Umberto Eco oversat af Finn Frandsen, første gang bragt i Slagmark #5.

Le concept d’enseignement se trouve au centre des conférences faites par Levinas au Collège philosophique et récemment publiées. Cette notion est toujours présente dans Totalité et Infini, mais semble disparaître ensuite de la philosophie de Levinas. Le but de ce travail est de comprendre pourquoi cela a lieu. En faisant un détour par un texte de Levinas sur « Judaïsme et éducation » de la même période, il est possible de proposer que la notion d’éducation chez Levinas conduise à une (...) ambiguïté au regard de la position du soi responsable faisant qu’il oscille entre l’accusatif et le datif. Cette ambiguïté est la cause de son abandon plus tardif ou plutôt : elle est résolue par la transformation de l’éducation en une instruction non médiate pour laquelle la révélation de la loi est la figure paradigmatique. (shrink)

What does the history of Christian views of economic life mean for economic life in the twenty-first century? Here Daniel Finn reviews the insights provided by a large number of texts, from the Bible and the early church, to the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation, to treatments of the subject in the last century. Relying on both social science and theology, Finn then turns to the implications of this history for economic life today. Throughout, the book invites (...) the reader to engage the sources and to develop an answer to the volume's basic question. (shrink)

A 2017 Nature report was widely touted as hailing the arrival of the artificial womb. But the scientists involved claim their technology is merely an improvement in neonatal care. This raises an under-considered question: what differentiates neonatal incubation from artificial womb technology? Considering the nature of gestation—or metaphysics of pregnancy—(a) identifies more profound differences between fetuses and neonates/babies than their location (in or outside the maternal body) alone: fetuses and neonates have different physiological and physical characteristics; (b) characterizes birth as (...) a physiological, mereological and topological transformation as well as a (morally relevant) change of location; and (c) delivers a clear distinction between neonatal incubation and ectogestation: the former supports neonatal physiology; the latter preserves fetal physiology. This allows a detailed conceptual classification of ectogenetive and ectogestative technologies according to which the 2017 system is not just improved neonatal incubation, but genuine ectogestation. But it is not an artificial womb, which is a term that is better put to rest. The analysis reveals that any ethical discussion involving ectogestation must always involve considerations of possible risks to the mother as well as her autonomy and rights. It also adds a third and potentially important dimension to debates in reproductive ethics: the physiological transition from fetus/gestateling to baby/neonate. (shrink)

How has feminism changed in the UK since the 1960s? This was the question I set out to explore in my research on the British Women’s Liberation Movement, published as Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement. I found that the motivations and aspirations of activists today were similar to those reported by feminists of the Second Wave; but the methods and tactics were more professionalized and there was less of a focus on women-only space.

The phenomenological attitude is essential for practising phenomenology. Many refer to wonder and wonderment as basic attitudes and ways of being present with and listening to phenomena. In this article a critical view is placed on the typically psychologically-loaded language and tonality that is used by phenomenological researchers in the human sciences in order to describe the wonder and openness they try to be a part of when doing phenomenology. With reference to the difference between Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s views on (...) Socratic dialectics the author points to an ontological dimension in the phenomenology of wonder that cannot be reached by taking only an emotional-bodily-oriented approach (the psychological approach) or an aesthetical-intuitiveoriented approach (the late Heidegger poeticised philosophizing). Instead this dimension must be reached through a Socratic questioning and Community of Wonder. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

This collection of papers investigates the most recent debates about individualism and holism in the philosophy of social science. The debates revolve mainly around two issues: firstly, whether social phenomena exist sui generis and how they relate to individuals. This is the focus of discussions between ontological individualists and ontological holists. Secondly, to what extent social scientific explanations may and should, focus on individuals and social phenomena respectively. This issue is debated amongst methodological holists and methodological individualists. -/- In social (...) science and philosophy, both issues have been intensively discussed and new versions of the dispute have appeared just as new arguments have been advanced. At present, the individualism/holism debate is extremely lively and this book reflects the major positions and perspectives within the debate. This volume is also relevant to debates about two closely related issues in social science: the micro-macro debate and the agency-structure debate. -/- This book presents contributions from key figures in both social science and philosophy, in the first such collection on this topic to be published since the 1970s. -/- . (shrink)

We reflect upon quantification in biology in two ways. First, from a sensory scientific perspective, we address theories and methods for studying sensation, perception, and cognition. Sensory science concerns action of the human senses, which are not passive receivers but operate in an active and fundamental way for human beings in various social and environmental contexts. In the past one could only handle one-to-one relationships within a univariate framework. Today we have tools to capture complexity closer to real world situations. (...) Thus, the second perspective is rooted in multivariate thinking and modeling tools. Relying mainly on soft modeling-exploratory methods, such as partial least squares regression, we claim that quantification in sensory biology in the future should be met with a dialectic view that simultaneously exploits the two perspectives. (shrink)

Don Ihde’s paper “Stretching the in-between: Embodiment and beyond” appears to me as a stimulating, topical text with a number of important arguments about human embodiment as a dynamic and epistemically relevant dimension to scientific knowledge production. But, indirectly, the text also raises some basic questions about how to describe the (current) scope of technoscientific knowledge, and the potentials of postphenomenology to deal with this complicated, multi-stable issue.

Among the results of recent investigation of epistemic intuitions by experimental philosophers is the finding that epistemic intuitions show cultural variability between subjects of Western, East Asian and Indian Sub-continent origins. In this paper I ask whether the finding of this variation is evidence of cross-cultural variation in the folk-epistemological competences that give rise to these intuitions—in particular whether there is evidence of variation in subjects’ explicit or implicit theories of knowledge. I argue that positing cross-cultural variation in subjects’ implicit (...) theories of knowledge is not the only possible explanation of the intuitions, and I suggest other explanations, including the hypothesis that each subject’s implicit theory of knowledge might contain a heterogeneous set of heuristics for ascribing knowledge. Variation in intuitions, then, might be the result of within-subject heterogeneity rather than across-subject heterogeneity. (shrink)

This article explores the phenomenon of “phantom pain.” The analysis is based on personal experiences elicited from individuals who have lost a limb or live with a paralyzed body part. Our study reveals that the ways in which these individuals express their pain experience is an integral aspect of that experience. The material consists of interviews undertaken with men who are living with phantom pain resulting from a traumatic injury. The phenomenological analysis is inspired by Zahavi :151–167, 2001) and Merleau-Ponty. (...) On a descriptive level the metaphors these patients invoke to describe their condition reveal immense suffering, such as a feeling of being invaded by insects or of their skin being scorched and stripped from their body. Such metaphors express a dimension of experience concerning the self that is in pain and others whom the sufferer relates to through this pain, as well as the agony that this pain inflicts in the world of lived experience. This pain has had a profound impact on their lives and altered their relationship with self, others and the world. Their phantom pain has become a reminder of their formerly intact and functioning body; they describe the contrast between their past and present body as an ambiguous and disturbing experience. We conclude that these sensitive and personalized experiences of phantom pain illuminates how acts of expression—spoken pain—constitute a fundamental dimension of a first-person perspective which contribute to the field of knowledge about “phantom pain”. (shrink)

Much attention in the meaningful work literature has been devoted to calling as an orientation toward work characterized by a strong sense of purpose and a prosocial motivation beyond self-gain. Nonetheless, debate remains as to whether individuals change or maintain their calling, and especially whether they live their calling differently in different occupational stages. In this article, we respond to this conundrum through an analysis of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) occupation—substantiated by interviews with 57 CSR practitioners from Swedish international (...) companies who are living their calling. We demonstrate that social/commercial tensions affect these CSR practitioners, fueled by a divide between their social aspirations and the commercial goals, and prompt them to respond in a way that impacts how they construct the purpose of their work. Subsequently, we induce three stages of the CSR occupation—_early-, mid- and late-stage_—and conceptualize three types of purpose in each stage—_activistic_, _win–win_ and _corporate purpose_. By uncovering how and why CSR practitioners respond to social/commercial tensions and construct different types of purpose in each stage of the CSR occupation, we show that individuals can live the same calling in multiple ways. Hence, our article advances the meaningful work literature as well as studies of micro-CSR. (shrink)

This article explores the relevance of death to the value of life. After a preliminary discussion of the human experience of mortality, I consider Heidegger’s argument that death is a condition of authenticity, Sartre’s claim that death is an externality that is irrelevant because it cannot be lived and Simmel’s theory that death is a boundary that is transcended by life. While all theories have their merits, I suggest that Simmel’s approach, which articulates well with Levinas’s ethical critique of Heidegger, (...) offers important insight into our responsibility for other people and for the survival of other forms of life. (shrink)

In revisiting Durkheim’s humanism in recent years, attention has been drawn to his theory of moral individualism and the usefulness of his argument that a reformed democratic capitalism can reconcile individual freedom with collective constraint. This article investigates Durkheim’s understanding of the relationship between the individual and society in greater detail, showing in the process that his thinking was ambiguous and inconsistent. Although he flirted with the notion that capitalist modernity might actively foster and legitimize destructive forms of individualism, his (...) default position was to attribute anti-social drives to a human nature set loose by weak or inadequate social norms, and then to idealize liberal humanism as the ethical remedy for this normative deficiency. The article argues that the inconsistencies in his thinking are significant, however, because they testify to the underlying contradiction between the logic of capitalism and the ideals of moral individualism, and to the difficulty of locating the moral individual in a morally irrational world. (shrink)

Paraspeckles are nuclear condensates, or membranelees organelles, that are built on the long noncoding RNA, NEAT1, and have been linked to many diseases. Although originally described as constitutive structures, here, in reviewing this field, we develop the hypothesis that cells increase paraspeckle abundance as part of a general stress response, to aid pro‐survival pathways. Paraspeckles increase in many scenarios: when cells transform from one state to another, become infected with viruses and bacteria, begin to degenerate, under inflammation, in aging, and (...) in cancer. Cells increase paraspeckles by increasing transcription of NEAT1 and adjusting its RNA processing. These increases in NEAT1 are driven by numerous stress‐sensing signaling pathways, including signaling to mitochondria and stress granules, revealing crosstalk between the cytoplasm and nucleoplasm in the stress response. Thus, paraspeckles are an important piece of the puzzle in cellular homeostasis, and could be considered RNA‐scaffolded nuclear equivalents of dynamic stress‐induced structures that form in the cytoplasm. We speculate that, in general, cells rely on phase‐separated paraspeckles to transiently tweak gene regulation in times of cellular flux. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

This book explores how a sense of wonder and the musicality of silence can be a rehumanizing force in education, health and welfare, countering overly anthropocentric and instrumental worldviews. Wonder - in an aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual sense - brings human beings in resonance with the world again.

This is a particularly important time to be reconsidering and revisiting radical feminism. The contemporary visibility of trans rights movements, and the unsurprising, accompanying backlash from a variety of camps makes this a politically charged and tense moment for reflection on the herstory, present, and future of this school of feminism.

Generally, saying: ‘feminist’, is revolutionary enough in this day and age, it's far more of a statement now than it was back in the eighties. And no, I wouldn't say I was a Revolutionary Feminist now ‘cos I'm less separatist than I was at that time and I think it's got overladen with such baggage that I'd have to spend about ten minutes defining what I meant. (Interview with Al Garthwaite, Leeds, 20 January 2012).

Autonomy is considered to be an important feature of professionals and to provide a necessary basis for their informed judgments. In this article these notions will be challenged. In this article I use Michel Foucault's deconstruction of the idea of the autonomous citizen, and his later attempts to reconstruct that idea, in order to bring some new perspectives to the discussion about the foundation of professionalism. The turning point in Foucault's discussion about autonomy is to be found in his proposal (...) for an ethics of the self. This ethics invites a break with the normalising discourses of modernity. As I see it, this makes it particularly relevant to a discussion about the principles of professionalism. The conception of parrhesia is central. I use the role of the teacher to illustrate my arguments. (shrink)

In the novel A Burnout-Out Case, Graham Greene argues for an intimate relationship between burnout and happiness. The novel claims that a life worth living is a continuous balancing between something painful, e.g. burnout and something desirable, e.g. happiness. In this essay, I try to make a case for the happiness of burnout. By examining the case story of a young artist, who suffered from burnout, I describe how such suffering might open up for a necessary reevaluation of the values (...) that actually make sense. Such creation of new values is what eventually leads to more happy moments, not happiness per se. This essay provides a philosophical reflection regarding the relationship between happiness and burnout in order to say something regarding which life is worth living. (shrink)