Neither laziness nor its condemnation are new inventions, however, perceiving laziness as a social condition that afflicts a 'nation' is. In the early modern era, Ottoman political treatises did not regard the people as the source of the state's problems. Yet in the nineteenth century, as the imperial ideology of Ottomanism and modern discourses of citizenship spread, so did the understanding of laziness as a social disease that the 'Ottoman nation' needed to eradicate. Asking what we can (...) learn about Ottoman history over the long nineteenth-century by looking closely into the contested and shifting boundaries of the laziness - productivity binary, Melis Hafez explores how 'laziness' can be used to understand emerging civic culture and its exclusionary practices in the Ottoman Empire. A polyphonic involvement of moralists, intellectuals, polemicists, novelists, bureaucrats, and, to an extent, the public reveals the complexities and ambiguities of this multifaceted cultural transformation. Using a wide variety of sources, this book explores the sustained anxiety about productivity that generated numerous reforms as well as new understandings of morality, subjectivity, citizenship, and nationhood among the Ottomans. (shrink)

Kant develops a concept of savagery, partly characterized by laziness, to envision a program for human progress. He also racializes savagery, treating native Americans, in particular, as literal savages. He ascribes to this “race” a peculiar physiological laziness, a supposedly hereditary trait of blunted life power. Accordingly, while he grants them the same “germs” for perfections as he does the civilized Europeans, he allows them no prospect of actually fulfilling any such perfection. For the road to perfection must (...) be paved through industry, a condition that Kant denies to the “savages” by racializing their alleged laziness. This case will shed new light on the debated relation between Kant’s moral universalism and his racism. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning. Implicit in these accounts, but lacking elaboration, is a concern with reformulating the notion of ‘time’ and temporalities of academic life. Employing a coloniality perspective, this article argues that in order to reconnect our minds to our bodies and center embodied pedagogy in the classroom, we should disrupt Eurocentric notions of time that colonize our academic lives. I show how this (...) entails slowing down and ‘being lazy’. (shrink)

Public companies in the US stock market must annually report their activities and financial performances to the SEC by filing the so-called 10-K form. Recent studies have demonstrated that changes in the textual content of the corporate annual filing can convey strong signals of companies’ future returns. In this study, we combine natural language processing techniques and network science to introduce a novel 10-K-based network, named Lazy Network, that leverages year-on-year changes in companies’ 10-Ks detected using a neural network embedding (...) model. The Lazy Network aims to capture textual changes derived from financial or economic changes on the equity market. Leveraging the Lazy Network, we present a novel investment strategy that attempts to select the least disrupted and stable companies by capturing the peripheries of the Lazy Network. We show that this strategy earns statistically significant risk-adjusted excess returns. Specifically, the proposed portfolios yield up to 95 basis points in monthly five-factor alphas, outperforming similar strategies in the literature. (shrink)

This paper expands the model of rational action by introducing a new concept. rational laziness, to better understand actors’ decision making. In addition to rational information processing, human beings often rely on automatic and lion-cognitive mental capacities, and I use the term mental laziness to account for information processing based on these capacities. When time is limited, supply abundant, and decisions have to be made, mental laziness might be a rational decision device. Actors’ choice of rational-calculating or (...) automatic-spontaneous mental decision devices is contingent on their locations within an opportunity structure. The empirical case studied is employers’ hiring processes, and employers’ activation of these action generating mechanisms are expected to cause discrimination of job applicants categorized as out-groups members. (shrink)

What do we owe to the lazy? On the assumption that the lazy are a paradigmatic case of people who are worse off, when they are through a fault, or choice, of their own, one might suspect that the answer is: not very much. This article shows that this suspicion is simple-minded. Four notions of laziness are distinguished. It is then shown that these notions differ – even from a luck egalitarian perspective – in ways bearing on the question (...) of what is owed to the lazy. It is claimed that in some – but not all – cases, being lazy grounds a claim to compensation rather than forming a ground for withholding it. (shrink)

We give a constructive treatment of the theory of Noetherian rings. We avoid the usual restriction to coherent rings; we can even deal with non-discrete rings. We introduce the concept of rings with certifiable equality which covers discrete rings and much more. A ring R with certifiable equality can be fitted with a partial ideal membership test for ideals of R. Lazy bases of ideals of R [X ] are introduced in order to derive a partial ideal membership test for (...) ideals of R [X ]. It is then proved that if R is Noetherian, then so is R [X ]. (shrink)

The Logic of Partial Terms LPT is a strict negative free logic that provides an economical framework for developing many traditional mathematical theories having partial functions. In these traditional theories, all functions and predicates are strict. For example, if a unary function (predicate) is applied to an undefined argument, the result is undefined (respectively, false). On the other hand, every practical programming language incorporates at least one nonstrict or lazy construct, such as the if-then-else, but nonstrict functions cannot be either (...) primitive or introduced in definitional extensions in LPT. Consequently, lazy programming language constructs do not fit the traditional mathematical mold inherent in LPT. A nonstrict (positive free) logic is required to handle nonstrict functions and predicates. Previously developed nonstrict logics are not fully satisfactory because they are verbose in describing strict functions (which predominate in many programming languages), and some logicians find their semantics philosophically unpalatable. The newly developed Lazy Logic of Partial Terms LL is as concise as LPT in describing strict functions and predicates, and strict and nonstrict functions and predicates can be introduced in definitional extensions of traditional mathematical theories. LL is "built on top of" LPT, and, like LPT, admits only one domain in the semantics. In the semantics, for the case of a nonstrict unary function h in an LL theory T, we have $\models_T h(\perp) = y \longleftrightarrow \forall x(h(x) = y)$ , where $\perp$ is a canonical undefined term. Correspondingly, in the axiomatization, the "indifference" (to the value of the argument) axiom $h(\perp) = y \longleftrightarrow \forall x(h(x) = y)$ guarantees a proper fit with the semantics. The price paid for LL's naturalness is that it is tailored for describing a specific area of computer science, program specification and verification, possibly limiting its role in explicating classical mathematical and philosophical subjects. (shrink)

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this “selective laziness,” we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other people's arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials, they were presented with their own argument as if it (...) was someone else's. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else's argument, more than half rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people's arguments than of their own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when the arguments are someone else's rather than their own. (shrink)

It has been argued (for example, by Nelson Goodman and John Hyman) that ‘depicts’ and similar terms such as ‘is a picture of’ and ‘represents’ are semantically ambiguous: sometimes they are two-place predicates expressing a relation, and sometimes they are not. This article takes issue with this claim and develops an alternative theory according to which the ambiguity in question is pragmatic rather than semantic.

I recall an old man selling Paul Lafargue’s Right to be Lazy on a busy street in the Latin Quarter in the 1980s. At the time, I was writing then my first book on the history of work time and leisure and felt by seeing this strange and grumpy man so energetically promoting the nearly forgotten work of Marx’s son-in-law somehow vindicated in my efforts. Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet makes an interesting assumption: The “natural” state of human being was relaxation and (...) that only a century or so of propaganda convinced the naïve worker and labor movement to embrace the doctrine of the “right” to work. The industrial revolution had produced the craziness of workers’ overproduction and legions of savants and servants for the small utterly unbusy rich. Once freed from the illusion of the right to work, machines, Lafargue insisted, would liberate us all from the drudgery of labor and let us live as the ancient Greek philosophers had dreamed—but without the dependence upon slaves. Lafargue’s view was hardly unique for its day. Many in the late nineteenth century believed that overwork caused production gluts and the irrational excesses of the rich. Busyness was a false doctrine of modern capitalism that was devoted to endlessly extending and intensifying work. Before and after him, many fought to win freedom from busyness with the reduction of worktime. But Lafargue’s dream that mechanical progress would liberate humanity from labor hardly happened. Instead, the “overproduction” that ceaseless toil created was “absorbed” by mass consumption. Even the “wastefulness” of the rich and their minions came to be seen merely as indifferent contributions to the Gross Domestic Product. So what happened? (shrink)

A lie is neither a false proposition, nor a mistake, nor a mere fiction; it is a type of fiction, an act, and precisely an intentional act. An act calls for a subject, and therefore a lie is inseparable from its subject. Together, they make up a real object: it has to be real, since a lie produces effects, and the cause-effect relationship only holds between real beings. Like every real object, a lie unfolds in a (phenomenological) context. But there (...) is more: it identifies a (dialectical) context. (shrink)

The Lazy Argument, as it is preserved in historical testimonies, is not logically conclusive. In this form, it appears to have been proposed in favor of part-time fatalism (including past time fatalism). The argument assumes that free will assumption is unacceptable from the standpoint of the logical fatalist but plausible for some of the nonuniversal or part-time fatalists. There are indications that the layout of argument is not genuine, but taken over from a Megarian source and later transformed. The genuine (...) form of the argument seems to be given in different form and far closer to Megarian logical fatalism and its purpose is not to defend laziness. If the historical argument has to lead to a logically satisfactory solution, some additional assumptions and additional tuning is needed. (shrink)

Tekst ponuja interpretacijo kontra verze Kant—Constant. Kontroverze, ki jo je začel Constant v svojem spisu iz leta 1797, Des Reacton politiques, Kant pa seje nanjo odzval s kratkim tekstom "O domnevni pravici lagati iz človekoljubja", ki nosi isto letnico. Vprašanje "pravice do laži" zadeva tako problematiko prava kot problematiko etike, in v zadevnem tekstu se ga avtorica loteva z obeh perspektiv.

Drawing upon in-depth case studies of vacation habits and the observations of philosophers, writers, and sociologists such as Aristotle, Mark Twain and Thorstein Veblen, Al Gini argues why vacations are so venerated and why 'doing nothing' is a fundamental human necessity. From shopping sprees and extreme sports to the ultimate vacation - retirement - The Importance of Being lazy demonstrates that without true leisure, we are diminished as individuals and as a society.  .

We show the adequacy of axioms and proof rules for strict and lazy functional programs. Our basic logic comprises a huge part of what is common to the two styles of functional programming. The logic for call-by-value is obtained by adding the axiom that says that all variables are defined, whereas the logic for call-by-name is obtained by adding the axiom that postulates the existence of an undefined object for each type. To show the correctness of the axiomatization we do (...) not use denotational semantics and the adequacy of the evaluation of programs with respect to the semantics. Instead we use the standard term models based on call-by-value and call-by-name evaluation. We introduce a new method to prove on the syntactical level the monotonicity of the evaluation of functional programs with unbounded recursion. The direct method yields results concerning the proof-theoretic strength of the axiomatization. As a side result we obtain a syntactical proof of the context lemma for simply typed lambda terms with recursion. (shrink)

Sudaτ 134: Ταρσοὶ καλάμων. οἱ δὲ Λαζοὶ βόθρους ὀρύξαντες καὶ δόρατα τοῖς βόθροις ἐγκαταπήξαντες ταρσοῖς καλάμων καὶ ὕλῃ μὴ βεβαίαν ἐχούσῃ βάσιν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸ ἐπιφερόμενον ἄχθος ὀλισθαινούσῃ, τὰ στόματα τῶν ὀρυγμάτων ἐκάλυψαν· καὶ χοῦν ἐπιβαλόντες τά τε παρ’ ἑκάτερα χωρία γεωργήσαντες καὶ πυροὺς σπείραντες ἐτροπώσαντο τοὺς Ῥωμαίους. Ταρσοὶ καλάμων παρ’ Ἡροδότῳ ἡ τρασιά (πρασιάmss), οὗ ἐξήραινον τὴν πλίνθον.Frames of reeds. ‘The Lazi, having dug pits and securely fixed spears within them, concealed the openings of the holes with frames of (...) reeds and material that has no firm foundation but would give way to any load placed upon it; and having thrown earth on top and tilled the ground to either side and sewn wheat, they put the Romans to flight.’ Frames of reeds in Herodotus are the drying-rack, where they used to dry bricks.This entry in theSudacomprises three elements. First, the lemma Ταρσοὶ καλάμων, compared with the usual format of the lexicon, is atypical (though not unparalleled) both in being a two-word phrase and in lacking an explanatory gloss. The word ταρσός most frequently denotes various artefacts with a flat and/or interwoven structure, such as screens, baskets and mats, and by extension is used figuratively of surfaces that resemble wickerwork or basketry. The phrase ταρσοὶ καλάμων or καλάμου is otherwise attested, with somewhat different meanings, in only three ancient authors: Herodotus, Thucydides and Aeneas Tacticus. Second, an anonymous extract from an unidentified historical work supplies a sample usage of the headword phrase, in this instance a military ruse in which wicker screens are instrumental in concealing pits dug by the Lazi prior to an engagement with the Romans. The historical setting, the style and language of the extract, along with the known sources and methodology of the compiler(s) of theSuda, indicate that the quotation belongs to a classicizing historian of Late Antiquity. These issues will be examined below. Third, as testimony to an alternative meaning of ταρσοὶ καλάμων, the compiler adduces a gloss on Herodotus’Histories, which he drew from an earlier glossary of Herodotean usages. Here two problems arise. The definition of a drying-rack for bricks indicates that the original glossarist (and in turn theSudacompiler) did not in fact understand Herodotus’ technical description. In any case, the reading πρασιά, transmitted in all codices of theSuda, and accepted by Adler, should undoubtedly read τρασιά. (shrink)

PROBEX (PROBabilities from EXemplars), a model of probabilistic inference and probability judgment based on generic knowledge is presented. Its properties are that: (a) it provides an exemplar model satisfying bounded rationality; (b) it is a “lazy” algorithm that presumes no pre‐computed abstractions; (c) it implements a hybrid‐representation, similarity‐graded probability. We investigate the ecological rationality of PROBEX and find that it compares favorably with Take‐The‐Best and multiple regression (Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Research Group, 1999). PROBEX is fitted to the point (...) estimates, decisions, and probability assessments by human participants. The best fit is obtained for a version that weights frequency heavily and retrieves only two exemplars. It is proposed that PROBEX implements speed and frugality in a psychologically plausible way. (shrink)

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, because both share the conceptual persona of a (...) subject whose potentialities exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. In the second part of the essay I consequently argue that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

Too much contemporary bioethical discourse is weak on science, lazily citing and adopting science fiction scenarios rather than science facts in the framing of analyses and policies. We challenge bioethicists to take more seriously the role of providing informed insight into and oversight over contemporary science and its implications and applications. Bioethicists must work harder to understand the fast-changing truths and limits of basic science, and they must incorporate only appropriate and authentic science into their discourse, just as they did (...) in the past when addressing the quandaries of clinical medicine. The field of bioethics is not so old and entrenched that its future is assured. Bioethicists must make themselves useful to society in order to deserve and retain the public's trust. They can best do this by ensuring that decision making and public policy are grounded in facts, not fictions and fantasies. (shrink)

We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry--not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the unceasing improvement of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques (...) Rousseau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin, this book explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility. Whether in the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who delayed and procrastinated or in the subjects of Chardin's paintings who delighted in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand shows how eighteenth-century works provided a strong argument for laziness. Rousseau abandoned his previous defense of labor to pursue reverie and botanical walks, Diderot emphasized a parasitic strategy of resisting work in order to liberate time, and Joubert's little-known posthumous Notebooks radically opposed the central philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely postpone work. Unsettling the stubborn view of the eighteenth century as an age of frenetic industriousness and labor, The Pursuit of Laziness plumbs the texts and images of the time and uncovers deliberate yearnings for slowness and recreation. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. (shrink)

Melis Erdur has argued that there is something morally wrong with moral realism. Moral realism promotes morally objectionable lethargy by recommending that we accept moral knowledge that could be acquired effortlessly. This is morally objectionable, because morality requires us to be reflective about moral truths. I argue that the moral realist need not be worried, because if reflection about morality is a genuine value, the realist can accept this: moral realism entails no prescriptions about how one morally ought to acquire (...) moral knowledge. It is merely a metaphysical thesis about the ontological status of moral truthmakers. If we ought to be reflective, moral realism can accept this. Moreover, Erdur’s argument generalizes to moral anti-realism, so the moral realist in particular has nothing to worry about. (shrink)

Epistemic responsibility involves at least two central ideas. (V) To be epistemically responsible is to display the virtue(s) epistemic internalists take to be central to justification (e.g., coherence, having good reasons, fitting the evidence). (C) In normal (non-skeptical)circumstances and in thelong run, epistemic responsibility is strongly positively correlated with reliability. Sections 1 and 2 review evidence showing that for a wide range of real-world problems, the most reliable, tractable reasoning strategies audaciously flout the internalist''s epistemic virtues. In Section 3, I (...) argue that these results force us to give up either (V), our current conception of what it is to be epistemically responsible, or (C) the responsibility-reliability connection. I will argue that we should relinquish (V). This is likely to reshape our epistemic practices. It will force us to alter our epistemic judgments about certain instances of reasoning, to endorse some counterintuitive epistemic prescriptions, and to rethink what it is for cognitive agents to be epistemically responsible. (shrink)

In this chapter, DeYoung explores the vice of sloth and how its traditional conception differs from popular thought. Pulling from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, Augustine, and Aquinas, DeYoung reconnects sloth to its spiritual roots to see how this vice detracts from love.

Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is a neurological vision disorder that studies have shown to affect two to five percent of the population. Current methods of treatment produce the best visual outcome, if the condition is identified early in the patient's life. Several early screening procedures are aimed at finding the condition while the patient is a child, including an automated vision screening system. This paper aims to use artificial intelligence techniques to automatically identify children who are at risk for developing (...) the amblyopic condition and should therefore be referred to a specialist, i.e., pediatric ophthalmologist. Three techniques, namely, decision tree learning, random forest, and artificial neural network, are studied in this paper in terms of their effectiveness, using metrics of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The features used by the techniques are extracted from images of patient eyes and are based on the color information. The efficacy of pixel color data is investigated with respect to the measurement of the rate of change of the color in the iris and pupil, i.e., color slope features. A 10-fold stratified cross validation procedure is used to compare the effectiveness of the three AI techniques in this medical application domain. (shrink)

Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Frozen 2 (2019) are among the highest-grossing films of all time (IMDb 2021) and are arguably among the most influential works of fantasy produced in the last decade in any medium. The films, based loosely on Hans Christensen Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” (Andersen 2014) focus on the adventures of the sisters Anna and Elsa as they, together with their companions, seek to safeguard their people both from external threats and (importantly) from Elsa’s inabilities to control her (...) magical abilities to summon ice and snow. While Anna’s choices drive much of the action of both films, Elsa has undoubtedly been the more influential and popular of the two characters, as indicated by measures such as merchandise sales (Ellen Byron and Paul Ziobro 2014), Google search data (Play Like Mum 2020), and even baby name choices (Wolfers 2015). -/- Despite her popularity, Elsa is in many ways a paradoxical sort of hero, as she finds her actions all but predetermined by both external and internal forces. This is particularly the case in the first film, where we meet an Elsa who has been born with a power she cannot control, and which appears more as a force of nature than as anything that “belongs” to Elsa. The film’s action is driven, in large part, precisely by Elsa’s failures to exert control over her emotions and abilities. She begins the film by accidentally injuring Anna. This, in turn, causes Elsa to become fearful and withdrawn and to isolate herself from her sister, even after their parents die on a quest to find a cure for Elsa. Elsa's fear and lack of control lead to an even more dire outcome when she inadvertently calls down winter on Arendelle and abandons her people for the mountains. It is only through Anna's devoted quest to rescue her sister, first by pursuing her to the mountains, and later by throwing herself in front of the villainous Hans’ sword attack on her sister, that Elsa (and Arendelle) are saved. Elsa's most active contribution to this is to appreciate the import of Anna's sacrifice and to discover the power of "love" to overcome her fear. -/- What then, are we to make of Elsa as a character? It is the younger sister Anna who corresponds most closely to Gerda, the unquestioned protagonist of Andersen’s original tale, and her character arc fits neatly with the well-known “Hero’s Journey” model for describing myth (Campbell 2020). It is Anna, for example, who goes on a quest, meets a group of motley companions (the human Kristoff, the reindeer Sven, and the magical snowman Olaf), accepts advice from wise elders (the trolls), undergoes a severe trial, and even gets the "reward" of romantic love at the end. All of this has led some scholars (Niemiec and Bretherton 2015; Heit 2019) to hold up Anna, rather than Elsa, as something like the hero of the story. Existing scholarship on Elsa, by contrast, has focused largely on issues related to her gender and sexuality (Law 2014; Lee 2015; Steinhoff 2017; Streiff and Dundes 2017; Dundes, Streiff, and Streiff 2018; Dundes 2020; Llompart and Brugué 2020). In what follows, I’ll be taking a closer look at Elsa’s unique status as a protagonist, and what her struggles with fate reveal about the nature of free will and ethical responsibility. I’ll argue that Elsa provides a useful model of a “Stoic hero” and that her strengths and weaknesses as a character provide valuable insight into an often-misunderstood school of philosophy. My argument will proceed in several stages. I’ll begin by describing the basic tenets of Stoic philosophy, paying special attention to the role of fate and nature. I’ll then move on to a more detailed treatment of Stoic ethics, as exemplified by Elsa’s own character development. I’ll close by considering the infamous “Lazy Argument” against. (shrink)

El segundo y tercer poemario (The Fat Black Woman’s Poems [1984] y Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman [1989], respectivamente) de Grace Nichols, autora guyanesa residente en el Reino Unido desde 1977, se encuentran hermanados por el uso del humor. Criticada por valerse de este recurso, visto como un exceso de liviandad para tratar temas complejos como el pasado de esclavitud, la dura vida del inmigrante caribeño o la sexualidad femenina, Nichols revindica su utilización en tanto implica su adscripción a (...) la tradición antillana. En el presente trabajo, mediante el análisis de cuatro poemas (dos de cada libro), se explora cómo opera el humor en ambas obras y qué simplificaciones conlleva, poniendo especial énfasis en cómo la aparente liviandad que aporta es, en tanto tradición caribeña, otro modo de resistencia. (shrink)

I present an argument Marilyn Strathern makes against characterizing Elmdon villagers as innately lazy. It looks as if the eventual direction of this material is going to be a rational actor model.

This article is about alertness and depressive enactments in Seattle, Washington. It tracks depression and depressive disorder as something beyond a psychiatric diagnosis—more as a generative cultural analytic and mode of alertness that people use to track affect and a sense of ordinariness-gone-tilt. I argue that depressive enactments constitute a mode of alertness used to track something emergent, unknown, unpredictable, and often disruptive—affective currents that are sensed but not clearly understood. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted (...) in Seattle in 2003–2004, I draw on examples of the cultural performance and training of alertness across a range of registers and spaces—individual sufferers, community mental health clinic routines, and popular culture figures such as Kurt Cobain and the “slacker”— in order to demonstrate how disturbances in normative modes of alertness are contested and worked through. Alertness in Seattle operates as a window onto cultural impasses at work in ordinary habits and dispositions. Thus, I suggest that figures of mental illness, as well as the slacker, are enactments through which individuals disengage from the reiteration of those impasses and attempt to reshape and relearn habits. (shrink)

Tendo por base os pensamentos de dois importantes intelectuais franceses do século XX, este trabalho pretende perguntar pelo lugar da preguiça em tempos em que todos são cobrados por sua alta performance. Foucault mostra, em diferentes momentos, que tanto do ponto de vista moral como em relação aos processos econômicos, a preguiça foi reprovada, vigiada, controlada. Vemos isso, por exemplo, em seu curso “A sociedade Punitiva”, que a preguiça clássica dos séculos XVII e XVIII, vista como vício indolente e antiprodutivo (...) e combatida com força policial, passa, a partir do século XIX, para um tipo complexo de ilegalismo, que compromete a maximização da produção e do lucro e é contida com trabalho intenso e contínuo e com a vigilância moral sobre o trabalhador. Como se vê em Vigiar e punir, é a sociedade disciplinar e vigilante, que, atuando sobre os corpos, deve eliminar todo tipo de preguiça, a fim de que se possa extrair deles a maior utilidade possível. Já no curso “Nascimento da biopolítica”, ele nos ajuda a perceber que o modelo neoliberal deve banir a preguiça, na medida em que o que se busca, na economia de mercado, é a máxima eficiência. Concomitantemente aos cursos de Foucault, dedicados a questões do liberalismo e do neoliberalismo, Roland Barthes, numa entrevista intitulada “Ousemos ser preguiçosos”, de 16 de dezembro de 1979 ao jornal Le Monde, nos provoca a pensar que houve, no Ocidente, a perda da “instituição preguiça” em vista, principalmente, de certa obrigação de diversificação do tempo. Por isso mesmo, para nós, torna-se intolerável o “não fazer nada”; é preciso, a todo momento, inserir algo à vida. Palavras-chave: Preguiça. Tempo. Michel Foucault. Roland Barthes. (shrink)

It has been suggested, by Michael Bishop, that empirical evidence on human reasoning poses a threat to the internalist account of epistemic responsibility, which he takes to associate being epistemically responsible with coherence, evidence-fitting and reasons-responsiveness. Bishop claims that the empirical data challenges the importance of meeting these criteria by emphasising how it is possible to obtain true beliefs by diverging from them. He suggests that the internalist conception of responsibility should be replaced by one that properly reflects how we (...) can reliably obtain true beliefs. In this paper I defend the internalist account by arguing that Bishop has misinterpreted the relevance of the empirical evidence to the philosophical theory. I argue that the empirical data actually provides support for the idea that, if we want to obtain true beliefs by being responsible, we should aim to meet the criteria that internalists associate with epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

Abstract:This article argues that the first-person narrator and anti-hero of Anthony Burgess’s famous dystopia is far from being the symbol for human freedom he has traditionally been taken to be. Quite the opposite, he is to be seen as a symbol for human “self-imposed nonage” at every point of the novel: from his alleged rebellion to his farewell to rape and aggression in the final chapter. All of his apparent acts of freedom are determined by the dynamic interplay of biological (...) disposition and political exploitation. Burgess’s theory of freedom, however, is more sophisticated than Alex’s “turnspit freedom.” It is displayed in two minor characters, F. Alexander and the prison chaplain, modelled on Burgess and his cousin the Catholic Archbishop George Dwyer, respectively, who display “political awareness” that leads to decisions based on informed judgment. (shrink)

This article argues that the first-person narrator and antihero of Anthony Burgess's famous dystopia is far from being the symbol for human freedom he has traditionally been taken to be. Quite the opposite, he is to be seen as a symbol for human “self-imposed nonage” at every point of the novel: from his alleged rebellion to his farewell to rape and aggression in the final chapter. All of his apparent acts of freedom are determined by the dynamic interplay of biological (...) disposition and political exploitation. Burgess's theory of freedom, however, is more sophisticated than Alex's “turnspit freedom.” It is displayed in two minor characters, F. Alexander and the prison chaplain, modelled on Burgess and his cousin the Catholic Archbishop George Dwyer, respectively, who display “political awareness” that leads to decisions based on informed judgment. (shrink)