Growing evidence, as presented by Jaswal & Akhtar, indicates that social motivation is not universally reduced in autism. Here, we evaluate and extend this argument in light of recent evidence of “compensation” in autism. We thereby argue that autistic “compensators” – exhibiting neurotypical behaviour despite persistent difficulties in social cognition – indicate intact or potentially heightened social motivation in autism.

After a century of major technicaladvance, essentially achieved by and for theindustrialized countries, the evolution of thefood sector in southern countries should nolonger be thought of in terms of a ``headlongpursuit.'' In the present context of demographicgrowth, urbanization, poverty and disparities,environmental degradation, and globalization oftrade, new priorities have emerged, and newethical questions have been raised, mainlyrelated to sustainability and equity. Thispaper analyses these ethical concerns in thefollowing terms: can the model of food sectordevelopment initiated by the industrializedcountries be applied to (...) the entire world on asustainable and equitable basis, given theeffects of this development with regard to theenergy consumed, the changes in dietarybehavior and related nutritional problems, thenew demands in terms of food safety, thequestions of biodiversity, ownership ofknowledge, cultural identities, gender issues,and Man's relationship to food and Nature? (shrink)

The different situations encountered by a professional make up the frame of the analysis of the working activity. These situations are analyzed as learning potentiality and as development of the workers and learners . We hypothesize that different situations are to be mobilized to rethink a personal and professional route whose finality is learning and development of the worker . These situations have to be thinking like a set of opportunities to learn and to grow, in other words, as carriers (...) of formative experiences situations. These encounter of situations could taking sens by a dialogical process or dialectic established between different situations. To support this thesis, we propose to identify and characterize these carriers learning and development situations. To do this, we propose to appeal to the experiential posture of these different situations , especially some of them , which are considered to be representative and often iconic vocational training , that is to say training period. Les différentes situations rencontrées par un professionnel constituent le cadre d’analyse de l’activité du travail. Ces situations sont à analyser comme des potentialités d’apprentissage et de développement d’un sujet travailleur et apprenant. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que différentes situations sont à mobiliser pour penser autrement un parcours personnel et professionnel dont la finalité serait l’apprentissage et le développement du sujet. Les situations seraient ainsi pensées comme un ensemble d’occasions d’apprendre et de se développer, autrement dit, comme des situations porteuses d’expériences formatrices. Cette rencontre de situations prendrait sens selon un processus dialogique voire dialectique institué entre les différentes situations. Pour soutenir cette thèse, nous proposons d’identifier et de caractériser ces situations porteuses d’apprentissage et de développement. Pour ce faire, nous proposons de convoquer la posture expérientielle de ces différentes situations, en particulier certaines d’entre elles, dont on considère qu’elles sont représentatives et souvent emblématiques des formations professionnelles, c’est-à-dire les stages. (shrink)

This work tests two conflicting views about double standards: whether they reflect evolved sex differences in behavior or a manipulative morality serving male interests. Two questionnaires on jealous reactions to mild (flirting) and serious (cheating) sexual transgressions were randomly assigned to 172 young women and men. One questionnaire assessed standards for appropriate behavior and perceptions of how young women and men usually react. The second asked people to report how they had reacted or, if naive, how they would react. The (...) questions concerned anger at and blame of partner and rival and the self-oriented responses of loss of self-esteem, feelings of hurt, and fear of losing the partner. As predicted by the idea of manipulative morality, both sexes advanced sets of double standards that serve the interests of their own sex at the expense of the opposite sex. Much of the data contradict the idea of a match between double standards and evolved sex differences. First, subjects who set self-serving double standards did not perceive gender differences in jealous reactions. Second, there were few gender differences in judgments regarding jealous responses. Third, in contrast with the familiar double standard, women were more aggressively reactive to a flirting rival than men. Fourth, self-reports of the strength of aggressive jealous reactions suggest that women’s behavior is stronger than the prescriptions for it. These data suggest that double standards represent a communication strategy which assists men’s control of women. The data on jealous reactions were interpreted in terms of the degree of threat to fitness posed by infidelity in different situations. (shrink)

Suicidal Thoughts is a compilation of some of the most moving and insightful writing accomplished on the topic of suicide. It presents the thoughts and experiences of fifteen writers who have contemplated suicide-some on a professional level, others on a personal level, and a few, both personally and professionally. Through this collection, the reader is able to bear witness to the struggle between life and death and to the devastating aftermath of suicide. Suicidal Thoughts provides readers with a better understanding (...) of the reasons why some individuals give serious consideration to killing themselves. (shrink)

The purpose of the study was to develop an understanding of how nursing students gained perspective on nursing care of diverse populations through watching documentaries in a cultural diversity course. The basis of this paper is our analyses of students’ written responses and reactions to documentaries viewed in class. The guiding theoretical frameworks for the course content and the study included postcolonial feminism, Foucauldian thought, and cultural safety. Krathwohl's Taxonomy of the Affective Domain was used to identify themes and determine (...) how undergraduate nursing students were progressing in achieving learning outcomes. Our findings suggest that while the use of documentaries serves as a tool for deepening students’ understanding of the realities of various populations, this activity, in the absence of critical reflection, may inadvertently promote stereotypes and further marginalize different people groups. Even though nursing students reflected on the importance of cultural safety in nursing, our findings indicate that their actions may not reflect this, especially since these students are in the early stages of the nursing program. Students need to be provided with a space where they can explore implicit biases evoked by exposure to new information about different people groups as a way of enhancing culturally safe care. (shrink)

The use of psychometric tools to investigate the impact of school-based wellbeing programs raises a number of ethical issues around students’ rights, confidentiality and protection. Researchers have explicit ethical obligations to protect participants from potential psychological harms, but guidance is needed for effectively navigating disclosure of identifiable confidential information that indicates signs of psychological distress. Drawing on a large-scale study examining student, school, and system-based factors that impact the implementation of a school-based social and emotional learning program, we describe patterns (...) of distress attained from quantitative and qualitative questions and describe the process that we evolved to monitor and disclose sensitive mental health information, providing one example of how researchers might effectively address the responsibilities that emerge when collecting sensitive information from students within an education system. The patterns and processes that emerged illustrate that the inclusion of mental distress information can elicit important insights, but also brings responsibilities for minimising risks and maximising benefits. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 57-59, July 2011.

'Non seulement je lis, mais j'aime Pascal.' L'hommage réitéré que Nietzsche adresse au penseur français n'a guère retenu l'attention des commentateurs. Il semble que cette affection ait gêné, dérouté même. Comment, en effet, l' 'anti-chrétien', l'athée 'de rigueur' et 'd'instinct' aurait-il pu sincèrement aimer le pieux janséniste, qui portait le cilice, croyait aux miracles, et consacra les dernières années de sa vie à l'écriture d'une apologie du christianisme? Cette admiration n'a pas été prise au sérieux, parce que tout invitait à (...) y voir une fantaisie, une extravagance, une provocation même, chez ce penseur qui aime tant choquer. Nietzsche nous avertit cependant qu'il se joue bien davantage dans cet attachement, comme en 1885 lorsqu'il écrit : 'Il ne s'est rien passé depuis Pascal : face à lui, les philosophes allemands n'entrent pas en ligne de compte.' Afin d'élucider ce qui pourrait bien apparaître comme une énigme, cette étude entreprend d'examiner la place et le rôle accordés à Pascal dans la pensée de Nietzsche."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Among the letters, memorabilia, manu­scripts, films, and tapes in the eighty-four warehouse boxes of the John Dewey Papers that came to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1972 were a number of boxes that contained the books and journals from Dewey’s personal and professional library. The circumstances surrounding the growth of that library were these: after John Dewey died in 1952, the second Mrs. Dewey, Roberta Grant Dewey, continued to live in the same apartment with the couple’s two adopted children. (...) Upon her death in 1970, the household was dismantled and all the books there were packed away. The library therefore comprises the many volumes col­lected through the years by the two families of John Dewey: the first, John and Alice Chipman Dewey and their children—Lucy, Evelyn, Jane, Fred, Gordon, and Sabino; the second, John and Roberta Dewey and their adopted children—Adrienne and John, Jr. In addition to the books signed or anno­tated by Dewey—well over a hundred have marginalia—or inscribed to him, a number of books with the names of other family members have been included in this checklist because evidence exists that Dewey also used them; others have been included because they were available for possible use. Only school textbooks have been excluded. The checklist is divided into two basic sections: works in English and works in other languages; entries in both sections are anno­tated to indicate Dewey’s notes, marginalia, inscriptions, and similar information. Beyond its use as a research tool, both in editing the Collected Works and in verifying Dewey’s references, this checklist of Dewey’s library provides interesting, often important, insights into his life and work. (shrink)

The internet provides us with a multitude of ways of interacting with one another. In discussions about how technological innovations impact and shape our interpersonal interactions, there is a tendency to assume that encountering people online is essentially different to encountering people offline. Yet, individuals report feeling a sense of togetherness with one another online that echoes offline descriptions. I consider how we can understand people’s experiences of being together with others online, at least in certain instances, as arising out (...) of their feeling together as a we. Using Walther’s phenomenological framework of communality, I explore whether the following might take place online: habitual communal experiences and actual we-experiences. While neither of these sketches amount to a full account of how we find ourselves with others online, I suggest that they reveal how insights from the phenomenology of sociality can be used to deepen our understanding of online communality. What is more, I suggest that the strength of this approach is that in some cases it allows us to circumvent tricky questions about embodiment online and, in others, prompts us to ask to what extent a fully-embodied interaction is really required for we-experiences. (shrink)

Paisley Livingston here addresses contemporary controversies over the role of "theory" within the humanistic disciplines. In the process, he suggests ways in which significant modern texts in the philosophy of science relate to the study of literature. Livingston first surveys prevalent views of theory, and then proposes an alternative: theory, an indispensable element in the study of literature, should be understood as a Cogently argued and informed in its judgments, this book points the way to a fuller understanding (...) of the special contribution that literary knowledge may make within the human sciences. (shrink)

Despite its long history of investigating sociality, phenomenology has, to date, said little about online sociality. The phenomenological tradition typically claims that empathy is the fundamental way in which we experience others and their experiences. While empathy is discussed almost exclusively in the context of face-to-face interaction, I claim that we can empathetically perceive others and their experiences in certain online situations. Drawing upon the phenomenological distinction between the physical, objective body and the expressive, lived body, I: (i) highlight that (...) empathy involves perceiving the other’s expressive, lived body, (ii) show that the lived body is not tied to the physical body and that empathy can take place outside of face-to-face interactions, and (iii) argue that the lived body can enter online space and is empathetically available to others there. I explore two ways in which the other’s lived body enters online space and can be empathetically perceived: first, in cases where our face-to-face encounter is technologically-mediated over video link and, second, by showing how the other’s texts, as speech, can form part of the other’s lived body. Investigating empathy online not only furthers our understanding of online encounters but also leads to a refined conception of empathy more generally. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a complex disorder characterised by self-starvation, an act of self-destruction. It is often described as a disorder marked by paradoxes and, despite extensive research attention, is still not well understood. Much AN research focuses upon the distorted body image that individuals with AN supposedly experience. However, based upon reports from individuals describing their own experience of AN, I argue that their bodily experience is much more complex than this focus might lead us to believe. Such research (...) often presents an overly cognitive understanding of bodily experience in AN, underplaying the affective, felt experience of individuals with AN, as well as descriptions of empowerment, strength and control reported in the early stages of AN. This paper seeks to enrich our understanding of bodily experience in AN as it progresses throughout the various stages of the disorder. I show how the classical phenomenological distinction between the body-as-subject and the body-as-object, as well as Leder’s conception of the visceral body, can inform our understanding of bodily experience in AN. I suggest that the project of self-starvation is an attempt to overcome the noisy demands of the visceral body, which are experienced as threatening the body-as-subject, through a process of objectifying the body-as-object. By cashing out AN as a project of radical bodily control that, tragically, comes to control the individual, we can capture important aspects of the bodily experience of AN and the temporal progression of the disorder. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contemporary IlluminationsReading Donne's "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day through Three Twenty-First-Century PoemsTheresa M. DipasqualeIn his contribution to the 2017 volume John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Judith Scherer Herz, Jonathan F. S. Post explores "a nearly endless landscape of comparisons and contrasts" that unfolds between Stephen Edgar's 2008 poem "Nocturnal" and Donne's "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day."1 Post's essay illuminates what Calvin (...) Bedient, in the same volume, calls the "great glacier-gloom" of Donne's "Nocturnall," its devastated "solemnity."2 In doing so, Post renders largely moot many questions that have preoccupied critics of Donne's poem: whether or how this poem reflects Donne's experience; whether the woman lamented by the speaker is a fiction or a historical person lamented by the poet; and if the latter, whether the poem mourns the 1617 death of John Donne's wife, Anne More Donne; the 1627 death of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford; or the Countess' near-fatal illness in 1612–13.3 These biographical and historical questions are not without value, but they draw the critic's attention away from more compelling questions regarding the "I" of the poem—a persona who claims not to be a person at all, but an inscription, a grave, "A quintessence" derived or "expresse[d]/... even from nothingnesse."4In this article, I widen and intensify the pool of light cast on Donne's "Nocturnall" by Post's presentist and intertextual analysis of Edgar's poem, examining three of the many other twenty-first-century poems that tap into Donne's poem, allude to it, quote it, adopt its structure, or respond to the anguish it expresses.5 Each of the three I discuss is [End Page 1] luminous in its own right but also a potent critical response to Donne's five-stanza poem. Each teaches something different about Donne's lyric. The poets whose work I consider—Liz Lochhead, Jay Wright, and Meena Alexander—all address twenty-first-century concerns; they grapple with questions and sorrows beyond the scope of Donne's conscious imagining yet latent in his poem. Each picks up where critics leave off when they "assume," as Alison R. Rieke notes, "that the speaker... is a husband or lover, possibly Donne, who experiences grief upon his wife's or mistress' death."6 Each takes up the challenge that Donne's persona issues when it denies that it is either "a man" (30) or any other living thing.In the first stanza of "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," this anti-persona observes that "all" other things around it are "Dead and enterr'd" and "yet" that "all these seeme to laugh, / Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph" (8–9). If it is an incised text rather than a human being, the poem's "mee" can no more speak than laugh; it is as silent as the grave it marks or as the dead flesh interred there. Indeed, it goes on to claim that it is "every dead thing" and that love's alchemical "art" has "expresse[d] / A quintessence even from" this mass of nonliving objects, this "nothingnesse" (12, 14–15). Struggling to define its anti-essential essence, it declares itself a mass burial site: "I, by loves limbecke, am the grave / Of all, that's nothing" (21–22). An epitaph, dead things, nothingness, a grave: all these are silent. And yet, in Donne's poem, they strenuously assert their nonbeing; they pulse with a paradoxically audible sense of self. After "Compar'd with mee" in the final line of the opening stanza, the reader encounters sixteen additional instances of the first-person singular in the poem's forty-five lines: "my" appears once, "mee" five times, and "I" eleven times. And the "I" issues a directive to readers: commanding, in the opening line of stanza 2, "Study me then, you who shall lovers bee" (10). But those who obey this order, making themselves students of the poem's inscribed nothingness, find themselves dismissed in the poem's final stanza. Having insisted that its "Sunne" will never "renew... (shrink)

Early analytic philosophy -- Radical translation and intersubjective practice -- Critical outcome.

Lucy Allais presents an original interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. She argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. Kant is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not (...) assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. On Allais's account, we cannot understand Kant's idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: she understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. This enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

When I started reading Sara Protasi’s book, The Philosophy of Envy, I was excited to learn more about an emotion I thought I rarely experienced. In the opening pages, I found myself nodding along as Protasi quotes her mother saying: “I never feel envy, but I often feel jealousy!” (6). But envy, it turns out, is sneaky, often masking itself in the guise of other emotions, hiding just below the surface. What this meticulously argued book unveils is both a nuanced (...) taxonomy of different kinds of envy and the intimate relationship that envy has to all manner of other emotions, including jealousy, shame, resentment, despair, and love. I now recognize that not only am I more familiar with envy than I supposed, but I experience envy rather often. This got me thinking about other instances of envy that I experience which I have previously overlooked or perhaps mislabeled. Prompted by Protasi’s insightful handling of envy in its varied forms, one question kept coming back to me: can you envy yourself? (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider three ‘promises’ of bringing phenomenology into dialogue with networked learning. First, a ‘conceptual promise’, which draws attention to conceptual resources in phenomenology that can inspire and inform how we understand, conceive of, and uncover experiences of participants in networked learning activities and environments. Second, a ‘methodological promise’, which outlines a variety of ways that phenomenological methodologies and concepts can be put to use in empirical research in networked learning. And third, a ‘critical promise’, which suggests (...) how work done in the realm of critical phenomenology is complementary to and useful for exploring the social justice and emancipatory aims of networked learning researchers. Through this framework, I reflect upon multiple ways in which phenomenology has and might continue to fruitfully inform and shape networked learning research. In doing so, I emphasise that deploying phenomenology in the context of networked learning not only enriches our understanding of networked learning but that phenomenology itself is enriched through testing, finetuning, and expanding its methods, concepts, and understanding, as well as unveiling its own limitations and constraints. (shrink)

La philosophy of mind est le terrain principal sur lequel Gilbert Ryle a mis à l'épreuve sa réponse personnelle à la question "Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?". Il nous montre comment la philosophie peut nous remettre sur la piste d'une meilleure compréhension des phénomènes humains. Cette philosophie de l'homme est ancrée dans une méthode qui a reçu le nom d'analyse du langage ordinaire : prêter une attention particulière à la façon dont nous parlons de nous-même et des autres devrait nous permettre (...) d'atteindre des conclusions positives. Lucie Antoniol nous propose ici une interprétation originale du célèbre ouvrage La notion d'esprit (1949) : l'argument de l'erreur de catégorie repose sur des catégories sémantiques et non ontologiques. C'est là un des apports philosophiques majeurs d'un philosophe dont on commence à peine à voir l'importance. (shrink)

The increasingly popular idea that cinematic fictions can "do" philosophy raises some difficult questions. Who is actually doing the philosophizing? Is it the philosophical commentator who reads general arguments or theories into the stories conveyed by a film? Could it be the film-maker, or a group of collaborating film-makers, who raise and try to answer philosophical questions with a film? Is there something about the experience of films that is especially suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflections? In the (...) first part of this book, Paisley Livingston surveys positions and arguments surrounding the cinema's philosophical value. He raises criticisms of bold theses in this area and defends a moderate view of film's possible contributions to philosophy. In the second part of the book he defends an intentionalist approach that focuses on the film-makers' philosophical background assumptions, sources, and aims. Livingston outlines intentionalist interpretative principles as well as an account of authorship in cinema. The third part of the book exemplifies this intentionalist approach with reference to the work of Ingmar Bergman. Livingston explores the connection between Bergman's work and the Swedish director's primary philosophical source-a treatise in philosophical psychology authored by the Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading this book was a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he "built on this ground." With reference to materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive, Livingston shows how Bergman took up Kaila's topics in his cinematic explorations of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and the problem of self-knowledge. (shrink)

Since the advent of the internet, researchers have been interested in the intersubjective possibilities and constraints that digital environments offer users. In the literature, we find some who argue that seemingly disembodied digitally mediated interactions are severely limited when compared to their embodied face-to-face counterparts and others who are more optimistic about the possibilities that such technologies afford. Yet, both camps tend towards offering what we see as static accounts of online intersubjectivity – accounts that attempt to determine the very (...) possibilities and constraints of digital platforms based upon their design. What we think these approaches fail to take into account is how users’ intersubjective capabilities on digital platforms can evolve and change over time. Developmental psychology emphasises the way in which intersubjective capabilities build upon and are interrelated to one another, allowing for more sophisticated styles of intersubjectivity to emerge only once earlier stages are already in place. We find this suggestive for analysing intersubjectivity online as it provides a framework for thinking about how various an individual’s intersubjective capabilities might develop. We argue that in some cases this can happen through gradual adjustments of our basic intersubjective capabilities to digital spaces, especially those that strive to mimic established forms of offline interaction (e.g., Zoom). In other cases, this can involve more substantial processes of learning to walk and talk again online. Consequently, determining the possibilities and limits of online intersubjectivity is, at least in part, relative to a user’s skill, history, and familiarity with the technology in question. (shrink)

The COVID pandemic was an exceptional public health situation – which brought with it unprecedented restrictions across the global populace. But what was it about this pandemic which caused us to implement such drastic restrictions on liberty? Much of the ethical debate on restrictive measures such as lockdowns and vaccine requirements focused on the potential harm that individuals cause to other individuals by the risk of infection. I will suggest that this may come from a reliance on J.S. Mill’s harm (...) principle as providing the ultimate justification for coercion – i.e., the well-accepted principle that state coercion is justified in order to prevent the imposition of unacceptable risk of harm to others. Though there have been attempts, in the wider public health ethics literature, to use the harm principle as a basis for restricting contribution to collective harms, I will suggest that these attempts cannot rely on the harm principle alone. I will then turn to the ways in which an individual-based line of reasoning does not capture a distinctive sort of harm posed by the COVID pandemic (and others like it): the potential failure of healthcare systems. I will draw out three ways in which a focus on the harm that an individual poses to another individual fails to capture the full scope of harm wrought by the collapse of healthcare systems. First, it can’t adequately capture the cumulative and “looping effects” of the harm caused by strained healthcare systems. Second, it fails to capture the widespread ripple effects the failure of a central societal institution can have on other institutions. And third, the failure of a healthcare system can impose “psychic costs”, affecting the moral character of all members of society, reducing trust in institutions, and potentially posing an existential threat to the fabric of society. Finally, I will sketch some implications of the recognition of this distinctive sort of harm for the justification of coercive public health measures. (shrink)

As John McMillan notes in January’s editorial,1 many countries are reflecting on how they responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, what went wrong and how responses to such system shocks can be better managed in the future. However, while it is tempting to think that the COVID-19 pandemic is over and that what is now needed is a reflection on how countries could have responded better, some of the underlying issues and problems COVID-19 both highlighted and created are still with us. (...) The legacy of the pandemic has continued particularly for healthcare workers at all levels, who have had to continue providing services with little time to rest and reflect and with new ‘shocks’ to the systems to cope with. For example, in England, industrial action by junior doctors has put already fragile systems under pressure, and the issues that staff are campaigning about remain unaddressed. Many of these issues are not distinctive to COVID-19, but as has been noted, ‘From an ethical perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic is like a prism: it helps us see the spectrum of …. (shrink)

Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs James's overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass -- his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines -- as the key to unlocking the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority (...) at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James's major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the conventional view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with a transatlantic critique of modernity, as well as with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy. (shrink)

The livingthinglikeness of language -- Words and things -- Thirds and wings -- The order of things in a nutshell -- Artistic interlude -- An introductory vignette -- Sometimes a cigar -- On meaning -- Fact and fiction -- How bad facts make good theories -- Self reference I -- Self reference II -- Autopoiesis -- Poetic interlude -- Performativity I -- Performativity II -- Artistic interlude: the abyss of distinction -- Performativity III -- The return to resemblance -- Gravity (...) cannot be held responsible? -- Queer in a queer world -- An alienist history. (shrink)

The ancient problem of the relationship of the continuous to the discrete, since its discovery by the Greeks, has posed a range of immensely fruitful challenges to both philosophical and mathematical thought, leading to a variety of mathematical and conceptual innovations whose positive development actively continues today. In this brief section introduction, I selectively outline some significant moments at which this problem has provided important historical occasions for concrete mathematical innovation as well as closely linked philosophical insights, before introducing the (...) particular contributions of the section authors to historical and contemporary research and practice into the nature and structure of the continuum, the construction of real numbers, the foundations of analysis, and the logical, set-theoretical, and computational underpinnings of the structure of continuously valued numbers in the most general sense, in both constructive and nonconstructivist contexts. (shrink)

This book argues that philosophy is as practical as plumbing and what we need right now is what philosophers can offer as philosophers to help us all, our species, and beyond, through this ecological emergency, this climate change, this anthropocene. This book is about the meaning and purpose of philosophy as a way of, a practice of, responding to the ecological emergency, which includes climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, habitat destruction, and all the associated impacts that fragment, and threaten to (...) create collapse, among the systems that created and sustain us. There are the related economic and social impacts, the fragmentation of communities and political ideologies through attitude polarisation, and the increasing threats to systems by those who seek to promote further exploitation at the expense of attempts to regain some system of cooperation and an attitude of compassion which is at the heart of our survival strategies as a species. Philosophy has always sought to address questions related both to our place in the universe, and to how to live, given our understanding of our place. Those of us committed to a philosophical life have used a range of metaphors and narratives to enlighten, and to exhort to action, those who would seek to understand what to do, how, and why. Philosophy has played a key role in helping us as a species to respond to the ecological emergency. What, then, is the practice of philosophy, given that we’re in an ecological emergency? This question is the thread, and it forms the framework for the dialogue that runs through the book. (shrink)

Despite its cultural prominence, shaming has been neglected in moral philosophy. I develop an overdue account of shaming, which distinguishes it from both blaming and the mere production of shame. I distinguish between two kinds of shaming. Agential shaming is a form of blaming. It involves holding an individual morally responsible for some wrongdoing or flaw by expressing a negative reactive attitude towards her and inviting an audience to join in. Non-agential shaming also involves negatively evaluating a person and inviting (...) an audience to join in. Yet it is not a form of blaming, because the shamer does not hold the target morally responsible for anything. For example, we non-agentially shame people for their body shapes, for having periods, or for being victims of rape. Non-agential shaming involves the expression of an emotionally toned objective attitude, like disgust. While agential shaming enforces social norms, non-agential shaming enforces social standards. (shrink)

:Space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer experiences. For in order for certain sensations to be related to something outside me , thus in order for me to represent them as outside and next to one another, thus not merely different but as in different places, the representation of space must already be their ground. Thus the representation of space cannot be obtained from the relations of outer appearance through experience, but this outer experience is (...) itself first possible only through this representation. 1Abstract:Der Raum is kein empirischer Begriff, der von äußeren Erfahrungen abgezogen worden. Denn damit gewisse Empfindungen auf etwas außer mir bezogen werden, imgleichen damit ich sie als außer und neben einander, mithin nicht bloß verschieden, sondern als in verschiedenen Orten vorstellen können, dazu muß die Vorstellung des Raumes schon zum Grunde liegen. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we (...) draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji’s phenomenology of aidagara (“betweenness”) and use his analysis in the contemporary context of online space. We argue that Watsuji develops a prescient analysis anticipating modern technologically-mediated forms of expression and engagement. More precisely, we show that instead of adopting a traditional phenomenological focus on face-to-face interaction, Watsuji argues that communication technologies — which now include Internet-enabled technologies and spaces — are expressive vehicles enabling new forms of emotional expression, shared experiences, (...) and modes of betweenness that would be otherwise inaccessible. Using Watsuji’s phenomenological analysis, we argue that the Internet is not simply a sophisticated form of communication technology that expresses our subjective spatiality (although it is), but that it actually gives rise to new forms of subjective spatiality itself. We conclude with an exploration of how certain aspects of our online interconnections are hidden from lay users in ways that have significant political and ethical implications. (shrink)

This paper situates the original choreography of Sacre as a basis for an ongoing exploration of non-Western themes in modern dance, a persistent fascination with the Orientalist ‘Other,’ before exploring the versions choreographed by Wigman, Bausch and Graham in chronological order of their first performances. In analysing different interpretations of the same score, two themes become apparent: first, that this piece heralded the birth of Modernism in classical dance performance, and second, that the driving anti-classical, anti-traditional rhythms that characterise the (...) piece communicate an enduring interest in primitive aesthetics. Accordingly, this discussion takes Nijinsky’s Sacre as a starting point in re-evaluating the influence of primitivism and Otherness on contemporary dance, and represents an early indication of the significance of the Saidian, non-Western ‘Other’ in shaping the evolution of avant-garde dance. (shrink)

This paper looks at the possibilities of using biographical research in social work focusing on the elderly. Social work with the elderly uses or should use biographical data to create individual plans for clients or for the purpose of sensory activation. Narrative interviews are a form of interaction between a senior client and a social worker. The social worker supports the senior’s narrative so they can view their life for themselves and explain its meaning from their own perspective. The use (...) of sensory activation in social work is only possible when the individual’s identity is supported by a sufficient amount of environmental stimuli, which can be achieved only by acquiring and analyzing data on the life events of the individual. The paper contains examples of the use of biographical data in social work with the elderly, which is essential for further structuring their lives. (shrink)

Anscombe thought that practical knowledge – a person’s knowledge of what she is intentionally doing – displays formal differences to ordinary empirical, or ‘speculative’, knowledge. I suggest these differences rest on the fact that practical knowledge involves intention analogously to how speculative knowledge involves belief. But this claim conflicts with the standard conception of knowledge, according to which knowledge is an inherently belief-involving phenomenon. Building on John Hyman’s account of knowledge as the ability to use a fact as a reason, (...) I develop an alternative, two-tier, epistemology which allows that knowledge might really come in a belief-involving and an intention-involving form. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding (...) to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. (shrink)

Craig Callender claims that ‘time is the great informer’, meaning that the directions in which our ‘best’ physical theories inform are temporal. This is intended to be a metaphysical claim, and as such expresses a relationship between the physical world and information-gathering systems such as ourselves. This article gives two counterexamples to this claim, illustrating the fact that time and informative strength doubly dissociate, so the claim cannot be about physical theories in general. The first is a case where physical (...) theories inform in directions that we have no reason to regard as temporal. The second is a case where our best physical theories fail to inform in directions that we have independent (pre-theoretic) reasons to regard as temporal. Taking these two cases into account suggests that the connection Callender makes between time and informativeness is perspectival. The second case demonstrates that although scientists often seek information in temporal directions, the behaviour of the physical world can present serious difficulties for finding it. In response, this article proposes a perspectival reading of Callender’s claim, according to which the connection between time and informative strength has more to do with the aims and objectives of science than the workings of the physical world. (shrink)

The twelve specially written essays in this volume investigate the neglected topic of mental action, and show its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. The essays investigate what mental actions are, how we are aware of them, and what is the relationship between mental and physical action.