Anne Devarieux | : En allant de Maine de Biran à Louis Lavelle, nous allons d’une métaphysique de l’expérience intérieure qui définit l’être du moi comme un volo donné dans le sentiment actuel de sa puissance propre, à une ontologie déclinant les puissances plurielles du moi, à l’intérieur d’une dialectique de la puissance et de l’acte (théorie de la participation). Mais tous deux ont pensé l’intériorité comme un mouvement absolu, secret et irréductible à toute représentation. Attentif à l’évolution de (...) la pensée de Maine de Biran, Louis Lavelle semble avoir développé toutes les potentialités cachées du moi biranien. Un tel mouvement permet d’éclairer la place de Maine de Biran dans l’histoire du spiritualisme français, et de ses héritiers, qu’il s’agisse d’Henri Bergson ou de Michel Henry. | : Going from Maine de Biran to Louis Lavelle, we can feel the distance between a metaphysics of inner experience which defines the being of the ego as a volo, given in the present sense of its own power, and an ontology asserting the plural virtual powers of the ego, within a dialectic of the power and the act (theory of participation). However, both have thought interiority as an absolute and secret motion, irreducible to any representation. Attentive to the evolution of Maine de Biran’s thought, Louis Lavelle seems to have developed all the hidden potential of the Biranian theory of the self. Such a movement can illuminate the place of Biran in the history of French spiritualism, and of his heirs, whether it be Henri Bergson or Michel Henry. (shrink)

The article analyses, in a comparative perspective, the phenomenon of the evolution of the protection of surviving spouse’s inheritance rights in France and Lithuania, the two legal systems historically having some points of interaction. The protection of the surviving spouse is one of the major preoccupations of married couples of today, the couple occupying a central role within the contemporary family. Comparative analysis reveals certain points of convergence between these two legal systems inasmuch the surviving spouse is considered by both (...) legislations as an heir ab intestat and whose protection over the years has been considerably strengthened. The surviving spouse is called to inherit alongside with the heirs of the first or second order and is entitled to the proportions in assets that have not ceased to increase. Lithuanian law seems to have been innovative at an earlier stage than French law, as it is only in the beginning of the 21st century that significant reforms were carried out in this area of law in France. Analysis has also revealed apparent differences in the scope of protection of the surviving spouse, both in regards to the protection provided by law (statutory protection), as well as protection organised by the will of the spouses (voluntary protection). In some respects the statutory protection is more extensive in France (for example, complementary statutory rights of the spouse in regards to the dwelling place or the quality of héritier réservataire) and the instruments of this protection seem to be more varied (for example, the possibility for the spouses to organise their matrimonial regime by inserting specific clauses into the nuptial contract, mechanisms outside the nuptial contracts, such as donations, wills or life insurance contracts). However, this protection might appear to be more extensive under Lithuanian law as far as the voluntary protection is concerned taking into account the introduction, by the new Lithuanian Civil Code of 2000, of the joint will of spouses under which the whole property of the deceased spouse shall be inherited by the surviving spouse (except the mandatory share of succession). The article raises some doubts as to the desirability or even feasibility of aligning the two models of protection given the fact that each of the two countries has its own history and traditions. Nevertheless, a proposition resurges from the analysis in regard to the possible improvement of the protection of the rights to the dwelling place of the surviving spouse under Lithuanian law. Some elements from the existing French model could be transposed given that the dwelling place is an essential family element providing some stability for the surviving spouse. (shrink)

La métaphore du réseau s'est imposée durant les années quatre vingt dix à l'occasion de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler le « topical turn », pour décrire les logiques de développement de la vie culturelle et leur analyse en termes spatiaux plutôt que temporels. Simultanément, il arrive que la constitution de réseaux soit bel et bien déterminée historiquement notamment de manière générationnelle ou sociopolitique. Les contributeurs de cet ouvrage s'inspirent de cette réflexion pour traiter d'un phénomène de réverbération dans l'histoire (...) culturelle, en particulier d'expression allemande, des années vingt aux années soixante du XXe siècle. Au plan métacritique, la réception répétée de la philosophie de Frédéric Nietzsche, mais aussi d'Ernst Cassirer notamment chez Michel Foucault et Gilles Deleuze apparaît comme un lien constitutif de ce déploiement métaphorique. D'autres modèles explicatifs sont présentés tel celui des paradigmes en science ou celui d'un équilibrage pulsionnel, de type psychanalytique. Des études de cas précis illustrent également cette hésitation entre le modèle métaphorique et le modèle historique, concernant les modes d'affirmation de certaines avants-gardes, l'étude de la reprise poétique chez Heissenbüttel ou Rühmkorf, filmique chez Godard, ou théâtrale chez les héritiers d'Artaud. Die Metapher des Netzwerkes hat sich im Laufe der neunziger Jahre anlässlich des sogenannten «topical turn» zur Beschreibung der logischen Mechanismen in der Entwicklung des kulturellen Lebens und deren Analyse in eher räumlichen als zeitlichen Begriffen durchgesetzt. Der Aufbau von Netzwerken mag aber auch historisch bedingt sein, zum Beispiel durch Generationszugehörigkeit und sozial-politische Umstsozial-politische Umstände. Die Beiträger dieses Bandes gehen von dieser Überlegung aus, um sich dem Phänomen der Spiegelung in der Kulturgeschichte - insbesondere in der deutschsprachigen - von den zwanziger bis sechziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts auseinanderzusetzen. Auf metakritischer Ebene erscheint die wiederholte Rezeption der Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches, aber auch Ernst Cassirers, insbesondere bei Michel Foucault und Gilles Deleuze als eine Verbindung, die wesentlich ist für die Entfaltung der räumlichen Metaphorik. Weitere Erklärungsmodelle werden vorgeschlagen, wie das paradigmatisch-wissenschaftliche oder das triebhaft-psychoanalytische. Fallstudien illustrieren zudem dieses Zögern zwischen metaphorischem und historischem Modell, was die Selbstbehauptung gewisser Avantgarden sowie die Untersuchung bestimmter Rezeptionsmomente betrifft, im poetischen Bereich bei Heissenbüttel oder Rühmkorf, im filmischen bei Godard, oder im dramatischen bei den Erben Artauds. (shrink)

Au tournant du xix e siècle, plusieurs théories des couleurs voient le jour. Elles partent du principe que l’appréciation des phénomènes colorés dépend en grande partie de la physiologie de l’œil et de la complémentarité des couleurs. Ces théories trouvent une résonance considérable dans le champ artistique français à partir des années 1830. Il s’agit plus spécifiquement d’interroger les modes d’intégration d’une optique des couleurs dans la critique d’art. Après un bref aperçu de quelques approches physiologiques des couleurs aux xviii (...) e et xix e siècles, nous nous arrêtons sur des textes de Théophile Thoré, de Théophile Gautier et de Charles Baudelaire ; trois critiques qui nous permettront de cerner les enjeux épistémologiques qui se cachent sous le jugement esthétique. (shrink)

Is it the task of legal semiotics or the legal philosophers to define legal semiotics? For the philosopher of law, the question recalls the distinction between philosophers’ philosophy of law and legal scholars’ philosophy of law. The thesis that the paper argues is that a semiotic legal perspective can also be sought from the analysis of anthropological knowledge on the origin of the social bond and society, implying a social and institutional theory of the mind. In the first paragraph, the (...) search for a different kind of rationality emerges from a semiotician, Jürgen Trabant, who analyses semiotically the thought of a rhetorician and philosopher of law, Giambattista Vico. In the second paragraph, the anthropological notion of social bond emerges from the debate on the relationship between the idea of the gift and that of exchange. In the third paragraph, the analysis of the legal notion of thirdness recognizes the central role of myth and fiction in the configuration of the civil world and sign, returning to Vico’s critical view of the philosophy of language as an institution of society. (shrink)

This issue of Diogenes is devoted to questions of bioethics. This subject was chosen not because bioethics is fashionable but rather because the purpose of this journal is to explore the timely and timeless questions of our era in order to understand what is at stake and to share this knowledge with our readers.I have chosen to call my piece “Bioethics: Between the Plausible and the Thinkable” to highlight at least three themes that are taken up either directly or indirectly (...) in the articles that follow. (shrink)

Without extending the historical analysis, this article analyzes the relationship between the legal concept of person with regard to the notion of living independently. The concept is normatively established in Article 19 of the CRPD and is presented as a legal fiction. The legal technique of fictio iuris is the premise for analyzing contemporary problems, for example, the attribution of responsibilities to non-human personalities, such as robots. The article, however, develops the problem of attributing rights to persons with disabilities. The (...) contraposition of robots and disabled people, understood as opposing visions of anthropological and human models, is part of the philosophical dispute between humanism and post- or transhumanism. The conception of man appears different if created in the image and likeness of God, or as the fruit of evolution from primates, or as a transhumanist entity that can be replaced by the robot. The latter vision is rooted in the mechanization of the mind triggered by cybernetics and cognitive sciences and referable to problems of justice theory and political philosophy concerning the inclusion in society of disabled people. In this article I will limit myself to analyzing, against the background of this complex problem, the link between person, legal fiction and the right to disability starting from the criticism addressed by Nussbaum to Rawls based on the convention and following the methodology developed by Marchisio and Curto in order to clarify the legal connection between thirdness, disability, and person.However, I go one step further by including the issue of disability as justice within the evolution of the notion of the legal person, through the inclusion of fictio iuris and rhetorical methodology in positive law, as a criterion for the interpretation of art. 19 CRPD. (shrink)

The paper aims to analyze the problems that religious truth, particularly Christian truth understood as an event, poses to the category of de re truth. How does the conception of truth ‘as event’ stand phenomenologically in relation to the contemporary analytical debate on truth? Statements in the catechism such as “true God and true man” referring to Jesus, or the same words attributed to Jesus in John’s gospel (14:6) such as “I am the way, the truth or the life” how (...) can they be understood in relation to the category of recently called ‘dual character concepts’? Is there a difference between the notion of ‘true warrior’ and that of ‘true God’? When is a person appropriately categorized as a true man? When is a person appropriately categorized as a true God? What is the relationship between faith and truth? (shrink)

The article reconstructs the is/ought debate in legal theory through a phenomenological reading of the concept of normality. An analysis of Siniscalchi, Fuller and Manderson looks at the issue from the perspective of law and literature, and then applies Giambattista Vico’s rhetorical methodology within the contemporary debate. The question: “is Hume’s law really visible within Hume’s thought?” also paradoxically poses the figure of phantoms and fictions at the heart of the current theoretical debate on law. A history of the phantom (...) placed at the centre of the history of Western institutions still remains to be written, but a comparison of very diverse and incongrous approaches such as the extended order of Hayek, the dogmatic anthropology of Legendre, the eunomics of Fuller and the new science of Vico shows how the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of institutions are inextricably entwined. It is impossible at the moment to draw a coherent doctrine from these conflicting perspectives, but their convocation is sufficient to demonstrate how the theory of law is always suspended between the unknown and the human attempt to inhabit it, moving us toward an affective turn that has yet to be fully conceived in the theory of law, following the iconic turn. The anthropological primacy of fictio and the aesthetic-legal dimension in the constitution of language is not that of a logic and separation from the body and meaning, but the exact inverse, even in the unavoidable constant tension between the two poles: logic is born through the gesture of the body that precedes it, as myth precedes the foundation of the State; the origin of the concept is affective, as Hume, and perhaps Vico himself, would have passionately affirmed. (shrink)

Brain in a vat scenarios in analytic philosophy feature both brains and technological apparatus. The relation between specimens and technology is an interesting aspect of these scenarios, and in order to explore this relation, I contrast here two kinds of scientific collecting practices: the collection of post-mortem brains versus the compilation of digital brain atlases. This contrast highlights a novel configuration of the relation between brains and new information technologies. This new configuration is traced back to the late 1980s, which (...) saw the rise of a new kind of collection of brains, with a markedly different scope and nature: the neuroscience database. Brains are now easily captured in vivo, so that while post-mortem brains were precious and few, scanners provide an embarrassment of riches in the form of terabytes of data. The rise of the virtual brain as a new digital object for research is reliant on the development of new imaging technologies, but also on the growth of computerised tools, informatics, and electronic networks in this field. These developments contribute to an informational turn in scientific research. This article considers what is involved in the shift in type of object, from the scarce, wet, biological brain to a plentiful, digital, virtual one. It discusses the significance of this new object in terms of collections, institutions, and research practices. (shrink)

In this article we introduce the reader to the reasons that led to this collection: an interdisciplinary exploration aimed at renewing interest in Luigi Einaudi’s search for «good government», broadly understood as «good society». Prompted by the Einaudian quest, the essays – exploring philosophy of law, economics, politics and epistemology – develop the issue of good government in several forms, including the relationship between public and private, public governance, the question of freedom and the complexity of the human in contemporary (...) societies. The common thread of these essays is that problematic but indissoluble knot that tells us something deeply human: our being torn between homing and roaming, institutional and individual, law and freedom, real and ideal. (shrink)

Dog whistling—speech that seems ordinary but sends a hidden, often derogatory message to a subset of the audience—is troubling not just for our political ideals, but also for our theories of communication. On the one hand, it seems possible to dog whistle unintentionally, merely by uttering certain expressions. On the other hand, the intention is typically assumed or even inferred from the act, and perhaps for good reason, for dog whistles seem misleading by design, not just by chance. In this (...) paper, I argue that, to understand when and why it’s possible to dog-whistle unintentionally (and indeed, intentionally), we’ll need to recognize the structure of our linguistic practices. For dog whistles and for covertly coded speech more generally, this structure is a pair of practices, one shared by all competent speakers and the other known only to some, but deployable in the same contexts. In trying to identify these enabling conditions, we’ll discover what existing theories of communicated content overlook by focusing on particular utterances in isolation, or on individual speakers’ mental states. The remedy, I argue, lies in attending to the ways in which what is said is shaped by the temporally extended, socio-politically structured linguistic practices that utterances instantiate. (shrink)

In their report in this supplement on research regulatory systems, Barbara Bierer and Mark Barnes note that, when research misconduct has been detected but not yet proven, the individual with institutional responsibility for oversight of research misconduct investigations “may determine that notification of relevant journals or professional societies and correction or full retraction of implicated papers or presentations is appropriate. In those cases, even when a finding of research misconduct per se has not been made or has not been explicitly (...) stated, the journal, professional society, and their readers or members may draw their own conclusions as to what led to the retraction or correction.” This statement highlights an aspect of the reviewed regulatory schemes that creates vulnerability for institutions of higher education subject to the regulations: while, as the authors suggest, it may be “appropriate” to notify third parties (that is, journals, professional societies, and other academic institutions) of suspected research misconduct, there is no regulatory obligation to provide such a notification, and, in fact, providing early (or any) notification is contrary to the confidentiality provisions of the research misconduct regulations. Moreover, the institution—and individuals acting on behalf of the institution—may face legal exposure for notifying outside entities. (shrink)

The book presents an interdisciplinary exploration aimed at renewing interest in Luigi Einaudi’s search for “good government”, broadly understood as “good society”. Prompted by the Einaudian quest, the essays - exploring philosophy of law, economics, politics and epistemology - develop the issue of good government in several forms, including the relationship between public and private, public governance, the question of freedom and the complexity of the human in contemporary societies.

This chapter provides a high-level introduction to the topic of propaganda. We survey a number of the most influential accounts of propaganda, from the earliest institutional studies in the 1920s to contemporary academic work. We propose that these accounts, as well as the various examples of propaganda which we discuss, all converge around a key feature: persuasion which bypasses audiences’ rational faculties. In practice, propaganda can take different forms, serve various interests, and produce a variety of effects. Propaganda can aim (...) to affect not only audiences’ beliefs and attitudes, but also their emotions and moods, and in turn how audiences subsequently reason or act. While propaganda is often thought of as false or misinformation, it can instead involve framing effects (“The war on drugs”), covert messaging (“There are Muslims among us”), emotionally charged slogans (“Make America Great Again”), or myths (“The American dream”). These forms of propaganda mislead audiences, not by introducing false information, but by making some beliefs and values, rather than others, salient. In fact, propaganda can even employ straightforwardly true claims (again, as in “There are Muslims among us”) and seemingly objective bureaucratic reports (“Crime has risen 4.2%”). To understand how these and other mechanisms enable propaganda to persuade by arational means, further study is needed. To that end, throughout the chapter we identify a number of places where the study of meaning and communication can help elucidate propaganda, as well as the places where propaganda issues challenges for the study of meaning. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s _History of Sexuality_ has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of _History of Sexuality_ in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom (...) issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In _Race and the Education of Desire, _Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of _History of Sexuality_ contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race. _Race and the Education of Desire_ will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault. (shrink)

WINNER BEST SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY BOOK IN 2021 / NASSP BOOK AWARD 2022 -/- Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral (...) agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty. (shrink)

Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective of (...) the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective action problem, i.e. the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ ‘we-reasoning’, a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best response reasoning, as I shall explain below. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available (more on that later) and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the sacred foundations of Western institutional order, moving from an epistemological, historical and legal–aesthetic perspective. Firstly, it identifies an epistemological theory of complexity which, pursuing Hayek’s theory of complexity, Robilant’s notion of informative–normative systems, Popper’s theory of the Worlds, and Dupuy’s theory of endogenous fixed point, will conclusively lead to presenting the hypothesis of World 0 as the World of the foundation of legal thinking, the home of the sacred and the aesthetic. Secondly, it identifies the axiological (...) character of the legal aesthetic as a discipline, a topic that will be taken up in relation to the work of the French historian of canonical law and psychoanalyst Legendre, starting from the analysis of a legal/historiographical context (Corpus Iuris Civilis, Corpus Iuris Canonici, Hobbesian Leviathan, Kelsenian Grundnorm). Thirdly, following Ellul’s thought on secularization, the idea that we now live in a secularized, lay society, lacking in the sacred is revealed as a sort of illusion, the creation of a myth of modernity, only apparently rational. Finally the paper proposes as the task of legal theory the identification of the system of “nomograms” in which the normative message is organized, according to a nonreductionistic approach that forces legal theory to recognize the plurality of the iconic forms of the normative message. The “nomograms” respond to the need of extending the field of legal science to phenomena that the positivist theory of law does not consider important, but which the process of evolution of contemporary society imposes. (shrink)

Involuntary autobiographical memories are spontaneously arising memories of personal events, whereas voluntary memories are retrieved strategically. Voluntary remembering has been studied in numerous experiments while involuntary remembering has been largely ignored. It is generally assumed that voluntary recall is the standard way of remembering, whereas involuntary recall is the exception. However, little is known about the actual frequency of these two types of remembering in daily life. Here, 48 Danish undergraduates recorded their involuntary versus voluntary autobiographical memories during a day (...) using a mechanical counter. Involuntary memories were reported three times as frequently as voluntary memories. Compared to voluntary memories, they were associated less with problem solving and social sharing and more with day dreaming, periods of boredom, no reasons for remembering and predominantly came to mind during unfocused attention. The findings suggest that involuntary recall is a typical way of accessing the personal past. (shrink)

Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to (...) reduce their individual carbon footprint. To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince. While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. After all, for most people the choice is between reducing one’s individual emissions and not doing anything. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter. (shrink)

Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that our epistemic obligations (...) concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods. (shrink)

Ann Whittle offers a fresh approach to questions about whether our actions are free and whether we are morally responsible for them. She argues that the answers to these questions depend on the contexts in which we make claims about our abilities and our control over our actions.

There are countless circumstances under which random individuals COULD act together to prevent something morally bad from happening or to remedy a morally bad situation. But when OUGHT individuals to act together in order to bring about a morally important outcome? Building on Philip Pettit’s and David Schweikard’s account of joint action, I will put forward the notion of joint duties: duties to perform an action together that individuals in so-called random or unstructured groups can jointly hold. I will show (...) how this account of joint duties is preferable to one which defends individual duties to cooperate. I then discuss the limits of joint duties and the ways in which one can fail to comply with them. It will become apparent that the circumstances under which individuals in random collectives acquire such joint duties are rare. (shrink)

In recent decades, concepts of group agency and the morality of groups have increasingly been discussed by philosophers. Notions of collective or joint duties have been invoked especially in the debates on global justice, world poverty and climate change. This paper enquires into the possibility and potential nature of moral duties individuals in unstructured groups may hold together. It distinguishes between group agents and groups of people which – while not constituting a collective agent – are nonetheless capable of performing (...) a joint action. It attempts to defend a notion of joint duties which are neither duties of a group agent nor duties of individual agents, but duties held jointly by individuals in unstructured groups. Furthermore, it seeks to illuminate the relation between such joint duties on the one hand and individual duties on the other hand. Rebutting an argument brought forward by Wringe, the paper concludes that it is not plausible to assume that all humans on earth can together hold a duty to mitigate climate change or to combat global poverty given that the members of that group are not capable of joint action. (shrink)

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations visà- vis large-scale injustice? In this paper, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed and unorganised groups of people are (...) often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense. (shrink)

In this original and controversial book Professor Rawls argues that Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is the crowning achievement of his sociological endeavour and that since its publication in English in 1915 it has been consistently misunderstood. Rather than a work on primitive religion or the sociology of knowledge, Rawls asserts that it is an attempt by Durkheim to establish a unique epistemological basis for the study of sociology and moral relations. By privileging social practice over beliefs and (...) ideas, it avoids the dilemmas inherent in philosophical approaches to knowledge and morality that are based on individualism and the tendency to privilege beliefs and ideas over practices, both tendencies that dominate western thought. Based on detailed textual analysis of the primary text, this book will be an important and original contribution to contemporary debates on social theory and philosophy. (shrink)

Across 13 essays "e; 12 of which were previously unavailable in English "e; Deleuze specialist Anne Sauvagnargues reveals the continuing potential of Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon to invent new concepts and new modes of creativity and existence. She redeploys their work, together with other key philosophers including Bergson, Lacan, Deligny and Ruyer, to create new concepts including geophilosophy, the artmachine, the ritornello, schizoanalysis and the machinic assemblage.