Conceived through collaboration by activist academics from Israel and Northern Ireland, this book draws from experience to offer practical and theoretical insights and programs for promoting activist pedagogy for shared learning and shared life in divided societies.

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that normal adult human beings possess a primitive or 'folk' psychological theory. Recently, however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human bings are able to predict and explain each others' actions by using the resources of their own minds to simuate the psychological etiology of the actions of others. The thirteen essays in this volume present the foundations of theory of mind debate, and are accompanied by (...) an extensive introduction. (shrink)

Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes of (...) modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault. (shrink)

In a step-by-step progression through Marx's three volume work, discovers a systematic theory of socio-economic categories ordered according to the dialectical logic derived from Hegel.

I argue that there is nothing wrong with perfect voyeurism , covert watching or listening that is neither discovered nor publicized. After a brief discussion of privacy I present attempts from Stanley Benn, Daniel Nathan, and James Moor to show that the act is wrong. I argue that these authors fail to make their case. However, I maintain that, if detected or publicized, voyeurism can do grave harm and to that extent should be severely punished. I conclude with some thoughts (...) on the stubborn intuition that perfect voyeurism is wrong despite the absence of harm. (shrink)

Using the lives of the three outstanding French intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned historian Tony Judt offers a unique look at how intellectuals can ignore political pressures and demonstrate a heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time. Through the prism of the lives of Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron, Judt examines pivotal issues in the history of contemporary French society—antisemitism and the dilemma of Jewish identity, political (...) and moral idealism in public life, the Marxist moment in French thought, the traumas of decolonization, the disaffection of the intelligentsia, and the insidious quarrels rending Right and Left. Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption. Judt constructs a compelling portrait of modern French intellectual life and politics. He challenges the conventional account of the role of intellectuals precisely because they mattered in France, because they could shape public opinion and influence policy. In Blum, Camus, and Aron, Judt finds three very different men who did not simply play the role, but evinced a courage and a responsibility in public life that far outshone their contemporaries. "An eloquent and instructive study of intellectual courage in the face of what the author persuasively describes as intellectual irresponsibility."—Richard Bernstein, _New York Times_. (shrink)

Gratitude to others is typically understood as a response to good things people give to us or do for us. Occasionally, though, we thank people for things other than gifts or actions. We sometimes thank people for being there for us, for instance, or for loving us, or for being good parents or teachers, or for believing in us. In this article, I develop a set of considerations to help determine whether gratitude to others for being, loving, or believing can (...) be fitting in any of these cases. I begin by arguing that when it is appropriate for a beneficiary thank a benefactor for ϕ-ing, the beneficiary’s gratitude to the benefactor for ϕ-ing is fitting only insofar as the benefactor ϕ-ed out of benevolence, care or concern for the beneficiary. I then show that thanking can express attitudes other than gratitude, thereby highlighting the thanks-gratitude fallacy: the mistake of inferring the fittingness of one person’s gratitude to another from the fact that it would be reasonable for the former to thank the latter. These considerations imply that gratitude for being there for us, gratitude for believing in us, and gratitude for being a good professional can sometimes be fitting, while gratitude for loving us and gratitude for being a good intimate generally are not. (shrink)

Freeman Dyson has questioned whether any conceivable experiment in the real universe can detect a single graviton. If not, is it meaningful to talk about gravitons as physical entities? We attempt to answer Dyson’s question and find it is possible concoct an idealized thought experiment capable of detecting one graviton; however, when anything remotely resembling realistic physics is taken into account, detection becomes impossible, indicating that Dyson’s conjecture is very likely true. We also point out several mistakes in the literature (...) dealing with graviton detection and production. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Health Research Council of New Zealand is the first major government funding agency to use a lottery to allocate research funding for their Explorer Grant scheme. This is a somewhat controversial approach because, despite the documented problems of peer review, many researchers believe that funding should be allocated solely using peer review, and peer review is used almost ubiquitously by funding agencies around the world. Given the rarity of alternative funding schemes, there is interest in hearing from the first (...) cohort of researchers to ever experience a lottery. Additionally, the Health Research Council of New Zealand wanted to hear from applicants about the acceptability of the randomisation process and anonymity of applicants.MethodsThis paper presents the results of a survey of Health Research Council applicants from 2013 to 2019. The survey asked about the acceptability of using a lottery and if the lottery meant researchers took a different approach to their application.ResultsThe overall response rate was 39%, with 30% from applicants in the years 2013 to 2018, and 68% for those in the year 2019 who were not aware of the funding result. There was agreement that randomisation is an acceptable method for allocating Explorer Grant funds with 63% in favour and 25% against. There was less support for allocating funds randomly for other grant types with only 40% in favour and 37% against. Support for a lottery was higher amongst those that had won funding. Multiple respondents stated that they supported a lottery when ineligible applications had been excluded and outstanding applications funded, so that the remaining applications were truly equal. Most applicants reported that the lottery did not change the time they spent preparing their application.ConclusionsThe Health Research Council’s experience through the Explorer Grant scheme supports further uptake of a modified lottery. (shrink)

There has recently been a good deal of controversy about Landauer's Principle, which is often stated as follows: The erasure of one bit of information in a computational device is necessarily accompanied by a generation of kT ln 2 heat. This is often generalised to the claim that any logically irreversible operation cannot be implemented in a thermodynamically reversible way. John Norton (2005) and Owen Maroney (2005) both argue that Landauer's Principle has not been shown to hold in general, and (...) Maroney offers a method that he claims instantiates the operation reset in a thermodynamically reversible way. In this paper we defend the qualitative form of Landauer's Principle, and clarify its quantitative consequences (assuming the second law of thermodynamics). We analyse in detail what it means for a physical system to implement a logical transformation L, and we make this precise by defining the notion of an L-machine. Then we show that logical irreversibility of L implies thermodynamic irreversibility of every corresponding L-machine. We do this in two ways. First, by assuming the phenomenological validity of the Kelvin statement of the second law, and second, by using information-theoretic reasoning. We illustrate our results with the example of the logical transformation 'reset', and thereby recover the quantitative form of Landauer's Principle. (shrink)

Abstract: For William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can ‘generate’ the appropriate sequence of world-time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the ‘derivative’ status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world-time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is to (...) succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane ‘tasks’, the contents of world-time nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into world-time the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling-off. I argue, instead, that world-time nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite ‘irrational’ but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or ‘iterative’ I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the ‘existential’ level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling-off of the world-time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time. (shrink)

Chris Arthur‟s body of work counts as a very important and original contribution to systematic dialectics, and I have profited immensely from his writings over the years. However we disagree on a number of points. Some have to do with the relatively secondary question of the intellectual relationship between Hegel and Marx; others involve more substantive matters. In his reply to my review of Joseph McCarney‟s Hegel on History Arthur distinguishes three different versions of the thesis that there is a (...) “homology” between the logic of capital (in a Marxian understanding of it) and Hegel‟s “idea.” I shall comment briefly on each and then conclude with a general remark. (shrink)

In his recent work The Myth of Dialectics John Rosenthal presents a forceful polemic against Hegel and Marxists sympathetic to the Hegelian legacy. The methodology Hegel employed, his metaphysical assertions, his rejection of the principles of formal logic, and the political implications of his standpoint, are all fundamentally incompatible with Marx’s perspective, according to Rosenthal. While Rosenthal grants that Marx did make use of Hegelian motifs in his theory of value, even this is not to Hegel’s credit: the very perversity (...) of Hegel’s thought made it useful for the comprehension of the perversity of capital. In this paper I argue that a close and reasonably charitable reading of Hegel’s Logic reveals a quite different picture of his methodology and ontological commitments from that presented by Rosenthal. While there are profound substantive differences between the Hegelian and Marxian 1 perspectives on capitalist society, it is not the case that Hegel’s Logic is homologous with capital. The Logic provides helpful conceptual resources for a critique of capital. In the final section of the paper five areas are briefly sketched in which Hegelian dialectical logic remains of contemporary interest. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the debate on the role of financial derivatives for capitalism. It responds to Bryan and Rafferty’s defence of their analysis and their critique of my own. The paper argues that their analysis confuses what a financial derivative does, and mixes together different kinds of derivative – and non-derivative – that play very different roles. After detailing these points, the paper discusses the relationship between gold, money and derivatives, rejecting their notion that derivatives are some kind of (...) new ‘commodity money’. An important theme absent from Bryan and Rafferty’s analysis is the relationship of financial trading and derivatives markets to parasitism in the imperialist world economy. To illustrate this, the paper notes advantages enjoyed by the major financial powers – the US and the UK – that are the main centres for the origination of derivatives and for derivatives trading. (shrink)

Yves Grandjean, Tony Kozelj and François Salviat The Zeus Gate on Thasos p. 175-268 The Gate of Zeus and Hera, offered by Pythippos son of Paiestratos, is one of the most remarkable features of the Thasian enceinte: to the sculptured reliefs that adorned it was added a particular architectural embellishment which has never been analysed in its entirety. The numerous blocks preserved in situ make it possible to reconstruct the elevation of the gate, which was in fact a gate (...) tower, and to detail the appearance of the latter with its architectural facing of superimposed orders — Doric and Ionic — on the town side and its Doric frieze integrated into the walls of the tower on the side facing the country. The influences of Macedonian, funerary and palatial architecture are manifest. According to the lists of theoroi and the amphora stamps discovered in the levels preceding its construction, the gate tower was erected in around 300 BC. It replaced an original opening going back to the time when the enceinte visible today was built, in other words after the raid on Thasos by Histiaios of Miletus in 494; the old excavations like the recent investigations confirm the account by Herodotus (VI 46), which there is no reason to doubt. (shrink)

The first text of Justinian’s sixth century Digest records that Ulpian, the leading lawyer from Syria and counsellor to successive emperors of the Severan age (AD 193-235), related the term ‘law’ to four elements: art, religion, ethics and philosophy.2 Law is the art of the good and equitable, of which lawyers can well be called priests. They cultivate justice and the knowledge of right and wrong, and aim, unless Ulpian is mistaken, at the true philosophy.3 He goes on to say (...) that private law is collected from three sources: natural law,4 the law common to all communities (ius gentium) and the law specific to each community (civil law).5 Gaius, a generation earlier, listed two sources: the civil law of each community and the ius gentium.6 He recognized, however, the existence of natural law which, so far as performing a ‘natural obligation’ is concerned, cannot be changed by civil law.7 At times he identifies natural law with ius gentium. (shrink)

This paper discusses Marx’s critique of the market in the light of Allan Megill’s recent book, Karl Marx: the Burden of Reason. Megill offers two main arguments concerning Marx’s critique. Firstly, Megill claims that, contrary to Marxian orthodoxy, Marx’s well-known theory of alienation does not in fact amount to an unambiguous critique of market society – in particular, Megill maintains that Marx lacks a clear argument demonstrating that worker alienation is an inevitable effect of the system of private property. Secondly, (...) Megill claims that the real reason why Marx rejected the market was because Marx could not account for the market’s arbitrary behaviour in terms of his rationalist conception of science (which Megill characterises, roughly speaking, as a synthesis of Hegel’s rationalism and Newtonianism). I take issue with Megill’s reading of Marx on three counts. Firstly, I claim, in opposition to Megill, that Marx does indeed have a coherent theory of alienation and one that undoubtedly implies that worker freedom and private property are incompatible. Secondly, I contend that Marx was not actually committed to scientific rationalism and hence could not have been opposed to the market on such grounds. Thirdly, I submit that Marx’s deep misgivings about market anarchy were based instead on his belief that the arbitrary nature of the market was a major barrier to individual freedom (and moreover formed an integral part of the whole system of private property). Finally, I discuss Marx’s claim that a fully planned economy is an essential prerequisite for the full and proper realisation of individual freedom, and consider, briefly, in this light, whether market socialism might in fact be a superior instrument for the fulfilment of Marx’s emancipatory aims. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ethics and Economies of Inquiry: Certeau, Theory, and the Art of PracticeTony Schirato (bio) and Jen Webb (bio)In this paper we will look at what Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, calls “Theories of the Art of Practice.” Certeau is perhaps best known as a theorist of the ways in which everyday practices inhabit the institutions and sites of power and official culture, while not being in (...) any sense recuperable or explicable to these “proper places.” In “Theories of the Art of Practice” he concerns himself not with cultural practices themselves but, rather, with the specific relationship between theoretical discourse and the object of that discourse. In order to do this he takes as examples certain cultural theorists—most obviously Foucault and Bourdieu—whose work is strongly underpinned by an emphasis on the relation between discourse and practice. He offers a detailed consideration and critique of their theories of practice and the tactics those theorists use to escape the theory/practice dichotomy.In the first two paragraphs of “Theories of the Art of Practice,” Certeau identifies the two points which, taken together, constitute the broad narrative of this section of Practice. The first relates to the theoretical basis from which we can approach practice. “Everyday practices,” he writes:depend on a vast ensemble which is difficult to delimit but which we may provisionally designate as an ensemble of procedures. The latter are schemas of operations and of technical manipulations. On the basis of some recent and fundamental analyses (those of Foucault, Bourdieu, Vernant and Détienne, and others) it is possible, if not to define them, at least to clarify their functioning relative to discourse (or to “ideology,” as Foucault puts it), to the acquired (Bourdieu’s habitus), and to the form of time we call an occasion (the kairos discussed by Vernant and Détienne). These are different ways of locating a technicity of a certain type and at the same time situating the study of this technicity with respect to current trends in research.[43]An important issue here is Certeau’s critique of the extent to which each theorist applies a specific technicity (Foucault’s disciplinary procedures, Bourdieu’s habitus) in an attempt to delimit the field, to reduce the multiplicity of practice—or the theorizing of practice—to a singularity. As he points out in his essay on Nicholas of Cusa [“The Gaze” 6], such “ways of proceeding are subject to a common problematics,” because they inscribe a particular way of thinking and seeing and, in that process, risk excluding other ways of understanding. However, Cusa’s praxis: [End Page 86]does not presuppose a language proper to theory, an autonomous metalanguage that would provide a distinct linguistic space for speculation.... A task related to each singularity liberates, as it were, and develops... the “impulsion” which is integral to each and which is revealed to be infinite by the very impossibility of finding a hierarchical unity among singularities.[“The Gaze” 7]What Certeau looks for in the work of Bourdieu and Foucault is the moment, or the “impulsion,” which allows a theoretical engagement with practice. If practice can’t be called up, defined, or finally explicated, what can be done is to plot the relationships between power and its structures, logics, places, and discourse and the objects of power (practices) it seeks to identify and regulate. This allows us to identify both how power seeks to exclude the heterogeneity that is practice and the ways in which practice, despite these acts of exclusion and regulation, leaves its mark on official places (discourses, institutions, the objective structures of cultural fields). What Certeau does is to explore how others (Foucault and Bourdieu in particular, Vernant and Détienne) have explored this terrain.The second move Certeau makes is to contextualize those theories of practice, not so much as metadiscourses or generalized maps but as practices themselves, specific to a time and place and informed both by their theoretical antecedents and by the politics, logics, and discourses of the field(s) within which they operate. This allows Certeau to exemplify both how bodies of theory (as well as intellectual fields) come about and develop and... (shrink)

It has always seemed to me that one of my father's great contributions to monarchical practice was the manner in which, without apparent design, he managed to resolve the internal contradictions of monarchy in the twentieth century that requires it to be remote from, yet at the same time to personify the aspirations of the people. It must appear aloof and distant in order to sustain the illusion of a Monarch who, shunning faction, stands above politics and the more mundane (...) allegiances. At the same time it must appear to share intimately the ideals of the multitude, whose affection and loyalty provide the broad base of constitutional Monarchy. My father, with the instinctive genius of the simple man, found the means of squaring the apparent circle within the resources of his own character. By the force of his own authentic example – the king himself in the role of the bearded paterfamilias … he transformed the Crown as personified by the Royal Family into a model of the traditional family virtues, a model that was all the more genuine for its suspected but inconspicuous flaws. The King, as the dutiful father, became the living symbol not only of the nation, but also of the Empire, the last link holding these diversified and scattered communities. (shrink)

Dune, released in 1984 and directed by David Lynch, from his own adaptedscreenplay of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel, provides a rich examplefor a reception study on ideas of authorship. On the one hand, Herbert’s 1960scult bestseller has evolved into a franchise and is thus regarded by Duneenthusiasts as a sacrosanct text. From a Lynch perspective, though, the film isusually seen as his least personal work – an event movie no less – and as such itholds the rank of the (...) most uncared for text in his filmic canon. It is the goal ofthis paper to analyse Dune’s meanings in relation to critical writings foundedupon the tenets of early auteurism so we might explore its function as areception preference for the predisposed reader. But rather than simply dismissauteurism as humanist idealism , the outcome of this paper seeks to also take account ofthe writing pleasures the author might bring to the interpretation of filmed texts. (shrink)

(2013). Building a New Populist Movement. World Futures: Vol. 69, Reclaiming Free Enterprise: The Scientific and Human Story, pp. 479-495.