Breast cancer is a major public health challenge. Organized mammography screening (OS) is considered one way to reduce breast cancer mortality. EU recommendations prone mass deployment of OS, and back in 2004, France introduced a national OS programme for women aged 50–74 years. However, in 2012, participation rate was still just 52.7%, well short of the targeted 70% objective. In an effort to re-address the (in) efficiency of the programme, the French National Cancer Institute has drafted an expert-group review of (...) the ethical issues surrounding breast cancer mammography screening. (shrink)

The aim of the present research was to develop a measure that could be used in future research for in-depth study of the psychological management of retirement. We report the results of six studies involving 1,898 French workers designed to develop and assess the psychometric properties of a new instrument named the Workers' Retirement Motivations Inventory (WRMI) using the push pull anti-push anti-pull model. The items were constructed based on a review of the relevant psychological literature and face-to-face interviews with (...) senior workers. A combined method of exploratory structural equations modeling and confirmatory factor analysis was employed and provided evidence for validating this structure of the inventory. The WRMI showed consistency of the four-factor structure across different samples, internal consistency, test-retest reliability and predictive validity of workers' plans for retirement. Implications of these findings and avenues for counseling activities and future research are discussed. (shrink)

This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

This article aims to develop new conceptions of the psychosocial dynamics that drive the re-romanticization of domestic femininity in current financialized capitalism. Feminist scholars have described this heightened cultivation of mothering as a reparative move in response to irreconcilable tensions between cultural ideals of the ‘balancing mother’ and ‘lean-in femininity’. This article adds a materialist-psychosocial lens to these conceptions, to enhance understanding of what drives this craving for domestic femininity. Drawing on a free-association narrative interview study with couples in the (...) financial elite in the comparatively gender-egalitarian Norwegian context, I describe a specific emotional mechanism that resists democratization of gender in this specific group. The interviews reveal a felt need to cultivate ‘the human side of things’ at safe distance from the competitiveness of ‘hard-core finance’. The Nordic earner–carer model with its entwinement of care and professional pursuits, cultivated by the more self-fulfilment-oriented parts of the professional middle-class appears not only unwanted but threatening. In my analysis, I retrieve and develop a psychoanalytically inspired historical-materialist feminism, one that perceives of the gendered division of work as a split in modes of focusing human energy. I suggest that the resurgent cultivation of domestic femininity is nurtured by a self-energizing antagonism between competitive and relational practices. I further argue that the cultivation of domestic femininity in these financial couples points to a potential antagonism between the democratization of love and the specific anxiety-driven competitiveness to which this financial-elite group may be particularly susceptible. (shrink)

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

This chapter considers the ways in which whiteness as a skin color and ideology becomes a dominant level that sets the background against which all things, people and relations appear. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, it takes up a series of films by Bruce Nauman and Marlon Riggs to consider ways in which this level is phenomenally challenged providing insights into the embodiment of racialization.

In matters of rights, constitutions tend to avoid settling controversies. With few exceptions, rights are formulated in open-ended language, seeking consensus on an abstraction without purporting to resolve the many moral-political questions implicated by rights. The resulting view has been that rights extend everywhere but are everywhere infringed by legislation seeking to resolve the very moral-political questions the constitution seeks to avoid. The Negotiable Constitution challenges this view. Arguing that underspecified rights call for greater specification, Grégoire C. N. Webber draws (...) on limitation clauses common to most bills of rights to develop a new understanding of the relationship between rights and legislation. The legislature is situated as a key constitutional actor tasked with completing the specification of constitutional rights. In turn, because the constitutional project is incomplete with regards to rights, it is open to being re-negotiated by legislation struggling with the very moral-political questions left underdetermined at the constitutional level. (shrink)

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of heat. (...) Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: (1) warming up, and (2) thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

This article illustrates instrumental variable (IV) estimation by examining an unexpected finding of the research on career adaptability and job satisfaction. Theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that in the general population, people’s abilities to adapt their careers are beneficial to their job satisfaction. However, a recent meta-analysis unexpectedly found no effect when personality traits are controlled for. We argue that a reverse effect of job satisfaction on career adaptability, originating from affective tendencies tied to personality, might explain this null effect. (...) Our argument implies that the estimates obtained with traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are biased by endogeneity, a correlation between an explanatory variable and the error term in a regression model. When experimental manipulations are impossible, IV estimations, such as two-stage least squares (2SLS) regressions, are one possible solution to the endogeneity problem. Analyzing three waves of data from a sample of 836 adults, the concurrent and time-lagged effect of job satisfaction on career adaptability was revealed to be more consistent than the reverse. Our results provide an explanation, rooted in affective dispositions, as to why recent meta-analytical estimates unexpectedly found that career adaptability does not predict job satisfaction at the interindividual level. We also discuss IV estimation in terms of its limits, weight the interpretation of its estimates against the temporality criterion for causal inference, and consider its possible extension to analyses of change. (shrink)

This paper considers the analogies and disanalogies between a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about free will and a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about the external world. In the case of free will, I offer the ancient Lazy Argument and an argument of my own, which I call the Agency Argument, as examples of the relevant genre; and in the case of the external world, I consider Moore’s alleged proof of an external world. (...) I draw attention to analogies and disanalogies between the arguments offered in each case in order to suggest that although the Agency Argument shares with its Moorean relative the unfortunate property of being dialectically ineffective against some of those it is mainly hoping to convince, it will not be dialectically ineffective against all of them. It is also argued that the Agency Argument is less vulnerable than Moore’s proof to worries about its justificatory structure. (shrink)

According to the theory of contextual integrity (CI), privacy norms prescribe information flows with reference to five parameters — sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle. Because privacy is grasped contextually (e.g., health, education, civic life, etc.), the values of these parameters range over contextually meaningful ontologies — of information types (or topics) and actors (subjects, senders, and recipients), in contextually defined capacities. As an alternative to predominant approaches to privacy, which were ineffective against novel information practices enabled by (...) IT, CI was able both to pinpoint sources of disruption and provide grounds for either accepting or rejecting them. Mounting challenges from a burgeoning array of networked, sensor-enabled devices (IoT) and data-ravenous machine learning systems, similar in form though magnified in scope, call for renewed attention to theory. This Article introduces the metaphor of a data (food) chain to capture the nature of these challenges. With motion up the chain, where data of higher order is inferred from lower-order data, the crucial question is whether privacy norms governing lower-order data are sufficient for the inferred higher-order data. While CI has a response to this question, a greater challenge comes from data primitives, such as digital impulses of mouse clicks, motion detectors, and bare GPS coordinates, because they appear to have no meaning. Absent a semantics, they escape CI’s privacy norms entirely. (shrink)

_Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: _The School of the Dead_--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; _The School of Dreams_--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and _The School of Roots_--the importance of (...) depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka. (shrink)

Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the indeterminate and undecidable? In _Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint_, French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that play through the life and works of one of the greatest living philosophers. Cixous is a lifelong friend of Derrida. They both grew (...) up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging"--not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family "one never said 'circumcision'but 'baptism,'not 'Bar Mitzvah'but 'communion.'" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint." An intellectual contemporary of Derrida, Cixous's ideas on writing have an affinity with his philosophy of deconstruction, which sought to overturn binary oppositions--such as man/woman, or Jew/non-Jew--and blur boundaries of exclusion inherent in Western thought. In portraying Derrida, Cixous uses metonymy, alliteration, rhyme, neologisms, and puns to keep the text in constant motion, freeing language from any rigidity of meaning. In this way she writes a portrait of "Derrida in flight," slipping from one appearance to the next, unable to be fixed in one spot, yet encompassing each point he passes. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being (or not being) Jewish. (shrink)

Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination, Manhunts takes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants.

Modality is standardly thought to come in two varieties: de dicto and de re. De re modality concerns the attribution of modal features to things or individuals, and enshrines a commitment to Aristotelian essentialism. This chapter considers how David Lewis's conception of de re modality fits into his overall metaphysics. The hypothesis is that the driving force behind his metaphysics in general, and his adherence to counterpart theory in particular, is the distinctly Humean thought that necessary connections between distinct existences (...) are literally unintelligible. Lewis's appeal to counterpart theory in his account of truthmakers is explicitly aimed at delivering a truthmaker principle that eschews necessary connections. Lewis's attitude towards several well‐rehearsed debates in contemporary ontology and the reasons underlying that attitude closely mirror Hume's incendiary verdict on "divinity and school metaphysics." Finally, de re modality is connected with his adherence to the doctrine of "Humean supervenience". (shrink)

Poser la question de la provenance du geste critique instaurant le pré-monde (Vorwelt) revient à s’interroger de manière plus générale sur le commencement ou plus précisément sur le fondement de L’Étoile de la Rédemption. À cette question, qui pourrait être qualifiée elle-même de fondamentale, Franz Rosenzweig fait remarquer tout d’abord, dans « La pensée nouvelle », qu’« à l’égard des premières pages d’un livre de philosophie, les lecteurs ont une attitude singulière : ils croient qu’elles c...

The paper argues that the reconciliation of the Causal Theory of Perception with Disjunctivism requires the rejection of causal particularism – the idea that the ontology of causation is always and everywhere an ontology of particulars (e.g., events). The so-called ‘Humean Principle’ that causes must be distinct from their effects is argued to be a genuine barrier to any purported reconciliation, provided causal particularism is retained; but extensive arguments are provided for the rejection of causal particularism. It is then explained (...) how the reconciliation of the causal theory with disjunctivism can proceed on the basis of an ontology of facts. (shrink)

Marcel Mauss published his essay The Gift in the context of debates about the European sovereign debt crises and the economic growth experienced by the colonies. This article traces the discursive associations between Mauss’ anthropological concepts and the reformist program of French socialists who pushed for an “altruistic” colonial policy in the interwar period. This article demonstrates that the three obligations which Mauss identified as the basis of a customary law of international economic relations served as key references in the (...) French debate about the relationships between metropolises and colonies in the interwar period. Mauss made this relation between colonial policy and the ethnology of the gift explicit in his book, The Nation. Moving beyond Mauss’ interwar writings, the article traces the genealogy of his later reflections to his involvement in prewar debate... (shrink)

Helen Steward argues that determinism is incompatible with agency itself--not only the special human variety of agency, but also powers which can be accorded to animal agents. She offers a distinctive, non-dualistic version of libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of organisation might make possible in the way of freedom.

This volume will be the starting point for future discussion and research.

La question de l’ennemi et de la guerre chez Rosenzweig est importante non seulement pour comprendre l’auteur, mais aussi son œuvre : L’Étoile de la Rédemption. Avec la relation d’hostilité, la temporalité rédemptrice basée sur le commandement d’amour s’affronte au problème des rapports qu’ont le judaïsme et le christianisme avec la guerre et le nationalisme.

Mix & Stir', this book's aim is an endeavour to understand art as being a panhuman phenomenon of all times and cultures; to steer away from the persistent Eurocentric/Western-centric viewpoint towards a transcultural and transnational interconnected model of exchange and processes of interculturalization. Mix & Stir wants to expand this landscape by bringing to the fore new, recalcitrant, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods and concerns that open up ways to approach art from a global perspective. Analogous (...) to a cookery book filled with recipes and instruction, Mix & Stir explores new outlooks on contemporary art from global perspectives. It intends to encourage studying art beyond national constraints, cultural dominances, and hierarchies: a voyage similar to that of culinary discovery. The book brings a variety of tastes and flavours to the table, and breaks new ground by allowing innovative, contrary, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods, and concerns to access art in its global dimensions. Researchers, curators and artists with a special interest in this topical issue were invited to present, develop, outline, and contemplate compelling frames of reference, both theoretical and artistic, in order to arrive at a true 'world art studies'. Their contributions are structured in seven thematic fields: Undecidability and Spectatorship, Collectives, Circulations, Exhibitions, Artists at Work, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Deep Art History. The reader is invited to explore the vast supply of dishes, to taste and test the aromas and to feast. (shrink)

Contemporary official parenting advice about disciplining children can be boiled down to ‘Be nice’. I first expand on this claim, drawing on primarily Birth to Five and secondarily Parentchannel.tv, showing that ‘Be nice’ breaks down into the absence of punishment and the expansion of both positive reinforcement and leading by example, these three components comprising an approach that is popularly described as positive parenting. Second, I examine the ways in which such apparently innocuous advice could be damaging: positive parenting is (...) arduous if not impossible, thereby setting parents up to fail, and partly because of this onerousness, it is arguably destructive of the spontaneity of the parent–child relationship. However, the difficulties of upholding a whole-heartedly spontaneous approach to parenting have led critics to endorse a model of the good parent as the reflective parent, and in conclusion I warn that this is just as coercive as the positive parenting model that it is designed to replace. (shrink)

Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation aims to correct certain imbalances in constitutional thought and scholarship that burden the legislature and rights with misconceptions...

Recently several thought experiments have been developed (by John Carroll amongst others) which have been alleged to refute the Ramsey-Lewis view of laws of nature. The paper aims to show that two such thought experiments fail to establish that the Ramsey-Lewis view is false, since they presuppose a conception of laws of nature that is radically at odds with the Humean conception of laws embodied by the Ramsey-Lewis view. In particular, the thought experiments presuppose that laws of nature govern the (...) behavior of objects. The paper argues that the claim that laws govern should not be regarded as a conceptual truth, and shows how the governing conception of laws manifests itself in the thought experiments. Hence the thought experiments do not constitute genuine counter-examples to the Ramsey-Lewis view. since the Humean is free to reject the conception of laws which the thought experiments presuppose. (shrink)

Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in (...) ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers. (shrink)

The book develops the notion of situated ethics and explores how ethical issues are practically handled by educational researchers in the field. Contributors present theoretical models and practical examples of what situated ethics involves in conducting research on specific areas.

Collectivist accounts of the ethics of war have traditionally dominated just war theory (Kutz 2005; Walzer 1977; Zohar 1993). These state-based accounts have also heavily influenced the parts of international law pertaining to armed conflict. But over the past ten years, reductive individualism has emerged as a powerful rival to this dominant account of the ethics of war. Reductivists believe that the morality of war is reducible to the morality of ordinary life. War is not a special moral sphere with (...) its own special moral rules. Reductivists typically reject a collectivist approach to the morality of war in favor of an individualist view, according to which individuals (rather than states or other collectives) are the proper focus of moral guidance and evaluation. This view holds that the rules governing killing in war are simply the rules governing killing between individuals, most obviously the rules of self-defense and other-defense (Fabre 2009; Frowe 2014; McMahan 2009; Tadros 2014). -/- This chapter defends reductive individualism against the claim that it is unable to sanction wars of national defense that seek to protect non-vital interests. These non-vital interests include political goods such as the defense of sovereignty—that is, of political and territorial integrity. (shrink)

Interrogating the relationship of the sovereign power of the nation state to the scientist's expert knowledge as a legitimating--and sometimes challenging- ...

How do people learn to talk about the causal and temporal relations between events, and the motivation behind why people do what they do? The narrative practice hypothesis of Hutto and Gallagher holds that children are exposed to narratives that provide training for understanding and expressing reasons for why people behave as they do. In this context, we have recently developed a model of narrative processing where a structured model of the developing situation is built up from experienced events, and (...) enriched by sentences in a narrative that describe event meanings. The main interest is to develop a proof of concept for how narrative can be used to structure, organize and describe experience. Narrative sentences describe events, and they also define temporal and causal relations between events. These relations are specified by a class of narrative function words, including “because, before, after, first, finally.” The current research develops a proof of concept that by observing how people describe social events, a developmental robotic system can begin to acquire early knowledge of how to explain the reasons for events. We collect data from naïve subjects who use narrative function words to describe simple scenes of human-robot interaction, and then employ algorithms for extracting the statistical structure of how narrative function words link events in the situation model. By using these statistical regularities, the robot can thus learn from human experience about how to properly employ in question-answering dialogues with the human, and in generating canonical narratives for new experiences. The behavior of the system is demonstrated over several behavioral interactions, and associated narrative interaction sessions, while a more formal extended evaluation and user study will be the subject of future research. Clearly this is far removed from the power of the full blown narrative practice capability, but it provides a first step in the development of an experimental infrastructure for the study of socially situated narrative practice in human-robot interaction. (shrink)

Hume is traditionally credited with inventing the ‘regularity theory’ of causation, according to which the causal relation between two events consists merely in the fact that events of the first kind are always followed by events of the second kind. Hume is also traditionally credited with two other, hugely influential positions: the view that the world appears to us as a world of unconnected events, and inductive scepticism: the view that the ‘problem of induction’, the problem of providing a justification (...) for inference from observed to unobserved regularities, is insoluble. Hume on Causation is the first major work dedicated to Hume’s views on causation in over fifteen years, and it argues that Hume does not subscribe to any of these three views. It places Hume’s interest in causation within the context of his theory of the mind and his theory of causal reasoning, arguing that Hume’s conception of causation derives from his conception of the nature of the inference from causes to effects. (shrink)

According to ‘regularity theories’ of causation, the obtaining of causal relations depends on no more than the obtaining of certain kinds of regularity. Regularity theorists are thus anti-realists about necessary connections in nature. Regularity theories of one form or another have constituted the dominant view in analytic Philosophy for a long time, but have recently come in for some robust criticism, notably from Galen Strawson. Strawson’s criticisms are natural criticisms to make, but have not so far provoked much response from (...) regularity theorists. The paper considers and rebuts Strawson’s objections. For example, Strawson claims that if there were no necessary connections in nature, we ought continually to find the regularity of the Universe surprising. I argue that the fact that the Universe is regular is something we take ourselves (fallibly) to know, and hence, in the light of this knowledge, its continued orderliness is not at all surprising. -/- . (shrink)

Fichte's philosophy represented one of the first coherent attempts to provide a utopian philosophical foundation for preventative police power, one which anticipated in surprising ways the fundamental logical premises of modern dataveillance or "datapower." This article examines Fichte's proposals for a new system of police passports and the logic of control on which it rests, contextualizing it within the transformation of police practices during his lifetime. It concludes with a discussion of Hegel's criticism of the logical incoherence of securitarian policing, (...) and its relevance for our situation today. (shrink)