The present article dwells on the idea of the empowerment of women as it was used by the Communist regime. Eugenics, a field much discussed in inter-war Romania, was the main tool in controlling women. The principles of this science, related to the idea of biology as destiny, were adopted and applied so that the private sphere became public. My thesis is that even if these principles were used in the communist strategy in order to strengthen the nation, in fact, (...) their core aspect – reproduction – became only a means for increasing work force and in the end weakened the family and implicitly the nation. (shrink)

This study examined the relationship between the perceived fairness of the assessment process and the intention of participants to appeal the process, while taking into consideration the influence of two personality traits. Specifically, two of the Big Five traits, neuroticism and agreeableness, were included in the model, based on their special importance in predicting “anger-like” reactions similar to that triggered by unfairness. This study builds on the theoretical integration of the two dominant frameworks of organizational justice, and on two separate (...) empirical studies that use different methodologies : a personnel selection simulation and a study of an academic examination process. The pattern of results was similar in both studies. Neuroticism was not detected as a moderator based on the significance of the interaction term, but conditional effect analysis identified the specific area of scores where neuroticism was found to have a buffer effect on intention to appeal. Agreeableness weakens the relationship between perceived fairness and intention to appeal. However, contrary to our expectation, high agreeableness does not decrease but rather increases the probability of appealing the assessment process when it is perceived as unfair, thus providing evidence for the Pollyanna myth, i.e., that highly agreeable individuals are more likely to react to and appeal unfairness. (shrink)

The Vagrant scholar -- Doxa -- Practical reasoning -- Epideictic -- The polis.

This paper discusses the relation between the human security paradigm and the cosmopolitan democracy scenario as models for humanizing and changing the current international system and transforming it in a global security and development system centered on the individual rather than on the nation state. The main idea for which I argue is that the human security paradigm and the changes it determined in international relations (especially through the responsibility to protect principle) are compatible with the cosmopolitan democracy scenario for (...) changing and transforming the current international system. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper investigates how the distribution of negative polarity items can inform our understanding of the underlying semantic representation of constituent questions. It argues that the distribution of NPIs in questions is governed by the same logical properties that govern their distribution in declarative constructions. Building on an observation due to Guerzoni and Sharvit that strength of exhaustivity in questions correlates with the acceptability of NPIs, I propose a revision of the semantics of questions that can explain this link in (...) terms already familiar from the literature of negative polarity, namely the availability of a local downward entailing environment. I argue for a new theory of questions that takes strength of exhaustivity to be encoded internal to the question nucleus rather than in different answer-hood operators. This switch, while conceptually a simple move, has far-reaching consequences in the domain of questions. I also show how this new analysis can account for a host of issues related to NPIs, such as the subject–object asymmetry noted by Han and Siegel, the interaction between NPIs and high versus low wh-adjuncts, the varying acceptability of NPIs in the restrictor of which-phrases, and the contrast between weak and strong NPIs. (shrink)

Moral emotions (i.e. guilt, shame) and interpersonal processes such as fairness have been theorised to facilitate cooperation within society. However, empirical tests to support this association have yielded inconsistent results. The present research investigated whether guilt and shame have an impact on fairness-related decision-making and reciprocity-driven cooperation. College students (N = 94) were assigned to one of three experimental conditions (Guilt vs. Shame vs. Control) and instructed to complete an iterated Ultimatum Game against two anonymous partners. We manipulated social context (...) so that one partner would appear as predominantly fair, and the other as predominantly unfair. For guilt, we found that participants (assigned as proposers) reciprocated fair partners with significantly larger amounts of money (i.e. positive reciprocity). For shame, we found that participants had higher rejection rates of unfair splits, and subsequently offered less money to unfair partners (i.e. negative reciprocity). We argue that both guilt and shame benefit fairness-related judgments, guilt by endorsing fairness, and shame by punishing unfairness. Our results also show that guilt and shame benefit reciprocity-driven cooperation, although they do so via different pathways. Our findings suggest that guilt promotes cooperation via positive reciprocity, whereas shame stabilises cooperation via negative reciprocity. (shrink)

As Larry Laudan pointed out in the 1970s, in a convincing attempt to revive Auguste Comte’s positive philosophy, one overlooked aspect of Comte’s nineteenth-century philosophy of science was his categorical rejection of causal notions and their explanatory role in physical science. For example, Comte was skeptical about Laplace’s interpretation of Newtonian mechanics and the expansion of Laplace’s model of particles and forces to electricity, magnetism, and heat. But Laudan himself was not very clear on how Comte’s overall skepticism about causation (...) was modern rather than, say, naive. Much earlier, John Stuart Mill made the case that Comte was in fact confused about the notion of cause, which impeded Comte from distinguishing between “metaphysical” and “physical” causes and which stemmed from a narrow and uncritical attachment to Comte’s antimetaphysical program. This article is an attempt to argue against Mill that Comte was not naive: he envisioned a construction of physical theories that did not need to rely on causal notions. By stressing this point, I hope to make more transparent the sense in which Comte’s rejection of causation in physical science had a “modern ring about it.”. (shrink)

Drawing on Husserlian resources and existentialist and hermeneutical approaches, this book argues that critique is largely a question of method. It shows that phenomenological discussions of social and political problems draw from a tradition of radically critical investigations in epistemology, social ontology, political theory, and ethics.

Regression testing is applied whenever a code changes, ensuring that the modifications fixed the fault and no other faults are introduced. Due to a large number of test cases to be run, test case prioritization is one of the strategies that allows to run the test cases with the highest fault rate first. The aim of the paper is to present an optimized test case prioritization method inspired by ant colony optimization, test case prioritization–ANT. The criteria used by the optimization (...) algorithm are the number of faults not covered yet by the selected test cases and the sum of severity of the faults. The cost, i.e. time execution, for test cases is considered in the computation of the pheromone deposited on the graph’s edges. The average percentage of fault detected metric, as best selection criterion, is used to uncover maximum faults with the highest severity, and reducing the regression testing time. Several experiments are considered, detailed and discussed, comparing various algorithm parameter’s alternatives. A benchmark project is also used to validate the proposed approach. The obtained results are encouraging, being a cornerstone for new perspectives to be considered. (shrink)

Many have deemed ineluctable the tension between Husserl’s transcendental eidetics and his Crisis method of historical reflection. In this paper, I argue that this tension is an apparent one. I contend that dissolving this tension and showing not only the possibility, but also the necessity of the successful collaboration between these two apparently irreconcilable methods guarantees the very freedom of inquiry Husserl so emphatically stressed. To make this case, I draw from Husserl’s synthetic analyses of type and concept constitution as (...) well as his later work on sedimentation and streaming-in and develop a richer modal taxonomy than the one Husserl proposed. I employ this taxonomy in an examination of the structures and conditions for the possibility of transcendental eidetic variation in order to show this method’s reliance on historically sedimented epistemic and normative resources. This reliance brings to light the necessity for a methodological critique, which is precisely what I take to be the work of teleological–historical reflection as Husserl comes to conceive it in the Crisis. (shrink)

Husserl’s extensive analyses of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and of the imagination (Phantasie) offer insightful and detailed structural explications. However, despite this careful work, Husserl’s discussions fail to overcome the need to rely on a most problematic concept: mental images. The epistemological conundrums triggered by the conceptual framework of mental images are well known—we have only to remember the questions regarding knowledge acquisition that plagued British empiricism. Beyond these problems, however, a plethora of important questions arise from claiming that mental images (...) are structural moments of imaging and imagining. Any attempt to clarify the structure and conditions for the possibility of aesthetic experience must first provide an unambiguous account of pictorial depiction—a task unattainable through the mental images discourse. Similarly, exposing the import of the imagination for theoretical scientific inquiries (be they positive or eidetic) requires an initial explication of the structure of this consciousness; this explication, however, must address our ability to imagine non-spatially determined objects—something the conceptual framework of mental images utterly fails to accomplish. In this paper I argue against Husserl’s reliance on mental images in his phenomenological analyses of imaging and imagining and propose an alternative structural account for both. This account is free of this reliance and able to steer clear of its insidious implications for epistemology, aesthetics, and methodological reflections. By closely following the development of Husserl’s account I suggest alternative descriptions while building on Husserl’s important work. (shrink)

In Yesterday's Self, Andreea Ritivoi explores the philosophical and historical dimensions of nostalgia in the lives of immigrants, forging a connection between current trends in the philosophy of identity and intercultural studies. The book considers such questions as, Does attachment to one's native culture preclude or merely influence adaptation into a new culture? Do we fashion our identity in interdependence with others, or do we shape it in a non-contingent frame? Is it possible to assimilate in an unfamiliar world (...) without risking self-alienation? Ritivoi's response: nostalgia is both the poison and the cure in such situations. (shrink)

This article examines the controversial issue of blasphemy in literature from the viewpoint of reception inside and outside the academia. The thesis of the article is that blasphemy in literature, though inherently related to religion and language, has a plurality of connotations and interpretations (dissidence, intertextuality, critique of colonialism, discursive strategy, alterity/Otherness, ethnicity, subversive text). Consequently, blasphemy in literature is an incentive for fruitful discussions regarding tolerance, freedom of expression, and the re-situation of the (post)modern self in today’s world, dominated (...) by an uncanny admixture of secular and religious values. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said each steered major intellectual and political schools of thought in American political discourse after World War II, yet none of them was American, which proved crucial to their ways of arguing and reasoning both in and out of the American context. In an effort to convince their audiences they were American enough, these thinkers deployed deft rhetorical strategies that made their cosmopolitanism feel acceptable, inspiring radical new approaches to longstanding problems in (...) American politics. Speaking like natives, they also exploited their foreignness to entice listeners to embrace alternative modes of thought. _Intimate Strangers_ unpacks this "stranger ethos," a blend of detachment and involvement that manifested in the persona of a prophet for Solzhenitsyn, an impartial observer for Arendt, a mentor for Marcuse, and a victim for Said. Yet despite its many successes, the stranger ethos did alienate many audiences, and critics continue to dismiss these thinkers not for their positions but because of their foreign point of view. This book encourages readers to reject this kind of critical xenophobia, throwing support behind a political discourse that accounts for the ideals of citizens and noncitizens alike. (shrink)

The paper contends that transcendental phenomenology is a form of radical immanent critique able to explicate the necessary structures of meaning-constitution as well as evaluate our present situation through the historically traditionalized layers of concrete, lived experience. In order to make this case, the paper examines the critical dimension of phenomenology through the lens of one of its core conditions for possibility: the imagination. Building on—yet also departing from—Husserl’s own analyses, the paper contends that the imagination is both self- and (...) lifeworld-constituting. The imagination is anchored in our everyday senses of self and world as well as able to distance itself from being naively moored in normalized and deeply sedimented commitments. It is precisely this ‘anchored distance,’ rather than a sweeping doxic and ontic neutrality and negative freedom, that reveals the critical dimension of the imagination. (shrink)

In 1992, the much acclaimed prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates publishes Black Water – a very harsh and condensed literary reenactment of a gruesome event having taken place more than twenty years before and known as the “Chappaquiddick incident”. Another twenty years later, through her 2012 novel Mudwoman, the author seems to revisit the topic that had haunted her for decades. This paper aims at establishing a certain narrative pattern connecting the two novels not only thematically, but also phantasmatically: (...) the sudden “resurrection” of Joyce Carol Oates’s character in the 2012 novel is, as we see it, far from being “incidental”. By “textual anastomosis”, we understand a subjective association of narratives in order to show how the disembodied consciousness “travels” from one character’s fictional body to another’s, triggering a whole bunch of personal memories which also resurrect in this other character’s fictional biography. (shrink)

Lipkind et al. compare the development of vocal units and sound sequences in sound production in human infants and songbirds. Early in development, infant as well as songbird vocalizations vary along continuous acoustic parameters, with discrete vocal categories and structured vocalizations only emerging later on. This emergence process shows remarkable similarities between infants and zebra finches. Contrary to earlier views, Lipkind et al. suggest that the early development of songbird song (subsong) is more comparable to the phonation stage in infants (...) than to babbling. (shrink)

Different societies came to consider certain behaviors as morally wrong, and, in time, due to a more or less general practice, those behaviors have also become legally prohibited. While, nowadays, the existence of legal responsibility of states and individuals for certain reprehensible acts committed during an armed conflict, international or non-international, is hard to be disputed, an inquiry into the manner in which the behavior of the belligerents has come to be considered reveals long discussions in the field of morals (...) and theory of morality, and, especially, regarding the different manner of establishing the elements to whom obedience is rather owed (the divinity, the sovereign, the law) and the relations between these. Hence, the present paper aims at analyzing the connections between moral responsibility and legal responsibility for wrongful behaviur during war in a diachronic approach, along with the major shifts in paradigm (codification and individual liability). Understanding morality as practice, convention, custom, we are arguing that the nowadays requirement of liability for war crimes appeared due to an assumed intention and practice of the decision-making entities (the sovereign, the state) and, ultimately, to a decision-making process of the most influential states. (shrink)

Following Husserl’s analyses of perception and imagination, the paper introduces two basic modes of intelligibility – the normalizing and the imagining – and argues that they are deeply intertwined, despite radical qualitative differences between them. What sets these two modes apart are their distinctive teleological orientations. To show this, the paper looks closely at the ways in which we experience difference in these respective modes. This discussion requires, however, that we challenge Husserl’s own framework for analyzing the imagination, which emerges (...) as non-exhaustive, perhaps even misleading. What transpires is that imagining consciousness exhibits a unique critical dimension, a potentially powerful resource for socio-cultural critique. (shrink)

The paper contends that abstraction lies at the core of the philosophical and methodological rupture that occurred between Husserl and his mentor Franz Brentano. To accomplish this, it explores the notion of abstraction at work in these two thinkers’ methodological discussions through their respective claims regarding the structure of consciousness, and shows that how Husserl and Brentano analyze the structure of consciousness conditions and strictly delineates the nature and reach of their methods of inquiry. The paper pays close attention to (...) intentionality, founding (Fundierung), and qualitative modification (qualitative Modifikation) understood as principles of consciousness. While intentionality has been the topic of numerous discussions surrounding these two thinkers’ work, founding and qualitative modification have slipped under the radar despite the fact that they hold—as I intend to show—the key to shedding new light on their respective methods of inquiry. More specifically, the paper explicates the ways in which Brentano’s notion of founding (understood as a relationship between whole acts) and his failure to identify radical-qualitative modification as a principle of consciousness preclude him from offering a successful model for philosophical universalizing thought. It is my hope to show that Husserl’s rethinking of founding as a relationship between certain structural moments of acts along with his novel notion of qualitative modification ground his attempt to carve a new method of philosophical inquiry—albeit jejune and ambiguous at the time of the Investigations, yet nevertheless able to successfully negotiate the problems faced by his predecessor. (shrink)

The general perception regarding the political discourse produced in Romania after 1989 is that the actors prioritized a number of themes, which, in spite of their circumstantial dimensions, tended to become strongly established topics. From this perspective, transitional politics became a discursive locus for a number of issues, the actors repeatedly returning to the same ‘well‑worn roads’. Using as corpus samples of discourse from the first electoral campaign post‑1989, the study analyses if and how the controversial theme of the recent (...) historical legacies became a crucial topic during that interval, investigating the main approaches used by the actors and discussing whether or not these settled the frame of interpretation for the following interval. The paper draws on critical and historical discourse analysis, interpreting discourse as both text and context, language and action, discursive event and social situation. It represents an analysis of a topic that, over the years, has become a thematic keystone in political discourse. (shrink)

This paper challenges the standard interpretation of Descartes’s view that the essence of the mind is thinking. Most commentators take the essence of the mind to be constituted by thoughts as objects of awareness. By contrast, the position defended here is that willing is as much part of the essence of the Cartesian meditating mind as awareness. Willing is not just a type of thought, but whenever thinking occurs it invariably involves both awareness and willing. To substantiate the claim that (...) Descartes could not separate willing from the one meditating, the paper examines the role of the will at all the key junctures of the Meditations: the cogito, the clarity and distinctness of some of our ideas, the arguments for God’s existence, and the propensity to believe that our ideas of sensible things comefrom those things. (shrink)

This volume collects twenty-one original essays that discuss Michael Krausz’s distinctive and provocative contribution to the theory of interpretation. At the beginning of the book Krausz offers a synoptic review of his central claims, and he concludes with a substantive essay that replies to scholars from the United States, England, Germany, India, Japan, and Australia. Krausz’s philosophical work centers around a distinction that divides interpreters of cultural achievements into two groups. Singularists assume that for any object of interpretation only one (...) single admissible interpretation can exist. Multiplists assume that for some objects of interpretation more than one interpretation is admissible. A central question concerns the ontological entanglements involved in interpretive activity. Domains of application include works of art and music, as well as literary, historical, legal and religious texts. Further topics include truth commissions, ethnocentrism and interpretations across cultures. (shrink)

This dissertation explores and argues for the import of the imagination (Phantasie) in Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method of inquiry. It contends that Husserl's extensive analyses of the imagination influenced how he came to conceive the phenomenological method throughout the main stages of his philosophical career. The work clarifies Husserl's complex method of investigation by considering the role of the imagination in his main methodological apparatuses: the phenomenological, eidetic, and transcendental reductions, and eidetic variation - all of which remained ambiguous despite (...) his extensive programmatic discussions. The work illuminates and clarifies aspects of the Husserlian phenomenological method never before explored. -/- In order to clarify Husserl's eidetic method of inquiry, I propose a new way of thinking about the imagination - as direct intuitive presentation (eigentliche anschauliche Vorstellung) and as horizonal-nexic level of consciousness exhibiting the neutrality, freedom, and possibility as its essential features. Following Husserl's studies of the imagination, I propose a three-level model of consciousness (realizing, imagining, and eidetic) and explore the dynamic flexibility of each level (as horizon within which acts such as judgments or memories can unfold). This model of consciousness allows for a rethinking of the sources and conditions for the possibility of eidetic phenomenological inquiry - topics Husserl was mostly silent about. -/- Through a rethinking of the model of consciousness, I propose a tight and substantial relationship between the natural (everyday) and artificial (methodological, theoretical) attitudes. I argue that the structure and systems of possibilities pertaining to the artificial attitude - i.e., our actual as well as possible methodological tools - are structurally and well as informationally bound to the structure and system of possibilities pertaining to the natural attitude. In order to explore the nature of the relationship between these two attitudes I argue that we must take a closer look at the structure and abilities of imagining consciousness - the sole nexic-horizonal level that can function both naturally and artificially. This insight regarding the nature of consciousness clarifies Husserl's transcendental idealism in its intimate connection to the everyday. Understanding Husserl's philosophical stance is thus purged of all possibility of mistakenly labeling it as entailing immanent detachment, solipsism, or Platonic idealism. (shrink)