The current text seeks to complement the concept of social outbreak referring to the political events of October 2019 in Chile with an idea of harmonization and utopian updating in affective-political terms. To do this, in the first place it will be established that it is possible to make a political-affective reading of the social outbreak, taking a detour through what would be the function of the affects in their political dimension, as articulators of communities, to later specify the affective (...) political sense in the context of our social outbreak. Secondly, it will be affirmed that, without denying the very idea of an explosion, at least in part there is also a decantation of a process of utopian harmonization and updating. To deploy these two statements, we will rely mainly on a 19th century author, Charles Fourier, who builds a materialist-affective theory that can provide important insights into our contingency. We will also carry out a reading of the RENACE intervention by Delight Lab to illustrate our thesis. (shrink)

Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice, whether that is about hip-hop music, romance novels, or film noir. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genres. Whether they are giving accounts of genres as such or of particular genres, genre talk abounds in philosophy as much as it does the popular discourse. As a result, theories of genre proliferate as well. However, in their accounts, philosophers have so far focused on capturing all (...) of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art. (shrink)

The role of China in the world economy is constantly growing. In particular we observe that it plays more and more important role in the support of theworld economic growth (as well as high prices of certain very important commodities). In the meantime the perspectives of the Chinese economy (as well as possible fates of the Chinese society) remain unclear, whereas respective forecasts look rather contradictory. That is why the search for new aspects and modes of analysis of possible development (...) of China turns out to be rather important for the forecasting of global futures. This article employs a combination of scientific methods that imply (a) the analysis at the level of Chinese economic model; (b) the analysis at regional level (at this level the Chinese economic model is compared with the regional East Asian model); (c) the analysis at the global level that relies on the modified world-system approach that allows to answer the question whether China will replace the USA as the global leader. It is important that the analysis is conducted simultaneously in economic, social, demographic, and political dimensions. As regards the analysis of specific features of the Chinese model as an especial type of the East Asian model (that is based on the export orientation, capital & technology importation, as well as cheap labor force), we note as organic features of the Chinese model the totalitarian power of the Communist Party and the immenseness of resources. As regards special features of the Chinese model, we note (in addition to “cheap ecology” and cheap labor force) and emphasize that China has a multilevel (in a way unique) system of growth driving forces, where, as opposed to developed states, the dominant role belongs not to native private capital, but to state corporations, local authorities and foreign business. This explains the peculiarities of the Chinese investment (or rather overinvestment), which determines high growth rate up to a very significant degree. A unique feature of the Chinese model is the competition of provinces and territories for investments and high growth indicators. As regards perspectives of the global hegemony of China, we intend to demonstrate that, on the one hand, economic and political positions of China will strengthen in the forthcoming decades, but, on the other hand, China, assuming all possible future success, will be unable to take the USA position in the World System. We believe that in a direct connection with the development of globalization processes the hegemony cycle pattern is likely to come to its end, which will lead to the World System reconfiguration and the emergence of its new structure that will allow the World System to continue its further development without a hegemon. Finally, the article describes some possible scenarios of the development of China. We demonstrate that China could hardly avoid serious difficulties and critical situations (including those connected with demographic problems); however, there could be different scenarios of how China will deal with the forthcoming crisis. We also come to the conclusion that it would be better for China to achieve a slowdown to moderate growth rates (that would allow China to go through the forthcoming complex transition period with less losses) than to try to return at any cost to explosive growth rates attested in the 2000s. (shrink)

Not only in its conceptual reconstruction but also in the straightforward application of Badioursquo;s thought its problems and tensions come to light. This paper thus sets out to identify a generic truth procedure in the domain of art; specifically within theatre starting out from the Meyerhold-event and tracing enquiries in the work of Artaud and Brecht. It turns out once one follows the lines of further enquiries one ends up sketching an explosive genealogy that gives rise to the concept of (...) an art of presentation transgressing the boundaries of theatre, art and philosophy. (shrink)

(1994). Perils of a modern Cassandra: Rhetorical aspects of public indifference to the population explosion. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 221-237.

In the mid-twentieth century when One-Dimensional Man was first published, the rapid advance of technology was already beginning to render “labor”—that is, what is known as “work”—superfluous. In 2016, half a century later, the process of “work” is being made largely redundant, if not “unnecessary”: the material truth of capitalist society that can never be uttered since as “work” disappears, so does what was one of its functional cornerstones. This article seeks to contribute to identifying some of the trends in (...) the early twenty-first century first outlined by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man fifty years ago, in critically defining One-Dimensional Society in 2016. (shrink)

In recent decades, the individual has become more and more central in both national and world cultural accounts of the operation of society. This continues a long historical process, intensified by the consolidation of a more global polity and the weakening of the primordial sovereignty of the national state. Increasingly, society is culturally rooted in the natural, historical, and spiritual worlds through the individual, rather than through corporate entities or groups. The shift has produced a proliferation and specification of individual (...) roles, accounting for what individuals do in society. It has also produced an expansion in recognized individual personhood, accounting for who individuals are in the extrasocial cosmos and fueling elaborated personal tastes and preferences. Where it has been contested, the shift to the individual has also produced a rise in specializing identities. These offer accounts of individuals' distinctive linkages to the cosmos, and they serve to bolster individual claims to standard roles and personhood. Over time, specializing identities tend to get absorbed into roles and personhood. And in turn, expanded roles and personhood provide further bases for specializing identity claims. Because many theorists mischaracterize the relationship of specializing identities to roles and personhood, the literature often overemphasizes the anomic character of the identity explosion and the closeness of the coupling between social roles and identity claims. On the contrary, specializing identities tend to be edited to remain within general rules of individual personhood and to be disconnected from the obligations involved in institutionalized roles. (shrink)

The development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has caused worldwide debate and has required us to reevaluate theories of social responsibility. This article, first, briefly discusses the progressive stages of social responsibility that scholars have outlined as they examine the history of businesses. Next an overview of the development of the DuPont corporation in the United States is presented, tracing DuPont’s transformation from an explosives and chemicals company into a life-science corporation and demonstrating how outside factors influenced this change. The (...) article then turns to the activities of the DuPont corporation in Brazil, a country with one of the world’s largest agricultural economies – and examines how the debate on GMOs is unfolding within the Brazilian context. It discusses how differing interest groups have taken part in this debate, the limits of their arguments, and the need to develop means for providing open collaborative efforts in evaluating new technologies. (shrink)

Inspired by contemporary criticism(s) levelled against evolutionist conceptions of history present within much classical social theory, this article seeks to discuss alternative conceptions of historical time, modernity, and coloniality within the works of Marxist-inspired thinkers who have sought to tackle the problematic aspects of evolutionism and ‘historical progress’ head on – namely, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon. After discussing orthodox Marxism’s ambivalent relation to notions of historical necessity and human agency, the article turns to discussing Gramsci’s anti-economistic conception (...) of hegemony and Benjamin’s and Fanon’s respective conceptions of the ‘dialectics of rupture’ in order to present alternative conceptions of historical time which partly or fully depart from orthodox Marxism’s tendencies towards evolutionism, albeit whilst retaining a focus on dialectics, power struggle, and revolutionary transformation. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest by companies in developing approaches to instill values in their decision‐making processes and to manage and report on their social performance. The emerging field of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting (SEAAR) is characterised by considerable differentiation not only in terminology, but also in methodology and focus. This article aims to analyse the key conceptual and methodological differences between internally focussed approaches to SEAAR, dealing with ethics (behavioural) issues, (...) and externally focussed approaches to SEAAR, dealing with social (stakeholder) issues. In their discussion of the benefits and potential pitfalls of exclusively internally or externally focussed approaches the authors suggest two organisational metaphors as heuristics – the Cultish and the Chameleon organisation. The authors then propose an integrative approach to SEAAR which will overcome this dissonance and initiate a mutually reinforcing process that, in the long‐term, can build both internal trust and cohesiveness and external credibility. The suggested approach is characterised as social and ethical alchemy since the aim is to achieve more than the sum of the two separate parts – a business ethics programme and a social reporting process – by creating leverage and synergy between the key components. (shrink)

Social systems are always exposed to critical processes in which their organization, or part of it, is questioned by the society that demands solutions through different critical saliences. The traditional approach to such social crises has mainly focused on their anticipation and management, implying that the focus is on trying to deal with crises once they occur, rather than delving in their essential characteristics that seemingly depend on the adaptive nature of the system and the increase in its internal complexity. (...) To address this issue, we propose a dual approach that utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to delve into the relationship between the complexity of the social system, its adaptation, and critical episodes. Our analysis shows how an explosive economic growth affects a social system, increasing its complexity. This complexity produces different demands from the system itself. These demands manifest signatures of complexity such as a heterogeneous and rich social structure, which emerges during moments when the society acts strongly. (shrink)

‘@AP: Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured’. So read a tweet sent from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account @AP, which affected financial markets, wiping out $136.5 billion of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s value. While the speed of the Associated Press hack crash event and the proprietary nature of the algorithms involved make it difficult to make causal claims about the relationship between social media and trading algorithms, we argue that it helps (...) us to critically examine the volatile connections between social media, financial markets, and third parties offering human and algorithmic analysis. By analyzing the commentaries of this event, we highlight two particular currents: one formed by computational processes that mine and analyze Twitter data, and the other being financial algorithms that make automated trades and steer the stock market. We build on sociology of finance together with media theory and focus on the work of Christian Marazzi, Gabriel Tarde and Tony Sampson to analyze the relationship between social media and financial markets. We argue that Twitter and social media are becoming more powerful forces, not just because they connect people or generate new modes of participation, but because they are connecting human communicative spaces to automated computational spaces in ways that are affectively contagious and highly volatile. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest by companies in developing approaches to instill values in their decision‐making processes and to manage and report on their social performance. The emerging field of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting (SEAAR) is characterised by considerable differentiation not only in terminology, but also in methodology and focus. This article aims to analyse the key conceptual and methodological differences between internally focussed approaches to SEAAR, dealing with ethics (behavioural) issues, (...) and externally focussed approaches to SEAAR, dealing with social (stakeholder) issues. In their discussion of the benefits and potential pitfalls of exclusively internally or externally focussed approaches the authors suggest two organisational metaphors as heuristics – the Cultish and the Chameleon organisation. The authors then propose an integrative approach to SEAAR which will overcome this dissonance and initiate a mutually reinforcing process that, in the long‐term, can build both internal trust and cohesiveness and external credibility. The suggested approach is characterised as social and ethical alchemy since the aim is to achieve more than the sum of the two separate parts – a business ethics programme and a social reporting process – by creating leverage and synergy between the key components. (shrink)

Sarah Grand was one of the most prominent New Women of the 1890s and a notable social purity feminist and suffragist. This collection offers important insights into the full range of her journalistic output and lesser-known fictional writings. It also makes available biographical and autobiographical material, and previously unpublished manuscript sources. The first volume reproduces Grand's articles and the contemporary critical reception of her work. The letters in volume two, written mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, shed light on Grand's (...) genesis as a writer and her interaction with 1890s artistic and feminist circles. The third and fourth volumes contain a selection of short stories from three collections published at and after the turn of the century. These comment on some of the explosive issues of that time: feminism, decadence, eugenics, class, race and war. They also reflect Grand's exploration of the interplay between gender and genre. (shrink)

Abortion, euthanasia, racism, sexism, pater­nalism, the rights of children, the population explosion, and the dynamics of economic growth are examined in the light of ethical principles by leading philosophers in order to suggest reasonable judgments. Originally prepared for the distinguished Wayne Leys Memorial Lecture Series at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, the essayists have addressed themselves to the most pressing ethical questions being asked today. William K. Frankena, Professor Emer­itus, University of Michigan, in “The Ethics of Respect for Life” argues (...) for a qualified view of moral respect for human personality. From his viewpoint it is always prima facie wrong to shorten or prevent human life, but not always actually wrong as other moral conditions may counter the presumed wrong. The late William T. Blackstone in “Zero Population Growth and Zero Economic Growth” contends that justice will require the production of the maximal level of goods to fulfill basic human needs com­patible with the avoidance of ecological catastrophe. Richard Wasserstrom, Professor of Phi­losophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, proposes an assimilationist ideal in “Racism, Sexism, and Preferential Treat­ment.” Gerald Dworkin, Professor of Phi­losophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, dares to ask “Is More Choice Better than Less?” Joel Feinberg, Professor of Phi­losophy at the University of Arizona, in “The Child’s Right to an Open Future,” offers a defense of “rights-in-trust” of children. Tom L. Beauchamp, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy In­stitute-Center for Bioethics of Georgetown University, considers the paternalism used to justify social policies in the practice of medi­cine and insists that it invariably involves a conflict between the ethical principles of be­neficence and autonomy. (shrink)

Few phenomena have found such divergent descriptions in sociological lit­ erature as have social inconsistencies. They were studied by George Herbert Mead as eruptive "natural" events constituting a social temporality. Alfred SchUtz described them as "explosions" of the individual actor's anticipatory action patterns. Talcott Parsons attempted to grasp social inconsistencies into his frame of "pattern variables," while Erving Goffman dealt with them as disruptions of "fostered impressions of reality" maintained by one or the other dominant team. The present study traces (...) these divergent approaches back to various un­ checked assumptions concerning the structure and the constitution of social types. Thus, to further clarify the relationship between social types and the relevance structure of interactional situations has been my first objective. This initially rather limited intention widened when the role of social incon­ sistencies for analysing the differences between play, game, and social action proper in the immediate context of social interaction became apparent. The structure of social inconsistencies seems to hold a key to unifying the theo­ ries of play and social,action. (shrink)

Chronic deficiencies of the Greek welfare state and the introduction of austerity measures as part of the international financial bailout agreements have created an explosive cocktail of poverty and social exclusion that severely tested the resilience of the frail social safety net and the demands of equity. The score on the indicators of social quality has worsened considerably as the Greek welfare system was overhauled. This article examines the four conditional factors of social quality from the viewpoint of socio-economic policies (...) and everyday experiences in Greece during the crisis. (shrink)

Stress and anxiety can both influence risk-taking in decision-making. While stress typically increases risk-taking, anxiety often leads to risk-averse choices. Few studies have examined both stress and anxiety in a single paradigm to assess risk-averse choices. We therefore set out to examine emotional decision-making under stress in socially anxious participants. In our study, individuals (N= 87) high or low in social anxiety completed an expanded variation of theBalloon Analogue Risk Task(BART). While inflating a balloon to a larger degree is rewarded, (...) a possible explosion leads to (a) a loss of money and (b) it is followed by an emotional picture (i.e., a calm vs. an angry face). To induce stress before this task, participants were told that they would have to deliver a speech. We operationalized risk-taking by the number of pumps during inflation and its functionality by the amount of monetary gain. In addition, response times were recorded as an index of decisional conflict. Without the stressor, high socially anxious compared to low socially anxious participants did not differ in any of the dependent variables. However, under stress, the low socially anxious group took more risk and earned more money, while high socially anxious individuals remained more cautious and did not change their risk-taking under social stress. Overall, high socially anxious individuals made their decisions more hesitantly compared to low socially anxious individuals. Unexpectedly, there were no main effects or interactions with the valence of the emotional faces. This data shows that stress affects socially anxious individuals differently: in low socially anxious individuals stress fosters risk-taking, whereas high socially anxious individuals did not alter their behavior and remained risk-averse. The noveleBARTis a promising research tool to examine the specific factors that influence decision-making. (shrink)

In the classic study Little science, big science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), Derek Price traces the historical shift from what he calls little science?exemplified by early?modern ?invisible colleges? of scientific amateurs and enthusiasts engaged in small?scale, informal interactions and personal correspondence?to 20th?century big science, dominated by professional scientists and wealthy institutions, where scientific information (primarily in print form and its analogues) was mass?produced, marketed and circulated on a global scale. This article considers whether the growing use of more (...) participatory, interactive ?Web 2.0? technologies and social media in science today (e.g. wikis, blogs, tagging and bookmarking, conferencing, etc.) may signal a revival of little science modes of communication that contrast with big science conventions that continue to dominate research policy, scientific institutions, and the publishing industry. A brief historical review of responses to the scientific ?information explosion? since the early 1900s is presented, with a particular focus on the idealization of large?scale, automated information systems and the privileging of formal (document?producing) over informal (interpersonal) modes of scientific communication. Alternative frameworks for scientific communication that incorporate both documents and interaction are used to examine contemporary examples of so?called Science 2.0 and citizen science projects to determine whether such projects indicate the emergence of new modes of communication in science that bridge the immediacy and involvement of invisible colleges and the rigor of peer?reviewed publishing. The implications for traditional documentary forms such as the journal article are also discussed. (shrink)

The explosion of health-related costs in U.S. firms over more than a decade is a huge concern for managers. The initiation of Health and Safety programs at the firm level is an adequate Corporate Social Responsibility initiative to contain this evolution. However, in spite of their documented efficiency, firms underinvest in those programs. This appears as a puzzle for health economists. In this paper, we uncover a strong negative relation of financial leverage to the implementation of H&S programs. The (...) negative impact of debt on investment and CSR activities is generally interpreted as an efficient disciplinary effect of debt on managers. H&S are particularly well suited to revisit this evidence, given their strong profitability and homogeneity across firms. Very interestingly, the negative effect is stronger for firms with high free cash flows, for which debt is used to prevent overinvestment. This strongly suggests that debt, while disciplining managers, also discourages investments which are valuable both for firms and society. (shrink)

Sociological explanations of racism tend to concentrate on the structures and dynamics of modern life that facilitate discrimination and hierarchies of inequality. In doing so, they often fail to address why racial hatred arises (as opposed to how it arises) as well as to explain why it can be so visceral and explosive in character. Bringing together sociological perspectives with psychoanalytic concepts and tools, this text offers a clear, accessible and thought-provoking synthesis of varieties of theory, with the aim of (...) clarifying the complex character of racism, discrimination and social exclusion in the contemporary world. (shrink)

De un tiempo a la actualidad el denominado modelo chileno se encuentra en jaque. Las exigencias de la sociedad civil chilena se vuelven palpables por las calles de nuestro país. La molestia y, por consiguiente, protesta social, ha tomado cada vez más fuerza y adhesión entre quienes no se sienten representados en lo más mínimo ni por el Estado ni por la clase política, generando como resultado diferentes frentes de conflictividad, tales como activistas ecológicos, trabajadores del cobre, estudiantes secundarios y (...) universitarios, profesores y el pueblo mapuche entre otros, que han desembocado en la amplia impopularidad y rechazo del ahora Presidente de Chile, Sebastián Piñera. No obstante, la dicotomía generada es interesante. Mientras en el foro interno del país se sucede una histórica protesta social de proporciones por la amplia brecha de desigualdad, éste refleja una pujante economía, cuyos indicadores macroeconómicos lo muestran como los mejores de América Latina. (shrink)

While the proliferation of social media technologies in China has empowered the public with new opportunities for public expression and political engagement in a ‘virtual public sphere’, Chinese Internet censorship has meant that users have to develop creative ways to engage in political criticism. In a context where both mechanical and human censors are employed, Chinese users have become adept at utilizing the affordances of technology, Chinese language and cultural resources to express their opinions through social media. Drawing upon data (...) from the Chinese microblogging website, Weibo, surrounding the major chemical explosions in 2015 in Tianjin, the study explores three discursive techniques of indirection by Chinese social media users to express political criticism in the context of censorship. The study highlights that through the creative use of quotation, allusion and irony, users challenged the authority’s official narratives of the event. The study not only demonstrates the pluralization and dynamics of Chinese online expression, but also points to a better understanding of Chinese censoring as a continuingly evolving interplay between technology and cultural forms and between layers of government and users. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need to post (...) content as a way of making sense of the situation and for gathering reactions of consensus from friends. This paper describes three types of informational context—weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional—which have not yet been taken into account by current measures to curb down the informational disorders. I show how these contexts are related to the infodemic and I propose measures for dealing with them for future global crisis situations. (shrink)

Worldwide, there is renewed public and political attention focused on public health fueled by the globally explosive H1N1 pandemic. Pandemic planning emerged as a major area for public action in the absence of an overarching ethics framework appropriate for the community and population focus of public health. Baylis, Sherwin, and Kenny propose relational personhood and relational solidarity as core values for a public health ethics. The Catholic faith tradition makes three useful contributions in support of a relational ethic: first, a (...) religious ontology that aligns with the view that human persons are inherently relational; second, a coherent account of the requisite social and communal ideals and structures that this belief demands; and third, inspiration and motivation for the attitudes and actions that are required in response to a relational ontology. (shrink)

This dissertation fits within the literature on subordinating speech and aims to demonstrate that how language subordinates is more complex than has been described by most philosophers. I argue that the harms that subordinating speech inflicts on its targets (chapter one), the type of authority that is exercised by subordinating speakers (chapters two and three), and the expansive variety of subordinating speech acts themselves (chapter three) are all under-developed subjects in need of further refinement—and, in some cases, large paradigm shifts. (...) I also examine cases that have yet to be adequately addressed by philosophers working on this topic, like the explosion of abusive speech online (chapter four) or the distinctive speech acts of protest groups (chapter five). I argue that by considering these alongside the ‘paradigm’ cases of subordinating speech that inform most models, we are better able to capture the lived realities of this phenomena, as described by members of groups targeted by such speech. I develop a novel account of speaker authority to explain the variety of pragmatic effects subordinating speech generates. Instead of seeing this authority as reducible to either a formal position or a merely local, linguistic phenomenon, I argue for a conception of speaker authority that is a richly contextual social fact, distributed unevenly among members of different social groups. I also develop an account of collective authority that explains how a group of speakers can join together to subordinate in a way that no individual speaker is capable of doing. This account, I argue, is better able to explain the social reality of subordinating speech than individualist models. Overall, I show how a more fine-grained account of subordinating speaker authority gives us a more accurate picture of the different subordinating speech acts available to different speakers, along with how these may harm their targets. (shrink)

Bataille and Blanchot figure among the authors who influenced Foucault the most. In this article we show how close Foucault was to these authors and to what extent his proximity to them permitted him to deviate from the prevailing university culture, i.e from those great philosophical machines called Hegelianism and phenomenology. The questions we pose are the following: How important were these experiences for Foucault? How did he receive them? How did he transform their theoretical stakes? In the first part (...) of this article we argue that the encounter with Bataille’s work and Blanchot’s was for Foucault a kind of experience of the self. In Bataille and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself: it is a project of desubjectivation and of destruction of the notion of the foundational subject and system in philosophy. The second part focuses on the contemporary experience of the death of God. According to Foucault, such an experience discloses the limitless reign of the Limit. We show how the work of Bataille, his discovery of the categories of irreversible expenditure, death, sacrifice, excess, limit, negativity pushes the system beyond its limit. In the third part we take into account the literary experience of Blanchot. According to Foucault, Blanchot’s work focuses on the disappearance of the subject: the being of language emerges in the exclusion of the subject. How is it possible to have a language stripped of dialectics? (shrink)

With the growing success of right-wing populism, there has been an explosion of debates on polarization and social cohesion. In part, social cohesion is seen as being disrupted by right-wing populists and those who blame migration for this alleged disruption of cohesion. The developing polarization is not only social, but also political, so that in some cases there is already talk of a new cleavage. On the one hand, there are right-wing populists, people who do not want any major (...) changes or who have problems with globalization; on the other hand, there are those who want to push through a transformation towards a ‘truly’ pluralistic society. Two issues in particular serve as bridges for this polarization: Muslim migration and the expansion of sexual and gender diversity. Positions on these two issues mark the content that facilitates the consolidation of opposing group identities. As a result, debates about values and identity dominate, leading to a polarization that reaches far into society. (shrink)

The ethical implications of the explosion of social media outlets for social work education are explored in this paper. Given that social work education has a dual focus, both of educating students and of socializing practitioners into the profession, the issue of the blurring between what is social and what is professional gains particular salience for both educators and students. Recommendations for educators to ethically address the need to maintain a consistent professional presence online and to avoid potentially harmful (...) dual relationships with students are presented. These recommendations include: abstain from using social media or use only a static professional profile; use only university protected sites to promote collaboration with students in the classroom including all students to avoid any appearance of impropriety; use social media with the utmost discretion mindful of all the risks by creating a very select circle of friends, separating one’s personal site from one’s professional site; develop policies which include not friending any individual student or any current student and inform students about the policies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing these poems (...) straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)

Since COVID-19 is a global-scale pandemic, it can only be solved on the global level. In this context, intercultural dialogues are of utmost importance. Indeed, different models of traditional ethics might be of assistance in constructing a new, global ethics that could help us confront the present predicament and prepare for other possible global crises that might await us in the future. The explosive, pandemic spread of COVID-19 in 2020 clearly demonstrated that in general, one of the most effective tools (...) for containment of the epidemics is precisely human and interpersonal solidarity, which must also be accompanied by a certain degree of autonomous self-discipline. The present paper follows the presumption that these types of personal and interpersonal attitudes are—inter alia— culturally conditioned and hence influenced by different traditional models of social ethics. In light of the fact that East-Asian or Sinic societies were more successful and effective in the process of containing and eliminating the virus compared to the strategies of the Euro-American regions, I will first question the widespread assumption that this effectiveness is linked to the authoritarian political traditions of the Sinic East and Southeast Asian areas. Then, I will critically introduce the Confucian ethics of relations, which in various ways has influenced the social structures of these regions, and clarify the question of whether and in which way the relics of this ethics had an actual effect on the crisis resolution measurements. The crucial aim of this paper is to contribute to the construction of theoretical groundworks for a new, transculturally grounded global ethics, which is more needed today than ever before. (shrink)

The explosion of the first atomic bomb at the Alamagordo Bombing Range, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, was the start of a new era, the dawn of the atomic age. The preliminary work on atomic fission was done before the last world war, and as military leaders visioned its great destructive possibilities, several countries entered the race to be the first to harness atomic fission for military purposes. Our own country gambled two billion dollars, and with the aid (...) of certain European scientists and in collaboration with England and Canada, succeeded in developing a fission chain reaction that made possible the atomic bomb. (shrink)

During the second half of the 20th century several American multidisciplinary social science „disaster research groups“ conducted numerous field studies after earthquakes, factory explosions and “racial riots”, both inside and outside of the United States. Their aim was to investigate the reactions and behavior of individuals, organizations and communities to disasters. All of these groups were either promoted or at least partly founded by different branches of the US military. This article will analyze the groups’ studies and findings on the (...) question of disasters’ psychological effects. The main focus will be on the stance the scientists took on the diagnosis of psychological trauma—especially Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—and the post disaster therapeutic interventions that became widespread in the 1970s and early 1980s. The disaster researchers questioned the need for, as well as the effectiveness and efficiency of “disaster mental health”. At the same time they advocated early ideas of resilience, which later became one of the most important concepts in disaster management and beyond. (shrink)

From the invention of the alphabet to the explosion of the internet, Dominic Wyse takes us on a unique journey into the process of writing. Starting with seven extraordinary examples that serve as a backdrop to the themes explored, it pays particular attention to key developments in the history of language, including Aristotle's grammar through socio-cultural multimodality, to pragmatist philosophy of communication. Analogies with music are used as a comparator throughout the book, yielding radically new insights into composition processes. (...) The book presents the first comprehensive analysis of the Paris Review interviews with the world's greatest writers such as Louise Erdrich, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Ted Hughes, and Marilynne Robinson. It critically reviews the most influential guides to styles and standards of language, and presents new research on young people's creativity and writing. Drawing on over twenty years of findings, Wyse presents research-informed innovative practices to demonstrate powerfully how writing can be learned and taught. (shrink)

En este trabajo, nos aproximaremos a las disputas de las memorias, que generó el intento gubernamental de borrar las expresiones artísticas plasmadas por el Estallido Social, en los muros del Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral. Las protestas que comenzaron el 18 de octubre del 2019 y que se extendieron hasta las marchas feministas del 8 y 9 de marzo del 2020, generaron varias interrogantes a partir de la explosión del pasado: ¿Qué tipo de desobediencia civil protagonizan las memorias? ¿Qué hacer cuando (...) el campo de acción de estos movimientos sociales, reivindica y logra instalar sus símbolos en el espacio público? Esta aproximación la haremos revisitando el pasado del GAM, que ya enfrentó intentos gubernamentales por borrar connotaciones anteriores, así podremos comprender por qué este Centro Cultural es un espacio en disputa y un patrimonio difícil. (shrink)

Si l’« explosion sociale » chilienne a rassemblé une série de mouvements sociaux, il est certain que les féminismes ont joué un rôle fondamental dans l’établissement de revendications contre les abus, les inégalités et la précarité de la vie. Malgré l’échec du rejet de la nouvelle Constitution, cet article approfondit deux normes minimales historiques que les féministes ont réussi à établir au niveau institutionnel et social : la parité dans la participation politique et la condamnation généralisée de la (...) violence à l’égard des femmes. (shrink)

The article offers a new interpretation of the technique and its evolution. The ideas about the technique of Aristotle, F. Bacon, P. Engelmeir, N.Berdyaev are analyzed, as well as the understanding of nature, on the basis of which the technique is comprehended and conceptualized. The author's hypothesis is that it is necessary to distinguish between two fundamentally different understandings of technology and the lines of its development: one, where technology is understood as engineering and conceptualized within the framework of the (...) first nature, and the other, technology as technology, conceptualized within the framework of the idea of the second nature. In addition, the author shows that in the twentieth century there is a convergence of both lines of technology development, entailing a synthesis of engineering and technology. The atomic project is given as an illustration. On the basis of the proposed ideas, an explanation of the peculiar explosion of the development of technology in the XIX and XX centuries and the emergence of technoprime is outlined. To analyze the features of the second nature, the work of Dmitry Efremenko is considered, who suggests the genesis of megamachines, distinguishing between their two main types and outlining the third. Another component of the second nature is technology, in which, in addition to the sequence of operations and the conditions that ensure them, the author highlights the division of labor, attitudes to economy, standardization and quality of products, research and optimization or restructuring of production activities. In conclusion, the article points out three consequences of the synthesis of engineering and technology, as well as the crisis of technology in modernity: the need to revise ideas about nature, technology and the modern project, as well as the importance of studying the second nature. (shrink)

Genetics today have occupied among sciences the privileged role of physics and chemistry of the beginning of this century. This explosive scientific field influences crucially various disciplines, among them life sciences and informatics. Moreover, it imposes “de facto” dramatic changes to our individual and collective life style, thus influencing the whole framework of our civilisation. The intensive involvement of the global economy in the progress of the research and the dissemination of its applications, arises ethical issues to be arranged.The danger (...) of reappearance of Eugenic ideologies and practices does threaten the contemporary society. Anthropology has to contribute more intensively in the cultivation of a humanistic and moral nurture, necessary for the new framework of principles, efficient for the technological society of the 21st century. (shrink)

When is it a good time to think about time? The answer provided by this essay is that there is no time like the present, especially the crazy, tense present of the year 2020. In this year four distinct scales of temporality have collided in a prolonged period of crisis and uncertainty: (1) the onset of a global pandemic that devastated the world economy and killed over a million people, the worst public health disaster since the Spanish flu of 1918; (...) (2) a political crisis featuring the rise of authoritarian governments around the world that threatened to overturn two centuries of efforts to secure stable representative democracies, centered in the rise of a would-be tyrant and demagogue in the US; (3) an explosive social movement centered in the endemic condition of systemic racism in the US; (4) a global environmental crisis that threatens the stability of the planetary ecological system as a sustainable habitat for thousands of species, including the human. Quarantined in monkish isolation by the pandemic, the author has engaged in a set of reflections on these convergent time scales. Instead of the classic (and unanswerable) philosophical question “What is time?” this essay reflects on the ways we picture time in metaphors, figures, personifications, and diagrams. In an anachronistic gathering of images of time from ancient and modern sources, the essay attempts to replace the ontology of time with an iconology that may provide some useful tools for finding our way through this epochal crisis. (shrink)

Aron-Sartre, Foucault-Deleuze, Ricoeur-Derrida, Derrida-Lévinas... D'où sont nées ces amitiés entre des philosophes qui ont marqué leur temps? En quoi ces "couples" sont-ils absolument singuliers et que nous disent-ils de leur époque et de ses enjeux intellectuels? "Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi", écrivait Montaigne à propos de l'amitié qui le liait à La Boétie, s'exclamant également : "O mes amis, il n'y a nul amy! " S'appuyant sur leurs correspondances, des écrits peu connus, des récits de témoins, François (...) Dosse lève le voile sur l'intimité de ces relations marquées par une proximité affective qui n'exclut pas jalousies et rivalités, rancœurs et haines recuites. L'intensité des joutes le dispute au caractère spectaculaire des réconciliations, parfois à titre posthume. A travers ces itinéraires croisés, c'est toute la seconde partie du XXe siècle qui nous est restituée, avec ses controverses, ses déchirures, ses explosions sociales..."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

La société contemporaine connaît de nombreux conflits qui tendent à mettre à mal le vivre-ensemble harmonieux. Le pluralisme qui caractérise les sociétés contemporaines est souvent considéré comme étant l’origine de ces conflits. C’est pourquoi le libéralisme consensualiste cherche une sorte d’entente permanente entre les différentes oppositions au sein de la société afin de résorber ces conflits et ainsi d’éviter l’explosion sociale qui demeure une menace incessante. Seulement le consensualisme ne semble pas être si efficace pour mettre fin aux (...) conflits sociaux qui s’accroissent de plus en plus. Pire, l’on a l’impression qu’au lieu d’être une voie d’apaisement social, le consensualisme constitue plutôt une source supplémentaire de conflits. C’est la raison pour laquelle le consensus falsifiable apparaît de nos jours comme une alternative plus adaptée aux réalités des sociétés contemporaines pour atténuer ces conflits. (shrink)

“Rethinking of philosophy to-day”, from my point of view, means new understanding of the “basic truths” of philosophy in their use in the analysis of actual social problems of the modern swiftly changing world. One of such actual problems is the problem of a nation that is the most stable social unit, representing a unity of a human and social being, and in this context a human being is understood as a national human being. Only in such a role becomes (...) an element of a social structure of a society. It is not correct to oppose the culture, common to all humanity, and the concrete culture of an individual that is national culture. The essence of culture – the totality of spiritual values - is in its penetration from the culture common to humanity, into the national culture and inversely. There are two tendencies in the world development to-day: integration, mainly in the sphere of economics, and disintegration in national-state sphere, that not always takes place in a peaceful form. It is important to find scientifically based answers to the following questions: whether national traits of social life will always be the source of tension and conflicts or they will bring bright, original vital colors into the picture of a globalized world? In general, can explosive social elements be always formed in the socio-ethnic structure of a society? The answers to these questions are formulated in the sphere of natiology - in the interdisciplinary sphere ofscientific knowledge about a nation, that realizes an important function of natiological education and upbringing. (shrink)

Emergency has two areas of meaning the one derived from the Anglism emergen-cy, the other that includes all meanings connectable to what emerges. COVID19 emergency is exemplary of both areas. A semiotics of emergence observes the process of explosion, veridification and normalization of phenomena that burst into cultural systems. The analysis of social discourses on the pandemic has pro-vided elements to identify semantic oppositions, through which we have outlined a system of meaning relations.

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this (...) thesis is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us. (shrink)

The explosion of interest in consciousness among scientists in recent decades has led to a revival of interest in the work of Whitehead. This has been associated with the challenge of biophysics to molecular biology in efforts to understand the nature of life. Some claim that it is only through quantum field theory that consciousness will be made intelligible. Most, although not all work in this area, focusses on the brain and how it could give rise to consciousness. In (...) this paper, I will support this challenge, but I will suggest that the focus of work in this area reflects the failure to fully overcome the assumptions of Cartesian thought, associated above all with a defective understanding of consciousness as a ‘thinking substance’. Firstly, as Bergson, Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty argued, consciousness is embodied. Secondly, as Jacob von Uexküll argued, consciousness is only comprehensible in relation to the organism’s world defined as such by the organism. Thirdly, in the case of humans, this is a ‘with-world’, a world shared with others. The consequent social nature of human consciousness is better captured by the German word for mind: Geist, which also translates as ‘Spirit’. And as Hegel argued, along with Subjective Spirit, there is also Objective Spirit, the realm of institutions, and Absolute Spirit, the realm of culture, with Subjective, Objective and Absolute Spirit being conditions, and even components, of each other. My argument is that this broader notion of mind as Spirit should be embraced, but without abandoning the work in biophysics. What is required is a further expansion of the notion of mind and Spirit as humanity comes to appreciate that it is part of nature and that it is through the development of institutions and culture that nature, through human subjects, is becoming conscious of itself and its significance. The development of process philosophy inspired by Whitehead, associated with the development of the concepts of field and ecology, should be seen as a development of the semiosphere and the advance of the Spirit of Gaia, essential for the creation of a global civilization able to augment the life of the current regime of the global ecosystem of which we are part. It is to orient humanity to create an ecologically sustainable civilization; an ecological civilization. (shrink)