In lower-income countries, owner-managers of small businesses take on heavy social responsibilities toward members of their extended family. However, using business resources to answer family needs can harm business, hence contradict broader responsibilities toward business stakeholders and society at large. In contexts where jobs are scarce and unemployment means deep poverty, this conundrum often translates into an ethical choice between recruiting needy relatives or avoid nepotism. To study such ethically loaded recruitment decisions, I adopt a stakeholder salience perspective. Focusing on (...) Rwanda, a small East African country, I use interview data to examine how owner-managers articulate their social responsibilities toward family and toward other stakeholders, and how this influences recruitment. I observe that owner-managers either nest, balance, or separate social responsibilities toward family and nonfamily stakeholders and preferentially recruit relatives or strangers accordingly. This study suggests that stakeholder salience depends on a process of stakeholder categorization, which is influenced by the cultural and political context. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The present article aims at setting the issue of the relationship between Buddhism and science in a historical and philosophical frame wider than that one taken into account by the international scholarship so far. The historical point of view allows us to conclude that the narrative that connects Buddhism with science is not based on features intrinsic to Buddhist thought. In fact, such narrative prospered thanks to the development of a dialectic, typical of the 18th and 19th centuries, between (...) science and religion. The philosophical point of view allows us to conclude that such narrative is backed by a metaphysical-like thought that denies the specificity of both science and Buddhism. RESUMO O presente artigo pretende enquadrar a questão do relacionamento entre budismo e ciência num âmbito histórico e filosófico mais amplo do que foi levado em consideração até agora pela scholarship internacional. A perspectiva histórica permite concluir que a narrativa que liga budismo e ciência não é baseada em características intrínsecas ao pensamento budista, mas floresceu em dependência do desenvolvimento da dialética religião-ciência dos séculos XVIII e XIX. A perspectiva filosófica, em contrapartida, permite concluir que essa mesma narrativa é sustentada por um pensamento de cunho metafísico e cientista, que nega a especificidade tanto da ciência quanto do budismo. (shrink)

This paper offers two competing accounts of normative requirements, each of which purports to explain why some—but not all—requirements are normative in the sense of being related to normative reasons in some robust way. According to the reasons-sensitive view, normative requirements are those and only those which are sensitive to normative reasons. On this account, normative requirements are second-order statements about what there is conclusive reason to do, in the broad sense of the term. According to the reasons-providing view—which I (...) attribute to John Broome—normative requirements are those and only those which constitute or provide normative reasons. I argue that the reasons-providing view is susceptible to two serious objections. First, the view generates an explanatory gap. Secondly, the view is implausible. I argue that these two objections give us reason to prefer the reasons-sensitive view of normative requirements over the reasons-providing view. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the regulation of medical practice from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in two Habsburg cities, Vienna and Osijek, in the light of the spread of medical knowledge and practice from the centre to the periphery of the Habsburg Monarchy. Although both cities were part of the Habsburg Monarchy for much of the early modern period, there were more differences than similarities between them. This may be explained by appealing to a variety of factors, including geographical position, (...) population structure, religion, government type, and professional organisations, all of which contributed to making medical practice very different in the two cities. The divergence occurred in spite of a central agenda for ensuring uniformity of medical practice throughout the Habsburg Monarchy. Although the legislation governing medical practice was the same in both cities, it was more strictly implemented in Vienna than in Osijek. In consequence, Osijek was the setting for some unique patterns of medical practice not to be found in the Habsburg capital. (shrink)

This article revisits the concept of the dividual, taking as a starting point Deleuze’s diagnosis about the relevance that dividual practices have gained with the advent of biotechnology and digital culture. Although we agree with this diagnosis, we highlight the intersections between the dividual and the individual both in Modernity and in the present time. The contemporary dividual is in tension with the modern individual, but not as a substitution, division or duplication of the individual. Rather, we state a complex (...) dividual-individual composition, focusing on biotechnologies, digital culture and financial capitalism. Following a Foucauldian approach, we understand this composition as a result of technologies of power and the result of certain modes of subjectivation. In dialogue with Simondon’s theory of individuation, we suggest that the dividual takes part in a new mode of subjectivation which can be named a ‘dividuation’ in the context of technologically mediated experiences. (shrink)

Political enunciation remains an enigma as long as it is considered from the standpoint of information transfer. It remains as unintelligible as religious talk. The paper explores the specificty of this regime and especially the strange link it has with the canonical definition of enunciation in linguistics and semiotics. The ‘political circle’ is reconstituted and thus also the reasons why a ‘transparent’ or ‘rational'political speech act destroys the very conditions of group formation.

Dès 1983, à l’occasion du colloque Une histoire des femmes est-elle possible? qui allait marquer le véritable départ de l’histoire des femmes en France, Alain Corbin soulignait la nécessité de se pencher aussi sur les « mentalités masculines », afin que puisse émerger une « histoire sexuée qui couple ses analyses ». L’auteur des Filles de noce resta longtemps peu entendu. Cette dernière décennie a pourtant vu une nette évolution s’amorcer, les masculinités françaises devenant peu à peu un ch...

The French, it is well known, love revolutions, political, scientific or philosophical. There is nothing they like more than a radical upheaval of the past, an upheaval so complete that a new tabula rasa is levelled, on which a new history can be built. None of our Prime Ministers starts his mandate without promising to write on a new blank page or to furnish a complete change in values and even, for some, in life. Each researcher would think of him (...) or herself as a failure, if he or she did not make such a complete change in the discipline that nothing will hereafter be the same. As to the philosophers they feed, from Descartes up to Foucault's days, on radical cuts, on ‘coupure épistémologique’, on complete subversion of everything which has been thought in the past by everybody. No French thinker, indeed no student of philosophy, would seriously contemplate doing anything short of a complete revolution in theories. To hesitate, to respect the past, would be to compromise, to be a funk, or worse, to be eclectic like a vulgar Anglo-Saxon! (shrink)

Interoception, the ability to feel the body’s internal sensations, is an essential aspect of emotional experience. There is mounting evidence that interoception is impaired in common mental health disorders and that poor interoceptive awareness is a major contributor to emotional reactivity, calling for clinical interventions to address this deficit. The manuscript presents a comprehensive theoretical review, drawing on multidisciplinary findings to propose a metatheory of reinforcement mechanisms applicable across a wide range of disorders. We present a reconsideration of operant conditioning (...) through the co-emergence model of reinforcement, which is a neurophenomenological account of the interaction between cognition and interoception, and its consequences on behavior. The model suggests that during memory processing, the retrieval of autobiographical memory (including maladaptive cognition) is dependent upon its co-emerging interoceptive cues occurring at the encoding, consolidation and reconsolidation stages. Accordingly, “interoceptive reinforcement” during emotional distress is a common factor to all emotional disorders and a major cause for relapse. We propose that interoceptive desensitization has transdiagnostic benefits, readily achievable through the cultivation of equanimity during mindfulness training and can be integrated in cognitive and behavioral interventions to permit a transdiagnostic applicability. We summarize the contributions of this approach into 10 specific and testable propositions. (shrink)

This translated work is an example of the type of writing that characterized the radical school of Hegelianism in the late 1830s and 1840s in that it mirrors the arguments and irritable temper of both the liberal Hegelians and their conservative opponents during the period between the French Revolution of 1830 and the general revolutions of 1848. As such, it is a useful period piece that can enhance an appreciation of the Hegelian involvement in the theological and philosophical argumentation that (...) characterized the German Vorm rz.". (shrink)

Vient ensuite une approche du style des philosophes dans son rapport à la construction même d'un système argumentatif autant qu'à divers modes d'expression : langage et littérarité donc, afin de sonder les voies de la création chez ...

The world has not always been there. At least not in philosophy. This two-part article examines the complex interplay of concepts among which the idea of the world appeared, and analyses the characteristics that allow it to play a central role in the space of philosophy. These are found to be fundamentally two. First, its capacity to identify with the idea of a closed, ordered totality, at the same time as it erodes the consistency of the latter and opens the (...) philosophical space onto a positive use of the idea of indetermination. And second, the way in which it operates inside several well-ordered philosophical systems as a point of confusion: as a blurred point that lacks the type of clarity and distinction normally required of philosophical concepts, and that nonetheless appears to be important enough not to be expelled from philosophy. The first part of the article, published in this issue, reconstructs some of the coordinates within which the problematic notion of the world comes to appear. The planned second part will investigate how the idea of the world comes to play a central role within contemporary philosophy by allowing for a new articulation between the idea of the universal and the idea of totality – which produces a cascade of effects, the most notable of which are a new articulation of the idea of subject, and of the relation between philosophy and praxis. (shrink)

This is a reply to Vann McGee’s response to my paper, ‘On Infinite Size’.

This paper addresses the question: given some theory T that we accept, is there some natural, generally applicable way of extending T to a theory S that can prove a range of things about what it itself (i.e. S) can prove, including a range of things about what it cannot prove, such as claims to the effect that it cannot prove certain particular sentences (e.g. 0 = 1), or the claim that it is consistent? Typical characterizations of Gödel’s second incompleteness (...) theorem, and its significance, would lead us to believe that the answer is ‘no’. But the present paper explores a positive answer. The general approach is to follow the lead of recent (and not so recent) approaches to truth and the Liar paradox. (shrink)

Assimilando a visão dialética de Adorno sobre o tema da perda da aura em Benjamin, pensado como uma “tendência evolutiva” da desartificação da arte, mas também como uma tendência a transformar a arte em indústria cultural, quando manejada a-dialeticamente, este artigo pretende analisar as consequências da dessacralização da arte. O objetivo é indicar a contrapartida positiva ligada à perda de autenticidade e valor de culto na arte, levando em conta a presença dos conceitos de “mimesis” e “jogo” na segunda versão (...) de A obra de arte na era da reprodutibilidade técnica e examinar algumas possíveis consequências desses efeitos dessacralizantes no campo sociopolítico. (shrink)

L’œuvre de Tocqueville nous propose et nous permet, au travers d’une approche libérale atypique, de pointer les différentes causes ou raisons qui font qu’en dépit de l’image émancipatrice que les sociétés modernes promeuvent d’elles-mêmes, celles-ci génèrent des tendances ou mettent en place des situations ou des processus qui incitent ou accoutument les libertés à se démettre d’elles-mêmes, ainsi que les volontés des individus à se soumettre. Les analyses de l’auteur s’accompagnent d’un projet éthique global dans lequel les questions des libertés (...) publiques, de la défense de la sphère privée, de la promotion d’une culture de l’association, celles de la force d’âme et de la lucidité intellectuelle, se veulent indissociables. La pensée de Tocqueville peut apparaître ainsi encore aujourd’hui, si l’on accepte d’aller au-delà d’une vision enchantée de la démocratie, comme une boîte à outils très suggestive et opératoire, pour comprendre combien les forces d’aliénation parmi les plus dangereuses de la démocratie ne sont pas nécessairement, ni les plus visibles, ni celles qui rencontrent immédiatement le plus de résistance de la part des citoyens. (shrink)

Belgian municipalities rely heavily on surcharges on national income taxes as a source of income. In a context offederal government, such taxes create "fiscal externalities": decisions at one level of government affect the welfare at other levels. We focus on one such interdependency: EC-civil servants are not subject to national incame taxation. We show that this federal decision has far reaching budgetary effectsfor the municipalities where these people reside. Apart from its budgetary impact, this situation also baspolitical and social relevance.

Le néo-russellien et les néo-frégéen soutiennent tous deux que certaines de nos pensées sont irréductiblement singulières et que cette singularité tient à la relation d’accointance que nous avons avec l’objet de la pensée. Cette relation d’accointance semble imposer une condition de transparence recognitionnelle qui empêche de considérer que deux objets avec lesquels nous entretenons une relation d’accointance puissent être les mêmes, sans que nous sachions qu’ils le soient. Il faut soit abandonner une notion de transparence présentationnelle, comme le font certains (...) néo-russelliens, en lui substituant une notion causale d’accointance, soit la conserver pour la rendre compatible avec les contraintes de Frege de Campbell. J’essaie de montrer que cette dernière rencontre de sévères difficultés, puisque la condition de transparence présentationnelle s’appliquant aux modes de présentation eux-mêmes, interdit à ces modes de remplir en même temps la double fonction qui est la leur : présenter un objet et le discriminer parmi d’autres. (shrink)

Over the past fifteen years, progress in distance learning and digital engineering has led to the emergence of so-called " hybrid " systems bringing together different modalities: face-to-face, distance learning, individual, collective, synchronous, or asynchronous. Our study, a survey of stakeholders in five hybrid didactic training systems for beginner teachers, explores how the efficiency and effectiveness of such hybrid systems result from the synchronization of rhythmicities experienced, constructed, or to be created. Do these rhythmicities thus created give the whole a (...) kind of temporal ecology aiming, for beginner teachers, to balance: the constrained times and rhythms of the path (more mechanistic scheme); or the times and rhythms constructed and conquered by the participants themselves (more emancipatory scheme)? Three ideal types of trainee-users of the system and to put forward the hypothesis of a search for eurythmy by the latter, regulating their representations, behavior, and activities vis-à-vis the system. (shrink)