can be captured by the kind of gradualism implicit in Friedman's view, although developing the gradualism itself might provide useful insights. To show this, I analyse the function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle (HWP) in population genetics in terms of its QA, GP, and ES. Whereas the HWP does not count as constitutive in classical philosophical interpretations (Sober 1984), nor does it within Friedman's framework, it does nonetheless perform a minimally constitutive function. By means of historical details and considerations on the prospects of replacing the HWP, I show that the HWP is minimally constitutive by being a counterfactual instantiation of a paradigmatically constitutive stability principle, where the latter might itself be regarded as an enabling condition for a variety of modelling practices across the sciences. (shrink)

In A New Form of Agent-Based Virtue Ethics , Daniel Doviak develops a novel agent-based theory of right action that treats the rightness (or deontic status) of an action as a matter of the action’s net intrinsic virtue value (net-IVV)—that is, its balance of virtue over vice. This view is designed to accommodate three basic tenets of commonsense morality: (i) the maxim that “ought” implies “can,” (ii) the idea that a person can do the right thing for the wrong reason, (...) and (iii) the idea that a virtuous person can have “mixed motives.” In this paper, I argue that Doviak’s account makes an important contribution to agent-based virtue ethics, but it needs to be supplemented with a consequentialist account of the efficacy of well-motivated actions—that is, it should be transformed into a mixed (motives-consequences) account, while retaining its net-IVV calculus. This is because I believe that there are right-making properties external to an agent’s psychology which it is important to take into account, especially when an agent’s actions negatively affect other people. To incorporate this intuition, I add to Doviak’s net-IVV calculus a scale for outcomes . The result is a mixed view which accommodates tenets (ii) and (iii) above, but allows for (i) to fail in certain cases. I argue that, rather than being a defect, this allowance is an asset because our intuitions about ought-implies-can break down in cases where an agent is grossly misguided, and our theory should track these intuitions. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo assess the impact of the closure of group-based cardiac rehabilitation training during the first COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 on patients’ physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and cardiovascular risk, and to describe the patient experience of lockdown and home-based exercise training during lockdown.DesignMixed methods study. Prospectively collected post-lockdown measurements were compared to pre-lockdown medical record data. Quantitative measurements were supplemented with qualitative interviews about the patient experience during lockdown.SettingOutpatient CR centre in Salzburg, Austria.ParticipantsTwenty-seven patients [six female, mean age 69 years] (...) who attended weekly CR training sessions until the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020.Outcome MeasureQuantitative: exercise capacity, cardiovascular risk. Qualitative: individual semi-structured interviews.ResultsExercise capacity had significantly reduced from pre- to post-lockdown: mean power in maximal ergometry 165 vs. 151, p < 0.001; submaximal ergometer training 99 vs. 97, p = 0.038. There was no significant difference in Framingham risk score and other cardiovascular risk factors. Qualitative data showed that almost all patients had kept physically active during lockdown, but 17 said they had been unable to maintain their exercise levels, and 15 felt their cardiorespiratory fitness had deteriorated. Many patients missed the weekly CR training and the motivation and sense of community from training together with others. Several patients stated that without professional supervision they had felt less confident to carry out home-based exercise training at high intensity.ConclusionThis study highlights the importance of group-based supervised exercise training for patients who engage well in such a setting, and the detrimental impact of disruption to this type of CR service on physical activity levels and exercise capacity. Additionally, learning from the COVID-19 pandemic may inform the development and implementation of remote CR modalities going forward. (shrink)

An original form of poetical debate is elaborated in the 12th and 13th century in relation to court lyricism. Under the appellation of “jeux-partis” in “oil” tongue, they meet some success in the urban frame of the “puy d'Arras”. As they formulate a sophistry of love, they intersect a number of different formalisations such as the poetical, juridical and scholastic ones.What is at stake in the debate is expressed on the dilemmatic mode. The argumentation is worked out at large through (...) three basic enunciations: maxims, proverbs and images.The maxim, inscribed as it is in the lyrical discourse that it lays down as being axiomatical for love, has an ambivalent function: on one hand it is the enunciation one intends to dispute, on the other hand it is the form taken by the demonstration. As it combines with a syntax of demonstration it only brings out the illusion of dialectics incidentally revealing the reduddant tautology of “le jeu-parti”. Out of a number of 120 poems, there are no less than 80 proverbial expressions which articulate themselves on the context differently — although they do so in majority through assertive formulations — yet disrupting with its isotopy in so much as they illustrate and enunciate the rule at the same time. The process of examplarisation, in the form of imaged enunciations operate other alterations. If the proverb, descending from the empirical universe, universalizes the situation it refers to, the image alone proceeds inversely: from a general theme it gives an example of one or several anecdotical situations out of which the universalness of the rule emerges.Now, none of those enunciations proceeds from a demonstrative or even properly argumentative logic. They are enclosed in themselves. The interlocutors do not resume what has just been said, unless it be in a blunt form of refutation. The true formalisation is polemical. It consists in a discourse which handles irony, lightly touches insult and seeks after effect rather than reasoning. It builds up its own truth — contradictorily though — as a game played on an audience whose complicity is to be grasped and then requested — for truthfulness does lie right in the midst of the debate and asserts itself unendlessly, such as it is in “les disputes”, those contests between scholars. “Disputes” and “jeux-partis” promote a logic of controversy. They are “argumentations-spectacles”. The elaboration of truth lies elsewhere, in the “Summae” for example. Le “jeu-parti” is aporhetical. If ever there exists an answer to its questioning, it can be found in love poetry the form of which includes the “sic et non” of “la joy”, mirth and play on love. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 333 Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair Refusing to Account: Toward a Pedagogy of Tectonic Instability The increasing commoditization of knowledge and corporatization of the academy have led to a drastic restructuring of higher education, and in particular, of public institutions of learning. There is a striking similarity to the strategies enacted across institutions, each (...) governed by modes of efficiency and profitability. These moves have included a preference for larger classes, curriculum decisions that are governed by seats rather than pedagogical possibilities, an expansion of online offerings, tuition increases, and ramped-up bureaucratization, with the latter being accompanied by fewer faculty hires, a greater dependence on contingent faculty, and a swell in the ranks of senior administrative staff. This restructuring has held very specific consequences for women ’s studies programs. While larger classes are not inherently at odds with a student-centered feminist pedagogy, they do require adjustments in order to achieve similar results with our students, and they do exact greater physical and emotional labor from us as instructors. These restructuring strategies have also positioned the field in a Catch22 in that a number of issues that we have lobbied to have valued within the academy have now come into the university’s line of vision only to be redeployed as part of the university’s public relations branding agenda. There are numerous examples if we would but look: campuses that are spotted with banners portraying faculty and students of color —a visual map to the institution’s “embrace of diversity”; committees 334 Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair that are convened to review the institution’s sexual harassment policy while simultaneously refusing the involvement of women’s studies academics in the process, for whom these are scholarly and intellectual areas of study; the introduction of multicultural general education curricula, where the study of “difference” amounts to a banal presence of one or more categories of “otherness” in syllabi. This list is not exhaustive but the similarity that threads through is the commodification and the PR-ization of issues that sit at the heart of the field of women’s studies. Such cooptation notwithstanding, in this economic climate of profit maximization, small, interdisciplinary programs and departments such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, and LGBT studies have become woefully vulnerable to mergers, downsizing, and elimination.1 Our own program, now defunct, attests to this growing reality.2 So what then is the story to be told for a program that no longer exists? As alumna of Clark University’s now defunct women’s studies doctoral program, we consider the ways in which Clark, under the guidance of Cynthia Enloe, worked to move the field toward a more transnational bent. While we begin with an engagement with Clark’s specific institutional vulnerabilities, we use Clark’s commitment to a transnational praxis as our comparative point of departure to note the ways in which the importance and acuity of a transnational feminist critique have seeped away from the field. At various points in the article, we discuss how our individual trajectories emerged out of a transnational feminist sensibility. We interrogate the ways that the dominant logics of the field continue to be complicit with the very inequities and modes of representation critiqued within transnational feminist discourses. We point to the role that our scholarly pursuits play in an ongoing effort to hold the field accountable to a transnational feminist critique. Finally, 1. See Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Privatized Citizens, Corporate Academies, and Feminist Projects,” in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 2. The doctoral program at Clark began in 1992 and closed in 2008, graduating twenty-six PhDs and training many more who have gone on to make significant contributions at NGOs among other locations. For example, Parissara Liewkeat and Barbara Schulman have held positions with the International Labor Organization and Amnesty International, respectively. Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair 335 we look back at our own training... (shrink)

Œuvres (ordre alphabétique des titres en français) Crise de la philosophie occidentale [1874], Paris, Aubier-Montaigne (Bibliothèque philosophique), 1947 (trad. et introduction de Maxime Herman), 384 p. Le développement dogmatique de l’Église [1885], Paris, Desclée, 1991 (trad. et présentation de François Rouleau et Roger Tandonnet), 209 p. Les fondements spirituels de la vie [1884], Lettre pré...

Baron has provided some examples of nonconsequentialism in decision making and describes them as biases; these may be the remnants of the biological origin of decision making. One may argue that decisions are made on the basis not of rationality but affective processes. Behavior follows the trend toward maximizing pleasure. This mechanism might explain apparent nonconsequentialism.

In this paper, we consider the composition of an optimal portfolio made of two dependent risky assets. The investor is first assumed to be a risk-averse expected utility maximizer, and we recover the existing conditions under which all these investors hold at least some percentage of their portfolio in one of the assets. Then, we assume that the decision maker is not only risk-averse, but also prudent and we obtain new minimum demand conditions as well as intuitively appealing interpretations for (...) them. Finally, we consider the general case of investor’s preferences exhibiting risk apportionment of any order and we derive the corresponding minimum demand conditions. As a byproduct, we obtain conditions such that an investor holds either a positive quantity of one of the assets or a proportion greater than 50 %. (shrink)

Gentle handling of mammals , and lizards , but not of frogs and fish elevated the set-point for body temperature, i.e., produced an emotional fever, achieved only behaviourally in lizards. Heart rate, another detector of emotion in mammals, was also accelerated by gentle handling, from ca. 70 b/min to ca. 110 b/min in lizards. This tachycardia faded in about 10 min. The same handling did not significantly modify the frogs’ heart rates. The absence of emotional tachycardia in frogs and its (...) presence in lizards , together with the emotional fever exhibited by mammals and reptiles, but not by frogs or fish, would suggest that emotion emerged in the evolutionary lineage between amphibians and reptiles. Such a conclusion would imply that reptiles possess consciousness with its characteristic hedonic dimension, pleasure. The role of sensory pleasure in decision making was therefore verified in iguanas placed in a motivational conflict. To be able to reach a bait , the iguanas had to leave a warm refuge, provided with standard food, and had to venture into a cold environment. The results showed that lettuce was not necessary to the iguanas and that they traded off the palatability of the bait against the disadvantage of the cold. Thus, the behaviour of the iguanas was possibly produced, as it is in humans, through the maximization of sensory pleasure. Altogether, these results may indicate that the first elements of mental experience emerged between amphibians and reptiles. (shrink)

The basic methods of constructing the sets of mutually unbiased bases in the Hilbert space of an arbitrary finite dimension are reviewed and an emerging link between them is outlined. It is shown that these methods employ a wide range of important mathematical concepts like, e.g., Fourier transforms, Galois fields and rings, finite, and related projective geometries, and entanglement, to mention a few. Some applications of the theory to quantum information tasks are also mentioned.

Numerous studies show that humans tend to be more cooperative than expected given the assumption that they are rational maximizers of personal gain. As a result, theoreticians have proposed elaborated formal representations of human decision-making, in which utility functions including “altruistic” or “moral” preferences replace the purely self-oriented "Homo economicus" function. Here we review mathematical approaches that provide insights into the mathematical stability of alternative ways of representing human decision-making in social contexts. Candidate utility functions may be evaluated with help (...) of game theory, classical modeling of social evolution that focuses on behavioral strategies, and modeling of social evolution that focuses directly on utility functions. We present the advantages of the latter form of investigation and discuss one surprisingly precise result: “Homo economicus” as well as “altruistic” utility functions are less stable than a function containing a preference for the golden rule or for the common welfare that is only expressed in social contexts composed of individuals with similar preferences. We discuss the contribution of mathematical models to our understanding of human other-oriented behavior, with a focus on the classical debate over psychological altruism. We conclude that human can be psychologically altruistic, but that psychological altruism evolved because it was generally expressed towards individuals that contributed to the actor’s fitness, such as own children, romantic partners and long term reciprocators. (shrink)

Recent evidence of intergenerational epigenetic programming of disease risk broadens the scope of public health preventive interventions to future generations, i.e. non existing people. Due to the transmission of epigenetic predispositions, lifestyles such as smoking or unhealthy diet might affect the health of populations across several generations. While public policy for the health of future generations can be justified through impersonal considerations, such as maximizing aggregate well-being, in this article we explore whether there are rights-based obligations supervening on intergenerational epigenetic (...) programming despite the non-identity argument, which challenges this rationale in case of policies that affect the number and identity of future people. We propose that rights based obligations grounded in the interests of non-existing people might fall upon existing people when generations overlap. In particular, if environmental exposure in F0 will affect the health of F2 through epigenetic programming, then F1 might face increased costs to address F2's condition in the future: this might generate obligations upon F0 from various distributive principles, such as the principle of equal opportunity for well being. (shrink)

Hardy and Unruh constructed a family of non-maximally entangled states of pairs of particles giving rise to correlations that cannot be accounted for with a local hidden-variable theory. Rather than pointing to violations of some Bell inequality, however, they pointed to apparent clashes with the basic rules of logic. Specifically, they constructed these states and the associated measurement settings in such a way that the outcomes satisfy some conditionals but not an additional one entailed by them. Quantum mechanics avoids the (...) broken ‘if …then …’ arrows in such Hardy–Unruh chains, as we call them, because it cannot simultaneously assign truth values to all conditionals involved. Measurements to determine the truth value of some preclude measurements to determine the truth value of others. Hardy–Unruh chains thus nicely illustrate quantum contextuality: which variables do and do not obtain definite values depends on what measurements we decide to perform. Using a framework inspired by Bub and Pitowsky and developed in our book Understanding Quantum Raffles (co-authored with Michael E. Cuffaro), we construct and analyze Hardy–Unruh chains in terms of fictitious bananas mimicking the behavior of spin-1/2 particles. (shrink)

Reasoning may help solving problems and understanding personal experiences. Ruminative reasoning, however, is inconclusive, repetitive, and usually regards negative thoughts. We asked how reasoning as manifested in oral autobiographical narratives might differ when it is ruminative versus when it is adaptive by comparing two constructs from the fields of psychotherapy research and narrative research that are potentially beneficial: innovative moments (IMs) and autobiographical reasoning (AR). IMs captures statements in that elaborate on changes regarding an earlier personal previous problem of the (...) narrator, and AR capture the connecting of past events with other parts of the narrator’s life or enduring aspects of the narrator. A total ofN= 94 university students had been selected from 492 students to differ maximally on trait rumination and trait adaptive reflection, and were grouped as ruminators (N= 38), reflectors (N= 37), and a group with little ruminative and reflective tendencies (“unconcerned,”N= 19). Participants narrated three negative personal experiences (disappointing oneself, harming someone, and being rejected) and two self-related experiences of more mixed valence (turning point and lesson learnt). Reflectors used more IMs and more negative than positive autobiographical arguments (AAs), but not more overall AAs than ruminators. Group differences were not moderated by the valence of memories, and groups did not differ in the positive effect of narrating on mood. Trait depression/anxiety was predicted negatively by IMs and positively by AAs. Thus, IMs are typical for reflectors but not ruminators, whereas the construct of AR appears to capture reasoning processes irrespective of their ruminative versus adaptive uses. (shrink)

Recent research indicates that angry facial expressions are preferentially processed and may facilitate automatic avoidance response, especially in socially anxious individuals. However, few studies have examined whether this bias also expresses itself in more complex cognitive processes and behavior such as decision making. We recently introduced a variation of the Iowa Gambling Task which allowed us to document the influence of task-irrelevant emotional cues on rational decision making. The present study used a modified gambling task to investigate the impact of (...) angry facial expressions on decision making in 38 individuals with a wide range of social anxiety. Participants were to find out which choices were (dis-) advantageous to maximize overall gain. To create a decision conflict between approach of reward and avoidance of fear-relevant angry faces, advantageous choices were associated with angry facial expressions, whereas disadvantageous choices were associated with happy facial expressions. Results indicated that higher social avoidance predicted less advantageous decisions in the beginning of the task, i.e., when contingencies were still uncertain. Interactions with specific skin conductance responses further clarified that this initial avoidance only occurred in combination with elevated responses before choosing an angry facial expressions. In addition, an interaction between high trait anxiety and elevated responses to early losses predicted faster learning of an advantageous strategy. These effects were independent of intelligence, general risky decision-making, self-reported state anxiety, and depression. Thus, socially avoidant individuals who respond emotionally to angry facial expressions are more likely to show avoidance of these faces under uncertainty. This novel laboratory paradigm may be an appropriate analog for central features of social anxiety. (shrink)

As the need for business to address pressing social and ecological issues intensifies, so does the importance of enhancing the development of sustainable marketing. The current dominant approach to sustainable marketing is based on a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) profit‐centric worldview, which suggests that firms can simultaneously improve their financial well‐being as they reduce negative social and ecological externalities. However, whereas the scope of TBL marketing is limited to sustainability initiatives that enhance profits, there is a growing need for—and interest (...) in—developing a sustain‐centric approach to marketing that relaxes the need to maximize financial well‐being in order to optimize social and ecological well‐being. Even so, because of the dominance of the profit‐centric worldview, hallmarks of sustain‐centric marketing practices remain under‐developed and may even lend themselves to becoming inauthentically mimicked on a piecemeal basis by greenwashing profit‐centric firms. We provide an exploratory empirical study of marketing practices evident in two sustain‐centric firms and draw implications to advance theory for both sustain‐centric and profit‐centric marketing. (shrink)

Nursing programs are complex systems that articulate values of relationality and holism, while developing curriculums that privilege metric‐driven competency‐based pedagogies. This study used an interpretive approach to analyze interviews from 20 nursing students at two Canadian Baccalaureate programs to understand how nursing's educational context, including its hidden curriculums, impacted student writing activities. We viewed this qualitative data through the lens of activity theory. Students spoke about navigating a rigid writing context. This resulted in a hyper‐focus on “figuring out” the teacher (...) with minimal focus on the act of writing. Students used a form of behavioral “code‐switching” to maximize their grade while considering how their “valuing” of the assignment fit within their writing motives. Hidden curriculum messages taught students that academic success was assured whether their writing mirrored instructor preferences. Instructional practices of rigidity reinforced unequal social conditions for some minority students. Faculty can counteract the impact of the hidden curriculum through encouragement of choice and independent thinking about writing activities. Acknowledging power relationships and their influence on how students navigate writing assignments and nursing discourse may relieve pressures on students who fear penalties for countering norms and result in a more flexible learning environment. (shrink)

Context In France, a new payment for performance (P4P) scheme for primary care physicians was introduced in 2009 through the ‘Contract for Improving Individual Practice’ programme. Its objective was to reduce healthcare expenditures while enhancing improvement in guidelines' observance. Nevertheless, in all countries where the scheme was implemented, it raised several concerns in the domain of professional ethics. Objective To draw out in France the ethical tensions arising in the general practitioner's (GP) profession linked to the introduction of P4P. Method (...) Qualitative research using two focus groups: first one with a sample of GPs who joined P4P and second one with those who did not. All collective interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. An inductive analysis of thematic content with construction of categories was conducted. All the data were triangulated. Results All participants agreed that conflicts of interest were a real issue, leading to the resurgence of doctor's dirigisme, which could be detrimental for patient's autonomy. GPs who did not join P4P believed that the scheme would lead to patient's selection while those who joined P4P did not. The level of the maximal bonus of the P4P was considered low by all GPs. This was considered as an offense by non-participating GPs, whereas for participating ones, this low level minimised the risk of patient's selection. Conclusion This work identified several areas of ethical tension, some being different from those previously described in other countries. The authors discuss the potential impact of institutional contexts and variability of implementation processes on shaping these differences. (shrink)

We provide an economic interpretation of the practice consisting in incorporating risk measures as constraints in an expected prospect maximization problem. For what we call the infimum of expectations class of risk measures, we show that if the decision maker (DM) maximizes the expectation of a random prospect under constraint that the risk measure is bounded above, he then behaves as a “generalized expected utility maximizer” in the following sense. The DM exhibits ambiguity with respect to a family of utility (...) functions defined on a larger set of decisions than the original one; he adopts pessimism and performs first a minimization of expected utility over this family, then performs a maximization over a new decisions set. This economic behaviour is called “maxmin under risk” and studied by Maccheroni (Econ Theory 19:823–831, 2002). As an application, we make the link between an expected prospect maximization problem, subject to conditional value-at-risk being less than a threshold value, and a non-expected utility economic formulation involving “loss aversion”-type utility functions. (shrink)

More than three billion users are currently on one of Meta’s online platforms with Facebook being still their most prominent social media service. It is well known that Facebook has designed a highly immersive social media service with the aim to prolong online time of its users, as this results in more digital footprints to be studied and monetized. In this context, it is debated if social media platforms can elicit addictive behaviors. In the present work, we demonstrate in N (...) = 1,094 users that it is possible to predict from digital footprints of the Facebook users their self-reported addictive tendencies toward social media by applying machine-learning strategies. More specifically, we analyzed the predictive power of a set of models based on different sets of features extracted from digital traces, namely posting activity, language use, and page Likes. To maximize the predictive power of the models, we used an ensemble of linear and non-linear prediction algorithms. This work showed also sufficient accuracy rates in distinguishing between disordered and non-disordered social media users. In sum, individual differences in tendencies toward “social networks use disorder” can be inferred from digital traces left on the social media platform Facebook. Please note that the present work is limited by its cross-sectional design. (shrink)

Books reviewed:Renate Egger‐Wenzel, Ben Sira's GodPaul J. Achtemeier, Joel B. Green and Marianne Meye Thompson, Introducing the New Testament, Its Literature and TheologyI. Boxall, Revelation: Vision and Insight. An Introduction to the ApocalypseS. Moyise, Studies in the Book of RevelationG. R. Osborne, Revelation: The Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New TestamentN. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of GodGillian Clark and T. Rajak, Philosophy and Power in the Graeco‐Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam GriffinRichard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius (...) of Cyzicus and the Nicene RevolutionStephen T. Davies, Daniel Kendall S. J. and Gerald O'Collins, The Incarnation. An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of GodRichard Cross, The Metaphysics of the IncarnationHugh Connolly, SinAnthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian AtonementStanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural TheologySarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and GenderChristopher Cocksworth and Rosalind Brown, Being a Priest Today: Exploring priestly identityRandall Balmer, Encyclopedia of EvangelicalismKate Armstrong, Crisis and RepetitionAnthony A. Barrett, Livia: First Lady of Imperial RomeGerhard Podskalsky, Von Photios zu Bessarion: Der Vorrang humanistisch geprägter Theologie in Byzanz und deren bleibende BedeutungNicola Coldstream, Medieval ArchitectureW. J. Armstrong, J. A. W. Hellmann and W. Short, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, IIIEllen E. Kittell and Thomas F. Madden, Medieval and Renaissance VeniceTheodor Dieter, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles: Eine historisch‐systematische Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Theologie und PhilosophieAndrew Brown, Church and Society in England, 1000–1500Renate Blumenfeld‐Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren, The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious LiteratureBarry Collett, Female Monastic Life in Early Tudor England, with an Edition of Richard Fox's Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517Marc R. Forster, The Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque. Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime 1648–1789Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France 1780–1804Catharine Edwards, Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945Bruce L. Kinzer, England's Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish QuestionJohn Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth CenturyPeter M. Chisnall, John Henry Cardinal Newman: A Man of Courage, Conflict and ConvictionVincent Ferrer Blehl, Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman 1801–1845Kester Aspden, Fortress Church. The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics 1903–63David Alvarez, Spies In The Vatican: Espionage and Intrigue From Napoleon to the HolocaustPeter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi, Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American JesuitsRuby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we (...) made. It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 40-78, Winter 2020.

According to an influential objection, which Martha Nussbaum has powerfully restated, expressing anger in democratic public discourse is counterproductive from the standpoint of justice. To resist this challenge, this article articulates a crucial yet underappreciated sense in which angry discourse is epistemically productive. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, which emphasize the distinctive phenomenology of emotion, I argue that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects: first, it can direct listeners’ attention to elusive (...) morally relevant features of the situation; second, it enables them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing. Thus, when employed skillfully, angry speech promotes a greater understanding of existing injustices. This epistemic role is indispensable in highly divided societies, where the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other... (shrink)

The notions of perceptual normativity and optimality have generated much discussion in the last decade or so in the literature on Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s position on the topic has been far less extensively investigated. Surprisingly, however, Husserl wrote a great deal about the question of perceptual optimality. Not only are there a considerable number of important passages scattered throughout the manuscripts, the archive also contains a few important full texts on precisely this issue. Given the role of fulfillment for Husserl’s concept (...) of intentionality, this should not really come as a surprise, since the teleological nature of the fulfillment structure terminates in an experience of the optimum. Hence, however marginal this topic might seem at first glance, reflecting on it rapidly leads us to the heart of Husserl’s project and sheds further light on his conception of intentional experience. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the symposium on Maxime Lepoutre, Democratic Speech in Divided Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). The symposium contains articles by Paul Billingham, Rachel Fraser, and Michael Hannon, and a response by the author.

An influential critique of anger holds that anger comes at an important epistemic cost. In particular, feeling angry typically makes risk less visible to us. This is anger’s ‘red mist.’ These epistemic costs, critics suggest, arguably outweigh the epistemic benefits commonly ascribed to anger. This essay argues that the epistemic critique of anger is importantly misleading. This is not because it underestimates anger’s epistemic benefits, but rather because it overlooks the fact that anger’s red mist performs a crucial moral function. (...) By concealing risk, the red mist helps protect the dignity and self-respect of those who live under severe and unchosen risk. This function is vitally important in non-ideal circumstances, where many are unjustly subjected to dignity-impairing risk. And it is irreplaceable, in that it cannot readily be performed by other political emotions, such as hope. Beyond providing a novel defence of anger, this argument has a broader upshot. Anger’s red mist reveals that ignorance is not always problematic in politics. Accordingly, it should not be treated—as has standardly been the case—as an unmitigated political evil. In the first instance, our efforts are better spent ascertaining when ignorance is a problem, and when, instead, it performs a felicitous function. (shrink)

Faced with hate speech, oppressed groups can use their own speech to respond to their verbal oppressors. This “counterspeech,” however, sometimes itself takes on a hateful form. This paper explores the moral standing of such “hateful counterspeech.” Is there a fundamental moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech, and the hateful utterances of dominant or oppressive groups? Or are claims that such an asymmetry exists indefensible? I argue for an intermediate position. There _is_ a key moral asymmetry between these two forms of (...) speech. But, this asymmetry notwithstanding, hateful counterspeech is capable of enacting serious harms—and so, contrary to what many legal theorists have argued, it is in principle an appropriate object of legal regulation. I begin by considering the central argument for thinking that hateful counterspeech is not seriously troubling. This argument holds that oppressed groups lack authority—and, by extension, “speaker power.” Yet this argument, I suggest, sits in tension with the fact that low-status members of dominant groups can, through their utterances, seriously harm members of oppressed groups. Philosophers of language have developed sophisticated arguments to explain this last phenomenon: they have argued that speaker power is relativised to particular jurisdictions; that it can be acquired dynamically in local settings; and that it is socially dispersed. I argue that, in light of these arguments, it appears that hateful counterspeech, too, can generate serious harms. Nevertheless, I show that this conclusion is compatible with recognising a crucial moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech and the hate speech of oppressors. (shrink)

Public opinion research has shown that voters accept many falsehoods about politics. This observation is widely considered troubling for democracy—and especially participatory ideals of democracy. I argue that this influential narrative is nevertheless flawed, because it misunderstands the nature of political understanding. Drawing on philosophical examinations of scientific modelling, I demonstrate that accepting falsehoods within one’s model of political reality is compatible with—and indeed can positively enhance—one’s understanding of that reality. Thus, the observation that voters accept many political falsehoods does (...) not necessarily establish that they lack political understanding. I then address three worries: that voters cannot generally engage in such political modelling; that political modelling obscures facts that are crucial to political understanding; and that successful political modelling would require knowing that one’s model contains falsehoods. My responses reveal how, going forward, we should measure political ignorance; and they highlight the standing importance of participatory democracy. (shrink)

According to the influential “expressive” argument for hate speech laws, legal restrictions on hate speech are justified, in significant part, because they powerfully express opposition to hate speech. Yet the expressive argument faces a challenge: why couldn't we communicate opposition to hate speech via counterspeech, rather than bans? I argue that the expressive argument cannot address this challenge satisfactorily. Specifically, I examine three considerations that purport to explain bans’ expressive distinctiveness: considerations of strength; considerations of directness; and considerations of complicity. (...) These considerations either fail to establish that bans are expressively superior to counterspeech, or presuppose that bans successfully deter hate speech. This result severely undercuts the expressive argument's appeal. First, contrary to what its proponents suggest, this argument fails to circumvent the protracted empirical controversies surrounding bans’ effectiveness as deterrents. Second, the expressive argument appears redundant, because bans are expressively distinctive only insofar as hate speech is already suppressed. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

The proliferation of conspiracy theories poses a significant threat to democratic decision-making. To counter this threat, many political theorists advocate countering conspiracy theories with ‘more speech’ (or ‘counterspeech’). Yet conspiracy theories are notoriously resistant to counterspeech. This article aims to conceptualise and defend a novel form of counterspeech – narrative counterspeech – that is singularly well-placed to overcome this resistance. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I argue that conspiracy theories pose a special problem for counterspeech for three interconnected (...) reasons relating to salience, emotion and internal coherence. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology, philosophy of emotion and cognitive science, I then demonstrate that narrative forms of counterspeech constitute an apt response to this diagnosis. Finally, I forestall two objections: the first questions the likely effectiveness of narrative counterspeech; the second insists that, even if it were effective, it would remain unacceptably manipulative. Neither objection, I contend, is ultimately compelling. (shrink)

How promising is Bitcoin as a currency? This paper discusses four claims on the advantages of Bitcoin: a more stable currency than state-backed ones; a secure and efficient payment system; a credible alternative to the central management of money; and a better protection of transaction privacy. We discuss these arguments by relating them to their philosophical roots in libertarian and neoliberal theories, and assess whether Bitcoin can effectively meet these expectations. We conclude that despite its advocates’ enthusiasm, there are good (...) reasons to doubt that Bitcoin can fulfill its promises and act as a functioning currency, rather than as a mere speculative asset. (shrink)

I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, (...) and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.[…]Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.[…]In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies.Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since 1970. His works include Madness and Civilization , The Birth of the Clinic , Discipline and Punish , and History of Sexuality , the first volume of a projected five-volume study. (shrink)