The politics of innovation involves displacements between various interrelated settings ranging from the context of design to the context of use. This variety of settings and their particular qualities raise questions about the democratic implications of displacements, which have been addressed within science and technology studies for decades from different perspectives and along various theoretical strands. This article distinguishes five different traditions of conceptualizing the relation between technological innovation and democracy: an intentionalist, a proceduralist, an actor—network, an interpretivist, and a (...) performative perspective. They differ in their concepts of “technology,” “politics,” and “democracy”; they imply different roles for the analyst and they suggest or urge other political means. It is suggested that spelling out the differences and similarities between the five perspectives creates the possibility to overcome the limitations of any particular perspective of technology and democracy. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the density of road traffic in the Global North decreased considerably. For those enjoying the resulting tranquillity, it prompted the hope that this experience would raise public noise awareness and alter mobility culture. Now that Global North economies are returning to pre-pandemic levels, however, not much appears to have changed. This article aims to contribute to understanding the persistence of the status quo by historically tracing discourse coalitions around traffic noise in the twentieth and early twenty-first (...) century. Discourse coalitions are connections between groups of actors that have opposing interests but share a specific set of storylines concerning a public problem. As we will show by focusing on the issue of traffic noise in the Netherlands, the long-term results of these discourse coalitions -in terms of discourse structuration, institutionalization and destabilization- tend to shift attention away from structural interventions in traffic flows. (shrink)

The Technology Assessment (TA) Program established in 2003 as part of the Dutch R&D consortium NanoNed is interesting for what it did, but also as an indication that there are changes in how new science and technology are pursued: the nanotechnologists felt it necessary to spend part of their funding on social aspects of nanotechnology. We retrace the history of the TA program, and present the innovative work that was done on Constructive TA of emerging nanotechnology developments and on aspects (...) of embedding of nanotechnology in society. One achievement is the provision of tools and approaches to help make the co-evolution of technology and society more reflexive. We briefly look forward by outlining its successor program, TA NanoNextNL, in place since 2011. (shrink)

In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the interplay between these two developments in a set of three case studies of fields of chemistry in the Netherlands. First, we describe how the conditions under which academic chemists work have changed since (...) 1975. Second, we investigate whether practical applications have become a source of credibility for individual researchers. Indeed, this turns out to be the case in catalysis, where connecting with industrial applications helps in many steps of the credibility cycle. Practical applications yield much less credibility in environmental chemistry, where application-oriented research agendas help to acquire funding, but not to publish prestigious papers or to earn peer recognition. In biochemistry practical applications hardly help in gaining credibility, as this field is still strongly oriented at fundamental questions. The differences between the fields can be explained by the presence or absence of powerful upstream end-users, who can afford to invest in academic research with promising long term benefits. (shrink)

Increased scrutiny of corporate legitimacy has sparked an interest in “historic corporate social responsibility”, or the mechanism through which firms take responsibility for past misdeeds. Extant theory on historic CSR implicitly treats corporate engagement with historical criticism as intentional and dichotomous, with firms choosing either a limited or a high engagement strategy. However, this conceptualization is puzzling because a firm’s engagement with historic claims involves organizational practices that managers don’t necessarily control; hence, it might materialize differently than anticipated. Furthermore, multiple (...) motivations could jointly affect managers’ approach to organizational history, especially when dealing with conflicting stakeholder demands, rendering it difficult to historicize consistently. Examining the relationship between the legitimacy of critical historic claims, corporate engagement with these claims and corporate legitimacy, the present paper performs a historical case study of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s (HBC) long term use of history in stakeholder relations. The data suggest that under conflicting internal and external pressures, the HBC’s engagement with historical criticism became “sedimented” over time, involving both open and stakeholder-inclusive practices of “history-as-sensemaking” and instrumental “history-as-rhetoric”. Enriching understanding of corporate-stakeholder interaction about the past, this finding may stimulate its generation of social value and corporate legitimacy. (shrink)

Research on meditation and mindfulness practice has flourished in recent years. While much of this research has focused on well-being outcomes associated with mindfulness practice, less research has focused on how perception of self may change as a result of mindfulness practice, or whether these changes in self-perception may be mechanisms of mindfulness in action. This is somewhat surprising given that mindfulness derives from traditions often described as guiding people to realise and experience the non-separation of self from the world (...) or its ‘oneness’ with the whole of reality. The current study used a collective intelligence methodology, Interactive Management (IM), to explore the nature of oneness experiences. Five IM sessions were conducted with five separate groups of experienced meditators. Participants generated, clarified, and selected oneness self-perceptions they believed most characterised their experience both during meditation and in their everyday experience in the world. Each group also developed structural models describing how highly ranked aspects of oneness self-perceptions are interrelated in a system. Consistent themes and categories of oneness experience appeared across the five IM sessions, with changes in the sense of space (unboundedness), time, identity, wholeness and flow highlighted as most influential. Results are discussed in light of emerging theory and research on oneness self-perception and non-dual awareness. (shrink)

Submission of study protocols to research ethics committees constitutes one of the earliest stages at which planned trials are documented in detail. Previous studies have investigated the amendments requested from researchers by RECs, but the type of issues raised during REC review have not been compared by sponsor type. The objective of this study was to identify recurring shortcomings in protocols of drug trials based on REC comments and to assess whether these were more common among industry-sponsored or non-industry trials.

ABSTRACTRecently, Cognition and Emotion published an article demonstrating that age cues affect the speed and accuracy of emotion recognition. The authors claimed that the observed effect of target age on emotion recognition is better explained by evaluative than stereotype associations. Although we agree with their conclusion, we believe that with the research method the authors employed, it was impossible to detect a stereotype effect to begin with. In the current research, we successfully replicate previous findings. Furthermore, by changing the comparative (...) context, Study 2 provides a first test of age-stereotypes affecting emotions recognition. We discuss recommendations for future studies in the domain of social categorisation and emotion recognition. (shrink)

In graphic novel format, explains the theories of various philosophers through humorous examples and anecdotes.

In graphic novel format, explains the theories of various philosophers through humorous examples and anecdotes.

Moral repair is an important way for firms to heal moral relationships with stakeholders following a transgression. The concept is rooted in recognition theory, which is often used to develop normative perspectives and prescriptions, but the same theory has also propelled a view of moral repair as premised on negotiation between offender and victim(s), which involves the complex social construction of the transgression and the appropriate amends. The tension between normative principles and socioconstructivist implementation begs the question how offending firms (...) should approach moral repair. Addressing this question, we develop a two-level conceptualization of moral repair, distinguishing between procedural and substantive levels of practice, which accommodate normativity and socioconstructivism, respectively. In so doing, we enrich the literature by 1) promoting conceptual clarity, 2) refining understanding of the moral repair process, and 3) suggesting the use of a unified, configurational approach to studying (nonlinear) relations between amends and moral outcomes. (shrink)

Social dilemmas occur when the pursuit of self-interest by individuals in a group leads to less than optimal collective outcomes for everyone in the group. A critical assumption in the human sciences is that people's choices in such dilemmas are individualistic, selfish, and rational. Hence, cooperation in the support of group welfare will only occur if there are selfish incentives that convert the social dilemma into a nondilemma. In recent years, inclusive fitness theories have lent weight to such traditional views (...) of rational selfishness on Darwinian grounds. To show that cooperation is based on selfish incentives, however, one must provide evidence that people donotcooperatewithoutsuch incentives. In a series of experimental social dilemmas, subjects were instructed to make single, anonymous choices about whether or not to contribute money for a shared “bonus” that would be provided only if enough other people in the group also contributed their money. Noncontributors cited selfish reasons for their choices; contributors did not. If people are allowed to engage in discussion, they will contribute resources at high rates, frequently on irrational grounds, to promote group welfare. These findings are consistent with previous research on ingroup biasing effects that cannot be explained by “economic man” or “selfish gene” theories. An alternative explanation is that sociality was a primary factor shaping the evolution ofHomo sapiens. The cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying such choices evolved under selection pressures on small groups for developing and maintaining group membership and for predicting and controlling the behavior of other group members. This sociality hypothesis organizes previously inexplicable and disparate phenomena in a Darwinian framework and makes novel predictions about human choice. (shrink)

This paper examines the vital role played by electron microscopy toward the modern definition of viruses, as formulated in the late 1950s. Before the 1930s viruses could neither be visualized by available technologies nor grown in artificial media. As such they were usually identified by their ability to cause diseases in their hosts and defined in such negative terms as “ultramicroscopic” or invisible infectious agents that could not be cultivated outside living cells. The invention of the electron microscope, with magnification (...) and resolution powers several orders of magnitude better than that of optical instruments, opened up possibilities for biological applications. The hitherto invisible viruses lent themselves especially well to investigation with this new instrument. We first offer a historical consideration of the development of the instrument and, more significantly, advances in techniques for preparing and observing specimens that turned the electron microscope into a routine biological tool. We then describe the ways in which the electron microscopic images, or micrographs, functioned as forms of new knowledge about viruses and resulted in a paradigm shift in the very definition of these entities. Micrographs were not mere illustrations since they did the work for the electron microscopists. Drawing extensively on primary publications, we adduce the role of the new instrument in understanding the so-called eclipse phase in virus multiplication and the unexpected spinoffs of data from electron microscopy in naming and classifying viruses. Thus, we show that electron microscopy functioned not only to provide evidence, but also arguments in facilitating a reordering of the world that it brought into the visual realm. (shrink)

The idea of progress was lent much importance by Collingwood, but it is difficult to elucidate his views on the idea. Considering his views of other related concepts -change, development, and process-aids the understanding of his idea of progress. Collingwood's treatment of the concept of historical progress shows a lack of consistency, when he denies on the one hand that ways of life can be grasped, while on the other he believes that historical periods may be understood. Collingwood denies the (...) possibility that historical periods can be compared, for each period is characterized and judged in terms of its own problems and the solutions it find's for them. It is possible to distinguish four different positions in Collingwood's attitude to the concept of progress: a) It is dependent on a point of view; b) It is meaningless when used in the realms of art, happiness, and morality; c) It is meaningful when applied to the identity of a certain problem; d) It is necessary in solving practical and theoretical problems. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that before the introduction of quantum mechanics, determinism was a straightforward consequence of the laws of mechanics. However, around the nineteenth century, many physicists, for various reasons, did not regard determinism as a provable feature of physics. This is not to say that physicists in this period were not committed to determinism; there were some physicists who argued for fundamental indeterminism, but most were committed to determinism in some sense. However, for them, determinism was often not (...) a provable feature of physical theory, but rather an a priori principle or a methodological presupposition. Determinism was strongly connected with principles of causality and continuity and the principle of sufficient reason; this thesis examines the relevance of these principles in the history of physics. Moreover, the history of determinism in this period shows that there were essential changes in the relation between mathematics and physics: whereas in the eighteenth century, there were metaphysical arguments which lent support to differential calculus, by the early twentieth century the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus led to concerns about its applicability in physics. The thesis consists of six papers. In the first paper, "On the origins and foundations of Laplacian determinism", I argue that Laplace, who is usually pointed out as the first major proponent of scientific determinism, did not derive his statement of determinism directly from the laws of mechanics; rather, his determinism has a background in eighteenth century Leibnizian metaphysics, and is ultimately based on the law of continuity and the principle of sufficient reason. These principles also provided a basis for the idea that one can find laws of nature in the form of differential equations which uniquely determine natural processes. In "The Norton dome and the nineteenth century foundations of determinism", I argue that an example of indeterminism in classical physics which has attracted attention in philosophy of physics in recent years, namely the Norton come, was already discussed during the nineteenth century. However, the significance which this type of indeterminism had back then is very different from the significance which the Norton dome currently has in philosophy of physics. This is explained by the fact that determinism was conceived of in an essentially different way: in particular, the nineteenth century authors who wrote about this type of indeterminism regarded determinism as an a priori principle rather than as a property of the equations of physics. In "Vital instability: life and free will in physics and physiology, 1860-1880", I show how Maxwell, Cournot, Stewart and Boussinesq used the possibility of unstable or indeterministic mechanical systems to argue that the will or a vital principle can intervene in organic processes without violating the laws of physics, so that a strictly dualist account of life and the mind is possible. Moreover, I show that their ideas can be understood as a reaction to the law of conservation of energy and to the way it was used in physiology to exclude vital and mental causes. In "The nineteenth century conflict between mechanism and irreversibility", I show that in the late nineteenth century, there was a widespread conflict between the aim of reducing physical processes to mechanics and the recognition that certain processes are irreversible. Whereas the so-called reversibility objection is known as an objection that was made to the kinetic theory of gases, it in fact appeared in a wide range of arguments, and was susceptible to very different interpretations. It was only when the project of reducing all of physics to mechanics lost favor, in the late nineteenth century, that the reversibility objection came to be used as an argument against mechanism and against the kinetic theory of gases. In "Continuity in nature and in mathematics: Boltzmann and Poincaré", I show that the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus in the nineteenth century led to concerns about its applicability in physics: through this development, differential calculus was made independent of empirical and intuitive notions of continuity and was instead based on mathematical continuity conditions, and for Boltzmann and Poincaré, the applicability of differential calculus in physics depended on whether these continuity conditions could be given a foundation in intuition or experience. In the final paper, "Determinism around 1900", I briefly discuss the implications of the developments described in the previous two papers for the history of determinism in physics, through a discussion of determinism in Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann. I show that neither of them regards determinism as a property of the laws of mechanics; rather, for them, determinism is a precondition for science, which can be verified to the extent that science is successful. (shrink)

Categorization is probably one of the most central areas in the study of cognition, language and information. However, there is a serious gap running through the semantic treatments of categories and concepts [3]. On one side we find the ’classical’, formal approach, based on logical considerations, that has lent itself well for computational applications. In this approach, concepts are defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On the other side is an informal approach to categorization that is usually motivated (...) by the results of psychological experiments and that has not found its way into technologies on a large scale. Concepts here are based on prototypes, stereotypical attributes and family resemblances, which have become the hallmark of cognitive semantics. Obviously, it is important to bridge this gap, for theoretical and practical reasons. (shrink)

This study addresses the question about which groups journalists in 12 European and two Arab countries feel that they are accountable to. In their daily work, journalists do not only face dilemmas about conflicting values, but they also have to make decisions about whose interests they should protect in the first instance. Academic scholarship has developed well argued discourses on pressure groups and conflicting interests, as well as on the various incentives that influence journalists' loyalties. The present study aims to (...) empirically analyze journalists' accountability perceptions and discuss what kinds of loyalty ideologies would be most widely disseminated by the professional community. Five profiles are constructed and analyzed based on a cluster analysis of responses from 1,215 journalists. (shrink)

The Society of Jesus has always been a highly “political” religious order. The context for its political thought was its engagement with higher-level education, its antiheretical, pastoral, and missionary activities, and its close relationships with secular rulers. Although there was no single, cohesive, or exclusively Jesuit political doctrine its members shared some premises: the (Thomist) premise that reason and revelation are complementary; that prudence is a pre-eminent virtue in all practical activity; and that the principles of good order (organization) are (...) the same for church, polity, and any other “body” or corporation (including the Society itself). Inferences could therefore be drawn from reason to revelation and from one kind of body to another. Reason and revelation concurred that the polity requires coordination of individuals to the common good by coercive authority, and therefore hierarchy and headship, although that headship need not be monarchical. However, like most of their contemporaries, Jesuits regarded monarchy as the best form of government. Although authority as such is natural and necessary, the element of consent is the political community’s freedom to choose its own form of government. The alterability of most laws implies an “absolute” ruler. However, the authority of any ruler or regime is limited by fundamental laws, natural and divine law, and the natural and legal rights of subjects, as well as the right or threat of tyrannicide. The Society’s antiheretical activities were centered on defending the ultimate authority of the papacy over the church, especially as supreme arbiter of controversies about faith and morals. Jesuit theologians defended the papal “indirect power” to intervene in secular government where the salvation of souls was involved. This could threaten the independent authority of secular rulers. However, the Society was normally highly sympathetic to the position of secular rulers; indeed Jesuit theologians and controversialists made substantial concessions to “reason of state.” Almost from the establishment of the Society of Jesus (1540), Jesuits have been involved with things political. The Society’s founders, preeminent among them Ignatius Loyola, had not intended this. However, their placing the Society at the papacy’s disposal, the remarkable gifts and educational attainments of its members, and its adaptability meant that even in the lifetime of the founding fathers (Ignatius died in 1563, Laínez his successor as superior general in 1565, and Salmerón, the last surviving founder, in 1586), its activities came to center on secondary- and tertiary-level education and antiheretical engagements, as well as retaining the original focus on foreign and domestic missions, and spiritual guidance. For all these activities, the Society needed patrons among prelates and secular rulers to fund and protect it, and in dealing with them it acquired a vast collective political experience, as well as political enemies. Its various engagements also demanded theoretical reflection about politics. (shrink)

The Victorian polymath William Stanley Jevons is generally and rightly venerated as one of the great innovators of economic theory and method in what came to be known as the 'marginalist revolution'. This book is an investigation into the cultural and intellectual resources that Jevons drew upon to revolutionize research methods in economics. Jevons's uniform approach to the sciences was based on a firm belief in the mechanical constitution of the universe and a firm conviction that all scientific knowledge was (...) limited and therefore hypothetical in character. Jevons's mechanical beliefs found their way into his early meteorological studies, his formal logic, and his economic pursuits. By using mechanical analogies as instruments of discovery, Jevons was able to bridge the divide between theory and statistics that had become more or less institutionalized in mid nineteenth-century Britain. (shrink)

John Calvin, 1509–1564, Reformer of Geneva, Frenchman, naturalized Genevan bourgeois 1559, authority for Reformed Christians throughout Europe, translator of the Bible into French, author of a famed theological text, the Institution (or Institutes) of the Christian Religion in successive Latin and French versions (first ed. 1536, last eds. 1559 (Latin), 1560 (French)), pastor, ecclesiastical organizer, bilingual preacher, and polemicist whose sermons and catechetical, controversial, and organizational works were very widely diffused.

Martin Luther was a German Reformer, theologian, translator of the Bible into German, priest, theology professor at the university of Wittenberg in Electoral Saxony, preacher and pastor, prolific author in both German and Latin, former Augustinian monk, and excommunicated by the papacy in 1521. His best known political doctrines are the Zwei Reiche/Regimente Lehre ; political obedience and hostility to rebellion and millennialism; endorsement of princely “absolutism”; the territorial “prince’s church” . Slightly less well known are his opposition to usury, (...) his anti-Jewish attitudes, his very “secular” interpretation of marriage and divorce, his doctrine of the three estates , his “congregational” tendencies in church government, and his belief that his was the “end-time” when Satan and Anti-Christ ruled the world. His principal political doctrines were not unfamiliar; they resemble Augustine’s conception of the two civitates, the medieval “two swords” controversy, and conventional doctrines of obedience and good order of his time. Luther, moreover, set out his political ideas in pamphlets prompted by specific emergencies, and never consolidated them in a definitive text. Some interpreters see them as an expression of “social conservatism” rather than as inferences from his theology. (shrink)

Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German Reformer, theologian, translator of the Bible into German, priest, theology professor (from 1512) at the university of Wittenberg in Electoral Saxony, preacher and pastor, prolific author in both German and Latin, former Augustinian monk, and excommunicated by the papacy in 1521. His best known political doctrines are the Zwei Reiche/Regimente Lehre (Two Kingdoms and/or Two Governments); political obedience and hostility to rebellion and millennialism; endorsement of princely “absolutism”; the territorial “prince’s church” (landesherrliches Kirchenregiment). Slightly (...) less well known are his opposition to usury, his anti-Jewish attitudes, his very “secular” interpretation of marriage and divorce, his doctrine of the three estates (the military, economic, and ecclesiastical), his “congregational” tendencies in church government, and his belief that his was the “end-time” when Satan and Anti-Christ ruled the world. His principal political doctrines were not unfamiliar; they resemble Augustine’s conception of the two civitates, the medieval “two swords” controversy, and conventional doctrines of obedience and good order of his time. Luther, moreover, set out his political ideas in pamphlets prompted by specific emergencies, and never consolidated them in a definitive text. Some interpreters see them as an expression of “social conservatism” rather than as inferences from his theology. (shrink)

A term of art, originally Italian, becoming common usage in other European vernaculars in the late sixteenth century. It meant practical reflection, albeit in writing and general in form, about all aspects of statecraft . It claimed practical usefulness in virtue of its grounding in experience and history, contrasting itself with “mirrors of princes,” which were supposedly ignorant of the realities of politics. More narrowly, reason of state meant a “Machiavellian” disregard for legal, moral, and religious considerations when the “interests (...) of the state” or “necessity” required it. Particularly contentious were the justifiability of dishonesty, duplicity, breach of faith and even treaty obligations, violence against opponents and competitors, illegal taxation, disregard of the claims of traditional institutions and officeholders, and the practice of religious toleration. Opponents of “reason of state” attempted to demonstrate that, on the contrary, adherence to religion, morality, and legality was the best policy, in that it earned providential rewards, but also that in strictly pragmatic terms it was most likely to bring political success. However, these proponents of “true reason of state” acknowledged that strict adherence to these norms was sometimes impossible, and when it was, statesmen must attempt to avoid the greater evil. Having become the subject of a vast literature and even a standard university topic, reason of state faded as an issue in the later seventeenth century. Realpolitik from the nineteenth century onwards resembles it, with the state representing a morality superior to the norms of legality and private morality, a view in turn contested by advocates of human rights and international morality. (shrink)

A term of art, originally Italian, becoming common usage in other European vernaculars in the late sixteenth century. It meant practical reflection, albeit in writing and general in form, about all aspects of statecraft (reason = reasoning, discussing, considering, but also a ground or justification for acting; state = government, the prince’s position, the institutional order of a “commonwealth” or “principality”). It claimed practical usefulness in virtue of its grounding in experience and history, contrasting itself with “mirrors of princes,” which (...) were supposedly ignorant of the realities of politics. More narrowly, reason of state meant a “Machiavellian” disregard for legal, moral, and religious considerations when the “interests of the state” or “necessity” required it. Particularly contentious were the justifiability of dishonesty, duplicity, breach of faith and even treaty obligations, violence against opponents and competitors, illegal taxation, disregard of the claims of traditional institutions and officeholders, and the practice of religious toleration. Opponents of “reason of state” attempted to demonstrate that, on the contrary, adherence to religion, morality, and legality was the best policy, in that it earned providential rewards, but also that in strictly pragmatic terms it was most likely to bring political success. However, these proponents of “true reason of state” acknowledged that strict adherence to these norms was sometimes impossible, and when it was, statesmen must attempt to avoid the greater evil. Having become the subject of a vast literature and even a standard university topic, reason of state faded as an issue in the later seventeenth century. Realpolitik from the nineteenth century onwards resembles it, with the state representing a morality superior to the norms of legality and private morality, a view in turn contested by advocates of human rights and international morality. (shrink)

Thomas Fitzherbert's two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (1606, 1610) was a rebuttal of unidentified Machiavellians, statists or politikes and their politics and policies. The work was apparently still well-regarded in the following century. Fitzherbert's objections to ‘statism’ were principally religious, and he himself thought the providentialist case against it unanswerable. But for those who did not share his convictions, he attempted to undermine Machiavellism on its own ground. Like both ‘Machiavellians’ and their opponents, he argued by inference from historical (...) examples, but with a particularly copious knowledge of historians ancient, medieval and modern to draw on. Equally, however, he deployed the principles of speculative (principally Aristotelian) ‘political science,’ as well as theology and jurisprudence, to demonstrate that the kind of knowledge that Machiavellians required to guarantee the success of their ‘reason of state’ policies was simply unobtainable. A particularly striking strategy (perhaps modelled on that of his mentor and friend Robert Persons) was Fitzherbert's attempt to demonstrate, on the Machiavellians’ own premises, that they advocated policies which were very likely to fail, and would be visited with divine punishments sooner as well as later, whereas policies that were compatible with faith and morals were also much more likely to succeed, even judged in purely human and ‘statist’ terms. (shrink)

As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science. Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions -- Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? -- from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, (...) evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom. The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth. The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization. -- Amazon. (shrink)

This book is about the interrelationship between nature, semiosis, metarepresentation and (self-)consciousness, and the role played by metarepresentation in ...

In this article, I examine the relation between Bateson and Guattari’s ecological thoughts: two thinkers whose ecological ideas at first sight have a lot in common. In order to show the difference between the thoughts of both thinkers, I will take my clue from Guattari’s remark that he parts ways with Bateson on the role of context. Explaining the role of context in both authors will allow me to show how Guattari’s thought implies both an endorsement and a critique of (...) cybernetics, and, specifically, promoting a machinic rather than cybernetic ecology. I will conclude by indicating what is at stake in this distinction. (shrink)

Over time, Mark Blaug became increasingly sceptical of the merits of the approach to the history of economics that we find in his magnum opus, Economic theory in retrospect, first published in 1962, and increasingly leaned to favour 'historical' over 'rational' reconstructions. In this essay, I discuss Blaug's shifting historiographical position, and the changing terms of historiographical debate. I do so against the background of Blaug's personal life history and the increasingly beleaguered position the history of economic thought found itself (...) in after the Second World War. I argue that Blaug never resolved the tensions between historical and rational reconstructions, partly because he never fleshed out a viable notion of historical reconstruction. I trace Blaug's difficulty in doing so to his firm conviction that the history of economics should speak to economists, a conviction clearly present in his 2001 essay: "No history of ideas, please, we're economists". (shrink)

This paper examines the self-measurement and self-tracking practices of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Genevese pastor and pedagogical innovator, François-Marc-Louis Naville, who extensively used Benjamin Franklin’s tools of moral calculation and a lesser known tool, Marc-Antoine Jullien’s moral thermometer, to set a direction to his life and to monitor and improve his moral character. My contribution sheds light on how technologies of quantification molded notions of personal responsibility and character within an emerging utilitarian context. I situate Naville’s use of these tools within his (...) work as a pastor in a parish of the Republic of Geneva and within the Genevese and Swiss pedagogical reform movement of the early nineteenth century. I provide a detailed examination of how Naville used and adapted Franklin’s and Jullien’s tools of moral accounting for his own moral and religious purposes. Time, God’s most precious gift to man, served Naville as the ultimate measure of his moral worth. (shrink)

Résumé Les questions d’échelle ont donné lieu à une large réflexion s’agissant de la modélisation et de l’expérimentation des systèmes physiques, mais elles n’ont pas été discutées dans le cadre des expériences économiques. Dans cet article, on distingue deux sortes d’expériences, les expériences « génériques » et « spécifiques ». Développant une comparaison entre deux études expérimentales en laboratoire portant sur l’« effet des prix postés », on montre que les questions d’échelle deviennent importantes dans les expériences spécifiques en raison (...) de la réduction aux dimensions du laboratoire de l’échelle de temps propre au marché cible. Cela impose des choix dans la configuration matérielle de l’expérience comme des changements de rôle pour les sujets expérimentaux. Notre discussion, donc, s’inscrit au sein de la littérature récente sur la validité externe et la matérialité des expériences. JEL Classification : B41, C90, L92, L98. (shrink)