What does evaluation mean? This article examines the evaluative process as a practical judgment that links a situation to a set of values in order to decide upon a course of action. It starts by discussing A. Sen’s “relational” and “comparative” account of evaluation, built in critical dialogue with J. Rawls’ deductive theory. Comparison, incompleteness, reality, and deliberation are the key principles of Sen’s approach, which, in some respects, echoes that of J. Dewey. The second part shows the relevance of (...) completing Sen’s approach with Dewey’s pragmatism, since Dewey’s emphasis on practical judgment is a useful counterbalance to Sen’s focus on evaluation as a cognitive process. Dewey introduces a shift from values to valuation and draws a distinction between prizing and appraising, which makes the logic of inquiry and the search for consistency between means and ends in a given situation the fulcrum of evaluation. The third part of this paper addresses the relationship between values and norms in evaluative processes. Neither Sen nor Dewey deals with this question in a systematic way, although norms, which are both similar and different from values, contribute to frame evaluations in different ways: as horizons, resources, or constrains. Bringing norms into the picture means completing the pragmatist account with an institutionalist perspective, as we suggest through the example of the evaluation of work. (shrink)

Within child and childhood research, contextual approaches are foregrounded, thus emphasizing children as active agents who take part in the social world and who thereby challenge and reproduce everyday social practices. However, child researchers seem to differ when it comes to understanding and exploring the social engagement of children and adults as either separated or interwoven. When understanding the engagement of children and adults as two separate things, adults are positioned as potentially disturbing the children, who are in turn doing (...) what they themselves choose to. Accordingly, adults are to distance themselves from adult perceptions of children. From the position of an adult researcher, this would suggest a position of ‘least adult’. As an alternative, this article proposes that adults and children are involved in a common social practice and that, in consequence, their arrangements are interwoven and interdependent. The researcher is also involved in this common social practice and thereby becomes entangled in conflicts within this practice. Finally, this article calls for further investigations into how conflicts in professional practice also become conflicts in research practice. (shrink)

Verschillende posities bij een vraagstuk -- Stemmen uit heden en verleden -- Wat zet ons aan het denken? -- Transcendentie en onttovering -- Filosofie als praktijk -- Guido Vanheeswijck, filosoof uit roeping.

By pitting John Cage against Andy Warhol, Arthur Danto shows how the arts themselves were gripped by a progressive logic that aimed at only one goal: to overcome the gap between art and life. The non‐tautological reading preserves a fundamental, philosophical difference between commonplace and art objects. The semantical space accounts for the aboutness of the work and is thus the necessary condition for something to be an artwork. Together with other Pop artists, Rauschenberg transformed the Artworld, while Cage aimed (...) at a re‐enfranchisement of the commonplace. Danto writes that his Buddhist phase came to an end when he, as a philosopher, felt the need for theories. The works of Fluxus and Cage, in the end, accepted asylum within the sanctuary of the Artworld, where they became less radical, and perhaps less radical than Pop. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ La problématique de l’écriture et la vie sera abordée dans le présent article, où je soulignerai que, dès ses débuts, la position d’Hélène Cixous suppose une distanciation de l’auteure par rapport à l’écriture autobiographique. En centrant mon analyse sur une scène de Si près, je constate que l’expérience de la narratrice faite chez les écrivains publics à Oran démontre cette même position: c’est l’écrivain qui est l’inventeur de l’écriture et la fiction ne reproduit pas le réel. J’établis une comparaison (...) entre Cixous et Cervantes: dans Don Quichotte I, chapitre 9, il y a une scène métafictive qui, d’une manière semblable, nous incite à réfléchir sur « la vérité » de la fiction et sur le rôle de l’écrivain. Puisant l’énergie créatrice au rêve et à l’inconscient, Hélène Cixous crée à partir des traces autobiographiques qui parcourent son œuvre un « miracle littéraire ». Les fragments personnels, tirés de notre histoire commune, prennent une valeur universelle. (shrink)

The Immersive Experience of Art: Deception or Emancipation? The immersive experience plays an increasingly important role in the contemporary experience of art. Digital and multimedia technologies are used to make works of art accessible to a broad and diverse audience. In popular discourse, this evolution is often framed in a narrative of democratization and social emancipation through the participation in art. In the background of that narrative resounds the Schillerian ideal of aesthetic Bildung, which regards the experience of beauty as (...) a necessary condition for achieving individual and political freedom. The question, however, is whether the contemporary immersive art experience is not fundamentally different from the pre-digital aesthetic experience, and what the repercussions of this would be for its emancipatory potential. This contribution examines the aesthetic characteristics of the immersive experience, including a case study of the work Sleep by the post-classical composer Max Richter, in order to assess the extent to which the contemporary immersive art experience can be understood as a continuation or, on the contrary, a departure from the Schillerian vision of art. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to (...) participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: in the allocation of platform resources, in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding. (shrink)

Our goal is to use prototype analysis to distinguish the folk or culturally held understandings of love, romantic love, and sex and to specify, from the obtained data, the semantic relationship among these three associated concepts. By considering the semantic distinctions between these three concepts, we come to an unintended insight: if romantic love is a socio-cultural universal it does not appear to have the same evolutionary history as love or sex and this may account for its somewhat ambiguous status (...) in the scholarly literature on romantic love. We demonstrate that, in the United States, sex, in and of itself, is seldom conceived of as a relationship while love and romantic love are primarily viewed as relational. Our findings, though preliminary, strongly suggest that romantic love is a synthesis of two evolutionary drives: love and sex. (shrink)

This paper argues that historical research on late medieval and early modern craft guilds fails to escape teleological and anachronistic views, including when they are addressed as commons or ‘institutions for collective action’. These present-day conceptual lenses do not only create idealized views on guilds, but also of the contexts in which they operated, especially the state and the market. This is especially the case with neo-institutional views on the commons, which fall back on a transhistorical rational actor, who can (...) choose between three options for the allocation of resources and surpluses, namely the state, the market and the common. The paper shows that guilds were fundamentally entangled with both the state and the market and that their ethic implied a less utilitarian and instrumental attitude towards natural resources. The consequence of this is that the history of the guilds offers different lessons to present-day commoners than those implied by present-day research. With an eye at launching a reflection on that, I argue in favour of a cosmopolitical perspective, which invites to take fundamentally different worldviews seriously. This includes questioning our own conceptual and analytical abstractions like the state, the market and the individual, up to and including the very distinction between nature and society or nature and politics, which are at the very basis of modern science itself. (shrink)

This book makes the powerful argument that Latin America needs to be a more central part of the discourse on emerging globalities and in the pursuit of an inter-civilizational focus to avoid West-centric perspectives. It deploys a cultural political economy approach that sees the global political economy as inescapably cultural and allows us to avoid the hyper-rational analysis of economics. It explores various aspects of contemporary Latin America from the revival of dependency theory, the ‘pink tide’ governments since 2000 and, (...) in particular, the potential of the Andean Buen Vivir political philosophy, to offer a distinctive paradigm for sustainable global development. The book provides a de-colonial frame and shows how many recent and new social science perspectives emerging globally are connected with Latin American scholars and Latin American social experiments: namely, dependency, decolonial and post-colonial epistemologies, post-neoliberalism, and the notion ofPluriverse. The book focuses on the cultural, the ethical, the economic and the political, and environmental dimensions of this transformation, which represents a reaction and alternative to the Western cultural, including ethical, economic, political, environmental crises. The readership for this book includes all who are fascinated by the globalization lens on the one hand, and the experience and lessons of Latin America on the other hand. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Beliefs have the potential to obscure and legitimate, or to challenge, inequalities of gender and race. Through an analysis of the association between education and beliefs about racial and gender inequality, this article explores for whom education is most likely to foster beliefs that challenge social inequality. Data from the 1996 General Social Survey suggest that education tends to have a greater positive impact on rejection of group segregation and rejection of victim-blaming explanations for inequality than it does on recognition (...) of discrimination or endorsement of group-based remedies for inequality. This pattern is consistent with the view that education reproduces rather than challenges inequality, and it is evident for white men, white women, and African American men. African American women present an exception, which is considered in terms of the unique structural location and historical legacy surrounding African American women's relationship to education. (shrink)

Else Margarete Barth (1928-2015) was een Noors-Nederlandse filosoof.0Else Barth vond dat filosofie in dienst zou moeten staan van de combinatie van medemenselijkheid en helder, geïnformeerd denken en discussiëren. Barth was ervan overtuigd dat zorgvuldig redeneren en debatteren noodzakelijk is voor het verbeteren van menselijke relaties. Met logica als wapen bestreed ze vaagheid en vooroordelen. Om logica van betekenis te maken voor het praktische leven, verbond ze het met analytisch onderzoek naar ideeën die rondwaren in wetenschap en politieke cultuur. Haar (...) bijzondere belangstelling ging daarbij uit naar anti-argumentatieve en anti-parlementaire houdingen en denksystemen die, vaak ten faveure van een hoger doel, minachting voor (groepen) individuen legitimeren of zelfs aanmoedigen. Met haar pleidooi voor een 'empirische logica' leverde Barth een originele bijdrage aan de Europese wijsbegeerte, die ook voor de huidige tijd relevant is.0'Empirische logica' is een selectie uit Barths werk. De bundel bevat voorbeelden van toegepast empirisch-logisch onderzoek, naar de logische grondslagen van het Duitse idealisme bijvoorbeeld, die volgens Barth dezelfde zijn als die van de klassieke homeopathie, naar het denken van de Noorse nazi Quisling, maar ook naar de onevenredige aandacht voor 'gemiddelden' in de sociale wetenschappen, die tot stigmatisering leidt. In beschouwende stukken reflecteert de auteur onder meer op het belang van cultuur-georiënteerd logica-onderwijs en zoekt ze een verklaring voor de kloof tussen logica en politiek. Ten slotte zijn essays0opgenomen die Barth schreef over filosofen die haar inspireerden: Bertrand Russell, Evert Willem Beth en Arne Naess. (shrink)

Public debate about who or what is to blame for the rising rates of obesity and overweight shifts between two extreme opinions. The first posits overweight as the result of a lack of individual will, the second as the outcome of bodily drives, potentially triggered by the environment. Even though apparently clashing, these positions are in fact two faces of the same liberal coin. When combined, drives figure as a complication on the road to health, while a strong will should (...) be able to counter obesity. Either way, the body’s propensity to eat is to be put under control. Drawing on fieldwork in several obesity clinics and prevention sites in the Netherlands, this paper first traces how this ‘logic of control’ presents itself in clinical practices targeted at overweight people, and then goes on to explore how these practices move beyond that logic. Using the concepts of ‘will’ and ‘drives’ as analytical tools, I sketch several modes of ordering reality in which bodies, subjects, food and the environment are configured in different ways. In this way it appears that in clinical practices the terms found in public discourse take on different meanings and may even lose all relevance. The analysis reveals a richness of practiced ideals. The paper argues, finally, that making visible these alternative modes of ordering opens up a space for normative engagements with obesity care that move beyond the logic of control and its critiques. (shrink)

This book is a guide to the poetics of the two Greek fountainheads of Western literary theory. Part I traces the development of Plato's great themes of inspiration and imitation but makes no attempt to reduce his disparate statements to a system. Part II demonstrates that Aristotle's Poetics embodies a powerful theory of literature that answers Plato's objections to poetry as an emotionally powerful, and therefore dangerous, communication of false opinion. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- (...) UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

When the original Dutch version of this book was presented in 1971 to the University of Leiden as a thesis for the Doctorate in philosophy, I was prevented by the academic mores of that university from expressing my sincere thanks to three members of the Philosophical Faculty for their support of and interest in my pursuits. I take the liberty of doing so now, two and a half years later. First and foremost I want to thank Professor G. Nuchelmans warmly (...) for his expert guidance of my research. A number of my most im portant sources were brought to my attention by him. During the whole process of composing this book his criticism and encouragement were carried out in a truly academic spirit. He thereby provided working conditions that are a sine qua non for every author who is attempting to approach controversial matters in a scientific manner, conditions which, however, were not easily available at that time. In a later phase I also came into contact with Professors L. M. de Rijk and J. B. Ubbink, with both of whom I had highly stimulating discussions and exchanges of ideas. The present edition contains some entirely new sections, viz. 1-9, IV-29, V-9, V-20, VII-14 (iii), (iv), VII-17 (i), VIII-22, IX-17, IX-19, X-9 and XI-8. Section X-9 was inspired by a remark made by Professor A. (shrink)

The contributions in the first part Re-modelling logic of this volume take account of formal logic in the theory of rational argumentation.

The evidence-based practice movement fails to pay attention to and to respect sufficiently the fundamental differences that exist between clinical practice and the kind of research that is modeled on the natural sciences. According to M. Polanyi knowledge, will always have a tacit dimension that is not possible to operationally define. This paper argues that the tacit dimension is especially important in clinical knowledge. This represents a challenge to the dominance of positivism and to the evidence-based practice movement. As psychiatrists, (...) we must be able to attend to the patient's perspective, his subjective experience and context. Clinical practice is a careful balance between dialogue and technique. Evidence-based psychiatry might tilt this balance toward a more technical attitude. This could pose problems, considering the importance of the so-called nonspecific factors in psychotherapy. (shrink)