This study investigates the ability of individuals with psychopathy to perform passive avoidance learning and whether this ability is modulated by level of reinforcement/punishment. Nineteen psychopathic and 21 comparison individuals, as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 1991), were given a passive avoidance task with a graded reinforcement schedule. Response to each rewarding number gained a point reward specific to that number (i.e., 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). Response to each punishing number lost a point punishment specific (...) to that number (i.e., the loss of 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). In line with predictions, individuals with psychopathy made more passive avoidance errors than the comparison individuals. In addition, while the performance of both groups was modulated by level of reward, only the performance of the comparison population was modulated by level of punishment. The results are interpreted with reference to a computational account of the emotional learning impairment in individuals with psychopathy. (shrink)

The sensation-perception distinction did not appear before the seventeenth century, but since then various formulations of it have gained wide acceptance. This is not an historical accident and the article suggests an explanation for its appearance. Section 1 describes a basic assumption underlying the sensation-perception distinction, to wit, the postulation of a pure sensory stage--viz. sensation--devoid of active influence of the agent's cognitive, emotional, and evaluative frameworks. These frameworks are passive in that stage. I call this postulation the passivity (...) assumption. Section 2 suggests three major reasons for the emergence of this assumption in the seventeenth century: the mental-physical gap, the causal theory of perception, and epistemological considerations regarding the status of the sensory given. In the last section a critical discussion is presented. The passivity assumption is found to have serious empirical and theoretical flaws. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of aesthetic experience. The argument is based on two empirical cases of qualitative interview material obtained from museum visitors and a world-renowned string quartet, which show that aesthetic experience contains an irreducible dimension of passive undergoing and surprise. Analyzing this material through the lens of passive syntheses helps explain these experiences, as well as the sense of subject–object fusion that occurs in some (...) of the most intense forms of aesthetic experience. These analyses are then contrasted with a potentially contradicting take on aesthetic experience from a recent trend in cognitive science, namely enactive aesthetics, which insists on the active subjective construction and sense-making of aesthetic experience. Finally we show that the two positions are in fact compatible. (shrink)

In Passive Obedience Berkeley argues that we must always observe the prohibitions decreed by our sovereign rulers. He defends this thesis both by providing critiques against opposing views and, more interestingly, by presenting a moral theory that supports it. The theory contains elements of divine - command, natural - law, moral - sense, rule - based, and outcome - oriented ethics. Ultimately, however, it seems to rest on a notion of spiritual reason — a specific God - given faculty that (...) all rational human beings have. Berkeley’s work on immaterialism, for which he is better known, could thus perhaps best be seen as an attempt to find a scientific justification for his moral doctrine. (shrink)

Examines the notion of passivity in the work of Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben.

Is it always better to be active than passive? Is passivity a sign of cowardice - or prudence? Are people who keep their thoughts to themselves passive, or might they be actively preparing for well-considered future actions? Seemingly simple concepts turn out to be deeper and more significant than they first appear.

The purpose of this essay is to examine Giorgio Agamben’s important but underappreciated debts to the early German Romantics and to Hegel. While maintaining critical distance from these figures, Agamben develops crucial aspects of his approach to radical passivity with reference to them. The focus of this essay is on Agamben’s consideration of the early German Romantics’ notions of criticism and irony, Hegel’s notion of language, and the implications of this view of language for his notion of community.

The first half of this paper is an attemptto conceptualize and understand the paradoxicalnotion of ``passive action''''. The strategy is toconstrue passive action in the context ofemotional behavior, with the purpose toestablish it as a conceivable and conceptuallycoherent category. In the second half of thispaper, the implications of passive action forcausal theories of action are examined. I arguethat Alfred Mele''s defense of causalism isunsuccessful and that causalism may lack theresource to account for passive action.Following Harry Frankfurt, I suggest analternative way (...) of understanding the nature ofaction that can accommodate passive action. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish a distinction and relationship between two types of noise – active noise and passive noise – while giving emphasis to the latter. Active noise is the discourse of negativity and violence that some theorists associate with noise’s materiality, an association particularly pronounced in engagements with Japanoise. The problem with this discourse is that it relies on a culturally normative understanding of noise as well as novelty. This narrative inevitably leads to a dead end. Noise, and (...) artistic practices like Japanoise that draw on noise sounds, have a short lifespan if their entire purpose is one of shock and disturbance. However, Japanoise is not dead: it persists both as a genre and as a sonic idea/gesture. This article suggests that noise persists, and Japanoise remains relevant, because it comes from a region not exhausted by categories of negativity and violence. This article will show how underneath active noise there resounds a deeper, more profound a-cultural noise. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s account of passivity, which names the anarchic region of absence in his thought, this noise will be described as passive noise. In this context, passivity must be understood differently from the conventional sense as something opposed to activity. Likewise, passive noise does not refer to background noise. Instead, passive noise will be described as the interiority of excess that manifests as a breach in the closure of active noise. This breach will be shown to be consistent with Blanchot’s view of the inexhaustibility of art and will be described, specifically in the context of Japanoise, as the intimacy of excess that is the lifeblood of maximalist forms of noise-making. This will also amount to a reconsideration of the idea of transgression by reframing Japanoise in terms of inertia. (shrink)

The idea of passive euthanasia has recently been attacked in a particularly clear and explicit way by an “Ethics Task Force” established by the European Association of Palliative Care in February 2001. It claims that the expression “passive euthanasia” is a contradiction in terms and hence that there can be no such thing. This paper critically assesses the main arguments for the Task Force’s view. Three arguments are considered. Firstly, an argument based on the wrongness of euthanasia and the permissibility (...) of what is often called passive euthanasia. Secondly, the claim that passive euthanasia cannot really be euthanasia because it does not cause death. And finally, a consequence based argument which appeals to the bad consequences of accepting the category of passive euthanasia.We conclude that although healthcare professionals’ nervousness about the concept of passive euthanasia is understandable, there is really no reason to abandon the category provided that it is properly and narrowly understand and provided that “euthanasia reasons” for withdrawing or withholding life-prolonging treatment are carefully distinguished from other reasons. (shrink)

This paper examines how to best be with women during birth, based on a phenomenological description of the birth experience. The first part of the paper establishes birth as an uncanny experience, that is, an experience that is not only entirely unfamiliar, but even unimaginable. The way in which birth happens under unknowable circumstances creates a set of anxieties on top of the fundamental anxiety that emerges from the existential paradox by which it does not seem possible for a body (...) to give birth to another body. Would homebirth provide a remedy to the uncanniness? The result yielded by medical studies is confirmed by the phenomenological perspective taken here: homebirth might be reassuring for some, but not for everybody; choice of birth place is important. Once the birth process starts happening, another layer of strangeness is added: it turns out to be an experience of radical passivity and waiting, normally. The question thus becomes how to best care for somebody who is exposed to uncanniness, passivity, and waiting. Martin Heidegger’s concepts of care and discourse prove useful in examining how to facilitate rather than interrupt this process. It becomes necessary to think beyond verbal communication towards a wider concept of communication that involves silence and intercorporeality. Birth requires a special kind of being-with as being-there. (shrink)

Passive frame theory attempts to illuminate what consciousnessis, in mechanistic and functional terms; it does not address the “implementation” level of analysis (how neurons instantiate conscious states), an enigma for various disciplines. However, in response to the commentaries, we discuss how our framework provides clues regarding this enigma. In the framework, consciousness is passive albeit essential. Without consciousness, there would not be adaptive skeletomotor action.

Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ‘passivity’ is a key to his account of perception. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is the way in which we are involved in the world, and it is on perception that the functions of understanding, reason, and reflection ultimately rest. While in his Phenomenology of Perception it is already clear that passive and active are intertwined, from a series of lectures he gave in 1954–5 we learn that inauguration or ‘institution’ arises out of a passivity that is (...) not merely an absence of activity. I show how the thoroughly temporal status of the subject as ‘instituting’ distinguishes it from a certain model of the ‘constituting’ subject. Next, I argue that, to grasp the sense in which Merleau-Ponty intends ‘passivity’, we must recognize its mediating or transitional status. Specifically, I examine terms that arise repeatedly in his analysis of the Freudian account of the unconscious — namely, ‘pivot’ and ‘enjambment’ — to show how they reveal the peculiar status of a passivity that operates through a dialectic focused on its transitional terms rather than on opposing poles. Finally, I suggest the exchange between passivity and institution that Merleau-Ponty has in mind can be illuminated through consideration of late Palaeolithic cave paintings, where the rock itself seems to begin an expression that the artist completes. (shrink)

The main problems faced by a conception of perception as passive will be introduced through a critical examination of John McDowell's account of 'empirical thinking'. Overcoming these difficulties will lead to a conception of perception as involving an active cognitive participation of the perceiver, and an account of how observational judgment is warranted that is focused on the conditions of experience. In both cases, analogies to inquiry in scientific experimental practice will be explored.

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization, Pinker proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and production priming studies have cast doubt upon this claim, finding no difference between highly affecting agent-patient/theme-experiencer passives and non-actional experiencer theme passives. (...) The present study provides evidence that a semantic constraint is psychologically real, and is readily observed when more fine-grained independent and dependent measures are used. We conclude that a semantic constraint on the passive must be incorporated into accounts of the adult grammar. (shrink)

In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that (...) resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)

In 1981, Paris and Wilkie raised the open question about whether and to what extent the axiom system did satisfy the Second Incompleteness Theorem under Semantic Tableaux deduction. Our prior work showed that the semantic tableaux version of the Second Incompleteness Theorem did generalize for the most common definition of appearing in the standard textbooks.However, there was an alternate interesting definition of this axiom system in the Wilkie–Paris article in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 35 , pp. 261–302 (...) which we did not examine in our year-2002 article in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Our first goal is to show that the incompleteness results of our prior paper can generalize in this alternate context. We will also develop a formal analysis, using a new technique called Passive Induction, that is simpler than the formalism we had used before.A further reason our results are of interest is that we have shown in a companion paper published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 165 , pp. 213–226 that some very unorthodox axiomizations for are anti-thresholds for the Herbrandized version of the Second Incompleteness Theorem. Thus, different axiomizations for have nearly fully opposite incompleteness properties.This paper is self-contained. It will not require a knowledge of our earlier results. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung. In der Auseinandersetzung um die Frage, ob aktive Sterbehilfe mit dem ärztlichen Ethos vereinbar ist, werden häufig deskriptive Unterscheidungen wie Tun vs. Unterlassen, aktiv vs. passiv oder auch intendieren vs. in Kauf nehmen benutzt, um eine kategorische moralische Differenz zwischen Töten und Sterbenlassen auszuweisen. Als zusätzliche Schwierigkeit erweist sich dabei zum einen, daß zentrale Begriffe zwischen einer deskriptiven und einer ethischen Bedeutung changieren, und zum anderen, daß die Kennzeichnung des Problems (z.B. Sterbehilfe) selbst ethisch nicht neutral ist. Nach der (...) Entwicklung einer ethisch neutralen Problemstellung werden kategorische Argumente gegen die ethische Zulässigkeit aktiver Sterbehilfe diskutiert und verworfen. Anschließend werden Begründungen diskutiert, die mittels intrinsischer oder extrinsischer Situationsmerkmale eine ethische Unzulässigkeit aktiver Sterbehilfe aufzuweisen versuchen. Dabei zeigt sich, daß graduelle ethische Unterschiede zwischen passiver, indirekt und direkt aktiver Sterbehilfe begründbar sind, die ein jeweils höheres Maß an Rechtfertigungsgründen erfordern. (shrink)

According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the (...) theory’s ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech- and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas’ recognized role in facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its “alerting capacity” and “corporality”, respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system. (shrink)

BackgroundEuthanasia can be thought of as being either active or passive; but the precise definition of “passive euthanasia” is not always clear. Though all passive euthanasia involves the withholding of life-sustaining treatment, there would appear to be some disagreement about whether all such withholding should be seen as passive euthanasia.Main textAt the core of the disagreement is the question of the importance of an intention to bring about death: must one intend to bring about the death of the patient in (...) order for withholding treatment to count as passive euthanasia, as some sources would indicate, or does withholding in which death is merely foreseen belong to that category? We may expect that this unclarity would be important in medical practice, in law, and in policy. The idea that withholding life-sustaining treatment is passive euthanasia is traced to James Rachels’s arguments, which lend themselves to the claim that passive euthanasia does not require intention to end life. Yet the argument here is that Rachels’s arguments are flawed, and we have good reasons to think that intention is important in understanding the moral nature of actions. As such, we should reject any understanding of passive euthanasia that does not pay attention to intent.Short conclusionJames Rachels’s work on active and passive euthanasia has been immensely influential; but this is an influence that we ought to resist. (shrink)

Passive Cooling addresses all of the existing creative energyless means of keeping buildings cool. Unlike passive heating, which draws on the sun, passive cooling relies on three natural heat sinks - the sky, the atmosphere, and the earth to achieve temperature moderation. This book describes and evaluates mechanisms for coupling buildings to these sinks and ways of integrating multiple strategies into effective passive cooling systems.In "Radiative Cooling," Marlo Martin explains how the sky specifically outer space - acts as the ultimate (...) absorber to balance energy inputs from the sun as well as other sources. "Ventilative Cooling" by Subrato Chandra and "Evaporative Cooling" by John Yellott describe two ways in which the atmosphere can serve as a medium of heat transfer. The third natural heat sink the earth, is evaluated by Kenneth Labs in "Earth Coupling." Gene Clark in "Passive Cooling Systems" explains how each of these cooling resources affects the design of a building in a dramatically different way and shows how they can be combined. And Jeffrey Cook reviews the current state of basic and applied research projects and anticipates promising future directions of study and application.Because passive cooling techniques have a rich and diverse history of worldwide development and application, the editor has taken special care to relate developments in the United States to international practice and research, providing a broad base for professional redirection in building design.Jeffrey Cook is Regents Professor of Architecture at Arizona State University. Passive Cooling is volume 8 in the series Solar Heat Technologies: Fundamentals and Applications, edited by Charles A Bankston. (shrink)

The idea that agents can be active with respect to some of their actions, and passive with respect to others, is a widely held assumption within moral philosophy. But exactly how to characterize these notions is controversial. I argue that an agent is active just in case her action is one whose motive she can truly avow as reason-giving, or her action is one whose motive she can disavow, provided her disavowal effects appropriate modifications in her future motives. This view (...) maintains a link between activity, reason-responsiveness, and answerability, while avoiding commitments to an implausible theory of motivation. (shrink)

Since its onset, scholars have characterized social media as a valuable source for data collection since it presents several benefits (e.g. exploring research questions with hard-to-reach populations). Nonetheless, methods of online data collection are riddled with ethical and methodological challenges that researchers must consider if they want to adopt good practices when collecting and analyzing online data. Drawing from our primary research project, where we collected passive online data on Reddit, we explore and detail the steps that researchers must consider (...) before collecting online data: (1) planning online data collection; (2) ethical considerations; and (3) data collection. We also discuss two atypical questions that researchers should also consider: (1) how to handle deleted user-generated content; and (2) how to quote user-generated content. Moving on from the dichotomous discussion between what is public and private data, we present recommendations for good practices when collecting and analyzing qualitative online data. (shrink)

Undoubtedly, Edmund Husserl's work is one of the most important contributions to the philosophy of the Twentieth Century to the field of culture, specifically influence on the formation of a new psychiatric - psychological paradigm embodied in the phenomenological psychology and psychiatry - existential. Thispaper aims to draw a brief introduction to the issues concerning the constitution originating from the life of the subject as the psychological level of objectivity and intersubjectivity, with emphasis on aspects related to the synthetic processes (...) taking place in the Genesis passive. Highlight how interesting from the notion ofintentionality of consciousness phenomenological analysis husserliano realizes the formation of the conscience of the time, the embodiment of the spatiality and intersubjectivity whose origin lies in the synthetic processes taking place since preyoica instinctive affection in intrauterine life. (shrink)

This article frames the poetry of William Wordsworth and the philosophical writings of Spinoza as mutually illuminating works exploring the ethical and ontological questions raised by bodies in states of passivity and immobility. Both writers, it argues, revise our idea of what a “powerful” body might be by developing the concept of “dynamic passivity”—a passivity that does not stand in simple opposition to states of activity, and that ought to be cultivated rather than overcome in the process (...) of empowering the body. The article examines and contrasts the different ways in which Wordsworth and Spinoza conceive of this dynamic passivity, with particular attention paid to how the former embeds a cultivation of “wise passiveness” for the reader in the very form of his poems, through a variety of elements like syntax, metre, and acoustic effects. (shrink)

“Passive fear” denotes a certain type of response to a perceived threat; what is distinctive about the state of passive fear is that its behavioral outlook appears to qualify the emotional experience. I distinguish between two cases of passive fear: one is that of freezing in fear; the other is that of fear-involved tonic immobility. I reconstruct the explanatory strategy that is commonly employed in the field of emotion science, and argue that it leaves certain questions about the nature of (...) passive fear unanswered. I subsequently propose an account of passive fear that builds upon a phenomenological theory of emotions, placing emphasis on the interpretation of current research into human tonic immobility. (shrink)

This paper is a critical review of the most relevant studies about the Levinasian concept of passivity. The purpose is to follow the way in which Levinas’s scholars have dealt with the following aspects: the relation between ethical passivity and the possibility of effective ethical agency, the origin of passivity, and the validity of ethical passivity in the public sphere. As a starting point for future research, I finally argue that the best way to read Levinas’s (...) passive ethics is through the dynamism between maximums and minimums present within it. This means that without sacrificing the omni comprehensive view of divine revelation and Jewish tradition, Levinas presents ethics as rationally understandable by everyone and philosophically defensible. Despite being biblically based, Levinas does not appeal to authority in supporting his view, he is confident in arguing rationally. This account could place Levinas in the way of public ethics, which consists in an ethos shared by all members of democratic societies. These minimums of justice could be the way to universalize Levinas’s ethics. (shrink)

When we compare Henry and Levinas, we stumble upon a difficulty. Henry tries to reduce transcendence to immanence; Levinas, on the contrary, strives to call immance into question and to lend a new dignity to transcendence. Hence, the two thinkers seem to be diametrically opposed to one another. Yet, if one does not limit oneself to such an overall view, one finds some similarities between them. There is an affinity between the two approaches which results from the fact that both (...) thinkers establish a narrow relationship between originally passive affectivity and the selfhood of the self. Henry and Levinas are, despite all their differences, united in their efforts to ground selfhood on passivity and affectivity. Assuredly, it remains a question whether or not an originally passive affectivity is really capable of founding selfhood. Some doubt arises here from the observation that affectivity tends to anonymity. However, the observation that affectivity is marked by a tendency to anonymity has not only a negative and critical significance; it also characterizes affective states and arousals in a positive way, since one can maintain that the self could not be a ?self? unless it were constantly confronted with a tendency to anonymity. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as (...) a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

La notion de révolution passive est aujourd’hui reconnue comme l’une des contributions théoriques les plus importantes de Gramsci ; elle a fait l’objet de travaux approfondis en langues étrangères, et est également mise en œuvre pour analyser différents phénomènes historiques et situations concrètes présentes. L’objectif de cet article est de constituer une étude synthétique de l’élaboration et des usages de la notion de révolution passive dans les Cahiers de prison. Pour cela, nous suivons les différentes phases de développement de la (...) notion, ainsi que les déplacements de son sens en fonction des cas pour l’étude desquels elle est mobilisée, même hypothétiquement (le Risorgimento, l’Europe du XIXe siècle, le fascisme, l’américanisme, etc.). Pour Gramsci, il apparaît que les apports de cette notion se situent sur au moins deux plans dialectiquement liés : concevoir une modalité du changement historique qui ne saurait être réduite aux bouleversements révolutionnaires proprement dits ; mettre en évidence d’une manière critique les stratégies politiques des classes dominantes, afin d’œuvrer à l’émancipation de l’activité autonome des subalternes. (shrink)

In addition, this volume offers us a much needed critical revaluation of key issues in Levinas's thought which are, more often than not, uncritically ...

This article frames the poetry of William Wordsworth and the philosophical writings of Spinoza as mutually illuminating works exploring the ethical and ontological questions raised by bodies in states of passivity and immobility. Both writers, it argues, revise our idea of what a “powerful” body might be by developing the concept of “dynamic passivity”—a passivity that does not stand in simple opposition to states of activity, and that ought to be cultivated rather than overcome in the process (...) of empowering the body. The article examines and contrasts the different ways in which Wordsworth and Spinoza conceive of this dynamic passivity, with particular attention paid to how the former embeds a cultivation of “wise passiveness” for the reader in the very form of his poems, through a variety of elements like syntax, metre, and acoustic effects. (shrink)

This paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education nor does it propose that passive education is in any way ‘better’ or more important than active education. Through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and B.S. Johnson, and gentle critiques of Jacques Rancière and John Dewey, passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay (...) are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of ‘learnification’, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education. (shrink)

In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that (...) resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)

Das Problem der Intersubjektivitiit Intersubjektivität ist Husserl schon seit der Darstellung der Ideen I in Zusammenhang mit dem Problem der phiinomenologischen phänomenologischen Reduk tion sehr stark bewusst und wird, wie die neue VerOffentlichung Veröffentlichung 'Zur Phänome Phiinome nologie der Intersubjektivität'l Intersubjektivitiit'l ausdrücklich ausdrucklich zeigt, zeit seines Lebens in seinem Denken mit mehr oder weniger Intensitiit Intensität behandelt. Bekanntlich hat Husserl Hussed die Einfühlungslehre EinfUhlungslehre in seinem spiiten späten Versuch mit der 'Selbstobjektivation' 'Selbstobjektivation',, 'Selbstauslegung' des absoluten, anonymen, transzen 2 dentalen ego (...) erkliirt. erklärt. Gerade auf diesen Punkt konzentriert sich zutreffende Kritik und zeigt die Unvermeidbarkeit des transzendentalen Solipsismus; was als Grund für fUr echte echte Intersubjektivitiit Intersubjektivität gesucht gesucht wird, wird, niimlich nämlich die die Gleichursprunglich Gleichursprünglich keit keit von von Subjekten, Subjekten, fUhrt führt schliesslich schliesslich auf auf den den Weg der Radikalisierung der trans zendentalen Reduktion und der Erklärung Erkliirung mit der immanenten Zeitigung des transzendentalen ego in die 'einseitige Verlagerung des Gewichts auf ein konsti tuierendes Ur-Ich, dem kein ebenso ursprungliches ursprüngliches Du gegenübersteht, gegeniibersteht,...'3. (shrink)

The book outlines the contribution of passivity to the constitution of phenomena as diverse as temporal syntheses, perceptual associations, memory fulfillment and cross-cultural communication.

The purpose of this essay is to examine Giorgio Agamben’s important but underappreciated debts to the early German Romantics and to Hegel. While maintaining critical distance from these figures, Agamben develops crucial aspects of his approach to radical passivity with reference to them. The focus of this essay is on Agamben’s consideration of the early German Romantics’ notions of criticism and irony, Hegel’s notion of language, and the implications of this view of language for his notion of community.

Verbs in the passive voice have been described as linguistic features which can exert ideological effects because they typically omit the agent, or ‘doer’ of an action. These missing agents are said to be potentially ‘mystified’ to readers. But to what extent are these agents actually mystified to readers, and can we predict when mystification is likely to occur? A text-based analytical framework for inference prediction focusing on agency mystification was applied to two corpora of US newspaper editorials. Eighty-four percent (...) of passive verbs were predicted not to mystify agency for casual readers. To test this method of inference prediction, a reader response study was carried out in which readers were asked to identify agents that had been deleted from texts via the addition of agentless passives. By a standard of 50% accuracy, 74% of passives were found to be non-mystifying. These results suggest that agents missing from texts are likely to be inferred correctly by readers in a majority of cases and that mystification may be predictable from text analysis. (shrink)

This article discusses passive and active aspects of consciousness as two equally justified roots of life experiencing the world. The passive domain involves the synthesis of internal time, association, habituality, bodily aspects, etc. The active domain includes strictly cognitive competences of consciousness: thinking, judging, etc. What has been actively constituted becomes passive as the basic level for higher form of understanding. The two domains interweave, influence each other, complement each other, and also remain in a certain tension and discrepancy. In (...) the broader perspective of the system of consciousness and its various layers, the passive-active differentiation must be treated functionally, and not as hierarchically arranged or constituted by separable concepts. It reflects the dynamics of the consciousness system at all its levels, and its meaning oscillates between the opposite and the overlapping. --------------------- Received: 26/01/2022. Reviewed: 28/03/2022. Accepted: 12/05/2022. (shrink)

I consider four recently suggested difference between killing and letting die as they apply to active and passive euthanasia : taking vs. taking no action; intending vs. not intending the death of the person; the certainty of the result vs. leaving the situation open to other possible alternative events; and dying from unnatural vs. natural causes. The first three fail to constitute clear differences between killing and letting die, and "ex posteriori" cannot constitute morally significant differences. The last constitutes a (...) difference but is not morally significant. (shrink)

In our present-day Western society, there has been an increasing tendency towards individualism and indifference and away from altruism and empathy. This has led to a resurgence of ethical concerns in contemporary Continental philosophy. Following the thinking of philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, ethics has come to be defined in terms of a disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Levinas claims that taking care of others in need is not a free, rational decision, but a fundamental responsibility (...) that is pre-consciously felt. We are passively obligated before we can actively choose to help. Levinas therefore argues that the needy other incapacitates our normal selfish ways, and that this ‘radical passivity’ enables us to recognise our inherent responsibility towards others in need. Levinas's own thinking on this subject is not unambiguous, however. While his early works stress the fact that we cannot care for others if we do not first take care of ourselves, his later works focus exclusively on the other as locus of our ethical responsibility. Following this line of thinking, a false opposition has emerged between an absolutised egoism and a crushing altruism that threatens to undermine the recent resurgence of ethical concerns. For how can we continue to care for others if we fail to recognise the duties we have towards ourselves? Moreover, what is the moral significance of responsible action if it is not freely chosen but passively imposed? (shrink)

Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, (...) intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies. Building upon the conceptual formations of the humanities, social sciences, and plant sciences as advanced by Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, and most importantly Matthew Hall and Anthony Trewavas, as well as precedents in the emerging areas of human-animal studies, I will sketch the conceptual basis for the further consideration and exploration of this interdisciplinary framework. (shrink)

The first part of this paper explores the kinship in diagnosis of contemporaneity of Hugo Ball and Martin Heidegger. Both thinkers recognize leveling as an important trait of their age. In Ball?s terms, leveling is identified with the apocalyptic abolishment of humanity. That happens by equalizing all of human creation, which becomes possible only after the abolishment of the hierarchy of values, thanks to which it was previously possible to distinguish a work of art from an average work. With Heidegger, (...) leveling is equated with the perverted forms of curiosity. Unlike the former forms of curiosity, coupled by the common desire for deeper insight, modern curiosity is fairly superficial, let loose with no boundaries to all the impressions which supersede the expected and already seen. In the second part of the paper, Husserl?s term of passive synthesis is examined, so we can observe the intervention of phenomenology from the perspective of deconstruction of the effects of leveling. I conclude with a warning that we cannot protect ourselves from the world to which we are exposed by natural subjectivity and conventional forms of knowledge. Which insight leads us to revert to the sources of subjectivity, the idea common to both the avant-garde and the phenomenologists. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility movement against labor abuses has gained momentum globally since the 1990s when many corporations adopted codes of conduct to regulate labor practices in their global supply chains. However, workers' participation in the process is relatively weak until very recently, when new worker empowerment programs are increasingly initiated. Using conceptual tool created by stakeholder theorists, this article examines dynamics and performance of worker participation in implementation process of codes of conduct through a case study of CSR practices of (...) Reebok at one of its footwear supplier factories in south China. Empirical data was collected during 2002-2005 through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document reviews. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze recognition as a kind of power. I analyze the notion of power in the general sense as some sort of causal capacity, and introduce the distinction between the active power of doing something and the passive power of undergoing something. Such a distinction is needed in order to capture some central features of the phenomenon of recognition, and in particular the way that ‘being recognized’ and ‘recognizing’ are intertwined. I then argue in favor of both (...) the conceptual and genetic priority of the passive power of being recognized over the active power of recognizing. Furthermore, I introduce the notion of ‘attractor’ of recognition as a way to analyze some relevant features of the phenomenon of ‘being-recognized’. My approach to recognition as some kind of power, should here offer some tools not only to bridge the gap between the theory of recognition and the theory of power, but also to get the passive side of both power and recognition right. This could provide a more plausible and phenomenologically adequate understanding of both, and be useful to help capture and read anew within a recognitive grounding of critical theory some aspects of the contemporary debate on biopolitics. (shrink)

This article critically engages with debates on uneven and combined development and particularly the lack of attention given in this literature to accounts of spatial diversity in capitalism’s outward expansion as well as issues of Eurocentrism. Through interlocutions with Antonio Gramsci on his theorising of state formation and capitalist modernity and the notion of passive revolution, we draw out the internal relationship between the structuring condition of uneven and combined development and the class agency of passive revolution. Interlocuting with passive (...) revolution places Antonio Gramsci firmly within a stream of classic social theory shaping considerations of capitalist modernity. As a result, by building on cognate theorising elsewhere, passive revolution can then be established as a lateral field of causality that necessarily grasps spatio-temporal dynamics linked to both state and subaltern class practices of transformation in social property relations, situated within the structuring conditions of uneven and combined development. (shrink)

describes developments in passive solar technology that will save time, energy, and resources in planning for the buildings of the future.

Undoubtedly, Edmund Husserl's work is one of the most important contributions to the philosophy of the Twentieth Century to the field of culture, specifically influence on the formation of a new psychiatric - psychological paradigm embodied in the phenomenological psychology and psychiatry - existential. Thispaper aims to draw a brief introduction to the issues concerning the constitution originating from the life of the subject as the psychological level of objectivity and intersubjectivity, with emphasis on aspects related to the synthetic processes (...) taking place in the Genesis passive. Highlight how interesting from the notion ofintentionality of consciousness phenomenological analysis husserliano realizes the formation of the conscience of the time, the embodiment of the spatiality and intersubjectivity whose origin lies in the synthetic processes taking place since preyoica instinctive affection in intrauterine life. (shrink)

In Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, the Zohar’s reading of Song of Songs, Shekhinah, echoing themes associated with the Shulamite of the biblical text, consistently initiates cosmic union. Sexual desire in the zoharic texts is a form of capital necessary to facilitate sefirotic intercourse, although scholarly readings of the zoharic corpus often identify Shekhinah as a passive receptacle. This, however, is only true if the endemic contradictions within the texts are glossed over. In Song of Songs, the Shulamite’s sexual ‘initiative’ is (...) core. This was not lost on the author of Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, who, in struggling to explain Shekhinah’s sefirotic role in line with the erotics of Song of Songs, inescapably echoed the ‘depatriarchalizing’ themes of the biblical text. As this article demonstrates, in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, Shekhinah is active and repeatedly encourages and frustrates cosmic sexual intercourse. Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim shows that it is possible to reread Shekhinah’s role beyond the androcentrism of the authors as well as scholarly assumptions about her passivity. (shrink)