Examines Bergson’s work from the perspectives of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory, placing it in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America. Building upon recent interest in Henri Bergson’s social and political philosophy, this volume offers a series of fresh and novel perspectives on Bergson’s writings through the lenses of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory. Contributors place Bergson’s work in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America to examine (...) Bergson’s influence on literature, science studies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social and political philosophy within these geopolitical contexts. The volume pays particular attention to both theoretical and practical forms of critical resistance work, including historical analyses of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements that have engaged with Bergson’s writings—for example, the Négritude movement, the Indigenismo movement, and the Peruvian Socialist Party. These historical and theoretical intersections provide a timely and innovative contribution to the existing scholarship on Bergson, and demonstrate the importance of his thought for contemporary social and political issues. Andrea J. Pitts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Mark William Westmoreland is a doctoral candidate and instructor of ethics and philosophy at Villanova University. (shrink)

This article is the third part of a trilogy investigating the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. All three essays are inspired by Foucault’s diagnosis of our epoch in terms of biopower. They therefore aim at the creation of a new concept of life. In ‘Un Ecart Infime (Part III)’, I lay out Foucault’s analysis, from the first chapter of The Order of Things, of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas. By stressing what Foucault says about the ‘sagittal lines’ exiting the painting, one (...) can show that that there are three major phases in Foucault’s analysis: locating the blind spot; multiplying the invisibility; and the diffraction of the multiplicity into singularities. More generally, we can see that Foucault’s analysis of the painting concerns the informal space in auto-affection; in other words, it concerns the ‘blind spot’ in the mirror relation, in the ‘psyché’. The blind spot in the ‘soul’ - and the ambiguity in the French word psyché between mirror and soul - is why we can say that Foucault’s analysis concerns life: being blind, life must be conceived as informal and unmappable. I show in the conclusion that the inability of mapping and of seeing this space in fact allows for the increase of power. (shrink)

What role does ‘ordinary language philosophy’ play in the defense of common sense beliefs? J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein each give central place to ordinary language in their responses to skeptical challenges to common sense beliefs. But Austin and Wittgenstein do not always respond to such challenges in the same way, and their working methods are different. In this paper, I compare Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical positions, and show that they share many metaphilosophical commitments. I then examine Austin and Wittgenstein’s (...) respective takes on the problem of other minds and the problem of our knowledge of the external world. Interestingly, we find Wittgenstein employing methods more frequently associated Austin and vice versa. Moreover, we find that a variety of defenses of common sense beliefs are compatible with ‘ordinary language philosophy.’. (shrink)

It is argued, in this paper, that moral theories should not be discussed extensively when teaching applied ethics. First, it is argued that, students are either presented with a large amount of information regarding the various subtle distinctions and the nuances of the theory and, as a result, the students simply fail to take it in or, alternatively, the students are presented with a simplified caricature of the theory, in which case the students may understand the information they are given, (...) but what they have understood is of little or no value because it is merely a caricature of a theory. Second, there is a methodological problem with appealing to moral theories to solve particular issues in applied ethics. An analogy with science is appealed to. In physics there is a hope that we could discover a unified theory of everything. But this is, of course, a hugely ambitious project, and much harder than, for example, finding a theory of motion. If the physicist wants to understand motion, he should try to do so directly. We would think he was particularly misguided if he thought that, to answer this question, he first needed to construct a unified theory of everything. (shrink)

By Focusing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method, this paper aims to show how understanding itself — including the understanding of artworks, texts, tradition, and living speech — can be understood as a kind of game or dialogical play-process which requires crucial ethical conditions to be met if it is going to succeed. Success, in terms of the communication of meaning, requires that the players (or interlocutors) commit to a genuine participation with each other in which they “open” (...) themselves to each other’s “claims to truth,” take each other seriously, listen, respond and question, and stand prepared to risk their old prejudices, learn from each other, and be transformed in the process. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es describir la percepción de riesgo y los factores de protección y de riesgo frente al consumo de sustancias psicoactivas legales e ilegales en estudiantes de la Universidad de Boyacá. Es un estudio cuantitativo y descriptivo de corte transversal, para el cual se tomó una muestra de 573 estudiantes que fueron seleccionados mediante muestreo estratificado probabilístico. El instrumento utilizado fue la encuesta sobre consumo de drogas, factores y percepción de riesgo en estudiantes universitarios (CODEU) diseñado (...) por Beverido, Salas, De San Jorge, Pavón, Blázquez, Gogeascoechea y Cruz (2012), que consta de 73 preguntas. Este instrumento fue validado y obtuvo un alpha de Cronbach de 0.787. Los hallazgos muestran que entre los factores protectores se encuentran: adecuadas relaciones familiares y practicar un deporte, como factores de riesgo se identifican principalmente: la permisividad social y las construcciones de reconocimiento social presentes ante el consumo de sustancias legales. De las sustancias ilegales, la marihuana es la que se percibe como de menor riesgo frente a la cocaína, el bazuco, los inhalantes y la heroína. (shrink)

Robert Veatch has proposed a model of the doctor-patient relationship that has as its foundation the sharing of values between the doctor and the patient. This paper uses qualitative research conducted with six doctors involved in the long term, specialised care of HIV positive patients in South Australia to explore the practical application of Veatch’s value sharing model in that setting. The research found that the doctors in this study linked “values” with sexual identity such that they defined value sharing, (...) in part, as a shared set of values and beliefs about sexual identity and practices. They voluntarily identified themselves as either homosexual or heterosexual and they regarded the relation between their own sexual identity and that of their patients as important for the provision of quality care. None of the doctors thought that value sharing, in the way they defined it, was essential to the clinical relationship, but the homosexual doctors attributed a greater degree of importance to it than their heterosexual colleagues. (shrink)

This book explores the integral vision of human development contained in the original works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. It delves into multiple layers of the human personality as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and explores a new developmental science of consciousness based on the practice of Integral Yoga. The book examines the major metatheoretical conceptions that shape the contemporary discipline of developmental psychology and discusses the ways in which Sri Aurobindo's philosophical and psychological perspective can help (...) break fresh ground for developmental theorisation and research by extending the current understanding of the human evolutionary potential. The author proposes a new agenda for human development which brings together the key ideas of integral individual and collective development and informs practices in the areas of counselling, education, parenting, and self-development. This book will be of special interest for researchers of developmental psychology, human development, counselling psychology, philosophy, social work, and education. (shrink)

Ethical leadership matters in the context of organizational change due to the need for followers to trust the integrity of their leaders. Yet, there have been no studies investigating ethical leadership and organizational change. To fill this gap, we introduce a model of the moderating role of involvement in change. Organizational change and involvement in change are proposed as context-level moderators in the relationships of ethical leadership and work-related attitudes and performance. We employ a sample of 199 supervisor–subordinate pairs from (...) a wide variety of organizations. Results support a three-way interaction (ethical leadership, organizational change, and involvement in change) for performance and OCBs. Our results have important implications for organizational change since ethical leadership appears to complement follower involvement when change is happening. (shrink)

What is a telenovela? Its literal meaning is “a novel transmitted by televison.” This implies a means of transmission—the television—and a form of discourse—the novel. The telenovela.

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell considers the nature of “utopian work”—not simply the kind of work that provides material support for community but rather the kind of “inner” work that reorients individual ethical and political sensibilities, and moves one toward a spiritual maturity that makes frank community with others possible. Drawing from Murdoch's philosophical work, Wagner-Lawlor examines Murdoch's promotion of the “work” that art does in educating our moral sensibilities over the kinds of work her Imber Court communitarians (...) engage in. Murdoch suggests that the real work of utopia is the working of the individual spirit toward an imaginative sympathy that lies at the heart of her conception of a utopian sensibility. (shrink)

While the words “utopia” and “anticipation” frequently appear together in discussions of the concepts of utopia and dystopia, little attention to the relationship of Anticipation Studies to utopian studies exists. Moreover, the relevance of literature and the arts to Anticipation Studies seems almost invisible. This essay focuses on the structuring of the original utopian narrative, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, in order to understand how this seminal text conceptualizes utopia’s relation to past, present, and future. This analysis focuses on the complex (...) framing devices characteristic of utopian narrative, as well as its open-endedness. The embedding of narratives sets up the dynamic movement between past, present, and future – the various forms of temporality – that allows us to clarify the nature of utopian anticipation.Throughout the chapter, I attempt to connect utopian textual and conceptual theory to specific concepts in the emerging field of Anticipation Studies, with which Utopian Studies, a long-established interdisciplinary field, have not yet engaged. Of particular interest is the notion, promoted by Miguel Abensour, that utopia is always a disruption and thus not an anticipation in any “natural” or logical sense: “what matters is the orientation toward what is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and now” : 407, 2008). From this premise, we can reintroduce a neglected literary term from science fiction theorist, Darko Suvin: the novum. The eruption of a future from a point of radical alterity – an ontological accident – opens up radical implication for the nature of utopian anticipation and futurity.Finally the essay suggests that Robert Poli’s and Robert Rosen’s description of an anticipatory system as comprising “the predictive model of itself” within the genre’s formal characteristics is in fact present in the structure of the utopian narratives: that is, that the persistence of utopia – as a literary genre and as a political concept – inheres in the narratological structuring of the possibility of another story and another listener. Utopian narrative thus ultimately anticipates not only temporal relationality, but an ethical relation between the outside narrator, the utopian traveler/narrator, and the reader. It anticipates another story. (shrink)

Figure used with kind permission of Pie: The Search for Utopia (http://pieonedotzero.wordpress.com). Charles Dickens's Hard Times is not a novel that typically springs to mind in the context of discussions of education in utopia or dystopia. But maybe it should be. Hard Times stages a fierce debate between utopic and dystopic visions of nineteenth-century Britain and the future that it prepares its children for. On one side: Mr. Gradgrind and his school, with a sclerotic curriculum of "Facts, facts, facts" that (...) hardens the heart and the mind and stamps out any spark of imagination. Gradgrind "manufactures," like identical widgets, model citizens in the form of the apathetic Bitzer. On the other side: Mr. .. (shrink)

This appreciation of Lyman Tower Sargent seeks a term to best capture the utopian sensibilities and contributions of this unique scholar. I propose a word taken from Susan Sontag, who shared a lifelong interest in “other worlds,” real and unreal, utopian and dystopian: cosmophage—literally, “world-eater.”.

The theorizing of utopia is a persistent theme throughout several generations of the French continental tradition, and alongside the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead to a large degree recuperates the concept of utopia from its supposed dismissal by Marx and his intellectual descendants. Most recently, attention to the notion of plasticity, popularized by Catherine Malabou, extends speculation on utopian possibility. Compelled to answer to Marx’s denigration of utopia as fantasy, the tendency was to compensate for the absence of a (...) programmatic politics by stressing what is “useful” about utopian dreaming, and therefore where or how exactly a utopian text reveals or creates political drive, or motivates political action. In this essay, I argue that theorists have overlooked the use of utopia as not only the reproduction of difference, or what Malabou calls positive plasticity, but also as, therefore, a disruption; Malabou might prefer the term accident here. Tracing the concept of plasticity from Roland Barthes to Malabou, with a nod at Miguel Abensour, this essay teases out the links between a contemporary notion of plasticity to argue, simply put, that utopia is plastic. This plasticity of the concept ensures its political force. These links, obscured in the essay “Plastic,” Barthes makes only later in his writing. But for Malabou, plasticity underlies a principle of futurity and/as generativity, such that new forms, new meanings, new concepts emerge through difference. Utopia’s horizons of potentiality depend on difference, and on non-achievement. Finally, I argue that the persistence of utopia as a form of thinking is the most important, and political, effect of utopian plasticity. (shrink)

Blockchain is an open digital ledger technology that has the capability of significantly altering the way that people operations operate in organizations. This research takes a first step in proposing several ways in which the blockchain technology can be used to improve current organizational practices, while also considering the ethical implications. Specifically, the paper examines the role that blockchain technology plays in three primary areas of people operations: entry to the organization, intraorganizational processes, and exit. In each section, the paper (...) reviews the ethical implications from the lenses of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology and contractarianism. The paper concludes that in whole the implementation of blockchain technology in people operations processes can create a more ethical work environment. However, careful implementation is necessary and requires extensive examination of ethical implications in advance. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

As a neonatal neurologist, I serve families facing tragic decisions in which they must balance trade-offs between death and life with profound disability. I often find myself in complex discussions about future outcome, in which families sort through in real-time what information they value most in making such a choice. Will he laugh? Will he be in pain? Will he know how much he’s loved? In this month’s feature article, Brick et al share the results of an online survey aimed (...) at assessing public views on when a life is not worth living, in an effort to inform ongoing legal and clinical debates about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for children. These findings raise important questions about how we define and measure outcomes that matter to parents as they make these tragic decisions. It is challenging to interpret these findings in the absence of context of how decision-making for infants occurs in real-time. The nature of this study and its objective required that cases be substantially simplified. As the authors acknowledge, the prognoses and function of the children involved in these cases were often deeply contested. Prognostic uncertainty is common for children with significant …. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)