If someone assaults you, should they get a milder penalty if they are rich than if they are poor? We wouldn't dream of passing a law that formalized such an arrangement. But the design of our legal systems in the US, UK, and elsewhere, which permits people with sufficient money to pay for better lawyers, means that wealth often does make a difference to legal outcomes. Justice, then, depends not only on the substance of the laws we pass, but on (...) the design of the system that administers and enforces them. Philosophers and legal theorists, however, have paid relatively little attention to what justice demands of the general design and structure of the legal system. Equal Justice argues among other things that market principles should not determine access to legal resources. If, for example, a large corporation sues a small startup, either the corporation has to use a law firm of the quality that the startup can afford or--which would be preferable, given the corporation's in-house lawyers--the startup would be given a subsidy to afford a top firm. The author builds on this core idea of equal access to resources to work out how the court system and the legal profession should be structured in order to ensure a generally just legal system. (shrink)

In a study drawing from both evolutionary biology and the social sciences, evidence and argument is assembled in support of the comprehensive appli- cation of selfish gene theory to the human population. With a focus on genes giving rise to characteristically-human cooperation (“cooperative genes”) in- volving language and theory of mind, one may situate a whole range of pat- terned behaviour—including celibacy and even slavery—otherwise seeming to present insuperable difficulties. Crucially, the behaviour which tends to propa- gate the cooperative genes (...) may be “at cost” to the genes of some who may be party to the cooperation itself. Explanatory insights are provided by Trivers’ parent-offspring conflict theory, Lack’s principle, and Hamilton’s kin selec- tion mechanism. A primary observation is that cooperation using language and theory of mind is itself interdependent with full human conceptualization of a world of objects and of themselves as embodied beings. Human capaci- ties inhering in, or arising out of, the ability to cooperate are also responsible for a vitally important long-term process, the domestication of animals and p- lants. The approach illuminates the difference between animal and human sexual behaviour, and the emergence of kinship systems. Again, recent pat- terns of population growth become much more explicable. It is argued that the gene is the single controlling replicator; the notion of the meme as a sec- ond independent replicator is flawed. (shrink)

A perspective in the philosophy of mathematics is developed from a consideration of the strengths and limitations of both logicism and platonism, with an early focus on Frege’s work. Importantly, although many set-theoretic structures may be developed each of which offers limited isomorphism with the system of natural numbers, no one of them may be identified with it. Furthermore, the timeless, ever present nature of mathematical concepts and results itself offers direct access, in the face of a platonist account which (...) generates a supposed problem of access. Crucially too, pure mathematics has its own distinctive method of confirming or validating results - mathematical proof - which supplies a higher level of confidence and objectivity than that available elsewhere. The dichotomy of invention and discovery is too jejune a framework for analysing creative mathematical activity. The Gödelian platonist perspective is evaluated and queried through scrutiny of the part played by mathematical resources and constraints in relation to human activity. It appears that there can be non-causal mathematical explanations and mathematical constraint on purely natural processes. Valuable implications of Quine’s naturalism are explored, but one must be cautious of his thesis of confirmational holism. The distinction between algebraic and non-algebraic mathematical theories usefully contributes to our understanding of the internally differentiated nature of the subject. (shrink)

A framework is developed for understanding what is “taken for granted” both in philosophy and in life generally, which may serve to orient philosophical inquiry and make it more effective. The framework takes in language and its development, as well as mathematics, logic, and the empirical sphere with particular reference to the exigencies of life. It is evaluated through consideration of seven philosophical issues concerned with such topics as solipsism, sense data as the route to knowledge, the possible reduction of (...) geometry to logic, and the existence and status of human rights. Various dichotomies and the notion of continuity are evidently highly strategic. (shrink)

Progress may be made in resolving the tension between free will and determinism by analysis of the necessary conditions of freedom. It is of the essence that these conditions include causal and deterministic regularities. Furthermore, the human expression of free will is informed by understanding some of those regularities, and increments in that understanding have served to enhance freedom. When the possible character of a deterministic system based on physical theory is considered, it is judged that, far from implying the (...) elimination of human freedom, such a theory might simply set parameters for it; indeed knowledge of that system could again prove to be in some respects liberating. On the other hand, it is of the essence that the overarching biological framework is not a deterministic system and it foregrounds the behavioural flexibility of humans in being able to choose within a range of options and react to chance occurrences. Furthermore, an issue for determinism flows from the way in which randomness (e.g. using a true random number generator) and chance events could and do enter human life. Once the implications of that issue are fully understood, other elements fit comfortably together in our understanding of freely undertaken action: the contribution of reasons and causes; the fact that reasons are never sufficient to account for outcomes; the rationale for the attribution of praise and blame. (shrink)

For many people "animal rights" suggests campaigns against factory farms, vivisection or other aspects of our woeful treatment of animals. Zoopolis moves beyond this familiar terrain, focusing not on what we must stop doing to animals, but on how we can establish positive and just relationships with different types of animals.

Religion emerged among early humans because both purposive and non-purposive explanations were being employed but understanding was lacking of their precise scope and limits. Given also a context of very limited human power, the resultant foregrounding of agency and purposive explanation expressed itself in religion’s marked tendency towards anthropomorphism and its key role in legitimizing behaviour. The inevitability of death also structures the religious outlook; with ancestors sometimes assigned a role in relation to the living. Subjective elements such as the (...) experience of dreams and the internalization of moral precepts also play their part. Two important sources of variation among religions concern the adoption of a dualist or non-dualist perspective, and whether or not the religion’s early political experience is such as to generate a systematic doctrine subordinating politics to religion. The near ubiquity and endurance of religion are further illuminated by analysis of its functions and ideological role. Religion tends to be socially conservative but has the potential to be revolutionary. (shrink)

Drawing mainly from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his middle period writings, strategic issues and problems arising from Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics are discussed. Topics have been so chosen as to assist mediation between the perspective of philosophers and that of mathematicians on their developing discipline. There is consideration of rules within arithmetic and geometry and Wittgenstein’s distinctive approach to number systems whether elementary or transfinite. Examples are presented to illuminate the relation between the meaning of an arithmetical generalisation or theorem (...) and its proof. An attempt is made to meet directly some of Wittgenstein’s critical comments on the mathematical treatment of infinity and irrational numbers. (shrink)

Feminist theory is a central strand of cultural studies. This book explores the history of feminist cultural studies from the early work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, through the 1970s Women's Liberation Movement. It also provides a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary key approaches, theories and debates of feminist theory within cultural studies, offering a major re-mapping of the field. It will be an essential text for students taking courses within both cultural studies and (...) women's studies departments. (shrink)

In an increasingly complex military operating environment, next generation wargaming platforms can reduce risk, decrease operating costs, and improve overall outcomes. Novel Artificial Intelligence enabled wargaming approaches, based on software platforms with multimodal interaction and visualization capacity, are essential to provide the decision-making flexibility and adaptability required to meet current and emerging realities of warfighting. We highlight three areas of development for future warfighter-machine interfaces: AI-directed decisional guidance, computationally informed decision-making, and realistic representations of decision spaces. Progress in these areas (...) will enable development of effective human-AI collaborative decision-making, to meet the increasing scale and complexity of today’s battlespace. (shrink)

Originally published in 1979, the aim of this work was to analyse the occupational role of the university teacher, with the help of data collected within a specific university institution. This involves examining both what is expected of university teachers and what they actually do, and accounting for the patterns which their activities exhibit. Since the university teacher's occupation is multi-faceted it is necessary to examine several areas of activity including teaching, research and 'external' professional activities, as well as a (...) number of types of relationships in which lecturers are involved. Data is presented and interpreted from interviews with the staff of four selected departments of a British provincial university (classics, pure mathematics, civil engineering and psychology) and also from questionnaire surveys of staff and students. Sociologically the university may be regarded as an organisation or institution, and the behaviour of its members understood through the notion of 'social role'. On the educational side of the study the central concern is with the teacher-pupil relationship. We are also confronted with a basic human problem of how employed people weave elements to give meaning to their working lives. (shrink)

The extent of confusion between symbols and that which is symbolised is examined across five institutional spheres. Religion is the institution most marked by confusion of this type; indeed in some respects the symbolic mes- sage of religion may be the extent of the substantive reality. On the other hand, the very existence of the nation state may be judged to depend upon the exercise of the human imagination; hence providing a source of instability which may lead to the excesses (...) of nationalism. In regard to social status, the main problematical element is a certain circularity: it is necessary to get peo- ple to exhibit differences in behaviour which are then used to justify or con- stitute the status differences themselves. In politics, the symbolism of left and right threatens to strangle creative thinking, while in education the tendency on all sides to orient towards public systems of measurement and grading undermines the claim that what is really important is pupil and student learn- ing. A social cost is being paid for the failure to recognise and, where possible, address the issues identified. (shrink)

When we consider the issue of linguistic justice, we must define what we mean by language. Standardisation of languages is closely associated with the development of the nation state, and the de Saussurian conception of language as system is in concert with nationalism and its divisions. In the early twenty-first century, however, this view of the world as a mosaic of stable national monolingualisms is outdated. In a globalising world, much of the political, social and economic structure that is developing (...) is transnational and patterns of contact, both real and virtual, have become extraordinarily complex. In the resulting communities of communication of this superdiverse world, much language practice is more function driven than in the recent past. New practices mean that we cannot consider questions of linguistic justice in this new world order using the linguistic toolkit of the old. The flows, exchanges and networks of globalisation present us with a new paradigm and we need to recalibrate concepts. (shrink)

In their commentaries on Zoopolis, Alasdair Cochrane and Oscar Horta raise several challenges to our argument for a “political theory of animal rights”, and to the specific models of animal citizenship and animal sovereignty we offer. In this reply, we focus on three key issues: 1) the need for a groupdifferentiated theory of animal rights that takes seriously ideas of membership in bounded communities, as against more “cosmopolitan” or “cosmo- cosmopolitan” or “cosmo- cosmopolitan” or “cosmo- ” or “cosmo- or “cosmozoopolis” (...) alternatives that minimize the moral significance of boundaries and membership; 2) the challenge of defining the nature and scope of wild animal sovereignty; and 3) the problem of policing nature and humanitarian intervention to reduce suffering in the wild. (shrink)

Sue Campbell reinstates the personal as an important dimension in analytic philosophy of mind. She argues that the category of feelings has a unique role in psychological explanation: the expression of feelings is the attempt to communicate personal significance. To develop a model for affective meaning, the author moves attention away from the classic emotions to feelings that are more personal, inchoate, and idiosyncratic.

Intellectual virtues are an integral part of adequate environmental virtue ethics; these virtues are distinct from moral virtues. Including intellectual virtues in environmental virtue ethics produces a more fine-grained account of the forces involved in environmental exploration, appreciation, and decision making than has been given to date. Intellectual virtues are character traits that regulate cognitive activity in support of the acquisition and application of knowledge. They are virtues because they further the human quest for knowledge and true belief; possessing these (...) traits improves us epistemically. Five intellectual virtues illustrate the nature and relevance of intellectual virtues to environmental ethics: thoroughness, temporal/structural sensitivity, flexibility, intellectual trust, and humility. While these virtues share many features of the moral virtues, there are differences between them that have practical implications and give sound reasons for considering these two types as distinct kinds. Intellectual virtues bear a structural relation to knowledge that moral virtues do not, and it is this epistemological stamp that sets them apart. Additionally, the two types of virtue can be possessed independently of one another. Ideally, intellectual virtues will combine with moral virtues such as respect, compassion, and humility to facilitate environmentally respectful behavior. The moral and intellectual virtues are thus importantly distinct and mutually reinforcing. Both should be present in a truly excellent human being, and both have a role to play in fully developed environmental virtue ethics. (shrink)

Most of this work is devoted to presenting aspects of proof theory that have developed out of Gentzen's work. Thus the them is "cut elimination" and transfinite induction over constructive ordinals. Smullyan's tableau systems will be used for the formalisms and some of the basic logical results as presented in Smullyan [1] will be assumed to be known (essentially only the classical completeness and consistency proofs for propositional and first order logic).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 93-101 [Access article in PDF] A Political LifeArendtian Aesthetics and Open Systems Sue Spaid Since the 1990s, artists have broken ground by producing works that are "open systems." That is, they are incomplete, participatory, and elastic. In this paper, I will argue that open systems exemplify Hannah Arendt's conception of vita activa, in contrast to art's traditional role as inspiring vita contemplativa. Since (...) they do not explicitly affirm or refute political policies, such works are generally not considered "political" art. However, they accommodate Arendt's notion of the political life, since they incorporate process, durability, pluralities of spectators, and unpredictability. Furthermore, because they do not resemble what ordinarily passes for art, reflective judgment is required to engage them, and to determine whether they are art.Echoing Diotima's interest in immortality, Arendt links beauty to durability. Open systems are particularly durable because we remember them as a public experiences that include participants and spectators. Such performative and pleasurable worldly actions entail aesthetic engagements that are very much in line with Arendt's description of the political life. Critical Engagement In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this [End Page 93] is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce... It is the reification that occurs in writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought things, which we usually call art works, the same workmanship is required that through the primordial instrument of human hands builds the other, less durable and more useful things of the human artifice. (Arendt 2000, 177-78) In a 1964 interview with Gunter Gaus, Hannah Arendt described herself as a political theorist, who though trained as a philosopher had "said good-bye to philosophy once and for all." In identifying the tension between philosophy and politics, she differentiated man as a thinking being from man as an acting being, and she identified with the latter. She found that, because philosophers cannot be neutral or objective with regards to politics, they share a certain enmity toward politics, and she sought to avoid that response. Not surprisingly, she named Kant as an exception, because he understood this enmity to lie in the nature of the subject itself. In The Critique of Judgement, experience precedes reflective judgement, thus affirming a place for each subject's particular experiences. Kant, too, was a man of action.Kant's aesthetic judgment of taste, which is a normative but non-prescriptive process, makes room for Arendt's notions of worldliness and unpredictability. Critics have decried Arendt's political theory for its anti-rationalism, political existentialism and "aestheticization of politics," yet much can be learned from her clear commitment to equality, and the way she trusted and perhaps even idealized humanity (Curtis 1999, 18). She wrote, "Only action and speech relate specifically to this fact that to live always means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present" (Arendt 2000, 179). Given her interest in freedom, active engagement, critical thinking, and anti-instrumentalism, it is perhaps not surprising that Arendt found inspiration in Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment as requiring only communicative sociability, the object's purposeless purposiveness, and the spectator's free play of imagination and understanding.I am interested here in Arendt's aesthetics of the political life in relation to recent art that unwittingly fosters an engaged and open conception of the political. The works in question are not necessarily conscious of their political capacity. Rather, their presence assumes that spectators are [End Page 94] equals, and facilitates an active life, what Arendt described as the vita activa, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. An active life, which requires a public space, entails active... (shrink)

Identifying a range of key concerns related to representation and difference, Representing the Other offers a provocative agenda for the future development of feminist theory and practice. The book's contributors, including many key international researchers in women's studies, draw on personal experiences of speaking "for" and "about" others in their research, professional practice, academic writing, or political activism. They highlight problems of representing the Other with an ethnic or cultural background different from one's own and extend discussions of "Othering" to (...) representations of children, prostitutes, infertile women, fat women, gay men with HIV/AIDS, and people with disabilities. The reader, which includes articles and discussions from four issues of the journal Feminism & Psychology, also features new pieces and an extensive editorial introduction. Representing the Other will be integral reading for students and academics in women's studies, gender studies, and feminist theory across a range of social science disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, social policy, and political science. (shrink)

Work‐related stress is too often neglected by employers and rarely seen as an ethical issue by them. Its moral implications are explored here by the Senior Corporate Policy Manager at City and Inner London North Training and Enterprise Council, 80 Great Eastern Street, London EC2A 3DP. Sue Bryan, M.A., A.M.I.P.D., is also completing an Executive MBA degree at London Business School.

Many theorists of the ‘political turn’ in animal rights theory emphasize the need for animals’ interests to be considered in political decision-making processes, but deny that this requires self-representation and participation by animals themselves. I argue that participation by domesticated animals in co-authoring our shared world is indeed required, and explore two ways to proceed: 1) by enabling animal voice within the existing geography of human-animal roles and relationships; and 2) by freeing animals into a revitalized public commons where citizens (...) encounter one another in spontaneous, unpredictable encounters in spaces that they can re-shape together. (shrink)

This paper employs Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the social, which lacks location and mandates conformity, to evaluate social media’s: a) challenge to the polis, b) relationship to the social, b) influence on private space, d) impact on public space, and e) virus-like capacity to capture, mimic, and replicate the agonistic polis, where “everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.” Using Arendt’s exact language, this paper begins by discussing how she differentiated the political, private, social, (...) and public realms. After explaining how online activities resemble (or not) her notion of the social, I demonstrate how the rise of the social, which she characterized as dominated by behavior (not action), ruled by nobody and occurring nowhere, continues to eclipse both private and public space at an alarming pace. Finally, I discuss the ramifications of social media’s setting the stage for worldlessness to spin out of control, as the public square becomes an intangible web. Unlike an Arendtian web of worldly human relationships that fosters individuality and enables excellence to be publicly tested, social media feeds a craving for kinship and connection, however remotely. Leaving such needs unfulfilled, social media risks to trump bios politicos. (shrink)

This paper argues that Heidegger's phenomenology of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1983) could be a promising addition to the ‘toolbox’ of scientists investigating conscious experience. We describe Heidegger's methodological principles and show how he applies these in describing three forms of boredom. Each form is shown to have two structural moments – being held in limbo and being left empty – as well as a characteristic relation to passing the time. In our conclusion, we (...) suggest specific ways in which Heidegger's phenomenological description can be used in scientific investigations of boredom. (shrink)

In Merleau-Ponty's work there is an intimate and reciprocal involvement of socio-cultural and philosophical concerns, more profound and central than Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledged. This gives rise to productive tensions over the course of his works, between the paradigm of perception and an emerging, more culturalist paradigm: language, history, and culture penetrate to the heart of perception, and at the same time the historicity at the heart of perception offers us new ways of understanding the sense and dynamics of the social, (...) cultural and historical fields. The outcome is an outline of an ontology which allows us to think of both nature and culture in new ways and in new relationships. Particularly fruitful is Merleau-Ponty's development of the paradigms of perception and of the life world in the concept of the World, emerging as an original ontological figure, and offering a way of thinking about meaning from our first opening upon it to the cultural world horizon and beyond. (shrink)

A biography of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Tracing the impact of the 'memory wars' on science and culture, Relational Remembering offers a vigorous philosophical challenge to the contemporary skepticism about memory that is their legacy. Campbell's work provides a close conceptual analysis of the strategies used to challenge women's memories, particularly those meant to provoke a general social alarm about suggestibility. Sue Campbell argues that we cannot come to an adequate understanding of the nature and value of memory through a distorted view of rememberers. The harmful stereotypes (...) of women's passivity and instability that have repopulated discussions of abuse have led many theorists to regard the social dimensions of remembering only negatively, as a threat or contaminant to memory integrity. Such models of memory cannot help us grasp the nature of harms linked to oppression, as these models imply that changed group understandings of the past are incompatible with the integrity of personal memory. Campbell uses the false memory debates to defend a feminist reconceptualization of personal memory as relational, social, and subject to politics. Memory is analyzed as a complex of cognitive abilities and social/narrative activities where one's success or failure as a rememberer is both affected by one's social location and has profound ramifications for one's cultural status as a moral agent. (shrink)

Essays by the late feminist philosopher Sue Campbell explore the entanglement of epistemic and ethical values in our attempts to be faithful to our pasts. Her relational conception of memory is used to confront the challenges of sharing memory and reconstituting selves even in contexts fractured by moral and political differences.

In times of stress, trauma and crisis—whether on a personal or global scale—it can be all too easy for us to externalize a larger-than-life figure who can assuage our suffering, a Hero who comes to the fore even as we recede into the background. In taking on our collective burden, however, such an omnipotent Hero can actually undermine us, representing as it does the very same characteristics we fail to note in one another. By granting the Hero to power to (...) set things right, we seem to deny it to ourselves, leaving us temporarily lightened but ultimately helpless. In response, Sue Grand deconstructs the myth of the Heroic and argues for the "ordinary hero," a more realistic figure with the same limitations, concerns and fears as the rest of us, but who nonetheless stands up for the greater good in the face of danger, despair and villainy. From the foundation of relational psychoanalysis, Grand incorporates cultural and ethical considerations in her examination of what this ordinary hero might look like, a trip that takes us from the consulting room to right outside our front doors, from the heart of a "civilized" nation to the myriad war-torn regions dappling the globe, both past and present. Along the way we meet individuals whose encounters with adversity range from the mundane to the catastrophic, and learn how they struggle against the dubious concept of the Hero looming large in their lives. Recounting this journey in finely-tuned yet imminently accessible and enjoyable prose, Grand demonstrates that the best place to ultimately find the ordinary hero is within each other: The hero is us. (shrink)

Research leadership in Australian universities takes place against a backdrop of policy reforms concerned with measurement and comparison of institutional research performance. In particular, the Excellence in Research in Australian initiative undertaken by the Australian Research Council sets out to evaluate research quality in Australian universities, using a combination of expert review process, and assessment of performance against ?quality indicators?. Benchmarking exercises of this sort continue to shape institutional policy and practice, with inevitable effects on the ways in which research (...) leadership, mentoring and practice are played out within university faculties and departments. In an exploratory study that interviewed 32 Australian academics in universities in four Australian states, we asked participants, occupying formal or informal research leadership roles, to comment on their perceptions of research leadership as envisioned and enacted in their particular workplaces. We found a pervasive concern amongst participants that coalesced around binaries characterized in metaphoric terms of ?carrots and whips?. Research leadership was seen by many as managerial in nature, and as such, largely tethered to instrumentalist notions of productivity and performativity, while research cultures were seen as languishing under the demoralizing weight of reward and punishment systems. Here, we consider what is at stake for the future of the academic workforce under such conditions, arguing that new models of visionary research leadership are urgently needed in the ?troubled times? of techno-bureaucratic university reforms. (shrink)

The work of feminists in science may seem less voluminous and less theoretical than the feminist scholarship in some humanities and social science disciplines. However, the recent burst of scholarship on women and science allows categorization of feminist work into six distinct but related categories: 1) teaching and curriculum transformation in science, 2) history of women in science, 3) current status of women in science, 4) feminist critique of science, 5) feminine science, 6) feminist theory of science. More feminists in (...) science are needed to further explore science and its relationships to women and feminism in order to change traditional science to a feminist science. (shrink)

In the popular literature of physics the electromagnetic field isoften treated as though it has an intrinsic particle nature. When thetheory is examined carefully, quantum theory only makes the weakerrequirement that the emission and absorption of light are restricted todiscrete amounts of energy. There are very few realizable experiments inoptics for which the classical Maxwell theory and the quantum theorymake a different prediction. I discuss some of these experiments with anemphasis on the distinction between what the experiments tell us aboutthe (...) measurement process, and what they tell us about the nature of thelight field. (shrink)

Nehama Aschkenasy Eves Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. ISBN 0‐8122‐8033‐4. Hardcover, $36.95. Pp. xv+269.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 93-101 [Access article in PDF] A Political LifeArendtian Aesthetics and Open Systems Sue Spaid Since the 1990s, artists have broken ground by producing works that are "open systems." That is, they are incomplete, participatory, and elastic. In this paper, I will argue that open systems exemplify Hannah Arendt's conception of vita activa, in contrast to art's traditional role as inspiring vita contemplativa. Since (...) they do not explicitly affirm or refute political policies, such works are generally not considered "political" art. However, they accommodate Arendt's notion of the political life, since they incorporate process, durability, pluralities of spectators, and unpredictability. Furthermore, because they do not resemble what ordinarily passes for art, reflective judgment is required to engage them, and to determine whether they are art.Echoing Diotima's interest in immortality, Arendt links beauty to durability. Open systems are particularly durable because we remember them as a public experiences that include participants and spectators. Such performative and pleasurable worldly actions entail aesthetic engagements that are very much in line with Arendt's description of the political life. Critical Engagement In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this [End Page 93] is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce... It is the reification that occurs in writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought things, which we usually call art works, the same workmanship is required that through the primordial instrument of human hands builds the other, less durable and more useful things of the human artifice. (Arendt 2000, 177-78) In a 1964 interview with Gunter Gaus, Hannah Arendt described herself as a political theorist, who though trained as a philosopher had "said good-bye to philosophy once and for all." In identifying the tension between philosophy and politics, she differentiated man as a thinking being from man as an acting being, and she identified with the latter. She found that, because philosophers cannot be neutral or objective with regards to politics, they share a certain enmity toward politics, and she sought to avoid that response. Not surprisingly, she named Kant as an exception, because he understood this enmity to lie in the nature of the subject itself. In The Critique of Judgement, experience precedes reflective judgement, thus affirming a place for each subject's particular experiences. Kant, too, was a man of action.Kant's aesthetic judgment of taste, which is a normative but non-prescriptive process, makes room for Arendt's notions of worldliness and unpredictability. Critics have decried Arendt's political theory for its anti-rationalism, political existentialism and "aestheticization of politics," yet much can be learned from her clear commitment to equality, and the way she trusted and perhaps even idealized humanity (Curtis 1999, 18). She wrote, "Only action and speech relate specifically to this fact that to live always means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present" (Arendt 2000, 179). Given her interest in freedom, active engagement, critical thinking, and anti-instrumentalism, it is perhaps not surprising that Arendt found inspiration in Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment as requiring only communicative sociability, the object's purposeless purposiveness, and the spectator's free play of imagination and understanding.I am interested here in Arendt's aesthetics of the political life in relation to recent art that unwittingly fosters an engaged and open conception of the political. The works in question are not necessarily conscious of their political capacity. Rather, their presence assumes that spectators are [End Page 94] equals, and facilitates an active life, what Arendt described as the vita activa, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. An active life, which requires a public space, entails active... (shrink)

India has a long, rich, and diverse tradition of philosophical thought, spanning some two and a half millenia and encompassing several major religious traditions. Now, in this intriguing introduction to Indian philosophy, the diversity of Indian thought is emphasized. It is structured around six schools of thought that have received classic status. Sue Hamilton explores how the traditions have attempted to understand the nature of reality in terms of inner or spiritual quest and introduces distinctively Indian concepts, such as karma (...) and rebirth. She also explains how Indian thinkers have understood issues of reality and knowledge-issues that re also an important part of the Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Who owns feminist theory? and just what is meant by the idea of ‘theory’? We explore these fundamental questions as part of interrogating some emergent orthodoxies about feminist theory, proposing that there is a ‘missing revolution’ in feminist thinking, for while ideas about feminist epistemology, methodology and ethics have been fundamentally reworked, those concerning feminist theory have not. Our purpose is to stimulate a debate about the form of feminist theory, rather than the more usual controversies about its content; and (...) thus our concern is with promoting the development of feminist metatheory. We argue that the now-dominant version of feminist theory is a parallel project to that of mainstream/malestream social theory, and that a feminist autocritique of this and related developments is needed, with the aim of achieving a transformation of the fundamental categories of feminist theory. (shrink)

This book cuts new ground in bringing together traditional Christian theological perspectives on truth and reality with a contemporary philosophical view of the place of language in both divine and wordly reality. Patterson seeks to reconcile the requirements that Christian theology should both take account of postmodern insights concerning the inextricability of language and world as well as taking God's truth to be absolute for all reality. Yet it is not simply about theological language and truth as such. Instead Patterson (...) asks: where does language fit in divine and human reality? Patterson's discussion straddles realist, liberal-revisionist and postliberal theological schools, and critiques their various positions before going on to utilise selectively their insights to develop and apply a theological model of 'language-ridden' reality. This model affirms that worldly reality has a radical dependence on God. Finally, the book explores the theological and ethical implications of the model it proposes. (shrink)

As employee assistance programs (EAPs) have evolved and expanded their scope in the past decade, many factors have contributed to meeting the demands of conflicting client constituencies in a multifaceted client environment. This article enumerates several of these factors, notes consequences of ensuing conflicts, and ultimately proposes some methods to counter some of these ethical dilemmas in the future. It is the hope that greater recognition and understanding of ethical conflicts in client loyalty within a host organization will foster increased (...) sensitivity on the part of the EAP practitioner toward resolving these conflicts. (shrink)

Recent feminist research has set out to show the extent to which women and their contributions have been neglected or misrepresented in many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In this book, active scholars in the movement survey the impact of this work in their respective fields.

In my response-paper, I dispute the claim of Firestone and Jacobs that “Kant’s turn to transcendental analysis of the moral disposition via pure cognition is perhaps the most important new element of his philosophy of religion” (In Defense of Kant’s Religion, 233). In particular, I reject the role given—in the latter—to “pure cognition.” Instead I propose a Kantian variation on cognition which remains consistent with Kant’s moral postulate for the existence of God. I urge that we treat this postulate as (...) regulative. So, in place of pure cognition, “belief in” God grounds our hope for perfect goodness. (shrink)

Extrait de R. Sue, Temps et ordre social. Sociologie des temps sociaux, Paris, PUF, 1994, p. 28-32. Nous remercions Roger Sue de nous avoir autorisé à reproduire ici ce texte. Il faut renoncer à faire une sociologie du temps en général. Renoncement difficile pour le sociologue toujours enclin à penser la société sous forme d'unité. Unité qui produirait son propre temps, un temps unique, le temps de la société. Cette illusion de l'unité est extrêmement forte lorsqu'il s'agit du temps, en (...) raison de la (...) - Sociologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)