We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a (...) rating task to examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the relationship between adult attachment styles and generalized negativistic social beliefs. Two general dimensions of attachment styles, avoidance and anxiety, are considered to be manifestations of an individual’s image of other people and of the self, respectively. We suggest that both dimensions may be a substantial basis for formulating negative beliefs about the social world. Firstly, we believe that a high level of negativistic social beliefs can be positively predicted by the growth of (...) avoidance and anxiety. Secondly, we formulate an expected interaction effect. Although the nature of such an interaction is ambiguous, it may be argued as having a synergistic as well as antagonistic pattern. These hypotheses were tested and supported on a representative sample of adult Poles. (shrink)

This article analyses the ambiguous intimacies generated by the competition that permeates desire in Lisa Aschan’s She Monkeys (2011). The article argues that in a new corpus of films about adolescence, the queerness of lesbian desire is evoked as a series of affects outside of figurative norms. Desire meets and is confused with other affects such as envy and disgust, all of which attach, sometimes simultaneously, to objects that do not always seem to recognise or permit them. Slow and languid (...) scenes reveal desire’s potential but rarely its achievement. The article explores the erotic potential of those intimacies that reside in the spaces between bodies, asking what happens to that potential when it is generated but immediately contained by the negotiations of control. In dialogue with psychoanalytic work on the ambivalent relations between desire, envy, attachment and idealisation, the article advances a reading of an affective mode of filmmaking that is saturated with desire but not defined by desire’s labelling. (shrink)

The dominant view on grieving processes throughout the twentieth century was based on the idea that grief ’s purpose is to loosen and finally sever the bonds with the deceased in order to set oneself free (free to enter new relationships). An expanded view, which aims at a more complete and more complex understanding of grief, corrected the former approach by arguing in favor of continuing bonds. The expanded view certainly fits better the meaning of attachment relations in human (...) life. So-called disenfranchised grief nonetheless reveals additional normative constraints in terms of (culturally varying) social control mechanisms taking effect with regard to expressions of grief. The present paper argues that duly considering the complex and ambiguous nature of grief, as well as its transformative power, requires challenging the standard view of disenfranchised grief. I propose an expanded view that is based on the idea that proponents of the standard view have failed to inquire into the equivocal meaning of a common conversation about “coping with grief ” (getting over it vs. getting along with it). Arguing in favor of an expanded account of disenfranchised grief by following the second reading (“getting along with grief ”) then requires acknowledging the inseparability of grief ’s existential depth and social implications. With a view to this inseparability, it is argued that coping with grief is a public (or even political) affair instead of a merely private experience. (shrink)

We develop a framework for understanding how lack of clarity in business press coverage of corporate social responsibility functions as a mediated and emergent form of strategic ambiguity. Many stakeholders expect CSR to exhibit clarity, consistency, and discursive closure. But stakeholders also expect CSR to conform to varying degrees of both formal and substantive rationality. These diverse expectations conflict with each other and change over time. A content analysis of press coverage in Denmark suggests that the business media reflect (...) and amplify the ambiguity generated by these shifting demands. We propose that this very public lack of discursive closure provides strategic advantages to CSR stakeholders by rendering the concept of CSR adaptable, resilient, and meaningful to diverse interests. From this perspective, strategic ambiguity emerges from a relational and mediated process, not from the direct intentions of individual stakeholders. Our framework suggests that CSR is best understood not as a clear or consistent agenda, but rather as a forum for sensemaking, diversity of opinion, and debate over the conflicting social norms and expectations attached to corporate activity. (shrink)

Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make inferences about the initial interpretation using pragmatic information, suggesting the possibility that the initial analysis persisted due to comprehenders' pragmatic inference but not to their failure to perform complete reanalysis of the initial misanalysis. Our study investigated (...) this by testing locally ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese, in which the initial misinterpretation contradicts the correct interpretation. Our study using a self-paced reading technique demonstrated evidence for the persistence of the initial analysis with this structure. The results from an eye-tracking study further suggested that the phenomenon directly reflected the amount of support given to the initial incorrect analysis prior to disambiguating information: The more supported the incorrect main clause analysis was, the more likely comprehenders were to preserve the analysis even after the analysis was falsified. Our results thus demonstrated that the preservation of the initial analysis occurs not due to referential ambiguities but to comprehenders' difficulty to fully revise the highly supported initial interpretation. (shrink)

We report the results of an experiment which investigates the impact of the manner in which likelihood information is presented to decision-makers on valuations assigned to lotteries. We find that subjects who observe representative sequences of outcomes attach higher valuations to lotteries than those who are given only a verbal description of a probability distribution. We interpret this in terms of a reduction in ambiguity about the possible lottery outcomes. These findings suggest that ambiguity aversion may be a (...) confounding factor in reported experimental violations of expected utility theory based on verbal descriptions of probability distributions. (shrink)

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with panhandlers who provide services while asking for money, informal interviews with pedestrians who have interacted with them, and formal interviews with twenty people who regularly interact with panhandlers, this article unpacks the relationship between temporality and ambiguity of meaning in exchange. In line with previous research, I find that providing a service while asking for money allows panhandlers to manage stigma by recasting their relationship with pedestrians who give as a market exchange. More surprisingly, (...) I find that this kind of recasting makes giving less compelling for the pedestrians in fleeting encounters with panhandlers: they resist service provision in fleeting encounters with panhandlers on the grounds that the exchange is experienced as a coldly rational quid pro quo. In contrast, pedestrians who have long-term relationships with panhandlers experience the interaction as a gift exchange and the service as an expression of gratitude and subservience. The development of an open-ended temporal horizon and of a cycle of exchange, I argue, allows the service and the money given to operate as boundary objects, enabling panhandlers and pedestrians to attach different meanings to the exchange of money for services. This emergent ambiguity allows them to carry out interaction and exchange successfully. Contrary to models of interaction and everyday economic transactions that frame shared definitions of the situation as necessary for successful and repeated interactions, I find that ambiguity and polysemy may be productive and sustaining in interactions between participants from distinct social worlds. (shrink)

S’attachant au Traité de la nature humaine de Hume, l’auteur essaie de montrer comment le concept moderne de naturalisme est un concept ambigu. D’un côté, Hume a ouvert la possibilité d’une science de la nature humaine, qui traite le sujet connaissant comme lui-même objet possible de connaissance. De l’autre côté, prenant en compte cette constitution du sujet connaissant comme pur fait et la réincorporant dans le flux de la vie (comme réalité et comme expérience), il a mis cette science aux (...) prises avec le risque du scepticisme, comme son envers. Dès lors, le naturalisme ne peut jamais être du seul ordre de la science. (shrink)

S’attachant au Traité de la nature humaine de Hume, l’auteur essaie de montrer comment le concept moderne de naturalisme est un concept ambigu. D’un côté, Hume a ouvert la possibilité d’une science de la nature humaine, qui traite le sujet connaissant comme lui-même objet possible de connaissance. De l’autre côté, prenant en compte cette constitution du sujet connaissant comme pur fait et la réincorporant dans le flux de la vie (comme réalité et comme expérience), il a mis cette science aux (...) prises avec le risque du scepticisme, comme son envers. Dès lors, le naturalisme ne peut jamais être du seul ordre de la science. (shrink)

All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs—more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long‐distance dependencies. Under a resource‐limited view of language processing, lengthy (...) integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support of this perspective. This article presents 2 self‐paced reading studies, which explore the hypothesis that dependency distance is a fundamental determinant of reading complexity in unambiguous constructions in English. The evidence suggests that the difficulty associated with integrating a new input item is heavily determined by the amount of lexical material intervening between the input item and the site of its target dependents. The patterns observed here are not straightforwardly accounted for within purely experience‐based models of complexity. Instead, this work supports the role of a memory bottleneck in language comprehension. This constraint arises because hierarchical linguistic relations must be recovered from a linear input stream. (shrink)

This article explains how li 禮 or ‘ritual propriety’ is the ‘body language’ of ren 仁 or the authentic expression of our humanity. Li and ren are interdependent aspects of a larger creative human way (rendao 仁道) that can be conceptually distinguished as follows: li refers to the ritualized social form of appropriate conduct and ren to the more general, authentically human spirit this expresses. Li is the social instrument for self-cultivation and the vehicle of harmonious human interaction. More, li (...) must mean something that is effectively communicated to others for an authentic, human (ren) interaction to occur. Li is the body language of ren in being the ritual vehicle for its’ expression; however, li is underdetermined by ren and so must be distinguished from it in on further grounds: authentic human activity must not just be equivocated with social convention because conclusively establishing whether a particular action is li (or is a truly ren action) is impossible. As a result, li is often confused with social power and privilege that is easier to empirically identify than ren conduct is, but this is a mistake since li has to express ren or it is not li at all. The inescapable ambiguity of li – an ambiguity that attaches to any language – can be critiqued by the Western view that sees something ‘essential’ to the ‘self,’ and that makes one a ‘self’ in and of oneself and not in a way that depends on others. I show that such Western individualism – while resting on a fundamentally different way of thinking of being a person and living a good life – does not reduce Confucian ritual to being an instrument for social discrimination and subordination. My argument is indebted to twentieth-century philosophy of language in the West that offered the idea that some words are actions. (shrink)

The sci-fi premise of the 2002 film Solaris allows director Steven Soderbergh to tell a compelling and distinctly philosophical love story. The “visitors” that appear to the characters in the film present us with a vivid thought experiment, and the film naturally prods us to dwell on the following possibility: If confronted with a duplicate (or near duplicate) of someone you love, what would your response be? What should your response be? The tension raised by such a far-fetched situation reflects (...) a tension that exists in real life: that between an attraction to qualities possessed by a person and attraction to the person in a manner that transcends such an attachment to qualities. In short, this cinematic thought-experiment challenges us to reflect on what we really attach to when we fall in love: is it the person, or is it merely the cluster of characteristics the person manifests? Which sort of attachment is appropriate? Which is philosophical defensible? The protagonist Chris Kelvin’s ambivalence at encountering this bizarre possibility is gripping because it tracks our own ambivalence about such matters. Frankly most of us don’t know just how we would react to such a situation. The thought that accepting and embracing such a “visitor” involves a violation to the original person is natural and pervasive, especially if the acceptance comes with a failure to acknowledge the distinction between the original person and the “visitor”. At the same time, a deep attraction to such a person would surely also be entirely natural and perhaps even inescapable. We, like Kelvin, are torn in different directions by this (thankfully) far-fetched possibility. One philosopher who affirms that accepting a duplicate as though it were the original is the rational thing to do is Derek Parfit. His argument for “the unimportance of identity” is both powerful and radical, and though I’ll be critical of his approach, in the final section of the paper I suggest that it does offer up the resources for an intriguing interpretation of the end of this complex and ambiguous film. (shrink)

On this occasion I wish to elaborate further the conception of distributive justice that I have already sketched elsewhere. This conception derives from the ideal of social justice implicit in the two principles proposed in the essay “Justice as Fairness.” These discussions need to be supplemented in at least two ways. For one thing, the two parts of the second principle are ambiguous: in each part a crucial phrase admits of two interpretations. The two principles read as follows: first, each (...) person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others; and second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices equally open to all. The two ambiguous phrases in the second principle are “everyone's advantage” in part (a) and “equally open to all” in part (b). I shall consider these ambiguities and the several interpretations of the two principles to which they give rise. I shall leave aside any difficulties with the first principle and assume that its sense is the same throughout and clear enough for our purposes. (shrink)

To defend the fatherland, to obey the laws and authorities, and to honour the State's cults are the principal points the Athenian citizen promised to fulfil in his oath of allegiance—called ephebic, because he took it as a recruit —at least since the second half of the fourth century B.C.. These duties are fundamental for the citizen's attachment to hispolis, so one will hardly assume that the content of the oath depends upon the existence of the Athenian institution of (...) cadet-training which is attested by inscriptions not earlier than 334/3 B.C. Some ambiguous passages in fifth- and fourth-century authors give no reliable clue to determine the form or origin of theephebeia.I shall consider sworn civic duties and the organisation of military training as different things, and shall treat the oath independently from the disputed question of when theephebeiacame into existence. My purpose is to draw attention to some fifth-century allusions to the oath which seem to have remained unnoticed so far.This oath is transmitted by Pollux, Stobaeus, and a fourth-century inscription from the Attic deme Acharnae. I give the epigraphic version, following G. Daux's text. I omit the first part of the whole inscription and the last part. (shrink)

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects... you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus (...) inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don't see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn't this fabulous? Isn't it really worth going to graduate school to study critique? (shrink)

According to the majority of linguists, case markers at the end of a declinable word, which could be of vowel, letter or elision type, are indicators of meaning. In other words according to the general acceptance, the iʿrāb signs at the end of words help one to understand the function of a given word in a sentence. Knowing the functions of the words of a sentence in turn enables the sentence to be understood correctly. Although there are those who say (...) that iʿrāb signs at the end of the words do not have anything to do with the function of words in a sentence, and that they only function to facilitate the transition between words, this view was not accepted by the majority. For this reason, thisarticle examines the iʿrāb-meaning within the scope of the prevailing attitude of naḥw scholars and Quranic exegetes. The majority of linguists accept that iʿrāb is an indicator of meaning. For this reason, explanations of iʿrāb, which are frequently used in Quranic commentaries, are aimed at understanding the sentences in the verses more accurately. The fact that Abū al-Aswad al-Duʾalīput vowel marks on certain words of the Quran was to facilitate the correct reading of the Quran and prevent a wrong vowel mark from causing any misunderstanding. Therefore, the close relationship between iʿrāb and meaning is clearly emphasized in naḥw books. Although it is stated as a general rule that iʿrāb is key in desciphering the meaning, there are cases where this general rule does not hold. This happens when there is a discrepancy between an iʿrāb sign at the end of a givenword and its meaning. Such situations are considered by naḥw scholars as qurb al-jiwār. According to this exception, a word does not take the iʿrāb indicator appropriate to its position in sentence and instead takes the same iʿrāb indicator of the previous word so as to be in harmony with it. The purpose of this is to prevent any disruption to the phonetic flow of the sentence rather than to function as an indicator of meaning. In fact, this phonetic harmony is not only limited to the iʿrāb at the end of words. In order to ensure harmony within a word, changes can be made in morphology of the word in question. This stems from the importance Arabs attach to the harmony of both intra-word and inter-word vowels, despite its contradiction to the rules of morphology and syntax. As a matter of fact, this kind of reading provides a sense of cohesion in terms of both ease of pronunciation and correspondence. In this article, I claim that the iʿrāb signs is not always a sign that reveals the meanings in the verses of the Qurʾān. In the light of this view, some of the verses of the Qurʾān comprise case endings that are contrary to the meaning for the sake of phonetic harmony, just as is the case in the current usage in Arabic language. This situation shows that besides the literary arts related tomeaning, those which are related to phonetic arts also constitute important literary aspects of the Qurʾān. The approaches of the Qurʾānic commentators towards the verses in which this feature, which is expressed as qurb al-jiwār in Naḥw, is found differ from each other. On the basis of these different approaches, the relevant narrations, syntax school, etc. that the commentators have generally considered matters are included. In fact, given that they lead to no confusion, irregularities contrary to the established grammar rules are tolerated. For this reason, qurb al-jiwār is used in the absence of ambiguity even though it is contrary to iʿrāb al-naḥwī. Unlike the Basran Grammarians, who regard qurb al-jiwār as a mere use, the Kufan Grammarians made the issue a regular grammar rule and used it as the basis for the jussiveness of apodosis of conditional clauses. Although qurb al-jiwār is accepted as a usage both in the Arabic language and the Quran by the majority of grammarians, there are differences of opinion in terms of the place of its use. While there is no clarity on this subject among the early grammarians, according to the general of late naḥw scholars, the issue of qurb al-jiwār is reserved for noun-adjective, corroborating-corroborated and connective explanation. However, it is controversial whether or not the qurb al-jiwār can be used in connectives. While in the early periods when controversies arose for the first time, qurb al-jiwār was generally unacceptable, in later periods it started to became more widely accepted. Extrapolating a theoretical framework for the issue based on primary classical sources on Naḥw constitutes a core methodology used in this work. According to the theoretical framework thus put forward, the discussions about the verses that are the subject of the iʿrāb of vicinity in the primary tafsīr sources from the first period to the present have been examined from an analysis-semantic perspective. (shrink)

The thesis that mental content is normative is ambiguous and has many forms. This article deals only with the thesis that normativity is connected to our mental attitudes rather than with the content of the attitudes, and more specifically with the view that it is connected to belief. A number of writers have proposed various versions of a ‘norm of truth’ attached to belief. I examine various versions of this claim, and defend it against recent criticisms according to which this (...) norm lacks normative force, that it violates the principle that ‘ought implies can,’ and that it is viciously circular. I defend the view that we should distinguish the statement of the objective norm and the way it is regulated, and that this distinction can answer most of the criticisms of the norm of truth for belief. (shrink)

A virtue account is focused on the character of those who argue. It is frequently assumed, however, that virtues are not action guiding, since they describe how to be and so fail to give us specific actions to take in a sticky situation. In terms of argumentation, we might say that being a charitable arguer is virtuous, but knowing so provides no details about how to argue successfully. To close this gap, I develop a parallel with the thick-thin distinction from (...) ethics and use Hursthouse’s notion of “v-rules”. I also draw heavily from the work in argumentation by Daniel Cohen to develop Wayne Brockriede’s notion of arguing lovingly. But “argue lovingly” has a delicious ambiguity. For Brockriede it describes how we engage with others arguers. It can also mean, however, a loving attachment to knowledge, understanding, and truth. Applying the thick-thin distinction to argumentation in general and loving argumentation in particular shows that a virtue theoretic approach to argumentation is valuable for two reasons: it can provide one articulation of what it means to be a virtuous arguer and provide some insights into how to become one. (shrink)

This book appraises the relationship between contemporary feminism and Julia Kristeva, a major figure in Continental thought. It addresses the conflicting range of feminist responses to Kristeva's key ideas and Kristeva's equally conflicting as well as ambiguous position vis-a-vis feminism. Schippers argues that this complex relationship can only be understood by positioning Kristeva along the fissures and fault lines which run through feminism. By attending to feminism's internal debates and disputes, and addressing the philosophical commitments and attachments held by Kristeva's (...) critics, the book clarifies the diverse Kristeva reception within feminism and illuminates how her ideas trouble contemporary feminist thought. And despite Kristeva's fundamental ambiguity towards all matters feminist, Schippers makes a case for Kristeva's important contribution to a feminist project which is sympathetic towards her account of fluid subjectivity and her critique of identity politics. In doing so, the author advances the scholarly understanding of Kristeva and of contemporary feminist thought. (shrink)

Race theorists have been unable to reach a consensus regarding the basic historical question, “is ‘race’ modern?” I argue that this is partly because the question itself is ambiguous. There is not really one question that race scholars are answering, but at least six. First, is the concept of race modern? Second, is there a modern concept of race that is distinct from earlier race concepts? Third, are “races” themselves modern? Fourth, are racialized groups modern? Fifth, are the means and (...) methods associated with racialization modern? And sixth, are the meanings attached to racialized traits modern? Because these questions have different answers, the debate about the historical origins of “race” cannot be resolved unless they are distinguished. I will explain the ways in which “race” is and is not modern by answering these questions, thereby offering a resolution to a seemingly intractable problem. (shrink)

In the BODY WORLDS exhibitions currently touring the United States, Gunther von Hagens displays human cadavers preserved through plastination. Whole bodies are playfully posed and exposed to educate the public. However, the educational aims are ambiguous, and some aspects of the exhibit violate human dignity. In particular, the signature cards attached to the whole-body plastinates that bear the title, the signature of Gunther von Hagens, and the date of creation mark the plastinates as artwork and von Hagens as the artist (...) in a gesture that strips the personal dignity from the donors. I conclude that the educational use of cadavers is compatible with respect for dignity if: 1) the utility of such use is great enough; 2) there are no other ways of achieving these ends; and 3) every effort is made to honor the dignity of the donors. (shrink)

[Herbert F.] Tucker has shown us in a very practical way that the concept of meaning is the problem of problems, not only in hermeneutics but in literary theory and, indeed, literary study generally. It may well be that in literary study there can be no talk of meaning that is not ambiguous, that does not require us to speak in figures or by means of metaphorical improvisations. It would not necessarily follow that our talk of meaning is merely provisional (...) or without philosophical authority since we know now that considerable authority attaches to ordinary language, whence we obtain our use of the word "meaning" as well as the figurations that we use to talk our way around it. To be sure, the discipline of literary study is now rapidly filling with grave masters who take our figures to mean that meaning is literally unspeakable—only so many transferences and substitutions within a system of differences alarmingly vast . This is itself a terrific idea, or a terrific figure, although it is used mainly to expose the thoughtless way we talk about meaning as well as our offhand assumptions about the conditions that make understanding possible. Our problem in literary study is not that meaning is unspeakable—even if it were it would not be a problem—but that we rarely reflect on the subject of meaning in a disciplined way. In our time, meaning as a topic of study is the preserve of logicians. It is almost exclusively a theme of analytical philosophy, and even those not bound by this philosophy address themselves to the analytical tradition when they speak of meaning.1 It is time that we entered into this discourse on meaning; a paper as fine as Tucker's should serve as a summons.· 1. Among numerous cases, see John R. Searle, "Metaphor" and "Literal Meaning," Expression and Meaning , pp. 76-136, and "Intentionality and the Use of Language," in Meaning and Use, ed. Avishai Margalit , pp. 181-97.Gerald l. Bruns, professor of English at the University of Iowa, is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Interpretation in Literary History. (shrink)

Parmi les 'but de l'homme' (puruṣārtha) qui orientent la vie humaine dans le monde indien, le dharma occupe une position très élevée, au-dessus de 'l'intérêt' (artha) et du 'désir' (kāma), respectivement la sphère du pouvoir (politique, économique, social) et celle de l'amour (y compris les passions et les plaisirs de la vie). Enfin, le dharma englobe le quatrième et ultime but de l'homme, la 'délivrance' (moksa). Le caractère normatif du dharma fixe la place de chacun dans la société, par l'exercice (...) de son devoir spécifique. Mais il ne se décline pas moins selon les dispositions individuelles de chacun, et l'action de l'homme en est la véritable mesure. Par-delà la littérature du dharma, le volume réunit des enquêtes sur cette notion 'en contexte,' de la poésie védique à la grammaire, de l'épopée au théâtre, des traditions religieuses et philosophiques--les premières Écoles bouddhiques, la Mīmāmsā, le tantrisme--à la médecine classique (Āyurveda) et jusqu'à la jurisprudence indienne moderne (du XVIIe au XIXe siècle) avec deux éclairages inédits sur le dharma des femmes. Une telle approche tend à restituer la complexité de quelques visages du dharma ainsi recomposés, non pas 'tel ou tel' aspect mais pour chaque cas le 'tout' d'un système à plusieurs facettes, à l'appui d'une histoire singulière dont les auteurs s'attachent à montrer points forts et limites, situations ambiguës, paradoxes et contradictions."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

After having accomplished an observation of the different problematic that affect the daily life of our city, as reflect of what happens in the rest of the national territory, we have been attracted to implement a juridical analysis to the situation of the donation and organ transplantation in the legal ambit of our country, with the objective to identify the level of efficacy and the normative scope with respect to the situation of people who need a transplant. This restlessness born (...) from the analysis of the law 1716 and its regulation, which ambiguously delimits the functions of the centers of health in what respect to this topic, also to establish the creation of a waiting list and a record, tool which objective would be norm the permanent supply of organs through donation programs. These do not accomplish their objective or being attached to a public policy in the ambit that allow the continuity of the institutions and benefit of the people in need. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, I will briefly introduce the concept of incongruity and its relation to humor and seriousness, connecting the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and the contemporary work of John Morreall. I will reveal some of the relations between Schopenhauer's notion of "seriousness" and the existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Be Beauvoir, and Lewis Gordon. In section II, I will consider the relationship between playfulness and incongruity, noting the role that enjoyment of incongruity plays (...) in creative, non-dogmatic thinking. In section III, I will critique Morreall's arguments against the efficacy of humor as a means of serious protest, analyzing the complex relationship between the ambiguous terms "seriousness" and "playfulness". In the final section, I contend that Morreall's conception of humor, with which I generally agree, fails to adequately address subversive humor. He is cognizant of the benefits of a humorous attitude and of the work of rebellious groups who use humor, but his insistence that the play mode of humor precludes emotional attachment and practical concern, renders his philosophical analysis of humor far less comprehensive than his title suggests. I will make the case, contra Morreall, and he is the most prominent of many humor theorists who make similar points, that some humor in play mode is non-existentially, non-gravely serious, and intends to do more than simply "delight" audiences; the subversive humorist, in particular, is attempting to disclose and transmit information in such a way as to create change in both attitudes and practical social interactions. (shrink)

This essay attempts to clarify the ambiguities attached to the term ‘the life-world’ and ‘a priori of the life-world’ in the phenomenological sense. It sketches the phenomenology of the life-world with respect to everyday pre-scientific life and perception, the mathematical and geometrical sciences of the natural world, and the eidetic and phenomenological reductions of pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy.

The French author Robert Charroux contributed to the popular discourse about alien visits to earth in the remote past, that he advanced in voluminous books replete with narratives of anomalous “facts.” According to Charroux, humanity is divided in “races” whose existence is explained in reference to greater or lesser “genetic” similarity to the “ancient aliens,” as well as to radiation that genetically modified humans on the occasions of major catastrophes. Additionally, he was convinced that a factor in humanity’s decadence was (...) its attachment to technology, that he regarded as detrimental in various ways; science, in his opinion, was overrated, a case in point being the theory of evolution. Extending the analysis of Charroux’s work offered by scholars like Wiktor Stoczkowski and Damien Karbovnik, I scrutinize Charroux’s books, reconstructing his ambiguous attitude towards science, his criticism of evolution, his racist theories, and his xenophobic worldview. (shrink)

Although Friedrich Nietzsche had no less to say about value than he did about truth, his writings reflect contradictory views about their interrelation. In several passages, Nietzsche explicitly remarks that no relation exists between phenomena and value, describing value as a derivative and secondary mode of interpretation arbitrarily ‘attached’ to primary, non-evaluative interpretations. Elsewhere and more understated, however, runs an opposing line of argumentation in which Nietzsche presents interpretation as emerging through evaluation and therefore as necessarily ‘colored’ by it. While (...) Gilles Deleauze's exegesis of Nietzsche struggles to maintain a certain faithfulness to this ambiguity, most contemporary inheritors of Nietzschean thought, including Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault, have embraced the claim of ‘no relation’ between value and interpretation. This article provides support, in part through the analytic of race, for the alternative hypothesis that holds the indissociable relation of value and interpretation. (shrink)

In this article we examine the idea of a politics of misrecognition of working activity. We begin by introducing a distinction between the kind of recognition and misrecognition that attaches to one’s identity, and the kind of recognition and misrecognition that attaches to one’s activity. We then consider the political significance of the latter kind of recognition and misrecognition in the context of work. Drawing first on empirical research undertaken by sociologists at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, we argue (...) for a differentiated concept of recognition that shows the politics of misrecognition at work to be as much a matter of conflict between modes of recognition as it is a struggle for recognition as opposed to non -recognition. The differentiated concept of recognition which allows for this empirical insight owes much to Axel Honneth’s theory. But as we argue in the section that follows, this theory is ambiguous about the normative content of the expectations of recognition that are bound up with the activity of working. This in turn makes it unclear how we should understand the normative basis of the politics of the misrecognition of what one does at work. In the final sections of the article, we suggest that the psychodynamic model of work elaborated by Christophe Dejours and others at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris can shed light on this matter; that is to say, it can help to clarify the normative significance and political stakes of the misrecognition of working activity. (shrink)

Secondary school teachers, trained as empowered mentors, were asked about their new role 2 years after the introduction of school-based initial teacher training. Kelly's repertory grid encouraged the development of personal constructs. The mentors demonstrated deep structure constructs which would not have been easily recognised by university tutors making relatively brief school visits. It is concluded that the mentors have reached a stage where continued experience in the role will not, per se, lead to improved skills. A number of tensions (...) within the role were highlighted, most of which are inherent in the school-based model, but some of which attach specifically to empowerment. Support for mentors not recognising such ambiguities is important. Mentor empowerment does appear to be a viable model of mentoring in school-based ITT, but continued training and changes in the type of support available is necessary. The place of appropriate theory at all stages of professional development was recognised. (shrink)

Cet article entreprend d’interroger l’intérêt ambigu de Spinoza pour la théocratie hébraïque. Ambigu, car s’il en récuse la valeur de modèle et en souligne très clairement les limites, il la considère aussi, manifestement, comme une réussite politique. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que cette valorisation de la théocratie hébraïque, peu commune dans ce type de discours, s’explique en partie parce qu’elle lui sert d’exemple et de matériau pour penser un aspect central de sa théorie politique : l’attachement du citoyen à l’État. Il (...) s’agira ainsi de voir comment Spinoza fait usage d’une théocratie mosaïque jugée inadaptable au temps présent, pour dégager les fondements d’un patriotisme non théocratique, adapté aux États modernes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper explores a taxonomy of uses of ‘because’ from the linguistics literature. It traces the apparent semantic differences between content, epistemic, and act ‘because’ to differences in attachment height. But it argues that the fact that these uses of ‘because’ never occur in the same environments is evidence of an underlying semantic unity. Arguments from such a distribution to underlying unity are familiar from phonology and morphology, and they are implicit in Quine's comments on ambiguity in (...) Word and Object, but they have too rarely been deployed in semantics. Here, such an argument points the way towards an underexplored conception of polysemy, while also making progress on the rather more limited topic of the lexical semantics of ‘because’. (shrink)

The words "analysis" and "synthesis" are among the most widely used and misused terms in the history of philosophy. They were originally used in geometrical reasoning during the age of Euclid to describe two opposing, but complementary, methods of arguing (roughly equivalent to deduction and induction). Since then philosophers have used them not only in this way, but also to refer to distinctions of various sorts between types of judgment or classes of propositions. To some they are regarded as defining (...) differences of kind, while others regard them as defining differences of degree. Moreover, they have been connected in numerous different ways with other distinctions, such as "a priori vs. a posteriori" or "necessary vs. contingent". Some philosophers have become so frustrated at the ambiguity attached to the various uses of the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" that they have given up all hope of assigning a coherent meaning to this distinction. (shrink)

Following some preliminary intuitions, a view attributing a specific level to sensation in a two levels model of mind is promoted. Some opinions deny the specificity of sensation by claiming either that it is physical or again by implying that it is completely cognitive. Meinong's definition of sensation as a simple perceptual representation originating from peripheric stimulation is reconstructed. France Veber's promotion of the hitting function with its attachment to sensation is derived from this definition by his teacher. Veber (...) ambiguously extends the hitting function to the higher cognitive level. Although he underlines their importance, just like Meinong he does not acknowledge sensations' autonomous level. (shrink)

Following some preliminary intuitions, a view attributing a specific level to sensation in a two levels model of mind is promoted. Some opinions deny the specificity of sensation by claiming either that it is physical or again by implying that it is completely cognitive. Meinong's definition of sensation as a simple perceptual representation originating from peripheric stimulation is reconstructed. France Veber's promotion of the hitting function with its attachment to sensation is derived from this definition by his teacher. Veber (...) ambiguously extends the hitting function to the higher cognitive level. Although he underlines their importance, just like Meinong he does not acknowledge sensations' autonomous level. (shrink)

First, two aspects of the partiality issue are identified: (1) Is it right/reasonable for professionals to favour their clients interests over either those of other individuals or those of society in general? (2) Are special non-universalisable obligations attached to certain professional roles?Second, some comments are made on the notions of partiality and reasonableness. On partiality, the assumption that only two positions are possible – a detached universalism or a partialist egoism – is challenged and it is suggested that partiality, e.g. (...) to family members, lies between these two positions, being neither a form of egoism, nor of impersonal detachment. On reasonableness, it is pointed out that reasonable is an ambiguous concept, eliding the notions of the morally right and the rational. (shrink)

We talk of the differences between the old Camus and the new Camus. Often such talk is equivalent to talk of the differences between Camus’ old self and Camus’ new self, between Camus’ diachronous selves. In other contexts, contexts which I shall ignore, the old and the new Camus is something we can read, provide literary criticism of, ponder over. In these contexts it is to the literary works of the old and new Camus that we are referring. The same (...) kind of ambiguity attaches to the expressions ‘the early Beethoven’ and ‘the later Beethoven’. (shrink)

Hugh of Saint-Victor's De Sacramentis is usually regarded as an early summa of theology. As such it has been regarded as not totally satisfying, lacking a clearness of its conceptual system when compared with the work of e.g. Peter the Lombard. What may make up for this lack of system and even confer coherence, be it on a different level, is Hugh's pedagogical view of creation and salvation history, as it shows most clearly in his tropological digressions. In his exposition (...) of the history of salvation as it unfolds since the very beginning, Hugh incorporates the process by which the monk can not only follow the story of the macrocosm, but at the same time can read his self into being, allowing recognition of ambivalence from the start, and thus presenting a multi-demensional view of being human. In the same way as, on the cosmic level, any pre-lapsarian state of innocence exhibits a flaw from the very beginning, so the life of man is in a permanent state of ambiguity. This ambiguity is the framework for man as a moral being. Only within the possibility of choice can man be just or happy, without choice justus and beatus have no real significance. Matters are shown to be even more complicated when, in the story of Eve Hugh draws attention to her doubtful interpretation of God's command, as a factor which precedes her choice. In this way, De Sacramentis is not only a doctrina in our sense of the content of Christian dogma, but it offers the monk a point to which he can attach and conform his intentio: by bringing his intentio in form with the story about creation and fall and reparation, the reader can in fact effect the necessary reparatio, consisting of knowledge of truth and love of virtue. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen 's critique of Rawlsian special incentives has been criticised as internally inconsistent on the grounds that Cohen concedes the existence of incentives that are legitimate because they are grounded on agent-centred prerogatives. This, Cohen 's critics argue, invites a slippery slope argument: there is no principled line between those incentives Cohen permits and those he condemns. This paper attempts a partial defence of Cohen : a prerogative can be granted but then its operation internally qualified. A better (...) off person has a prerogative that grounds incentive payment, but that person should be sensitive to the degree of difference between her resources and those of the representative worst off person. This gives a better off person under a distribution a discretion that is then internally qualified by a commitment to an egalitarian ethos. The paper concludes that on balance this is not, in fact, a reasonable view of a prerogative: granting it and then qualifying it in this way undermines the unfettered discretion that should attach to a prerogative. However, Cohen has certainly identified an ambiguity in how we conceive of prerogatives. (shrink)

This paper explores the many meanings attached to the designation,"the rodent in the laboratory". Generations of selective breeding have created these rodents. They now differ markedly from their wild progenitors, nonhuman animals associated with carrying all kinds of diseases.Through selective breeding, they have moved from the rats of the sewers to become standardized laboratory tools and saviors of humans in the fight against disease. This paper sketches two intertwined strands of metaphors associated with laboratory rodents.The first focuses on the idea (...) of medical/scientific progress; in this context, the paper looks at laboratory rodents often depicted as epitomizing medical triumph or serving as helpers or saviors. The second strand concerns the ambiguous status of the laboratory rodent who is both an animal and not an animal.The paper argues that, partly because of these ambiguous and multiple meanings, the rodent in the laboratory is doubly "othered"—first in the way that animals so often are made other to ourselves and then other in the relationship of the animal in the laboratory to other animals. (shrink)

In this thesis I develop an account of how processes of social understanding are implicated in experiences of mental disorder, critiquing the lack of examination of this phenomena along the way. First, I demonstrate how disorder concepts, as developed and deployed by psychiatric institutions, have the effect of shaping the cognition of individuals with psychopathology through setting expectations. Such expectation-setting can be harmful in some cases, I argue, and can perpetuate epistemic injustices. Having developed this view, I criticise enactive accounts (...) of mental disorder for failing to consider how such terms like ‘dysfunction’ are open to interpretation and can come embedded with normative expectations. Enactive accounts consequently run the risk of perpetuating injustices in their account of the sociality of mental disorder. Similar concerns arise when we consider the attachment of enactivism to the medical model, I argue. But by adapting enactivism to consider other experiences of disorder, such as those described as ‘madness’, enactive psychiatry may genuinely provide ethical groundwork for a better conception of disordered experience. Then, I consider a further concern with a distinctly medicalised conception of mental disorder from the perspective of self-illness ambiguity, arguing that self-illness ambiguities appear to form a special class of ambiguities due to their proximity to disorder concepts which mark them as appropriate targets for therapeutic treatment. However, I argue further that we should be critical of the idea that self-illness ambiguities necessitate disambiguation, as, in cases where self and illness are demarcated, individuals may still experience distress because simply having a mental disorder can be socially alienating. The medicalised focus in self-illness ambiguity, and the explicit need from the medical perspective to disambiguate it, might then exacerbate the distress someone experiences in mental disorder. Moreover, drawing on Mad Studies, I suggest that one might not need a coherent self-narrative to live well. Because of this, one may not need to adopt a medicalised view of the self in the case of selfillness ambiguity. In order to support this analysis, I provide a phenomenological account of language and argue that the very thoughts implicated in mental disorder shape the individual’s perception of the world due to the way that language foregrounds particular aspects of our world. This demands a critical examination of the language adopted and used by both clinicians and disordered individuals. I thus conclude with some thoughts on how to approach research and developing understanding of mental disorder given that we, as people, are always implicated in this process and therefore socialisation of some kind will always be taking place. (shrink)