Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning (...) and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

Le livre de Caroline Petit, Galien de Pergame ou la rhétorique de la Providence, constitue la première étude d’ensemble du rôle de la rhétorique dans l’œuvre de Galien, aux sources du discours médical et scientifique, et de l’autobiographie intellectuelle. Caroline Petit’s Galien de Pergame ou la rhétorique de la Providence is the first comprehensive study of the role of rhetoric in Galen’s oeuvre, a cornerstone of medical and scientific discourse and of intellectual autobiography in the West.

Inspired by Voltaire's advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française (...) d'étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Climate change and decarbonization raise complex justice questions that researchers and policymakers must address. The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the IPCC. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations. Here we propose a conceptual framework grounded in philosophical theory for this purpose. We apply this framework to climate mitigation scenarios (...) literature as proof of concept, enabling a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice. We identify areas of future research, including new metrics of service provisioning essential for human well-being. [Can be freely read by clicking the ReadCube link below.]. (shrink)

Le « Bulletin bibliographique de philosophie politique et sociale » est réalisé pour la revue Philosophique par une équipe de rédactrices et de rédacteurs. Il est coordonné par Caroline Guibet Lafaye (CNRS) et Fabien Ferri (université de Franche-Comté) au sein du Centre de Documentation et de Bibliographie Philosophiques de l’université de Franche-Comté (UR 2274 CDBP – Logiques de l’agir), et propose de brèves recensions d’ouvrages récemment parus, réparties dans diverses rubriques thématique...

Up Against Foucault offers both a feminist critique of Foucauldian theories as well as an attempt to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. Feminists are often "up against Foucault" because he questions key conclusions in feminism regarding the nature of gender relations, and men's possession of power. This book, however, fills the gap in literature about Foucault by showing how his theories of sexuality and power relations are often applicable to the everyday realities of women's lives. Drawing upon their diverse backgrounds (...) in social theory and philosophy, the contributors discuss the ways in which Foucault provokes feminists into questioning their grasp of power relations, and examines the implications of his decision to overlook categories of gender in his discussion of sexuality and power relations. They also show that in spite of his lack of interest in gender, Foucault's ways of understanding the control of women and female sexuality ultimately have much to offer feminism. (shrink)

If, as many suppose, pornography changes people, a question arises as to how.1 One answer to this question offers a grand and noble vision. Inspired by the idea that pornography is speech, and inspired by a certain liberal ideal about the point of speech in political life, some theorists say that pornography contributes to that liberal ideal: pornography, even at its most violent and misogynistic, and even at its most harmful, is political speech that aims to express certain views about (...) the good life, 2aims to persuade its consumers of a certain political point of view—and to some extent succeeds in persuading them. Ronald Dworkin suggests that the pornographer contributes to the ‘moral environment, by expressing his political or social convictions or tastes or prejudices informally’, that pornography ‘seeks to deliver’ a ‘message’ , that it reflects the ‘opinion’ that ‘women are submissive, or enjoy being dominated, or should be treated as if they did’, that it is comparable to speech ‘advocating that women occupy inferior roles’.3 Pornography on this view is political speech that aims to persuade its listeners of the truth of certain ideas about women, and of course ‘the government must leave to the people the evaluation of ideas’.4 Another answer offers a vision that is not grand and noble, but thoroughly reductive. Pornography is not politically persuasive speech, but speech that works by a process of psychological conditioning. This view seems common enough in the social science literature. Consider, for example, this description of an early experiment, from a time that pre-dates contemporary political debate. (shrink)

When producing a description of a target referent in a visual context, speakers need to choose a set of properties that distinguish it from its distractors. Computational models of language production/generation usually model this as a search process and predict that the time taken will increase both with the number of distractors in a scene and with the number of properties required to distinguish the target. These predictions are reminiscent of classic findings in visual search; however, unlike models of reference (...) production, visual search models also predict that search can become very efficient under certain conditions, something that reference production models do not consider. This paper investigates the predictions of these models empirically. In two experiments, we show that the time taken to plan a referring expression—as reflected by speech onset latencies—is influenced by distractor set size and by the number of properties required, but this crucially depends on the discriminability of the properties under consideration. We discuss the implications for current models of reference production and recent work on the role of salience in visual search. (shrink)

Le « Bulletin bibliographique de philosophie politique et sociale » est réalisé pour la revue Philosophique par une équipe de rédactrices et de rédacteurs. Il est coordonné par Caroline Guibet Lafaye (CNRS) et Fabien Ferri (Université de Franche-Comté) au sein de Centre de Documentation et de Bibliographie Philosophiques de l’Université de Franche-Comté (UR 2274 CDBP–Logiques de l’Agir), et propose de brèves recensions d’ouvrages récemment parus, réparties dans diverses rubriques thématiques....

A fundamental part of the process of referring to an entity is to categorise it (for instance, as the woman). Where multiple categorisations exist, this implicitly involves the adoption of a conceptual perspective. A challenge for the automatic Generation of Referring Expressions is to identify a set of referents coherently, adopting the same conceptual perspective. We describe and evaluate an algorithm to achieve this. The design of the algorithm is motivated by the results of psycholinguistic experiments.

A fundamental part of the process of referring to an entity is to categorise it (for instance, as the woman). Where multiple categorisations exist, this implicitly involves the adoption of a conceptual perspective. A challenge for the automatic Generation of Referring Expressions is to identify a set of referents coherently, adopting the same conceptual perspective. We describe and evaluate an algorithm to achieve this. The design of the algorithm is motivated by the results of psycholinguistic experiments.

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as (...) longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as (...) longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for the notion of what I term ‘uncanny water’ as a conceptual tool for reading contemporary oceanic fictions. The uncanny’s affective capacity to destabilise epistemological and ontological certainties makes it a particularly potent literary tool for challenging the nature/culture binary. I argue that fictions which actively defamiliarise the ocean can be used to redress the anthropocentric privilege found in hitherto narratives of the oceanic that were predicated upon mastery and control, and that uncanny moments of (...) displacement and uncertainty can illuminate human/oceanic interconnections and foster a sense of responsibility and compassion towards the oceans. I identify resonances between the uncanny’s continuing referentiality and the notion that feminist transcorporeality interrelates the subject into networks of materiality which extend across time and space in unknowable ways. Both transcorporeality and the uncanny work against the conceit of the individual through the dissolution of boundaries, and, crucially, both require a suspension of assumptions of the self as whole, discrete and impermeable. To demonstrate this, I read the uncanny waters of contemporary fictions from the Northern Atlantic Littoral (Atlantic Canada and the westernmost parts of the UK). The littoral position of these spaces makes them ideally placed to negotiate the borders between habitable and unhabitable spaces, and the limitations of knowledge that run alongside this. I assert that iterations of uncanny water offer a transoceanic dialogue which shifts constructions of subjectivity away from national and terrestrial boundaries to one more akin to the fluid and relational dialectics of transcorporeality. (shrink)

Engineers encounter difficult ethical problems in their practice and in research. In many ways, these problems are like design problems: they are complex, often ill-defined; resolving them involves an iterative process of analysis and synthesis; and there can be more than one acceptable solution. This book offers a real-world, problem-centered approach to engineering ethics, using a rich collection of open-ended scenarios and case studies to develop skill in recognizing and addressing ethical issues.

Research in the U. S. on fair trade consumption is sparse. Therefore, little is known as to what motivates U. S. consumers to buy fair trade products. This study sought to determine which values are salient to American fair trade consumption. The data were gathered via a Web-based version of the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) and were gleaned from actual consumers who purchase fair trade products from a range of Internet-based fair trade retailers. This study established that indeed there are (...) significant interactions between personal values and fair trade consumption and that demographics proved to be useless in creating a profile of the American fair trade consumer. (shrink)

A cause is proportional to its effect when, roughly speaking, it is at the right level of detail. There is a lively debate about whether proportionality is a necessary condition for causation. One of the main arguments against a proportionality constraint on causation is that many ordinary and seemingly perfectly acceptable causal claims cite causes that are not proportional to their effects. In this paper, I suggest that proponents of a proportionality constraint can respond to this objection by developing an (...) idea that is present in Yablo’s early work on proportionality, but which has strangely been ignored by both Yablo and others in the subsequent debate. My suggestion is that proportionality—and, indeed, causation itself—is relative to a domain of events. At the metaphysical level, this means that the causal relation has an extra relatum—namely, a domain of events. At the level of language, it introduces a new way in which causal claims are context-sensitive: what is expressed by a causal claim depends on the contextually relevant domain of events. As I argue, this suggestion allows us to accommodate the truth of ordinary causal claims while extending the explanatory benefits of a proportionality constraint. (shrink)

This article introduces the topic ‘‘Production of Referring Expressions: Bridging the Gap between Computational and Empirical Approaches to Reference’’ of the journal Topics in Cognitive Science. We argue that computational and psycholinguistic approaches to reference production can benefit from closer interaction, and that this is likely to result in the construction of algorithms that differ markedly from the ones currently known in the computational literature. We focus particularly on determinism, the feature of existing algorithms that is perhaps most clearly at (...) odds with psycholinguistic results, discussing how future algorithms might include non-determinism, and how new psycholinguistic experiments could inform the development of such algorithms. (shrink)

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young describes the lived bodily experience of women who have “chosen” their pregnancies. In this essay, Lundquist underscores the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy. Drawing on sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology, she offers descriptions of the cryptic phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy, indicating the vast range of pregnancy experience and illustrating substantial phenomenological differences between “chosen” and unwanted pregnancies.

It is widely held that our beliefs can be epistemically faultless despite being morally flawed. Theories of moral encroachment challenge this, holding that moral considerations bear on the epistemic status of our attitudes. According to attitude-based theories of moral encroachment, morality encroaches upon the epistemic standing of our attitudes on the grounds that we can morally injure others with our epistemic practices. In this paper, I aim to show that current attitude-based theories have asymmetric mechanisms: moral features only make it (...) harder for attitudes to secure epistemic merits. I argue that, if attitudes can incur moral injury, failure to form attitudes can too. To make sense of this, I contend, attitude-based accounts require symmetric mechanisms, allowing that moral considerations make it both harder and easier for attitudes to attain epistemic merits. I maintain that, once we recognize this, attitude-based encroachment views must soon concede that they sometimes demand we believe against the evidence. (shrink)

In the first edition of The Gay Science (GS), Nietzsche proposes that we treat knowledge as unconditionally valuable and life as a tragic quest for truth. In the second edition of GS, he seems to retract this proposal, suggesting that we substitute “incipit parodia” for “incipit tragœdia.” But Nietzsche does not say what he means by “parody,” or what role he believes it should play in our evaluative lives. This article proposes that by introducing parody into GS, Nietzsche intends not (...) only to correct the original text by mocking his earlier treatment of science as tragic, but also to designate parody as a basis for new tasks, duties, and values beyond what science can offer. This article speculates that parodic value creation might consist in the imitation of behaviors and practices associated with preexisting values without the reproduction of the beliefs and feelings corresponding to those practices. (shrink)

Viewing animals as a disposable resource is by no means novel, but does milking the cow for all its worth now represent a previously unimaginable level of exploitation? New technology has intensified milk production fourfold over the last 50 years, rendering the cow vulnerable to various and frequent clinical interventions deemed necessary to meet the demands for dairy products. A major question is whether or not the veterinary code of practice fits, or is in ethical tension, with the administration of (...) ‘efficient’ techniques, such as artificial insemination, to enhance reproduction levels among cattle? Vets perform these interventions and their ‘success’ is measured by the maximisation of milk production, requiring perpetually pregnant cows. Our empirical research on 33 farm vets explores how their professional ethical code promising to protect the welfare of the animal ‘above all else’, is increasingly in conflict with, and subordinate to, the financial demands of clients. Since vets cannot stand outside of the productive power–knowledge relations that have intensified the consumption of animal bodily parts and secretions, we argue that a process of adiaphorization’ occurs, whereby humans become morally indifferent to cruel practices deemed necessary to our consumerist ways of life. However, this indifference reflects and reinforces a taken-for-granted anthropocentrism among vets, animal owners and the population generally. We suggest that posthumanist ideas may offer new insights for the study of human–animal relations in organisations that transcend the coercive and negative impact of discourses that deny any alternative to prevailing farm/veterinary practices. Our study has major implications in relation to climate warming and zoonotic diseases, both partly derived from our unethical relationship to animals, that are increasingly threatening our, and their, lives. (shrink)

This paper builds on existing research investigating CSR and ethical consumption within luxury contexts, and makes several contributions to the literature. First, it addresses existing knowledge gaps by exploring the ways in which consumers perform ethical luxury purchases of fine jewellery through interpretive research. Second, the paper is the first to examine such issues of consumer ethics by extending the application of theories of practice to a luxury product context, and by building on Magaudda’s :15–36, 2011) circuit of practice framework. (...) This is significant in that, to date, consumer research using practice theories has focused mainly on routine and habitual practices. Our findings and discussion provide an analysis of intentional and less intentional ethical consumer performances within the interconnected nexus of activities of consumers’ fine jewellery consumption practice, where meanings, understandings and intelligibility of social phenomena are worked through the various activities that shape such a practice. Finally, the paper concludes with significant managerial and policy-related implications, as our extended circuit of practice analysis conveys that if ethics and sustainability dimensions are to be embedded in fine jewellery consumption practice, they must first be made an intrinsic part of the nexus of the social and material environment of trading and consumption places. (shrink)

Psychologists say a measure has construct validity when it, in fact, measures the construct it is intended to measure. Construct validity is both an important notion in psychological research methods and the source of much confusion and debate among psychologists. I argue that this confusion arises, in part, because of a failure to distinguish between construct validity, a feature of measures relative to a construct, and construct legitimacy, a feature of the construct itself. I propose a prescriptive account of construct (...) validity on the basis of this distinction, then provide evidence for my account through two examples from research psychology. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one-shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young describes the lived bodily experience of women who have “chosen” their pregnancies. In this essay, Lundquist underscores the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy. Drawing on sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology, she offers descriptions of the cryptic phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy, indicating the vast range of pregnancy experience and illustrating substantial phenomenological differences between “chosen” and unwanted pregnancies.

The ability to explain the occurrence of errors in children's speech is an essential component of successful theories of language acquisition. The present study tested some generativist and constructivist predictions about error on the questions produced by ten English-learning children between 2 and 5 years of age. The analyses demonstrated that, as predicted by some generativist theories [e.g. Santelmann, L., Berk, S., Austin, J., Somashekar, S. & Lust. B. (2002). Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions: (...) dissociating movement and inflection, Journal of Child Language, 29, 813-842], questions with auxiliary DO attracted higher error rates than those with modal auxiliaries. However, in wh-questions, questions with modals and DO attracted equally high error rates, and these findings could not be explained in terms of problems forming questions with why or negated auxiliaries. It was concluded that the data might be better explained in terms of a constructivist account that suggests that entrenched item-based constructions may be protected from error in children's speech, and that errors occur when children resort to other operations to produce questions [e.g. Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: the acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Liguistics, 11, 83-102; Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. (2000). Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: What children do know? Journal of Child Language, 27, 157-181; Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. However, further work on constructivist theory development is required to allow researchers to make predictions about the nature of these operations. (shrink)

There is much still to learn about the nature of fair trade consumers. In light of the Pope’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, this article sought to advance the current understanding by investigating the role of religion in fair trade consumption. In this study, fair trade consumers and non-consumers across many religions as well as the non-religious described their consumption of fair trade products as well as the use of their religious beliefs in their purchase behavior. It appears that the non-religious (...) are slightly more inclined toward buying fair trade products. Of the religious observers studied, Buddhists have a greater propensity to buy fair trade. The relationship between religion and fair trade consumption is complex in that religious affiliation – group membership – alone is not enough to encourage members to buy fair trade; rather, it is the use of religious beliefs as a criterion in consumption behavior that linked religion to fair trade consumption. (shrink)