Desde su descolonización en los años sesenta, África ha sido entendida en el imaginario global como un lugar de conflictos armados, inestabilidad política y pobreza. Sin embargo, durante las últimas décadas, el continente ha atravesado un importante proceso de estabilización, democratización y pacificación. Desde el liderazgo de Mandela en África en la década de 1990 hasta la creación y consolidación de la Unión Africana (UA) desde 2002, los esfuerzos pacificadores han transformado radicalmente el continente. En este proceso han participado numerosos (...) actores internacionales, continentales y regionales como las Naciones Unidas (ONU), la UA y organizaciones regionales como la Comunidad para el Desarrollo del África Meridional (SADC), que, en conjunto, han implementado diferentes enfoques para la consolidación de la paz en el continente. Uno de ellos es la puesta en marcha de una activa iniciativa de "Diplomacia Preventiva" destinada a hacer frente a las tensiones antes de que se conviertan en conflictos armados. Algunos de los ejemplos más importantes son la disputa entre Malawi y Tanzania por la demarcación de las fronteras nacionales en el lago Malawi y la participación continental en la resolución de las crisis políticas de Lesoto y Gambia. Este capítulo destaca los esfuerzos para prevenir los conflictos en África, a nivel estatal y desde las organizaciones regionales. También se analiza la forma en que África se ha convertido en un punto de referencia en las iniciativas internacionales de diplomacia preventiva, al tiempo que se asumen las carencias y dificultades a las que todavía se enfrenta el aparato de consolidación de la paz del continente. (shrink)

Many views rely on the idea that it can never be rational to have high confidence in something like, “P, but my evidence doesn’t support P.” Call this idea the “Non-Akrasia Constraint”. Just as an akratic agent acts in a way she believes she ought not act, an epistemically akratic agent believes something that she believes is unsupported by her evidence. The Non-Akrasia Constraint says that ideally rational agents will never be epistemically akratic. In a number of recent papers, the (...) Non-Akrasia Constraint has been called into question. The goal of this paper is to defend it... for the most part. (shrink)

The literature on epistemic injustice currently displays a logocentric or propositional bias that excludes people with intellectual disabilities from the scope of epistemic agency and the demands of epistemic justice. This paper develops an account of epistemic agency and injustice that is inclusive of both people with and people without intellectual disabilities. I begin by specifying the hitherto undertheorized notion of epistemic agency. I develop a broader, pluralist account of epistemic agency, which relies on a conception of knowledge that accounts (...) not only for propositional knowing, but also for other types of knowing that have been largely neglected in debates on epistemic injustice and agency. Based on this pluralist account of epistemic agency, I then show that people with intellectual disabilities qualify as epistemic agents and therefore as subjects of epistemic justice. Finally, I argue that this pluralist account of epistemic agency pushes us to revisit the current conception of epistemic injustice and to expand its taxonomy in two important ways. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 324-346, September 2022.

The contrast between third- and first-personal accounts of the experiences of autistic persons has much to teach us about epistemic injustice and epistemic agency. This paper argues that bringing about greater epistemic justice for autistic people requires developing a relational account of epistemic agency. We begin by systematically identifying the many types of epistemic injustice autistic people face, specifically with regard to general assumptions regarding autistic people’s sociability or lack thereof, and by locating the source of these epistemic injustices in (...) neuronormativity and neurotypical ignorance. We then argue that this systematic identification pushes us to construe epistemic agency as resulting from a fundamentally relational and dynamic process between an individual, others around them, and their social, cultural, or institutional environment, rather than as a fixed and inherent property of individuals. Finally, we show how our relational account of epistemic agency allows us to introduce the novel concepts of epistemic disablement and epistemic enablement. We argue that these two concepts allow us to more accurately track the mechanisms that undermine or facilitate epistemic agency, and thereby to better understand how epistemic injustice arises and to design more effective interventions to foster greater epistemic justice for autistic people. (shrink)

I analyze the relation between deliberative democracy and trust through the lens of epistemic justice. I argue for three main claims: (i) the deliberative impasse dividing majority and minority groups in many democracies is due to a particular type of epistemic injustice, which I call ‘hermeneutical domination’; (ii) undoing hermeneutical domination requires epistemic trust; and (iii) this epistemic trust is supported by the three deliberative democratic requirements of equality, legitimacy, and accountability. In arguing for those claims, I contribute to the (...) conceptualization of both epistemic injustice and domination, as well as to discussions of trust and deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Epistemologists often assume that rationality bears an important connection to the truth. In this paper I examine the implications of this commitment for permissivism: if rationality is a guide to the truth, can it also allow some leeway in how we should respond to our evidence? I first discuss a particular strategy for connecting permissive rationality and the truth, developed in a recent paper by Miriam Schoenfield. I argue that this limited truth-connection is unsatisfying, and the version of permissivism that (...) supports it faces serious challenges; so, for mainstream permissivism, the truth problem is still unsolved. I then discuss a strategy available to impermissivists, according to which rationality bears a quite strong connection to truth. I argue that this second strategy is successful. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Explainable artificial intelligence has become a vitally important research field aiming, among other tasks, to justify predictions made by intelligent classifiers automatically learned from data. Importantly, efficiency of automated explanations may be undermined if the end user does not have sufficient domain knowledge or lacks information about the data used for training. To address the issue of effective explanation communication, we propose a novel information-seeking explanatory dialogue game following the most recent requirements to automatically generated explanations. Further, we generalise our (...) dialogue model in form of an explanatory dialogue grammar which makes it applicable to interpretable rule-based classifiers that are enhanced with the capability to provide textual explanations. Finally, we carry out an exploratory user study to validate the corresponding dialogue protocol and analyse the experimental results using insights from process mining and argument analytics. A high number of requests for alternative explanations testifies the need for ensuring diversity in the context of automated explanations. (shrink)

Believing rationally is epistemically valuable, or so we tend to think. It’s something we strive for in our own beliefs, and we criticize others for falling short of it. We theorize about rationality, in part, because we want to be rational. But why? I argue that how we answer this question depends on how permissive our theory of rationality is. Impermissive and extremely permissive views can give good answers; moderately permissive views cannot.

William James famously tells us that there are two main goals for rational believers: believing truth and avoiding error. I argues that epistemic consequentialism—in particular its embodiment in epistemic utility theory—seems to be well positioned to explain how epistemic agents might permissibly weight these goals differently and adopt different credences as a result. After all, practical versions of consequentialism render it permissible for agents with different goals to act differently in the same situation. -/- Nevertheless, I argue that epistemic consequentialism (...) doesn’t allow for this kind of permissivism and goes on to argue that this reveals a deep disanalogy between decision theory and the formally similar epistemic utility theory. This raises the question whether epistemic utility theory is a genuinely consequentialist theory at all. (shrink)

This book develops a unique phenomenology of plurality by introducing Hannah Arendt’s work into current debates taking place in the phenomenological tradition. Loidolt offers a systematic treatment of plurality that unites the fields of phenomenology, political theory, social ontology, and Arendt studies to offer new perspectives on key concepts such as intersubjectivity, selfhood, personhood, sociality, community, and conceptions of the "we." _Phenomenology of Plurality_ is an in-depth, phenomenological analysis of Arendt that represents a viable third way between the "modernist" and (...) "postmodernist" camps in Arendt scholarship. It also introduces a number of political and ethical insights that can be drawn from a phenomenology of plurality. This book will appeal to scholars interested in the topics of plurality and intersubjectivity within phenomenology, existentialism, political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to reflect mechanisms involved in word identification, was also examined. The ERP data showed a clear frequency effect as early as 350 ms from word onset on the (...) P350, followed by a later effect at word offset on the late N400. A neighborhood density effect was also found at an early stage of spoken-word processing on the PMN, and at word offset on the late N400. Overall, our ERP differences for word frequency suggest that frequency affects the core processes of word identification starting from the initial phase of lexical activation and including target word selection. They thus rule out any interpretation of the word frequency effect that is limited to a purely decisional locus after word identification has been completed. (shrink)

The traditional blackface character Black Pete has been at the center of an intense controversy in the Netherlands, with most black citizens denouncing the tradition as racist and most white citizens endorsing it as harmless fun. I analyze the controversy as an utter failure, on the part of white citizens, of what Alison Jaggar has called multicultural literacy. This article aims to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy and the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be (...) possible. I argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice and to white ignorance. I close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy. (shrink)

The philosophical debate on secession has hitherto revolved primarily around the question of self-determination rather than that of distributive justice. Normative theorists of secession have approached the question of secession mostly in terms of the right that the secessionist group has to secede. Much less attention has been paid to the extent and the nature of obligations or duties that the seceding group might have toward the group it is leaving behind. At best, secession theorists have introduced clauses to the (...) effect that secession should not undermine the remainder state’s viability nor violate prior arrangements of reciprocal cooperation. While these clauses certainly reflect a certain concern for distributive justice, I argue that they are insufficient in two respects: they are problematically minimal in what they require, and the justification given for these clauses accounts only for part of the normative picture. In this paper, I address these two shortcomings by arguing that the seceding group might have significant duties of distributive justice toward the remainder group, and that these duties are associative in nature and stem from a concern to secure non-domination within the pre-secession polity. What is gained from my non-domination account, then, is that it is analytically more comprehensive and normatively more accurate. In arguing for claims and, the paper contributes both to the debate on secession as well as to the conceptualization of associative duties and of non-domination. (shrink)

Does motor behavior early in development have the same signatures of habituation, dishabituation, and Spencer-Thompson dishabituation known from infant perception and cognition? And do these signatures explain the choice preferences in A not B motor decision tasks? We provide new empirical evidence that gives an affirmative answer to the first question together with a unified neural dynamic model that gives an affirmative answer to the second question.In the perceptual and cognitive domains, habituation is the weakening of an orientation response to (...) a stimulus over perceptual experience. Switching to a novel stimulus leads to dishabituation, the re-establishment of the orientation response. In Spencer-Thompson dishabituation, the renewed orientation response transfers to the original stimulus. The change in orientation responses over perceptual experience explains infants' behavior in preferential looking tasks: Familiarity preference early during exposure and novelty preference late during exposure. In the motor domain, perseveration in the A not B task could be interpreted as a form of familiarity preference. There are hints that this preference reverses after enough experience with the familiar movement. We provide a unified account for habituation and patterns of preferential selection in which neural dynamic fields generate perceptual or motor representations. The build-up of activation in excitatory fields leads to familiarity preference, the build-up of activation in inhibitory fields leads to novelty preference. We show that the model accounts for the new experimental evidence for motor habituation, but is also compatible with earlier accounts for perceptual habituation and motor perseveration. We discuss how excitatory and inhibitory memory traces may regulate exploration and exploitation for both orientation to objects and motor behaviors. (shrink)

Credences, unlike full beliefs, can’t be true or false. So what makes credences more or less accurate? This chapter offers a new answer to this question: credences are accurate insofar as they license true educated guesses, and less accurate insofar as they license false educated guesses. This account is compatible with immodesty; : a rational agent will regard her own credences to be best for the purposes of making true educated guesses. The guessing account can also be used to justify (...) certain coherence constraints on rational credence, such as probabilism. The chapter concludes by discussing some advantages of the guessing account over rival accounts of accuracy. (shrink)

In the wake of the Supreme Court Decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) argue that the unraveling of the constitutional right to abortion t...

What determines qualitative sameness and difference? This book explores four principal accounts of the ontological basis of properties, including universals, trope theory, resemblance nominalism, and class nominalism, considering the assumptions and ontolological commitments which are required to make each into a plausible account of properties. -/- The latter half of the book investigates the applications of property theory and the different conceptions of properties which might be adopted with these in mind: first, the possibility and desirability of individuating properties, and (...) the distinction between sparse and abundant conceptions of properties; second, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties; third, the relationship between properties and their causal powers, and whether this is necessary or contingent; fourth, the relationship between properties and causation, modality, and laws of nature; finally, whether properties exist objectively, and if they do, what our epistemic position is with respect to such entities. (shrink)

Sophie Grace Chappell develops a picture of what philosophical ethics can be like, once set aside from the idealising and reductive pressures of conventional moral theory. Her question is 'How are we to know what to do?', and the answer she defends is 'By developing our moral imaginations'.

Because secession centrally involves taking away a territory, a successful normative theory of secession must give a credible account of when a seceding group has a valid territorial claim. One of the most prominent types of normative theory of secession is remedial theories of secession. I argue that while remedial theories address the question of territorial justification, they fail to do so adequately, because their account is both arbitrary and internally inconsistent. I argue that addressing the question of territorial justification (...) non-arbitrarily and consistently requires adopting a broader and morally more plausible conception of justice than that on which remedial theories explicitly rely; and I show that this broader conception of justice is implicit in remedial theories’ account of territorial justification. Recognizing this, however, has significant implications for remedial theories, as it considerably broadens the scope of valid territorial claims, and hence of valid secessionist claims. (shrink)

In science policy, it is generally acknowledged that science-based problem-solving requires interdisciplinary research. For example, policy makers invest in funding programs such as Horizon 2020 that aim to stimulate interdisciplinary research. Yet the epistemological processes that lead to effective interdisciplinary research are poorly understood. This article aims at an epistemology for interdisciplinary research, in particular, IDR for solving ‘real-world’ problems. Focus is on the question why researchers experience cognitive and epistemic difficulties in conducting IDR. Based on a study of educational (...) literature it is concluded that higher-education is missing clear ideas on the epistemology of IDR, and as a consequence, on how to teach it. It is conjectured that the lack of philosophical interest in the epistemology of IDR is due to a philosophical paradigm of science, which prevents recognizing severe epistemological challenges of IDR, both in the philosophy of science as well as in science education and research. The proposed alternative philosophical paradigm entails alternative philosophical presuppositions regarding aspects such as the aim of science, the character of knowledge, the epistemic and pragmatic criteria for accepting knowledge, and the role of technological instruments. This alternative philosophical paradigm assume the production of knowledge for epistemic functions as the aim of science, and interprets ‘knowledge’ as epistemic tools that must allow for conducting epistemic tasks by epistemic agents, rather than interpreting knowledge as representations that objectively represent aspects of the world independent of the way in which it was constructed. The engineering paradigm of science involves that knowledge is indelibly shaped by how it is constructed. Additionally, the way in which scientific disciplines construct knowledge is guided by the specificities of the discipline, which can be analyzed in terms of disciplinary perspectives. This implies that knowledge and the epistemic uses of knowledge cannot be understood without at least some understanding of how the knowledge is constructed. Accordingly, scientific researchers need so-called metacognitive scaffolds to assist in analyzing and reconstructing how ‘knowledge’ is constructed and how different disciplines do this differently. In an engineering paradigm of science, these metacognitive scaffolds can also be interpreted as epistemic tools, but in this case as tools that guide, enable and constrain analyzing and articulating how knowledge is produced. In interdisciplinary research, metacognitive scaffolds assist interdisciplinary communication aiming to analyze and articulate how the discipline constructs knowledge. (shrink)

The conventional view of Hobbes’s commonwealth is that it was inspired by contemporary theories of tyranny. This article explores the idea that a paradigm for Hobbes’s state could in fact be found in early modern readings of Aristotle on democracy, as found in Book Three of the Politics. It argues that by the late sixteenth century, these meditations on the democratic body politic had developed claims about unity, mythology, and personation that would become central to Hobbes’s own theory of the (...) commonwealth. Tracing the history of commentary on the relevant passages in Aristotle reveals new perspectives not only on the political theories of both Aristotle and Hobbes but also introduces modern readers to the richness of early modern commentaries on classical political texts. The article ends with some thoughts on why attention to traditions of commentary might be valuable for political theorists today. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion on control has largely centred around control over our actions and beliefs. Yet this overlooks the question of whether we also have control over the reasons for which we act and believe. To date, the overriding assumption appears to be that we do not, and with seemingly good reason. We cannot choose to act for a reason and acting-for-a-reason is not itself something we do. While some have challenged this in the case of reasons for action, these claims (...) seem especially untenable regarding believing for a reason. And extending the scope of control in this way also faces the threat of regress. In the face of this orthodoxy, the present paper argues that we do in fact have control over both believing and acting for a particular reason. It also starts to develop an account of the way in which this would be possible. Given the broad importance of understanding control and agency, this paper bears on a number of topics in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. (shrink)

The recent crisis involving the territory of Crimea has been characterized both as a case of wrongful annexation and as one of rightful secession. Territory and competing territorial claims lie at the heart of the normative questions of secession and annexation. Any normative theory of secession or of annexation must therefore address their territorial aspect: It must explain why one agent rather than another has a valid claim to the disputed territory. One of the most interesting, yet controversial, normative accounts (...) of secession has been offered by choice theorists of secession. Choice theorists adopt a rather permissive stance, based on the normative significance of political self-determination. Choice theories, however, have been widely criticized for failing to provide a satisfactory account of what legitimates the seceding group’s territorial claim. This article argues that it is possible to remedy choice theories’ failure to address the question of territorial justification adequately. To do so, this article offers a two-tier account of territory that is grounded in the normative significance of self-determination. It defends this account of territory by showing that it is implied by our normative condemnation of annexation. It argues that the same reasons that warrant opposition to annexation provide support for secession. In closing, this article revisits the case of Crimea in light of its two-tier account of territory, and considers what role international law and institutions might play in addressing this type of situation. (shrink)

Epiphanies is a philosophical exploration of epiphanies, peak experiences, 'wow moments', or ecstasies as they are sometimes called. What are epiphanies, and why do so many people so frequently experience them? Are they just transient phenomena in our brains, or are they the revelations of objective value that they very often seem to be? What do they tell us about the world, and about ourselves? How, if at all, do epiphanies fit in with our moral systems and our theories of (...) how to live? And how do epiphanic experiences fit in with the rest of our lives? These are Sophie Grace Chappell's questions in this ground-breaking new study of an area of inquiry that has always been right under our noses, but remains surprisingly under-explored in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This paper introduces the reconstitutor as a comprehensive unit of heredity within the context of evolutionary research. A reconstitutor is the structure resulting from a set of relationships between different elements or processes that are actively involved in the recreation of a specific phenotypic variant in each generation regardless of the biomolecular basis of the elements or whether they stand in a continuous line of ancestry. Firstly, we justify the necessity of introducing the reconstitutor by showing the limitations of other (...) evolutionary conceptions of the unit of heredity, such as the replicator, the reproducer, and the Darwinian individual. We argue that these conceptions are based on the requirement of lineage formation, which we argue to be unnecessary for the existence of evolutionary heredity. In the second part, we introduce the reconstitutor, which we base on the concept of Stability of Traits, and illustrate how it covers cases of hereditary phenomena not covered by the previous accounts. Secondly, we illustrate how the reconstitutor could serve as a platform to rethink ecological inheritance and other forms of inheritance that have been recently introduced under the song/singer model of evolution. (shrink)

Mental causation has been a hotly disputed topic in recent years, with reductive and non-reductive physicalists vying with each other and with dualists over how to accommodate, or else to challenge, two widely accepted metaphysical principles—the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and the principle of causal non-overdetermination—which together appear to support reductive physicalism, despite the latter’s lack of intuitive appeal. Current debate about these matters appears to have reached something of an impasse, prompting the question of (...) why this should be so. One possibility well worth exploring is that, while this debate makes extensive use of ontological vocabulary—by talking, for instance, of substances, events, states, properties, powers, and relations—relatively little attempt has been made within the debate itself to achieve either clarity or agreement about what, precisely, such terms should be taken to mean. Hence, the debate has become somewhat detached from broader developments in metaphysics and ontology, which have lately been proceeding apace, providing us with an increasingly rich and refined set of ontological categories upon which to draw, as well as a much deeper understanding of how they are related to one another. In preparing this volume, the editors invited leading metaphysicians and philosophers of mind to reflect afresh upon the problem of mental causation in the light of some of these recent developments, with a view to making new headway with one of the most challenging and seemingly intractable issues in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage collectif porte sur la place qu’occupent les femmes dans différentes parties de l’Empire romain d’Orient hellénophone. Il résulte de trois rencontres scientifiques organisées dans le cadre du programme GRECS d’ANIHMA entre 2012 et 2014. Comme l’explique Sophie Lalanne dans son introduction, le volume ne reflète que partiellement le contenu de ces rencontres ; l’éditrice formule d’ailleurs des réflexions intéressantes sur la place de l’histoire des femmes et du genre dans le domain...

The actions of able agents are often reliably successful. I argue that their success may be modally robust along two dimensions. The first dimension helps distinguish the exercise of abilities, which requires local control, from lucky success. The second concerns the global availability of acts: agents with the ability to φ can φ across a variety of circumstances. I introduce a framework that captures the two dimensions and their interaction, and show how it bears on a disagreement about the modal (...) force the robustness of ability requires: while local control involves a kind of local necessity, global availability does not. (shrink)

Should citizens have equal say regarding the running of society? Following the principles of democracy, and most of political philosophy: yes (at least at a fundamental level, thus allowing for representatives and the like). Indeed, comparing the main alternative seemingly supports this intuition. Epistocracy would instead give power just to the most epistemically competent. Yet testing citizens’ political and economic knowledge looks apt to disproportionately disempower marginalised groups, making the position seem like a nonstarter and democracy the clear winner. Nevertheless, (...) this paper argues against giving citizens equal say, or at least, it offers the strongest possible motivation for this position. In particular, I introduce the progressive case for epistocracy, and what I term standpoint epistocracy. This account refigures the relevant notion of political competence such that it is not the most privileged classes who would most likely constitute our epistocracy, but rather, the least. The resulting picture considerably improves on traditional versions of epistocracy and also democracy. (shrink)

This article illuminates Henry Irving’s production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1896) as a major contribution to fin-de-siècle Gothic culture. Cymbeline (1896) was one of the most popular Victorian Shakespeare productions, running to wild acclaim for more than seventy-two performances. In Cymbeline’s sexually-charged bedroom scene, Imogen, played by beloved Victorian actress Ellen Terry, was preyed upon by Henry Irving’s villainous Iachimo. Terry and Irving were at the zenith of a twenty-year partnership at London’s Lyceum theatre, and Victorian Britain’s greatest star actors. Ellen (...) Terry’s Imogen became an ideally desirable heroine for both audiences and critics of Victorian Shakespeare. Simultaneously, Cymbeline, and the acclaimed performances of Terry and Irving, became a source for literature’s most famous Gothic vampire novel: Dracula, published by Bram Stoker in 1897. Bram Stoker was Henry Irving’s business manager, and intimately involved with Irving and Terry’s professional lives at the Lyceum theatre. This article reveals the relationship between Shakespeare and Dracula, especially Ellen Terry’s Imogen as an inspiration for Lucy Westenra. Textual evidence includes Terry’s correspondence and unpublished promptbooks, as well as Stoker’s biography of Henry Irving, and facsimile notes on Dracula. Examining Cymbeline (1896) and Dracula (1897) offers a new reading of Dracula, given Cymbeline’s obsession with liminal states and female vulnerability. Moreover, Victorian responses to Ellen Terry’s Imogen in the bedchamber scene highlight fin-de-siècle eroticisations of the sleeping woman, and Victorian fantasies of sexual access to the actress. Examining Terry’s reception illuminates the disjunction between performed female passivity as Imogen, and the professional, creative activity that underlined Terry’s stage practice and agency as a Victorian actress. (shrink)

Intentional binding describes the phenomenon that actions and their effects are perceived to be temporally approximated. We introduced a new method of duration estimation to the research field, the method of constant stimuli. Participants freely chose to press one of two keys or experienced passive key presses. After an interval of 250 ms or 600 ms a visual effect occurred. In Experiment 1, each key produced an effect after a specific interval. In Experiment 2, both keys produced an effect after (...) the same interval that varied between sessions. Participants compared the duration of the action–effect interval with a tone of varying duration. To assess intentional binding, we compared the perceived duration of the action–effect interval between the active and passive condition. We showed intentional binding for 600 ms, but not for 250 ms action–effect intervals in both experiments. Thus, the method of constant stimuli is suitable to assess intentional binding. (shrink)

En Afrique, les religions ancestrales enseignent à chercher sa cohérence intérieure, en restant relié aux autres et à l’univers. Ainsi, chez les Maasaï, la spiritualité peut se traduire par ces lignes de force : vaincre ses peurs, rester relié, ne pas créer de divisions en soi et autour de soi. L’homme doit mettre en adéquation ses mots et ses actes pour éviter la dissonance et les antagonistes, sources de déséquilibres personnel et relationnel. Actes et mots doivent être «jumeaux», aller de (...) paire. Aucune différence entre le dire et le faire chez ces peuples d’Afrique, qui savent par expérience que cette cohérence est la garantie de relations saines et durables. Au-delà des images, l’Afrique est avant tout la terre de la religion. Non pas d’une religion mystique et abstraite vouée aux grandes questions de la métaphysique, mais d’une religion terrienne, liée à la nature, qui s’exprime à chaque instant de la vie, qui inspire aux hommes et aux femmes chaque geste, chaque parole. Sophie Ekoué nous guide dans la découverte de la sagesse africaine, dans toute la diversité des peuples. Mythes fondateurs de l’Afrique, art de la parole juste et du silence, représentation du corps à travers les masques et les danses, conception du temps conjugué au présent, lien étroit entretenu avec les ancêtres et la nature : autant de conceptions du monde à prendre en compte dans notre quotidien, quelle que soit notre culture et nos croyances. (shrink)

I propose a programme of research in ethical philosophy, into the peak-experiences or wow-moments that I, following James Joyce and others, call epiphanies. As a first pass, I characterize an epiphany as an (1) overwhelming (2) existentially significant manifestation of (3) value, (4) often sudden and surprising, (5) which feels like it “comes from outside” – it is something given, relative to which I am a passive perceiver – which (6) teaches us something new, which (7) “takes us out of (...) ourselves”, and which (8) demands a response. Often the correct response is love, often it is pity, or again creativity. It might also be anger or reverence or awe or a hunger to put things right – a hunger for justice; or many other things. It may be something that leads directly to action, but it may also be something that prompts contemplation; or other responses again. Since epiphanies are what I call a focal-case category, not all of the conditions listed above have to be fulfilled by all instances of epiphanies. In order to allow the reader to get a better grip on which range of phenomena may count as an epiphany, I examine in some detail several examples from literature, in particular from works by Murdoch, Hopkins, Wordsworth, C.S. Lewis, and by James Joyce. (shrink)

Algorithmic technologies and artificial intelligence are centred on data and generate new business models, known as the data-driven economy. In the European Union context, the development of such new business is accompanied by a regulatory and political framework. An important aspect of this regulatory framework regards the legal conditions that enable the data collection, availability, sharing, use and reuse. Within the larger context, this article analyses the development of the European Union regulatory framework governing the availability, sharing and reuse of (...) public sector data, also referred to as Public Sector Information policy. Anchored in the analytical tools provided by Discursive Institutionalism and Critical Data Studies and after studying the evolution of this policy over 25 years, this article argues that economic considerations have been overwhelmingly decisive in the European Union Public Sector Information policy and much less attention has been paid to fundamental rights and democracy issues. It also shows how European Union Public Sector Information policy contributes to the data infrastructure, enabling a thriving data-driven economy. In doing so, this article argues that the possible problematic effects of this new data-driven economy are not only affordances of the technology itself but are also the result of political and regulatory choices. More globally, the article stresses the need for policymakers to inscribe each of the policies and regulations affecting the digital transformation in the framework of fundamental rights and democracy. (shrink)

Preterm birth is defined as delivery occurring before 37 weeks gestation.1 Infants born prematurely have increased risks of morbidity and mortality throughout life, especially during the first year. These risks increase as the gestational age at birth decreases.2 Additionally, there are significant racial and ethnic differences in preterm birth rates. In 2022, the rate of preterm birth among non-Hispanic black women was approximately 50% higher than that observed in non-Hispanic white women.1 The outcomes for these infants are also disparate–preterm birth (...) and low birth weight are the second-leading causes of infant mortality (deaths before 1 year of age). Notably, among preterm neonates, infants born to non-Hispanic black women have a mortality rate more than double that of infants born to non-Hispanic white mothers.3 Importantly, there is a small but significant group of neonates that can be classified as severely premature (those born <28 weeks). Infants born before 28 weeks have varied and uncertain outcomes. While this group accounts for only 0.4% of preterm births, it also accounts for 40% of deaths among preterm neonates.4 As noted by Romanis and Adkins, the advent of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) holds promise for its potential to address the physiologic complications and mortality risks of extreme prematurity by introducing amniotic substitutes that mimic in vivo placental oxygenation and substrate delivery. In contrast …. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to explore the process linking participative leadership to organizational identification. The study examines the relationship between participative leadership and internal CSR perceptions of employees and also investigates the role that pride in membership plays in the affiliation of CSR perceptions with organizational identification. By studying these relationships, the paper aspires to contemplate new presumed mediators in the association of participative leadership with organizational identification as well as determine a possible novel antecedent of employee CSR (...) perceptions. Empirical evidence is provided from data that was collected through a survey distributed to employees working for small- and medium-sized enterprises in three countries in the Middle East and North Africa regions, particularly the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Tunisia. Findings show that participative leadership leads to positive internal CSR perceptions of employees and that these CSR perceptions lead to pride in membership which, in turn, results in organizational identification. Implications of these findings are also discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that confabulation is motivated by the desire to have fulfilled a rational obligation to knowledgeably explain our attitudes by reference to motivating reasons. This account better explains confabulation than alternatives. My conclusion impacts two discussions. Primarily, it tells us something about confabulation – how it is brought about, which engenders lively debate in and of itself. A further upshot concerns self-knowledge. Contrary to popular assumption, confabulation cases give us reason to think we have distinctive access to why (...) we have our attitudes. (shrink)