The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher-practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N = 35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who (...) were also affiliated with a university (N = 68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, 2(1, N = 30) = 12.80, p < .001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, 2(1, N = 33) = 12.44, p < .001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, t(30) = -2.77, p = .009, and the client, t(30) = -2.50, p = .018, in such a relationship. (shrink)

Philosophy lacks criteria to evaluate its philosophical theories. To fill this gap, this essay introduces nine criteria to compare worldviews, classified in three broad categories: objective criteria (objective consistency, scientificity, scope), subjective criteria (subjective consistency, personal utility, emotionality), and intersubjective criteria (intersubjective consistency, collective utility, narrativity). The essay first defines what a worldview is and exposes the heuristic used in the quest for criteria. After describing each criterion individually, it shows what happens when each of them is violated. From the (...) criteria, it derives assessment tests to compare and improve different worldviews. These include the is-ought, ought-act, and is-act first-order tests; the critical and dialectical second-order tests; the mixed-questions and first-second-order third-order tests; and the we-I, we-it, and it-I tests. The essay then applies these criteria and tests to a concrete example, comparing the Flying Spaghetti Monster deity with Intelligent Design. For another application, it draws more general fruitful suggestions for the dialogue between science and religion. (shrink)

Much of the recent scholarship on the problem of political accountability in Africa leans toward the proposition that it is largely a post-colonial phenomenon that was caused by the destruction of the democratic institutions that were inherited by Africa's political elites. By replacing the democratic institutions they inherited from European colonial powers with quasi-democratic and downright despotic structures, it is argued that African elites became increasingly unaccountable and, in the process, destroyed their otherwise robust economies and impoverished the vast majority (...) of their citizens. In reality, however, the problem of political accountability in Africa is far more complex than that in its origins, character and manifestations. This paper critically examines notions and models of political accountability to demonstrate that the sources of the problem of accountability in Africa are both domestic and external. I argue that, contrary to widespread perception that African states suffer from impunity and lack of accountability, African governments have demonstrated a remarkable degree of responsiveness or accountability in their external relations while remaining virtually unaccountable to their own citizens. Therefore, the solution to the problem of political accountability in Africa should include a combination of internal reforms as well as the concerted support of the international community to generate a robust and sustained demand for accountability of African governments to their citizens. (shrink)

I discuss some of the speculations proposed by Stewart ( 2010a ). These include the following propositions: the cooperation at larger and larger scales, the existence of larger scale processes, the enhancement of the tuning as the universe cycle repeats, the transmission between universes and the motivations to produce a new universe.

Jan Greben criticized fine-tuning by taking seriously the idea that “nature is quantum mechanical”. I argue that this quantum view is limited, and that fine-tuning is real, in the sense that our current physical models require fine-tuning. Second, I examine and clarify many difficult and fundamental issues raised by Rüdiger Vaas’ comments on Cosmological Artificial Selection.

There is currently a gap between assessment and intervention in the literature concerned with climate change and food. While intervention is local and context dependent, current assessments are usually global and abstract. Available assessments are useful for understanding the scale of the effects of climate change and they are ideal for motivating arguments in favor of mitigation and adaptation. However, adaptation projects need assessments that can provide data to support their efforts. This requires the adoption of a more local and (...) context-sensitive approach to assessments. I suggest that Community-Based Participatory Research has the potential to be a tool for such an approach. (shrink)

Brooks convincingly makes the case that the current arguments for climate mitigation and adaptation fail. Each of the arguments discussed by Brooks appeals to end-state solutions that are some combination of poorly defined, inadequate, inappropriate, or are impossible. Thus, those arguments provide us with relatively limited guidance regarding what we should do about climate change. I hope to extend Brooks’ article by providing a rough sketch of how we might think about responding to climate change that does not depend upon (...) achieving a particular end state. (shrink)

Kafka’s works very often work as parables in which the lesson has been lost; or at least is ingeniously obfuscated from immediate understanding from the reader. His short story “In the Penal” Colony is no exception: the Traveller visits a penal colony with an unusual take on capital punishment as a sophisticated machine, built by the former commandant, inscribed unto the flesh of the criminals the law whose violation has resulted in their excruciating painful death. Our proposal is that the (...) story is a clear reference of a very commonplace Jewish ritual of laying “tefillin”, i.e. phylacteries containing certain commandments and to be affixed to one’s head and arm every morning, and that such preoccupation of ensuring the transmission of the law by physical inscription unto the mind and the flesh. (shrink)

This essay proposes ways to extend the concept of _planetary health_, in the framework of major evolutionary transition applied to the planet as a whole. I argue that planetary health can be naturally extended to a fully planetary scale, including issues related to geo- bio- techno- and noo- spheres. I show the need and importance for ethics and governance to become global and I give some examples of physiological and psychological health issues from a planetary perspective.

Crane envisions the speculative conjecture that intelligent civilizations might want and be able to produce black holes in the very far future. He implicitly suggests two main purposes of this enterprise: (i) energy production and (ii) universe production. We discuss those two options. The commentary is obviously highly speculative and should be read accordingly.

Teilhard de Chardin developed an evolutionary vision of our planetary future, currently developing from a sphere of life, or biosphere towards a sphere of mind, or noosphere. As a visionary, Teilhard was not only on the brink of formulating the internet, but he also anticipated current academic efforts to understand globalization, as well as human, cultural and technological evolution. However, his ideas are sources of enduring controversies in both scientific and theological circles. Here I uncover some of the core reasons (...) why his ways of thinking and writing are often problematic, and propose a way forward. This note aims to introduce Teilhard’s central article about the noosphere, but can also be read as an independent introduction to Teilhard’s system of thought. A detailed exegesis of Teilhard’s article is available as a supplementary document. (shrink)

Cette contribution se propose de caractériser le personnage de Superman au travers du prisme de la série télévisée Smallville. Prioritairement adressée aux adolescents, elle se consacre largement à représenter les rites de passages, qu’ils soient ceux du jeune garçon appelé à devenir un homme parmi les siens, ou ceux du héros en quête de ses origines, devenu une légende inscrite dans l’imaginaire collectif depuis plus de sept décennies. Notre approche s’appuie sur la possibilité d’une lecture de cette série sur deux (...) plans : celui de la biologie imaginée, cerveau imaginé compris ; et celui du cerveau imaginant. Smallville s’offre, de manière quasi immédiate, à une approche mythopoïétique du parcours super-héroïque donné au cours des dix saisons, jouant sur les thématiques de la mémoire, celle des origines comme celle de la génétique imaginée. Elle permet aussi par sa mise en images insistante des capacités spectaculaires du futur Superman, de mieux comprendre dans quel incubateur neural d’ontologies fantastiques le récit puise cette composante génératrice de son célèbre pouvoir de vol aptère, les expériences « hors-du-corps ». Nous avons pu ainsi distinguer dans les « imaginaires du cerveau », aussi clairement que possible, les apports du cerveau imaginant au cerveau imaginé chez notre super-héros. This contribution aims at unveiling—through episodes of television series Smallville —the complementarity of apparently dissociated aspects of Superman character. Primarily targeted at teenagers, rites of passage are pervasive in Smallville, whether for the young boy to become a man, or for the hero to succeed in the quest of his origins—as he became a legend in the collective imagination over more than seven decades. Our approach dwells on the potentiality to read Smallville on two levels: as so-called “naïve” or intuitive biology, including the imagined brain; as the imagining brain, with its neural correlates of imagination, i.e. biology as counter-intuitive as science may be. Smallville lends itself to a mythopoïetic reading, for the life course of our superhero, focussing on his personal memory issues, deeply concerned both with his origins and what is imagined about his own genetics. Smallville allows also, by the dramatic pageantry of Superman supernatural powers by design, to inquire about the neural incubator of such marvel ontologies, over-intuitively gifted, in Superman mainly his airworthiness for wingless flight, like in so-called oneiric out-of-body experiences. Thus in the brain imaginarium we ended with disentangling what of the over-intuitive sensori-motor experience of the imagining brain was tapped into the imagined brain of our superhero. (shrink)

If we maintain that free will requires the absence of determinism, Then can we claim to be free without any wants? if we had no wants at all, What sense would there to be talk about free will? the difference between free will and the absence of free will is not that between indeterminism and determinism. Free choice presupposes determinism in that in order to make a choice an individual must have some motive or reason for so doing. The difference (...) is found within determinism, Among the different kinds of motives that can influence an individual to make a choice. Furthermore, If I already possess the motive to change or eliminate undesirable motives then I increase my opportunity to realize more desires and thus increase freedom of choice, Even though my motive to change or eliminate undesirable motives is already predetermined. (shrink)

In bioethics, the first decade of the twenty-first century was characterized by the emergence of interest in the ethical, legal, and social aspects of neuroscience research. At the same time an ongoing extension of the topics and phenomena addressed by neuroscientists was observed alongside its rise as one of the leading disciplines in the biomedical science. One of these phenomena addressed by neuroscientists and moral psychologists was the neural processes involved in moral decision-making. Today both strands of research are often (...) addressed under the label of neuroethics. To understand this development we recalled literature from 1995 to 2012 stored in the Mainz Neuroethics Database (i) to investigate the quantitative development of scientific publications in neuroethics; (ii) to explore changes in the topics of neuroethics research within the defined time interval; (iii) to illustrate the interdependence of different research topics within the neuroethics literature; (iv) to show the development of the distribution of neuroethics research on peer-reviewed journals; and (v) to display the academic background and affiliations of neuroethics Researchers ... (shrink)

A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social rela- tions between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking (...) that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, dis- dainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cognitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians’ channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole. (shrink)

I point out that, though animal bodies and their parts are not sufficiently similar to the products of conscious design to warrant an inference to a supernatural designer of the former things, the proponent of the design argument would be on firmer ground were he to base his inference on the more specific resemblance of well-functioning human eyes and brains to well-functioning cameras and computers. Though I argue that Darwin has not refuted the design argument, I conclude that the design (...) arguer needs to show that there is a first cause in the enormously lengthy causal sequences which have culminated in human eyes and brains. (shrink)

In the final chapter of his book, The View from Nowhere , the American philosopher, Thomas Nagel, writes as follows about death: We do not regard the period before we were born in the same way we regard the prospect of death, yet most of the things that can be said about death are equally true of the former. Lucretius thought this showed that it was a mistake to regard death as an evil. But I believe it is an example (...) of a more general future-past asymmetry... [Derek] Parfit has explored the asymmetry in connection with other values such as... pain. The fact that a pain is in prospect rather than in the past has a very great effect on our attitude toward it, and this effect cannot be regarded as irrational... [the former asymmetry] can't be accounted for in terms of some other difference between past and future nonexistence, any more than the asymmetry in the case of pain can be accounted for in terms of some other differences between past and future pains, which makes the latter worse than the former. Nagel is maintaining in this quote that it is rational for a person to view pains which he is apt to experience in the future in a manner different from the way in which he views pains which he has experienced in the past. Nagel is saying that it is rational for a person to think of his future pains as more undesirable than his past ones. And Nagel claims that there is a similar asymmetry between a rational person's attitude towards a past in which he did not exist and a time in the future when he will not exist. In Nagel's view, just as a rational person will think of pains which he will experience as more undesirable than pains which he had in the past, he will think of his not existing in the future as much more undesirable than his not having existed in the past. (shrink)

In this paper I try to show that three of William L. Rowe’s criticisms of my book, Theism, are much less than conclusive.(1) Rowe agrees that I have established, via my defense of Descartes’s Meditation Five argument for God’s existence, that God is not a non-existing being. He denies, however, that it follows that God is an existing being. In reply, I reject the thesis that something might be neither an existing nor a non-existing object.(2) Rowe maintains that the impossibility (...) of God’s non-existence might consist simply of its being the case that no one can destroy God---a kind of impossibility which is not strong enough to sustain my (S5) modal argument for God’s existence. In reply, I argue that the impossibility of God’s non-existence must be logical.(3) Rowe maintains that it may well be that religious experiencers have experienced God without experiencing him qua maximally great being, so that religious experiences do not provide us with a reason to believe that a maximally great being is logically possible. I argue in reply that if religious experiencers do not experience God qua supremely perfect, then they have no reason to believe that they experience God. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two kinds of impossibility and maintain that one is entitled to suppose that they do not obtain, in the absence of a reason to think that they do. I claim that there is no reason to think that the first kind obtains with respect to God and that, though there are nonnegligible arguments that the second kind does, my argument for the possibility of God, which appeared in an earlier volume of this (...) journal, adequately rebuts those arguments. (shrink)

In my paper, ‘Agnosticism’, I asked the reader to consider the following three propositions. There is more evidence for theism than for atheism. There is more evidence for atheism than for theism. There is roughly the same amount of evidence for both. And I claimed that if it is not known which of to is true, then theism, atheism and agnosticism are all equally rational positions. As against that claim, Professor Brinton cites the following epistemic principle: When the state of (...) the evidence on some question ‘p?’ is uncertain, suspension of belief is the most appropriate doxastic attitude . However, my paper contained the seeds of a refutation of this principle. I wrote there that the agnostic. (shrink)

In this book, I discuss the question whether God exists, not as a Tillichian religious symbol, but as an actual person, albeit a person who is very different from you and me. My procedure is to examine arguments bdth for and against God's existence qua person and to assess their relative merits. I shall try to show that there is more evidence that God exists than that he does not. This position is, of course, rejected nowadays, even by most religious (...) thinkers, who hold, for one reason or another, that evidence has nothing to do with religious belief, properly understood. My reply to these thinkers is simply to ask them to examine what follows. A useful companion to Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and the Appendix of this book would be Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity.l Though I avoid technical terminology wherever possible, those chapters presuppose an elementary understanding of 'possible worlds' discourse; and a clear and concise explanation of that terminology can be found in Chapter IV of Plantinga's book. Also, I use 'logical' throughout to mean what Plantinga means by 'broadly logical' on page 2 of The Nature of Necessity. (shrink)

The problem of evil may be characterized as the problem of how precisely to specify a property, P , about which it is possible for a morally sensitive man to believe that a person who possesses it would be morally justified on that account in not preventing instances of intense innocent suffering and it is neither impossible nor unlikely that if there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, he possesses it. Atheists have typically claimed that P cannot be precisely specified. (...) Moreover, they have maintained that in view of our inability to give a precise specification of P , it is irrational to believe that there is an omnipotent and omniscient being who is perfectly good and, hence, irrational to believe that God exists. In the remainder of this paper, I want to discuss the question whether there is any good reason for believing that this latter thesis is true. 1 If there is no such reason, then no matter how much he may busy himself with an attempt at formulating a precise specification of P , the theist can be justifiably contented with the thought that it doesn't much matter whether he succeeds. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper, I discuss a quantum mechanical account, which is endorsed by the MIT physicist, Alan Guth, of the origin of what Guth believes to have been an absolutely first universe. I argue that, though his explanation is unsound, there is no reason to think that it needs to be replaced by a supernaturalist one. In the second section, I argue that though Professor Steven Weinberg's tentative explanation of the apparent fine-tuning of the cosmological constant (...) is unacceptable, we need not accept a supernaturalist account of the coming about of intelligent life. (shrink)

Responding to the provocative phrase ‘The Age of Grammatology’, I propose to question the notion of ‘age’, and to interrogate the powers or forces, the dynameis or dynasties attached to the interpretative model of historical periodisation. How may we think the undeniable actuality of the event beyond the sempiternal history of ages, and beyond the traditional, onto-teleological chain of power, possibility, force or dynamis that undergirds such history?

In the last 25 years, several philosophers and scientists have challenged the historical consensus that nonhuman animals cannot be moral agents. In this article, I examine this challenge and the debate it has provoked. Advocates of animal moral agency have supported their claims by appealing to non-rationalist accounts of morality and to observations of animal behavior. Critics have focused on the dangers of anthropomorphism and have argued that we cannot know animals’ states of mind with any certainty. Despite the strengths (...) of the arguments for animal moral agency, the critics’ skeptical counter-challenges seem to bring this debate to a stalemate. However, I suggest that recent philosophical work focusing on personal experiences with animals may reveal a way to dissolve skeptical concerns and offer new insights about the role of animals in morality. (shrink)

This essay explores how contemporary works of critical theory and deconstruction can challenge preconceptions of the body and embodiments and interrogate their limits, particularly in relation to intertwined foldings of desire, gender, race and sexuality. It aims to suggest that Jacques Derrida’s acute concern for the question of translation might help challenge and re-configure the conventional dichotomy between understandings of the body either as physical/material or as socio-culturally constructed. The authors then analyse the questions of translation and untranslatability in relation (...) to interculturality, and explore their implications for thinking the corporeal and the material. (shrink)

The overlap between virtue epistemology and the philosophy of education has been dominated by discussions of the epistemic qualities of good learners, that is, the intellectual virtues that must be nurtured in students. Not much has been said about the epistemic qualities of good teachers expressed in virtue-theoretic terms. This paper offers a preliminary account of such qualities, which are designated as pedagogical virtues. I use Battaly's pluralist conception of intellectual virtue as a starting point, then describe a pedagogical virtue (...) as an intellectual virtue with an other-regarding success or motivational component. I end with an elucidation of the pedagogical versions of two mainstream intellectual virtues, perseverance and inquisitiveness. (shrink)

The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher-practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N=35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who were also (...) affiliated with a university (N=68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, ?²(1,N= 30) = 12.80, p <.001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, ?²(1, N= 33) = 12.44, p<.001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, r(30) = -2.77, p = .009, and the client, f(30) = -2.50, p = .018, in such a relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among students. To respond to these challenges, this paper considers the aim of educating against intellectual vices (EAIV) – teaching students not to develop intellectual vices or weakening those that they have already developed (...) – which comes with the emergence of vice epistemology. More specifically, I look at how negative epistemic exemplars can be used as a classroom strategy for EAIV, and demonstrate how this could address the aforementioned weaknesses of EFIV. (shrink)

Proponents of the ethic of care regard it as a personal ethic created by women which reveals the deficiencies of the male-defined ethic of justice. In contrast, feminist critics of the ethic of care hold that the ethic of care is parochial and renounces justice and therefore inconsistent with feminist goals. In my dissertation I resolve this debate by examining the concepts of care, justice, autonomy, and public and private spheres. ;Care and autonomy are often thought to be mutually exclusive (...) because care is based on a social conception of the self, while autonomy is based on an individualistic conception of the self. I challenge this dichotomy by showing that autonomy presupposes that we are socially constituted, and that care requires that we be able to individuate ourselves from others. I also examine the symbolic and institutional structures that construct care and autonomy in opposition to each other in our society. ;Moral theorists usually understand care and justice as having different domains, with their boundaries drawn along public-private lines. I challenge the traditional boundaries of care, showing that the expansion of care need not come at the expense of justice, but instead can serve to enrich our conception of justice. I also explore some of the moral issues that arise in attempts to apply the ethic of care to public questions of pacifism and welfare policy. ;The conflicts between the ethic of care and the ethic of justice need not lead us to accept one at the expense of the other, but can help us distinguish between better and worse versions of each ethic, providing the groundwork for a feminist ethic of care. However, despite the theoretical compatibility of the two ethics, I argue that given their present social contexts, integrating them into a comprehensive ethic brings the danger that the ethic of care will be subsumed by the ethic of justice. (shrink)

Seleucus, son of Antiochus I Soter, is mentionned as his father's coregent from 281, but disappeared in 266 under mysterious circumstances, on which ancient authors and modern historiography oppose each other. Ancient historians talk about a family crisis that led to Seleucus' execution, while Moderns conclude to natural death. By reappraising sources, we intend to demonstrate that this event results from the failure of a political experiment : a triarchy which associated Antiochus Soter to both of his sons, Seleucus and (...) Antiochus. Séleucos, fils d'Antiochos Ier Sôter, apparaît comme corégent de son père dès 281, mais disparaît en 266 dans des circonstances mystérieuses, sur lesquelles les auteurs anciens et l'historiographie moderne s'opposent. Les sources évoquent une crise familiale ayant conduit à l'exécution du fils par le père, mais les Modernes préfèrent conclure qu'il a été emporté par une épidémie. En réétudiant les sources, nous entendons montrer que la disparition du corégent Séleucos résulte de l'échec d'une expérience politique originale: une triarchie associant Antiochos Ier et ses deux fils, Séleucos et Antiochos. (shrink)

This article interrogates a certain philosophical scene – one which constitutes itself through the position of what Jacques Derrida calls “the ethical instance of violence.” This scene supposes a certain “style” of writing or doing philosophy, and perhaps even a certain philosophical “genre” or “subgenre”: the philosophical discourse on violence. In the course of the essay, I analyze this quasi-juridical scene through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Werner Hamacher, Rodolphe Gasché, and Martin Hägglund among (...) others. The scene, built on texts on texts on violence, demands a logic of purity; it is wary of contaminations and equivocations. And yet it thrives on them. In analyzing the implications of text, writing, and trace for the philosophical discourse on violence, I follow Derrida “just to see” what could make the scene tremble. (shrink)

This text was prompted by a forum discussing the legacy of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, twenty-five years after its publication. In this short essay, I explore the book’s influence on the fields of Marxism, post-Marxism, and beyond. With the problematic of heritage and legacy in mind, I raise the questions of sexual difference and dissemination as that which comes to interrupt the genealogical logic of inheritance understood as filiation and reproduction. I show that Derrida’s book, besides questioning reception and (...) influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida’s numerous engagements with Marx and Marxist thought in a series of unpublished seminars from the 1970s. This is done more specifically through a reading of an unpublished seminar from 1974-1975, dealing with the Marxian concepts of ideology and division of labor – which Derrida interrogates more particularly in relation to sex, sexuality, and sexual differences. This text was published in the section "Ambivalent Promises—Reproductions of the Subject: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part IV", Contexto Internacional, 42 (1), pp. 125-148. (shrink)

We treat companion animals according to one set of guidelines and so-called “meat animals” according to an opposing set of guidelines, despite the apparently significant similarities between the animals in question. I consider moral justifications offered for this disparity of treatment and show that this paradox reveals a mistake in our moral thinking. Generally, we group animals used in farming and free-living animals together as subject to the ethic of justice and distinguish both from companion animals, who are subject to (...) the ethic of care. I argue that animals used in farming, like companion animals, should be understood as within the sphere of care. (shrink)

Much has been written on Derrida’s and Butler's discussions of Austin’s speech act theory, but one thing at least remains unclear: why does performativity hinge on the notion of “force,” and what “force” are we here talking about? For Austin, the force of the performative signals a performative enforcement, a validating repetition of prior conditions of legitimation: it testifies to the “felicity” or “success” of the performative event.According to Derrida, this articulation between force and success closes off the eventness of (...) the event; it implies an ontological reduction and reconstruction, that is, an appropriation of the event in the form of performative power. However, the performative, if it is to truly produce an event, must exceed prior conditions of validation and transform, in its performance, the conditions of validity it was meant to repeat. Eventness must remain beyond and without power. In this perspective, the article explores the “force” which Derrida describes as “force of the event”: an excessive force in the face of which “performative force” must fail. At bottom undecidable, “the force of the event” suggests the fallibility of force and the force of fallibility. I compare this self-deconstructive notion of force with Butler’s subversive politics of the performative, which theorizes “performative force” as the force of a failure – but a successful failure – to comply with the norm: a non-normative repetition and a reappropriation that forces change, and of which “queer” is at once the example, the model, and the very name. While Derrida’s is an attempt to think the uncanny force of a strange, non-appropriable, non-ontologizable, and perhaps “queer” event or quasi-event, characterized by fallibility and undecidability, Butler’s theory of power and her notion of “performative force” reverse, but fundamentally maintain, Austin’s ontological oppositions between success and failure, legitimacy and illegitimacy, repetition and change. (shrink)

This essay examines Étienne Balibar's readings of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. The text is framed as a review of two books by Balibar: 'Equaliberty' and 'Violence and Civility'. After describing the context of those readings, I propose a broader reflection on the ambiguous relationship between 'post-Marxism' and 'deconstruction', focusing on concepts such as 'violence', 'cruelty', 'sovereignty' and 'property'. I also raise methodological questions related to the 'use' of deconstructive notions in political theory debates.

Peripheral vision has different functional priorities for mammals than foveal vision. One of its roles is to monitor the environment while central vision is focused on the current task. Becoming distracted too easily would be counterproductive in this perspective, so the brain should react to behaviourally relevant changes. Gist processing is good for this purpose, and it is therefore not surprising that evidence from both functional brain imaging and behavioural research suggests a tendency to generalize and blend information in the (...) periphery. This may be caused by the balance of perceptual influence in the periphery between bottom-up and top-down processing channels. Here, we investigated this interaction behaviourally using a peripheral numerosity discrimination task with top-down and bottom-up manipulations. Participants compared numerosity between the left and right peripheries of a screen. Each periphery was divided into a centre and a surrounding area, only one of which was a task relevant target region. Our top-down task modulation was the instruction which area to attend – centre or surround. We varied the signal strength by altering the stimuli durations i.e., the amount of information presented/processed. We found that numerosity perceived in target regions was affected by contextual information in neighbouring areas. This effect appeared as soon as stimulus duration allowed the task to be reliably performed and persisted even at the longest duration. We compared the pattern of results with an ideal-observer model and found a qualitative difference in the way centre and surround areas interacted perceptually in the periphery. When participants reported on the central area, the irrelevant surround would affect the response as a weighted combination – consistent with the idea of a receptive field focused in the target area to which irrelevant surround stimulation leaks in. When participants report on surround, we can best describe the response with a model in which occasionally the attention switches from task relevant surround to task irrelevant centre – consistent with a selection model of two competing streams of information. Overall our results show that the influence of spatial context in the periphery is mandatory but task dependent. (shrink)

Mathematical apriorists usually defend their view by contending that axioms are knowable a priori, and that the rules of inference in mathematics preserve this apriority for derived statements—so that by following the proof of a statement, we can trace the apriority being inherited. The empiricist Philip Kitcher attacked this claim by arguing there is no satisfactory theory that explains how mathematical axioms could be known a priori. I propose that in analyzing Ernest Sosa’s model of intuition as an intellectual virtue, (...) we can construct an “intuition–virtue” that could supply the missing explanation for the apriority of axioms. I first argue that this intuition–virtue qualifies as an a priori warrant according to Kitcher’s account, and then show that it could produce beliefs about mathematical axioms independent of experience. If my argument stands, this paper could provide insight on how virtue epistemology could help defend mathematical apriorism on a larger scale. (shrink)

There’s something paradoxical with a person saying ‘I am humble’; it doesn’t seem so humble to self-attribute humility in general, and intellectual humility in particular. In light of the recent interest in educating for intellectual virtues, this paradox has interesting implications to educating for intellectual humility. In particular, one might wonder how a teacher can be a model of intellectual humility to her students. If a teacher says something like ‘Here’s me being an exemplar of intellectual humility’, the paradox above (...) takes on a pedagogical angle. In this paper, I analyze the paradoxes in self-attributing and learning intellectual humility using three different accounts of this virtue, before proceeding to untangle what could be called the ‘Modeling Paradox’ of teaching intellectual humility and figure out whether this virtue can be non-problematically demonstrated to one’s students. (shrink)

In an archived draft at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Foucault describes two questions haunting him since 1963: “Why are we obliged to tell the truth about ourselves? Which truth?” Foucault poses these two questions in 1980 in drafts for his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, and I see in these two questions two argumentative threads that weave through Foucault's changing History of Sexuality series over his last decade. These two threads correspond to the dimorphism Foucault frames in (...) Part III of Confessions of the Flesh between confessing monks and married men, that correlates with the distinction between “veridiction” and “juridiction” as two forms relating subjectivity and sexuality. To help tease out these threads, I make two recommendations for how to read Confessions of the Flesh in this following review essay: (1) situate Confessions of the Flesh in relation to Foucault's History of Sexuality series which spans his last decade from 1974 to 1984 and (2) untangle two major threads of Confessions of the Flesh in Foucault's treatment of Cassian and Augustine, as progenitors of veridiction and juridiction respectively, which together produce the conditions for modern disciplinary subjects. (shrink)

La storia della follia assume i tratti di uno straordinario racconto, laddove trame e personaggi s’intrecciano in uno svolgimento comune e condiviso. Questa storia, però, perturba gli animi, poiché essa alterna disumane crudeltà a rivoluzionarie pre- se di consapevolezza. In certi periodi e contesti storici, infatti, il folle diviene beffarda maschera del male, da allontanare, internare o, addirittura, perseguitare. Su di lui s’abbatte la crudeltà umana, dietro il velo menzognero di un’improbabile cura. La follia diviene malattia, demone, male assoluto da (...) estirpare a ogni costo, finanche sacrificando alcune sue vittime. In tal senso, la storia della follia ricorda quella dello schiavismo, o quella delle deportazioni e dei genocidi. In altri periodi e contesti stori- ci, invece, il folle diviene emblema di lotta sociale e culturale, per l’affermazione del- la soggettività umana e del suo assoluto rispetto. Egli diviene, così, il simbolo della rinascita culturale e spirituale, con gesta simboliche, come la rottura delle catene nei manicomi, sino addirittura a mettere in dubbio, o negare, l’esistenza stessa della follia. In tal senso, la storia della follia ricorda quella delle rivoluzioni, o dei moti insurrezionali, o dei radicali cambiamenti del paradigma scientifico. Nel mezzo, infine, tra estremismi così netti, s’inserisce lo scorrere della storia stessa della follia, con modali- tà spesso più sfumate e altre meno. Questa storia assume multidimensionalità, come fosse l’insieme di tante storie parallele. C’è, infatti, una storia dei luoghi della follia: dai più indegni e disumani, come i lebbrosari convertiti, le navi dei folli e i manicomi, ai più accoglienti e sensibili, come le case morali e le comunità terapeutiche. C’è, inol- tre, una storia delle idee sulla follia: da quelle che la definiscono una malattia simile a una sostanza agente, come l’organicismo, a quelle che la definiscono, invece, una proprietà o condizione esistenziale dell’individuo, contingente e risolvibile, come il mentalismo; o da quelle che la definiscono una disarmonia spirituale e una forza avversa, come l’animismo, a quelle che la definiscono, invece, una compromissione di natura ambientale, come l’ambientalismo. C’è, infine, una storia dei trattamenti della follia: da quelli più bruti e ciechi, come la bara d’acqua e la lobotomia, a quelli più umani e terapici, come l’arte della consolazione e la buona relazione. (shrink)

Background: Small-sided games are an adjusted form of official games that are often used in training scenarios to introduce a specific tactical issue to team sports players. Besides the acute effects of SSGs on players' performance, it is expectable that the consistent use of these drill-based games induces adaptations in the technical execution and tactical behaviors of youth team sports players.Objective: This systematic review with meta-analysis was conducted to assess the effects of SSG programs on the technical execution and tactical (...) behaviors of young and youth team sports players.Data Sources: The data sources utilized were PubMed, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science.Study Eligibility Criteria: Young and youth team sports players (i.e., 17 and <17 SSG training sessions, respectively.Conclusions: This systematic review and meta-analysis revealed a significant beneficial effect of using SSG training programs for enhancing technical execution in young and youth players. The benefits were similar despite the various numbers of training sessions applied. Further studies should add tactical behaviors as one of the outcomes for controlling the effects of SSG training programs. (shrink)

Commenting on Ziyaad Bhorat’s discussion of despotism, contextualising comments are presented to discuss how unjust social stratifications and beliefs around ownership might be embedded through the deployment of law. I also suggest an additional response to his list of rebellious activities: Art.