The encounter of amateur science with synthetic biology has led to the formation of several amateur/do‐it‐yourself biology (DIYBio) groups worldwide. Although media outlets covered DIYBio events, most seemed only to highlight the hope, hype, and horror of what DIYBio would do in the future. Here, we analyze the European amateur biology movement to find out who they are, what they aim for and how they differ from US groups. We found that all groups are driven by a core leadership (...) of (semi‐)professional people who struggle with finding lab space and equipment. Regulations on genetic modification limit what groups can do. Differences between Europe and the US are found in the distinct regulatory environments and the European emphasis on bio‐art. We conclude that DIYBio Europe has so far been a responsible and transparent citizen science movement with a solid user base that will continue to grow irrespective of media attention. (shrink)

The emergence of Do-It-Yourself science movements is becoming a topic widely discussed in academia and policy, as well as by the general public and the media. While DIY approaches enjoy increasing diffusion even in official research, different social actors frequently talk about them in different ways and circumstances. Interaction and negotiation processes amongst actors define the premises upon which different conceptualisations of DIY science are deployed.

In contemporary social epistemology, the claim has been made that there is a traditional “neglect of testimonial knowledge,” and that in the history of epistemology, first-hand self-knowledge was invariably prioritised over secondary knowledge. While this paper acknowledges some truth in these statements, it challenges the given explanations: the mentioned neglect of testimonial knowledge is based not so much on a primacy of self-knowledge, but that of self-agency. This article retraces some crucial chapters of this ‘do-it-yourself’ paradigm: it considers the (...) imperative of autopsia in early Greek epistemology, history and medicine, and the early modern refashioning of the privilege of self-generated and self-taught (autodidactic) knowledge. A new picture emerges of how the emphasis on (self-)agency progressively shifted towards a focus on the self as the source of ultimate knowledge. (shrink)

The essence of life in an oligarchy like George Orwell presents in '1984' is that freedom of choice is virtually non-existent. But what happens when so many trivial and meaningless choices inundate a culture such as our own and freedom itself becomes devalued? In 'A Do-It-Yourself Dystopia', through a variety of essays, Steven Carter addresses this and other issues in a wide-ranging search for hidden oligarchies of the American self.

One of the virtues of Fred Dretske's recent work has been the salutary openness with which he has described the motivations he discovers controlling his thought, and this candor has brought a submerged confusion close to the surface. Since this confusion is widely shared by philosophers and others working on the problem of content ascription, an analysis of its influence on Dretske will at the same time illuminate the difficulties it is creating for other writers.

ABSTRACT Drawing on limited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009 and 2010, this article analyzes how the idioms of “craft” and “handmaking” are being evoked and imagined in Detroit. Because of a recent flurry of journalistic accounts of artists, makers, and entrepreneurs flocking to the city’s industrial ruins, Detroit has reemerged in the public imaginary as a utopic “blank canvas”: an empty space waiting to be inscribed and transformed by the arrival of a new creative class. In this narrative of transforming (...) the “Motor City” into “Maker City,” the future of the not-quite-postindustrial city rests in the hands of those willing and able to do-it-themselves. While urban farming, artist collectives, hackerspaces, and business start-ups are all part of this narrative, here I focus primarily on the gendered domestic arts, craft fairs, and in particular the work of an all-female grassroots collective of makers called Handmade Detroit. Interrogating the intersections between postfeminist and post-Fordist subjectivities that emerge in and through the narratives, spaces, and practices of the “indie” crafting community in Detroit, I argue that pleasure and self-fulfillment are often exchanged for what might otherwise be felt to be unstable, precarious, and even exploitive work. Finally, this article explores how the transformative rhetoric of DIY often espouses values of pleasure, autonomy, and choice, reproducing neoliberalist rationalities and limiting the political potential of craft and community activism in Detroit. (shrink)

Wearable sensors are an integral part of the new telemedicine concept supporting the idea that Information Technologies will improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare. The use of sensors in diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of patients not only potentially changes medical practice but also one’s relationship with one’s body and mind, as well as the role and responsibilities of patients and healthcare professionals. In this paper, we focus on knowledge assessment of the online communities of Fitbit and the Quantified Self (...) movement. Through their online forums, we investigate how users’ knowledge claims, shared experiences and imaginations about wearable sensors interrogate or confirm the narratives through which they are introduced to the publics. Citizen initiatives like the Quantified Self movement claim the right to ‘own’ the sensor generated data. But how these data can be used through traditional healthcare systems is an open question. More importantly, wearable sensors trigger a social function that is transformative of the current idea of care and healthcare, focused on sharing, socialising and collectively reflecting about individual problems. Whether this is aligned with current policy making about healthcare, whose central narrative is focused on efficiency and productivity, is to be seen. (shrink)

Résumé La critique situationniste a transformé l’art en pratique de la vie quotidienne. Les punks y ont ajouté le pullulement des groupes autoproduits et le souci de subvertir les moyens de communication de masse. Les cercles underground, l’art vidéo et les sound systems ont fait le reste. Internet a pu brancher le monde sur la contre-culture. Le 18 Juin 1999, de nombreux centres financiers, à commencer par celui de Londres, ont été attaqués par les masques multicolores de Reclaim the Streets (...) et d’autres groupes disparates, qui multipliaient les activités joyeuses depuis plusieurs années. Le net.art a pris le relais de ces carnavals dans l’expression des multitudes insurgées. (shrink)

Situationist critique has transformed art into a practice of the everyday. Punks have added themselves to that massing of self-organised groups committed to subverting the means of mass communication. In underground circles, video art and sound systems have done the rest. The internet has been able to extend counter-culture across the world. On 18th June 1999 several financial centres, most notably London, were attacked by the multi-coloured masks of Reclaim the Streets and other disparate groups who have multiplied their joyful (...) activities for a couple of years. net.art relays these carnivals through the self-expression of these insurgent multitudes. (shrink)

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a simple means of brain stimulation, possesses a trifecta of appealing features: it is relatively safe, relatively inexpensive and relatively effective. It is also relatively easy to obtain a device and the do-it-yourself (DIY) community has become galvanised by reports that tDCS can be used as an all-purpose cognitive enhancer. We provide practical recommendations designed to guide balanced discourse, propagate norms of safe use and stimulate dialogue between the DIY community and regulatory authorities. We (...) call on all stakeholders—regulators, scientists and the DIY community—to share in crafting policy proposals that ensure public safety while supporting DIY innovation. (shrink)

This article offers a descriptive and analytic view of the different stages leading to the constitution of a corpus that is representative of the issues of climate and energy justice. Overall, the corpus contains over five million words and gathers reports, newsletters and web-pages dealing with the most equitable ways of moving to a low-carbon future in the aim of limiting climate change. It can be divided into six sub-corpora, according to types of discourse communities, and methods of constitution. We (...) begin by presenting the small Do It Yourself (DIY) corpora which were used as a starting point. Three discourse communities were selected to observe possible variation in their treatment of the issue: Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), United-Nation institutions, and the Renewable Energy Sector (RES). The sources are selected according to author, date, keywords in title. Using the concordance Antconc and WMatrix software we test the reliability of the corpora for their thematic content, terminology and lexical unit classification. Our first results enable us to confirm variation between the discourse communities. The discrepancy in sizes and the time-consuming nature of the initial DIY corpus constitution lead us to use BootCat to extend them, using keywords from the corpora as seeds to retrieve and download webpages. We thus contrast a more traditional approach to corpus building to web-as-corpus data gathering methods. We compare the results found in the BootCat corpora to test if they are as specific as those in the DIY corpora. This enables us to draw conclusions on the possible uses and advantages of relatively small corpora for the study of specialised discourse. (shrink)

Devices that record from and stimulate the brain are currently available for consumer use. The increasing sophistication and resolution of these devices provide consumers with the opportunity to engage in do-it-yourself brain research and contribute to neuroscience knowledge. The rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) neuroscience may provide an enriched fund of neural data for researchers, but also raises difficult questions about data quality, standards, and the boundaries of scientific practice. We administered an online survey to brain–computer interface (BCI) researchers (...) to gather their perspectives on DIY brain research. While BCI researcher concerns about data quality and reproducibility were high, the possibility of expert validation of data generated by citizen neuroscientists mitigated concerns. We discuss survey results in the context of an established ethical framework for citizen science, and describe the potential of constructive collaboration between citizens and researchers to both increase data collection and advance understanding of how the brain operates outside the confines of the lab. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the disparate phenomena we psychologize as “selfhood”. A central argument is that, far from being a deus ex machina as required in the Cartesian schema, our felt experience of self is above all a consequence of data compression. In coming to this conclusion, it considers in turn the Cartesian epiphany, other traditional and contemporary perspectives, and a half-century’s empirical work in the Freeman lab on neurodynamics. We introduce the concept of consciousness qua process as a force.

The concept of “the body without organs” takes up a great part of the oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, it is difficult to answer their question–“How do you make yourself a body without organs?”–or to understand their answer. In this paper I propose that the body without organs is an ethical concept. To support this assertion, I relate, especially, Deleuze’s thought on the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s auto-fictive project, My Struggle, suggesting that My Struggle can be read (...) as a body without organs. By doing so, I aim at two things: first, to illustrate a possible application of Deleuze’s ethic, and second, to show how such an ethic may guide us regarding what we ought to do. (shrink)

We tend to applaud those who think for themselves: the ever-curious student, for example, or the grownup who does their own research. Even as we’re applauding, however, we ourselves often don’t think for ourselves. This book argues that’s completely OK. -/- In fact, it’s often best just to take other folks’ word for it, allowing them to do the hard work of gathering and evaluating the relevant evidence. In making this argument, philosopher Jonathan Matheson shows how 'expert testimony' and 'the (...) wisdom of crowds' are tested and provides convincing ideas that make it rational to believe something simply because other people believe it. Matheson then takes on philosophy’s best arguments against his thesis, including the idea that non-self-thinkers are free-riding on the work of others, Socrates’ claim that 'the unexamined life isn’t worth living,' and that outsourcing your intellectual labor makes you vulnerable to errors and manipulation. Matheson shows how these claims and others ultimately fail -- and that when it comes to thinking, we often need not be sheepish about being sheep. (shrink)

Much more than their machinic reality, current iterations of AI rely on imagined divisions of human and non-human properties and skills that have genealogical ties to colonization. For this reason, research efforts have recently been made to historicize these imaginaries, connecting them to colonial ideals that delegate black and brown colonized people into the realm of the non-human. Atanasoski and Vora (Surrogate humanity. Race, robots and the politics of technological futures, Duke, Durham and London, 2019) have called this a “surrogate (...) humanity”, where narratives of autonomous technologies function to disappear precisely the formerly colonized peoples that are enveloped in its production process. At the same time, the gendered and racialized roots of this maternal figure represents an opportunity to uncover and critique the invisibilization of embodied resources necessary to produce AI, precarious bodies labouring to produce algorithmic infrastructures in a manner that can be considered in a genealogy of carework and reproduction. These genealogies complicate the detachment suggested by the surrogate figure and go beyond it to proclaim a more generative function of the relationship between the black maternal figure and AI. The article analyses Tabita Rezaire’s multi-media artwork Sugar Walls Teardom to think through decolonial and queer renderings of the black female bodies upon which technological imaginaries rest, to extend beyond AI surrogacy and towards notions of kinship, care and world-making by producing an AI aesthetics that is relational, embodied, and celebratory of other ways of liveness. (shrink)

Neonatal suffering has been the focus of recent debate in pediatric bioethics and suffering theory. How to access and conceptualize the suffering that can be attributed to newborns? How to discern the suffering of newborns who, due to being non-neurotypical, may have a short life and severe neurocognitive disabilities, in addition to being entirely dependent on people or life-sustaining technologies? Phenomenology has provided valuable tools for analysing human experiences of suffering, but its application to the neonatal suffering experience is not (...) without fundamental challenges. In this article, I will consider recent contributions to elucidating the phenomenon of neonatal suffering, especially those in the field of non-experiential theories of suffering. Based on this review, a recent phenomenological approach to suffering will be examined. Explicitly directed toward narrative persons, this approach appears to be inherently limited in elucidating the phenomenon of neonatal pediatric suffering. Nevertheless, a suggestion will be offered to partially elaborate the theoretical foundations of a phenomenological theory of neonatal suffering. This suggestion points to the program of a phenomenology of the existential feelings of newborns. (shrink)

Control of the population diversity in genetic algorithms applied to the protein structure prediction problem. Genetic Algorithms (GAs), a successful approach for optimization problems, usually fail when employed in the standard configuration in the protein structure prediction problem, since the solution space is very large and the population converges before a reasonable percentage of the possible solutions is explored. Thus, this work investigates the effect of increasing the diversity of the population on this problem by using Hypermutation and Random Immigrants, (...) two traditional population diversity control schemes, in the structure prediction of the proteins Crambin (PDB 1CRN), Met-Enkephalin (PDB 1PLW), and DNA-Ligand (PDB 1ENH). Results show a significant reduction of the minimal energy found, thanks to the diversity, but this does not necessarily means a higher similarity to the original structure.(Portuguese). (English) Copyright of Scientia is the property of Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (shrink)

The Commentary on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties provides an in-depth article-by-article analysis of all of the Vienna Convention's provisions. Each provision's analysis consists of (I) Purpose and Function of the Article, (II) Historical Background with Negotiating History, (III) Elements of the Article and finally (IV) Treaties of International Organizations. In short, the present Commentary contains a comprehensive legal analysis of all aspects of the international law of treaties. Furthermore, where the law of treaties reaches into other (...) fields of international law, e.g. the law of state responsibility, the relevant interfaces are discussed and contextualized. With its focus on international practice, the Commentary is an invaluable reference for both academia and practitioners of international law. (shrink)

"Labyr", developed by Carlheinz Caspari in 1960, is an aesthetical-ethical pattern of thought and a cultural technique, which surpasses any previous artistic model in terms of radicalness. This publication is the first examination of "Labyr", analysing it historically as well as through Caspari's texts and correspondences, documented here for the first time.

"The world's leading expert on the unconscious mind reveals the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious mind--not Freud's dark, malevolent unconscious but the new unconscious, a helpful and powerful part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. Now Dr. Bargh presents an engaging and enlightening tour of the influential psychological forces that are at work (...) as we go about our daily lives--checking a dating app, holding a cup of hot coffee, or getting a flu shot. Dr. Bargh takes you into his labs at New York University and Yale where his ingenious experiments have shown how the unconscious guides our actions, goals and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. He reveals the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind on who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as tricks to help you remember to-do items, shop smarter, and sleep better. Before You Know It will profoundly change the way you understand yourself by introducing you to a fascinating world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving."--Jacket. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke's Wittgenstein argues that it is possible for individuals in communities to speak a language and otherwise follow rules, but impossible for a single, conceptually isolated individual to do so. I show that the roots of the argument lie in his general account of the legitimacy of practices, and that he actually argues for two distinct conclusions: (a) solitary individuals cannot have useful practices of rule‐following and (b) solitary individuals cannot place substantive restrictions (...) on their own behavior. I show that if it is, in fact, possible for individuals in communities to use language and follow rules, then both of Kripke's Wittgenstein's anti‐solitary language arguments fails; and, furthermore, that his general account not only fails to exclude the possibility of solitary language‐use and rule‐following, it actually guarantees their possibility. (shrink)

In 1939, the influential psychophysicist S. S. Stevens proposed definitional distinctions between the terms ‘number,’ ‘numerosity,’ and ‘numerousness.’ Although the definitions he proposed were adopted by syeveral psychophysicists and experimental psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, they were almost forgotten in the subsequent decades, making room for what has been described as a “terminological chaos” in the field of numerical cognition. In this paper, I review Stevens’s distinctions to help bring order to this alleged chaos and to shed light on (...) two closely related questions: whether it is adequate to speak of a number sense and how philosophers can make sense of the claim by cognitive scientists that numbers are perceptual entities. Moreover, I offer further support to Stevens’s distinction between numerosity and numerousness by showing that they are relational properties that emerge through different relationships between agents and their environments. The final conclusion is that, by adopting Stevens’s distinctions, numbers do not need to be seen as perceptual entities, since the so-called number sense is better described as a sense of numerousness. (shrink)

The Doomsday Argument is alive and kicking, and since its formulation in the beginning of the Eighties by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter it has gained wide attention, been strongly criticized and has been described in many different, and sometimes non-interchangeable analogies. I will briefly present the argument here, and departing from Nick Bostrom's interpretation, I will defend that doom may be sooner than we think if we start building conscious machines soon in the future.

The epoch of Augustine is marked by several crises that settled in the Roman society. These crises did not escape from the sharp look of Saint Augustine. He showed how the political action of his contemporaries was something excessively ineffective to answer the wishes of a fair society, integrated by several people and races. This society, that had conquered in history, with mistakes and cleverness, power and glory, booth in the field of science and technology, for itself, the ways that (...) make sure to its citizens a prosper life, gradually succumbed. Thus, this article aims to exposes to the reader some aspects experienced by this society and make note that when policy is practiced by men who possess as premises the power and his own advantages, there is no richness or organization that will sustain such state or nation. (shrink)

The Master from Mountains and Fields is a fully annotated translation of the prose texts from the "collected works" of Sŏ Kyŏngdŏk (1489-1546), an influential Confucian scholar from the early Chosŏn period (1392-1910). A native of Songdo (also known as Kaesŏng) in present-day North Korea, Sŏ has loomed large in the Korean cultural imagination and appeared as an exceptional sage and popular hero in numerous tales, dramas, and films, yet his writings are little known outside the academic milieu. Also called (...) Master Hwadam, Sŏ embodied an archetype of the secluded scholar who remains hidden in "mountains and forests" to devote himself to his studies. Held in esteem in both South and North Korea today (a notable exception in contemporary studies on Chosŏn Neo-Confucianism), Sŏ and his ideas about Vital Energy influenced the great Korean Neo-Confucian debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surrounding the psychophysiological origins of morality as well as various non-orthodox intellectual trends in the late Chosŏn. His thought is fundamentally rooted in the cosmology based on the exegesis of the Book of Changes and follows the teachings of various early Chinese Neo-Confucian thinkers; it presents a vivid example of the eclectic nature of ideas and intellectual trends coexisting within what is generically called Neo-Confucianism out of convenience. This volume presents the first English translation of all prose writings attributed to Sŏ and most of the peritexts from his posthumously published collection Hwadam chip. It reflects the importance of literary compilations (munjip) in the intellectual history of Chosŏn and the complex process of the making of Confucian masters in Korea. Sŏ's prose works are concise and diverse and offer a glimpse at an author who thwarts stereotyping; an introduction and annotations provide further context. The lengthy endnotes that accompany each text make this a useful handbook for anybody interested in Chosŏn Korea and Confucianism, from students in East Asian and Korean studies to specialists in literary Chinese (hanmun) or East Asian intellectual history. (shrink)

This review shows the various tools used to implemente the food quality system in food establishments. Presenting the various laws that subsidize this process, establishing criteria and instrumentes for a correct implementation of the quality system in order to offer adequate hygiene processes in the production of safe food, in addition to favoring the maintenance of companies in the consumer market. The implementation of food safety management systems such as Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) e Hazard Analysis (...) and Critical Control Points (HACCP), in order to guarantee the safety of the food served and portray the organization of the company. It is essential to implement these systems ensuring the quality of the servisse (planning, control and improvement). In order to achieve healthy criteria related to foodstuffs, it is necessary to implement quality programs as prerequisites of the Hazard Analysis System and Critical Control Points in food services. Regulating and inspecting are just a few points that guarantee food security, since food that does not pose a health hazard to consumers is considered safe. (shrink)

This work has its origin in a master's research about Brazilian Education. The approach that we present in this text reveals the perspectives of caring perceived in a five-year-olds classroom in the daily life in a municipal center for Early Childhood Education in Fortaleza. The theoretical discussions on the theme involved a dialogue between Pedagogy and Philosophy of Education based on the contributions of Kramer, Pagni, Foucault, Rancière, Kohan and Boff. It was a qualitative research of phenomenological inspiration, which method (...) of data creation was participant observation. The analysis revealed that: in the interactions occurred in pedagogical practices, teachers and children take care of each other; the meaning of caring for children can be perceived in the minutia of their daily actions, as well as in affective involvement, in playing together, in speaking and listening to others, in sharing life on a daily basis; as for the meaning of caring for the adults, it is influenced by the way they were cared for, by their subjectivation and their choices in their way of being; caring humanizes teaching practices, inspiring emancipation; the policy on results that has aimed at "improving educational indices" may represent a danger to Early Childhood Education by minimizing the sharing of specific childhood experiences to training in order to achieve expected results. The study emphasized the need to reflect on the meaning of education and therefore proposes that caring be valued as an ethical decision and as an option for reflection on the way of living and interacting. (shrink)

The debate about how to solve the paradox of fiction has largely been a debate between Kendall Walton and the so-called thought theorists. In recent years, however, Jenefer Robinson has argued, based on her affective appraisal theory of emotion, for a noncognitivist solution to the paradox as an alternative to the thought theorists’ solution and especially to Walton's controversial solution. In this article, I argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, Robinson's affective appraisal theory is compatible with Walton's solution, at (...) the core of which lies the thesis that there are quasi-emotions. Moreover, since Robinson's theory is compatible with Walton's solution, I show how it can be used as a model to empirically test whether quasi-emotions exist. (shrink)

In Vietnam, patriotism is the highest value in the nation's spiritual value system. Patriotic feelings were formed from the very beginning of the founding of the country and continue to grow strongly to this day. It soon became the reason for life, the ideal, and the belief in the spiritual life of the Vietnamese people. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth view of patriotism as a specific philosophy of the Vietnamese nation. To that end, (...) the paper focuses on analyzing what patriotism is and its expressions. It discusses the basic tenets of Vietnamese patriotism: the spirit of independence, self-reliance, the sense of national self-reliance, solidarity in national construction and defense and a humanistic spirit. The paper thus highlights the peculiarities of the patriotic philosophy of the Vietnamese nation and how it manifests in the rural villages. (shrink)

No Discurso sobre as Ciências e as Artes, seu primeiro discurso, Rousseau defende a polêmica tese de que o progresso das ciências e das artes, contrariamente ao que pretendia o Iluminismo, estava contribuindo mais para a degeneração dos costumes e da sociedade do que para seu aperfeiçoamento. O Primeiro Discurso foi escrito em 1749, há quase 300 anos. Nesse período, a ciência e a nossa compreensão sobre ela mudaram profundamente. Mais importante, nesse período surgiu da ciência algo imprevisto para Rousseau (...) no Primeiro Discurso: a tecnologia moderna. A proposta deste trabalho é, pois, revisitar as críticas de Rousseau à ciência com um olhar contemporâneo, buscando avaliar o quanto daquelas críticas ainda faz sentido nos panoramas científico e social atuais. Para tanto, classificamos esquematicamente as críticas de Rousseau em dois grupos: as que acusam a inutilidade das ciências e as que acusam como nociva a sofisticação que as ciências produzem na sociedade. Defenderemos que o surgimento da tecnologia moderna tornou obsoletas as críticas quanto à inutilidade ao mesmo tempo que potencializou as críticas quanto à sofisticação. Assim, uma parte importante de suas críticas à ciência pode ser recuperada, vestida em nova roupagem e aplicada justamente na crítica à tecnologia.: In the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, his first discourse, Rousseau supports the polemical thesis according to which the scientific and artistic progress were contributing more to moral degeneration than to the improvement of society. The First Discourse was written in 1749, almost 300 years ago. Since then, science and our understanding of it have changed completely. More important, in this period something new and unpredictable from Rousseau's view point has emerged from science: modern technology. In this essay, thus, we intend to review Rousseau's criticisms of science from a contemporary perspective to evaluate if they are still appropriate in face of our transformed society and science. To do so, we classify Rousseau's criticisms in two groups: those which claim that science is futile and those which blame science for the sophistication of society. We argue that the emergence of technology has become obsolete the criticisms of the first group meanwhile has made powerful those of the second group. Consequently, as we intend to show, an important part of his criticisms of science can be useful to criticize modern technology. Keywords: Science. Technology. Rousseau. (shrink)

Die AutorInnen aus der Humangeographie und Soziologie leisten einen Beitrag zur raumbezogenen qualitativen Sozialforschung, indem sie in kritischer Reflexion auf den spatial turn die soziale Welt erforschen und interpretieren. Einer schlagwortartig vorgebrachten Renaissance des Raumes in den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften werden konkrete qualitativ-empirische und theoretisch-konzeptionelle Arbeiten gegenübergestellt, die einen eigenständigen, raumreflektierten Zugang zur Thematik bieten. Die AutorInnen verfolgen zwei Ziele: Zum einen geht es um die Überwindung von „just-do-it“-Ansätzen in der (raumbezogenen) Methodologie. Zum anderen wird deutlich, dass eine eingehende methodologische (...) Reflexion kein redundanter Aspekt ist oder einen lässlichen Arbeitsschritt darstellt, sondern entscheidender Bestandteil qualitativer Forschungslogik sein muss. Gefordert ist hierfür eine Debatte sowohl über die theoretischen Grundlagen einer solchen Positionierung, als auch die Diskussion ihrer praktischen Umsetzungen in der empirischen Forschung. Die AutorInnen demonstrieren, dass mit ‚Raum‘ qualitativ verfahren werden kann und die Sensibilität hinsichtlich relationaler und praxeologischer Raumbezüge in der qualitativen Sozialforschung gestärkt werden kann. (shrink)

Tanto desde el punto de vista teórico como desde una perspectiva práctica, el fenómeno de la "estetización" no parece ser portador de buenos augurios. En el ámbito teórico, la estetización ha sido vinculada con la crisis de los discursos orientados en términos de verdad, mientras que en el terreno práctico, ella ha sido asociada a ciertos procesos culturales que conducirían a la debacle de los principios normativos. Dejando de lado la problemática teórica, el presente trabajo se concentra en el debate (...) en torno al fenómeno práctico de la estetización de la política. En primer lugar, nos remontamos a la historia de la condena filosófica de la estetización de la esfera política para ocuparnos luego, en un segundo momento, de algunas posiciones esteticistas y antiesteticistas de finales del siglo XX. Posteriormente, procuramos avanzar en una redescripción de esta problemática que nos permita rescatar un sentido productivo de lo estético para el pensamiento político. Para esto último, nuestro trabajo se apoya en las reflexiones de la actual coeditora de la Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Juliane Rebentisch. Tomando como parámetro algunos de los supuestos de sus investigaciones, aquí intentaremos demostrar hasta qué punto la estetización de la vida política puede contribuir al desarrollo de una concepción renovada de esta última. Both from a theoretical and from a practical perspective, the phenomenon of "aestheticization" does not seem to anticipate anything particularly good. On a theoretical level, it has been linked to the crisis of discourse-oriented in terms of truth, while in the practical, has been associated with certain cultural processes that lead to the the collapse of the normative principles. Leaving aside the theoretical issues, this paper focuses on the debate on the phenomenon of the aestheticization of the political culture. First, it goes back to the history of philosophical condemnation of the aestheticization of the political sphere. In a second time, he deals with some conceptions of the late twentieth century. Subsequently, the paper seeks to advance a redescription of this problem that allows rescue a productive sense of aesthetics for political thought. For the latter, our article is based on the reflections of Juliane Rebentisch and attempts to show how the aestheticization of political life can help to develop a new concept of the same. (shrink)

Aquinas’ conception of causality, especially when associated to the notions of creation and nature, grounds his cosmology as presented in the Summa contra gentiles. Two theses are central to this cosmology. The first claims that the divine causality bestows order upon the world. The second in turn maintains that the set of stars, the heaven, rules and moves the sublunar realm, which necessarily occurs due to divine causality. There is therefore an articulation conceived by Aquinas between the two theses. To (...) show this articulation is the aim of this paper. For this, I investigate how Aquinas understands and associates the notions of causality, creation and nature in such a way that it guarantees both divine creation and the operation proper to natural beings, among which stands out the heaven, which, in virtue of continuous locomotion, sets the condition for the actualization of beings’ potentialities. (shrink)

The concept of ‘resistance’ has turned into a critical tool in different areas of political, philosophical and sociological thought. At the same time, the notion seems to be as productive as it is diffuse. ‘Resistance’ is used in very specific contexts in scientific or technical disciplines, and with extreme flexibility in social and cultural studies. In the latter two areas, the concept is often used without prior reflection on its characteristics and limitations. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze provides a possible (...) framework for conceiving cultural and political practices of resistance as positions of force, when he defines contraction as ‘a contemplation that preserves the preceding in the following’. The purpose of this article is to understand political ecologism in its activist and poetical dimensions, in light of a Deleuzian interpretation of resistance. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] you are philosophically uncurious or have no aesthetic life, Peter Kivy’s new book may not be for you. Otherwise you owe it to yourself to read it. Kivy’s question—why we argue about art—has received scant philosophical attention, yet the slightest philosophy is all you need to motivate it. Though aesthetic disputes are, as (...) Kivy says, widespread, persistent, vigorous and often heated, we seem unable to account for why we engage in them. Kivy develops his own account with patience and good sense. He writes with unusual care for his reader. He is indeed unwilling to leave any intelligent layperson behind. Yet the force of his arguments and the novelty of his conclusions are likely to shake the assumptions of the most... (shrink)