Corporate citizenship is a prominent international issue as contemporary corporations are no longer expected to perform financially, but are also expected to have an ethical relationship of responsibility between the corporate itself and the society in which it operates and performs it business activities. Provides an up-to-date theoretical content pertaining to corporate citizenship, providing local and global examples and case studies.

Au paragraphe 27 de la Critique de la raison pure, Kant affirme que la présence des catégories dans l'esprit est a priori, terme qu'il faut bien distinguer de l'inné. Innées, les catégories seraient contingentes, implantées en nous par le Créateur, simples dispositions subjectives dont nul ne pourrait prouver la nécessité. C'est là la thèse de Hume. Quelle est toutefois la différence avec l'a priori? Il faut comprendre que ce dernier en quelque sorte s'engendre, se produit, selon, pour ainsi dire, une (...) " épigenèse ", le mouvement graduel et différencié d'un développement embryonnaire. Le livre développe tous les paradoxes contenus dans cette analogie, laquelle sert de fil directeur à la discussion : Kant parvient-il vraiment, grâce à l'épigenèse, à distinguer entre a priori et inné, à contredire le scepticisme et à conférer une valeur fondatrice au transcendantal? Adversaires et défenseurs du kantisme s'affrontent. De Meillassoux au cognitivisme en passant par l'évolutionnisme mental, de Heidegger à Foucault, Kant est sommé de répondre et de prendre position sur trois questions centrales qui sont celles du temps, de la contingence et de la différence entre raison et cerveau. (shrink)

In this essay, I argu e that Descartes considered his theory that the body is an inn ervated machine – in which the soul is situated – to be his most original contribution to philosophy. His ambition to prove the immortality of the soul was very poorly realized, a predictable outcome, insofar as his aims were ethical, not theological. His dualism accordingly requires reassessment.

This article analyses the policies and the use of social rights in France and Germany in relation to the philosophical conception of subjective rights theorised by Catherine Colliot-Thélène. The first part is devoted to the relationship between the innate right and the solidarist conception of social citizenship, which is institutionalised and evolves within the framework of the “labour society” in both countries. The second part deals with the differences and developments in the French and German regimes of social citizenship (...) and policies of access to rights. In recent times, social rights have been redefined as fundamental rights and form part of a renewed conception of citizenship. In the third part, we study the implementation of schemes of access to social rights and their agents in Berlin, Paris and the Paris region, focusing on the case of “poor migrants”. (shrink)

Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she (...) argues for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns. Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief. (shrink)

This edited volume of 13 new essays aims to turn past discussions of natural kinds on their head. Instead of presenting a metaphysical view of kinds based largely on an unempirical vantage point, it pursues questions of kindedness which take the use of kinds and activities of kinding in practice as significant in the articulation of them as kinds. The book brings philosophical study of current and historical episodes and case studies from various scientific disciplines to bear on natural kinds (...) as traditionally conceived of within metaphysics. Focusing on these practices reveals the different knowledge-producing activities of kinding and processes involved in natural kind use, generation, and discovery. -/- Specialists in their field, the esteemed group of contributors use diverse empirically responsive approaches to explore the nature of kindhood. This groundbreaking volume presents detailed case studies that exemplify kinding in use. Newly written for this volume, each chapter engages with the activities of kinding across a variety of disciplines. Chapter topics include the nature of kinds, kindhood, kinding, and kind-making in linguistics, chemical classification, neuroscience, gene and protein classification, colour theory in applied mathematics, homology in comparative biology, sex and gender identity theory, memory research, race, extended cognition, symbolic algebra, cartography, and geographic information science. -/- The volume seeks to open up an as-yet unexplored area within the emerging field of philosophy of science in practice, and constitutes a valuable addition to the disciplines of philosophy and history of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. -/- Contributions from a diverse group of established and junior scholars in the fields of Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science including Hasok Chang, Jordi Cat, Sally Haslanger, Joyce C. Havstad, Catherine Kendig, Bernhard Nickel, Josipa Petrunic, Samuli Pöyhönen, Thomas A. C. Reydon, Quayshawn Spencer, Jackie Sullivan, Michael Wheeler, and Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther. (shrink)

But in this book, Catherine Malabou proposes a more radical meaning for plasticity, one that not only adapts itself to existing circumstances, but forms a ...

Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to “hope well,” and what does “hoping well” involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. (...) It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. (shrink)

Is contemporary continental philosophy making a break with Kant? The structures of knowledge, taken for granted since Kants Critique of Pure Reason, are now being called into question: the finitude of the subject, the phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. Relinquish the transcendental: such is the imperative of postcritical thinking in the 21st century. Questions that we no longer thought it possible to ask now reemerge with renewed vigor: can Kant really maintain the difference between a priori and innate? Can he (...) deduce, rather than impose, the categories, or justify the necessity of nature? Recent research into brain development aggravates these suspicions, which measure transcendental idealism against the thesis of a biological origin for cognitive processes. In her important new book Catherine Malabou lays out Kants response to his posterity. True to its subject, the book evolves as an epigenesis – the differentiated growth of the embryo – for, as those who know how to read critical philosophy affirm, this is the very life of the transcendental and contains the promise of its transformation. (shrink)

This book is one of the most important recent books on Hegel, a philosopher who has had a crucial impact on the shape of continental philosophy. Published here in English for the first time, it includes a substantial preface by Jacques Derrida in which he explores the themes and conclusions of Malabou's book. _The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic_ restores Hegel's rich and complex concepts of time and temporality to contemporary philosophy. It examines his concept of time, relating (...) it to perennial topics in philosophy such as substance, accident and the identity of the subject. Catherine Malabou's also contrasts her account of Hegelian temporality with the interpretation given by Heidegger in _Being and Time_, arguing that it is the concept of 'plasticity' that best describes Hegel's theory of temporality. The future is understood not simply as a moment in time, but as something malleable and constantly open to change through our interpretation. The book also develops Hegel's preoccupation with the history of Greek thought and Christianity and explores the role of theology in his thought. Essential reading for those interested in Hegel and contemporary continental philosophy, _The Future of Hegel _is also fascinating to those interested in the ideas of Heidegger and Derrida. (shrink)

The experience of the impossible churns up in our epoch whenever a collective dream turns to trauma: politically, sexually, economically, and with a certain ultimacy, ecologically. Out of an ancient theological lineage, the figure of the cloud comes to convey possibility in the face of the impossible. An old mystical nonknowing of God now hosts a current knowledge of uncertainty, of indeterminate and interdependent outcomes, possibly catastrophic. Yet the connectivity and collectivity of social movements, of the fragile, unlikely webs of (...) an alternative notion of existence, keep materializing--a haunting hope, densely entangled, suggesting a more convivial, relational world. Catherine Keller brings process, feminist, and ecopolitical theologies into transdisciplinary conversation with continental philosophy, the quantum entanglements of a "participatory universe," and the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Walt Whitman, A. N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, to develop a "theopoetics of nonseparable difference." Global movements, personal embroilments, religious diversity, the inextricable relations of humans and nonhumans--these phenomena, in their unsettling togetherness, are exceeding our capacity to know and manage. By staging a series of encounters between the nonseparable and the nonknowable, Keller shows what can be born from our cloudiest entanglement. (shrink)

We propose that a direct analogy can be made between optimal behaviour in animals and rational behaviour in humans, and that lessons learned by the study of the former can be applied to the latter. Furthermore, we suggest that, to understand human decisions, rationality must be considered within an evolutionary framework.

At the center of Catherine's Malabou's study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel's relation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojève, have taken Hegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou finds a more supple impulse, open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of “plasticity,” and shows how Hegel's dialectic—introducing the sculptor's art into philosophy—is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithful reader, (...) and allows her classic “maître” to speak, if not against his own grain, at least against a tradition too attached to closure and system. Malabou's Hegel is a “plastic” thinker, not a nostalgic metaphysician. (shrink)

In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's ...

Talents often play a significant role in our personal and social lives. For example, our talents may shape the choices we make and the goods that we value, making them central to the creation of a meaningful life. Differences in the level of talents also affect how social institutions are structured, and how social goods and resources are distributed. Despite their normative importance, it is surprising that talents have not yet received substantial philosophical analysis in their own right. As a (...) result, the current literature is rife with conceptual ambiguity: a talent is referred to as all of a skill, potential, ability, capacity, endowment, and a natural gift. In response to this confusion, in this paper I develop an account of what a talent is, based on the debate concerning the metaphysics of ability and dispositions. I argue for a position that I call ‘talent dispositionalism’: S has a talent for skill A in circumstances C iff S has the general disposition to excellently develop and maintain A when, in circumstances C, she tries to excellently develop and maintain A. On this account, a talent is not the skill itself, but a general iterated ability for the excellent development and up-keep of a particular skill, constituted by an agent’s dispositional properties. I defend the account against four objections usually levelled against traditional dispositionalist theories of ability, and highlight some ways the account may influence debates in other areas of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. Natural (...) history and its descendant discipline of biological taxonomy are prime examples of sciences dedicated to creating and managing systems of ordering data. In some sense, the idea of biological taxonomy as an information science is commonplace. Perhaps it is because of its self-evidence that the information science perspective on taxonomy has not been a major theme in the history and philosophy of science. The botanist Vernon Heywood once pointed out that historians of biology, in their ‘preoccupation with the development of the sciences of botany and zoology… [have] diverted attention from the role of taxonomy as an information science’ (Heywood 1985: 11). More specifically, he argued that historians had failed to appreciate how principles and practices that can be traced to Linnaeus constituted ‘a change in the nature of taxonomy from a local or limited folk communication system and later a codified folk taxonomy to a formal system of information science [that] marked a watershed in the history of biology’ (ibid.). A similar observation could be made about twentieth-century philosophy of biology, which mostly skipped over practical and epistemic questions about information management in taxonomy. The taxonomic themes that featured in the emerging philosophy of biology literature in the second half of the twentieth century were predominantly metaphysical in orientation. This is illustrated by what has become known as the ‘essentialism story’: an account about the essentialist nature of pre- Darwinian taxonomy that used to be accepted by many historians and philosophers, and which stimulated efforts to document and interpret shifts in the metaphysical understanding of species and (natural) classification (Richards 2010; Winsor 2003; Wilkins 2009). Although contemporary debates in the philosophy of taxonomy have moved on, much discussion continues to focus on conceptual and metaphysical issues surrounding the nature of species and the principles of classification. Discussions centring on whether species are individuals, classes, or kinds have sprung up as predictably as perennials. Raucous debates have arisen even with the aim of accommodating the diversity of views: is monism, pluralism, or eliminativism about the species category the best position to take? In addition to these, our disciplines continue to interrogate what is the nature of these different approaches to classification: are they representational or inferential roles of different approaches to classification (evolutionary taxonomy, phenetics, phylogenetic systematics)? While there is still much to learn from these discussions—in which we both actively participate—our aim with this topical collection has been to seek different entrypoints and address underexposed themes in the history and philosophy of taxonomy. We believe that approaching taxonomy as an information science prompts new questions and can open up new philosophical vistas worth exploring. A twenty-first century information science turn in the history and philosophy of taxonomy is already underway. In scientific practice and in daily life it is hard to escape the imaginaries of Big Data and the constant threats of being ‘flooded with data’. In the life sciences, these developments are often associated with the socalled bioinformatics crisis that can hopefully be contained by a new, interdisciplinary breed of bioinformaticians. These new concepts, narratives, and developments surrounding the centrality of data and information systems in the biological and biomedical sciences have raised important philosophical questions about their challenges and implications. But historical perspectives are just as necessary to judge what makes our information age different from those that preceded us. Indeed, as the British zoologist Charles Godfray has often pointed out, the piles of data that are being generated in contemporary systematic biology have led to a second bioinformatics crisis, the first being the one that confronted Linnaeus in the mid-18th century (Godfray 2007). Although our aim is to clear a path for new discussions of taxonomy from an information science-informed point of view, we continue where others in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science have already trod. We believe that an appreciation of biological taxonomy as an information science raises many questions about the philosophical, theoretical, material, and practical aspects of the use and revision of biological nomenclatures in different local and global communities of scientists and citizen scientists. In particular, conceiving of taxonomy as an information science directs attention to the temporalities of managing an accumulating data about classified entities that are themselves subject to revision, to the means by which revision is accomplished, and to the semantic, material, and collaborative contexts that mediate the execution of revisions. (shrink)

Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North (...) America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self. Contributors Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon. (shrink)

Although interest in the subject of human-resource marketing is growing among researchers and practitioners, there have been remarkably few studies on the effects on employees of how benevolent their organization is. This article looks at the link between the presumption of organizational benevolence and the well-being of employees at work. The results of an empirical study of 595 employees show that the presumption of organizational benevolence is positively linked to employee well-being. The effect is indirect, as it is mediated by (...) the perceived level of organizational support. The existence of a link between employee well-being and intention to quit the company is also confirmed. (shrink)

This article examines two contrasting interviews—with an Anglo and a Puerto Rican woman—and concludes that gender congruence does not help an Anglo interviewer make sense of the working-class, Hispanic woman's account of her marital separation. Both in form and content, her discourse contrasts sharply with an Anglo woman's account. The two women use different narrative genres or forms of telling to communicate their culturally distinctive experiences with marriage. In the case of the Puerto Rican woman, these differences result in major (...) misunderstandings by the interviewer. Applying narrative methods to these interviews shows how closer attention to the voice of the subject can enrich qualitative research. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following is widely regarded to have identified what Kripke called "the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date". But does it? This paper examines the problem in the light of Charles Peirce's distinctive "scientific hierarchy". Peirce identifies a phenomenological inquiry which is prior to both logic and metaphysics, whose role is to identify the most fundamental philosophical categories. His third category, particularly salient in this context, pertains to general predication. Rule-following scepticism, the (...) paper suggests, results from running together two questions: "How is it that I can project rules?", and, "What is it for a given usage of a rule to be right?". In Peircean terms the former question, concerning the irreducibility of general predication (to singular reference), must be answered in phenomenology, while the latter, concerning the difference between true and false predication, is answered in logic. A failure to appreciate this distinction, it is argued, has led philosophers to focus exclusively on Wittgenstein's famous public account of rule-following rightness, thus overlooking a private, phenomenological dimension to Wittgenstein's remarks on following a rule which gives the lie to Kripke's reading of him as a sceptic. (shrink)

Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s recent exchange, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, is remarkable because in their rereading of Hegel’s famous lord and bondsman parable, rather than focusing on recognition, work, or even desire, Butler and Malabou each wonder about how Hegel contributes to a new way of thinking about ‘having’ a body and how coming to ‘be’ a body necessarily involves a kind of dispossession. Butler and Malabou’s reading (...) of Hegel is congruent with a current shift on the left away from a liberal politics of recognition to a Marxist analytic of dispossession: a move, in other words, away from liberal ‘solutions’ of redistribution – of either goods or recognition – towards thinking through issues of settler colonialism, forced migration and empire. Butler and Malabou’s piece points towards the insight that Hegel’s parable must be thought in terms of the political history of possessive individualism, and so in terms of the history of juridically defined property relations; the history of regarding both the body and the land as property. The ‘two valences’ of dispossession, in other words, refers in fact to a logic of property relations, one between those who ‘have’ property and those who are juridically defined as propertyless. (shrink)

The paper starts with reflections on Plato’s critique of the poets and the preference many express for Aristotle’s view of poetry. The second part of the paper takes a case study of analytic treatments of ancient philosophy, including the ancient philosopher poets, to examine the poetics of analytic philosophy, diagnosing a preference in Analytic philosophy for a clean non-poetic style of presentation, and then develops this in considering how well historians of philosophy in the Analytic tradition can accommodate the contributions (...) of philosophers who wrote in verse. The final part of the paper reviews the current enthusiasm for decoding Empedocles’ vague and poetic descriptions of the cosmic cycle into a precise scientific periodicity on the basis of the recently discovered Byzantine scholia on Aristotle. I argue that this enthusiasm speaks to a desire for definite and clear numerical values in place of poetic motifs of give and take, and that this mathematical and scientific poetic is comparable to the preferred poetic of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

At the center of Catherine's Malabou's study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel's relation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojève, have taken Hegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou finds a more supple impulse, open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of “plasticity,” and shows how Hegel's dialectic—introducing the sculptor's art into philosophy—is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithful reader, (...) and allows her classic “maître” to speak, if not against his own grain, at least against a tradition too attached to closure and system. Malabou's Hegel is a “plastic” thinker, not a nostalgic metaphysician. (shrink)

In this paper I explore a famous part of Plato’s Theaetetus where Socrates develops various models of the mind (picturing it first as a wax tablet and then as an aviary full of specimen birds). These are to solve some puzzles about how it is possible to make a mistake. On my interpretation, defended here, the discussion of mistakes is no digression, but is part of the refutation of Theaetetus’s thesis that knowledge is “true doxa”. It reveals that false doxa (...) is possible only if there is a certain stock of abstract knowledge, conceptual knowledge, that is not awareness of the particular individual that is being described. The individual must be identified under some description, or seen as something of a certain kind. Error can only occur if the description applied misdescribes the situation, but then if it is to be applied falsely it must first have been known from somewhere else. So knowledge cannot be reduced to the application of descriptions to particulars, but is to be found in the prior possession of abstract descriptions that can be deployed in identifying particular individuals on the ground. (shrink)

In a world surrounded by smart objects from sensors to automated medical devices, the ubiquity of ‘smart’ seems matched only by its lack of clarity. In this article, we use our discussions with expert stakeholders working in areas of implantable medical devices such as cochlear implants, implantable cardiac defibrillators, deep brain stimulators and in vivo biosensors to interrogate the difference facets of smart in ‘implantable smart technologies’, considering also whether regulation needs to respond to the autonomy that such artefacts carry (...) within them. We discover that when smart technology is deconstructed it is a slippery and multi-layered concept. A device’s ability to sense and transmit data and automate medicine can be associated with the ‘sting’ of autonomy being disassociated from human control as well as affecting individual, group, and social environments. (shrink)

In its governance activities for genetic resources, the international community has adopted various approaches to their ownership, including: free access; common heritage of mankind; intellectual property rights; and state sovereign rights. They have also created systems which combine elements of these approaches. While governance of plant and animal genetic resources is well-established internationally, there has not yet been a clear approach selected for human genetic resources. Based on assessment of the goals which international governance of human genetic resources ought to (...) serve, and the implications for how they will be accessed and utilised, it is argued that common heritage of mankind will be the most appropriate approach to adopt to their ownership/control. It does this with the aim of stimulating discussion in this area and providing a starting point for deeper consideration of how a common heritage of mankind, or similar, regime for human genetic resources would function and be implemented. (shrink)

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from South India, the author analyzes married women's experiences of stigma when they are childless and their everyday resistance practices. As stigma theory predicts, childless women deviate from the “ordinary and natural” life course and are deeply discredited, but contrary to Goffman's theory, South Indian women cannot “pass” or selectively disclose the “invisible” attribute, and they make serious attempts to destigmatize themselves. Social class and age mediate stigma and resistance processes: Poor village women of childbearing (...) age are devalued in ways affluent and professional women avoid; differently situated women challenge dominant definitions and ideologies of family in distinctive ways. South Indian women are creating spaces for childless marriages within the gendered margins of families and culturally prevalent definitions of womanhood. The findings contribute to rethinking Western assumptions in Goffman's theory and suggest new directions for research on power and everyday resistance. (shrink)

Do you need to know the name of the god you're praying to? If you get the name wrong what happens to the prayer? What if the god has more than one name? Who gets to decide whether the name works (you or the god or neither)? What are names anyway? Are the names of the gods any different in how they work from any other names? Is there a way of fixing the reference without using the name so as (...) to avoid the problems of optional names? There is a type of formula used in prayer in ancient Greece which I call (in this paper) a "precautionary formula". The person praying uses expressions like "whether you want to be called [x] or [y]", and "if this is the name by which you would like to be called". I also include here the practice of adding definite descriptions that identify the god by means other than the name (e.g. their place of birth or residence, their deeds etc). In this paper I ask what these formulae were for, why so many occur in philosophical work, particularly Plato, and whether the puzzles about the names of the gods go back to the Presocratics. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we can better understand Plato’s Phaedo, if we don’t concentrate solely on the hints of Pythagoreanism among the characters and their doctrines, as though that were the principal key to the dialogue’s dialec- tical targets. I suggest that the dialogue is intended to make us think of the meta-physics of at least one other Presocratic predecessor, besides any Pythagorean influence (which may be much less than has been thought). Not least among the thinkers of (...) whom we are reminded is Heraclitus. In the Phaedo, Plato invites us to explore the limitations of these earlier metaphysical views, and to consider how far they can or cannot make space for the capacity of the soul to direct the body, to make decisions, to grasp eternal truths and potentially to survive in perpetuity beyond the decay of the body. (shrink)

This article uses Hans Kelsen's theory of a legalsystem to take a fresh look at European Community law,and the relationship between the European Community,its Member States, and international law. It arguesthat the basis of the Community's legal legitimacy isindeterminate, and offers a model to accommodate thatindeterminacy. This model is founded on aconstructivist approach suggested to be particularlyuseful in the EC context. Using this approach, it isargued that the concepts of system, autonomy andsovereignty in the Community can only be understoodthrough the (...) recognition of a plurality of viewpoints,and that it is crucial, in describing the Community,to distinguish between a concept per se and thechoice to adopt that concept. (shrink)

Ce témoignage écrit est le récit d'un 8 mars, très particulier, dans un pays aujourd'hui déchiré par la guerre civile, l'Algérie. Catherine Lévy a enseigné de 1962 à 1965 en tant que « pied-rouge » : on désignait ainsi les Français et les Françaises qui sont partis en Algérie après l'indépendance pour aider à la construction de l'Algérie nouvelle. Professeur au Collège Ben Cheneb à Alger, elle était militante à l'UGTA de Bab-El-Oued et a participé à la manifestation qu'elle (...) décrit ci-d.. (shrink)

Ce témoignage écrit est le récit d'un 8 mars, très particulier, dans un pays aujourd'hui déchiré par la guerre civile, l'Algérie. Catherine Lévy a enseigné de 1962 à 1965 en tant que « pied-rouge » : on désignait ainsi les Français et les Françaises qui sont partis en Algérie après l'indépendance pour aider à la construction de l'Algérie nouvelle. Professeur au Collège Ben Cheneb à Alger, elle était militante à l'UGTA de Bab-El-Oued et a participé à la manifestation qu'elle (...) décrit ci-d... (shrink)

Today, new artistic practices incorporate scientific techniques linked to medical research that modify the body’s biological performance in vivo, transforming it into a singular laboratory object. In this way, some artists are making works of their bodies by subjecting them to various biotechnological procedures, often invasive. Augmented, the biological body of these performance artists becomes a site for experimentation. DIY (Do It Yourself) enthusiasts or accompanied by biologists and doctors, are these ‘bio-artists’ evidence of the changes brought about by a (...) new mechanisation of the human body, the complexity of which we are only just beginning to understand? Could there be, in the name of art, reasons that justify the creation of utopian bodies that are not eschatological, and that could make us believe in the worst or the best of all worlds? Based on performances by Stelarc, Yann Marussich, Marion Laval-Jeantet and the Quimera Rosa duo, our aim is to analyse what is at stake in this new fabrication of the body outside its biological limits. (shrink)

Commentators on the work of Catharine Macaulay acknowledge her influence on the pioneering feminist writing of Mary Wollstonecraft. Yet despite Macaulay's interest in equal education for women, these commentators have not considered that Macaulay offered a self-contained, sustained argument for the equality of women. This paper endeavors to show that Macaulay did produce such an argument, and that she holds a place in the development of early feminism independent of her connections with Wollstonecraft.

Commentators on the work of Catharine Macaulay acknowledge her influence on the pioneering feminist writing of Mary Wollstonecraft. Yet despite Macaulay's interest in equal education for women, these commentators have not considered that Macaulay offered a self-contained, sustained argument for the equality of women. This paper endeavors to show that Macaulay did produce such an argument, and that she holds a place in the development of early feminism independent of her connections with Wollstonecraft.

The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The (...) fastest-growing regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors. (shrink)

Aux frontières de l’art et de l’expérience scientifique, des artistes s’aventurent à reprogrammer les mécanismes du vivant, à les réincarner en s’appuyant sur les données les plus récentes de la biologie pour produire des réalités vivantes inédites. Transposés du monde clos des laboratoires au monde de l’art, ces artefact vivants, sont-ils en mesure de modifier le regard que nous portons sur la science et plus encore sur le vivant et d’infléchir nos comportements à l’égard d’entités vivantes reprogrammées sur mesure? Sont-ils (...) les pièces à conviction d’une science en train de transformer la société et les valeurs qui s’y rattachent? L’identité humaine court-elle le risque de se perdre à travers cette collection d’entités biologico-futuristes qui transgressent la logique du vivant? Dans une société libérale où prévaut l’autonomie artistique, quand la performance technique semble se confondre avec la valeur esthétique de l’œuvre et que l’artiste relève autant de l’ingénieur que du concepteur, cet art protéiforme qui œuvre en laboratoire hors de tout programme appliqué à la médecine et à l’industrie, est-il en mesure de produire tous les possibles en matière de fabrication du vivant? Notre propos consistera à interroger d’un point de vue éthique la production de ces artistes qui érigent en dogme la rationalisation des phénomènes biologiques, interfèrent l’organisation spontanée des organismes vivants, et dessinent les contours d’une biosphère inédite. (shrink)

This article brings together two excerpts from the forthcoming book, The Weary Sons of Freud (Verso/new Left Books, 1987) by Catherine Clément, translated from the French by Nicole Ball. It also includes an edited version of the book's Introduction by Ann Rosalind Jones. Feminist Review would like to thank her for her help in editing this piece, and also Verso/new Left Books for permission to reproduce these extracts.

Even though The Medium Place is overshadowed by the dramatic events that unfold in the fake Good Place neighborhood, it is more significant to The Good Place. The Medium Place is described as an individually tailored “eternal mediocrity,” a place of neutrality and compromise. One of the most prominent contemporary cultural theorists, Homi K. Bhabha, calls this space of becoming, where contradictions and differences are explored rather than resolved, a “Third Space”. Bhabha claims that despite its importance, being “in‐between” is (...) usually “unrepresentable,” and Roland Barthes too refers to his idea of the “third possibility” as having “no place” of its own. But the writers of The Good Place have proved them wrong—they have found a way to represent this middle “in‐between” space it as a geographical neighborhood. The morality of The Medium Place is the most human and realistic of all The Good Place neighborhoods. (shrink)

Disorders of consciousness (DOC) are a family of related neurological syndromes characterized by deficits of varying degrees of wakefulness (e.g., sleep–wake cycles and arousal) or awareness (e.g., reacting to stimuli, interacting with the environment). Although coma rarely persists for more than a few weeks, some patients remain in a subsequent vegetative state or a minimally conscious state for months or years. Caring for patients with DOC raises ethical questions, but the perspectives of healthcare providers on these questions remain poorly documented. (...) We conducted a qualitative study involving healthcare providers with different backgrounds. Semistructured interviews were used to explore attitudes toward ethical issues. We found that contextual (e.g., time, resource allocation) and relational aspects (e.g., communication process, families) shaped how ethical challenges surfaced and were managed. We call for greater awareness of contextual, institutional and social aspects and focus on these issues in training programs. (shrink)

Philosophers are generally somewhat wary of the hints of number mysticism in the reports about the beliefs and doctrines of the so-called Pythagoreans. It's not clear how much Pythagoras himself (as opposed to his later followers) indulged in speculation about numbers, or in more serious mathematics. But the Pythagoreans whom Aristotle discusses in the Metaphysics had some elaborate stories to tell about how the universe could be explained in terms of numbers—not just its physics but perhaps morality too. Was this (...) just fanciful speculation? Is it muddled as a theory of causality, as Aristotle suggests? I shall try to rehabilitate the passion for numbers by linking it with the notions of harmony and proportion in other thinkers who have a higher credibility factor in the philosophical stakes, and by showing that the desire to reduce quality to quantity, and to discover an exact science that can explain human life and meaning, is a serious philosophical passion that doesn't easily go away. And, after all, why should it? (shrink)