This essay investigates the troubled status of the concept of the index and its concomitant notion of evidence within the context of a global, visual culture. Specifically, the essay centres on the notion of the index in an era, where the use of digital images claiming to truthfully represent war and conflict has become an increasingly important part of warfare. Focusing on two documentary works by respectively performance artist Rabih Mroué and visual artist Abu Lawrence Hamdan, the article shows that (...) whilst both artists rely on material documents, which in each their way index back to conflictual events, the crucial point is not so much the status of the evidentiary material per se. Instead, enabled by fictitious strategies, the artists invite us to pay attention to the differing statuses and meanings assigned to documents depending on the particular knowledge systems and spaces of appearance within which they are perceived. In this way, the essay argues, the works of Mroué and Hamdan help us move beyond the discourses within documentary theory, which tend to conform to either a postmodernist relativist position or a realist epistemology. (shrink)

The book brings together leading contemporary thinkers of war to outline the aesthetic dimension of warfare across art, technology, and politics.

In this article, I demonstrate that the term ‘ubuntu’ has frequently appeared in writing since at least 1846. I also analyse changes in how ubuntu has been defined in written sources in the period 1846 to 2011. The analysis shows that in written sources published prior to 1950, it appears that ubuntu is always defined as a human quality. At different stages during the second half of the 1900s, some authors began to define ubuntu more broadly: definitions included ubuntu as (...) African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, and as a worldview. Furthermore, my findings indicate that it was during the period from 1993 to 1995 that the Nguni proverb ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ (often translated as ‘a person is a person through other persons’) was used for the first time to describe what ubuntu is. Most authors today refer to the proverb when describing ubuntu, irrespective of whether they consider ubuntu to be a human quality, African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, or a worldview. (shrink)

In this article, I describe and systematize the different answers to the question ‘What is ubuntu?’ that I have been able to identify among South Africans of African descent (SAADs). I show that it is possible to distinguish between two clusters of answers. The answers of the first cluster all define ubuntu as a moral quality of a person, while the answers of the second cluster all define ubuntu as a phenomenon (for instance a philosophy, an ethic, African humanism, or, (...) a worldview) according to which persons are interconnected. The concept of a person is of central importance to all the answers of both clusters, which means that to understand these answers, it is decisive to raise the question of who counts as a person according to SAADs. I show that some SAADs define all Homo sapiens as persons, whereas others hold the view that only some Homo sapiens count as persons: only those who are black, only those who have been incorporated into personhood, or only those who behave in a morally acceptable manner. (shrink)

In this article, I demonstrate that the term ‘ ubuntu ’ has frequently appeared in writing since at least 1846. I also analyse changes in how ubuntu has been defined in written sources in the period 1846 to 2011. The analysis shows that in written sources published prior to 1950, it appears that ubuntu is always defined as a human quality. At different stages during the second half of the 1900s, some authors began to define ubuntu more broadly: definitions included (...) ubuntu as African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, and as a worldview. Furthermore, my findings indicate that it was during the period from 1993 to 1995 that the Nguni proverb ‘ umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ’ (often translated as ‘a person is a person through other persons’) was used for the first time to describe what ubuntu is. Most authors today refer to the proverb when describing ubuntu , irrespective of whether they consider ubuntu to be a human quality, African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, or a worldview. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between infrastructure and attention through the lens of contemporary Danish poetry. It applies Susan Leigh Star’s concept of “infrastructural inversion” on the poetic practices of two Danish poets with immigrant background, Yahya Hassan and Shadi Angelina Bazeghi, by focusing on the infrastructural conditions for the production, circulation and reception of their poetry via literary institutions and liberal news media in Denmark in recent years.

ZusammenfassungAdipositas ist eine weltweite Herausforderung für die Gesundheitssysteme. In Zeiten des demografischen Wandels sind auch immer mehr ältere Menschen davon betroffen, was sowohl die Akut- als auch die Langzeitpflege vor erhebliche Herausforderungen stellt. Bislang fehlt eine detaillierte Analyse der vielfältigen Gruppe der über 65-Jährigen in diesem Bereich. Weder die Bedürfnisse der Pflegebedürftigen noch der Pflegekräfte und Einrichtungen werden beobachtet, analysiert oder systematisch bewertet. Darüber hinaus sind die ethischen Implikationen der professionellen Pflege von älteren Menschen mit Adipositas in Forschung und Politik (...) noch nicht diskutiert worden. Wir argumentieren, dass ein bedürfnisorientierter Ansatz angemessen ist, um diese ethische Komplexität anzugehen. Dafür sollte eine breite und umfassende Analyse der ethischen Aspekte aus einer interdisziplinären Perspektive erfolgen. Daher führen wir ein systematische Literaturrecherche (Scoping Review) und eine thematische Fallanalyse durch, um den aktuellen Stand der Forschung aus professionellen Pflegeeinrichtungen in europäischen und nordamerikanischen Institutionen zusammenzufassen. So gewinnen wir Einblicke in die direkten Erfahrungen von Leistungserbringern und adipösen Patient*innen im Pflegebereich. Wir kommen zu dem Schluss, dass auch in Deutschland ein erheblicher Forschungsbedarf an der Schnittstelle ethischer Herausforderungen von Langzeitpflege, Alter und Adipositas besteht. Aus der begrenzten Anzahl von (Fall‑)Studien, die sich finden lassen, geht eine Reihe von ethischen Bedenken hervor, die direkte Auswirkungen auf den Zugang, die Inanspruchnahme und die Qualität der Versorgung haben. Ein empirisch-ethischer Ansatz kann die künftige Forschung und Pflegepraxis im Bereich der Adipositas und der Altenpflege leiten. Schwerpunkte der zukünftigen Mixed-methods-Forschung sollten sein: die Bedürfnisse adipöser älterer Menschen und ihrer Pfleger*innen, Kriterien für die Abwägung von Bedürfnissen und Ressourcenallokation sowie praktische Lösungen für mehrfach stigmatisierte Menschen. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have argued that disability activists' redefinition of disability' as a social problem, rather than a medical problem, is maleficent, unjust, and inconsistent. It seems that the discussion on whether disability is a medical or a social category is not settled and that disability is an essentially contested concept. However, the question is: What is the social aspect in disability? It appears that there is some confusion as to what the social is in a social definition of disability. The (...) article pursues possible reasons for this confusion by investigating the critique of the social model. This is followed by a discussion on what a possible space for the social might be in a social definition of disability. Such a space is illuminated by using the framework of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health. The article suggests that disability as a social category is not inconsistent if reframed within a social relational model of disability. (shrink)

Several theorists argue that one does not experience something as being at or coming from a distance or direction in olfaction. In contrast to this, I suggest that there can be a variety of spatial aspects of both synchronic and diachronic olfactory experiences, including spatial distance and direction. I emphasise, however, that these are not aspects of every olfactory experience. Thus, I suggest renouncing the widespread assumption there is a uniform account of the nature, including the spatial nature, of what (...) is experienced in olfactory experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the puzzle. (...) While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal. (shrink)

The relationship between music and dance can sometimes be a ‘match’, a remarkable fit between the audible manifestation that music is and the visual or kinaesthetic manifestation that dance is. A match between two things seems to require a common measure with respect to which the match obtains. What can this be for two so different phenomena as music and dance? I argue that the most promising answer is: movement. This answer will not be satisfactory unless the movement of music (...) and the movement of dance are the same on some level. I suggest that they are: there are qualities of movement that guide both dancers and musicians when producing dance and music as perceptible phenomena. But the match in qualities is elusive, since the qualities are instantiated in different ways in music and dance, respectively. (shrink)

This paper explores a colonial controversy: the imposition of state rules to limit salmon fishing in a Scandinavian subarctic river. These rules reflect biological fish population models intended to preserve salmon populations, but this river has also been fished for centuries by indigenous Sámi people who have their own different practices and knowledges of the river and salmon. In theory, the Norwegian state recognizes traditional ecological knowledge and includes this in its biological assessments, but in practice this does not happen, (...) so Sámi fishing practices and the realities that they enact are disappearing. This paper explores how to conceptualize colonial differences in knowing. Drawing on recent anthropology, it asks how “settler” and “nomadic” enact worlds and their realities, suggesting that, unlike the latter, the former create a single reality intolerant of alternatives. The focus is thus on a “politics of how” and the ways in which colonial realities and knowledges might intersect less destructively. (shrink)

This paper outlines a ‘perceptual account’ of depiction. It centrally contrasts with experiential accounts of depiction in that seeing something in a picture is understood as a visual experience of something present in the picture, rather than as a visual experience of something absent. The experience of a picture is in this respect akin to a veridical rather than hallucinatory perceptual experience on a perceptual account. Thus, the central selling-point of a perceptual account is that it allows taking at face (...) value the intuitive claim that we see things in pictures. Preserving this claim has a potential cost, however: we need to postulate that some kind of thing, T, is present in the realm of the picture, and it is not straightforward to find a plausible type of entity to play this role. The paper examines three alternative choices of T; T may be a material object, a visual appearance or a universal. (shrink)

The Bologna Framework for higher education has agreed on three “cycle descriptors”—knowledge, skill and general competence—which are to constitute the learning outcomes and credit ranges for the three cycles of higher education: The Bachelor, the Master and the PhD. In connection with the implementations of the national qualification framework these descriptors initiated a new debate on the possibility of Bildung within higher education in Norway. Pursuing this question of whether the triad knowledge, skill and general competences makes possible or prevents (...) Bildung within higher education I argue that regardless of how one conceptualizes Bildung, one must say something about the kind of thinking that initiates a process transforming knowledge to become internalised so as to influence one’s choices and actions. A vital aim for the initiative of the Bologna process as envisioned in the Bologna Declaration 1999 was to develop a “Europe of Knowledge”. Underpinning this and other educational documents it appears that lack of knowledge is seen as an important explanation to todays many challenges. A confidence in knowledge per se as having a transformative power in itself seems to be a belief supporting the knowledge policy that dominates official documents. Following Kierkegaard and his critique of becoming objective as nurturing disinterestedness, I am critical to an understanding of knowledge as transformative in itself if knowledge primarily is understood as objective knowledge. In this paper I argue that in order to take responsibility for the knowledge one holds, a thinking which Kierkegaard calls subjective is an important contribution to one kind of thinking involved if knowledge shall initiate a transformation of one’s life and thus foster responsibility. (shrink)

The British writer John Wyndham (1903–1969) explored societal effects of surprising or mystical events. A paradigmatic example is _The Midwich Cuckoos_ (1957), which portrays identical-looking children born without sexual intercourse. I propose a reading strategy that focuses on the fictional spatial order and analyses how the construction of the children’s otherness interferes with the village’s demarcation. Furthermore, I interpret the mysterious pregnancies as a reference to basic embryo research in the 1950s – cloning. Finally, I scrutinize Wyndham’s negotiation of utilitarianism (...) throughout the novel and his critique of truly utilitarian decisions that are based on constructions of Otherness. (shrink)

It is not unusual in the philosophy of perception to use empirical research to build arguments against or in favour of a certain philosophical view (see Phillips 2016 for a scrutinizing discussion). This methodology is what Barwich uses in her book entitled Smellosophy (2020) when criticizing an approach to olfaction according to which ‘truthful perception is an accurate mental representation of physical properties’ (Barwich 2020: 310). Furthermore, Barwich would like neuroscience to set the agenda for philosophical questions about olfaction, so (...) that empirical evidence is not just used to adjudicate between existing philosophical theories but instead inspires new ones, such as Barwich’s own. Thus, while her main focus is first-order theories of olfaction, she also aims to exemplify a methodology for developing and assessing such theories that ‘break[s] down the silos of institutionalized disciplinarity that are neatly dividing philosophical from neuroscientific inquiry’ (Barwich 2020: 311). The ways in which Barwich arrives at and justifies claims about olfaction give rise to various questions about the relationship between philosophical discussion of perception and neuroscientific results concerning how the brain works. In part 1 of this critical notice, I look at the approach to olfaction that Barwich criticizes and raise a few of these questions. This leads to a query about exactly how the approach differs from Barwich’s own view of olfaction. Part 2 discusses selected aspects of her view. I examine how her claim that olfaction is both exteroceptive and interoceptive and the associated idea that the brain creates odours relate to the empirical research she presents. This leads to a query concerning her methodology, which uses empirical research about brain processing to arrive at conclusions concerning a subject’s experience. (shrink)

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the (...) authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

The article considers Gertrude Stein’s reflections about the increasing abstraction of economics in response to the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal in a number of explicitly political pieces from the mid-1930s, including “A Political Series”, and her five brief newspaper commentaries on “money”: ”Money”, “More About Money”, “Still More About Money”, “All About Money”, and “My Last About Money”. The article then relates them to Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the religious implications of the money system that (...) resonate with Stein’s salute to the “believer in money” as security against contemporary authoritarian tendencies. Stein’s opinion pieces argue against taxation, unionism, and public spending, yet also demonstrate the slippery passage between her explicit conservatism, her economic liberalism and her still present radicalism and critique of patriarchal authority as they recycle crucial elements from contemporaneous works such The Geographical History of America and Everybody’s Autobiography. (shrink)

Metaphors are common in legal discourse because they reify abstract legal concepts. The game metaphor, sometimes used to characterise legal trials, tends to be associated with legal professionals’ work in court. This metaphor portrays a legal trial as a competitive, hostile and masculine process that excludes victims from participating in the trial. In this article, I analyse interviews with victims of rape who have had their case prosecuted in the courts in Norway. The victims use the game metaphor to characterise (...) both the trial and their participation in it. I investigate how the game metaphor adds meaning to rape victims’ understanding and experience of a legal trial and creates room for agency in relation to the prosecution of their rape case. (shrink)

Discussions on diversity and disability in dialogue with special educationalists and philosophers of education are not often found in the research literature. Researchers within disability studies have been critical towards the enterprise of special education and vice versa, and the language they use is often different, as they draw on various subject fields. In this article, I bring these fields of research together and draw on research from the philosophy of education, special education and Disability Studies. My argument is that (...) a language of diversity needs to be embedded in a language about educational ends and other fundamental questions discussed in the philosophy of education, and not solely in discussions within the field of inclusive education, as is often found in the research literature relating to special education. I argue that the language of diversity related to disability should be embedded in the language of the person, being someone. In order to build my argument, I sketch out three distinctions: disability and impairment, education as cultivation versus an existential education and the distinction between being someone and being something. I argue that an understanding of diversity and the case of disability within the framework of education should preferably be: interpreted within a social relational model of disability, drawing on an adjusted capabilities approach, an existential educational paradigm and seeing the person as someone, and not as something that is associated with a series of facts that happen to relate to what we call persons. (shrink)

This book explores the influence of ubuntu on South Africa’s post-apartheid transitional justice mechanism, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and—in contrast to ethnophilosophy—takes differences, historical developments, and social contexts seriously.

It is widely accepted that pictures can only depict visible things. The paper criticises this ‘visibility constraint’ on the objects of depiction. The constraint is shown to imply that the range of visibilia is settled prior to an investigation of what can be seen in pictures. By contrast to this, I suggest that settling what can be seen in pictures is relevant to settling the range of visibilia. It is what we experience in pictures, and not the objects of depiction, (...) that is subject to a visibility constraint, I propose. After criticising the widely accepted visibility constraint in the first half of the paper, I outline an account of what we experience in pictures in the second half of the paper. (shrink)

Given the need for organs, public organizations use social marketing strategies to increase the number of donors. Their campaigns employ a variety of moral appeals. However, their effects on audiences are unclear. We identified 14 campaigns in Germany from over the last 20 years. Our approach combined a multimodal analysis of categorized posters with a qualitative analysis of responses, collected in interviews or focus groups, of 53 persons who were either skeptical or undecided about organ donation. The combined analyses revealed (...) that the posters failed to motivate laypersons in general to donate, and were even less effective on skeptical or undecided individuals. We explain this in terms of the types of moral messages found on posters and the limits of such social marketing strategies. Furthermore, we discuss certain ethical aspects of organ donation campaigns pertaining to communicating norms and trust in public institutions. (shrink)

In the traditions of narrative ethics and casuistry, stories have a well-established role. Specifically, illness narratives provide insight into patients’ perspectives and histories. However, because they tend to see fiction as an aesthetic endeavour, practitioners in these traditions often do not realize that fictional stories are valuable moral sources of their own. In this paper I employ two arguments to show the mutual relationship between bioethics and fiction, specifically, science fiction. First, both discourses use imagination to set a scene and (...) determine a perspective. Second, bioethics and science fiction share the family resemblance of expressing moral beliefs. I then consider how understanding bioethics and science fiction as interrelated discourses can be the basis of a methodology for inquiry into relational autonomy in the context of biotechnologies and medicine. As an example of this methodology, I analyse Fay Weldon’s novel The Cloning of Joanna May. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, wie angesichts eines Interessenpluralismus ethische Diskurse über innovative und hochriskante Forschungsvorhaben angemessen geführt werden können. Dazu rekonstruieren wir erstens den Begriff des Stakeholders im Kontext seiner Entstehung in der Unternehmensethik und Anwendung in der Medizinethik und legen dessen implizite normative Prämissen frei. Wir entwickeln zweitens eine Klassifizierung von Stakeholdern und illustrieren diese am Beispiel der klinischen Forschung. Besonderes Augenmerk wird dabei auf das Kriterium der Betroffenheit gelegt. Drittens werden für unterschiedliche Formen der Betroffenheit von Stakeholdern angemessene (...) Beteiligungsverfahren vorgestellt, die von Information bis Empowerment reichen können. Wir zeigen, warum es für ethische Diskurse in der Medizin- und Bioethik wichtig ist, Betroffenheit und Beteiligungsverfahren auf transparente und nachvollziehbare Weise in ein reflektiertes Verhältnis zu setzen und wie das praktisch zu bewerkstelligen ist. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the puzzle. (...) While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal. (shrink)

When unknowingly experiencing a perceptual hallucination, a subject can attempt to think specifically about what is, as far as he or she can tell, the perceived object. Is the subject then deceived about his or her cognitive situation? I answer negatively. Moreover, I argue that this answer is compatible with holding that thought specifically about a certain object – singular thought – is object-dependent. By contrast, both critics and advocates of the view that singular thought is object-dependent have assumed this (...) view to be committed to postulation of illusions of object-dependent thought in cases like that mentioned. The core ingredient in my illusion-free version of the view is a special form of disjunctivism. Alleged cases of illusion are not considered parasitic on ‘the good case’ where the object thought about is perceived. (shrink)

At profesjonsutøvere er ansvarlige og har ansvar knyttet til arbeidet de utfører, tar vi nærmest for gitt. Mitt sikte med denne artikkelen er å gi et innspill til nærere drøfting av hvordan det profesjonelle ansvaret kan forstås. I nyere profesjonsetiske kodekser knyttes ansvar først og fremst til konsekvenser av handlinger. Det innebærer at den profesjonelles ansvar forutsetter at det kan trekkes en linje fra en handlings konsekvens til den handlende. I komplekse organisasjoner kan imidlertid rekonstruksjon av veien fra konsekvens av (...) handling tilbake til den handlende vise seg vanskelig. Alternativt kan ansvar knyttes til spørsmål om handlingens samsvar med regler og prosedyrer. En slik tilnærming benevnes gjerne som «accountability». Disse to ulike tilnærmingene til ansvar har det til felles at det er handlingen som er i fokus – handlingens regelsamsvar eller dens konsekvenser, ikke en individuell dimensjon knyttet til den handlende som person. Den profesjonelle som selvstendig, tenkende og vurderende person blir perifer. Til videre drøfting av dette trekker jeg veksler på Hannah Arendts tenkning om ansvar. «To-i-én-dialog» og «tenkning» er sentrale elementer, og jeg vil peke på hennes bidrag som en mulig vei til en utdypet forståelse av det profesjonelle ansvarets individuelle dimensjon.Nøkkelord: profesjonelt ansvar, handlingens konsekvenser, accountability, to-i-én-dialog, tenkningEnglish summary: Individual responsibility and shallowness in professional workIt is almost taken for granted that professionals are responsible for the work they do. The scope of this article is to contribute to an evaluation of how we can understand this professional responsibility. Modern professional–ethical codes tie responsibility primarily to the consequences of acts. Thus the responsibility of a professional assumes that a connection can be drawn between the consequences of an act to the person who acted. However, in complex organizational structures, it can be difficult to find the path from consequence to actor. Another option is to look at responsibility as the product of an action's compliance with rules and procedures. Such an approach is often called «accountability». What these two different approaches to responsibility have in common is the focus on an action. It is the consequences of acts or compliance of rules that matter rather than the individual who performs the act. The idea of a professional as an autonomous, thinking and evaluating person becomes peripheral. The individual dimension of responsibility involves that the professional's responsibility goes beyond adherence to rules and procedures and what follows from tracking acts and consequences. I use Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the responsibility to facilitate further debate on this topic. A «two-in-one» dialogue and «thinking» are core elements in this, and I will point to her contribution as a possible path to a more in-depth understanding of the individual dimension of professional responsibility. (shrink)

A program for the simulation of rational social normative trust, predictive `trust,' and predictive reliance between agents will be introduced. It offers a tool for social scientists or a trust component for multi-agent simulations/multi-agent systems, which need to include trust between agents to guide the decisions about the course of action. It is based on an analysis of rational social normative trust (RSNTR) (revised version of M. Tuomela 2002), which is presented and briefly argued. For collective agents, belief conditions for (...) collective agency should be added. For the various forms of trust agents must have (at least) subjectively rational reasons to believe that the conditions of the trust account are fulfilled. A list of such reasons (of varied weights), e.g., given by empirical research, can manually be built into a parameter file or be generated by a calling program in a fixed format. From this list of reasons the program randomly generates a belief base for the agents of the artificial society. Reasons can be chained together so that one set of reasons satisfies several belief conditions. The program checks if the conditions are fulfilled for the artificial agents' social normative trust/predictive `trust'/`predictive reliance' in another agent that he will perform an action X. Each outcome is logged to a result file. In conclusion we discuss various aspects of the application of a trust component of the suggested kind in empirical research, social simulation, and multi-agent systems. (shrink)

In his tragedy Philoctetes, Sophocles has firmly tied the fundamental conflicts to the characters, more precisely to the triangular relationship Ulysses - Neoptolemus - Philoctetes. In the prologue, he sets up the relationship of the older, designing Ulysses to the young, executive Neoptolemos as a problematic one through ambivalent formulations. These traces laid out by the poet are crucial for the interpretation of the entire tragedy. The connotation of the term ξυνεργάτης (v. 93), with which Neoptolemos describes the role Odysseus (...) has intended for him, has been rather neglected so far by scholars but appears to be of particular significance: Parallels in Euripides show that its divergent meanings ‘helper’ and ‘accomplice’ reflect the general conflict of the young hero in nuce. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article looks to Attic comedy to explain Socrates’ first argument in Plato's Hippias Major: his refutation of Hippias’ claim that the Beautiful is a beautiful girl. As part of his argument, Socrates introduces three examples of beautiful things—a mare, a lyre and a pot —all of which are used in comedy as metaphorical obscenities for sexualized women. The author contends that an erotic reading of the text accomplishes what no other interpretation can: a unified account of the passage that (...) allows for Socrates’ successful refutation of a proposal in keeping with Hippias’ character. In addition, it explains Socrates’ choice of examples—in particular, the rarely cited χύτρα—and Hippias’ otherwise inexplicable reaction to the χύτρα, as well as the analogous relationship of monkeys and men to pots and girls. (shrink)

This article questions whether enmity is always bad and trust always good. In the borderlands between Ikland in northern Uganda and Turkanaland in Kenya, sometimes violent enmity combines with friendly barter relations between the Ik, a subsistence agricultural people that also hunts, and their goat-and-cattle herding neighbors, the Turkana and Dodoth peoples. “Half-trust,” as some of the Ik call it, works to prevent the escalation of conflict. While the Ugandan groups have been disarmed by their government, the Kenyan Turkana, armed (...) with AK-47s, are allowed into Ugandan territory for pasture during drought, and some Turkana take violent advantage of this power imbalance as they leave. Paradoxically, intervention by Ugandan state institutions that, in the name of peaceful coexistence, welcome the Turkana in Uganda has led to the escalation of conflict, while tribal “half-trust” has kept it relatively limited. (shrink)