Structural Injustice advances a theory of what structural injustice is and how it works. Powers and Faden present both a philosophically powerful, integrated theory about human rights violations and structural unfairness, alongside practical insights into how to improve them.

Starting from the special theory of relativity it is argued that the structure of an experience is extended over time, making experience dynamic rather than static. The paper describes and explains what is meant by phenomenal parts and outlines opposing positions on the experience of time. Time according to he special theory of relativity is defined and the possibility of static experience shown to be implausible, leading to the conclusion that experience is dynamic. Some implications of this for the relationship (...) of phenomenology to the physical world are considered. (shrink)

Although numerical systems have been regarded as static models of a symbolic system and treated as mythological behavior, it is postulated that these systems are more profitably analyzed as dynamic models, better understood as ritual behavior. As ritual, numerical systems, limited in number and expressive of rhythmicity, contribute to the biogenetic structuralist's notion of “equilibration” between the central nervous system and the environment.The relationship between concrete and abstract numeration is also examined, showing that counting behavior, requiring asymmetrical use of the (...) hands, may contribute to understanding the relationships between handedness and brain hemisphericity, as well as enumeration and memorization. (shrink)

This book explores the important yet neglected relationship between the philosophy of time and the temporal structure of perceptual experience. It examines how time structures perceptual experience and, through that structuring, the ways in which time makes perceptual experience trustworthy or erroneous. -/- Sean Power argues that our understanding of time can determine our understanding of perceptual experience in relation to perceptual structure and perceptual error. He examines the general conditions under which an experience may be sorted into different (...) kinds of error such as illusions, hallucinations, and anosognosia. Power also argues that some theories of time are better than others at giving an account of the structure and errors of perceptual experience. He makes the case that tenseless theory and eternalism more closely correspond to experience than tense theory and presentism. Finally, the book includes a discussion of the perceptual experience of space and how tenseless theory and eternalism can better support the problematic theory of naïve realism. -/- Philosophy of Time and Perceptual Experience originally illustrates how the metaphysics of time can be usefully applied to thinking about experience in general. It will appeal to those interested in the philosophy of time and debates about the trustworthiness of experience. (shrink)

Rule-based ethical theories like Kant's appear to be promising for machine ethics because of the computational structure of their judgments. On one formalist interpretation of Kant's categorical imperative, for instance, a machine could place prospective actions into the traditional deontic categories (forbidden, permissible, obligatory) by a simple consistency test on the maxim of action. We might enhance this test by adding a declarative set of subsidiary maxims and other "buttressing" rules. The ethical judgment is then an outcome of the consistency (...) test. While this kind of test can generate results, it may be vacuous in the sense that it would do no more than forbid obviously contradictory maxims of action. It is also possible that the kind of inference in such a rule-based system may be non-monotonic. I discuss these challenges to a rule-based machine ethics, starting from the framework of Kantian ethics. (shrink)

While it is customary for instructors when teaching a philosophical text to point to where a philosopher lays out their overall plan and then let students fill in the pieces, no such passage exists in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics.” While many philosophy courses focus on analyzing arguments, Aristotle’s work provides students a unique opportunity to learn how to assemble the parts into a coherent whole. This paper describes an assignment where students are asked to construct a diagram that visually represents the (...) structure of Aristotle’s work. In response to the tremendous success of this assignment, the paper examines the assignment’s precedents, suggests a theoretical basis for its success, and details its practical benefits. (shrink)

Habermas's transcendentalism in Knowledge and Human Interests ( KHI) deserves to be reappraised for a number of reasons. Prevailing conceptions of strong transcendental arguments, which inform many of his critics, cannot be sustained. The analytic reception of Kant suggests a more modest role for them that is remarkably similar to Habermas's claims for the paradigm of rational reconstruction. Hence a reinterpretation of transcendentalism provides a new basis for establishing a continuity between his early and later work. Habermas's underlying argument structure (...) owes much, albeit unconsciously, to Kant's concept of a regulative idea. Only the "as if" status of regulative ideas allows one to make sense of the metacritical structure of KHI and Habermas's transcendental arguments emerge as deeply hermeneutic in character rather than logical in any formal sense. (shrink)

: In its response to pressures to rationalize health care resource allocation, the American health care system has embraced managed care without concurrent comprehensive health care reform, either in the form of the centralized tax-based systems found in Europe and Canada or that of the Clinton reform plan. What survives is managed care without managed competition, employer mandates, or universal access. Two problems inherent in the incentive structure of managed care plans developed in the absence of comprehensive health care reform (...) work against the public interest. First, sacrifices in terms of medical innovation and quality of care may not be offset by greater equity in the distribution of health care. Second, such managed care plans fail to address the need for long-term accountability. (shrink)

Dislocation phenomena in natural language can be, and often are, thought of as the effects of movement transformations. We propose to handle these phenomena in terms of parser combinators [3, 8] that transform recursive descent parsers for a ‘deep structure language’ into parsers for a ‘surface structure language’. This combinator approach to extraction keeps close to the ‘movement’ intuition and gives a computational account of the well known island constraints on extraction first proposed in [7].

The moral economics of the Islamic Action Front, the partisan wing of the original Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, is both defined and compromised by internal inconsistency. Similar to others that might be classified as a socially conservative, religiously-oriented political party, the Islamic Action Front pledges a paternalist commitment to the poor only to undermine the already limited prospects of such paternalism through the adoption of charity-based approaches to social welfare and through their more general advocacy for economic liberalization, free markets, capital (...) mobility, and private initiative. How can one best explain both the contradictions constituting the Islamic Action Front’s economics and the political implications contained within such an economic agenda? This article will review the intersection of local class structure, party ideology, and history so to furnish an answer. (shrink)

The Buddhist World joins a series of books on the world's great religions and cultures, offering a lively and up-to-date survey of Buddhist studies for students and scholars alike. It explores regional varieties of Buddhism and core topics including buddha-nature, ritual, and pilgrimage. In addition to historical and geo-political views of Buddhism, the volume features thematic chapters on philosophical concepts such as ethics, as well as social constructs and categories such as community and family. The book also addresses lived Buddhism (...) in its many forms, examining the ways in which modernity is reshaping traditional structures, ancient doctrines, and cosmological beliefs. (shrink)

We use content analysis to show that the diagnosis of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 shifted significantly from a focus on the need for structural change in the banking industry to an emphasis on culture and reform at the organizational level. We consider four overlapping subsystems in which this shift in problem–solution clusters played out—political, regulatory, legal, and consulting—and show that the “structural reform agenda,” which was initially strong and publicly prominent in the political arena, lost attention. Over (...) time it was displaced by a neoliberal managerialist turn, which watered down or abandoned structural solutions and instead played up a new “culture and conduct reform agenda.” We explain this shift in terms of the marketization of regulation, which—following Mautner (_Language and the market society_, 1st ed. Routledge, 2010)’s model of interdiscursive alignment—we detect in the shifting language of financial-services reform across the four subsystems in scope. We argue that a neoliberal turn took place with a _discursive closure_ that made the structural reform alternative gradually unsayable and, in the end, unthinkable. At the same time, the discourse turned to embrace the neoliberal agenda, built on the myth of self-regulating actors and markets, manifest in the culture problematic. This managerialist turn was able to mobilise, and be operationalised by, an industry of consultants, whereas structural change came to be seen by regulators as too risky to implement. We claim that these dynamics reveal how a form of “collective strategic ignorance,” based on powerful institutional myths, was systematically oriented to ignore and reject structural sources of crisis. Finally, we suggest that the observed pattern of displacement—whereby initial calls for structural change become later displaced by managerial and procedural solutions—is common to other social issues, such as audit reform and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Background Cardiopulmonary resuscitation and subsequent care are subject to various ethical and legal issues. Few studies have addressed ethical and legal issues in post-resuscitation care. Objective To explore nurses’ experiences of ethical and legal issues in post-resuscitation care. Research design This qualitative study adopted an exploratory descriptive qualitative design using conventional content analysis. Participants and research context In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in three educational hospital centers in northwestern Iran. Using purposive sampling, 17 nurses participated. Data were analyzed by conventional (...) content analysis. Ethical considerations The study was approved by Research Ethics Committees at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. Participation was voluntary and written informed consent was obtained. For each interview, the ethical principles including data confidentiality and social distance were respected. Findings Five main categories emerged: Pressure to provide unprincipled care, unprofessional interactions, ignoring the patient, falsifying documents, and specific ethical challenges. Pressures in the post-resuscitation period can cause nurses to provide care that is not consistent with guidelines, and to avoid communicating with physicians, patients and their families. Patients can also be labeled negatively, with early judgments made about their condition. Medical records can be written in a way to indicate that all necessary care has been provided. Disclosure, withdrawing, and withholding of therapy were also specific important ethical challenges in the field of post-resuscitation care. Conclusion There are many ethical and legal issues in post-resuscitation care. Developing evidence-based guidelines and training staff to provide ethical care can help to reduce these challenges. (shrink)

New biotechnologies have the potential to both dramatically improve human well-being and dramatically widen inequalities in well-being. This paper addresses a question that lies squarely on the fault line of these two claims: When as a matter of justice are societies obligated to include a new biotechnology in a national healthcare system? This question is approached from the standpoint of a twin aim theory of justice, in which social structures, including nation-states, have double-barreled theoretical objectives with regard to human well-being. (...) The first aim is to achieve a sufficient level of well-being in each of six core dimensions. In the special case of healthcare systems, this aim is focally but not exclusively attentive to achieving health sufficiency as one of the core dimensions. The second aim is to combat the emergence and persistence of densely woven patterns of systematic disadvantage that tend to undermine the achievement of a sufficient level of health and the other core elements of well-being of some persons and groups. Judgments about entitlements to health related resources, including new biotechnologies, are made in light of a threshold notion of health sufficiency. What is enough or sufficient health? The answer that is defended here is that sufficient health is enough health for a decent human life, understood as enough health to live a full life course without preventable, significant functional disability or decrement in health, or treatable pain or suffering. When a state must include a new biotechnology in its national healthcare system is also influenced by ancillary concerns about the connection between health and other core dimensions of well-being. What counts as a significant functional impairment or health decrement is thus explicated, in part, in relation to the theory’s sufficiency aim for the other essential dimensions of well-being, and thus for a decent life, overall. Those elements of health that play a critical role in the experience of sufficient reasoning, affiliation, security, respect and self determination are especially important; any loss of health function or capacity that threatens the individual’s prospects for sufficiency in these other dimensions, including the relational egalitiarian concerns they entail, constitutes a significant functional impairment. Within national borders, individuals are thus entitled to those health-related goods and services that are essential for a sufficiency of each of the dimensions of well-being; with regard to self determination and respect, what is sufficient by way of guaranteed access to specific goods and services is going to depend on the implications of such access for where an individual stands in relation to her co-nationals. The content of any entitlement to health-related goods and services is also necessarily dynamic. What can be done for health and the other core dimensions of well-being as a function of technological innovation and diffusion is in constant flux. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this analysis for the conditions under which states are obligated to include access in their healthcare systems to one biotechnology, deep brain stimulation. (shrink)

Research in various disciplines has highlighted that humans are uniquely able to solve the problem of cooperation through the informal mechanisms of reputation and gossip. Reputation coordinates the evaluative judgments of individuals about one another. Direct observation of actions and communication are the essential routes that are used to establish and update reputations. In large groups, where opportunities for direct observation are limited, gossip becomes an important channel to share individual perceptions and evaluations of others that can be used to (...) condition cooperative action. Although reputation and gossip might consequently support large-scale human cooperation, four puzzles need to be resolved to understand the operation of reputation-based mechanisms. First, we need empirical evidence of the processes and content that form reputations and how this may vary cross-culturally. Second, we lack an understanding of how reputation is determined from the muddle of imperfect, biased inputs people receive. Third, coordination between individuals is only possible if reputation sharing and signaling is to a large extent reliable and valid. Communication, however, is not necessarily honest and reliable, so theoretical and empirical work is needed to understand how gossip and reputation can effectively promote cooperation despite the circulation of dishonest gossip. Fourth, reputation is not constructed in a social vacuum; hence we need a better understanding of the way in which the structure of interactions affects the efficiency of gossip for establishing reputations and fostering cooperation. (shrink)

Historically Wales has been regarded as a country with relatively low levels of school exclusion, particularly in comparison with England. This has been used as an indicator of Wales’ commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which foregrounds a rights-based agenda that would argue school exclusion is a consequence of broader socio-economic structures than individual actions. However, simple analyses may mask a different picture of school exclusions in Wales. In this article, we study more detailed information (...) on formal school exclusions by looking at ‘instances’ of school exclusion, which considers the frequency and length of formal school exclusions in Wales, and alongside recorded school absence. The article also demonstrates that the pupils ‘at risk’ of formal school exclusion varies by when they experience school exclusion during their educational lifecourse. The article concludes by highlighting that patterns of school exclusion are complex, and that interpretation of these patterns depends on what kind of measure of school exclusion is used. By publishing these results, the article hopes to persuade policymakers and practitioners to re-examine their processes of exclusion to ensure they are commensurate with the law and to prevent unnecessary school exclusions. (shrink)

Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time – but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms‟ capacity for the “stability of form” – homeostasis - is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue that this capacity is derived from, and grounded (...) in a more primitive one – namely, the homeodynamic capacity for the “specified variation of form”. In introducing a novel type of causal power – a „structural power‟ – we claim that it is the persistence of their dynamic potential to produce a specified series of structurally adaptive morphologies which grounds organisms‟ privileged status as metaphysically “one over many” over time. (shrink)

The 2008 bailout is often taken as evidence of the domination of the US political system by large financial institutions. In fact, the bailout demonstrated the vulnerability of US banks to government pressure. Large banks in the United States could not defy regulators, because their future income depended on the US market. In Britain, by contrast, one bank succeeded in scuttling the preferred governmental solution of an industry-wide recapitalization, because most of its revenue came from outside the United Kingdom. This (...) was an exercise of structural power, but one that most contemporary scholarship on business power ignores or misclassifies, since it limits structural power to the automatic adjustment of policy to the possibility of disinvestment. We show that structural power can be exercised strategically, that it is distinct from instrumental power based on lobbying, and that it explains consequential variations in bailout design in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany. (shrink)

The past decade has been marked by a series of global crises, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship between science and politics. The biological sciences are instrumental in understanding natural phenomena and informing policy decisions. However, scholars argue that current scientific expertise often fails to account for entire populations and long-term impacts, hindering efforts to address issues such as biodiversity loss, global warming, and pandemics. This article explores the structural challenges of integrating an evolutionary perspective, historically opposed to (...) functional determinants of health and disease, into current biological science practices. Using data on Swiss biology professors from 1957, 1980, and 2000, we examine the structural power dynamics that have led to the division between these competing epistemologies, and how this division has influenced resource allocation and career trajectories. Our analysis suggests that this cleavage presents a significant obstacle to achieving fruitful reconciliations, and that increased academicization and internationalization may benefit functional biologists at the expense of evolutionary biologists. While evolutionary biologists have gained symbolic recognition in recent years, this has not translated into valuable expertise in the political domain. (shrink)

Minimal genetic pre-formationism is defended, in that primacy is ascribed to DNA in the structuring of molecules through molecular codes. This together with the importance of such codes for stability and variation in living systems makes DNA categorically different from other causal factors. It is argued that post-transcriptional and post-translational processing in protein synthesis does not rob DNA of this structuring role. Notions of structuring causal powers that may vary in degree, of arbitrary molecular codes that are more or less (...) realized, of partial templating and of genetic information as a subspecies of mechanistic information are brought in to support this and to rival causal and semantic notions of information. It is concluded that the primacy of genes in their structuring of molecules goes together with parity between genes and non-genetic causal factors in regulation of living systems. This is seen to hold independently of the radical reconceptualization of organism cum environment that has been suggested in developmental systems theory. (shrink)

Since the 2008 financial crisis, Europe's largest banks have largely remained unchallenged. Is this because of the structural power banks continue to hold over states? This article challenges the view that states are sheer hostages of banks’ capacity to provide credit to the real economy—the conventional definition of structural power. Instead, it sheds light on the geo-economic dimension of banks’ power: key public officials conceive the position of “their own” banks in global financial markets as (...) a crucial dimension of state power. State priority toward banking thus results from political choices as to what structurally matters most for the state. Based on a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates in France, Germany, and Spain, as well as on a comparative analysis of the implementation of a special tax on banks, this article shows that power dynamics within states largely shape political priorities toward banking at both domestic and international levels. (shrink)

This article argues for the utility in conceiving of two distinctive approaches to the structural power of finance—New Structural Power and Traditional Structural Power. While both are crucial to political economy scholarship, this article highlights the intellectual trade-off that is inherent to the adoption of one perspective over the other, and it stresses the explanatory advantages of the TSP perspective specifically. First, it shows how the TSP framework can facilitate an understanding of when policymaker (...) ideas do and do not matter in the exercise of structural power, retaining the concept of “automaticity” in structural power operations. Second, it demonstrates how each framework is custom-built to explain substantively different aspects of the policy process, with TSP research aimed at system-oriented limitation mechanisms and NSP research aimed at agent-oriented selection mechanisms. Third, it contends that TSP formulations must be embedded within a model of functional explanation, which is the best way to gain empirical traction on the most important macrostructural developments in contemporary finance-led capitalism. Methodologically, this implies an agenda of “explanation through commonalities” rather than the NSP-favored “explanation through variation.”. (shrink)

If we want to say what “fundamentality” means, we have to start by approaching what we generally see at the empty place of the predicate “____ is fundamental”. We generally talk about fundamental entities and fundamental theories. At this article, I tried to make a metaphysical approach of what is for something to be fundamental, and I also tried to talk a little bit of fundamental incomplete and complete theories. To do that, I start stating the notion of “entity” and (...) looking at the difference at perceived entities. The difference led us to talk about the entities’ structures and their powers, and about the supervenience between these last two. The supervenience talk made us to see the fight between emergentism and reductionism as the difference between the irreducibility of laws and the reducibility of powers and structures to lower-order domains. Then, we conclude that “fundamentality” is a mereological relation – a relation that a whole structure has to a certain combination of its structural parts or that a power has to a certain combination of its constituent powers – of to be identical and to exist in virtue of them. (shrink)

A comparative historical perspective shows how globalization and the specificities of China’s rapid growth era limit its hegemonic potential in the twenty-first century global economy. Although state capitalism and openness to foreign capital facilitated China’s economic transformation, interactions among three forms of capital—state, private, and foreign—have produced developmental dynamics that constrain China’s capacity to assume the position of the world’s economic hegemon. These include the compromised competitiveness of China’s corporate sector due to the domination of state-owned enterprises, limits on the (...) ability of Chinese firms to develop leading transnational corporations, and early openness to and continued dependence on foreign capital. Moreover, the party-state’s efforts to ameliorate these constraints arouse external suspicion rather than support a Chinese-led hegemonic order based on consent and shared interests. These historically conditioned realities should temper expectations that China is converging teleologically toward a familiar hegemonic role in the international economy. (shrink)

In contemporary democracies, global capitalism exerts a significant influence over how state power is exercised, raising questions about where political power resides in global politics. This question is important, since our specific considerations about justifiability of political power, i.e. political legitimacy, depend on how we characterize political power at the global level. As a partial answer to this question, I argue that our notion of global political legitimacy should be reoriented to include the structural (...) class='Hi'>power of the Transnational Capitalist Class as its subject matter. Structural power is a social relation in which the institutional context makes some agents comply with others’ preferences regardless of actors’ intentional efforts to bring about such outcomes. Even when global business elites do not intentionally exercise power to obtain political control of global governance, their structural power has recognizable effects that partly enforce the world order. To advance my claim, I utilize the radical realists’ argument that the notion of legitimacy is applicable to a broader range of social practices that are beyond dyadic power relations, i.e. rulers intentionally exercising power over subjects. (shrink)

This article analyzes the Turkish central bank's “managed uncertainty” policy after the global financial crisis. During 2010–14, the central bank intentionally generated uncertainty around short-term interest rates, using the level of predictability faced by financiers as a tool to buffer the domestic economy from volatile capital flows. How did the central bank implement this unconventional policy? Building on interview data and public texts, the article argues that the surge in capital inflows after the crisis sourced a debt-led, financialized economic growth (...) model and deepened Turkey's reliance on external financing. The central bank could diverge from the financial sector's policy preferences despite Turkey's increased foreign capital dependence because the availability of low-cost, ample, private funding opportunities temporarily expanded policymakers’ room to maneuver. However, operating vis-à-vis an unsustainable growth regime, the central bank had to revert to orthodoxy in 2014 due to declining investor confidence and capital flight. This article contributes to the literature on the structural power of finance by demonstrating how finance derives its structural power from funding financialized growth, not productive investments. It also shows that financial structural power varies based on the source and cost of external financing beyond the degree of foreign capital dependence. (shrink)

The power of finance vis-à-vis the nonfinancial sector is changing. Macroeconomic developments and financial innovations have reduced financial actors’ exit options, thus diminishing exit-based structural power. At the same time, shareholdings have become more concentrated in the hands of large asset managers, thus increasing control-based power. This article documents these trends, before examining whether asset managers wield their power and why, despite being universal shareholders, they have not steered corporate behavior toward decarbonization. Rather than assuming (...) orderly, good-faith interactions between shareholders and managers, this article argues that in the United States today, political considerations govern the use of control-based power. Asset managers’ corporate governance policies are subservient to the—increasingly inconsistent—goals of maximizing assets under management while avoiding regulatory backlash. Unlike exit-based power, control-based power is constrained by being highly visible and, therefore, easily politicized. (shrink)

How do we theorize and analyze the structural power of finance when global capitalism itself undergoes constant and profound structural transformation? The literature continues to assume that the source of financial structural power is its unique ability to provide credit to the real economy, playing a crucial role in meeting the investment imperative. But recent research documents that most financial market activities no longer facilitate productive investment and can even be a drag on economic development. (...) If the financial sector's primary role is not to support productive investments, then on what basis does it continue to hold structural power? The contributions to this special issue engage with how decades of financialization have transformed the basis of structural power toward alternative functions that have gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These include household and real estate lending that fuels consumption-led growth, concentration and expansion of financial institutions as tools of geo-economic strategy, financing current account deficits that facilitate global imbalances, and wealth preservation that bolsters inequality. (shrink)

In this paper the concept of structural power is presented as a philosophical and social category that should be used when modern processes of political, cultural or economic change are considered. The arguments will be presented in three stages: 1. Power - two perspectives, two traditions 2. Structural power - the concept 3. Structural power - as a mechanism of explanation the modern social change. The paper refers to two traditions of analyzing the (...) problem of power (as a corrective or as a persuasive influence) and shows that concept of structural power can be a link between those two theoretical perspectives. The paper also refers to the problem of modern, macro changes. It will be shown how the concept of structural power, because of its usage of categories like "experts' power,"public discourse meanings" or "legitimization", can be useful in philosophical reflection about contemporary international and national issues. (shrink)

This article examines the structural power of domestic finance in developing and emerging economies in the context of a shift toward increasingly activist financial development planning and financial sector reform. Focusing on efforts to create large, internationally competitive banks in Malaysia and Nigeria dating to the late 1990s and early 2000s, it highlights that banks have not played their envisaged role in financing structural transformation via industrial growth and economic development. Nonetheless, banks in DEEs have attained considerable (...) structural power over financial policy, supporting their ability to shape growth and investment strategies. Therefore, the article proposes a revised model of the structural power of finance, recognizing its contingent nature. States pursue various forms of financialization both as a substitute to, or in conjunction with, industrial policy. Financialized development strategies enhance the structural power of large banks in DEEs, notwithstanding their limited role in meeting the investment/development imperative. (shrink)

The importance of overt levers of business political influence, notably campaign donations and lobbying, has been overemphasized. Using executive branch policymaking during the Obama administration as a case study, this article shows that those paths of influence are often not the most important. It places special emphasis on the structural power that large banks and corporations wield by virtue of their control over the flow of capital and the consequent effects on employment levels, credit availability, prices, and tax (...) collection. At times, business disinvestment, combined with demands for government policy reforms, constitutes a conscious “capital strike,” which has the potential to shape political appointments, legislation, and policy implementation. At other times, the threat of disinvestment, the hint of a drop in “business confidence,” or rhetoric about job creation is sufficient to achieve those objectives. The present analysis has important implications for our understanding of political power and social change in capitalist economies. (shrink)

A cohesive power of a structure is an effective analog of the classical ultrapower of a structure. We start with a computable structure, and consider its effective power over a cohesive set of natural numbers. A cohesive set is an infinite set of natural numbers that is indecomposable with respect to computably enumerable sets. It plays the role of an ultrafilter, and the elements of a cohesive power are the equivalence classes of certain partial computable functions determined (...) by the cohesive set. Thus, unlike many classical ultrapowers, a cohesive power is a countable structure. In this paper we focus on cohesive powers of graphs, equivalence structures, and computable structures with a single unary function satisfying various properties, which can also be viewed as directed graphs. For these computable structures, we investigate the isomorphism types of their cohesive powers, as well as the properties of cohesive powers when they are not isomorphic to the original structure. (shrink)

Powers often depend on structures. It is because of the eye’s structure that it confers the power of sight; destroy that structure, and you destroy the power. I sketch an antireductive yet broadly naturalistic account of the relation between powers and structures. Powers, it says, are embodied in structures. When applied to philosophy of mind, this view resembles classic emergentist theories. I nevertheless argue that it differs from them in crucial respects that insulate it from the problems that (...) beset them – including the problem of emergence and the problem of mental causation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm offers an in-depth analysis of the ethical facets of climate change. In this paper, I contend that he nonetheless overlooks an important structural layer to climate vulnerabilities and injustices because he analyzes them implicitly interactional. I argue that climate change should rather be understood as a form of structural injustice as outlined by Iris M. Young. In this reading, the unjust socio-economic structural processes that give rise to climate change, the (...) production and consumption of fossil fuel energy, are at their core marked by (i) oppressive and dominating power relations that position agents (ii) intersecting with other structural constraints. Crucially, (iii) these structural processes arose historically, persist over time, and entrench the burden on those suffering in the future. This viewpoint improves our understanding of how the climate crisis unfolds over time in a way that augments Gardiner’s analysis. The structural approach can advance the climate justice debate both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Recognition is one of the most ambivalent concepts in political and social thought. While it is a condition for individual freedom, the subject’s demand for recognition can be exploited as an instrument for reproducing domination. Axel Honneth addresses this issue and offers the concept of ideological recognition: Recognition is ideological when the addressees accept it from their subjective point of view but is unjustified from an objective point of view. Using the examples of the recognition of femininity, I argue that (...) Honneth’s account fails not only to offer the objective normative standard that delineates between morally justified and unjustified recognition, but also to descriptively explain why the addressees of ideological recognition accept their identities as having positive qualities. To overcome these problems, I provide an alternative, epistemic structural account. First, my account offers the concept of epistemic trust and identifies the objective injustice that Honneth’s account cannot capture. Second, my account offers the concept of structural power and discusses the problem of internalization of problematic identities. Furthermore, I argue that epistemic structural account has theoretical and practical benefits for analyzing domination and advancing the task of critique by explaining the ideological recognition in the case of racial identity, for example. (shrink)

Poststructuralism and After provides a comprehensive, innovative and lucid account of contemporary poststructuralist theory, which probes its limits, explores rival theoretical approaches, and elaborates new concepts and logics. The book distils and articulates the basic philosophical assumptions and theoretical concepts of poststructuralism, but by building upon the work of Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Lacan, Laclau, Levi-Strauss, Marx, Saussure and & ek it also provides a distinctive version of the poststructuralist project.The philosophy and theory of poststructuralism is presented through a critical engagement (...) with the central problems of social and political theory. Such problems include the structure/agency dilemma; the problem of social order; the ongoing debates between positivists, interpretivists and realists about the role and character of social science; the relationship between the economy, the state and society; the complexities of identity/difference; and the role of power, domination and ideology. Empirical illustrations and case studies of selected social phenomena further illuminate the theoretical arguments displayed in this book. (shrink)

The problem of structure and agency has been the subject of intense debate in the social sciences for over 100 years. This book offers a solution. Using a critical realist version of the theory of emergence, Dave Elder-Vass argues that, instead of ascribing causal significance to an abstract notion of social structure or a monolithic concept of society, we must recognise that it is specific groups of people that have social structural power. Some of these groups are entities (...) with emergent causal powers, distinct from those of human individuals. Yet these powers also depend on the contributions of human individuals, and this book examines the mechanisms through which interactions between human individuals generate the causal powers of some types of social structures. The Causal Power of Social Structures makes particularly important contributions to the theory of human agency and to our understanding of normative institutions. (shrink)

It is consistent with ¬CH that every universal theory of relational structures with the joint embedding property and amalgamation for P --diagrams has a universal model of cardinality ℵ 1. For classes with amalgamation for P --diagrams it is consistent that $2^{\aleph_0} > \aleph_2$ and there is a universal model of cardinality ℵ 2.

This article conceptualizes power in the context of long-term process of structural change. First, it discusses the field of transition studies, which deals with processes of structural change in societal systems on the basis of certain presumptions about power relations, but still lacks an explicit conceptualization of power. Then the article discusses some prevailing points of contestation in debates on power. It is argued that for the context of transition studies, it is necessary to (...) develop an interdisciplinary framework in which power is explicitly conceptualized in relation to change. Subsequently, such a framework is presented, with reference to existing literature on power. Starting with a philosophical and operational definition of power, a typology is developed of the different ways in which power can be exercised, explicitly including innovative power and transformative power. Finally, the presented power framework is applied to transition studies, redefining pivotal transition concepts in terms of power and formulating hypotheses on the role of power in transitions. By doing so, the article not only offers an interdisciplinary framework to study power in the context of transition studies, but also contributes to power debates more generally by including innovation and transformation as acts of power, and thereby proposes a re-conceptualization of the relation between power and structural change. (shrink)

This book sets out to theoretically delineate the relationship between agency, structure and power. The author offers an original appraisal and critique both of the work of power theorists, such as Lukes and Clegg and of structuration theory as represented in the work of Giddens.

It is consistent with $\neg\mathrm{CH}$ that every universal theory of relational structures with the joint embedding property and amalgamation for $\mathscr{P}^-(3)$-diagrams has a universal model of cardinality $\aleph_1$. For classes with amalgamation for $\mathscr{P}^-(4)$-diagrams it is consistent that $2^{\aleph_0} > \aleph_2$ and there is a universal model of cardinality $\aleph_2$.