The philosopher Graham Harman argues that contemporary debates about the nature of reality as such, and about the nature of objects in particular, can be meaningfully applied to social theory and practice. With Immaterialism, he has recently provided a case-based demonstration of how this could happen. But social theorists have compelling reasons to oppose object-oriented social theory’s 15 principles. Fidelity to Harman’s aesthetic foundationalism, and his particular use of serial endosymbiosis theory as (...) a mechanism of social change, constrain the very practices which it is supposed to enable. However, social theory stands to benefit from object-oriented philosophy through what we call posthuman relationism – characterised as a commitment to the reality of the nonhuman, but not divorced from the human. The emphasis in object-oriented social theory on how objects withdraw from cognitive or affective capture and representation needs to be tempered by an equal focus on how objects appeal. (shrink)

The philosopher Graham Harman argues that contemporary debates about the nature of reality as such, and about the nature of objects in particular, can be meaningfully applied to social theory and practice. With Immaterialism, he has recently provided a case-based demonstration of how this could happen. But social theorists have compelling reasons to oppose object-oriented social theory’s 15 principles. Fidelity to Harman’s aesthetic foundationalism, and his particular use of serial endosymbiosis theory as (...) a mechanism of social change, constrain the very practices which it is supposed to enable. However, social theory stands to benefit from object-oriented philosophy through what we call posthuman relationism – characterised as a commitment to the reality of the nonhuman, but not divorced from the human. The emphasis in object-oriented social theory on how objects withdraw from cognitive or affective capture and representation needs to be tempered by an equal focus on how objects appeal. (shrink)

What objects exist in the social world and how should we understand them? Is a specific Pizza Hut restaurant as real as the employees, tables, napkins and pizzas of which it is composed, and as real as the Pizza Hut corporation with its headquarters in Wichita, the United States, the planet Earth and the social and economic impact of the restaurant on the lives of its employees and customers? In this book the founder of object-oriented philosophy (...) develops his approach in order to shed light on the nature and status of objects in social life. While it is often assumed that an interest in objects amounts to a form of materialism, Harman rejects this view and develops instead an “immaterialist” method. By examining the work of leading contemporary thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Levi Bryant, he develops a forceful critique of ‘actor-network theory’. In an extended discussion of Leibniz’s famous example of the Dutch East India Company, Harman argues that this company qualifies for objecthood neither through ‘what it is’ or ‘what it does’, but through its irreducibility to either of these forms. The phases of its life, argues Harman, are not demarcated primarily by dramatic incidents but by moments of symbiosis, a term he draws from the biologist Lynn Margulis. This book provides a key counterpoint to the now ubiquitous social theories of constant change, holistic networks, performative identities, and the construction of things by human practice. It will appeal to anyone interested in cutting-edge debates in philosophy and social and cultural theory. (shrink)

This essay aims to explore the impact of Object-Oriented Ontology (O.O.O) within the realm of pedagogy, critically examining its departure from humanistic and traditional paradigms. Simultaneously, it presents an alternative perspective on education that decenters the human as an inevitable ground. In a contrasting move, attention is directed towards Bruno Latour and Graham Harman, elucidating key facets of their ideas. This shift also signifies a departure from the conventional realm of “critical pedagogy”, as championed by Brazilian pedagogue Paulo (...) Freire. However, it is crucial to acknowledge and appreciate the contributions and significance of Freire’s work. This essay adopts a left-wing stance, with no intention of launching moral attacks on Paulo Freire, as is sometimes witnessed when reactionaries and conservatives enter the academic arena. Criticisms within these pages focus on the content of Freire’s writings, tracing the trajectory from his seminal work, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, published in 1968, to his final piece, “Pedagogy of Autonomy” written in 1996. The aim is not to exhaust all arguments put forth by Freire but to engage with select ideas, since his oeuvre is extremely complex and full of different layers. It is essential to clarify that the critique presented here does not target the character of Paulo Freire but rather delves into some of the theoretical references behind the scenes, particularly the anthropocentrism associated with his ideas. Consequently, this essay emerges as an interdisciplinary endeavor, a conjunction between philosophy and social theory. What doors will this discussion open? What new field of possibilities awaits us? I invite you to dive into this debate, exploring the potential for an Object-Oriented Pedagogy (O.O.P) on the horizon. (shrink)

Although the opposition between realism and idealism is exhibited in their different assumptions on objectivity, in the field of social theory, John Anderson's social realism and Jürgen Habermas's social idealism are united in their rejection of positivism's separation of theory from praxis. Social realism's agreement with social idealism's critique of Popper's ?positivism?, on logical, methodological, ethical and ontological grounds, does not mean, however, a dissolution of the conflict between these two traditions. Indeed, (...) class='Hi'>social idealism's and social realism's rejection of the fact/value dichotomy and synthesis of theory and praxis take different forms. Accordingly, social idealism advances a prescriptive ethic and rejects objectivity whilst social realism advances a descriptive ethic, and accepts objectivity. The strength of social realism, as an objective basis upon which positivist sociology might be reconstructed, lies in its refutation of social idealism. Through immanent critique, social idealism is shown to rest on an ontological mistake, a mistake of synthesis, a subjective mistake, and a substantive mistake. (shrink)

In his recent Immaterialism, Graham Harman develops a theory of social objects based on his object-oriented ontology. Whereas some of the more mainstream theories in the humanities would dissolve such objects into their material constituents or their various effects on others, object-oriented social theory theorizes them as inert, resilient entities with a private reality that exceeds their components and actions. Harman’s theory focuses on what social entities are qua objects, and (...) consequently says little about their specificity as social objects. A more complete social theory would also outline how human existence is to be understood in relation to a social world comprised of discrete and inert entities, as opposed to, for example, far more continuous material fields or networks of associations. We argue that an unexpected yet solid candidate for such an extension of object-oriented social theory already exists in Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of practico-inert being and group formation. We first outline Harman’s and Sartre’s respective ontologies of social objects, and then discuss how their many complementarities make the latter a suitable extension of the former. (shrink)

Moral-theoretical categories have almost disappeared from the theoretical vocabulary of sociology. Neither perceptions of legitimacy nor perceptions of injustice, neither moral argument nor normative consensus now play a significant role in explaining the social order. Instead the object of sociological inquiry is understood either according to the pattern of anonymous self-organization processes or as the result of cooperation among strategically-oriented actors; accordingly, the disciplinary role models are biology or economics, whose conceptual models appear suited to explain such (...) a complex process as the reproduction of societies. One may easily get the impression that current sociology wishes to finally bid farewell to the generation of its founding fathers; since from Weber and Durkheim to Talcott Parsons, it was a settled matter that an adequate basic conception of the social world could only be derived using the concepts, models, or hypotheses of moral theory – practical philosophy was, so to speak, the foundation and guiding discipline for classical sociology. After the “Theory of Communicative Action”– the last grand sketch of a complete social theory based on the sources of practical philosophy – all this seems to have been forgotten. In any event, it could until recently appear that with Habermas’ book the tradition of a normatively oriented sociology has come to an end. It is mostly due to the efforts of a small group of researchers in France – which assembled around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot – that there continues to be a strand within social theory that employs sources of moral philosophy. Having emerged from an internal critique of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, the works of this highly productive circle, probing ever new directions, seek to explain the integration of our societies through the interplay of different moral convictions.1 The foundational text of this sociological school is the study On Justification, originally published in 1991.2 This book, which has meanwhile also been published in German,3 deserves careful consideration not least because it represents the most interesting attempt of the more recent past to give sociology a basis in moral philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines the theoretical conditions of studying media considered as a specific type of phenomenon, a 'medium phenomenon', to use a philosophical term. The purpose of this study is to examine and evaluate the interpretations of the medium phenomenon in the context of object-oriented ontology, with the authors drawing on the latest philosophical theories and explaining other scholars' reasons for investigating media in particular ways. As part of this inquiry, the authors aim at clarifying the content of (...) the medium phenomenon whilst explaining the reasons for investigating the medium from specific positions in the context of the latest philosophical theories. The authors conclude their inquiry by offering the examination and evaluation of the potential of object-oriented ontologies aimed at characterizing the medium as a type of social object. As the medium's distinctive features are revealed, the authors suggest that interrogating it further is important for improving our understanding of social processes and creating new strategies and technologies of media usage. (shrink)

The spring, summer, and fall 2006 editions of Critical Inquiry hosted a heated exchange between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek regarding the proper definition of the Lacanian Real. Žižek claims "the Real is the inexorable abstract spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality". In response, Laclau states that Žižek's "spectral logic of capital" is a gross distortion of Lacanian theory: "The Real is not a specifiable object endowed with laws of movement on (...) its own but, on the contrary, something that only exists and shows itself through its disruptive effects within the Symbolic". Laclau's formulation of the Real, however, forecloses the possibility of... (shrink)

Social entrepreneurship orientation is a behavioral construct of social entrepreneurship ; therefore, we examined the influence of SEO of the organization on social and financial performance. A random sample of 810 employees was drawn from social enterprises of Pakistan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although increasing research focuses on SE, the discipline continues to disintegrate, and this has led to appeals for a careful investigation of the associations of firms’ SE. In the recent decade, “social entrepreneurship” (...) has earned its importance as a segment of entrepreneurship. Instead of mixed activity, firms are more likely to engage in either for-profit or non-profit activities. The causes for and consequences of this conduct has been mainly studied using objective measures of SEO, social performance, and financial performance, with little attention paid to the subjective experiences of social enterprises. We rely on the theory of stakeholder and mixed structuring to postulate that social performance intermediates the SEO-financial performance relation. By assessing a sample of 810 employees from active enterprises, we discover that social performance mediates positively and partially between SEO and financial performance, and both direct and indirect paths are in the same direction and significant. Our findings exhibit that social performance variance explained 74% of the mediating role, and the remaining 26% of the effect is because of SEO. We consider the functions by which an SEO influences enterprise performance and delivers more prominent understanding into multiple spectrums of performance. We discuss the prospective suggestions of our research and foster an encouraging pathway for more enquiry on the SEO paradigm. The study adds contribution to the literature, which has not been testified before on hybrid firms. SEO is a newly defined construct and requires more prospective research. This research gives the researchers/scholars new directions to address related disciplines and further explore this domain. (shrink)

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we contribute to the behavioral ethics literature by examining how and why organizational socialization processes can affect newcomers’ adoption of unethical behaviors. Specifically, we contend that quality peer coaching provides newcomers with enhanced self-resources that diminishes emotional exhaustion and thus indirectly reduces newcomer unethical conduct. Conversely, peer coach unethical conduct increases newcomers’ emotional exhaustion, and thus indirectly increases newcomers’ own unethical acts. Our research also identifies newcomers’ goal orientations as important individual differences that (...) moderate the proposed mediation effects. Newcomers with high mastery orientations respond to high emotional exhaustion by harnessing more resources and identifying new work strategies, thereby engaging in less unethical conduct. Conversely, newcomers with high performance orientations give into emotional exhaustion and engage in unethical conduct as a way of outperforming others while conserving resources. We tested our theoretical model using a sample of peer coaches and newcomers from the Real Estate industry, using objective reporting of peer coaches’ and newcomers’ unethical conduct over a nine-month period. (shrink)

The philosophy of mathematical practice sometimes investigates the social constitution of mathematics but does not always make explicit the philosophical-normative framework that guides the discussion. This chapter investigates some recent proposals in the philosophy of mathematical practice that compare social facts and mathematical objects, discussing similarities and differences. An attempt will be made to identify, through a comparison with three different perspectives in social ontology, the kind of objectivity attributed to mathematical knowledge, the type of representational or (...) non-representational semantics adopted, and the justificatory or coordinative role entrusted to axiomatics. After a brief introduction to key issues in social ontology, Sect. 3 of the chapter offers a survey of contributions by Feferman, Ferreirós, and Cole, highlighting a difference between approaches based on rules, practices, and intentional states, respectively. Section 4.1 also discusses results by Carter, Collin, Giardino, and Pantsar, focusing on differences between the objectivity of knowledge and objectivity of objects and showing that many authors combine a realist, structuralist, and pragmatist perspective, as well as the idea that objectivity comes in degrees. Section 4.2 focuses on the kind of semantics that is adopted in socially oriented approaches. A representational semantics is preferred by authors grounding their views on mental states, whereas a non-representational semantics best fits with views based on practices. Section 5 considers how axiomatics can be understood in a social perspective. Axiomatics generally plays a justificatory role also in theories that aim to explain the social constitution of mathematical knowledge. Yet, if one shifts from approaches based on mental states to approaches anchored on rules or habits, axiomatics can be viewed as an institution based on obligations, functions, coordination problems, and agent’s actions and roles, thus playing an organizational and coordination role. (shrink)

We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. "To think a reality beyond our thinking is not (...) nonsense, but obligatory." At OOO's heart is the idea that objects--whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human, or non-human--are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out OOO's history, ideas, and impact, taking in art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. From Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, and videogames to Dadaism, Voltaire, and string theory, this book will change the way you understand everything. (shrink)

In face of the postmodern ideal of a 'mutiple' subject, there has been talk at regular classical psychoanalysis's normative orientation toward intervals since the end of the the ego's capacity to cope consistently with reality may Second World War of psy seem obsolete. However, a psychoanalytic theory choanalysis being obsolete. which is revised in the light of object-relations theory, In these fields - where the integrationist social psychology, and an intersubjectivist notion is not just an ideolo (...) account of the formation of the drives can answer the gical weapon - this signifies postmodern challenge. According to this alternative the tendency of a growing psychoanalytic view, the goal of a 'healthy' development discrepancy said to have of personality is a state of an inner capacity for dialo opened up between the origue, able to account normatively for altering forms of ginal and the current socio-ego-identity under changing social conditions. (shrink)

s book, Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A critique of Gadamer and Habermas, intends to present an account of debates on objectivity in the social sciences, in stressing the political and epistemological responsibility, in public spheres, to those who want to create a fairer understanding of societies and history, without demonizing natural enterprises or leaving social studies out of acute critical questioning. Key Words: dialogue • hermeneutic • social sciences • natural sciences • method.

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

In Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), an apparent tension arises between his pursuit of a self-proclaimed “new theory of everything,” or general ontology, and his assertion that any ontology must be able to account for distinctions among various regions of being. This paper delves into this tension between universality and specificity, particularly concerning the question of animal ontology, and examines the potential for constructing an object-oriented animal ontology. By juxtaposing Harman’s perspectives with those of Matthew (...) Calarco and other scholars, I aim to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an animal ontology using the framework of OOO. (shrink)

Although a large number of theories justify the presence of games in school, all of them converge in two of the educational functions described by Biesta, socialization and qualification. In contra...

In the modern world, with the processes of social development gaining accelerated rates, a new philosophical image of the world emerges, accompanied by the formation of a new social philosophy. Contemporary social philosophy is not a monosemantically defined field of the usage of notions, because it generalizes the most complicated and rapidly changing objects such as society and man. In this sense social philosophy is always incomplete, relatively open and, therefore, a temporary, theoretically "imperfect", "nonsystematic". Over (...) the last few decades social philosophy has suffered a deep crisis. This crisis was evoked by changes in the paradigm of science. Philosophy was too slow with its reaction to these changes; its former means of cognition failed to explain the new, rapid processes of social life. Philosophy began to get out of the crisis for two reasons. First, social theory felt the need of new, more general means of explanation, of a metatheory, which can be nothing else but philosophy. Second, philosophy itself changed its orientation, entered the paradigm of integrity, accepted the idea of society as an open system. The task of contemporary philosophy is not only to attain truth, but also to show how this truth can become active. Contemporary philosophy is the means of both thinking and action. Philosophy has no absolutely accomplished truth any more: it is searching for the truth of its time. (shrink)

In the modern world, with the processes of social development gaining accelerated rates, a new philosophical image of the world emerges, accompanied by the formation of a new social philosophy. Contemporary social philosophy is not a monosemantically defined field of the usage of notions, because it generalizes the most complicated and rapidly changing objects such as society and man. In this sense social philosophy is always incomplete, relatively open and, therefore, a temporary, theoretically "imperfect", "nonsystematic". Over (...) the last few decades social philosophy has suffered a deep crisis. This crisis was evoked by changes in the paradigm of science. Philosophy was too slow with its reaction to these changes; its former means of cognition failed to explain the new, rapid processes of social life. Philosophy began to get out of the crisis for two reasons. First, social theory felt the need of new, more general means of explanation, of a metatheory, which can be nothing else but philosophy. Second, philosophy itself changed its orientation, entered the paradigm of integrity, accepted the idea of society as an open system. The task of contemporary philosophy is not only to attain truth, but also to show how this truth can become active. Contemporary philosophy is the means of both thinking and action. Philosophy has no absolutely accomplished truth any more: it is searching for the truth of its time. (shrink)

Background Social inequities in the healthcare system threaten global health. Efforts to establish equity in healthcare is a key goal of healthcare systems worldwide. Social justice is a basic value of the nursing profession that always merits attention. Objective This study aimed to identify and explain the processes of the nursing profession’s participation in establishing social justice in healthcare system. Research design and methods This qualitative study was conducted using the grounded theory method. Participants and research (...) context Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured, individual interviews with 26 participants, 23 of whom were members of the nursing profession. Sampling started purposefully and, then, continued with theoretical sampling. Field notes were also taken for data collection. Data analysis was performed using Corbin and Strauss’ 2015 method. Ethical considerations The research was approved by the Ethics Committee of Urmia University of Medical Sciences in Iran. Findings The “Professional Dynamics in the Path of Justice” was the study’s core category. This theory is the result of nine main categories: “inefficient professional authority,” “social justice, a neglected component in education,” “clinical concerns, barriers to nurses’ presence in society,” “individual input reserves to facilitate social justice,” “inadequate maturity of the profession in the path of equity in health,” “promoting justice in clinical practice,” “a tendency to community-oriented profession,” “use of personal approaches for justice promotion,” and “emerging justice-expanding nursing.” These categories cover the underlying factors, strategies, and outcomes of the nursing profession’s participation in establishing social justice process in healthcare. Conclusion The theory of professional dynamics in the path of justice can be used as a practical guide to describe the role of nurses in establishing social justice. Further studies with a quantitative approach to applying this theory are recommended. (shrink)

Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social theorists who lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories interpret the persistence of misrecognition and violence within contemporary societies? Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition represents the most compelling attempt to address these questions within the so-called ‘third generation’ of critical (...) class='Hi'>theory, yet Honneth sidesteps or sublimates the most troubling aspects of the psychoanalytic legacy, displaying a quasi-Hegelian ‘cunning of recognition’ that sees human destructiveness as a purposive, experimental force within the psyche and the social. By rooting his theory in the work of D.W. Winnicott, Honneth avoids the ambivalent account of psychic and social life offered by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein and Wilfrid Bion. However, I argue that Klein’s concept of ‘integration’ offers a more compelling orientation for social theory, insofar as it countenances the fragility of recognition alongside a desire for misrecognition. The turn to Klein and those directly influenced by her, such as Bion and Hanna Segal, has both theoretical and practical implications for contemporary critical theory. Theoretically it makes the case for reconnecting mainline critical theory – with its overtures to liberalism and deliberative democracy – with agonistic approaches to social life. Practically speaking it directs attention to the social and political spaces by which destructive impulses can be effectively articulated, held, and to some extent worked through. In particular, it offers a psychological and political defense of recent experiments in local, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes. (shrink)

Theory in the traditional sense of the word comprises a deductive system in which hypotheses and their logical consequences are compared with empirical observations. Such comparison is usually regarded as a verification of the theory. The ideal for this conception of theory is a universal scientific system in which the theories of the different scientific disciplines are brought together under the head of a few fundamental principles.Traditional theory and reality belong to two distinct and separate provinces. (...) Insofar as men make forecasts with the help of theory and attempt to change reality, they do not act as theoreticians. Theory remains in the realm of contemplation. Philosophers have frequently made something absolute out of this aspect of theory and, under the title of,logosf or.spirit', have deified the subject of these intellectual activities. It appears in their systems as the creator of the world. What they are really doing, however, is treating the scholar’s activity, which is based on the division of labor in modern society, as an dbjective and independent substance. The real subject of theory in its traditional aspect is not pure spirit but the scholar who performs definite and necessary functions in modem society.If such an analysis is accepted, the philosophical naiveté of the theoretician disappears. He perceives that not only thinking as such, but also its task, its direction, and the structure of the objective world are ultimately connected with human activity and work. Out of the historical process by which men wrest their living from nature, there emerges the separation of material and intellectual work, as well as the structure and the content of the latter. The dogmatic differentiation between the logical and historical premises of science cannot be maintained. The theoretician is himself part and parcel of the subject which forms the real objective world. To take an active part in the direction of the social life of humanity, therefore, becomes a function and a requirement of science.So it is as theory, in the critical sense of the word, that the author regards the type of reasoning which attempts to impart to social life in its totality a rational form and which does not limit itself to working within the framework of the given system of the division of labor. The history of different scientific theories shows theory, with its unity and clarity, in contrast and opposition to the heterogeneity and disharmony of the real world. In the attempts to achieve harmony in society, thought may play an important role.The author analyses the logical structure of critical theory in the performance of such a function. Its content is the description of present society in terms of a development towards a rational form. Critical theory, therefore, always remains intimately linked up with the reality of existence. It needs for its development in each and every instance the existence and assistance of the various scientific disciplines. Its logical structure, however, is more complicated than that of theory in the traditional sense, because it does not regard its objectives as a separate and foreign province. Science, in the traditional sense, even where it formulates developments in nature and human history, regards interests and purposes as given facts and guideposts that are foreign to its own structure. It has a utilitarian character in a directly understandable sense. Critical theory, however, is confronted with the task of justifying its own problems and their differentiation and has to adjust its internal structure accordingly. It does not set up an unchanging system but sees as its purpose the attempt to apply the knowledge that has been accumulated in the traditional theories to the social totality in the direction that critical theory itself indicates.La théorie, au sens traditionnel, est un système déductif. La confrontation des connaissances obtenues par voie déductive avec les faits constatés permet la vérification de la théorie. L'idéal est un système universel de la science dans lequel les théories des différentes disciplines, toutes ensemble, sont rattachées à un petit nombre de propositions premières.La réalité demeure extérieure à une théorie ainsi conçue. Dans la mesure où les hommes utilisent la théorie pour faire des prévisions et pour modifier la réalité, ils ne sont plus des théoriciens. En ce sens, la théorie est purement contemplative. Les philosophes qui ont analysé la connaissance ont souvent porté à l'absolu cet aspect de la théorie et ont fait du sujet des opérations intellectuelles, sous les noms de,Logos4 ou de,Esprit4, le démiurge du monde. En vérité, ils ont ainsi hypostasié l'activité, qui dans la société moderne revient au savant du fait de la division du travail. Le sujet réel de la théorie sous sa forme traditionnelle, loin d'être l'esprit pur, est le savant qui remplit dans la société bourgeoise une fonction nécessaire, bien déterminée.Après cette prise de conscience, la naïveté philosophique du théoricien doit disparaître. Il comprend que la pensée, ses tâches et son orientation, l'organisation du monde qui lui est donné, se ramènent en dernière analyse au travail humain. Le combat de l'homme avec la nature est la condition de l’évolution historique, dans laquelle le travail matériel se sépare du travail intellectuel, il détermine la structure et le contenu de ce dernier. La séparation rigide des hypothèses logiques et historiques de la science est impossible à maintenir. L'activité du théoricien exprime le sujet concret qui ne donne pas forme à la seule théorie, mais aussi au monde réel. Prendre position dans la vie sociale, l'influencer consciemment devient une tâche immanente à la science.Par théorie au sens critique, H. entend la connaissance qui ne se contente pas de construire ses systèmes en respectant les cadres de la division du travail existante, mais qui s'efforce de donner à la totalité sociale une forme raisonnable. Dans l'histoire, la cohérence logique et comme transparente qui caractérise les théories traditionnelles, était en contradiction avec les rapports réels. Dans les tentatives pour rendre la société conforme à l'harmonie de la pensée, celle-ci peut jouer un rôle important.H. étudie la structure logique que présente la pensée lorsqu'elle exerce une telle fonction. Elle a pour contenu la représentation de la société actuelle, envisagée par rapport à révolution vers la raison. La théorie critique forme par conséquent un jugement existentiel unique. Pour développer et justifier celui-ci, elle a besoin, à chaque instant, de la science spéciale. Mais comme la théorie ne conçoit pas les buts qu'elle s'assigne comme extérieurs à elle, elle est logiquement plus compliquée que la théorie traditionnelle. Même lorsque la discipline spéciale construit des évolutions comme dans l'histoire naturelle et humaine, elle est orientée par des objectifs et des intérêts. Elle est, en un sens immédiatement compréhensible, utile. La théorie critique, au contraire, doit justifier elle-même la manière dont elle pose les problèmes, qui d'ailleurs sans cesse se transforment, elle doit modifier en conséquence l'ordre de son développement. Elle ne travaille pas en vue d'un système fixe, mais se comprend elle-même comme une tentative pour appliquer le savoir accumulé par les théories traditionnelles, à la marche historique de l'ensemble social, afin d'exercer une action dans un sens bien déterminé.Aussi bien, cette fonction de la théorie est-elle la réalisation des intentions authentiques de la philosophie idéaliste classique. (shrink)

In this volume, the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is set in conversation with some of today’s most talented psychodynamically-sensitive political thinkers. The editors and contributors demonstrate that Winnicott’s thought contains underappreciated political insights, discoverable in his reflections on the nature of the maturational process, and useful in working through difficult impasses confronting contemporary political theorists. Specifically, Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory and practice offer a framework by which the political subject, destabilized and disrupted in much postmodern and contemporary thinking, (...) may be recentered. Each chapter in this volume, in its own way, grapples with this central theme: the potential for authentic subjectivity and inter-subjectivity to arise within a nexus of autonomy and dependence, aggression and civility, destructiveness and care. This volume is unique in its contribution to the growing field of object-relations-oriented political and social theory. It will be of interest to political scientists, psychologists, and scholars of related subjects in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

We are still searching for an adequate theory of the first amendment freedom of speech. Despite a plethora of judicial opinions and scholarly articles, there are fundamental conflicts over the meaning of the words "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." This Article examines the possibility that recent developments in social theory can aid our understanding of the freedom of speech. My thesis is that Jiirgen Habermas' theory of communicative action can serve as (...) the basis for an interpretation of the first amendment that fits the general contours of existing first amendment doctrine and provides a coherent justification for the freedom of speech. Habermas' theory takes as its point of departure the speech act theory developed through contemporary analytic philosophy and linguistics. The central theme of speech act theory is that speech is action; communication coordinates individual behavior through achieving rational understanding. An important corollary is the proposition that communication is intersubjective; speech acts involve both speakers and listeners. In addition, the theory of communicative action makes a distinction between communicative action-oriented to the coordination of behavior through rational agreement-and strategic behavior-the use of speech to manipulate, coerce, or deceive. I argue that a theory of free speech can incorporate this distinction to mark the boundaries of the right to free speech: freedom of speech is freedom to engage in communicative action, not strategic action. Another component of Habermas' theory is the ideal speech situation, in which rational agreement may be reached because distorting factors are excluded; this ideal situation serves as the basis of a principle of equality of communicative opportunity that can give the freedom of speech its fundamental content. Habermas' theory of communicative action provides the basis for my reinterpretation of the first amendment freedom of speech as the freedom of communicative action. This Article has two aims. My first aim is to develop a theory of the meaning of the first amendment from the theory of communicative action. In pursuit of this first goal, the Article assumes a perspective that is internal to the practice of American constitutional law. I argue that Habermas' theory has substantial power to explain and justify first amendment doctrine. Indeed, it is my view that a theory of freedom of speech based on the theory of communicative action, more so than any other theory, provides the best justification for the first amendment while simultaneously providing the best fit with the existing case law. In addition to the development of a theory of the first amendment, this Article has a second aim: From the point of view of the practice of social theory, the current Article is a "thought experiment" designed to test and elaborate Habermas' theory of communicative action. I explore various objections to and ambiguities in the theory of communicative action by taking up the attitude of a participant in the practice of legal interpretation who adopts the theory of communicative action as a practical principle for institutionalization of discourse in the public sphere. It is my hope that this thought experiment will have value in the enterprise of understanding, clarifying, and extending the theory of communicative action. For example, this Article responds to the suggestion that the theory of communicative action should be reformulated as a theory of institutionalized discourse "in the public sphere of a participatory democracy." Part II of this Article begins with a hermeneutic approach to the problem of interpreting the first amendment. Part III explores and criticizes existing theories of the freedom of expression. The theory of communicative action is explicated in Part IV; the implications of that theory for the freedom of speech are explored in Part V. Finally, Part VI applies the results to specific problems in first amendment doctrine, and Part VII draws some conclusions about the implications of this exercise for both first amendment doctrine and the theory of communicative action. (shrink)

There have been several criticisms of Object-Oriented Ontology from the political Left. Perhaps the most frequent one has been that OOO’s aspiration to speak of objects apart from all their relations runs afoul of Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism.” The main purpose of this article is to show that even a cursory reading of the sections on commodity in Marx’s Capital does not support such an accusation. For Marx, the sphere of entities that are not commodities is actually (...) quite wide, including all the beings of nature not subject to exchange, as well as bartered goods, and tithes and rents paid in kind to feudal lords. In short, the theory of commodity fetishism is a theory of v a l u e, not an anti-realist theory of b e i n g, and thus does not touch on OOO at all. In closing, I make some brief comments on Marx’s relation to Kantian formalism and to Heidegger’s famous account of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. (shrink)

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses--like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism--that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented (...) feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong." Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinic, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL. (shrink)

Save for Anthropologists, few social scientists have been among the participants in the discussions about the appropriate structure of a ‘Universal Darwinism’. Yet evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena has a long tradition, going back well before Darwin. And over the past quarter century significant literatures have grown up concerned with the processes of change operating on science, technology, business organization and practice, and economic change more broadly, that are explicitly evolutionary in theoretical orientation. In each (...) of these fields of study, the broad proposition put forth by Darwin that change proceeds through a process involving variation, systematic selection, renewed variation... has proved both persuasive and powerful. On the other hand, the evolutionary processes involved in these areas differ in essential ways from those we now know are operative in the evolution of biological species. The objective of this essay is to highlight those differences, which a ‘Universal Darwinism’ needs to encompass, if it is to be broad enough to be a theory that is applicable to the evolution of human cultures as well as evolution in biology. (shrink)

This essay calls for an independent theory of features in object-oriented philosophy. Theories of features are in general motivated by at least two interconnected demands: 1) to explain why objects have the characteristics they have, 2) to explain how regular divisions in those characteristics can be intuited. While a theory of universal properties may be the most internally consistent means of addressing these demands, an object-oriented metaphysics needs to address them without a concept of (...) shared features. This means that regular divisions of invariant features and our intuitions of them cannot be explained by the repetition of self-same characteristics or natural laws. They can instead be explained by the immanent repetition of similar features. However, this requires a new, radically aesthetic understanding of what it means to be similar in the first place, one in which similarity is an emergent process rather than a state of affairs existing between resembling particulars. (shrink)

This is a review of this new field touted by Harman as THE best thing to happen to academic philosophy in recent times. The review tests Object-Oriented Ontology against various yardsticks and finds it wanting in rigour.

Technological advancement has an ambivalent character concerning the impact on biodiversity. It accounts for major detrimental environmental impacts and aggravates threads to biodiversity. On the other hand, from an application perspective of environmental science, there are technical advancements, which increase the potential of analysis, detection and monitoring of environmental changes and open a wider spectrum of sustainable use strategies.The concept of biodiversity emerged in the last two decades as a political issue to protect the structural and functional basis of earthbound (...) life. In this respect, it represents a great challenge for science, in particular for ecology, which is the scientific discipline mainly involved in contributing to understand biodiversity issues.In this paper, we state a strong necessity for ecologists to work in close connection with other disciplines and within their own discipline across the different organisation levels. Each level has some specific properties to which ecological terminology has been adapted, and joint views are necessary to understand complex networks. In this context, ecological theory provides the background to analyse biological complexity and the relationship of structure and dynamics on different integration levels and provides the interface to mediate social and political issues.Important features of new technologies for advances in ecological theory refer to an increase in information processing capacities, more efficient automatic data acquisition and device operation, and an increase in resolution.One crucial consideration we analyse is the trend that a quantitative development in one particular discipline may open a new potential for qualitative advancement in other disciplines when the quantitative advancement is applied in a new disciplinary context.We illustrate these qualitative developments that are based on technological advancements and which helped to advance ecological theory qualitatively with two examples: The underlying mechanisms causing regularly oscillating rodent populations are subject to a decade long discussion in ecology. Using the possibilities of modern information processing, it is possible to represent the discussed hypotheses in an integrative object oriented model and analyse how the underlying causal net works. The second example originates from biosafety research dealing with the environmental impact of genetically modified organisms. The project GenEERA develops a complex up-scaling procedure from below field-level information to the landscape scale in order to investigate spread and persistence of GM oil seed rape under different scenarios. The approach gives an example, how ecological modelling can be used to combine different information levels to derive conclusions on a higher spatial scale.In an overall conclusion we relate the described approaches to a wider system analytical context in which we interpret theory developments and biodiversity issues with a system theoretical description of growth processes. We obtain the view that in self-organising systems there is a tendency for autonomous development which tends to be dominating far away from capacity limitations. However, while approaching capacity limitations, a tendency towards closer coupling of internal and external cause-effect networks emerges. We also find that the relation of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and social dynamics can be interpreted in this framework. In this context, the demand for closer interdisciplinary cooperation to solve existing problems appears as an indication of emerging capacity limitations both, in the theoretical as well as in the physical domain. (shrink)

Nanotechnology presents significant challenges in terms of developing a regulatory framework. This is due to a lack of scientific knowledge about the behaviour of the technology in its interactions with biological and ecological processes, the environment and other technologies. Crucially, there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the potential environmental and human health and safety impacts of NT. Consequently, the development of NT is a potential test case for framing new models of ‘soft law’ voluntary governance as a substitute (...) for traditional command and control type regulation. Driven by ‘new science governance,’ an approach based on a combination of ideas in anticipatory ethics, future-oriented responsibility, upstream public engagement and deliberation and theories of justice may offer a solution. The uniqueness of the approach can be found in the incorporation of anticipatory approaches via public participation and deliberation as the input into procedural justice approaches with distributional justice as the output. The overarching objective of this work is to contribute to the discussion in relation to the internalisation of responsibility and the building of intellectual and societal capacity to anticipate negative consequences before they arise in the hope that such an approach could be the antithesis of the retrospective imposition of responsibility and liability after the harm is done, which is the outcome of traditional regulatory and ethical approaches. Ultimately, the purpose is to contribute to the long-term sustainability of NT. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the need for a theory of essences within Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and then formulate one. I will do so by drawing on Graham Harman’s work on OOO and Martin Heidegger’s thought on the essence of being, presented in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Harman touches on essences, describing them as the tension between a withdrawn object and its withdrawn qualities, but fails to distinguish between essential and inessential qualities within this framework. (...) To fill in the gaps, I will turn to Heidegger’s explication of phusis in order to show that an essential aspect of being is how one enters into causal relations and continually reveals oneself to other beings. In bringing OOO and Heidegger together, I will find that each object has a unique way of exerting itself in the world and that the domestic relations that make up this unique profile are essential to it, while other domestic relations, those that do not influence its particular way of exerting itself, are inessential. Thus, the essence will be found to be the set of domestic relations that make up the determinate form, or unique causal profile, of the object. (shrink)

This essay’s main objective is to develop a theoretical, ontological basis for critical, social justice-oriented science education. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblages, rhizomes, and arborescent structures, this article challenges authoritarian institutional practices, as well as the subject of these practices, and offers a way for critical-social justice-oriented science educators and students to connect with sociopolitical contexts. Through diagramming institutional and community relationships using DG’s theory of assemblages, we envision new ontological spaces that bridge (...) social and material entities. A conceptualization of science education through DG’s philosophy of rhizomes and assemblages allows educators to merge critical, post-foundational perspectives with questions of ontology: not just what exists, but what could exist in terms of human social organizations, inorganic matter, microorganisms, and plant/animal populations. (shrink)

In the debate about the nature of social cognition we see a shift towards theories that explain social understanding through interaction. This paper discusses autopoietic enactivism and the we-mode approach in the light of such developments. We argue that a problem seems to arise for these theories: an interactionist account of social cognition makes the capacity of shared intentionality a presupposition of social understanding, while the capacity of engaging in scenes of shared intentionality in turn presupposes (...) exactly the kind of social understanding that it is intended to explain. The social capacity in question that is presupposed by these accounts is then analyzed in the second section via a discussion and further development of Searle’s ‘sense of us’ and ‘sense of the other’ as a precondition for social cognition and joint action. After a critical discussion of Schmid’s recent proposal to analyze this in terms of plural pre-reflective selfawareness, we develop an alternative account. Starting from the idea that infants distinguish in perception between physical objects and other agents we distinguish between affordances and social affordances and cash out the notion of a social affordance in terms of “interaction-oriented representations”, parallel to the analysis of object affordances in terms of “action-oriented representations”. By characterizing their respective features we demonstrate how this approach can solve the problem formulated in the first part. (shrink)

My intention is to cast light on the characteristics of epistemic or fundamental research (in contrast to application-oriented research). I contrast a Baconian notion of objectivity, expressing a correspondence of the views of scientists to the facts, with a pluralist notion, involving a critical debate between conflicting approaches. These conflicts include substantive hypotheses or theories but extend to values as well. I claim that a plurality of epistemic values serves to accomplish a non-Baconian form of objectivity that is apt (...) to preserve most of the intuitions tied to the objectivity of science. For instance, pluralism is the only way to cope with the challenge of preference bias. Furthermore, the plurality of epistemic values cannot be substantially reduced by exploring the empirical success of scientific theories distinguished in light of particular such values. However, in addition to pluralism at the level of theories and value-commitments alike, scientific research is also characterized by a joint striving for consensus which I trace back to a shared epistemic attitude. This attitude manifests itself, e.g., in the willingness of scientists to subject their claims to empirical scrutiny and to respect rational argument. This shared epistemic attitude is embodied in rules adopted by the scientific community concerning general principles of dealing with knowledge claims. My contention is that pluralism and consensus formation can be brought into harmony by placing them at different levels of consideration: at the level of scientific reasoning and at the level of social conventions regarding how to deal with claims put forward within the scientific community. (shrink)

In her article 'What is Information Ethics?', Mathieson seeks to establish a new framework for Information Ethics, contesting the 'rival theories' of Van Den Hoven and of Floridi. However, when the arguments are examined in terms of Object Oriented Modelling conventions, the concepts in question appear in a different light.

The purpose. Explore the major ideological patterns of development of a socially philosophies of education in the context of the problems of institutionalization of knowledge about human and social development. To analyse system-integration aspect of social philosophy and education management in interaction of concepts of an instrumentalism of a pragmatism and a neopragmatism with model of «new humanism» in formation of socially valuable orientations. Methodology. Classification existing in the western philosophy of education and education of directions is spent, (...) proceeding from basic principles of philosophical school or a current, first of all considering those the purpose and means which are really involved by them in process of education, social development and socially-moral education and being based on the basic installations, the purpose expressed by that or other direction, how its supporters imagine the person, its requirement, a social role, модус behaviour which the education system and education urged to form. Scientific novelty. In conditions when against crisis of an education system of the government of the USA and the leading countries of Europe are compelled to begin its long-term reform, its theorists substantially pay attention to democratic workings out of concepts of an instrumentalism of a pragmatism/neopragmatism in modern social philosophy of education, in particular on their aspiration to introduce in process of social development, education and education idea and practical model both educational, and a social equality. Considering growing requirement of a practical embodiment of ideas of freedom, justice, aspiration to realization of the human rights proclaimed a society, supporters of the concept of «new humanism» see the main objective in blocking a way to conformism, to a manipulation behaviour of the person and to create conditions for its free self-expression, for realization by the person of a fundamental choice of acts in a concrete situation and by that to warn danger of formation of the unified form of behaviour. In it principles of «new humanism» approach with a position of «new humanism» instrumentalism and neopragmatism. Conclusions. Before social philosophy of education/education it is necessary to define a problem factors which cause achievement of its main objective, to state an estimation to moral principles and personal qualities with which actually the education/education theory connects realization of the problems, to show, why these, instead of any other principles and qualities open to the person possibility to choose in a concrete situation socially powerful both morally defensible and comprehensible line of conduct in public the relation. Statement of a question on necessity of the philosophical analysis of problems of education and education in a social context serves as an indicator of understanding philosophers, teachers of an increasing role of the human and moral factor in society development. And, at last, the aspiration to develop socially-philosophical bases of pedagogics in general and education in particular, testifies that the western and domestic philosophers, teachers, representatives of social and psychological sciences, at least, the majority of them, have realized the public importance of an education system and education, its global character. (shrink)

Scant research has examined the effects of an organization’s stakeholder orientation on the cognition and attitudes of employees. Our study focuses on how one aspect of an organization’s objective, its stakeholder orientation, affects employee job satisfaction. Through seven studies utilizing different samples and measures, we theorize and demonstrate that employees with a higher perceived stakeholder orientation experience enhanced job satisfaction. We provide correlational field data and causal experimental evidence to show that increased employee perspective-taking is one potential mediator of this (...) effect. These results contribute to our understanding of job satisfaction and perspective-taking by showing how employee orientation toward other stakeholders affects their attitude toward their job and social cognition. We also expand the focus of stakeholder orientation beyond normative philosophy and toward understanding its effects on the cognitions and attitudes of organizational members to provide a basis for examining the behavioral implications of different stakeholder orientations. (shrink)

The paper attempts to walk some first steps toward a unified and empirically oriented theory of both the structure and the history of physics. Physics is considered a structured whole made up of three interconstitutive elements (conceptual system, object, experimental procedures). This conceptual system is always already interpreted while it is this interpretation which ties the system to our overall experience thereby making it understood. It is argued that our experience is always ideologically (and thence socially) determined (...) and that this interpretation inevitably harbours the ideological element in the form of scientifically unwarranted ideological "assumptions." The character of such "assumptions" is discussed, some examples are given and some consequences for the history of physics are drawn. (shrink)

Reprising and revising a question from Longino regarding an earlier phase of standpoint theory, I raise some issues regarding the place of a substantive normative social theory in the strong objectivity project in Harding’s recent book, Objectivity and Diversity. I offer reasons to think the issue needs to be reframed in the co-constructionist and pluralist setting of the new book but that interesting issues continue to arise in thinking about the philosophical resources feminist philosophies of science can (...) or might rely on. (shrink)

'This is a smart and compelling book. Difficult ideas are presented in an accessible manner, with plenty of supporting illustrations…Students will enjoy the research material and other supporting material. A definite winner!'- Professor Jay Gubrium, University of Missouri This book gets to the heart of what the social sciences really know about the elusive and contradictory object of research: human reality. Drawing on a wide range of international examples and scenarios, Social Theory and Human Reality examines (...) key sociological concepts that we use to understand human behaviour such as: norms, rules and meanings; language and discourse; ritual; and personality and identity construction. Alasuutari clearly and convincingly demonstrates: - The constant interplay between routines and reflexivity that grounds social order - how the body and our bodily experiences mediate our social reality - that language plays a multi-faceted role as it describes, reflects and constructs human reality Building on the work started by Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality, this book is a lucid and contemporary analysis of the premises shared across the social sciences, and of the kaleidoscope of 'human reality'. This important book will be welcomed by students and scholars alike in the fields of Cultural Studies, Sociology and Anthropology. (shrink)

How do we think about the worlds we live in? The formation of categories of events and objects seems to be a fundamental orientation procedure. Facet theory and its main tool, the mapping sentence, deal with categories of behavior and experience, their interrelationship, and their unification as our worldviews. In this book Hackett reviews philosophical writing along with neuroscientific research and information form other disciplines to provide a context for facet theory and the qualitative developments in this approach. (...) With a variety of examples, the author proposes mapping sentences as a new way of understanding and defining complex behavior. (shrink)

This book offers clinicians a long-awaited comprehensive paradigm for assessing object relations functioning in disturbed younger and older adolescents. It gives a clear sense of how object relations functioning is manifest in different disorders, and illuminates how scores on object relations measures are converted into a therapeutically relevant diagnostic matrix and formulation. Outlining the process of object relations assessment, Kelly presents vividly detailed cases of a range of disorders including anorexia nervosa, borderline states, depressive disorders, and (...) trauma. The cases portray the vicissitudes of object relations functioning and disruption that result in a unique structural developmental composite for a given adolescent. A major concern is demonstrating the utility and validity of two object representation measures--The Mutuality of Autonomy Scale and The Social Cognition Object Relations Scale --that are the main ones employed in the assessment of adolescents. MOA and SCORS scores facilitate a multidimensional understanding of the nuances of an adolescent's object relations functioning, and provide clinicians with organized, theory-based data leading to clear, specific treatment directions and guidelines and appropriate therapeutic programming. The book addresses the following questions: * Is individual psychotherapy indicated--will this adolescent benefit from an insight-oriented approach? * What are the likely directions that transference parameters will take in the treatment? * What types of countertransference reactions are likely to be anticipated in a given patient? * Is medication likely to be helpful in making this adolescent more accessible for treatment? Focusing only on adolescents, covering both the TAT and the Rorschach, and utilizing object relations theory as its major interpretive foundation, the book offers practitioners an alternative to general references based on a more actuarial, nomothetic, and atheoretical interpretive approach. It reflects one school of contemporary thought in projective assessment--one that advocates a more phenomenological, theory-based approach to test application and interpretation. (shrink)

This book offers clinicians a long-awaited comprehensive paradigm for assessing object relations functioning in disturbed younger and older adolescents. It gives a clear sense of how object relations functioning is manifest in different disorders, and illuminates how scores on object relations measures are converted into a therapeutically relevant diagnostic matrix and formulation. Outlining the process of object relations assessment, Kelly presents vividly detailed cases of a range of disorders including anorexia nervosa, borderline states, depressive disorders, and (...) trauma. The cases portray the vicissitudes of object relations functioning and disruption that result in a unique structural developmental composite for a given adolescent. A major concern is demonstrating the utility and validity of two object representation measures--The Mutuality of Autonomy Scale and The Social Cognition Object Relations Scale --that are the main ones employed in the assessment of adolescents. MOA and SCORS scores facilitate a multidimensional understanding of the nuances of an adolescent's object relations functioning, and provide clinicians with organized, theory-based data leading to clear, specific treatment directions and guidelines and appropriate therapeutic programming. The book addresses the following questions: * Is individual psychotherapy indicated--will this adolescent benefit from an insight-oriented approach? * What are the likely directions that transference parameters will take in the treatment? * What types of countertransference reactions are likely to be anticipated in a given patient? * Is medication likely to be helpful in making this adolescent more accessible for treatment? Focusing only on adolescents, covering both the TAT and the Rorschach, and utilizing object relations theory as its major interpretive foundation, the book offers practitioners an alternative to general references based on a more actuarial, nomothetic, and atheoretical interpretive approach. It reflects one school of contemporary thought in projective assessment--one that advocates a more phenomenological, theory-based approach to test application and interpretation. (shrink)

This book features papers written by renowned international scholars that analyze the interdependence of art, phenomenology, and social science. The papers show how the analysis of the production as well as the perception and interpretation of art work needs to take into consideration the subjective viewpoint of the artist in addition to that of the interpreter. Phenomenology allows a description of the subjectively centered life-world of the individual actor-artist or interpreter-and the objective structures of literature, music, and the aesthetic (...) domain in general. The perspective of social science serves to reconstruct the socio-historical structure involved in the creation and reception of the art work. The authors concentrate on this specific theoretical focus which combines both phenomenology and social science and offers an innovative framework for the analysis of works of art from the fields of literature, music, visual arts, photography, and film. Some of the contributions present creative interpretations of a variety of distinct art works in addition to the realization of theoretical reflections on the interdependence of arts, phenomenology, and social science. This book features papers that were presented at the international and interdisciplinary conference Phenomenology, Social Sciences, and the Arts, held at the University of Konstanz, May 2009, in commemoration of philosopher and social scientist Alfred Schutz, the developer of phenomenologically oriented sociology. It will appeal to researchers, scholars, and students in phenomenology, social sciences, art theory, and the arts.. (shrink)

An important question in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its associated literature is how OOO relates to its competitor theories. This article is a meta-philosophical investigation into OOO and its grounding, which hopes to fully theorise this relation, deriving ultimately a “negative dialectic” that emphasises the irreducible differences between OOO and non-OOO. Beginning by analysing the use of OOO as a “starting point”, I consider Althusser’s various contributions to meta-philosophical debates. This leads me to focus on Harman’s notion of (...) “hyperbolic reading”, and on how attempts to hyperbolically ground OOO force it to immanently include its competitors. Finally, I apply these insights to systematise both the negative dialectical relation between OOO and non-OOO and the becoming-OOO of thinking, by applying Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy. (shrink)