In this paper, we offer a Leftist critique of standard liberal defenses of the public school. We suggest that the standard arguments employed by mainstream liberal defenders of the public school are generally inadequate because they fail to provide a credible representation of their historical object, let alone effective remedies to our current problems. Indeed, many of these narratives, in our view, are grounded in fantasies about what public schools, or teaching and learning, are or could be, as (...) much as they are grounded in the historical realities of public schools or the realities of so-called privatization. We speculate whether the self identification of the proponents of this cause as ‘progressive’ is not part of this ideological construction and if the underlying political agenda is not in fact more conservative. (shrink)

Liberalism is often criticized for its emphasis on order and system. The liberal phraseology is hallmarked by such concepts as individual rights and impartial justice. Relying on law and reason and using tight legal definitions, the polity advocated by liberals views itself as applying equally to all citizens within it. Though ostensibly concerned with protecting liberties, the mechanisms liberalism deploys to carry out this task betray an oppressive streak. Individuals are addressed as modular and homogenous legal personalities that (...) carry identical packages of rights. Personal identities are hence prescribed by a system that recognizes no difference. The law book encompasses all and is impartial to all, admitting no incongruity and no irony. It is blind to insights that are local and particular, intuitive, or non-verbal. It therefore suppresses agents that are seen as the carriers of such insights and significantly limits the depth of the liberty it offers. Liberalism, however, is not a monolithic abstraction. Several historical liberalisms are known, each spelling out its particular variation on the shared terminology. Problems raised by the notions of universal applicability and comprehensive knowledge are addressed differently by different liberals. This essay examines the effort made by one school of liberal thinkers to relate to questions of incongruity and difference. It focuses on the early-twentieth century British new liberal group. The essay begins by outlining some of the critiques that concern liberalism's systematizing attribute. This is followed by an attempt to show where new liberalism matches the critical description of liberalism as preoccupied with system. The text then goes on to examine the new liberals' attitudes to notions of disorder, and points out that these Edwardian theorists were aware of the problems implicit in integrating knowledge and society. The text ends with a look at the possible significance of the concepts of excess over system as developed by new liberalism. (shrink)

Congress's national-security legislation will often require clear and specific congressional authorization before the executive can undertake certain actions. The War Powers Resolution, for example, prohibits any law from authorizing military hostilities unless it "specifically authorizes" them. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required laws to amend FISA or repeal its "exclusive means" provision before they could authorize warrantless electronic surveillance. But efforts to legislate clear-statement regimes in national-security law have failed to induce compliance. The Clinton Administration inferred congressional (...) "authorization" for the 1999 Kosovo War from an appropriations statute that failed to specifically authorize the conflict. And the Bush Administration inferred congressional "authorization" for the NSA surveillance program from ambiguous language in the post-September 11th Authorization to Use Military Force. In both situations, executive-branch lawyers employed expansive theories of implied repeal and constitutional avoidance to evade the codified clear-statement requirements, and Congress and the courts acquiesced to the President's actions. Recent proposals to strengthen the clear-statement requirements in Congress's national-security framework legislation are unlikely to be effective without institutional mechanisms, such as points of order, that can deter future legislators from enacting vague or ambiguous legislation from which the executive might claim implicit congressional "authorization," and that can induce Congress to confront Presidents that act without specific congressional authorization. Simply enacting more narrow or explicit clear-statement requirements, or adding funding restrictions to Congress's framework legislation, fails to counter the aggressive interpretive doctrines that executives of both political parties have used to concoct congressional "authorization" from vague or ambiguous statutory language. (shrink)

This is not a work of mine. For some reason, I am unable to remove it from my page. It is a list of Dr. Reiner Schürmann's lecture notes for courses that he taught at the New School for Social Research (aka The New School).

Legal theory usually distinguishes only two kinds of legal realism: the American and the Scandinavian. Another school of this theoretical perspective is German legal realism, which refers to scholars like Ihering, Weber, and Schelsky. According to German legal realism, the author outlines what legal theory can do to persuade modern jurisprudence to face the social reality of law, conceived as institutionalized normative communication. The latter always occurs with reference to already valid and effectively operative legal norms which are used (...) in an established, normatively binding legal practice in a given regional society. (shrink)

This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory. Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work covers such (...) wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis, intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society. (shrink)

Determinist thought with its sui generis view on life, nature and being as a whole is a point of view that could be observed in many different cultures and beliefs. It was thanks to Greek thought that it ceased to be a cultural element and transformed into a systematic cosmology. Schools such as Leucippos, then Democritos and Stoa attempted to integrate the determinist philosophy into ontology and cosmology. In the course of time, physics and metaphysics-based determinism approaches were introduced, and (...) a wide spectrum has emerged from genetics to behaviorism, from culture to psychology, from atomism to divinity. Determinism, whether physical or metaphysical origin, ignores freedom of will and deny agency competence over human behavior. Due to this feature, it is opposed by ethical theories, legal philosophies and religions. When the arguments for determinism are possible to disprove logically and philosophically, this is not so easy when the claims base themselves on scientific base. As the logical consequence of this novel fact, it is important to question the epistemological value of scientific knowledge and critically analyze the data of experiments and clinical studies in terms of methodology when answering any hypothesis such as neuro-biological, neuro-psychological, or neuro-theological argumentations. On the other hand, it is necessary to reach alternative experiments on the same subject or to show that it is possible to interpret them in different ways, as in the example of the Libet experiment. The neurobiological determinism based on biological reductionism, emerged as the result of ignoring the ontological difference of the mind, equating the mind with the brain, or defining mentality as an epiphenomenon of the brain. The main divergence stems from the acceptance of materialist philosophy. Paradigms that reduce existence only to matter do not take the metaphysical possibilities into account. In this case, although the problems called qualia or subjective experience stand there unresolved, the claim is preserved. Although many new developments such as the discovery of the entropy law, the big bang theory, and quantum physics have shaken the materialist philosophy, modern science resists an epistemological revision. However, with the current epistemology, it does not seem possible to grasp both the universe and the being as a whole. This is the most important reason why every attempt to understand the nature and spiritual side of human beings fails despite numerous experiments on the brain. However, the human brain is an organ that seems sophisticated and its secrets cannot be easily solved. Since there is not enough information about the brain, there is not enough evidence to claim that the brain, and therefore the mind, are part of the deterministic universe. Increasing brain researches since the last quarter of the twentieth century has revealed that genes, neurons and particularly brain chemistry claim much greater role than expected in human behavior. These results have been instrumentalized by some researchers for a radical claim that free will is an illusion, while by others it has led to the acceptance of will as less important over actions than was thought. Both ideas adopted a model of biological determinism in which freedom of will was ignored. Hypotheses based on controversial interpretations of various experiments raised concerns about religious, moral, and legal responsibility. Although man cannot be thought of as a non-free being from the point of view of common sense, the smog screen over the truth would not be lifted unless the scientific data in question had a correct interpretation. At first glance, it seems unreasonable to discuss universal determinism in the quantum universe. Nevertheless, the claim that strong causality prevails in the material world, including consciousness, remains in place. Therefore, firstly criticizing determinism and then examining biological determinism will help to fix the conceptual framework. This article aims to explain why genetics and neurobiology, while acknowledging their importance in the realization of behavior, can’t completely abolish moral agency. Some hypotheses attribute consciousness and free will to the physico-shimic structure of the brain, the random activity of neurons, or the ability to automatically transform inputs into outputs with the advantage of genetic information. This is the most sensitive and important point of being human; it attacks free will. Paradoxically, while global civilization of our time promises infinite freedom to human beings the science of the same age tries to prove that it is not free. (shrink)

There is an old but powerful argument for the claim that exhaustive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A crucial ingredient in this argument is the principle of the “Fixity of the Past”. A seemingly new response to this argument has emerged, the so-called “dependence response,” which involves, among other things, abandoning FP for an alternative principle, the principle of the “Fixity of the Independent”. This paper presents three arguments for the claim that FI ought to (...) be preferred to FP. (shrink)

Two major regulatory changes are affecting the provision of undergraduate legal education in England and Wales. On the one hand, the Qualifying Law Degree is being deregulated, meaning law schools are free to make significant changes to how and what they teach. On the other hand, higher education in England has seen a significant overhaul through the creation of the Office for Students, which treats students as consumers. Now more than ever, law schools need to ask themselves existential questions which (...) will not only test their continued relevance or indeed viability within the ‘market’ for higher education, but also the status of the discipline of law as a whole. The regulatory landscape may indeed present a significant threat, but it is also an opportunity to reflect on what law schools are for, and consequently what changes could result from the academic freedom that comes with deregulation. Whilst different law schools will interpret their mission differently, they should caution against either generalised inertia or succumbing to an outcomes-oriented provision that simply prepares students for the new Solicitors Qualifying Examination. Instead, law schools will find their proper purpose in critical reflection and academic self-grounding, providing undergraduate students with a ‘question everything’ mentality, and showing them that law is something to be experienced and not merely learnt. (shrink)

This centenary volume of essays explores a number of related themes which differentiate and characterize the approach of the LSE. Central to this, is the assumption that law is one of the social sciences and that law should be studied "in context" as a social phenomenon. The contributors have been chosen both for their distinction and for their connection with the LSE, and include such eminent figures as Mrs Justice Arden, Judge Rosalyn Higgins, Sir Stephen Sedley, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. (...) The essays focus on three main subject areas: Law and Economy; Dimensions of Law; and Courts and Process which are discussed against the broader canvas of the School's approach to Law. Thus, Comaroff, Cohen, Unger and Teubner adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, stressing both legal and social theory, while the contributions of Cranston, Cornish and others stress an internationalist approach. A characteristic LSE focus on the dynamic nature of law runs through the work of Collins, Higgins and Lord Wedderburn, while a reformist tradition is explored alongside the introduction of new legal subjects into the curriculum. Fascinating and thought provoking, this volume is an accesible summary of current thought and debate presented by today's leading scholars and practioners. Law, Society and Economy will be of enduring interest to scholars and practioners worldwide, akin to Ginsberg's celebrated and widely cited volume of essays which marked the School's fiftieth anniversary. (shrink)

This centenary volume of essays explores a number of related themes which differentiate and characterize the approach of the LSE. Central to this, is the assumption that law is one of the social sciences and that law should be studied "in context" as a social phenomenon. The contributors have been chosen both for their distinction and for their connection with the LSE, and include such eminent figures as Mrs Justice Arden, Judge Rosalyn Higgins, Sir Stephen Sedley, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. (...) The essays focus on three main subject areas: Law and Economy; Dimensions of Law; and Courts and Process which are discussed against the broader canvas of the School's approach to Law. Thus, Comaroff, Cohen, Unger and Teubner adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, stressing both legal and social theory, while the contributions of Cranston, Cornish and others stress an internationalist approach. A characteristic LSE focus on the dynamic nature of law runs through the work of Collins, Higgins and Lord Wedderburn, while a reformist tradition is explored alongside the introduction of new legal subjects into the curriculum. Fascinating and thought provoking, this volume is an accesible summary of current thought and debate presented by today's leading scholars and practioners. Law, Society and Economy will be of enduring interest to scholars and practioners worldwide, akin to Ginsberg's celebrated and widely cited volume of essays which marked the School's fiftieth anniversary. (shrink)

There is an old and powerful argument for the claim that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A recent response to this argument, sometimes called the “dependence response,” centers around the claim that God’s relevant past beliefs depend on the relevant agent’s current or future behavior in a certain way. This paper offers a new argument for the dependence response, one that revolves around different cases of time travel. Somewhat serendipitously, the argument also paves the way (...) for a new reply to a compelling objection to the dependence response, the challenge from prepunishment. But perhaps not so serendipitously, the argument also renders the dependence response incompatible with certain views of providence. (shrink)

“The influence of [Kazimierz] Twardowski on modern philosophy in Poland is all-pervasive. Twardowski instilled in his students a passion for clarity [. . .] and seriousness. He taught them to regard philosophy as a collaborative effort, a matter of disciplined discussion and argument, and he encouraged them to train themselves thoroughly in at least one extra-philosophical discipline and to work together with scientists from other fields, both inside Poland and internationally. This led above all [. . .] to collaborations with (...) mathematicians, so that the Lvov school of philosophy would gradually evolve into the Warsaw school of logic [. . .]. Twardowski taught his students, too, to respect and to pursue serious research in the history of philosophy, an aspect of the tradition of philosophy on Polish territory which is illustrated in such disparate works as [Jan] Łukasiewicz’s ground-breaking monograph on the law of non-contradiction in Aristotle and [Władysław] Tatarkiewicz’s highly influential multi-volume histories of philosophy and aesthetics. [. . .] The term ‘Polish philosophy’ is a misnomer [. . .] for Polish philosophy is philosophy per se; it is part and parcel of the mainstream of world philosophy – simply because [. . .] it meets international standards of training, rigour, professionalism and specialization.”– Barry Smith, “Why Polish Philosophy does Not Exist”. (shrink)

This is the penultimate draft of a paper originally presented at the Hart-Fuller at 50 conference, held at the NYU Law School in February 2008. A revised version will appear in the NYU Law Review. The paper seeks to clarify and assess HLA Hart's famous claim that legal positivism somehow involves a 'separation of law and morals.' The paper contends that Hart's 'separability thesis should not be confused with the 'social thesis,' with the 'sources thesis,' or with a methodological (...) thesis about jurisprudence. Hart's thesis denies the existence of necessary (conceptual) connections between law and morality. But that thesis is false: there are many necessary connections between law and morality, some of them conceptually significant. Among these is an important negative connection: law is of its nature morally fallible and morally risky. Lon Fuller emphasised the 'internal morality of law,' the 'morality that makes law possible'. Hart stressed that there is also an immorality that law makes possible. Law's nature is seen not only in its internal virtues, in legality, but also in its internal vices, in legalism. (shrink)

The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testamentdocuments alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima (...) facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed—a principle I call the contamination principle—entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of good independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence. (shrink)

Although much recent social science and humanities work has been a revolt against simplification, this volume explores the contrast between simplicity and complexity to reveal that this dichotomy, itself, is too simplistic. John Law and Annemarie Mol have gathered a distinguished panel of contributors to offer—particularly within the field of science studies—approaches to a theory of complexity, and at the same time a theoretical introduction to the topic. Indeed, they examine not only ways of relating to complexity but complexity _in (...) practice._ Individual essays study complexity from a variety of perspectives, addressing market behavior, medical interventions, aeronautical design, the governing of supranational states, ecology, roadbuilding, meteorology, the science of complexity itself, and the psychology of childhood trauma. Other topics include complex wholes in the sciences, moral complexity in seemingly amoral endeavors, and issues relating to the protection of African elephants. With a focus on such concepts as multiplicity, partial connections, and ebbs and flows, the collection includes narratives from Kenya, Great Britain, Papua New Guinea, the Netherlands, France, and the meetings of the European Commission, written by anthropologists, economists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and scholars of science, technology, and society. _Contributors._ Andrew Barry, Steven D. Brown, Michel Callon, Chunglin Kwa, John Law, Nick Lee, Annemarie Mol, Marilyn Strathern, Laurent Thévenot, Charis Thompson. (shrink)

Human rights discourse has been likened to a global lingua franca, and in more ways than one, the analogy seems apt. Human rights discourse is a language that is used by all yet belongs uniquely to no particular place. It crosses not only the borders between nation-states, but also the divide between national law and international law: it appears in national constitutions and international treaties alike. But is it possible to conceive of human rights as a global language or lingua (...) franca not just in a figurative or metaphorical sense, but in a literal or linguistic sense as a legal dialect defined by distinctive patterns of word choice and usage? Does there exist a global language of human rights that transcends not only national borders, but also the divide between domestic and international law? Empirical analysis suggests that the answer is yes, but this global language comes in at least two variants or dialects. New techniques for performing automated content analysis enable us to analyze the bulk of all national constitutions over the last two centuries, together with the world’s leading regional and international human rights instruments, for patterns of linguistic similarity and to evaluate how much language, if any, they share in common. Specifically, we employ a technique known as topic modeling that disassembles texts into recurring verbal patterns. The results highlight the existence of two species or dialects of rights talk—the universalist dialect and the positive-rights dialect—both of which are global in reach and rising in popularity. The universalist dialect is generic in content and draws heavily on the type of language found in international and regional human rights instruments. It appears in particularly large doses in the constitutions of transitional states, developing states, and states that have been heavily exposed to the influence of the international community. The positive-rights dialect, by contrast, is characterized by its substantive emphasis on positive rights of a social or economic variety, and by its prevalence in lengthier constitutions and constitutions from outside the common law world, especially those of the Spanish-speaking world. Both dialects of rights talk are truly transnational, in the sense that they appear simultaneously in national, regional, and international legal instruments and transcend the distinction between domestic and international law. Their existence attests to the blurring of the boundary between constitutional law and international law. (shrink)

On January 18, 2006, the United States Supreme Court unanimously held that the constitutional challenge to New Hampshire's Parental Notification Prior to Abortion Act would be remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to determine whether the Court of Appeals could, consistent with New Hampshire's legislative intent, formulate a narrower remedy than a permanent injunction against enforcement of the parental notification law in its entirety.In 2003, New Hampshire enacted the Parental Notification Prior to Abortion Act. (...) The Act specifies, in pertinent part, that “No abortion shall be performed upon an unemancipated minor or upon a female for whom a guardian or conservator has been appointed… until at least 48 hours after written notice of the pending abortion has been delivered....” The Act allows for three exceptions where a physician may perform an abortion on a minor child without parental or guardian notification. (shrink)

"End-Of-Law week drinkS @ ACT Magistrates Court: Friday 20 May 2005." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (198), pp. 24.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This chapter analyses Soren Kierkegaard's thought about the history of theology, discussing different notions of historical theology and evaluating how they apply to the way Kierkegaard engaged with history of theology. It explains the two key elements of the Kierkegaardian historical theology: tracking the process of decline from the Christianity of the New Testament to the enfeebled caricature that passed for Christianity in contemporary Denmark; and recovering the voices of the true Christians of the past who genuinely followed Christ in (...) suffering and martyrdom. (shrink)

On January 18, 2006, the United States Supreme Court unanimously held that the constitutional challenge to New Hampshire's Parental Notification Prior to Abortion Act would be remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to determine whether the Court of Appeals could, consistent with New Hampshire's legislative intent, formulate a narrower remedy than a permanent injunction against enforcement of the parental notification law in its entirety.In 2003, New Hampshire enacted the Parental Notification Prior to Abortion Act. (...) The Act specifies, in pertinent part, that “No abortion shall be performed upon an unemancipated minor or upon a female for whom a guardian or conservator has been appointed… until at least 48 hours after written notice of the pending abortion has been delivered....” The Act allows for three exceptions where a physician may perform an abortion on a minor child without parental or guardian notification. (shrink)

The theological energies released by Martin Luther in 1517 created a set of theological insights and problems that eventually led to the development of kenotic Christology. This article traces how kenotic Christology originated in the Eucharistic Controversy between Luther and Zwingli, before receiving its first extensive treatment in the debate between the Lutheran theologians of Tübingen and Giessen in,the early seventeenth century. Attention then turns to the nine-teenth century, when doctrinal tensions resulting from the enforced union of the Prussian Lutheran (...) and Reformed churches created the conditions for a new flowering of kenotic Christology in the theologies of Ernst Sartorius and, subsequently, Gottfried Thomasius. Kenotic Christology ultimately originates with Luther, however, for it owes its existence to the creative theological energies he unleashed and which remain his lasting legacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The New Liberalism of L. T. Hobhouse and the Reenvisioning of Nineteenth-Century UtilitarianismDavid WeinsteinIn the eyes of some, modern liberal theorizing has fallen victim to tyrannizing conceptual dualisms that have rendered it a tedious dialogue of predictable positioning and strident partisanship. On the one hand those who dream the dream of unencumbered selfhood are said to be locked in a bitter struggle with those who long for the (...) rebirth of encumbering community. On the other hand and in a not wholly unrelated way, Kantians are supposedly and forever beating back the phoenix of consequentialism. In short, the tyrannizing dualisms of individualism vs. communitarianism and Kantianism vs. consequentialism allegedly and detrimentally channel much modern liberal theorizing.But such rivalries, however real or fanciful, need not be philosophical liberalism’s singular fate. Nor do these rivalries exclusively characterize its variegated past. My aim is to challenge the cogency and expose the historical limitations of one of these tyrannizing dualisms, namely that between Kantianism and consequentialism, by way of examining L. T. Hobhouses’s new liberalism. In my view this seeming rivalry within liberalism is a convenient straw man readily weakened by more scrupulous attention to liberalism’s new liberal past. 1 [End Page 487]Principally, I hope to show that Hobhouse’s rendering of liberalism privileged good but not at the price of stultifying welfare pooling, individuality but not at the cost of pitiless individualism. Hobhouse’s version of new liberalism may not have been quite utilitarian, but it nevertheless took maximizing good seriously while retaining a firm commitment to strong moral rights and the flourishing of individuals as ends. Hobhouse’s new liberalism, then, was as robustly juridical and as authentically liberal as it was fundamentally consequentialist.The Rational Good and Moral PersonalitySelf-realization was the normative hinge of Hobhouse’s new liberalism. Self-realization, in turn, can not be understood without examining Hobhouse’s notion of the rational good. Hence, The Rational Good, published later in his life in 1921, occupies a vital position in his thought though recent scholarship has all but ignored this work. 2In this work Hobhouse begins by asking “whether there is a Rational, and therefore demonstrable, standard of values to which the actions of man and the institutions of society may be referred for judgment.” 3 For Hobhouse, such a standard exits and the remainder of the book endeavors to persuade us accordingly.In a chapter entitled “The Good,” Hobhouse claims that the proposition that something is good expresses a “disposition” and asserts a “fact.” The disposition consists of a favorable “practical attitude” towards pleasurable feelings, which certain (self-realizing) experiences invariably entail. In Hobhouse’s words “the judgment ‘This is good’ is not only the expression of an attitude but also the assertion of a fact, and the fact which it asserts is a harmony between an experience and a feeling.” 4 Hence, we deem good only those self-realizing experiences that are harmonious in the sense that they generate feelings of pleasure. A pleasure-producing experience is a harmonious experience and, assuming that it is also self-realizing, we are disposed to pronounce it “good.”Now separate harmonious experiences, unless rationally coordinated, will likely clash, thereby generating overall disharmony or pain. Experiences which we separately judge as good may turn out to be bad on the whole. A good life, therefore, is a satisfying coherent life. Only a rationally coherent life is fully self-realizing and constitutes the rational good. In short “that what we reasonably call good or what is really good must be a harmony of the [End Page 488] totality of feeling with the totality of experience so far as it affects feeling. Thus, Practical Reason is the effort of the mind towards harmony within itself, and with nature.” 5But if, for Hobhouse, practical reason is an ongoing “effort” in coordination, then the fully rational good is a formal ideal which actual lives succeed more or less skillfully in realizing. Hence, Hobhouse also introduces the “realized good” as the practically possible good, and the distance one goes in realizing his or her own good is, as Hobhouse says, “what we call character.” 6 To... (shrink)

The year is 2100. Geena is the proud new owner of Emit, a state-of-the-art robot. She has just unwrapped him, the packaging strewn across the dining room floor. Emit is designed to replicate the outward behaviour of a human being down to the last detail . Emit responds to questions in much the same way humans do. Ask him how he feels and he will say he has had a tough day, has a slight headache, is sorry he broke that (...) vase, and so on. Geena flips the switch at the back of Emit's neck to ‘on’. Emit springs to life. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, (...) our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after circulatory (...) determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

From Descartes to designer babies, The Philosophy Gym poses questions about some of history's most important philosophical issues, ranging in difficulty from pretty easy to very challenging. He brings new perspectives to age-old conundrums while also tackling modern-day dilemmas -- some for the first time. Begin your warm up by contemplating whether a pickled sheep can truly be considered art, or dive right in and tackle the existence of God. In this radically new way of looking at philosophy, Stephen Law (...) illustrates the problem with a story, then lets the argument battle it out in clear, easily digestible and intelligent prose. This perfect little mental health club is sure to give each reader's mind a great workout. (shrink)

This article examines the social development of Hong Kong's cultural and national identity since its return from the UK to the People's Republic of China nearly six years ago, focusing on the extent to which Hong Kong students are now inculcated in traditional Chinese music and express their devotion to the PRC through singing the national anthem. Hong Kong music teachers experience conflicts concerning their roles as music teachers and as purveyors of values education. These observations raise fundamental questions concerning (...) the sociopolitical function of values education in the music classroom. (shrink)

David Law's new book deals with Kierkegaard's `apophaticism' - or those elements of Kierkegaard's thought which emphasize the incapacity of human reason and the hiddenness of God.