Sans prétendre à l’exhaustivité, les éléments de base de la notion d’existence – dans la falsafa, principalement chez Alfarabi et Avicenne, sont ici examinés. En commençant par les questions terminologiques, on considère ensuite quelques questions concernant la conception de l’existence dans la philosophie arabe jusqu’à Avicenne. Puis, on analyse la notion d’existence chez Avicenne en prenant en considération les dernières recherches sur ce sujet.

Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence was—and sometimes still is—read in the sense of a priority of essence. My analysis will focus on an important example of such a reading: Beatrice Zedler’s interpretation of one of the most important texts for Thomas’s discussion of Avicenna’s philosophy, the Quaestiones de Potentia. Independently of its consistency, Zedler’s interpretation gives me the opportunity to discuss Avicenna’s supposed “essentialism”. My aim is to show that Avicenna is very well aware of the aporia that an (...) essence existing independently of existence would represent. If essentialism is a risk of Avicenna’s metaphysics, this is not because of the essence-existence distinction. It is because of the ethical dimension that creation perforce implies, that Avicenna seems in fact to posit an “independent order of possibles” before God’s creative action. (shrink)

L’idée de totalité se trouve dans la Métaphysique du Livre de la Guérison (les Ilāhiyyāt du Kitāb al-Šifā') d’Avicenne en relation avec plusieurs thèmes. Dans cet article, l’analyse concerne en premier lieu la conception de la création et, en deuxième lieu, celle du mal. Dans les deux cas, c’est en relation aux termes et aux idées d’absolu et de non-existence que la totalité est conçue. L’examen du concept de totalité chez Avicenne permet enfin de réaffirmer les traits fondamentaux de sa (...) conception du Premier : le Principe est, quant à lui, incomposé et un, car Il est seulement être ou existence sans la limitation « essentielle » qui dépendrait de l’essence, alors que tout ce qui est causé et n’est donc pas le Principe, doit être en soi un double et un composé. (shrink)

In his Metaphysics of the Healing, Avicenna presents his ideas about the destiny of the human soul in the afterlife. Considered philosophically, the afterlife is intellectual. The human soul achieves perfection by becoming an intellectual world in which the whole of reality may be reflected. Analysing the meaning of this statement helps to elucidate not only how Avicenna conceives intellectual pleasure in the afterlife, but also how he characterizes the very process of knowledge. Intertwined therewith are at least two important (...) subjects, richly illuminated by recent medieval historiographical research: ‘intellectual’ or ‘mental felicity’ and knowledge as conjunction with the agent intellect. (shrink)

The idea that defines quiddity – independence or neutrality in relation to the modalities of existence – allows Avicenna not only to speak of a duality in the being of existing things, but also to use apparently logically incompatible notions to qualify quiddity: that of reality, on the one hand, and that of possibility, on the other. The very conception of the independence of quiddity – which lets us consider quiddity as a separate element in the existing thing – can (...) be recognized in the resolution of the doubt that concludes the Maqāla fī l‑tawḥīd of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. A comparison between Avicenna’s discussion of quiddity in his Metaphysics and the discourse of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī confirms the idea that this Christian philosopher and theologian who was active in Baghdad in the tenth century could have played an important formative role in the ontology of the great Persian philosopher. (shrink)

Où en est l'étude de la philosophie arabe? Ce livre propose un état des lieux. Il s'agit de dresser un premier bilan des travaux menés dans ce vaste champ. On examine l'historiographie, les dénominations employées; on s'interroge sur les thématiques, les objets retenus et les méthodes d'analyse mises en oeuvre ; on y présente aussi des études sur des auteurs, des traditions ou des concepts, qui montrent comment le travail progresse, quelles tensions perdurent, quelles sont les perspectives."--Page 4 of cover.

This is a part of an in-depth study of a set of the manuscripts related to the Jayadrathayāmala. Taking JY.3.9 as a test-chapter, a comparative paleography analysis of the 11 manuscripts was made within READ software framework. The workflow within READ minimized the effort to make a few important discoveries (manuscripts containing more than one script, identification of the manuscripts potentially written by the same person) as well as to create an overview of the shift from Nāgarī to Newārī and, (...) finally, to Devanāgarī scripts within the history of manuscript transmission of a single chapter. Exploratory statistical analysis in R of the syllable frequency in each manuscript, based on the paleography analysis export from READ, helped to establish that there are potentially two lines of manuscript transmission of the JY.3.9. (shrink)

The paper analyses and evaluates the linguistic policy of the Court of Justice of the European Union against the background of other multilingual courts and in the light of theories of legal interpretation. Multilingualism has a direct impact upon legal interpretation at the Court, displacing traditional approaches with a hermeneutic paradigm. It also creates challenges to the acceptance of the Court’s case-law in the Member States, which seem to have been adequately tackled by the Court’s idiosyncratic translation policy.

Although epidemiology as a scientific study of disease in populations claimed an independent disciplinary status already in the mid–nineteenth century, its history in the twentieth century can be seen as a continuous and often contentious attempt to define the field’s social and intellectual boundaries vis-à-vis a variety of neighboring scientific fields and public health practices. In a period dominated by laboratory biomedical sciences, epidemiologists repeatedly tried to spell out how their discipline met the requirements of scientificity despite its focus on (...) disease as a collective phenomenon and its reliance on nonlaboratory methods. This article asks about the relationship between the changing institutional and intellectual contexts of British epidemiological practice and the epidemiologists’attempts to define both science in general and epidemiology in particular. An examination of the epidemiologists’boundary-making endeavors is also used to reflect on the circumstances in which scientists engage in the discourse of disciplinary demarcations. (shrink)

Confronted with an unprecedented scale of human-induced environmental crisis, there is a need for new modes of theorizing that would abandon human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism and instead focus on developing environmentally ethical projects suitable for our times. In this paper, we offer an anti-anthropocentric project of an ethos for living in the Anthropocene. We develop it through revisiting the notion of sustainability in order to problematize the linear vision of human-centric futurity and the uniform ‘we’ of humanity upon which it (...) relies. We ground our analyses in posthumanism and material feminism, using works by posthumanist and material feminist thinkers such as Stacy Alaimo, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett, among others. In dialogue with them, we offer the concept of posthuman sustainability that decenters the human, re-positions it in its ecosystem and, while remaining attentive to difference, fosters the thriving of all instances of life. (shrink)

Liberal-Democratic changes in the Russian Society have brought a number of acute problems threatening national security and leading to converting Russia into a peripheral socio-cultural system («national self-identification crisis»). Scientific research shows that the main indicator of the said crisis is not only the critical economic differentiation of people into the «poor» and «rich» Russia (with the different ways of life, needs, mentality) but also spiritual degradation, spread of aggressive – depressive syndrome (growth of hatred, feeling of injustice, loss of (...) meaning of the life, anger, melancholy, hopelessness, loneliness etc.). Twothirds of the citizens (74.9%) interviewed in 2006 think that their social status does not correspond to their personal achievements in education and professional abilities. One of the main reasons of their distrust towards the government bodies is insufficient professional and cultural level, absence of unity of a word and business. It is worth mentioning that books and articles of scientists and ideologists who resist Western liberalism are freely published, but you can hardly see these people close to the President. Russians are openly and secretly under pressure of ideas propagandizing negative past which undermine national self-identification, national pride for the great history of their country. The original sphere of influence of Russian language and Russian culture is shortening under the press of mass-culture. Meanwhile, 67% of Russians expressed their negative attitude towards massive Western cultural expansion. The Futureof Russia is in safeguarding national intellectual and spiritual values, Science, education and in supporting the person of work and creativity. (shrink)

This paper attempts to be a contribution to the epistemological project of explaining complex conceptual structures departing from more basic ones. The central thesis of the paper is that there are what I call “functionally structured concepts”, these are non-harmonic concepts in Dummett’s sense that might be legitimized if there is a function that justifies the tie between the inferential connection the concept allows us to trace. Proving this requires enhancing the russellian existential analysis of definite descriptions to apply to (...) functions and using this in proving the legitimacy of such concepts. The utility of the proposal is shown for the case of thick ethical terms and an attempt is made to use it in explaining the development of natural numbers. This last move could allow us to go one step lower in explaining the genesis of natural numbers while maintaining the notion of abstract numbers as higher order entities. (shrink)

Dans le champ de la linguistique francaise, Olga Galatanu est de ceux qui ont muni l'analyse du discours et des interactions verbales d'un modele semantique de description. La Semantique des Possibles Argumentatifs qu'elle developpe depuis une vingtaine d'annees adhere aux visions argumentative, stereotypique, referentielle, cognitiviste de la langue, et s'attache a rendre compte de la construction des representations en langue et en discours.<BR> Les articles que ses collaborateurs et amis lui offrent dans ce volume se rapportent de pres ou (...) de loin a la SPA. Certains en partagent les postulats: sens referentiel et denomination, interfaces semantique-syntaxe et semantique-pragmatique, construction discursive du sens, valeurs; d'autres reprennent et developpent des elements specifiques de la SPA: possibles argumentatifs, deploiements argumentatifs, modalites; d'autres encore montrent les convergences et complementarites entre la SPA et des theories voisines.<BR> Les analyses portent notamment sur l'attitude metalinguistique des locuteurs, la malleabilite semantique des mots, la negociation des sens et des valeurs, les principes et strategies discursives qui regulent la communication, l'heterogeneite discursive, la presentation de soi, la construction d'objets discursifs, les actes de langage indirects, etc.". (shrink)

The aim of this article is to shed light on women’s experience of informal trade on one of the EU external borders: Belarus–Lithuania. The article suggests looking at the informal economy beyond the notion of precarity and to pay attention to how women themselves understand their involvement in trading practices. The author argues that, although economic necessity is an important motivation for women to start trading activities, this experience rewards them not only financially but also through non-economic aspects such as (...) self-respect, solidarity and socializing. Theoretically, the article brings together the discussion of the gendered nature of informal work with the feminist theory of agency. It shows that women’s experience of informal cross-border trade is agentive. Trade provides women with a sense of pride, self-confidence and respect and enables them to recognize their self-sufficiency. However, it is also argued that agency is not synonymous with autonomy and individualism. Theoretically and empirically, the article stresses a relational understanding of agency. On the one hand, women acknowledge their financial achievements as the capability to take proper care of their children, especially in situations when the second breadwinner is absent. On the other hand, they also value their trading experience as a space of socializing with other women. The success of cross-border trade depends on the sense of solidarity and collective action to resist the system represented by customs and border control. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the decolonization of Ukrainian culture as an important factor of nation-building in the European perspective. At the same time, decolonization is a current trend in Western academic thought, which is embodied in social activism, in particular, in the wok movement and the culture of abolition. Postcolonial studies has become an intellectual battleground. These studies draw a new front line in the culture wars. Rethinking Western culture in light of its imperial expansionist past defines the goal (...) of decolonization. However, the tendency towards the politicization of vouk and the culture of cancellation. carries the risks of undermining the basic values of Western culture - freedom of thought and the rule of law, while the decolonization of Ukrainian culture has a different purpose. Unlike cultural decolonization in Western countries, cultural decolonization in Ukraine is aimed at legitimizing modern European values (Lisbon Agreement, 2007) by overcoming the «Russian-oriented» (Eurasian) tradition of thinking.Identifying the authentic contents of Ukrainian culture and refuting its imperial-Soviet interpretations is one of the main tasks of the decolonization of Ukrainian culture. The article offers a comparative analysis of Ukrainian and Western versions of cultural decolonization in order to avoid uncritical borrowings and ignoring the peculiarities of the Ukrainian context. The successful decolonization of Ukrainian culture requires the development of its 1) concept, 2) methods of theoretical substantiation, and 3) methods of practical implementation. The article states that the decolonization of Ukrainian culture becomes possible if its research strategies are deprived of colonial influences, which reveal indications of the imperial and Soviet scientific paradigm of social and humanitarian knowledge. The key concepts of the research are referring to the works of Nigel Giggar (2023), Douglas Murray (2022), Linda Martín Alcoff (2023), Jonh Darwin (2009), Kwasi Kwarteng (2013), Yaroslav Hrytsak (2022), Serhii Plokhii (2021, 2023), Timothy D. Snyder (2017, 2918) and others. (shrink)

This article examines the discourse competence of high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders to participate in narrative introduction sequences with family members. The analysis illuminates the children’s own efforts to launch narratives, as well as their ability to build upon the contributions of others. Ethnographic, discourse analytic methodology is integrated with the theory of discourse organization and the weak central coherence account of autism. Introductions of both personal experience narratives as well as fictional narratives are examined. The children were especially (...) competent in the use of stable introductory practices when launching fictional narratives, pre-organized by the media of expression. Their challenge was not in the introduction, but in the narrative co-telling, which often was not globally organized over an extended course of propositions. The heterogeneity of the ASD children’s discourse competence and its implications for discourse analysis are discussed. (shrink)

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co‐verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis (...) to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual‐spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON‐R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Since the beginning of signed language research, the linguistic units have been divided into conventional, standard and fixed signs, all of which were considered as the core of the language, and iconic and productive signs, put at the edge of language. In the present paper, we will review different models proposed by signed language researchers over the years to describe the signed lexicon, showing how to overcome the hierarchical division between standard and productive lexicon. Drawing from the semiotic insights of (...) Peirce we proposed to look at signs as a triadic construction built on symbolic, iconic, and indexical features. In our model, the different iconic, symbolic, and indexical features of signs are seen as the three sides of the same triangle, detectable in the single linguistic sign. The key aspect is that the dominance of the feature will determine the different use of the linguistic unit, as we will show with examples from different discourse types. (shrink)

Overzicht van recent in Nederland ontwikkelde vormen van niet-universitaire toepassingen van de filosofie, zoals in het bedrijfsleven en de horeca-sector.

Populations have different percents on different history realms regarding baths and fountains. A constant historical issue of such places is related with constant use and adore. Therefore we find ourselves in time where they where more used and ages where they where less used. On our paper we analyse from a sociological perspective the use of such spaces, mainly associated with social interaction and sociability. At the end of our paper, we are going to analyse both issues directly linked with (...) tourism perspective in terms of health and care on the so called “Postindustrial Society”. (shrink)

El Programa de Termalismo del IMSERSO, perteneciente al Instituto de Mayores y Servicios Sociales del Gobierno de España, se encuentra englobado dentro de de las políticas y actuaciones públicas de carácter social y económico que tienen como objetivo favorecer la salud e integración social de las personas mayores y su envejecimiento activo. Este artículo estudia, desde el año 2010 hasta el 2013, la evolución de las plazas adscritas al programa y hace una prospección para 2014-2015. Los resultados revelan una disminución (...) generalizada del número de plazas, tendencia que se mantendrá en los próximos años. (shrink)

The summary focuses on topical educational and methodological issues discussed at the meeting of the presidium of the Federal Educational and Methodological Association held in November 2019 in Saint Petersburg. The authors reviews the process of realization of new federal educational standards. Special attention is paid to applied ethics education, the specifics and current problems of teaching it in Russia. The authors also discuss the current state of philosophical education in Belarus, its current problems and possible ways for further development. (...) In addition, the summary outlines various issues related to the work of higher education institutions in Russia. (shrink)

While the implementation of digital technology in psychiatry appears promising, there is an urgent need to address the implications of the absence of ethical design in the early development of such technologies. Some authors have noted the gap between technology development and ethical analysis and have called for an upstream examination of the ethical issues raised by digital technologies. In this paper, we address this suggestion, particularly in relation to digital healthcare technologies for patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The introduction (...) of digital technologies in psychiatry offers a broad spectrum of diagnostic and treatment options tailored to the health needs and goals of patients’ care. These technologies include wearable devices, smartphone applications for high-immersive virtual realities, smart homes, telepsychiatry and messaging systems for patients in rural areas. The availability of these technologies could increase access to mental health services and improve the diagnostics of mental disorders.Additional Instruction AbstractIn this descriptive review, we systematize ethical concerns about digital technologies for mental health with a particular focus on individuals suffering from schizophrenia. There are many unsolved dilemmas and conflicts of interest in the implementation of these technologies, such as (1) the lack of evidence on efficacy and impact on self-perception; (2) the lack of clear standards for the safety of their daily implementation; (3) unclear roles of technology and a shift in the responsibilities of all parties; (4) no guarantee of data confidentiality; and (5) the lack of a user-centered design that meets the particular needs of patients with schizophrenia. mHealth can improve care in psychiatry and make mental healthcare services more efficient and personalized while destigmatizing mental health disorders. To ensure that these technologies will benefit people with mental health disorders, we need to heighten sensitivity to ethical issues among mental healthcare specialists, health policy makers, software developers, patients themselves and their proxies. Additionally, we need to develop frameworks for furthering sustainable development in the digital technologies industry and for the responsible usage of such technologies for patients with schizophrenia in the clinical setting. We suggest that digital technology in psychiatry, particularly for schizophrenia and other serious mental health disorders, should be integrated into treatment with professional supervision rather than as a self-treatment tool. (shrink)

This essay explores the return of the subject in the computational context, which I address as a digital subject. This digital subject encompasses a digital identifier, correlations in data or a data profile, moving between biological characteristics and symbolic expression. I focus on the processes through which digital subjects are constructed by matching, correlating, modelling, as well as how they become enactive. The ways of pulling data together into a digital subject is often presented as a logic of fact, where (...) data is equated with documentary evidence. Instead, I propose the notion of the distance in which digital subjects are produced. Indexicality comes from outside of data, whereas the regard for the thick distance becomes a mark of the form of knowledge. I conclude by arguing for a posthumanities approach that establishes the distance while allowing for different subjects to be called upon. (shrink)

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present (...) studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles. We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\kappa$$\end{document} of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard. (shrink)

The paper presents a mode of researching epistemological and conceptual implications of text focused on the category of countertextuality. Parallel to the development of the orality / literacy theory within different areas of humanities and social sciences there runs a thread of various reconceptualization of text and textuality. It implies an increasing awareness of the non-neutral character of text (as a means of communicating knowledge within the academia) for the research results, which appears on both methodological and ethical grounds.In the (...) paper the example of the project of postmodern anthropology is invoked to show how the constraints of the norms of writing texts specific of anthropology in mid-1980’s are articulated and what the proposed ways of writing are that would overcome the perceived flaws of text. The article focuses on the major manifesto of the postmodern turn in anthropology (Writng Culture), some other methodological articles of its authors, as well as some of the actual ethnographic researches. I highlight some of the major charges laid against text in these works and some of the major countertextual writing strategies. (shrink)

The main indicators of assistance activity in the insurance market in Ukraine have been analyzed. Beneficial and negative trends of its development have been shown. The dynamics of the insurers' liquidation expenses structure and the payment of services expenses of the assistance establishments have been highlighted. Their structure has been shown due to the types of voluntary and compulsory insurance. The main problems hindering the effective development of the assistance services market have been characterized and the prospects of its development (...) have been offered. The aim of the research is to carry out comprehensive analysis of the current market of assistance services, to identify the main problems of their implementation and to point out the prospects of insurance market development. The dynamics of insurance bonuses and benefits including insurance compensation and services and the insurers' operating expenses concerning the payment of services of the assistance establishments has been analyzed on the basis of a sample survey of the main indicators of insurance market development due to the statistic data of National Committee of Financial Services. It has been revealed that majority of the insurance services provide settlement of insurance claims by offering assistance service. Alongside increasing of the share of insurance payment due to the contract providing the insurance service, allows the majority of insurance claims to be settled due to the payment of insurance compensation. Expenses on assistance services were the highest and the court expenses were the lowest in the structure of the insurer's liquidation expenses during 2011-2014. Expenses on services of the non-residential assistance establishments are low but they are increasing. It shows that emergency assistance to our citizens in the country and outside is being increased. Structure of assistance services in the voluntary and compulsory insurance market has been analyzed; main trends of assistance activity development according to the separate insurance services have been highlighted. In particular it was found out that the greatest amount of assistance services were provided due to the voluntary medical insurance, medical costs insurance, land transport insurance and compulsory insurance of civil liability of the owners of vehicles. On the basis of conducted analysis, we can draw a conclusion about the low level of assistance services market development. It is affected by negative trends of economic and political crisis, low solvency of insurers and the quality of insurance services, a lack of guaranties to provide emergency assistance in time, imperfect state regulation of assistance services provision, and a low level of institutional support. We offer to intensify the interaction between the insurers and assistance companies while providing insurance services including additional ones, insurance compensation, and settlement of insurance claims by ensuring emergency assistance in monetary and natural-material form. This will promote the increasing of quality of the insurance protection. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that critical posthumanism is a crucial tool in nursing philosophy and scholarship. Posthumanism entails a reconsideration of what ‘human’ is and a rejection of the whole tradition founding Western life in the 2500 years of our civilization as narrated in founding texts and embodied in governments, economic formations and everyday life. Through an overview of historical periods, texts and philosophy movements, I problematize humanism, showing how it centres white, heterosexual, able‐bodied Man at the top of (...) a hierarchy of beings, and runs counter to many current aspirations in nursing and other disciplines: decolonization, antiracism, anti‐sexism and Indigenous resurgence. In nursing, the term humanism is often used colloquially to mean kind and humane; yet philosophically, humanism denotes a Western philosophical tradition whose tenets underpin much of nursing scholarship. These underpinnings of Western humanism have increasingly become problematic, especially since the 1960s motivating nurse scholars to engage with antihumanist and, recently, posthumanist theory. However, even current antihumanist nursing arguments manifest deep embeddedness in humanistic methodologies. I show both the problematic underside of humanism and critical posthumanism's usefulness as a tool to fight injustice and examine the materiality of nursing practice. In doing so, I hope to persuade readers not to be afraid of understanding and employing this critical tool in nursing research and scholarship. (shrink)

This article offers an anthropological perspective on autism, a condition at once neurological and social, which complements existing psychological accounts of the disorder, expanding the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the socio-cultural one. Persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to other individuals, but as members of social groups and communities who act, displaying both social competencies and difficulties, in relation to socially and culturally (...) ordered expectations of behavior. The article articulates a socio-cultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences; formulating situational scenarios; and interpreting socio-cultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. Providing ethnographic data on the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome, the article outlines a cline of competence across the three domains, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture, illuminating how members of social groups are at once shaped by, and are agents of, social life and cultural understanding. (shrink)

This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American grammar’ (...) fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism. (shrink)

Abstracts The aim of the paper is to propose an alternative model to realist and non-cognitive explanations of the rule-guided use of thick ethical concepts and to examine the implications that may be drawn from this and similar cases for our general understanding of rule-following and the relation between criteria of application, truth and correctness. It addresses McDowell’s non-cognitivism critique and challenges his defence of the entanglement thesis for thick ethical concepts. Contrary to non-cognitivists, however, I propose to view the (...) relation between the two terms of the entanglement as resulting from the satisfaction of a previously applied moral function. This is what I call a “Three-Fold Model”. (shrink)