In the present research, we validated a new scale developed from self-determination theory to assess the functional meaning of cash rewards offered in the workplace. According to SDT, rewards can take on different meanings based on the way they are perceived by individuals. In a series of three studies in different socioeconomic contexts, we replicated the two-factorial structure of the scale measuring respectively workplace cash rewards’ informative and controlling meanings. In Study 1, we validated the English version of the scale (...) by exploring and then confirming its two-factor structure with two English-speaking employee samples. We further replicated its two-factor structure in a French-speaking employee sample of employees in Study 2 and in a Greek-speaking employee sample in Study 3, allowing us to validate its French and Greek version. Results from our three studies show how distinct meanings attributed to cash rewards, i.e., informative or controlling, relate differently to autonomous and controlled forms of motivation based on SDT. These findings suggest that workplace cash rewards differently influence employees’ motivation depending on whether they are perceived as informative or controlling, thus providing empirical evidence for the theoretical and practical implications of SDT’s concept of functional meaning of cash rewards. Our research contributes to the assessment and understanding of employees’ experience of workplace cash rewards and provides empirical evidence that the concept of the functional meaning of cash rewards is a distinct concept from other money-related concepts such as subjective pay satisfaction, performance-contingent rewards, and financially contingent self-worth. (shrink)

Through a detailed re-reading of Saussure's work in the light of contemporary developments in the human, life and physical sciences, Paul Thibault provides us with the means to redefine and refocus our theories of social meaning-making. Saussure's theory of language is generally considered to be a formal theory of abstract sign-types and sign-systems, separate from our individual and social practices of making meaning. In this challenging book, Thibault presents a different view of Saussure. Paying close attention to the (...) original texts, including the Cours de Linguistic Generale, he demonstrates that Saussure was centrally concerned with trying to formulate a theory of how meanings are made. In addition to demonstrating the continuing viability of Saussure's thinking through a range of examples, Re-reading Saussure makes an important intervention in contemporary linguistic and semiotic debate. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to introduce an approach to play based on semiotics of culture and, in particular, grounded in the works and ideas of Juri Lotman. On the one hand, it provides an overview of Lotman’s works dedicated to play and games, starting from his article on art among other modelling systems, in which the phenomenon of play is treated deeply, and mentioning Lotman’s articles dedicated to various forms of play forms, such as involving dolls and playing (...) cards. On the other hand, it applies a few Lotmanian theories and ideas to playfulness in order to shed some light on this highly debated, as well as intriguing, anthropic activity. Thus, the paper approaches some of the core questions for a play theory, such as the definition of play, the cultural role of toys and playthings, the importance of unpredictability, the position held by playfulness in the semiosphere and, finally, the differences and commonalities between play and art. Lotman’s theories and works, often integrated by other existing semiotic or ludologic perspectives offer an extremely insightful and fresh take on play and illustrate the great heuristic potential of semiotics of culture. (shrink)

This article argues that the most widely disseminated reading of Lafitte’s writings, which aligns his proposals for ‘mechanology’ with cybernetics, overlooks the broader ethical and social project to which he hoped his ideas would contribute. It is shown that the purpose of mechanology articulated by Lafitte was the development of an ethical relation to machines, a theme he developed in his later publications. It is argued that Lafitte’s position resonates with positions taken by contemporary works focused on the renewal of (...) a critical approach to the philosophy of technology, particularly those that seek to transform the relationship between humans and the natural world. (shrink)

Cet article examine la question de l’attention dans son rapport à l’admiration, dont le traitement fait apparaître de profondes divergences entre les Passions de l’âme et l’ Éthique. Dans Les Passions de l’âme, Descartes propose une genèse passionnelle de l’attention, dont la destination gnoséologique est assurée par un acte de la volonté qui transcende les perceptions de l’âme. À l’inverse, dans l’ Éthique, la connaissance ne dépend pas de l’exercice d’une faculté autonome, elle est immanente à l’ordre des idées, ce (...) à quoi l’admiration fait irréductiblement obstacle. La critique spinoziste de l’admiration s’accompagne alors d’une refonte du statut de l’attention et repose sur la critique de la partition cartésienne des facultés de l’âme. Nous montrerons néanmoins que l’attention a une fonction positive sous la forme d’une présence à soi de l’esprit qui veille à l’enchaînement en lui des idées vraies. (shrink)

There is widespread and growing concern among U.S. consumers about the treatment of farmed animals, and consumers are consequently paying attention to food product labels that indicate humane production practices. However, labels vary in their standards for animal welfare, and prior research suggests that consumers are confused by welfare-related labels: many shoppers cannot differentiate between labels that indicate changes in the way animals are raised and those that do not. We administered a survey to 1,000 American grocery shoppers to better (...) understand the extent to which consumers purchase and pay more for food with certain labels based on an assumption of welfare improvement. Results showed that 86% of shoppers reported purchasing at least one product with the following labels in the last year: “cage or crate-free”, “free-range”, “pasture-raised”, “natural”, “organic”, “no hormone”, “no antibiotic”, “no rBST”, “humane”, “vegetarian-fed”, “grass-fed”, “farm-raised”. Of those who purchased one of the aforementioned labels, 89% did so because they thought the label indicated higher-welfare production practices, and 79% consciously paid more for the product with the label because they thought that the label indicated better-than-standard animal welfare. However, many of these labels lack uniform standards for the production practices they represent, and some labels represent production practices that do not influence animal welfare, thus the degree of the animal welfare impact of a given label is highly variable. These results indicate that labels need to clearly and accurately specify their animal welfare benefits to improve the consumers’ ability to purchase products that align with their expectations. (shrink)

Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term 'language' as defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have drawn on, have arguably, limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault's study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language - the Distributed Language view - that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that the (...) fundamental architecture of language can be localized as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organization that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault's book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of experience it actualizes is always an event, not a thing that we 'use'. In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume 1 focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II integrates the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated. (shrink)

L’un des gestes distinctifs de Cornelius Castoriadis fut de rapporter l’histoire de la philosophie à un concept de création « ex nihilo », qu’il définissait comme surgissement immotivé et irréductible de nouvelles déterminations formelles de l’être dans le temps. Cet article s’intéresse à la signification d’un tel parti pris pour l’instruction de la question cosmologique, entendue comme enquête sur les principes et le devenir de la totalité de l’être. L’auteur montre dans un premier temps comment Castoriadis a justifié sa position (...) ontologique à partir d’une réflexion sur l’histoire de la science. Il la rapporte ensuite à deux voies possibles afin de résoudre la question cosmologique : la dialectique et la complexité. Il est soutenu que l’intention de Castoriadis ne fut pas de produire une cosmologie comme telle, mais de rapporter la pratique scientifique à la création et d’expliciter les conditions de possibilité de son intellection. (shrink)

Cet article propose une réflexion sur la manière d’appréhender, en milieu autochtone, la collecte et l’analyse des données, les deux dimensions de la recherche qui sont les plus vulnérables aux biais ethnocentriques. En optant pour une démarche qui part du point de vue des participants eux-mêmes, il est suggéré de porter un regard de l’intérieur et d’aller à la rencontre du savoir intime, culturellement et territorialement situé, afin d’éclairer les choix réflexifs et originaux que font les acteurs autochtones. Pour cela, (...) il est proposé d’opter pour l’approche biographique et d’adapter celle-ci en fonction des réalités et des demandes des partenaires de recherche autochtones. Cette adaptation doit s’effectuer à différentes étapes du processus, notamment à l’étape de l’analyse et de la valorisation des résultats. Il est notamment proposé que les récits biographiques ne devraient pas être considérés comme de simples données de terrain, mais plutôt comme un niveau d’analyse en soi et qu’à ce titre, ils devraient pouvoir avoir une existence propre, en dehors tout autant qu’au sein de la recherche. (shrink)

In 1996, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro chose a sentence by Gilles Deleuze as the epigraph for an article, published in the Brazilian journal Mana, on Amerindian perspectivism. (A modified version of the article appeared in English two years later, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.) Since then, Deleuze's name has appeared often in works about perspectivism, but Chamois's new book is the first monograph to focus on perspectivism and Deleuze. Among the most important contributions of Chamois's (...) analysis is to draw our attention to a little-known passage in a course, “Truth and Time,” that Deleuze taught in 1983 (and that is available for listening online). In it, he criticizes the example of the cube used as a paradigm, at least since Edmund Husserl's day, to conceptualize what a perspective is. It is impossible to see all six faces of a cube at the same time; thus, to “intuit” the cube as a cube, we must add to our own perception of a profile of the cube more possible points of view on it. The problem with this example and description is that it takes for granted that the subject already knows what she needs to see (a cube).Inspired, however, by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze holds that each perception is an invitation to other perceptions: “To perceive is to become capable of perceiving more and more things that were initially not perceived” (percevoir, c'est devenir apte à percevoir de plus en plus de choses qui d'abord n’étaient pas perçues). Deleuze contrasts the “spatial” or “frozen” notion of perspective to the “temporal perspective” that he seeks to emphasize: “It's time that acts as perspective” (C'est le temps qui agit comme perspective). The question, therefore, at the heart of Deleuze's perspectivism is how a perspective changes over time. Chamois goes through the early texts of Deleuze to show how the idea of the temporal perspective emerged from the concept of the structure Autrui. The “structure-Other” is best exemplified by someone else's emotive face—the frightened face of my friend, for instance. If I perceive that face while, say, I am laughing, another possible world would slip into my own: a frightening world penetrates my humorous one, and perhaps I should turn my head to see what danger may be en route. As in the case of the cube, my own limited perception is supplemented by others’ limited perceptions. The object of perception in this case, however, is not presupposed to be stable (the world is changing), and what I am about to see is not known in advance.But what, precisely, in the face of the other must I notice to become aware of the world she perceives? Deleuze does not explore that question in any detail, but Chamois reviews recent anthropological and psychological research that supplies some elements of a response. To confront the writings of Deleuze with relevant scientific data is fruitful. I must admit, though, that I was a bit embarrassed by the framing of the discussion: Chamois presents Deleuze's concepts as hypotheses demanding verification that they are “corroborated by the facts.” For Deleuze, concepts are inseparable from percepts and affects; as opposed to a hypothesis, a concept is true not because it correlates to a set of relevant facts but because it helps us to perceive other aspects of the world (percept) and induces us to act better (affect). Thus, the minute and rewarding analysis of Chamois should be complemented with an assessment of what we learn to focus on and of how we change our actions thanks to the perspectivism of Deleuze—in contrast to other forms of perspectivism (or indeed to other cosmologies). (shrink)

Bayard's book appeared in 2007. Word of mouth about it probably reached me at the time, but it did not catch my attention until the day (in 2012, if I am not mistaken) that a young professor, on the verge of burnout, told me how reading it had functioned for him as a kind of therapy. Though a voracious reader, he found himself confronted by ever more recommendations for reading, some from reviewers whose suggestions were felt as obligations and sounded (...) almost like insults. The line between a reading recommendation and an insult is very thin (the interlocutor may feel infantilized). The young professor was particularly irritated by recurrent advice to read Derrida. Must I read De la grammatologie, he asked, because it is vaguely related to the topic I am working on? Why must I quote him? And if I have not read him, must I pretend that I have?In the academic quotation economy, we very often find ourselves lying to the public, pretending we have read authors whom we have not. For a decade, the title of Bayard's book worked for me as a motto I could repeat internally whenever faced with a reading recommendation, especially when it was broad and general (I have often been advised to read Marx or Lacan, for instance, with no further indication of passages that might interest me). Inversely, when I make a recommendation, I add a little comment on Bayard's book, though until recently I have specified that I have not read it myself. I have hoped my comment would reduce the risk of my recommendations being interpreted as obligations or insults.As is the case with many books, Bayard's became important to me well before I decided to read it (in 2022). An interlocutor, reacting to my recommendation of the book without having read it, told me that the book (he had read it) was more than an antidote for academic name-dropping. It was foremost, he added, an investigation into various modes of nonreading. Apart from pure ignorance (when one does not even know that it exists), one can be familiar with a book just by learning bibliographical details and information about its genre and tradition. One can know a book by hearsay (one can speak extensively about it on the basis of remarks that one has heard). One can consult the table of contents furtively or read some pages randomly.Each mode of nonreading enables us to talk differently about a book, and in each we fill the parts of which we are ignorant with peripheral knowledge and imagination. Therefore, nonreading—active nonreading at least—can be more demanding, Bayard argues, than reading itself. Still, what happens when we talk about books that we have not read happens also when we speak about books that we have read, since we never speak of a book as such without adding what we imagine the book to be. Based on this similarity of reading and nonreading, Bayard comes to a paradoxical conclusion typical of French thinkers: each reading, he contends, from the most inattentive to the most intense, is also a form of nonreading. He misses, however, that by the same argument the inverse proposition could also be defended: what he calls nonreading is already a form of reading.During the decade between beginning to think about Bayard's book and actually reading it, I constructed what he calls a “screen book” (livre-écran)—a work of my imagination. But the book I invented was enriched by my eventually reading it. I discovered that it delivered not simply a criticism of our quoting practices but also a celebration of some forms of active nonreading. In Bayard's enthusiasm, however, I believe that he goes too far when he concludes, with Oscar Wilde among others, that it is better not to read the books we review. Often, as was my case with How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read, they turn out to be more original than our fancy is capable of imagining. Hence I have set forth in this review a reason not mentioned by Bayard in favor of discussing books one has not read: doing so may function as a self-reminder. By dint of speaking about a book, one sometimes ends up reading it. (shrink)

Barba non facit philosophum. L'habit ne fait pas le moine. In those proverbs, Latin and French, we find the classical opposition between appearance and reality—between the accessory (the superficial, the beard, the clothing) and the essential (the profound, the philosopher, the monk), the latter being independent from and unchanged by the former. Berliner questions this dichotomy. As an anthropologist, he reviews many situations in which humans wear masks or use other techniques to cover their identities: cosplaying, puppy play, historical reenactments, (...) live-action role-playing, and the use of pseudonyms. Cosplayers, the subject of Berliner's first case study, impersonate characters from movies or video games. On the basis of lengthy interviews, he concludes that role-players change when they wear the costumes of their favorite heroes, behaving, for instance, with more self-confidence. A little psychological experiment not cited in this book suggests the same. In 2012, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky asked a group of students to perform a task demanding concentration. Those given a white medical coat to wear during the experiment performed better, probably because they were more prone to adopt traits and postures attributed to doctors—postures thought to enhance concentration. Berliner believes that, in the case of more immersive games, such changes are not necessarily temporary. They can persist after the acting is done. In other words, in some contexts at least, clothes can change the man.To impersonate a historical figure such as Napoleon, another case covered in Berliner's book, the reenactor must pay attention to minute details of the figure's life, habits, and social environment. The reenactor may then experience a moment de bascule, during which he is so much absorbed in his role that he forgets he is playing a character. As such, the activity of imitating is a way of learning some particular forms of paying attention to the individual serving as model. I regret that this aspect of disguise is not discussed when Berliner approaches animal role-playing. He affirms instead that identification with animals “rests upon our imagining what an animal is.” To imitate animals, however, we must first learn about, watch, and interact with them. Imitation is never fully based on the imagination; our imaginations are opened by prior, more or less proximate interactions with the beings that serve as models. It is far from easy to imagine, out of the blue, using our bodies in the ways that imitating animals requires.Despite the book's title, Becoming Other, Gilles Deleuze is barely mentioned in it, probably because he was very critical of the concept of imitation, which is omnipresent in Berliner's thought. Still, the way in which Berliner uses the concept is Deleuzian to a degree. Deleuze is skeptical of the concept of imitation because the success of an imitation is usually judged by whether the model and the imitation correspond in appearance—the imitation, in that case, does not bring any novelty to the world. In contrast to Deleuze, who proposes to abandon the concept of imitation, Berliner invites us to study it in new ways. Indeed, his book teaches us how creative imitation can be. What counts is not whether an imitation is successful but whether it is fruitful, and that we measure by whether it transforms us. The imitator does not become an alter ego of the model impersonated but a superego, an ego more aware of all its capacities. Even if it is never made explicit, the contrast between successful and fruitful—a contrast dear to Vinciane Despret—structures Berliner's analyses, which are a valuable contribution not only to anthropology but also to philosophy. (shrink)

In his latest book, Descola analyzes more than 150 graphic works from all over the world, among which are animal statuettes of the Koryaks, a people of the Kamchatka region of Russia. Those figurines always represent animals lying in wait, ready to jump or already running. Such representations, the anthropologist argues, incline us to pay attention to what motivates and what troubles the animals: “All those animals that we see undertaking an action manifestly intentional or properly responding to unexpected events (...) cannot but impose on the observers of their image the idea that they are moved by aims, that they have an interiority just like humans.” This type of animal figuration is especially common in peoples that in Descola's previous book, Beyond Nature and Culture, he referred to as “animist.”In that book, published in 2005, he described the animist ontology and three other modes of paying attention to continuities and differences between humans and animals: naturalism, analogism, and totemism. At the time, he focused exclusively on the description of those ontologies, as opposed to any study of their evolution. He begins his study of the genesis of ontologies in Les formes du visible by suggesting that each type of graphic work induces a different way of paying attention to psychological and physical continuities and differences. For instance, in contrast to a Koryak statuette, an anatomical plate (to use a simple example not covered in the book) depicts only the body of a dead and dissected specimen. By referring simultaneously to an anatomical description of the human body and to that of another mammal, we tend to see how similar our bodies are. Whereas the animist ontology emphasizes the psychological continuity of humans and animals, the naturalist ontology insists instead on their physical continuity. By producing and using repeatedly some kinds of graphic works, each society comes to favor one or another ontology, one or another way of paying attention to the world. (Descola never says so in these words, but what he seems to mean by ontologies are modes of attention).Descola's questions in this new book are engaging: What do images make us pay attention to? What modes of attention do images stimulate? Each case study selected by the author is, moreover, fascinating in itself: an Amerindian mask, an Aboriginal painting on a piece of bark, a sixteenth-century Mongolian drawing of an elephant. The answers offered for the questions asked are unfortunately always already canvassed by the theory of the four ontologies. In previous work, Descola built that theory based on discursive and ethnographic material; sometimes we are left with the impression that images (as opposed to spoken words) do not make any significant difference, since they did not motivate him to modify in any way his theory in his new book.In addition, Descola's framework brings him to focus only on a particular aspect of what images induce in our modes of attention: in his thinking, ontologies are defined solely by the way we notice (or do not notice) differences and continuities between beings on two levels, physical and psychological, which respectively he terms the exteriority and the interiority of beings. By combining these two pairs of opposing features (continuity/difference, interiority/exteriority), he constitutes his four ontologies. But depictions can produce more fine-grained ontologies by making us pay attention to, say, the separation or the blending of bodies, the stability or fluidity of souls, the equality or inequality of power between beings. Moment by moment, while reading Descola, we find ourselves tied to his four ontologies and indeed find it almost impossible to imagine ontologies other than the four he has set out. In a structuralist vein, he even presents that number as a necessary, logical, and cognitive limit to the construction of ontologies. Nevertheless, by opening the analysis of the modes of attention to more than just the double pair of features picked out by the anthropologist, we could well unearth more diversified ontologies, induced by images (and by other cultural and technical particulars). We could detect, in other words, more than four modes of paying attention to our environment and to our companion beings. (shrink)

The title of this book, by one of the great editors and publishers of our time, comes from its first and longest chapter: “How to Organize a Library.” In it, Calasso celebrates the “golden rule” proposed by Aby Warburg: “In the perfect library, when we look for a given book, we end up taking the one next to it, which would reveal itself even more useful than the one we were looking for.” It demands effort, knowledge, and sensibility to “curate” (...) such a library, where each book maintains good neighborly relations with the others. Such a library is an oeuvre requiring constantly to be maintained and refreshed, because a book is never a self-contained, self-sufficient object. Each book is connected to others in myriad and surprising ways.Calasso applies this relational understanding of books in a very short chapter on, reputedly, the first book review ever written: Madame de Sablé’s little note of 1665 on her friend La Rochefoucauld's Maximes. In that book, which prefigures some of Nietzsche's ideas, La Rochefoucauld argues that “most often our virtues are nothing but disguised vices” (Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés). Before submitting her review to the Journal des Savants, which had been inaugurated only a few months earlier, Madame de Sablé sent it to La Rochefoucauld, asking him to amend it as needed or even to “throw it into the fire.” Calasso compares the original review and the corrected version that was eventually published. La Rochefoucauld erased many passages, making a short text (273 words) even shorter (189 words). In the process, he wiped out the first sentence, the most important, where Sablé summarized what she saw as the achievement of the Maximes: “It is a treatise about movements of the heart of man which we may say have been ignored until now” (C'est un traité des mouvements du cœur de l'homme, qu'on peut dire lui avoir été inconnus jusqu’à cette heure). Calasso comments: “Nothing more radical and more courageous could be written about the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. However, the author of the work did not hesitate to cancel those very words—perhaps to avoid frightening people, himself included.” In other words, Calasso suggests that Sablé understood the Maximes better than its author did. The culture of book reviewing ushered in by Madame de Sablé taught and continues to teach us that a book may be more than its author believes it to be. Indeed, every book is in need of attentive and penetrating readers to discover its latent potentialities. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) was a biologist, but the impact of his work has been perhaps stronger and more persistent in philosophy and the humanities than in the natural sciences. As one of the contributors to this book observes, Uexküll's conception of biology is “more at home among the disciplines composing the Geisteswissenschaften [humanities] than those included in the Naturwissenschaften [sciences], insofar as Uexküll's biology put Verstehen [understanding] before Erklären [explaining].” Uexküll began his career as an experimentalist of a “proto-behaviorist” (...) kind but came rapidly to be dissatisfied with the reduction of physiology to action-and-reaction chains. He argued that the animal-as-machine, the model that lies behind behaviorism, cannot be the starting point of biology. The relation between cause and effect in a machine is direct: the wings of a windmill, say, transfer their movement to a cog even if no one is there to perceive the transfer. In contrast, in the realm of the living, “a stimulus must be ‘noticed’ by a subject” to have any effect. Thus, Uexküll claims, “the first task of [the biologist] consists in seeking out the animal's perception signs”—in searching for what, in its surroundings, an animal perceives and of what it takes notice.Uexküll defined surroundings (Umgebung) as the whole physical reality in the vicinity of an animal, whereas by the term environment (Umwelt) he meant only that part of an animal's surroundings that it perceives. Given Uexküll's understanding of biology as the study of signs of perception (Merkmale), it is no surprise that his work has been a crucial source of inspiration for semiotics. Only one chapter of this new book is devoted to that topic, since Uexküll's presence in the field of semiotics (and in biosemiotics more particularly) is already well documented and analyzed in many publications, whereas his impact on the field of philosophy has been less studied (Brett Buchanan's Onto-Ethologies is, to date, perhaps the best study of that kind). Martin Heidegger was not the first to import the Umwelt theory into philosophy (Max Scheller, Helmuth Plessner, and Ernst Cassirer did so before him, and to each of them a chapter is devoted), but Heidegger is the most famous. It was by reworking an example of Uexküll's—“the rock on which the lizard lies is not given to the lizard as rock, in such a way that it could inquire into its mineralogical constitution for example”—that Heidegger characterized the divergent ways in which animals and humans approach the world. The former can use the things of the world, but humans are uniquely capable of conceiving things as independent of their use of them. We have no more direct access to our physical surroundings than other animals do, but, Heidegger held, we are at least able to imagine our surroundings and the things that fill them as independent of us (and eventually to examine them in the way that a mineralogist examines stones).Thus, Heidegger used Uexküll to set out an “ontological difference” between humans and animals. Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, made use of Uexküll to advance a nondualistic ontology in which “the affects [that animals] are capable of” is given as the definition of bodies—a definition, he emphasized, “no less valid for us, for humans, than for animals.” Other philosophers whose understanding and use of Uexküll are examined in detail include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Hans Blumenberg, and Giorgio Agamben; in addition to the complementary chapter on Uexküll and semiotics, already mentioned, there is one on his place in hermeneutics and one on the influence of Kant. The final chapter concerns the remaking of Uexküll by artists. In this way, this collection of studies offers a varied, detailed, well-structured, and engaging presentation of one of the most original biologists of the last century. As a whole, this book is an example of philosophy at its best—which is: when it specifies, pluralizes, and intensifies the thoughts and works of others. (shrink)

In French schools, La Fontaine is presented as “the height of French culture,” but he was only marginally inspired by French poets. His main sources were Spanish and Italian authors, as well as classics of both the Occident and Orient. In this way La Fontaine exemplifies, for Serres, a general pattern in which “cultures grow at the crossroads of other cultures.” One's identity develops out of numerous contacts with others, by learning from them and assimilating some of their qualities—by being (...) open to, not isolated from, the rest of the world. The non-French genealogy of the fables puts in doubt the entrenched concept of identity as involving separation and isolation.Their genealogy also sets a limit on political and moralistic interpretations of La Fontaine's stories. At school, pupils are taught that the Lion stands for the King, the Fox for the Nobles, the Lamb for the Poor. But is it possible, Serres asks, that so many poets from diverse times and places have been describing “the same society with the same hierarchies submitted to the same laws”? As for moralistic readings, Serres shows that for each fable there is a counterfable in which the winner becomes the loser. The Wolf that eats the Lamb in one fable is killed by the Hunter in another. In “The Two Mules,” the animal loading the salt is murdered by bandits, whereas in “The Ass with a Load of Sponges and the Ass with a Load of Salt,” it is the latter that survives. In other words, the fables illustrate how beings metamorphose into one another: the Wolf (the attacker) can appreciate and play the role of the Lamb (the victim) when chased by the Hunter; salt can lead to death or to freedom, depending on the circumstances. The fables, taken together, offer a collection of behaviors that we, humans and animals, are capable of: our “so-called moralities,” Serres explains, “don't speak about ethics, but about ethology.”The fables offer as well a “palimpsest [that] lies silently in our bodies and our practices.” Serres speculates that the oldest forms of the fables were not spoken, but gesticulated; they mimed animal behaviors. By imitating them, we humans not only learned about the animals we were observing and living with but also about the potentialities of our own bodies. If La Fontaine became the epitome of French culture by assimilating elements of other cultures, then it was by embodying animal behaviors that we became human. (The omnipresence of prepositions in the fables—next to, in front of, under, above—suggests that the body underpins the stories. Those little words, which Serres analyzes minutely in a long chapter, locate each body in relation to those of other beings.)Serres was planning to write a book about La Fontaine as early as 1997. In his notebooks, he scribbled possible titles, all of which are evocative: “Archaeology of Miming,” “Anthropology of Simulation,” “The Fabulous Bodies of Animals,” “The Scale and the Net.” Sadly, he died in 2019 when his work on the manuscript was progressing. He had not yet settled on a definitive title, nor had he decided the order of the chapters and sections. Jean-Charles Darmon, who was allowed to edit the work, faced chapters that were almost completed but others consisting of a single line suggesting a main idea. (The blanks are often about a type of fable never defined or described: “fables of representation.”) In spite of its incompleteness, this book intermingles systematic analysis, textual and historical contextualization, and philosophical speculation—in it, we find the conceptual inventiveness, the lexical and etymological alertness, and above all the joyfulness that characterize the whole of Serres's extraordinary oeuvre. (shrink)

Magritte et les philosophes, written by a Belgian semiotician, puts in dialogue some paintings by René Magritte with some thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault, and, in a chapter on La condition humaine, even Plato. Painted in 1933, La condition humaine represents a garden as seen from a salon, but in the room there is already a painting on an easel that represents the same garden. Because the second-order painting (the painting in the painting) is placed in front (...) of the window, we cannot see the full garden of the first-order painting. In it we see only the bottom of a hill and a part of a hedge, but in the second-order painting we see, in perfect continuity, the rest of the hill and the hedge. Thus we are inclined to think that the second-order painting covers exactly the reality it reproduces from the first-order painting and that, if we removed the second-order painting, we would see the same garden with a tree in the middle—a tree that for the moment we see only in the second-order painting.Therefore, some perceive in La condition humaine (and also in a similar painting, La belle captive) a parable of the transparency of painting. Opposing this position, Badir claims instead that “the pictures that are represented [that is, the second-order pictures] seem transparent; they give the sensation of transparency,... but their nature is totally different, and the painted landscapes in the [second-order] painting cannot make the representation [of the first-order painting] disappear.” We cannot superpose the painting over the reality to see whether the strokes of the painting cover exactly the lines of reality, since, if we do so, the painting gets between us and the garden. Still, we as observers cannot help but think that the second-order painting reproduces the reality behind it. But from where does that irresistible intuition come? Not from the resemblance between the picture and what it represents (since we know nothing about what is hidden by the picture), but from the continuity of the brushstrokes in the second-order painting and the lines of reality in the first-order picture.As in Plato's cave, in Magritte's room we have access to a semblance of reality, but in contrast to Plato, who regarded those shadows as pale imitations, Magritte offers us what may be a method of connecting semblance to reality less invidiously. The relation between the second-order picture and the first-order picture, between painting and reality, is not primarily a relation of analogy, since the analogy between the two orders is insinuated by other, nonanalogical relations—those of continuity and proximity between the brushstrokes of the painting and the lines of the garden. Even if Gilles Deleuze is not mentioned in Badir's book, this option seems to me to capture the gist of his critique of Platonism. When we are inclined to see a relation of analogy, Deleuze, like Magritte, wants us to pay attention to other, more diverse and more creative relations: nonanalogical relations that in some cases induce the sensation of resemblance.The title of Badir's book is Magritte and Philosophers, but it could just as well have been Magritte as Philosopher, because the classical philosophers he deals with play only a minor role as possible interlocutors for the painter. Magritte's thinking, as developed in his artwork, constitutes the main subject of this study. We learn while reading this book that painting can be a powerful tool for developing complex concepts and not merely percepts. Its argument may indeed be a critique of Deleuze's too-categorical distinction between the percepts proper to art and the concepts developed by philosophers. (shrink)

In this article, we build on the stakeholder-politics literature to investigate how corporate scandals transform political contexts and give impetus to the contentious movements of fringe stakeholders against multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on Adut’s scandal theory, we flesh out three scandal-related processes that directly affect political-opportunity structures (POSs) and the generation of social movements against MNCs: convergence of contention toward a single target, publicization of deviant practices, and contagion to other organizations. These processes reduce the obstacles to collective actions by (...) fringe stakeholders by pushing corporate elites to be more sensitive to their claims, by decreasing MNCs’ capability to repress contentious movements, by forcing the targeted MNCs to formalize a policy to monitor and eradicate the controversial practices, and by helping fringe stakeholders find internal and external allies to support their claims. This conceptual model of scandals as catalysts of contentious actions contributes to a better understanding of stakeholder politics by unveiling the role of the political context in the coordination of fringe stakeholders. (shrink)

We argue, in the spirit of some of Jean-Yves Jaffray’s work, that explicitly incorporating the information, however imprecise, available to the decision maker is relevant, feasible, and fruitful. In particular, we show that it can lead us to know whether the decision maker has wrong beliefs and whether it matters or not, that it makes it possible to better model and analyze how the decision maker takes into account new information, even when this information is not an event and finally (...) that it is crucial when attempting to identify and measure the decision maker’s attitude toward imprecise information. (shrink)

This article attempts to evaluate emotive meanings across languages and cultures expressed and elicited semiotically from viewers. It investigates the challenges of subtitling emotive feelings in the American filmHomeless to Harvard(2003) into Arabic. It adopts Paul Thibault’s (2000. The multimodal transcription of a television advertisement: Theory and practice. In Anthony Baldry (ed.),Multimodality and multimediality in the distance learning age, 311–385. Campobasso: Palladino Editore) method of multimodal transcription and Feng and O’Halloran’s (2013. The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating (...) cognitive and semiotic approaches.Semiotica197(1/4). 79–100) framework of the multimodal representation of emotion to formulate strategies for subtitling emotion from English into Arabic. Additionally, Feng and O’Halloran’s (2013) framework is adapted to show how stylistic choices (e.g., cinematography, music, soundtracks, etc.) and semiotic expressions can elicit emotion from viewers. The social semiotic model is employed to investigate how emotive representation is realized through verbal and non-verbal items. The findings showed that the filmmakers had properly used stylistic choices and various semiotic techniques to elicit emotion from the viewer derived from the emotion of the film’s heroine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology by Paige E. HochschildJoseph T. Lienhard, S.J.Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology. By Paige E. Hochschild. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 251. $125.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-19-964302-8.When students of St. Augustine consider his teaching on memory, they turn instinctively to the Confessions, book 10, and to On the Trinity, books 11 and 12. The lyrical passage in the Confessions is easy to teach and (...) intriguing in its contents. Paige Hochschild paints a much larger picture, drawing on far more sources. She also sees memory as a central category in Augustine’s thought. In the opening paragraph of the introduction, she describes memory (for Augustine) as the way the mind meets the world, as the way things external to the body are apprehended, as the way intelligible objects are known, and as what it means to be constituted in the image of God. This is a big order. And “order,” in Augustine’s sense, is key: the mind, as memory, brings order to the natural world, but also brings to light a providential order that is implicit in the sensible.The book is divided into three parts: (1) the philosophical tradition (Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus), (2) Augustine’s earlier writings (from the Cassiciacum dialogues up to De magistro and De musica), and (3) the Confessions and De trinitate. The conclusion of this complex study is that memory is salvific: it accounts for the soul’s progress by the dialectical play of the knowledge and love of what is possessed, yet not possessed. The lifelong process of healing in which memory functions is fulfilled in contemplation.Two characteristics of Hochschild’s book can be mentioned at the outset. First, she studies each author diachronically, measuring progress and growth in the author’s thought, and particularly in his understanding of memory. Second, she readily invokes a wide range of categories to explain and illuminate her main topic. The book is anything but an extended encyclopedia article on “memoria in Augustine.” The two principal terms in the title, “memory” and “theological anthropology,” are richly developed and elaborated.Chapter 1 begins with a short note on Augustine’s knowledge of Plato. It is generally admitted that Augustine read some of the dialogues of Plato in translation: the Timaeus, the Republic (albeit only parts of it), the Phaedo, and the Phaedrus. Some of these works, at least, may have come down to him through doxographers. But Plato’s influence on Augustine remains shadowy. It is “Platonism,” and particularly Plotinus, that influences him so clearly, a point made memorably in Confessions 7.9.13-15, and its intriguing reference to the libri Platonicorum. Before all else, Platonism delivers Augustine from the bondage of materialism.Hochschild treats Plato’s doctrine of memory under four headings: sense perception, knowledge as recollection, divisions in the ways of knowing, and the practice of dialectic. In regard to sense perception, the sharp distinction (found in the Republic) between opinion (doxa) and knowledge (epistêmê) [End Page 144] needs to be refined, Hochschild avers. At least in some later works, the sensible is an image of the intelligible, and hence some sense perception can be infallible. On the next topic, Plato invokes recollection to explain direct apprehension of the forms, but recollection does not recall what was perceived in the past but is a restoration of a clear, logical relationship. The Republic introduces a new element, “the illuminative power of the Good” (21). The final section of chapter 1 treats dialectic, concluding that “knowledge is fulfilled in virtue, and the art of dialectic is not merely an exercise in definition, but a hexis, and a way of living” (27).Chapter 2, on Aristotle, begins with the observation that, if Plato’s influence on Augustine was indirect, Aristotle’s was even more indirect, reaching Augustine through Plotinus. Most familiar, of course, are Augustine’s account of reading Aristotle’s Categories during his days at Carthage (Confessions 4.16.28-31) and his later use of the categories of substance and relation in his understanding of the Trinity, creating the category of “substantial relation,” which would... (shrink)

Charlene Haddock Seigfried argues that William James’s philosophy significantly influenced the shaping of pragmatist feminism and feminist pragmatism. Interpreting his works, she recognized the potential of his ideas for feminist reconstruction and their alignment with feminist goals. However, Seigfried also criticizes James for what she perceives as pervasive sexism in his writings. In this paper, I will defend James from the accusations made by Seigfried and demonstrate that he did not hold such a hostile attitude towards women as she suggests.

This letter replies to the letter “Colonial and Neocolonial Barriers to Companion Digital Humans in Africa,” by Luís Cordeiro‐Rodrigues, in the same, May‐June 2024, issue of the Hastings Center Report.

In this short, dense essay, Jean Cavaillès evaluates philosophical efforts to determine the origin - logical or ontological - of scientific thought, arguing that, rather than seeking to found science in original intentional acts, a priori meanings, or foundational logical relations, any adequate theory must involve a history of the concept. Cavaillès insists on a historical epistemology that is conceptual rather than phenomenological, and a logic that is dialectical rather than transcendental. His famous call (cited by Foucault) to abandon "a (...) philosophy of consciousness" for "a philosophy of the concept" was crucial in displacing the focus of philosophical enquiry from aprioristic foundations toward structural historical shifts in the conceptual fabric. This new translation of Cavaillès's final work, written in 1942 during his imprisonment for Resistance activities, presents an opportunity to reencounter an original and lucid thinker. Cavaillès's subtle adjudication between positivistic claims that science has no need of philosophy, and philosophers' obstinate disregard for actual scientific events, speaks to a dilemma that remains pertinent for us today. His affirmation of the authority of scientific thinking combined with his commitment to conceptual creation yields a radical defense of the freedom of thought and the possibility of the new. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude toward envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy poses to political stability. Yet he also briefly discusses the kind of envy that individuals experience toward their social peers, which he calls particular envy, and which I refer to as peer envy. He quickly concludes, however, that particular envy would not present a serious risk to the stability of his just society. In this article, I contest (...) this claim by arguing that the principles that structure Rawls’s ideal society are likely to exacerbate particular envy to a politically risky extent. Section 1 reconstructs his account of envy, giving special attention to his belief that competition kindles envy between peers. Section 2 then examines the way in which Rawls often endorses rivalry within the body politic. I argue that the society governed by justice as fairness is, on account of this rivalry, likely to generate a politically problematic degree of particular envy. In Section 3, I invoke ancient Greece as an example of a society that was, as a result of its intense competitiveness, often imperiled by dangerously elevated levels of peer envy. I then survey the key institutional mechanisms by which the ancient Greeks sought to manage this hazardous emotion. It turns out, however, that most of these mechanisms would be unavailable to Rawls insofar as they starkly contravene his principles of justice. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society that fosters rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)

Dewey's voluminous writings, spanning decades and reflecting the contrasting national moods of different historical periods, abound with tensions, not to say contradictions. In highlighting and working with a conflict within Dewey's commitments, then, I do not mean to be catching him out or correcting a mistake. The tension on which I focus is one with which he struggled for most of his philosophical career and one that he never satisfactorily resolved, yet it is also one that goes to the heart (...) of what it is to be a pragmatist. It involves the role of final ends in a philosophy that places practical reasoning at the heart of all knowledge. I will argue that while Dewey had powerful philosophical prejudices that prevented him from adequately dealing with this problem himself, a solution is nonetheless forthcoming that maintains, and perhaps even deepens, the main themes of his pragmatism. Setting out this solution will lead me, in the end, to a novel formulation of the pragmatist theory of truth. (shrink)

Ptolemy reports three dated lunar eclipses observed by Hipparchus, and also refers to two more, without identifying them, which Hipparchus compared with two earlier counterparts (apparently, observed in Mesopotamia) to assess the validity of the Babylonian period relations of the lunar motion. Also, in Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, we are told that a horizontal lunar eclipse (selenelion) at sunrise and moonset was reported (observed?) by Hipparchus. Reviewing a paper by G.J. Toomer in 1980, it is shown that the pairs (...) of the eclipses were, almost certainly, the ones occurring on “31 January 486 b.c. and 27 January 141 b.c.” and “19 November 502 b.c. and 14 November 157 b.c.”; and if Hipparchus observed from St. Stephen’s Hill in Rhodes, the most probable candidate for the selenelion at moonset was the lunar eclipse of 7 February 142 b.c., although he also had the chance to observe any of the four others, occurring on 3 July 150 b.c., 10 April 145 b.c., 26 November 139 b.c., and 15 November 138 b.c., on a sufficiently elevated mountain on the island. (shrink)

_This paper discusses the concept of compassion fatigue in light of the importance that political decisions, especially the application of the concept of public spirit, have had on care and nursing in a Danish hospital context during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is based on recent research literature in the field as well as the author’s own participatory observation study. The paper suggests that nurses already show a sense of public spirit due to their authorization and professional ethics, but at (...) the same time they must balance the ambiguity of nursing care. A linguistic-philosophical study of public spirit shows that the concept can have a discursive, double-binding and interpellative effect on nurses, who may therefore have an experience of inadequacy and compassion fatigue. In this context, compassion fatigue must be understood as the fact that nurses cannot provide the care they want or that is expected of them. Public spirit can be said to have had a renaissance and linguistic and moral supremacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper views the concept of __waywardness 1 as a possible response for how to prevent or completely avoid compassion fatigue, so that nurses instead have an experience of compassion / self-compassion. This could in the end be important for encouraging more nursing students and nurses who have the desire and opportunity to stay in the profession._ _Keywords_: Nursing care, compassion fatigue, public spirit, compassion, COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The practical goal of preventing premature death seems uncontroversial. But the term ‘premature death’ is vague with several, sometimes conflicting definitions. This ambiguity results in several conceptions with which not all will agree. Moreover, the normative rationale behind the goal of preventing premature deaths is masked by the operational definition of existing measures. In this article, we argue that ‘premature death’ should be recognized as a normative concept. We propose that normative theories should be used to justify measures of premature (...) death to provide them with normative validity and public legitimacy. (shrink)

In the ground-breaking 2018 judgment of Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India ushered in a new era by decriminalizing homosexuality, marking a pivotal moment in the country's legal history. However, this progressive stride was accompanied by persistent questions concerning homosexual rights that remained unexplored within both cultural and legal frameworks. Despite the legal acknowledgment, members of the homosexual community are often professed merely as 'individuals' and not fully integrated into mainstream society. This perception (...) is aggravated by the absence of a societal 'stamp of marriage,' reinforcing their marginalization. In the realm of Hindu law, the sanctity of marriage is deeply rooted in the scriptures, which explicitly define it as the union of 'two souls.' Remarkably, these very scriptures also assert that a soul is inherently without gender, elucidating that gender is a characteristic exclusive to the human body. It is crucial to recognize that Hindu law, including the relevant Acts, draws extensively from these scriptures, making them a fundamental source of legal principles. The legislation, such as the Hindu Marriage Act, essentially serves to codify and organize the pre-existing Hindu law without seeking to undermine the intrinsic values enshrined within the Holy Scriptures. This article aims to delve into the unaddressed aspects of homosexual rights within the contemporary legal framework, shedding light on the denied rights that persist. While global attitudes are progressing towards recognizing and safeguarding homosexual rights, the Indian government and cultural factors appear hesitant to renounce orthodox and conservative stances. This article seeks to analyse and critique these aspects, exploring the challenges hindering the full acceptance and integration of homosexual individuals into the broader societal fabric despite the transformative legal landscape initiated by the Navtej Singh Johar case. (shrink)

In this paper we seek to clarify the question of what exactly is meant by an “autonomous” decision or act by focusing on the most fundamental personal condition for deciding or acting autonomously. This basic personal requirement has often been overlooked in recent debates; where it has been seen, it is characterized in ways that are too demanding. What is meant here is an individual form of self-relation that seems to be constitutive for leading a life as a human and (...) is likely to be acquired very early in life. This significant personal self-relation has three essential aspects: a primal sense of “self-confidence”, a basic form of “self-assertiveness”, and a fundamental form of “self-esteem”. We will call this the “triple S condition” for autonomy. Our main thesis is that any decision or action which is not based on this triple S condition cannot be called “autonomous”. (shrink)

Ṣadr, Muḥammad Bāqir; Islamic philosophy; 20th century.

This article explores the contributions of nineteenth-century philosophers of habit to understanding the rigidity of desire. Focusing on the work of Félix Ravaisson, I argue that Of Habit (1838) makes sense of something that much queer theory fails to address in its investment in the subversion of identity: the tendency of desire to return to known objects and follow well-worn paths, a tendency that does not always result in the affirmation of norms or the consolidation of power. Of Habit offers (...) a new set of terms—crystallization, patterning, and necessity, among others—for comprehending the limits of desire’s flexibility without naturalizing gender or sexuality as permanently fixed or inherent. In so doing, it offers an alternative to queer theories that, indebted to Judith Butler’s performativity thesis, attribute the rigidities of sexual life entirely to the productive power of cultural prohibitions and discursively constructed norms. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that we need more research into concussions and other injuries with potential long-term effects in sport because such research underpins effective, evidence-based prevention, management, support, and treatment. This paper provides an analysis of the obligations of sports federations to support and facilitate such research, as well as an analysis of the role active participants in the sport should have in the research process. The paper focuses on concussion and concussion research, though very similar arguments apply to (...) other common sports injuries with potential long-term effects. The paper argues that sports federations have a moral obligation and a prudential interest in initiating, facilitating, and funding concussion research. This follows from their duty of care towards active participants and from considerations of reciprocity. The ability to discharge these research obligations depends on the resources available to a particular federation, but those who can discharge them should do so. The paper further argues that athletes and other active participants in sport should be involved in all aspects of the concussion research process from conception to design, i.e. that Active Participant Involvement and Engagement (APIE) should be a non-negotiable element of concussion research projects. This is supported by instrumental reasons, but also by philosophical argument based on standpoint epistemology and on ethical arguments related to the interests of active participants. Standpoint epistemology is the epistemological position that the knowledge a person has and can have depends on that person’s standpoint in the world. Keywords: Concussion, funding, participant involvement, sport, sport association, sport federation. (shrink)

Classical Sanskrit commentary on Brahmasūtra; includes original Sanskrit text with English translation.