Donating money to a charity based on consumer purchase is referred to as cause-related marketing . In this research, we profile consumer psychographics for skepticism toward advertising in a CRM context. To be specific, this study investigates whether and how psychological antecedents and gender differences influence consumer skepticism toward advertising. An empirical study was conducted with 291 participants. Structural equation modeling was employed for hypothesis testing. The results suggest that a utilitarian orientation and an individualistic mindset are positively related to (...) skepticism toward advertising, while a hedonic orientation and a collectivistic mindset are negatively related to skepticism toward advertising. Gender differences are also found in the aforementioned relationships. The segmentational approach of gender and psychographics can assist marketers to explain consumer attitudes toward CRM and then to communicate with those CRM advocates better. (shrink)

This essay examines a controversy that erupted in 2004 over the bones of a human relative discovered in Indonesia, proclaimed to be a new species named Homo floresiensis. It argues that the controversy comprised two intertwined struggles with roots in Indonesia’s colonial history. Indonesia’s transition to an independent country, it contends, gave rise to a particular set of cultural values, scientific practices, and theories that resulted in scientific objects becoming tied to national identity in ways that shaped the debates. Highlighting (...) the imbalances that can occur in cross-cultural negotiations over the study of human relatives, this essay reveals that the circulation of scientific objects is not a simple process. By focusing on how anthropological objects moved—and the claims of ownership and access embedded in those movements—it illustrates the role of local circumstances in shaping that knowledge as it contributes to increasingly global science. (shrink)

In this article I argue that if conscience, working properly, involves some form of ‘moral tug’, then this is incompatible with the state of ‘quiescence’ put forward as a central element of Eleonore Stump’s account of repentance. Quiescence is also a key notion for Stump’s theodicy in Wandering in the Darkness and Stump’s thesis in her book, Atonement. Quiescence is about an inactive, or neutral, or stationary, state of the will prior to turning to the good, or God, through receiving (...) God’s saving grace. But if God exerts a non–coercive pressure on people through their conscience to turn to him, and turn from evil, then this drawing towards the good, or tugging away from evil, can only be yielded to, or resisted. There is no neutral state. I give examples of language such as being ‘bound’ to obey one’s conscience, which seem to reflect such non–coercive pressure. I conclude by commenting on free will. (shrink)

A review of Steven Fuller's excellent book. Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, argues that, unfortunately for science, Kuhn won this debate. In the wake of Kuhn, science has come to be justified more by its paradigmatic pedigree than by its progressive aspirations. In other words, science is judged by whatever has come to be the dominant scientific community.

Reproduction and immunity are energy intensive, intimately linked processes in most organisms. In women, pregnancy is associated with widespread immunological adaptations that alter immunity to many diseases, whereas, immune dysfunction has emerged as a major cause for infertility in both men and women. Deciphering the molecular bases of this dynamic association is inherently challenging in mammals. This relationship has been traditionally studied in fast‐living, invertebrate species, often in the context of resource allocation between life history traits. More recently, these studies (...) have advanced our understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings of the immunity‐fertility dialogue. Here, we review the molecular connections between reproduction and immunity from the perspective of human pregnancy to mechanistic discoveries in laboratory organisms. We focus particularly on recent invertebrate studies identifying conserved signaling pathways and transcription factors that regulate resource allocation and shape the balance between reproductive status and immune health. (shrink)

The transactivation response‐DNA binding protein of 43 kDa (TDP‐43) is an aggregation‐prone nucleic acid‐binding protein linked to the etiology of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD). These conditions feature the accumulation of insoluble TDP‐43 aggregates in the neuronal cytoplasm that lead to cell death. The dynamics between cytoplasmic and nuclear TDP‐43 are altered in the disease state where TDP‐43 mislocalizes to the cytoplasm, disrupting Nuclear Pore Complexes (NPCs), and ultimately forming large fibrils stabilized by the C‐terminal prion‐like (...) domain. Here, we review three emerging and poorly understood aspects of TDP‐43 biology linked to its aggregation. First, how post‐translational modifications in the proximity of TDP‐43 N‐terminal domain (NTD) promote aggregation. Second, how TDP‐43 engages FG‐nucleoporins in the NPC, disrupting the pore permeability and function. Third, how the importin α/β heterodimer prevents TDP‐43 aggregation, serving both as a nuclear import transporter and a cytoplasmic chaperone. (shrink)

This paper gives a brief sketch of György Márkus’s philosophical style as manifest in the context of his role within the revival of Hegelian philosophy in Sydney in the last decades of the 20th century. Written from the perspective of one of his students, this style is sharpened by the contrast with that of another philosopher who was influential in the Hegel revival around that time, Richard Rorty. It is suggested that the stark antithesis between Márkusian and Rortarian philosophical and (...) interpretative styles reflects tensions within Hegel’s own attitude to what it might mean to reanimate a philosophy from the past within a radically changed cultural context. (shrink)

As a result of the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic, an internal tension in the goals of medicine has come to the forefront of public debate. Medical professionals are continuously faced with a tug of...

This personal narrative tugs at the heart strings. However, personal narratives are not sufficient to justify public funding for any screening policy. We have to take seriously the ‘just caring’ problem. We have only limited resources to meet virtually unlimited health care needs. No doubt, screening tests often save lives. The author wants public funding for prostate-specific antigen screening for prostate cancer. However, why only prostate cancer? Numerous cancers at various stages can be screened for. Are all of them (...) equally deserving of public funding? What about screening for a very long list of other life-threatening medical disorders? There is nothing ethically special about cancer. Where does the money come from to pay for all these screening tests? Do we reduce expensive life-prolonging care for patients in late-stage diseases? Ultimately, a balance must be struck between saving statistical lives through screening and saving identifiable lives in the intensive care unit. Achieving a just balance requires rational democratic deliberation as justification for these choices, not personal narratives. (shrink)

Often, when there is a reason for you to do something, it is the kind of thing to motivate you to do it. For example, if Max and Caroline are deciding whether to go to the Alcove for dinner, Caroline might mention as a reason in favor, the fact that the Alcove serves onion rings the size of doughnuts, and Max might mention as a reason against, the fact that it is so difficult to get parking there this time of (...) day. It is some sign—perhaps not a perfect sign, but some sign—that each of these really is a reason, that Max and Caroline feel the tug in each direction. Mention of the Alcove's onion rings makes them feel to at least some degree inclined to go, and mention of the parking arrangements makes them feel to at least some degree inclined not to. According to some philosophers, reasons for action always bear some relation like this to motivation. This idea is variously known as ‘ reasons internalism’, ‘internalism about reasons ’, or ‘the internal reasons theory’. According to other philosophers, not all reasons are related to motivation in any of the ways internalists say. This idea is known as ‘ reasons externalism’ or ‘externalism about reasons ’. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s perspectivism is a philosophical methodology for achieving various epistemic goods. Furthermore, perspectives as he conceives them relate primarily to agents’ motivational and evaluative sets. In order to shed light on this methodology, I approach it from two angles. First, I employ the digital humanities methodology pioneered recently in my recent and ongoing research to further elucidate the concept of perspectivism. Second, I explore some of the rhetorical tropes that Nietzsche uses to reorient his audience’s perspective. These include engaging the (...) audience’s emotions, apostrophic address to the reader, and what I’ve elsewhere called ‘Nietzschean summoning’. Each of these methods tugs at the affects and values of the audience, positioning them to notice, find salient, and be disposed to act in relation to certain (aspects of) things while ignoring, finding less salient, and being disposed to neglect (aspects of) other things. This suggests that, for Nietzsche, perspectivism may have less to do with cognition than the painterly metaphor of a visual perspective suggests. Instead, I’ll argue that for Nietzsche, perspectivism relates primarily to agents’ motivational and evaluative set. (shrink)

I discuss first Adam Smith’s ethical theory and the peculiar function played by the quadrangle of sympathy, the social function of sympathy with the rich and powerful and the unavoidable corruption of moral sentiments it carries. Secondly, I examine human nature in Smith’s work, and show how diverging tendencies are carried by different social roles. Thirdly I discuss the modest normative claims advanced by his ethical theory and show how these are not from utilitarian ones, how ethical pluralism is (...) mirrored in Smith’s triad of private virtues, prudence, justice, benevolence and of public virtues, liberty, justice, equality, how these are far from being utilitarian virtues, being rather the result of overlapping between several reasonable normative ethics. Fourthly I discuss Smith’s attitude to merchants and master-manufacturers, showing how, far being the theorist of ‘bourgeois virtues’, he was a radical critic of both the aristocratic establishment and the new emerging class in the name of oppressed. My conclusion is that ‘The Wealth of Nations’ is not an argument for self-regulating markets but instead an argument for a less authoritarian society where political authority, under pressure from a newly formed public opinion made by people in the middling ranks of life, would cease favouring the most powerful pressure group and leave ‘civil society’ in a condition where an adjustment in the distribution of wealth, revenue, knowledge and power could take place through a quasi-spontaneous process. (shrink)

This article examines the (bio) ethical and professionalism issues that may arise in the context of medical practice in low and middle income countries (LAMIC), and the challenges this poses for medical regulatory bodies in the regions, in upholding ethics in professional practice. A quadrangle of source of the problems given rise to the breach of ethics in medical practice is identified, and suggested steps, based on ethical principles and concept, is proposed towards the resolution of the problems presented. (...) As LAMIC progress to improve the health of its population, this endeavour should occur hand in hand with contemporary medical ethics theories, taking in context the region’s ethnographic and cultural beliefs and practices. (shrink)

Evolution is frequently concentrated in bursts of rapid morphological change and speciation followed by long‐term stasis. We propose that this pattern of punctuated equilibria results from an evolutionary tug‐of‐war between host genomes and transposable elements (TEs) mediated through the epigenome. According to this hypothesis, epigenetic regulatory mechanisms (RNA interference, DNA methylation and histone modifications) maintain stasis by suppressing TE mobilization. However, physiological stress, induced by climate change or invasion of new habitats, disrupts epigenetic regulation and unleashes TEs. With their capacity (...) to drive non‐adaptive host evolution, mobilized TEs can restructure the genome and displace populations from adaptive peaks, thus providing an escape from stasis and generating genetic innovations required for rapid diversification. This “epi‐transposon hypothesis” can not only explain macroevolutionary tempo and mode, but may also resolve other long‐standing controversies, such as Wright's shifting balance theory, Mayr's peripheral isolates model, and McClintock's view of genome restructuring as an adaptive response to challenge. (shrink)

This largely expository lecture deals with aspects of traditional solid geometry suitable for applications in logic courses. Polygons are plane or two-dimensional; the simplest are triangles. Polyhedra [or polyhedrons] are solid or three-dimensional; the simplest are tetrahedra [or triangular pyramids, made of four triangles]. -/- A regular polygon has equal sides and equal angles. A polyhedron having congruent faces and congruent [polyhedral] angles is not called regular, as some might expect; rather they are said to be subregular—a word coined for (...) this lecture. To repeat, a subregular polyhedron has congruent faces and congruent [polyhedral] angles. A subregular polyhedron whose faces are all regular polygons is regular—using standard terminology. -/- Geometers before Euclid showed that there are “essentially” only five regular polyhedra: every regular polyhedron is a tetrahedron (4 faces), a hexahedron or cube (6 faces), an octahedron (8 faces), a dodecahedron (12 faces), or an icosahedron (20 faces). -/- The first question is whether there are subregular polyhedra that are not regular. For example, are there tetrahedra having congruent angles and congruent triangular faces but whose faces are not equilateral triangles? -/- Another question is the classification of subregular polyhedra if they exist. For example, considering the fact that the regular tetrahedra all have equilateral triangles as faces, we ask which triangles other than equilaterals are faces of subregular tetrahedra. Similarly, considering the fact that the regular hexahedra all have squares as faces, we ask which quadrangles other than squares are faces of subregular hexahedra. -/- After introductory remarks that include historical and philosophical points, we concentrate on tetrahedra. A triangle that is congruent to each of the four faces of a tetrahedron is called a generator of the tetrahedron. The main result proved is that every acute triangle is a generator of a subregular tetrahedron. The proof includes an algorithm –implementable with scissors and paper –that constructs from any given acute triangle a subregular tetrahedron whose faces are congruent to the given triangle. -/- Algorithm: Given any acute triangle. Construct a similar triangle whose sides are double the sides of the given triangle. Draw the three lines connecting the three midpoints of the sides (making four triangles congruent to the given triangle—a central triangle surrounded by three peripheral triangles). Make three “hinges” along the lines connecting the midpoints. “Fold” the peripheral triangles together (into a tetrahedron). [LIGHTLY EDITED VERSION OF PRINTED ABSTRACT] Acknowledgements: William Lawvere, Colin McLarty, Irvin Miller, Frango Nabrasa, Lawrence Spector, Roberto Torretti, and Richard Vesley. -/- . (shrink)

We develop the theory of germs of generic functions in simple theories. Starting with an algebraic quadrangle (or other similar hypotheses), we obtain an "almost" generic group chunk, where the product is denned up to a bounded number of possible values. This is the first step towards the proof of the group configuration theorem for simple theories, which is completed in [3].

The relationship between ethics and economics has never been easy. Opponents in a tug of war, friends in a warm embrace, ships passing in the night—the relationship has been highly variable. In recent years, the friendship model has been gaining credence, particularly among U.S. corporate executives. Increasingly, companies are launching ethics programs, values initiatives, and community involvement activities premised on management’s belief that “Ethics pays.”.

In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imaginary and the real. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the two discursive traditions provides an elaborate systematic framework for (...) introducing the individual articles. The first axis of debate is generated by conceptual residues of the traditional tug-of-war between idealism and materialism which continues to infiltrate recent redescriptions of the web of sociality/materiality. The concern here is how much autonomy and agency can be granted to material objects in view of their social inscription and symbolic construction, and how far conceptual experiments with the ontological symmetry between humans and nonhumans may take us and/or should be permitted to go. The second axis of debate concerns the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing. (shrink)

From Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the man best known as Malcolm X restlessly redefined himself throughout a controversial life. His transformations have appeared repeatedly in books, photographs, paintings, and films, while his murder set in motion a series of tugs-of-war among journalists, biographers, artists, and his ideological champions over the interpretation of his cultural meaning. This book marks the first systematic examination of the images generated by this iconic cultural figure--images readily found on everything from T-shirts and (...) hip-hop album covers to coffee mugs. Graeme Abernethy captures both the multiplicity and global import of a person who has been framed as both villain and hero, cast by mainstream media during his lifetime as "the most feared man in American history," and elevated at his death as a heroic emblem of African American identity. As Abernethy shows, the resulting iconography of Malcolm X has shifted as profoundly as the American racial landscape itself. Abernethy explores Malcolm's visual prominence in the eras of civil rights, Black Power, and hip-hop. He analyzes this enigmatic figure's representation across a variety of media from 1960s magazines to urban murals, tracking the evolution of Malcolm's iconography from his autobiography and its radical milieu through the appearance of Spike Lee's 1992 biopic and beyond. Its remarkable gallery of illustrations includes reproductions of iconic photographs by Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and John Launois. Abernethy reveals that Malcolm X himself was keenly aware of the power of imagery to redefine identity and worked tirelessly to shape how he was represented to the public. His theoretical grasp of what he termed "the science of imagery" enabled him both to analyze the role of representation in ideological control as well as to exploit his own image in the interests of black empowerment. This provocative work marks a startling shift from the biographical focus that has dominated Malcolm X studies, providing an up-to-date--and comprehensively illustrated--account of Malcolm's cultural afterlife, and addressing his iconography in relation to images of other major African American figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Kanye West, and Barack Obama. Analyzing the competing interpretations behind so many images, Abernethy reveals what our lasting obsession with Malcolm X says about American culture over the last five decades. (shrink)

This paper takes Anscombe, Mumford and Anjum as key interlocutors for an exploration of the causality involved in our understanding of free will. Anscombe tried to disentangle causality from necessary determination in order to make room for free will, and a first section points to the historical and theological background of this entanglement. However, what is also crucially at stake is the relation between time and causality whereby this paper advocates a shift from a diachronic to a synchronic conception. This (...) synchronic conception of the contingency of free will is then argued to be superior to Mumford and Anjum’s dispositional modality in providing the libertarian desiderata of alternative possibilities and ultimate authorship, and gives us a picture of a permanent causal tug-of-war in the present. The final section then points out that this puts persons and their contingent decisions partly in the role of being an explanans for, rather than an explanandum of, any current contingent state of affairs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:34 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. James Bliss Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies Literary theory continues to be received by some as if it were an alien or antagonistic presence from whose leaden and reductive grasp it is imperative to keep literature protected. It is rare, however, that it is the literary, as such, that is being protected, rather than (...) a certain comfortable accommodation with it—not irreducible strangeness and surprise, but the security of knowing that one’s expectations will be fulfilled and one’s competence as a reader rewarded. The pleasures of accommodation and immediate assimilation are the first that theory asks us to forego—which may do as much to make it seem forbidding and “inhumane” as anything it actually proposes. —Elizabeth W. Bruss1 I. Theory Not for the first time, we find ourselves building new genres. Pursuing new writings. Not for the first time, the theoretical and the literary envelope, eclipse, and rearticulate one another. What’s more, the theoretical has been a mode of artistic practice for so long that every page is a palimpsest, a sedimentation of sedimentations of conceptual frames— swirled, spiraling genealogies. Fluent in invented tongues, in the idioms 1. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 483. 35 James Bliss Books Discussed in This Essay Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. By Jennifer C. Nash. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. By Stephen Best. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. By Amber Jamilla Musser. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Queer Times, Black Futures. By Kara Keeling. New York: NYU Press, 2019. of invention, in the fluid looseness of disintegrated discourses, our works turn singular. The monograph as signature. The page promises to freeze the text, the object, the artwork, the lifeworld, the performance, and in that stillness to teach us its movements. New moves, secret passageways, lines of escape and gaps in the walls of institutions that die, dissolve, and ossify around and inside us. And here we are. The permanent apocalypse that racial capitalism has been for most life has reached the quadrangles of the college campus. What are we even doing anymore? In the great and dreadful remaking of higher education, as students face permanent indebtedness as the cost of entry into a world without work, what is the ethical impetus for our researches and the systems within which we publish? What are the ethics of critical cultural studies in a debt mine? By what arithmetic do we benefit the students we teach to “steal from the university ” when the university is so much more adroit at stealing from them (and us)? At the same time that the contours of our professional lives are, apparently, unraveling, we find ourselves in (another) new renaissance in Black studies and Black study. We find ourselves within (another) new moment of textual production around the trio of race/gender/sexuality— that is, around Blackness or around Black feminism. 36 James Bliss Or, Black invention—where the Black female, femme, feminine, and maternal operate as synecdochic figures for a species of poiēsis.2 In the 1980s, Jacques Derrida wryly called California the “state of theory” as a function of its tectonic instability.3 In the 2010s, Blackness became the state of theory as a function of its coincidence of death and life, ending and beginning, absence and excess, apocalypse and invention. Blackness, in this instance, is as material as it is metaphor, a projection of meaning across both the great ephemeral skin and the body as flesh. This piece emerges from a sense of the necessity and the hazards of an intellectual history of a moment during which, to take a suggestive phrase from Jared Sexton, “Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.”4 But already language presents an issue. What is the relationship between Sexton’s “theory” and the “theory” found in the epigraph from Elizabeth Bruss? Or, between Sexton’s “theory” and Lewis R. Gordon’s “theory,” as Sexton borrows from Gordon’s “Theory in... (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

In September 2006, when 45 scholars and activists from 19 countries around the world gathered amid the spires and gargoyles of Oxford for a conference entitled, “Hope: Probing the Boundaries,” complex dialectics of hope and despair circulated through the meeting rooms by day, and the conversations in quadrangles and pubs late into the night. On the one hand, the remarkable social and political openings and possibilities of the previous decade, from Berlin to Johannesburg, Leningrad to the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, (...) seemed to be ever-more constrained by political and economic forces as brutal as those that preceded them, but, on the other hand, there were the Zapatistas and a thousand other movements persisting in the belief that, to echo the mantra of the World Social Forums, “another world is possible,” and there we were from around the world, to do the work of theorizing, describing, and enacting the persistence of individual and collective hope despite grim realities. The essays developed from that conference and collected here reflect both the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings and the cultural and political praxes of “hope against hope.”. (shrink)

Medieval theologians may not have agonized over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—though the question does arise in the anonymous mystical dialogue Schwester Katrei—but on other matters angels provoked them to endless speculation. How many are there? Perhaps 34,720,000,000, but that was not the only calculation. Without bodies, how do they speak or sing? Do they have names, or even personal identities? How and why and when did some of them rebel? How do they flit (...) back and forth between praising God in heaven and tending to people on earth? The Bible says much about angels, but they remain abstract and good to speculate about. They are ranked in a hierarchy of orders, but the theologians have different ways of organizing them. James Collins used to say that angels, rational beings like us, show what we would be without our bodies. Even disembodied, however, we would be less mysterious to ourselves than angels are. Saints, being less abstract than angels, lend themselves far more to storytelling—which is precisely what Weinberger does when he shifts from angels to saints. Having guided the reader through issue after speculative issue in the field of angelology, he tells story after story from the treasure trove of hagiography. Are there no issues to be explored? Might the reader be interested in the tug-of-war between action and contemplation, or the role of conversion and penitence, or the gender dynamics of sainthood, or for that matter the tendency of saints to wrestle with demons, bidden or unbidden? Saints are paradoxically both imitable and utterly beyond imitation: they feed the hungry, but they also (some of them) levitate, or starve themselves to death, or produce fire from their fingertips. Unlike angels, they are firmly grounded in history, which means they change over time: modern saints differ from ancient ones, at least in context. Weinberger gives ample material for reflection about saints—at one point, a catalog of ten Hyacinths and a Hyacintha. In approaching the angels, he gives questions with multiple answers; in dealing with saints, he gives answers and leaves it for us to ask the right questions. (shrink)

In this paper, we continue the construction done in [3], so that under model-4-CA or 4-CA, given a bounded quadrangle C induced from a group configuration, we build a canonical hyperdefinable homogeneous space equivalent to C. When C is principal, we can choose the homogeneous space principal as well.

This article takes a look back at the historical and philosophical context of the International Map of the World, humans’ first attempt at mapping the entire surface of the earth in detail on a uniform scale. Albrect Penck’s initial idea for a thoroughly detailed topographic map of the world, proposed at Fifth International Geographical Conference in 1891 and securing the support, both symbolic and financial, of many of the world’s governments by the first decades of the twentiethcentury, consisted of a (...) uniform series of hypsometrically-colored topographical maps overlaid with human data and dividing the world into consistently-scaled quadrangles. Envisioned by some geographers and cartographers as a component of the peace, both following both the First and then the Second World War, the project would come to be administered by international and non-governmental organizations by midcentury, as primary governmental support for cartography at that time increasingly reflected territorial interests and claims over and above those in favor of employing concepts of geographical knowledge that were not explicitly political or territorial. The slow demise of the project can be understood to signify the ultimate difficulty of a project that disacknowledged the fundamentality of politically constructed boundaries by employing another scale, in this case, a geometric scale with systematically geographical content, in order to frame its maps. (shrink)

This volume explores contemporary social conflict, focusing on a sort of violence that rarely receives coverage in the evening news. This violence occurs when powerful institutions seek to manipulate the thoughts of marginalized people-manufacturing their feelings and fostering a sense of inferiority-for the purpose of disciplinary control. Many American institutions strategically orchestrate this psychic violence through tactics of systemic humiliation. This book reveals how certain counter-measures, based in a commitment to human dignity and respect for every person's inherent moral worth, (...) can combat this violence. Rothbart and other contributors showcase various examples of this tug-of-war in the US, including the politics of race and class in the 2016 presidential campaign, the dehumanizing treatment of people with mental disabilities, and destructive parenting styles that foster cycles of humiliation and emotional pain. (shrink)

The original essays in this volume, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy that seem not readily allied: Wittgenstein, who urges us to bring our words back home to their ordinary uses, recognizing that it is our agreements in judgments and forms of life that ground intelligibility; and feminist theory, whose task is to articulate a radical critique of what we say, to disrupt precisely those taken-for-granted agreements in (...) judgments and forms of life. Wittgenstein and feminist theorists are alike, however, in being unwilling or unable to "make sense" in the terms of the traditions from which they come, needing to rely on other means—including telling stories about everyday life—to change our ideas of what sense is and of what it is to make it. For both, appeal to grounding is problematic, but the presumed groundedness of particular judgments remains an unavoidable feature of discourse and, as such, in need of understanding. For feminist theory, Wittgenstein suggests responses to the immobilizing tugs between modernist modes of theorizing and postmodern challenges to them. For Wittgenstein, feminist theory suggests responses to those who would turn him into the "normal" philosopher he dreaded becoming, one who offers perhaps unorthodox solutions to recognizable philosophical problems. In addition to an introductory essay by Naomi Scheman, the volume’s twenty chapters are grouped in sections titled "The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject," "Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions," "Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds," "Being Human: Agents and Subjects," and "Feminism’s Allies: New Players, New Games." These essays give us ways of understanding Wittgenstein and feminist theory that make the alliance a mutually fruitful one, even as they bring to their readings of Wittgenstein an explicitly historical and political perspective that is, at best, implicit in his work. The recent salutary turn in philosophy toward taking history seriously has shown how the apparently timeless problems of supposedly generic subjects arose out of historically specific circumstances. These essays shed light on the task of feminist theorists—along with postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists—to "rotate the axis of our examination" around whatever "real need[s]" might emerge through the struggles of modernity’s Others. Contributors are Nancy E. Baker, Nalini Bhushan, Jane Braaten, Judith Bradford, Sandra W. Churchill, Daniel Cohen, Tim Craker, Alice Crary, Susan Hekman, Cressida J. Heyes, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Christine M. Koggel, Bruce Krajewski, Wendy Lynne Lee, Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Deborah Orr, Rupert Read, Phyllis Rooney, and Janet Farrell Smith. (shrink)

Using projectivity groups, we classify some polygons with strongly minimal point rows and show in particular that no infinite quadrangle can have sharply 2-transitive projectivity groups in which the point stabilizers are abelian. In fact, we characterize the finite orthogonal quadrangles Q, Q$^-$ and Q by this property. Finally we show that the sets of points, lines and flags of any N$_1$-categorical polygon have Morley degree 1.

Reclaiming the Wild Soul takes us on a journey into Earth's five great landscapes - deserts, forests, oceans and rivers, mountains, and grasslands - as aspects of our deeper, wilder selves. Where the inner and outer worlds meet we discover our own true nature mirrored in the Earth's wild beauty and fierce challenges. A powerful archetypal model for transformation, the "soulscapes" return us to a primal terrain rich in knowing, healing, and wholeness. To guide our path, each soulscape offers up (...) wisdom in the form of soul qualities the modern world often undervalues and even undermines. We see how deserts model simplicity and silence, how forests help us make peace with uncertainty, how rivers and oceans reveal the power of flow, how mountains inspire our highest purpose, and how grasslands teach us about giving back. Weaving personal story with poetry, imagery, and explorations, Reclaiming the Wild Soul is simultaneously self-help and a courageous call to action. It is written for all those disillusioned with our hyper-paced, high-tech world, who decry what we are doing to the Earth, who feel the tug of their own wild souls longing for discovery and mystery - a new, yet ancient, way of being human. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the conditions under the umbrella “personality disorders” actually constitute two very different kinds of theoretical entities. In particular, several core personality disorders are actually moral, and not medical, conditions. Thus, the categories that are held to represent them are really moral, and not medical, theoretical kinds. The chapter works back from the possibility of treatment to the nature of the kinds that are allegedly treated, revisiting 18th-century ideas of moral treatment along the way. The discussion closes (...) with a reflection on how the ambiguous medical status of personality disorders and their treatment today is reminiscent of the ideological tug of war that pits alienist “mad doctors” like Pinel against their lay counterparts such as Tuke as they battled over who should be in charge of treating the mad. (shrink)

The convergence of India’s rich cultural and religious heritage with its rapidly transforming economy provides a unique opportunity to understand how senior executives navigate the demands of the business environment within the context of their religious convictions. Forty senior executives with varying religious backgrounds and global responsibilities within Indian multinational corporations participated in this study. Drawing from virtue ethics theory and using systematic content analysis, several themes emerged for ethical virtues. The analysis illustrates how these deeply seated ethical virtues helped (...) to form and refine these executives’ ethical mindsets via guiding principles such as an ethical culture, environment, molding, education, commitment and leadership. In turn, these ethical mindsets influenced the executives’ ethical decision-making processes. We find that these executives’ ethical virtues and mindsets are inspired by their religious backgrounds. In summary, a very complex mental tug-of-war appears to take place as these executives rationalize and negotiate unethical circumstances while being cognizant of personal religious beliefs. We contend that in a pluralistic multi-faith society such as India, it is critical for corporations to align the virtues of its senior executives with those of the corporation so that virtues are applied consistently when dealing with various stakeholders. The findings present several theoretical and practical implications, which are discussed. (shrink)

Nelson's Proof of the Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge -/- In addressing the possibility of a theory of knowledge, Leonard Nelson noted the contradiction of an epistemological criterion that one would require in order to differentiate between valid and invalid knowledge. Nelson concluded that the inconsistency of such a criterion proves the impossibility of the theory of knowledge. -/- Had the epistemological criterion had a perception, then it would presume to adjudicate on its own truth (thus epistemological circular argument). (...) However, if one were to assume that the criterion is not knowledge, one would then have to justify how this is a criterion for truth - yet this would only be possible when it may be considered as an object of knowledge. One would equally have had to predetermine the criterion in order to determine the truth of this knowledge, thereby providing another circular argument. Ostensibly, every criterion of truth fails at its very own test since it cannot guarantee its own truth, just as Munchausen, contrary to his assertion, could not draw himself out of the swamp by tugging on a tuft of his own hair. -/- Nelson proposed a solution of the epistemological problem (the question of the differentiation between valid and invalid knowledge), that based on Jakob Friedrich Fries' differentiation between proof and deduction. Proof, according to Nelson (in reference to Fries), can be defined as derivation of truth from one statement from another statement. Thus, from the truth in the statement that "all men are mortal", one is then able to say that "Socrates is a man" and thence extrapolate from the truth of the statement that "Socrates is mortal." If knowledge were to be considered somewhat judgmental (in a statement), then an attempt at proof (i.e. recourse to previous judgments) would inevitably lead to an infinite regression in justification, since each judgment would necessitate a further justification from another judgment. Every attempt to prove an epistemological criterion is thus also confronted by this regression in justification. -/- Nelson's attempt at a solution rests on the assumption of the existence of an immediate knowledge as a justification of the truth (mediate) of knowledge. Nelson considers immediate knowledge to be non-judgmental knowledge. These include intuitions (e. g. seeing-the-red-roof) and also philosophical knowledge that pre-exists in his opinion before a judgmental reflexion (immediate) in our reason (e. g. the principle of causality). -/- Proof of the truth of mediate knowledge can be effected by showing its compliance with attendant immediate knowledge (rational truth = correspondence of mediate knowledge with their immediate knowledge). Nelson considered this as a resolution of the circular epistemological argument. In regard to philosophical knowledge, Nelson sees these as subject to deduction and not proof. The following example illustrates the goal of deduction: -/- An approach for deducing the principle of causality: A) Every change has a cause. (The principle of causality) A´) A is a reiteration of an immediate knowledge. (Meta-assertion following A) -/- "A" may not be provable, but A´ may justified, and thus Nelson identified it as a deduction following from A. // reference: http://www.friesian.com/nelproof.htm. (shrink)

There are two ways that we might respond to the underdetermination of theory by data. One response, which we can call the agnostic response, is to suspend judgment: "Where scientific standards cannot guide us, we should believe nothing". Another response, which we can call the fideist response, is to believe whatever we would like to believe: "If science cannot speak to the question, then we may believe anything without science ever contradicting us". C.S. Peirce recognized these options and suggested evading (...) the dilemma. It is a Logical Maxim, he suggests, that there could be no genuine underdetermination. This is no longer a viable option in the wake of developments in modern physics, so we must face the dilemma head on. The agnostic and fideist responses to underdetermination represent fundamentally different epistemic viewpoints. Nevertheless, the choice between them is not an unresolvable struggle between incommensurable worldviews. There are legitimate considerations tugging in each direction. Given the balance of these considerations, there should be a modest presumption of agnosticism. This may conflict with Peirce's Logical Maxim, but it preserves all that we can preserve of the Peircean motivation. (shrink)

Should we merely celebrate diversity in the sphere of religion? What of the social cohesion of a country? There is a constant tug between belief in religious truth and the need for respect for other religions. Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions examines how far a firm faith can allow for toleration of difference and respect the need for religious freedom. It elucidates the philosophical credentials of different approaches to truth in religion, ranging from a dogmatic fundamentalism to a pluralism (...) that shades into relativism. Must we resort to a secularism that treats all religion as a personal and private matter, with nothing to contribute to discussions about the common good? How should law approach the issue of religious freedom? Introducing the relevance of central discussions in modern philosophy of religion, the book goes on to examine the political implications of increasing religious diversity in a democracy. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the conditions under the umbrella “personality disorders” actually constitute two very different kinds of theoretical entities. In particular, several core personality disorders are actually moral, and not medical, conditions. Thus, the categories that are held to represent them are really moral, and not medical, theoretical kinds. The chapter works back from the possibility of treatment to the nature of the kinds that are allegedly treated, revisiting 18th-century ideas of moral treatment along the way. The discussion closes (...) with a reflection on how the ambiguous medical status of personality disorders and their treatment today is reminiscent of the ideological tug of war that pits alienist “mad doctors” like Pinel against their lay counterparts such as Tuke as they battled over who should be in charge of treating the mad. (shrink)

In his recent papers, entitled Intelligence without Representation and Intelligence without Reason, Brooks argues for mobile robots as the foundation of AI research. This article argues that even if we seek to investigate complete agents in real-world environments, robotics is neither necessary nor sufficient as a basis for AI research. The article proposes real-world software environments, such as operating systems or databases, as a complementary substrate for intelligent-agent research and considers the relative advantages of software environments as test beds for (...) AI. First, the cost, effort, and expertise necessary to develop and systematically experiment with software artifacts are relatively low. Second, software environments circumvent many thorny but peripheral research issues that are inescapable in physical environments. Brooks's mobile robots tug AI toward a bottom-up focus in which the mechanics of perception and mobility mingle inextricably with or even supersede core AI research. In contrast, the softbots (software robots) I advocate facilitate the study of classical AI problems in real-world (albeit, software) domains. For example, the UNIX softbot under development at the University of Washington has led us to investigate planning with incomplete information, interleaving planning and execution, and a host of related high-level issues. (shrink)

What is abolition? What is the logic of its movement, the character of its kinesthetic signature? By exploring abolition’s debts to Foucauldian genealogy, the messianism in Derridean deconstruction, and the affective resistance among queer/trans communities, this essay argues that abolition is a kite-idea. It moves by flying overhead, shimmering in the sun, and tugging at the hand. Abolition is a practice of history, a dream of the future, and an affective struggle lived today. This is its fragile promise.