No natal de 1872, Cosima Wagner, filha de Franz Liszt e esposa de Richard Wagner, é presenteada com um conjunto de cinco ensaios que abordavam temas diversos, relativos a um projeto de renovação da cultura alemã em que ela se engajara.

This article critically examines the 1992 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada on pornography (Butler v. the Queen). The decision, like the LEAF (Legal Education Action Fund), argues that the dehumanizing and degrading images of women in pornography undermine the achievement of gender equality and reinforce existing inequality. Section 15 of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms takes precedence over Section 2(b) freedom of expression. More immediately, Section 163(8) of the Criminal Code of Canada remains the primary instrument for (...) dealing with pornography. These arguments fail to distinguish between degradation and devaluation; they offer no evidence of a connection between pornography and its effects on gender stratification, nor do they feel obliged to offer such evidence despite the extensive literature on inequality by the social science community. Citing the Sears-Roebuck case on gender discrimination, the author demonstrates that the enemy of gender equality is the stereotype of the idealized traditional woman, not the one-dimensional lust-driven nymphomaniac of pornography. Her opposite is not the "stud" of pornography who is in a constant state of tumescence but "economic man" who sublimates his sexual passion in sports, cars, politics, and money. Censorship, it is suggested, infantilizes women and contributes to their dependency. The article comments on the doctrine of "balancing" rights and on the meaning of "equality" within a feminist context. The larger questions of a trend toward the legalization of cultural issues and the role of the judiciary (weak in European democracies but strong in the American tradition) are raised. (shrink)

Hegel's objection -- Is Kant's idealism subjective? -- An ambiguity in 'subjectivism' -- The epistemological problem -- The transcendental deduction of the categories and subjectivism -- Are Kant's categories subjective? -- Hegel's suspicion : Kantian critique and subjectivism -- What is kantian philosophical criticism? -- Hegel's suspicion : initial formulation -- A shallow suspicion? -- Deepening the suspicion : criticism, autonomy, and subjectivism -- Directions of response -- Critique and suspicion : unmasking the critical philosophy -- Hegel's transformation of critique (...) -- The rejection of Kantian critique : philosophy, skepticism, and the recovery of the ancient idea -- Hegel's epistemology in the shadow of Schelling -- Schulze's skepticism contra the critical philosophy -- Ancient versus modern skepticism : Hegel's difference -- Against the modern conception of rational cognition -- Against modern self-certainty -- The history of skepticism: decline into dogmatism -- Philosophy counter culture and time -- The return to Kantian critique : recognizing the rights of ordinary consciousness -- Two conceptions of philosophical critique -- The return to critique and the relation of philosophy to its history -- The rights of ordinary consciousness and the need for critique -- Critique as the realization of the science of metaphysics -- Hegel's self-transformational criticism -- Presuppositionless philosophy -- The problem of the criterion -- Self-transformational criticism -- The problem of the we' -- Our transformation -- Hegel's alternative model : critical transformation as self-realization. (shrink)

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes the interesting, but obscure claim that the normative constraints that constitute the objectivity of our representations have their source ultimately in transcendental apperception. Keller focuses on this claim. He interprets Kant’s condition of transcendental apperception as the claim that I must represent myself in an impersonal way, and he argues that impersonal self-consciousness is a necessary condition under which I can distinguish my particular take on things from the way things are independently (...) of my own perspective on them. He elaborates his interpretation and defense of the condition of transcendental self-consciousness by discussing its role in each of the central arguments in the Critique in which the notion importantly figures: the transcendental deduction in both the first edition and in the second, the Analogies of Experience, the Paralogisms, and the second-edition refutation of idealism. (shrink)

In this chapter, Thelma Zeno Lavine argues that the sociology of knowledge should subject the norms of knowledge to socio-historical analysis.

This volume illuminates the achievements of present-day social science insights. It merits a close reading by those for whom the history of ideas is a living entity.

Habermas' social philosophy can now be perceived in its oppositional structures and their symbolic meaning. His repetition of structural opposition finds its expression in the symbolism which pervades The Philosophic Discourse of Modernity in the opposition between the dreaded myth of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the redemptive fantasy of the path yet to be taken. More significant for the intellectual culture of modernity is the neglect, by erasure on the part of this esteemed philosopher, of the great drama of (...) philosophy in our time. This is the drama occasioned by the dialectical struggle, rushing to climax in the 20th Century, between Enlightenment reason and its Counterenlightenment opponent. The struggle between these philosophical constellations is refracted in the great wars of this century. Thus the drama of the philosophical thought of the century and its historical development is lost. The philosophic discourse of modernity has yet to be written. Its text, once it has been freed from the tenacity of ideological hostilities and their erasures and concealing circumlocutions, will at the same time provide the sought-for foundation for social philosophy and a just society: it is the philosophic framework of Modernity itself which is the foundation of all modern philosophies, in the dialectic of Enlightenment and its Counterenlightenment other. (shrink)

This paper examines discourses of stakeholders regarding global climate change to assess whether and how they construct industrial animal agriculture as posing a risk. The analysis assesses whether these discourses have shifted since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, a report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which indicated that the industrial animal agriculture sector as a whole contributes more to global climate change than the transportation sector. Using Ulrich Beck’s theorizing of the “risk society,” this paper examines (...) how various animal rights and welfare groups, environmental organizations, meat industry stakeholders, governmental agencies, and newspapers in Canada, the United States, and internationally investigate and construct industrial animal agriculture as a risk, if at all, and how their respective discourses conflict. The findings indicate that while some stakeholders acknowledge industrial animal agriculture’s contribution to global climate change, for the most part the problematization of animal agriculture has not increased since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, and the animal agriculture industry has seemingly not lost its power to “rationalize risk.”. (shrink)

The article discusses leadership enactment in medical emergencies. We draw on video recordings of simulated obstetric emergencies and investigate how senior clinicians ‘do being’ the leader discursively in the spatiomaterial context of the emergency room. We take an interactional analysis approach, combining conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics and look specifically into the ways in which professional roles do interactional control using directives and questions in the material space of the obstetric room. We discuss this interactional performance in relation to the (...) clinical performance of the teams. Our analysis shows that leadership in medical emergencies is multimodally achieved; professionals draw on discursive strategies, the affordances of material space, body and gaze orientation, which build on each other and converge in indexing leadership. Our findings highlight the situated nature of negotiating responsibility, illustrating that leadership in our context is claimed, projected and resisted discursively. We provide a typology of the functions of questions in the emergency encounter, and close the article by foregrounding the implications of our study and providing directions for further research. (shrink)

My analysis of political debate in the United Kingdom during the summer of 2016 unpacks the compression of two highly complex issues within an unprecedented moment in British politics: reinvestment in nuclear arms and nuclear energy during the EU referendum crisis. I recover unities and discontinuities across events in this period and throughout history both to examine the non-identity between the particular and the universal as a major trope in parliamentary rhetoric, which construed the universal sentiment of world peace and (...) denied this in terms of security, and to seek out the use of determinate negation, especially when it has bearing on the advancing of climate-related policies. From nuanced speeches in the House of Commons and House of Lords, I move tentatively outwards by gesturing to the moment of truth in reified concepts, seeking to pry them open in their non-identity with art objects of the Anthropocene that are understood within a context of ecological poetics. (shrink)

In South African slang ‘Half-Tiger’ refers to five rand, half of a ‘Tiger’ (ten rand) and amounts to approximately 60 US cents. It is at the ‘Half-Tiger’ level of commerce where contemporary and deeply afro-urban digital cultural practice is found. A mass street level culture that in East Africa is driven by the mobile phone as socio-political development tool. And in South Africa by a booming media industry that has been hacked and gone viral. These cultures augment music, fashion, politics (...) and social shifts with a digital aesthetic unique to each city. The article addresses mobile and digital culture in the two cities and compares the effect of mobile technology and its residue in the cultural practices of these very diverse urban environments. I will be addressing the work of key artists and musicians, looking closely at how they respond aesthetically and in a uniquely afro-urban way to a shifting engagement with digital mobile media and networked social practices. (shrink)

Paradoxically, loss is the only unconditional possession possible in elegy. A deep understanding of this phenomenon is to be found in long prose forms and lyricism of contemporary Australian writers. Turning the history of literature – from the Medieval to the contemporary – into a body of work more relevant to our ecological plight, in Kinsella’s corpus genres are consequences of textual events operating within an organic totality. This totality deconstructs the reference point for elegy: loss as the condition of (...) thought and experience. Sidestepping while matrixially reconfiguring traditional and experimental forms of writing, Kinsella’s engagement with genre exemplifies not only the undoing of the codes that constitute all possible readings of a text; it is an implicit critique of speech acts that tend to “fix” life into static nouns, reflecting our culture’s ideology of appropriation of nature. Within a critical counterpoint to appropriation, Australian writing can be read as both urging readers to remain alert to pastoral precedents yet avoid projecting genre onto texts. To some extent, elegy has been decolonised in Australian pastoral. (shrink)

This article takes Afrofuturism as a model for addressing the concerns for digital and technology arts practice in Africa. The focus is on a mechanism for decentralization of a centralized western worldview. Cyberfeminist notions from Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’; propositions for an African Science Fiction; and Bouriaud’s ‘Radicant’ are additionally taken into account to reflect similar mechanism in addressing the mechanisms of decentralization. All these act as speculative methods, which are applied to thinking about the concerns that come with contemporary Globalization. (...) The aim is to rethink these issues in globalisaton, particularly with regard to creative and cultural practice with communication technologies emanating from Africa. (shrink)