Perhaps the question “What is philosophy?” can only be posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There are (...) cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted path from which there was no return, and that was no longer distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a work of old age, a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow.We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion, the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question “between friends” as a confidence or a trust, or else, faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even the friend. Gilles Deleuze was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987. Among his books translated into English are the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , the two-volume Cinema , The Logic of Sense , and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza . Daniel W. Smith is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is translating Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. (shrink)

"Gill's and Ryan's Parmenides is, simply, superb: the Introduction, more than a hundred pages long, is transparently clear, takes the reader meticulously through the arguments, avoids perverseness, and still manages to make sense of the dialogue as a whole; there is a fine selective bibliography; and those parts of the translation I have looked at in detail suggest that it too is very good indeed." --Christopher Rowe, _Phronesis_.

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

Conceptual projection from one mental space to another always involves projection to "middle" spaces-abstract "generic" middle spaces or richer "blended" middle spaces. Projection to a middle space is a general cognitive process, operating uniformly at different levels of abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual circumstances. Middle spaces are indispensable sites for central mental and linguistic work. The process of blending is in particular a fundamental and general cognitive process, running over many (conceivably all) cognitive phenomena, including categorization, the making of (...) hypotheses, inference, the origin and combining of grammatical constructions, analogy, metaphor, and narrative. Blending is not secondary to these phenomena but prerequisite, and its operation is not restricted to any one of these phenomena. We give evidence for blending from a wide range of data that includes everyday language, idioms, literary metaphor, non-verbal conceptualization of action, creative thought in mathematics, evolution of socio-cultural models, jokes, and advertising. Blending is in general invisible to consciousness and detectable only on analysis. Blended spaces are routinely necessary for constructing central meanings, inferences, and structures, and for motivating emotions. We show that the blending of highly schematic spaces yields the fusion of grammatical constructions and functional assemblies studied in Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar. Finally, recognizing the cognitive import of middle spaces allows us to propose a generalized four-space model of conceptual projection that subsumes a variety of previous models. We explore the consequences of this model for the theory of concept formation. Introduction 3 I. The four space model 4 II. The phenomenon of blended spaces 5 1. Dante's Inferno 5 2. Regatta 7 3. The riddle of the Buddhist monk 8 4. Getting ahead of oneself 9 5. Tuning in, and other actions 11 6. Complex numbers 12 III. Prototypes of blending and mistaken reductions 14 IV. Further evidence for conceptual projection into a blended space 17 1. President Bush on third base 18 2. President Nixon in France 19 3. Personification 21 V. Category extension 22 VI. Generic spaces 24 VII. Parameters and subschemes 25 VIII. Blending and grammar 30 IX. The concept of a concept 33 Notes 35 References 38. (shrink)

Here, I lay the foundations of a high-level ontology of particulars whose structuring principles differ radically from the 'continuant' vs. 'occurrent' distinction traditionally adopted in applied ontology. These principles are derived from a new analysis of the ontology of “occurring” or “happening” entities. Firstly, my analysis integrates recent work on the ontology of processes, which brings them closer to objects in their mode of existence and persistence by assimilating them to continuant particulars. Secondly, my analysis distinguishes clearly between processes and (...) events, in order to make the latter abstract objects of thought (alongside propositions). Lastly, I open my ontological inventory to properties and facts, the existence of which is commonly admitted. By giving specific roles to these primitives, the framework allows one to account for static and dynamic aspects of the physical world and for the way that subjects conceive its history: facts account for the life of substances (physical objects and processes), whereas events enable cognitive subjects to account for the life story of substances. (shrink)

Texts and interviews from the period that saw the publication of Deleuze's major works. People tend to confuse winning freedom with conversion to capitalism. It is doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to free peoples.... The American “revolution” failed long ago, long before the Soviet one. Revolutionary situations and attempts are born of capitalism itself and will not soon disappear, alas. Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that is not to be confused with the history of revolutions.—from (...) Two Regimes of Madness Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze's life, the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts. This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus, Cinema I: Image-Movement, Cinema II: Image-Time, all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy?. Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze's increasing involvement with politics. Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: “One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian.” This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last. This volume restores the full text of the original French edition. (shrink)

Most models of response time (RT) in elementary cognitive tasks implicitly assume that the speed-accuracy trade-off is continuous: When payoffs or instructions gradually increase the level of speed stress, people are assumed to gradually sacrifice response accuracy in exchange for gradual increases in response speed. This trade-off presumably operates over the entire range from accurate but slow responding to fast but chance-level responding (i.e., guessing). In this article, we challenge the assumption of continuity and propose a phase transition model for (...) RTs and accuracy. Analogous to the fast guess model (Ollman, 1966), our model postulates two modes of processing: a guess mode and a stimulus-controlled mode. From catastrophe theory, we derive two important predictions that allow us to test our model against the fast guess model and against the popular class of sequential sampling models. The first prediction—hysteresis in the transitions between guessing and stimulus-controlled behavior—was confirmed in an experiment that gradually changed the reward for speed versus accuracy. The second prediction—bimodal RT distributions—was confirmed in an experiment that required participants to respond in a way that is intermediate between guessing and accurate responding. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage propose la définition d'un concept généralisé du style, considéré non plus seulement comme catégorie esthétique, mais comme applicable à tout travail humain. L'auteur applique ce concept de style à des exemples d'œuvres mathématiques, puis au cas plus familier des œuvres de langage, avant d'esquisser le projet d'une stylistique des sciences de l'homme, complémentaire d'une histoire des connaissances et d'une épistémologie des structures. Gilles-Gaston Granger, spécialiste d'épistémologie, est professeur honoraire au Collège de France. Chapitre I. Contenu, forme et pratique (...) Chapitre II. Le style euclidien et la notion de grandeur Chapitre III. Style cartésien, style arguésien Chapitre IV. Naissance du style « vectoriel » Chapitre V. Le problème des significations Chapitre VI. Syntaxe et sémantique Chapitre VII. L'analyse stylistique fonde une esthétique du langage Chapitre VIII. L'image de l'action dans la construction de l'objet scientifique Chapitre IX. Les nouvelles« mathématiques sociales » Conclusion Index. (shrink)

In this article, we advocate the use of “epistemic” ontologies, i.e., systems of categories representing our knowledge of the world, rather than the world directly. We first expose a metaphysical framework based on a dual mental and physical realism, which underpins the development of these epistemic ontologies. To this end, we refer to the theories of intentionality and representation established within the school of Franz Brentano at the turn of the 20th century and choose to rehabilitate the notion of a (...) ‘representation object’, as theorized by Kasimir Twardowski. We therefore propose that the categories of epistemic ontologies correspond to ‘general representation objects’. Secondly, we apply these proposals to the treatment of technical artefacts, material qualities of objects and events (notably as a continuation of our previous work on events). This leads us to sketch out a foundational epistemic ontology. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Preface to the English edition \ Translators' Introduction \Preface to the French Edition \ 1. Theses on Movement: First Commentary onBergson \ 2. Frame and Short, Framing and Cutting \ 3. Montage \ 4. TheMovement-Image and its Three Varieties: Second Commentary on Bergson \ 5. ThePerception-Image \ 6. The Affection-Image Face and Close-Up \ 7. TheAffection-Image: Qualities, Powers, Any-Space-Whatevers \ 8. From Affect toAction: The Impulse Image \ 9. The Action-Image: The Large Form \ 10. (...) The Action-Image:The Small Form \ 11. Figures, or the Transformation of Forms \ 12. The Crisisof the Action-Image \ Glossary \ Notes \ Index. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two theories of democracy that can be found in contemporary French philosophy. Both Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancière offer a critique of modern democracy with the purpose of refounding it. The ‘refoundation narratives’ they propose are both based on an account of the origins of democracy in ancient Greece. According to Castoriadis, ancient democracy is grounded in a ‘magma’ of ‘social imaginary significations’ in which ‘autonomy’ is considered the correct response to Being defined as an (...) insurmountable ‘Chaos’. On the contrary, modern democracy defines Being as a determinacy and consequently fails to grasp the notion of autonomy. According to Rancière, the origins of democracy are to be found in the invasion of the public space by ‘those without a part’ who consequently have no title to govern. The problem with the ‘domesticated’ modern democracy is that it denies the existence of Otherness; that is, of non-citizens excluded from the public space. Therefore it appears incapable of letting the ‘dis-agreement’ manifest itself and consequently incapable of transforming the ‘police’ order. After examining the meaning of both theories, I attempt to elucidate the difficulties encountered by each author in the attainment of his goal, which is that of refounding modern democracy. (shrink)

The following text is not just unpublished. There is something intimate, secret, confidential about it. It consists of a series of notes - classed from A to H - that Gilles Deleuze had entrusted to me in order that I give them to Michel Foucault. It was in 1977. Foucault had just published La Volonté de savoir, the introduction to a Histoire de la Sexualité which challenged the play of categories through which the struggles of sexual liberation reflected itself. The (...) reception of the book, poorly understood, was contemporary with a sort of crisis in Foucault, already wholly bent to the task of bringing out of himself, and converting himself to, what would become the problematic of L'usage de plaisirs and the Souci de soi. Gilles Deleuze, sensitive to what he perceives as a suffering in his friend, thus writes up these notes: therein he gives the account of his convergences and divergences with Foucault. It is not a matter of a critique, even less of a polemic, but of an invitation, entirely imbued with the sincerity of friendship, to take up again a dialogue which had been interrupted. (shrink)

Most of Freud’s readers take it for granted that the question of the relation to others is completely neglected by Freudian psychology. Whereas his clinical accounts of pathological cases thoroughly relate the complex bonds that the patient weaves with others, Freud, through his metapsychological views, seems to propound an ego-focused conception: whatever the subject experiences, it stands for an inner event in a lonely self-regulated system. Taking issue with this conception, I point out that Freud has always thought the mind (...) as an open entity which is essentially involved in exchanges with others. Based on the poorly-known developments of the posthumous publication Entwurf einer Psychologie, the article begins to consider drives not as organic functions, but as claims addressed to somebody. It then refutes two common objections against the supposed Freudian solipsism, excerpted from Laplanche’s works. In its conclusion, the article outlines the philosophical stakes of Freudian thought understood as a relational. (shrink)

This essay argues that John Stuart Mill is not the radical anti-censorship thinker he is sometimes supposed to be. By describing a contemporary case ofa journalist who denied the holocaust, I show that there is evidence in Mill that supports the position that the journalist should have been censored.

Curriculum 2000 has meant significant change for the post-16 sector. New qualifications have been introduced (e.g. the new Advanced Subsidiary examination) and the number of students involved in education and training post-16 has increased. In this scenario how can the standards of new qualifications, particularly the new Advanced Subsidiary examinations, be compared with those of previous qualifications? One method is to use the prior achievement of candidates (i.e. GCSE results) as a basis for comparison of their results on subsequent qualifications (...) (i.e. A levels and AS). This method of comparability and its limitations will be explored using examples with actual data. (shrink)

In this article I draw on an approach - Actor Network Theory - which is well developed within the sociology of science and technology. However, rather than focusing on technical objects in the workplace, I examine food and drink as non-human entities which build, maintain and stabilize links between diverse actants. Using five case study examples I consider what happens when people come together at work around food, and the specific sets of relations between people, activity and organizations that result (...) from this engagement. In doing so I focus on some of the processes through which working bodies are in-corporated into organizational life through emerging food practices; and highlight some of the processes through which working bodies are reconstituted as organizational food practices are in-corporated into the bodies of employees. (shrink)

An idea has been increasingly gaining currency in Western democracies since the 1950s and '60s, namely the idea of the omnipotence of the media, a power that has become more pronounced as the influence of politics has become steadily weaker. This omnipotence of the media manifests itself, firstly, in the fabrication of individualistic tastes and desires, and secondly in the fragmentation of public space and social relations, if not the explosion of public space and social relations.These are the themes to (...) which I would like to return in the hope of not rewriting the story of Pangloss. I think no one will dispute the idea that the media has played, and continues to play, a crucial role in the dynamics of postmodern individualism. The norm of private happiness, the value of pleasure, and the ideal of intimate fulfilment are diffused throughout mass culture, the press and television. Thanks to the media, the fulfilment of these desires and the love of oneself has become a socially legitimated form of behaviour, an ideal for the masses. In celebrating private pleasures and private happiness, the media have undoubtedly contributed to the decline of tradition, strict moral codes and ideological commitments. Living in the present, living for oneself and in accordance with these desires have become the legitimate norm, and in this sense the media have without a doubt contributed to the culture of individualism.That is not all. Television is known to have played a role in the erosion of social life, in the erosion of certain forms of community life like the neighbourhood, the street, and the café, which had been important areas of social interaction since the nineteenth century. Television has put an end to people going out regularly to bars, cafés or on the streets; everyone goes home in the evening to watch the news or look at a film. The traditional social life of men has largely disappeared, and men spend much more time with their family and in private life. Leisure culture and the media have converged in such a way that privileges pleasures enjoyed in the intimacy of the home.For the same reason, television has caused the attendance of cinema, sporting events and theatre to drop. Television has shattered traditional forms of social and public life in favour of the consumption of images within the home, and this trend will undoubtedly only become more pronounced as the number of familial receivers increases, such as video machines, internet, cable, what one can in short call `fragmented television'.Access to information and images is becoming more and more personalized; there are greater possibilities for everyone to construct his own timetable and to escape from the homogeneity of media programming. From this point of view, the media appear to be as much an instrument for the creation of homogeneous, mass tastes as an instrument of individualization, and the privatization of life. In this context, and despite its obvious shortcomings, McLuhan's famous formula `the medium is the message' seems to me correct. (shrink)

In man-machine communication, there is a relationship between what may be described as tacit (human) and explicit (machine) knowledge. The tacit lies in practice and the explicit in the formulation of the processes and content of this practice. However, when a human communicates with another human face to face, we may describe them as communicating aspects of the tacit and explicit dimension of their knowledge, i.e. the expression and its background of meaning for the particular situation. When this is unsuccessful (...) in being communicated, some mediator (not necessarily a third person) is needed to provide the bridge for the particular discrepant aspects of the tacit and explicit dimensions to meet. This is achieved by making the tacit nature of the discrepancy in the communication explicit to both participants such that they both understand the background to their discrepancy. Once they become aware, it is possible for them to begin to resolve it. (shrink)

In this paper, I will try to propose a general characterisation of the spirit in Hegel's Encyclopaedia. This characterisation is based on the opposition between nature and spirit. More precisely, in my view the Hegelian spirit can be defined as the activity of bringing the natural exteriority back to a living totality.

In this paper, I will try to propose a general characterisation of the spirit in Hegel'sEncyclopaedia. This characterisation is based on the opposition between nature and spirit. More precisely, in my view the Hegelian spirit can be defined as the activity of bringing the natural exteriority back to a living totality.We know that for Hegel the notion of spirit takes so many shapes that their unity is difficult to find. For instance, what does the soul in the subjective spirit, property (...) in the objective spirit and the cult of the Greek gods in the absolute spirit have in common? Furthermore, when we consider property, for example, the problem is knowing if the spirit is here constituted by the owner, by the deeds of ownership or by the living relationship between the owner and the possessed goods.Moreover, the Hegelian spirit is a philosophical descendant of several different traditions. The question is, therefore, to know how these traditions are linked in the Hegelian notion. I will present these briefly before stating my general hypothesis about the definition of the spirit.First, the Hegelian spirit is connected to thenoûsof the Greek philosophers. Thenoûs— on the one hand, an immaterial entity leading the universe, and, on the other, a faculty of the soul — is most often distinguished by its separate and rational nature. For Hegel too, the spirit, as a non-perceptible entity, constitutes the freest and most rational stage in the development of the Idea. (shrink)

Formulating a definition of ‘good’ poetry is, and should be, impossible. Yet women's poetry of the First World War seems generally to have been condemned as ‘bad’. It inspires an ambiguous response from readers who recognize the value of its historical, social and psychological content, but shudder at the limitations of its form. However, I believe that a much more fruitful reading of these ‘recalcitrant’ texts is possible. It is not my intention to deny either their problematic nature, or the (...) diversity and complexity of male responses to the war, but rather to emphasize that women's experience of the First World War was radically different from that of men, and we should not therefore be constrained by the traditional parameters of 1914–18 criticism when we explore these works. This article examines a selection of this poetry in the light of the psychological processes of grief and bereavement, and in so doing indicates other areas in which constructive readings of these texts might be made. Why do we expect the articulation of a radically new and uniformly consistent poetic voice from what was a large and diverse group of women? The expectations of modernism ironically have created a literary ‘mainstream’ out of a selection of experimental, and largely male, writing. I hope to show that the ‘failure’ of these women to conform to our textual ‘great expectations’ is irrelevant. The single most characteristic feature of these women's experience of war was isolation. Their position had neither the homogeneity of the trenches, nor the intense intellectualism of experimental circles. Predominantly middle class, alienated by absence and bereavement, they attempted to articulate the unprecedented nature of their experience. That their experiments were not wholly successful is perhaps indicative of the near impossibility of the task they undertook. (shrink)

In the mid-20th century, descriptive meta-ethics addressed a number of central questions, such as whether there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, whether moral reasons are absolute or relative, and whether moral judgments express attitudes or describe states of affairs. I maintain that much of this work in mid-20th century meta-ethics proceeded on an assumption that there is good reason to question. The assumption was that our ordinary discourse is uniform and determinate enough to vindicate one side (...) or the other of these meta-ethical debates. I suggest that ordinary moral discourse may be much less uniform and determinate than 20th century meta-ethics assumed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes voter choice in selected House of Representatives elections during the past 30 years. I estimate multinomial probit models using data from the AkaruiSenkyoSuishinKyokai (Society for the Promotion of Clean Elections) surveys and use qualitative data gathered in focus groups. I argue that no gender gap exists in the votes garnered by the main parties because, first, influential people are not simply able to votes from their networks and, second, have no special relevance to women in their vote (...) choice. Instead, women and men vote for the Liberal Democratic Party because they associate the Party with stability and increased standards of living, including substantial social provisions. (shrink)

This paper presents a country profile of the United States using data from the AsiaBarometer (2008) survey. I first examine how citizens see themselves, their government and big business. My findings show that Americans remain ambivalent toward politics, their government, and big business. Citizens overwhelmingly support democracy as a political system and are satisfied with a broad range of specific democratic rights, but, at the same time, they complain about the workings of their democratic system, policy output, and many distrust (...) government and big business. I then examine the role citizens play in politics, analyzing who participates and why. (shrink)

The higher order matching problem is the problem of determining whether a term is an instance of another in the simply typed [lgr]-calculus, i.e. to solve the equation a = b where a and b are simply typed [lgr]-terms and b is ground. The decidability of this problem is still open. We prove the decidability of the particular case in which the variables occuring in the problem are at most third order.

Même s’ils ne sont pas volumineux, les commentaires de l’Ecriture tiennent une place essentielle dans la pratique théologique de S. Thomas. Après avoir rappelé ses clés de lecture et d’interprétation du texte biblique selon les coutumes et traditions de son temps, G. Berceville en vient, à propos du texte crucial de Rm 7,14-25 au « je » du discours de Paul tel que le perçoit S. Thomas. Tout en tenant compte de ce qu’en avaient dit les « Autorités », S. (...) Thomas n’en marquait pas moins ses « préférences » : ce texte, sur le bien difficile à faire et le mal qui se présente au « je », s’applique aussi bien au juste qu’au pécheur. En contrepoint, la lecture de Luther, en réaction contre le naturalisme de la Renaissance, se trouve au terme d’une transformation radicale de la raison et de la philosophie. Cette « lecture » dit à la fois l’étrangeté aujourd’hui de l’exégèse de Thomas et la sensibilité Luther à la dimension historique de l’homme, ce qui structure son « anthropologie théologique ». La question est posée : est-il possible aujourd’hui de se mettre à l’école de Thomas le contemplatif sans rien perdre de l’attention inquiète que notre modernité porte à l’histoire où Dieu vient et fait grâce ?Although they are not voluminous, St. Thomas’s commentaries on Scripture are essential to his practical theology. After recalling the keys to reading and interpreting Biblical texts according to the customs and traditions of his time, G. Berceville arrives at St. Thomas’ interpretation of the “I” in the discourse of St. Paul in the crucial text of Rm 7, 14-25. While taking into account what the “Authorities had said,” St. Thomas nevertheless pointed out his “preferences.” This text, concerning the good which is difficult to do and the evil that presents itself to the “I”, can be applied to the just man as well as to the sinner. In contrast, Luther’s reading – a reaction against the naturalism of the Renaissance – came at the end of a radical transformation of reason and philosophy. This “reading” reveals both the strangeness of Thomas’ exegesis today, and Luther’s sensitivity to the historical dimension of man, which structures his “theological anthropology.” It also raises the question: Is it possible today to follow the school of Thomas the contemplative without losing the uneasy attention our modernity brings to history which God enters and saves? (shrink)

With the rise of research impact as a ‘third’ space (next to research and teaching) within the universities in the United Kingdom and beyond, academics are increasingly expected to not only produce research but also engage in brokering knowledge beyond academia. And yet little is known about the ways in which academics shape their practices in order to respond to these new forms of institutionalised expectations and make sense of knowledge brokering as a form of academic practice. Drawing on 51 (...) qualitative interviews with researchers and research users involved in two large knowledge brokering initiatives in the UK, this study identifies four repertoires of co-production practices: (i) _Challenge_ to the existing policy framework, (ii) _Deliberation_ between diverse stakeholders, (iii) _Evidence intervention_ producing of actionable knowledge, and (iv) _Advocacy_ for specific evidence-based options. By exploring knowledge brokering as navigation of different knowledge production regimes – traditionally academic and policy-oriented – the paper contributes to the existing debates by providing insights into the nature of navigating science-policy interactions as a process of epistemological bricolage, requiring an assemblage of different meanings, values and practices into new repertoires of practice. Importantly, the choice of a repertoire is not limited to the individual choice of a researcher but rather, it is shaped by the broader institutional context of higher education, risking _instrumental bias_ in which practices oriented towards practical solutions are incentivised over critical or participatory forms of engagement. (shrink)

I argue that a policy of presumed consent for cadaveric organ procurement, which assumes that people do want to donate their organs for transplantation after their death, would be a moral improvement over the current American system, which assumes that people do not want to donate their organs. I address what I take to be the most important objection to presumed consent. The objection is that if we implement presumed consent we will end up removing organs from the bodies of (...) people who did not want their organs removed, and that this situation is morally unacceptable because it violates the principle of respect for autonomy that underlies our concept of informed consent. I argue that while removing organs from the bodies of people who did not want them removed is unfortunate, it is morally no worse that not removing organs from the bodies of people who did want them removed, and that a policy of presumed consent will produce fewer of these unfortunate results than the current system. (shrink)

In theMetaphysics, Aristotle pointed out that some activities are engaged in for their own sake, while others are directed at some end. The test for distinguishing between them is to ask, ‘At any time during a period in which someone is Xing, is it also true that they have Xed?’ If both are true, the activity is being done for its own sake. If not, it is being done for the sake of some end other than itself. For example, if (...) I am thinking, it is true that I have thought. But if I’m making a blouse, it is not true that I have made a blouse, at least not this particular blouse. That’s not true until I have completed the project.There have been a number of attempts to deepen our understanding of this distinction. Anthony Kenny devoted a chapter of Action, Emotion, and Will to this issue, exploring the effect tense has on implication relations, and using that as a basis for dividing verbs of action into state-verbs, activity-verbs and performance-verbs. In more recent years the trend has been to generalize these categories so as to include occurrences other than actions, i.e., occurrences which do not involve intentions. While interest in this area tends to focus primarily on linguistic issues, such as the categorization of verbs, or on the logical analysis of sentences, there has been some interest in related metaphysical issues. In 1978 Alexander Mourelatos published ‘Events, Processes, and States,’ a paper which has turned out to be quite influential, in which he proposes an ontological trichotomy of occurrences. In his view, processes and events form distinct categories within the general category of occurrences. In this paper I will examine the reasoning underlying Mourelatos’s claim, arguing that the differences between processes and events cannot provide the basis for an ontological subcategorization of occurrences. (shrink)

Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country). Mapping Desire explores the places and spaces of sexuality from body to community, from the "cottage" to the Barrio, from Boston to Jakarta, from home to cyberspace. Mapping Desire is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desires presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how (...) the heterosexed body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. Editors David Bell and Gill Valentine have brought together contributors with a wealth of approaches to ways in which the spaces of sex and the sexes of space are being mapped out across contemporary culture. Among the many sexual geographies covered are: Lesbians at home and on the streets; gay men on fantasy islands; bisexual identities; The heterosexualization of the workplace; bachelor farmers and spinsters; surveillance and sexuality; prostitution; queer politics; sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualized spaces: global/local; sexualized spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature. Mapping Desire will be a valuable and accessible travelogue of information for anyone interested in social, cultural and political geography, lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, or simply those who want to find out more about the sexual landscape of contemporary society. Contents: Part I: Cartographies/Identities; Resolving Riddles: The Sexed Body, Julia Cream ; Locating Bisexual Identities: Discourses of Bisexuality and Contemporary Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings; Of Moffies, Kaffiers and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State, Glen Elder; Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets (a Play on Whores), Alison Murray; Body Work: The Performance of Gendered and (Hetero)Sexualized Identities in City Workplaces, Linda McDowell; Part II: Sexualized Spaces: Global/Local; Whenever I Lay My Girlfriend That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments, Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine; The Lesbian Flaneur, Sally Munt; Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of Marooned Masculinities, Gregory Woods; Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis, Lawrence Knopp; Part III: Sexualized Spaces: Local/Global; "And She Told Two Friends...": Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space, Tamar Rothenberg; Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space, Jon Binnie; Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota, Jerry Lee Kramer; (Re)Constructing a Spanish Redlight District: Prostitution, Space and Power, Angie Hart; Part IV: Sites of Resistance; "Surveilliant Gays": HIV, Space and the Construction of Identities, David Woodhead; Sex, Scale and the "New Urban Politics": HIV-Prevention Strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver, Michael Brown; "Boom, Bye, Bye": Jamaican Ragga and Gay Resistance, Tracey Skelton; The Diversity of Queer Politics and the Redefinition of Sexual Identity and Community in Urban Space, Tim Davis; Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy, David Bell; Guide to Further Reading; Bibliography. (shrink)

Moral cognitivists hold that in ordinary thought and language moral terms are used to make factual claims and express propositions. Moral non-cognitivists hold that in ordinary thought and language moral terms are not used to make factual claims or express propositions. What cognitivists and non-cognitivists seem to agree about, however, is that there is something in ordinary thought and language that can vindicate one side of their debate or the other. Don Loeb raises the possibility — which I will call (...) “the variability thesis” — that ordinary moral thought and language contains both cognitivist and non-cognitivist elements, and that there is no principled reason for thinking that either the cognitivist or non-cognitivist elements are conceptually more primary or aberrant than the other. According to the variability thesis, cognitivists accurately capture some aspects of what we think and say when we use moral terms and non-cognitivists capture other aspects, but neither side provides a correct analysis of ordinary moral thought and language as a whole. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explicates Shaftesbury’s idea that we ought to live our lives as though they are works of art. I show that this idea is central to many of Shaftesbury’s most important claims, and that an understanding of this idea enables us to answer some of the most contested questions in the scholarship on Characteristics.

There are themes in Wittgenstein's later work which are extremely radical. By ‘radical’ I mean both that they cut to the very root of crucial philosophical issues, and that they tend to be ignored by the established philosophical positions of the day. More specifically, these themes focus on the understanding of epistemological bedrock, and they lead in directions about which it is difficult to get a hearing in major philosophical circles.

It is often claimed that in the ancient world character was believed to be something fixed, given at birth and immutable during life. This belief is said to underlie the portrayal of individuals in ancient historiography and biography, particularly in the early Roman Empire; and tc constitute the chief point of difference in psychological assumptions between ancient and modern biography. In this article, I wish to examine the truth of these claims, with particular reference to Plutarch and Tacitus.

Metaphysics Θ treats potentiality (δύναμις) and actuality (ἐνέργεια), and many scholars think that Aristotle broaches these topics once he has answered his main questions in Ζ and Η. In Ζ he asked, what is primary being? After arguing in Ζ.1 that substance (οὐσία) is primary being—a being existentially, logically, and epistemologically prior to quantities and qualities and other categorial beings—he devotes the rest of the book to οὐσία itself, investigating what it is, to decide what entities count as primary substances. (...) I differ from the leading interpretative consensus that ΖΗ adequately answer the questions about primary substance, and contend instead that Metaphysics Θ continues the same investigation as ΖΗ and, using δύναμις and ἐνέργεια as tools, arrives at a striking new conception of hylomorphism, different from that in ΖΗ, which enables Aristotle to defend the substantial primacy of living organisms consisting of matter and form. (shrink)

En este artículo reúno los resultados de una serie de estudios sobre el trabajo en los empleos vinculados con las nuevas tecnologías (incluyendo mi propia investigación en el Reino Unido, los Estados Unidos y los Países Bajos), para explorar lo que significa gestionar las vidas en estos nuevos medios. Utilizo aquí la gestión no en su sentido convencional o de escuela de negocios, sino con una inflexión más crítica que proviene del pensamiento marxista, feminista y posestructuralista. Me interesa cómo los (...) propios trabajadores y trabajadoras gestionan vidas, una gestión que se caracteriza por procesos de aceleración, intensificación y contingencia. Usando una óptica foucaultiana, sugiero que trabajar en estos nuevos medios implica múltiples prácticas de autogestión en condiciones de incertidumbre radical.In this article I pull together the findings of a number of studies of new media work (including my own research in the UK, US and Netherlands) to explore what it means to manage lives in new media. I use management here not in its conventional or business school sense but with a more critical inflection that comes from Marxist, feminist and poststructuralist thinking. I am interested in how workers themselves manage lives that are characterised by processes of speeding up, intensification and contingency. Using a Foucauldian optic, I will suggest that working in new media involves multiple practices of managing the self in conditions of radical uncertainty. (shrink)

Shaftesbury believed that the height of virtue was impartial love for all of humanity. But Shaftesbury also harboured grave doubts about our ability to develop such an expansive love. In The Moralists, Shaftesbury addressed this problem. I show that while it may appear on the surface that The Moralists solves the difficulty, it in fact remains unresolved. Shaftesbury may not have been able to reconcile his view of the content of virtue with his view of our motivational psychology.

There is good reason to believe that Paul Tillich would have objected to the title of this paper. Several years ago I heard him begin a lecture on ‘Religious Existentialism’ with the comment, ‘There is no such thing as Religious Existentialism because there is only Religious Existentialism’. Similarly, he might have objected to the present paper's title by suggesting that every search for knowledge is, consciously or unconsciously, a religious search.

Reasoning about religion would seem to involve both explicit and tacit factors. These latter are what Pascal had in mind when he spoke of the ‘reasons of the heart which the reason knows not of’. Moreover, these reasons of the heart are the more interesting by virtue of being at least the more difficult and perhaps the more crucial. In these pages I want to examine the notion of reasons of the heart from the angle provided by the insights of (...) Michael Polanyi. Space will not permit a review of the major features of Polanyi's crucial concept of tacit knowledge. 1 I shall simply introduce and explore certain of these features as they seem relevant to the main concern of the paper. I trust this can be done in such a way as to be both meaningful to the reader and fair to Polanyi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 1, April 1996, pp. 23-48 Fantastick Associations and Addictive General Rules: A Fundamental Difference between Hutcheson and Hume MICHAEL B. GILL The belief that God created human beings for some moral purpose underlies nearly all the moral philosophy written in Great Britain in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. David Hume attacks this theological conception of human nature on all fronts. It is (...) out of these attacks that Hume develops his own "science of man" based solely on "experience and observation."1 Francis Hutcheson is often taken to be the most important positive influence on Hume. And there can be no doubt that Hume does take on board several crucial Hutchesonian elements. But Hutcheson's moral theory, like that of most of his contemporaries, is grounded in a theological conception of human nature to which Hume is adamantly opposed.2 In this paper I will examine how Hume's disagreements with Hutcheson embody the anti-theological purpose that defines Hume's work as a whole. I will look, in particular, at Hume's and Hutcheson's different positions on the principles of association. I hope to show how Hume's use of these principles in the Treatise advances his larger goal of placing "the science of man" on "a foundation almost entirely new" (T xvi). I will proceed, first, by explaining Hutcheson's conception of human nature and his use of the principles of association; second, by sketching in broad outline how Hume's accounts of the origins of justice and natural virtue undermine crucial components of Hutcheson's conception of human nature; and third, by elucidating in more detail an aspect of Hume's associationism that is particularly revealing of his distance from Hutcheson. Michael B. Gill is at the Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, 1360 Liberal Arts and Education Building, West Lafayette IN 47907 USA. email: [email protected]. 24 Michael B. Gill I. Hutcheson and Association Hutcheson discusses the mind's tendency to associate in all of his writings, but his most extensive treatment of the matter comes in his Essay on the Passions.3 Hutcheson begins the Essay by telling us that something is good if and only if the perception of it "Causes, or Occasions" a pleasurable feeling, and that something is evil if and only if the perception of it causes or occasions a painful feeling (EP 2). Crucially, Hutcheson denies that all of our pleasures and pains are of the same type (EP 1-8).4 He holds, rather, that there are at least five distinct types of pleasures and pains and that each of them grounds a different irreducible type of good and evil. There are, first, the pleasures and pains caused by things we perceive through the external senses of taste, touch, smell, etc.; things that cause such pleasures are called naturally good, while things that cause such pains are called naturally evil. Second, there are the "Pleasant Perceptions, arising from regular, harmonious, uniform Objects" (EP 5); the things that cause these pleasures are called beautiful.5 Third, there are the pleasures and pains we feel upon perceiving the happiness or misery of other human beings; the things that cause these pleasures are called public goods while those that cause the corresponding pains are called public evils. Fourth, there are pleasures and pains, usually called approval and disapproval, that we feel upon perceiving the actions of others; the actions that cause approval are called virtuous or morally good, while those that cause disapproval are called vicious or morally evil. Finally, there are the pleasures and pains we feel upon perceiving others' moral perceptions of our own actions; the pleasure of perceiving others' approval of one's actions is called the feeling of honor, while the pain of perceiving others' disapproval is called the feeling of shame. For Hutcheson, then, natural goodness, beauty, the public good, virtue and honor are all defined by our pleasures and pains. He does not think, however, that these are defined by just any of our actual or occurrent pleasures and pains. He holds, rather, that they are defined by the pleasures and pains we feel under certain privileged... (shrink)