Despite the public conversation and the voluminous discussion of sex and gender in academia, there is little systematic analysis of precisely what those terms mean, or how we should understand what it is to be male or female, or men or women per se. The discussion is somewhat divided between those who would point to our chromosomes or gametes to settle the matter, and others who focus on culture and discourse which they claim are the proper starting point for understanding (...) gender. Outside of studies in the history of philosophy and contemporary Thomistic circles, Aristotle very rarely comes up in this debate, except as a kind of whipping boy for anti-essentialists in their rejection of a neo-essentialism which Aristotle does not even represent. The reasons for this are clear enough: his outdated biology and misapplied metaphysics lead to a disastrous account of sexual difference with women viewed as a kind of natural failure. In spite of this, I propose that his developed conception of nature with its form-matter composition continues to provide a fruitful way to understand sexual difference and can, in fact, be integrated with a contemporary biological understanding of sexual development and the mechanisms that differentiate men and women. While a small number of Thomists have partially rehabilitated Aristotle through Aquinas in regard to the metaphysical classification of sexual difference, this thesis will expand upon the limited defence of a contemporary Aristotelian account of sexual differentiation, and, in particular, will highlight his hierarchical conception of living things as a means to understand sexual difference. This hierarchical conception of living things is an important aspect of Aristotle's philosophy of nature which remains almost entirely unexplored in its application to sexual difference. I contend that it permits us to recognise our animality and humanity in their fullness. Viewing sexual difference through this lens provides a firm grounding for gender difference in our sexually differentiated bodies without reducing us to animals but instead elevating that which we share with other living things. While this theoretical study does not aim to settle current disagreements over claims about sexual difference and still less does it provide any policy suggestions, a sound anthropology which recognises our dual nature as men and women can provide a more secure basis for further reflection and argument. (shrink)

Drawing on Foucauldian perspectives, this article takes as a case study the workplace safety app Hygieia, which emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore how the app’s users were positioned in relation to questions of responsibility, agency, potential surveillance, and the app’s general features. We used qualitative, semistructured interviews with nine of Hygieia’s developers and conducted an autoethnographic analysis of the app, drawing on the “walkthrough” method. This combination allowed for a robust analysis of envisioned and actual functionalities. (...) Developers’ own ideas about workplace safety were realized in their design choices, creating a network of actors and informational flows coordinated by the app. We argue that the app produces instances of responsibilization in which users are individualized, depersonalized, and encouraged to use the app in particular ways. We question this configuration by emphasizing potential implications for agency, accountability, and privacy, and highlight how ordinary employees appear to shoulder a burden of responsibility for workplace safety against a backdrop of uncertainty, heightened surveillance, and moral obligations. At the same time, some levels of responsibilization and surveillance were also necessary in the context of the pandemic. This article makes a novel contribution to digital surveillance and organization studies by applying Foucauldian perspectives to the new context of developing monitoring support technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

This book presents the first in-depth study of online misogyny and the manosphere from a psychoanalytic perspective. The author argues that the men of the manosphere present contradictory thoughts, desires and fantasies about women which include but also go beyond misogyny. They are in a state of dis/inhibition: torn between (un)conscious forces and fantasies which erupt and are defended against. Dis/inhibition shows itself in self-victimization and defensive apathy as well as toxic agency and symbolic power and expresses itself in desire (...) for and hatred of other bodies. The text draws on the psychoanalytic thinkers Klaus Theweleit, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Jessica Benjamin and Wilhelm Reich to present detailed analyses of the communities within the so-called manosphere, including incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), alt-right YouTubers and NoFap users. Drawing on wider discussions about the status of sexuality in contemporary neoliberal technoculture since the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, it illuminates how sexuality, racism and images of the white male body shape the fantasies and affects of many men on the internet and beyond. Integrating a unique theoretical framework to help understand how today’s increase in online misogyny relates to the alt-right and fascism, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere is an important resource for academics in a variety of fields including psychoanalysis, media and communication studies, internet studies, masculinity research and more. (shrink)

This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that (...) users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but are disciplined and policed by platforms into adopting modes of adult sexuality that are shaped by ideology and the social. Platforms resemble a child – caregiver relation that is further complicated by other users who, from the perspective of the individual user, occupy the position of siblings. The user – sibling relation is marked by competition as well as moments of care and cooperation. As users work, chat, share, like, and practically live online and via networked objects, their forms of usage mimic, or come close to, the sensual-affective rhythms of sexuality itself. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between economic and political realms by reference to the Marxist conception of the economy as the ‘motor of history’. The discussion is framed through a recent debate around Cultural Political Economy (CPE) and its efforts to keep Marx’s materialist premises without falling into economic reductionism, or ‘bend the stick too far’ into the opposite direction and fall into ‘constructivism’. Despite the efforts to avoid said extremes, CPE have been criticised for being both reductionist and constructivist. (...) This piece will defend CPE against the above charges while also highlighting some unresolved tensions within the method. I will then propose ways to resolve said tensions as well as providing the means of extending the scope of CPE to deal with political issues going beyond the economic realm, without losing sights of their connections to regimes of accumulations and resulting material needs and grievances of various groups. I will argue that this further development is necessary to analyse an increasingly unpredictable political landscape where tribal enmities and xenophobic feelings are returning to mainstream politics. (shrink)

Physical activity can prevent and treat multiple diseases. Exercise referral schemes have been used extensively as one healthcare pathway. Schemes typically involve the referral of an inactive individual, with a long term condition, for a time limited exercise programme. Evidence has shown limited benefit, yet the exploration of implementation is under researched. National guidance, in the United Kingdom, recommends that exercise referral schemes should not be commissioned unless behaviour change practices are implemented. Nonetheless, novel evaluations, which are sensitive to the (...) complex nature of behaviour change implementation, have not been undertaken. Therefore, this research sought to answer how, why, and in which circumstances behaviour change practices are implemented by exercise referral practitioners. Realist evaluation, a form of theory driven evaluation, was adopted to address the research question. Programme theory, the envisaged causal workings of implementation, was developed and tested to advance knowledge on how behaviour change practice can be achieved by exercise referral practitioners. An 8-month focused ethnography was used to develop programme theory. Subsequently, a survey was validated to empirically test programme theory. Adjudication between theory required an assessment of the fidelity to behaviour change practices. Therefore, vignettes were created and validated, which acted as a proxy to observations. The survey was then completed through online, and facilitated interviews, using a ‘think aloud’ methodology. The analysis showed that practice frameworks augment motivation when there is congruent practitioner characteristics and practice monitoring is utilised, whereas frameworks improve capability when faced with challenging attendees. Supportive leadership improves motivation when there is an organisational commitment to behaviour change and practitioners are passionate to empower attendees. Supportive leadership improves capability for implementation when a learning climate is created. Partnerships with medical professionals enhance implementation, through changes to motivation, when medical professionals commit and recognise the value of schemes, and partnerships enhance capability where medical professionals reinforce practice via congruent communication. On-going support enhances capability where practitioners are cognizant of their role and have lower behaviour change competencies, conversely, motivation is enhanced as practitioners become more capable. Exercise referral schemes risk being labelled ineffective without considering the implementation climate and fidelity to best practice guidance. This thesis provides portable and actionable findings, which could lead to a greater translation of behaviour change practices to applied settings in exercise referral and in other medically led community based self-management interventions. (shrink)

George Eliot and Joseph Conrad do not often find themselves discussed on the same page. The first is a writer of rural realism and the other a Polish born aristocrat turned sailor turned author of transnational and political fiction who early in his career declared himself 'modern'. However, the similarities between these two writers are not only found in their personal circumstances - alienation, change of name, physical and mental illness - but in their call upon humanity to find meaning (...) in a universe that apparently has none. This paper explores the scientific materialist position of Conrad and Eliot, arguing that each uses food as a deterministic tool in the lives of their characters, securing not only their natures but the traditions and values that determine their fates. (shrink)

In 1950 Alan Turing asked whether machines could think. This question has been vigorously debated since, and its relevance for machine intelligence, or even agency, continues to provoke interdisciplinary debate. In fact, Turing’s next step in his paper is to ask a far more nuanced question about imitation, which, we suggest, assumes a number of connections between intelligence, agency and the possibility of imitation. This paper will offer three key arguments against these assumptions, and in so doing make the following (...) claims: that intelligence is not a guarantee of personhood or agency, that Turing’s claims for imitation neither resolve the issue of intelligence, nor of agency, and that recognition between agents centres on the interpersonal relationship between agents, which in turn centres on the possibility for communication with a shared language. Our paper does not seek to argue either for or against the possibility of machine thought. Instead we seek to question whether any such processing would be recognized as thought or agency, and what this recognition might involve. (shrink)

This article engages with an example of Newman's reception in 20th Century thought, in Raymond Williams's Culture and Society from 1958. Williams considers that Newman's wording in The Idea of a University demonstrates a particular moment in the development of the semantic field of the word ‘culture’, which is indicated by the fact Newman does not use the word at an important juncture in his text. Williams also locates Newman in a developing trajectory of English understandings of culture at a (...) point when culture was presented as a surrogate religion. Both of these points are responded to by showing that the word ‘culture’ would not have served the purpose Williams apportions to it for Newman's argument, and that Newman should not be associated with those for whom the domain of culture was emerging as an alternative to religion in the 19th Century. Moreover, this analysis will show that Newman's understanding of what we today term ‘culture’ should be understood in terms of a broader semantic cluster best captured by the word “sensibility”: a set of pervasive tendencies, predispositions, and qualities. (shrink)

While the intellectual background to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics is undoubtedly theological and philosophical ethical discourse, this article argues that the interpretation of an important element of the Ethics manuscripts is well-served by being approached through aesthetics, specifically poetics. The element in question is what Bonhoeffer considers a sense of ‘objective necessity’ involved in acting obediently to Christ, and the case that this is best approached through aesthetics is made by exploring Bonhoeffer’s use of Goethe’s Iphegenia in Tauris to articulate this (...) ‘objective necessity’. Working from Bonhoeffer’s use of Goethe, the article explores how poetics can involve a sense of necessity comparable to that which drives the undertaking of certain ethical deeds. This possibility is found in the poetics of the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who considers this poetic and ethical necessity always to be concrete, and coins a category for it, named ‘having-to-be-thus’. Examining this category promises to contribute to the difficult theological question of how concrete obedience to Christ can be ‘objectively necessary’ at all, but also point more broadly to the aesthetic character of Bonhoeffer’s ethical stipulations. (shrink)

Academic philosophy is increasingly criticised for being excluding and exclusive: a relatively small number of women and minorities work in philosophy departments. This article contributes to the debates around this issue by arguing that academic philosophy could learn from philosophical practice. The article offers reflections on a particular practice of Socratic dialogue, which defines itself as a shared undertaking. Socratic dialogue in the Nelson-Heckmann tradition is a philosophical investigation, based in experience and undertaken together. By relating the practice to the (...) work of Hannah Arendt and in particular to Arendt’s notion of common sense or sensus communis I argue that the significance of philosophy as a shared undertaking is its ability to strengthen our sense of a common world. (shrink)

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’s Chapter XI on imagination is central to the book. It is physically located in the middle and considers a central faculty, or central faculties, in Murdoch’s philosophy: imagination and fantasy. The chapter begins with in-depth, original discussions of Immanuel Kant and Plato’s understanding of imagination. These discussions are not easy to follow. One of my aims here is to reconstruct Murdoch’s argument through close text reading, explaining some of the terminology and adding missing elements. (...) Another aim is to relate the remaining sections of this chapter to the earlier discussion of Kant and Plato. However, I begin by briefly exploring my own reading experience of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and to suggest some solutions to the the difficulties experienced when reading the work. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage with Law’s paper ‘Evil Pleasure Is Good For You!’ I argue that, although his criticism of hedonistic utilitarianism may hold some weight, his analysis of the goodness of pleasure is overly simplistic. I highlight some troubling results which would follow from his analysis and then outline a new account which then remedies these problems. Ultimately, I distinguish between Law’s ‘evil pleasures’ and, what I call, ‘virtuous pleasures’ and show how we can accept the goodness of (...) virtuous pleasures without being obliged to say that evil pleasures are also good for us. (shrink)

Making a connection between ‘post-modernism’ and post-truth has by now become a standard trope, both within academia and popular discourse, despite post-truth’s only recent emergence as a concept. Such claims are often rather vague and fanciful and lack an altogether credible account of either phenomenon in many cases. This Chapter argues however that within a legal context, there is the emergence of a legal post-truth which is the direct consequence of a concrete form of post-modernity within legal practice and thought. (...) While law may be called upon to engage in judgments of ‘truth’ in numerous interesting ways, it does not itself have any particular form of privileged access to the truth of statements or allegations, even though it is often treated as doing so. However, the most persistent question which law must deal with, and indeed the most persistent question within legal philosophy, relates to a deeper form of inquiry into truth: the question of legal truth. In simple terms this refers to the correctness of any particular proposition of law. Within legal theory, this expands to the larger question of what makes, in general, any legal proposition valid, or true. Reflecting upon legal scholarship through the lens of truth reveals that theories of law can be broken down into two broad and radically distinct categories. On the one hand, there exist empirical accounts of law which fundamentally understand questions of legal truth as social questions whose answers are empirically demonstrable. On the other hand, there are ‘idealist’ accounts of law which view legal content, and hence truth, as existing in some way or other in a manner which transcends social practice and which is autonomous from it. Both of these classical accounts, while radically different, share an interesting paradox: they see truth in law as an objective fact, but one which is fleeting and distant, far from the paradigm of legal certainty upon which the ideology of law is partly based. However, such accounts of legal truth share many other unstated aspects, and are largely based upon ideas which place the separateness and completeness of legal systems at their heart, providing either a unified ideal or a unified empirically observable social practice. However, they are share a common flaw, namely the failure to account for what might be called a post-modern phase of development in law, in which ordinary legal questions now regularly require the complex and non-hierarchical interaction of competing legal systems with different ‘truths’ and different ways of arriving at such truths. Such phenomena are commonly referred to as legal or, at times, constitutional ‘pluralism’. This post-modern turn within law has also produced therefore what we might call a form of post-truth within law. This is particularly significant because it places under great strain both the empirical and ideal accounts of legal truth and require us to re-elaborate an account of what makes a legal proposition true. From certain perspectives, this legal post-truth shares certain important aspects with the cultural phenomenon of post-truth, namely its apparently capricious and deracinated nature. However, it is argued in this Chapter that, in the legal context at least, post-truth allows for the transcendence of the empirical/ideal divide and the revealing of deeper forms of legal truth and our ability to account for them through theory or, put more simply, explanation. Upon greater reflection, legal truth is generated by the very forms of argument, or modes, which allow access to it. Such forms of argument exist also to produce legal truths outside and between legal orders where these appear to conflict or collide. While some legal scholars and others claim that such pressures on structures of knowledge reveal the end of the potential for law to generate truth, it is argued here that, on the contrary, they require a more open and more transparent use of the pure methods and modes of reason which both reveal but also generate legal truth in the first place. This is relevant to post-truth more generally in one specific way, despite the numerous idiosyncrasies of legal truth and knowledge: when assertions of truth within structures of power seem to come to embody the perspectivism and relativism used as methods of deconstruction, the post-modern and deconstructionist projects themselves require radical change: they stay true to their goal of deconstructing structures and discourses of power by applying the classical epistemologies which are rejected by those in power. Just as legal outcomes which are asserted rather than reasoned or justified are most convincingly deconstructed through sober legal modes, so can the post-modernist project find purpose in a world where dominant epistemes seem to have come to embody a simplistic version of post-modernist critiques. (shrink)

This article argues that law is an inherently modernist normative practice. Constructing a vision of Modernism which is at once an epistemology and an attitudinal disposition to doubt and make anew our assumptions about the world, the authors demonstrate that legal practice encounters the world through individual cases, ‘examples’. Through these examples the law is capable of both interacting with and comprehending that world, while also being forced to question the law’s own precepts and their application. In this manner, the (...) law’s generalisations and abstractions become concrete, and can indeed be upended, through fleeting, impressionistic and highly case-specific examples. This exemplarity within law explains how law is able to navigate its apparently contradictory aspirations and natures which have bedevilled legal philosophy for millennia. In reality, law exists within a series of polarities, rather than contradictions, which are navigated through the law’s encounters with examples from the extra-legal world. The authors conclude that this aspect of the law’s nature also has practical consequences, requiring the law to maintain the fora in which new and novel cases are heard, and through which law’s modernist spirit can thrive. (shrink)

This chapter presents the striking similarities between the cases of Mr Kadi and Josef K., and indeed their contrasting conclusions, to delve into the insights of Franz Kafkas fictional depictions of the law. These focused heavily, among other themes, on the experience of law for those who are subject to the legal systems demands but who do not have, at that moment at least, privileged access to its inner workings. Rather, therefore, than contributing to the literature on Kadi which focuses (...) on intra- and inter-systemic normative conundra, this chapter seeks to understand law as it is experienced as a social artefact which primarily serves and seeks to regulate the actions of people who are not lawyers. Finally, this chapter draws further on the Kadi saga to demonstrate that, beyond these conceptual concerns, certain empirically observable contemporary trends within the law are contributing additional complexity to this problem. (shrink)

Computational scientific discovery is becoming increasingly important in many areas of science. This chapter reviews the application of computational methods in the formulation of scientific ideas, that is, in the characterization of phenomena and the generation of scientific explanations, in the form of hypotheses, theories, and models. After a discussion of the evolutionary and anthropological roots of scientific discovery, the nature of scientific discovery is considered, and an outline is given of the forms that scientific discovery can take: direct observational (...) discovery, finding empirical rules, and discovery of theories. A discussion of the psychology of scientific discovery includes an assessment of the role of induction. Computational discovery methods in mathematics are then described. This is followed by a survey of methods and associated applications in computational scientific discovery, covering massive systematic search within a defined space; rule-based reasoning systems; classification, machine vision, and related techniques; data mining; finding networks; evolutionary computation; and automation of scientific experiments. We conclude with a discussion of the future of computational scientific discovery, with consideration of the extent to which scientific discovery will continue to require human input. (shrink)

In construction better practice has been sought through the employment of knowledge management. Interest in tacit knowledge has grown due to its importance for raising performance at all organisational levels. Aspects of the limits which tacit knowledge places on knowledge management approaches in construction are considered with the focus being upon broad knowledge management categories rather than the details of particular methods. The distinction between knowing how and knowing that coupled with examination of whether the main mode of knowing is (...) tacit or explicit is used to analyse the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge in construction. There are significant general theoretical difficulties with incorporating tacit knowledge into the objectivist knowledge management approaches which predominate in construction particularly since methods for converting tacit to explicit knowledge are problematic. Improving performance requires appreciating the limitations of objectivist and practice based knowledge management within the context of construction projects as the consideration of performance management measures illustrates. (shrink)

We present a system to represent and discover computational models to capture data in psychology. The system uses a Theory Representation Language to define the space of possible models. This space is then searched using genetic programming, to discover models which best fit the experimental data. The aim of our semi-automated system is to analyse psychological data and develop explanations of underlying processes. Some of the challenges include: capturing the psychological experiment and data in a way suitable for modelling, controlling (...) the kinds of models that the GP system may develop, and interpreting the final results. We discuss our current approach to all three challenges, and provide results from two different examples, including delayed-match-to-sample and visual attention. (shrink)

New semi-autonomous technology enables agencies to identify individuals by their faces. My research question is: What is the impact of this Face Recognition Technology on privacy, and on autonomy generally, of citizens and their personal identifiable images? Do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and risks? My purpose is to review, examine and critique the ethical and legal circumstances as they are now developing. To this end I deploy a qualitative methodology to interrogate the literature and the growing evidence. A rigorous (...) literature review focuses on the issues of personal liberty and surveillance from the discourses in ethics, law and sociology that are related to my hypothesis of privacy erosion by FRT. My broad conclusion is that in an increasingly data-dependent and concomitantly risk-averse society there is evidence that privacy is being eroded in the trade-off against national security. To balance this trade-off and to ameliorate the threat to privacy, the moral right to privacy needs to be more widely understood and examined. Ultimately, without adequate public accountability and transparency the FRT project will continue to diminish citizen autonomy, because public debate and approval is denied and therefore the majority in democratic western societies are likely to lose their understanding of, and their ability to control the use of their personal identifiable images in the form of digital data despite the impending EU General Data Protection Regulation. (shrink)

This paper deploys elements of the philosophy of information in order to explore ideas of dialogical governance. Dialogue in the governance of contentious issues is at least partly a response to the recognition of pluralism among perspectives on various issues. This recognition is prevalent in the context of European governance. However, it is a first step to a better understanding of diverging opinion, rather than an end point. This paper argues that the PoI offers a fruitful path to follow up (...) this first step. Specifically, PoI provides epistemological tools that can be used to clarify the meanings of terms and relevance of perspectives at issue in dialogical scenarios. Importantly, this approach revises the enlightenment view of the individual, offering a more nuanced and ultimately more accurate view of the self as internally complex. This represents a step beyond the status quo wherein these things are taken as unproblematic. This paper argues that PoI’s resources ought to feature as a methodological background to a reinvigorated dialogical governance paradigm. This method and these resources can inform an improved view of dialogical governance in Europe and, in their generality, beyond. (shrink)

It is well-documented that children do not begin school as blank slates but that they bring with them extensive knowledge about how the world around them works. This conceptual knowledge, embedded within rich theoretical structures, is not always accurate and requires change through learning and instruction. Yet some ideas – such as object motion – appear to be particularly resistant to such change. So how can conceptual change be achieved or facilitated? Collaboration, for one, has long been recognised as a (...) beneficial learning and teaching approach, including early science education. However, for deep-rooted ideas collaborating with others may not always have the desired impact. Instead, the notion of self-collaboration is considered in this review. The current state of research in the field of predictive and underlying knowledge in childhood is outlined and different models of how the knowledge systems relate to each other are discussed. While further work is still needed to establish a clearer picture of how self-collaboration might effect conceptual change, research to-date clearly identifies significant differences between predictive and underlying knowledge structures throughout childhood, how these structures can be related to traditional conceptual change theories, and how they may play a role in future learning and instructional approaches. (shrink)

The last few years have seen a growing interest in the philosophical work of Iris Murdoch. Where the interest in her literary work started early in her career, with the first monograph published in 1965, the first monograph on her philosophical work did not appear until 1996. It is now clear that this first work was not a one-off, but the start of a new area of research.

The idea that science is nearing completion assumes that science is completable. I argue that it is incompletable in principle. This needs to be recognized if science is to be fully deployed for human welfare, addressing critical global problems of the age. Nonrecognition of incompletability leads not only to the diversion of human, intellectual, material and energy resources away from critical human problems but exacerbates the neglect, misidentification and misconceived prioritization of human problems and the goals of science. The case (...) for incompletability is outlined in terms of three dimensions of scientific development: theoretical, technological and economic. There appear to be insurmountable theoretical barriers, growing technological uncertainties and an economic trend to diminishing marginal returns on investment. These dimensions may converge at a limit, the Lambda Limit. Dire human problems that are resolvable with current science and technology are neglected, such as water supplies and the eradication of malaria. The author argues that one reason for this is that science is misconceived as the ideology of scientism, a universal project in which “everything” can eventually be explained and predicted. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present an overview of salient issues of exposure, characterisation and hazard assessment of nanomaterials as they emerged from the consensus-building of experts undertaken within the four year European Commission coordination project NanoImpactNet. The approach adopted is to consolidate and condense the findings and problem-identification in such a way as to identify knowledge-gaps and generate a set of interim recommendations of use to industry, regulators, research bodies and funders. The categories of recommendation arising from (...) the consensual view address: significant gaps in vital factual knowledge of exposure, characterisation and hazards; the development, dissemination and standardisation of appropriate laboratory protocols; address a wide range of technical issues in establishing an adequate risk assessment platform; the more efficient and coordinated gathering of basic data; greater inter-organisational cooperation; regulatory harmonization; the wider use of the life-cycle approaches; and the wider involvement of all stakeholders in the discussion and solution-finding efforts for nanosafety. (shrink)

In discussions of English fiction, Hardy and Conrad are only occasionally considered together, and generally as being different exemplars of a late Victorian pessimism who give human dimension to the cosmic ironies of a world bereft of Providence. This study argues for a more vital connection than a coincidence of intellectual outlook, one that finds their fiction is generated by similar conceptions of how human beings experience and gain knowledge of the world in which they live. An epistemology of sense (...) impressions underlies the invention of ‘fictional worlds’, the construction of characters, and the literary style of the otherwise very different novels considered here. As such, it is illuminating to explore both of these novelists in the light of the empirical scientific investigations of the nineteenth century which accorded such prominence to the function and evidence of the senses. While both authors have been the subject of several excellent studies of their relation to Darwin, such studies have tended to concentrate on biology in the case of Hardy, and have seen Conrad more in the province of metaphysics than empirical science. The originality of my study lies in its attention to physics and physiology as informing realms for fiction, not as a matter of direct influence upon the writers, but rather as conceptually and historically complementary modes of apprehending the world within which human experience takes place. Consequently, some of the work of contemporary scientists, as well as modern theorists in the fields of sensation, vision and sound, are seen to be as helpful in elucidating the sensory effects achieved in Hardy’s and Conrad’s novels as the many contemporary and modern literary critics whose work also informs this study. After an Introduction which locates Hardy and Conrad in relation to each other in terms of critical estimation, and which establishes the importance of the senses to their fiction and to their theoretical outlook as novelists, the study closely examines the modes of writing found in three sets of paired novels, exploring their individual treatment of a shared epistemology. In taking Desperate Remedies and The Rescue as often disregarded yet, in my view, foundational texts for each author, the focus is upon the phenomenology of sensation itself, with a distinction made between the outer-directed sensory field established in these novels as opposed to the inner mental world characteristic of Walter Pater which was so influential for Modernism. Both Hardy and Conrad are renowned for their visual evocations, and I take Far From the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim in order to explore each novelist’s extraordinary attention to light, and what it reveals to the eye. I argue that, unlike the later Modernists, the scenic construction of Hardy and Conrad creates occasions that exceed the perceptions of individual consciousness, which it renders as participating in a larger process of the ‘event’. Attending to the sound-world of these novels yields a different inflection of this account: The Return of the Native and ‘Heart of Darkness’ show characters surrounded by an active universe which penetrates to that which is hidden within, and the subject for portrayal is the attempt to give a human accent to phenomena that retain a mystery in their location and transmission. Throughout, both novelists are seen to have a united interest in the medium that surrounds human action and perception, but each novel examined is allowed its individuality and is not coerced into being a mere representative for a theoretical position. This is a study centred upon the early fiction, but the Conclusion proposes that Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Nostromo explore in very different ways an end-point for the novel of sensation, in which the identity of the individual self is open to absorption by the sensory qualities of the circumambient universe that it apprehends. (shrink)

This paper analyses how talk between researchers and their volunteer human subjects works to construct a safe and supportive environment in a laboratory setting where women volunteers participate in the development of a new imaging technology with potential for diagnosing breast cancer. Drawing on discourse analysis perspectives, we explore the work talk has to do in order to facilitate the instrumental, ethical and social dimensions of the interaction between researchers, volunteers and technology. An important cross-cutting theme is the use of (...) various discursive strategies by both researchers and volunteers to manage perceptions of risk and construct a safe research environment, which will foster the active cooperation from volunteers necessary to achieve successful research outcomes. We draw attention to the interactive and two-way character of the technology talk observed in our research setting and how it co-produces researchers, volunteer subjects and the technology and supports the working social relationship between them that is vital to success. (shrink)

This article argues for the inclusion of comics amongst the resources examined in interdisciplinary legal studies. Law and humanities enriches understanding of the human and experiential dimensions of justice through engagement with a variety of aesthetic discourses. The comics medium, however, remains under-researched in this context. Comics are distinct in their interaction of word and image, existing at the borderline between the textual and the visual, and between the rational and the aesthetic; they can thus assist in navigating the limits (...) of rational language, a key issue for legal knowledge and debate which are deeply ingrained with this means of representation. The ‘in-betweenness’ of comics not only challenges the idealised use of text for the articulation of legal issues, but enables engagement with a wider set of interacting knowledges beyond the rational that can help triangulate issues surrounding justice in a human world inhabited by sensual beings. (shrink)

Situating his inquiry amidst the debate over mystical language and the 'core experience', Tyler deftly exposes and explores the mystical, transformational element in Wittgenstein's thought and life. In turn, Wittgenstein provides Tyler a clear lens through which he reexamines the mystical theology of seminal figures from Dionysius the Areopagite to Teresa of Avila. An immensely important contribution to the comparative study of mysticism, The Return of the Mystical also significantly advances our understanding of Wittgenstein.