Medium-sized language communities face competition between local and global languages such as Spanish, Russian, French and, above all, English. The various regions of Spain where Catalan is spoken, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania show how their medium-sized languages (a term used to distinguish them as much from minority codes as from more widely-spoken codes) coexist alongside or struggle with their big brothers in multilingual families. This comparative analysis offers unique insight into language contact in present-day Europe.

About half of the undergraduate and roughly 40 percent of graduate degree recipients in science and engineering are women. As increasing numbers of these women pursue research careers in science, many who choose to have children discover the unique difficulties of balancing a professional life in these highly competitive (and often male-dominated) fields with the demands of motherhood. Although this issue directly affects the career advancement of women scientists, it is rarely discussed as a professional concern, leaving individuals to face (...) the dilemma on their own. To address this obvious but unacknowledged crisis—the elephant in the laboratory, according to one scientist—Emily Monosson, an independent toxicologist, has brought together 34 women scientists from overlapping generations and several fields of research—including physics, chemistry, geography, paleontology, and ecology, among others—to share their experiences. From women who began their careers in the 1970s and brought their newborns to work, breastfeeding them under ponchos, to graduate students today, the authors of the candid essays written for this groundbreaking volume reveal a range of career choices: the authors work part-time and full-time; they opt out and then opt back in; they become entrepreneurs and job share; they teach high school and have achieved tenure. The personal stories that comprise Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory not only show the many ways in which women can successfully combine motherhood and a career in science but also address and redefine what it means to be a successful scientist. These valuable narratives encourage institutions of higher education and scientific research to accommodate the needs of scientists who decide to have children. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of emotion focuses on challenging dualistic conceptualizations. Three of the most obvious dualisms are the following: 1. emotion opposes reason; 2. emotion is subjective, while reason is objective; 3. emotion lies internal to the subject, while reason is external. With challenges to these dualisms, one of the more interesting questions that has surfaced is the idea of emotional appropriateness in a particular context. Here, consider a widely held belief in the United States associates racialized groups (...) with specific emotions—most notably African American women with anger. Clearly these emotional attributions are essentialistic--and hence racist. But this response is too easy. The acknowledgement that emotion lies both internally in the subject and externally in the world opens the possibility of attributing an emotional temperament to a population group. Yet if an identity group has an emotional temperament, can they be accountable for emotionally appropriate behavior? (shrink)

Research on the specific features of daydreaming compared with mind-wandering and night dreaming is a neglected topic in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of spontaneous thought. The extant research either conflates daydreaming with mind-wandering (whether understood as task-unrelated thought, unguided attention, or disunified thought), characterizes daydreaming as opposed to mind-wandering (Dorsch, 2015), or takes daydreaming to encompass any and all “imagined events” (Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018). These dueling definitions obstruct future research on spontaneous thought, and are insufficiently (...) precise to guide empirical studies. They also fail to illuminate the phenomenal core of daydreaming, namely, its dreamlike qualities. Although daydreaming is related to both mind-wandering and narrative imagination, it is not reducible to either. We argue that daydreams are experiences of spontaneous, immersive imagination in the waking state. The main task of our investigation is to distinguish daydreaming, conceptually and phenomenologically, from mind-wandering, on the one hand, and night dreaming, on the other. Although daydream experiences can vary widely, we distinguish prototypical experiences of daydreaming from adjacent imaginative activity, including fleeting imagery and “focused daydreaming,” or crafted visualization. We consider our phenomenological analysis as preparatory work for conceptually distinguishing different spontaneous and imaginative states so that they can be investigated accordingly with questionnaires and qualitative methods. We argue that precision about the phenomenal character of daydreaming can guide neurophenomenological investigations, help delimit studies on individual variance in daydreaming features, and identify differences among daydreaming, mind-wandering, and night dreaming conceptually and phenomenologically, and possibly eventually in terms of neural correlates. (shrink)

_Philosophers consider race and racism from the perspective of lived, bodily experience._.

Play is a vital component of the social life and well-being of both children and adults. This book examines the concept of play and considers a variety of the related philosophical issues. It also includes meta-analyses from a range of philosophers and theorists, as well as an exploration of some key applied ethical considerations. The main objective of The Philosophy of Play is to provide a richer understanding of the concept and nature of play and its relation to human life (...) and values, and to build disciplinary and paradigmatic bridges between scholars of philosophy and scholars of play. Including specific chapters dedicated to children and play, and exploring the work of key thinkers such as Plato, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Deleuze and Nietzsche, this book is invaluable reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in education, playwork, leisure studies, applied ethics or the philosophy of sport. (shrink)

Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was an English logician and contemporary of Bertrand Russell, as well as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. In this book, originally published in 1911, she argues for the existence of another fundamental law of thought to join the Law of Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle: the Law of Significant Assertion. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in logic or in Jones' work.

Exploring the intimate tie between body movement and space and time, Lee begins with the position that body movement generates space and time and explores the ethical implications of this responsibility for the situations one’s body movements generate. Whiteness theory has come to recognize the ethical responsibility for situations not of one’s own making and hence accountability for the results of more than one’s immediate personal conscious decisions. Because of our specific history, whites have developed a particular embodiment and body (...) movement that generates places that can only be characterized as more comfortable and more enabling to whites. (shrink)

Given the growing centrality of interdisciplinarity to scientific research, gaining a better understanding of successful interdisciplinary collaborations has become imperative. Drawing on extensive case studies of nine research networks in the social, natural, and computational sciences, we propose a construct that captures the multidimensional character of such collaborations, that of a shared cognitive–emotional–interactional platform. We demonstrate its value as an integrative lens to examine markers of and conditions for successful interdisciplinary collaborations as defined by researchers involved in these groups. We (...) show that markers and conditions embody three different dimensions: cognitive, emotional, and interactional; these dimensions are present in all networks, albeit to different degrees; the dimensions are intertwined and mutually constitutive; and they operate in conjunction with institutional conditions created by funders. We compare the SCEI platforms to available frameworks for successful interdisciplinary work. (shrink)

El propósito del presente artículo consiste en indagar las diferencias de fuerza que sostienen el aparato conceptual de la obra de Suely Rolnik, para pensar una poética de la resistencia pasiva. Para ello, se abordará primero un análisis de la tradición biopolítica para distinguir una tendencia inmanentista (Foucault, Agamben) de otra que vincula la vida con la alteridad (Butler, Coccia). A continuación, se leerá esta segunda tendencia desde la teoría de la performatividad después de la deconstrucción, para proponer una genealogía (...) de la fuerza vulnerable que se denominará speech passion theory. En fin, el artículo enmarca en esta genealogía la fuerza afirmativa de Rolnik, y piensa desde ella la tarea de la política y el arte como una práctica estética más allá de la institución del arte. (shrink)

The concept of self-gaslighting has recently become prevalent in popular discourse but has yet to be subjected to detailed philosophical analysis. In this paper, I examine one context in which self-gaslighting is often discussed: situations in which someone has experienced trauma. I argue that the phenomenon currently described as self-gaslighting fails to display core features of manipulative gaslighting and that therefore we should seek other conceptual resources for understanding such cases. I suggest that self-gaslighting, at least in some paradigmatic cases, (...) amounts to either extremely successful interpersonal gaslighting or to internalized oppression. Utilizing these concepts instead of self-gaslighting avoids conceptual difficulties and also has a significant practical payoff. By moving away from the language of self-gaslighting we can move away from feelings of self-blame that so often accompany trauma. (shrink)

Background:Moral courage is defined as courage to act according to one’s own ethical values and principles even at the risk of negative consequences for the individual. In a complex nursing practice, ethical considerations are integral. Moral courage is needed throughout nurses’ career.Aim:To analyse graduating nursing students’ moral courage and the factors associated with it in six European countries.Research design:A cross-sectional design, using a structured questionnaire, as part of a larger international ProCompNurse study. In the questionnaire, moral courage was assessed with (...) a single question (visual analogue scale 0–100), the questionnaire also covered several background variables.Participants and research context:The sample comprised graduating nursing students (n = 1796) from all participating countries. To get a comprehensive view about graduating nursing students’ moral courage, the views of nurse managers (n = 538) and patients (n = 1327) from the same units in which the graduating nursing students practised were also explored, with parallel questionnaires.Ethical considerations:Ethical approvals and research permissions were obtained according to national standards in every country and all participants gave their informed consent.Results:The mean of graduating nursing students’ self-assessed moral courage was 77.8 (standard deviation 17.0; on a 0–100 scale), with statistically significant differences between countries. Higher moral courage was associated with many factors, especially the level of professional competence. The managers assessed the graduating nursing students’ moral courage lower (66.5; standard deviation 18.4) and the patients slightly higher (80.6; standard deviation 19.4) than the graduating nursing students themselves.Discussion and conclusions:In all countries, the graduating nursing students’ moral courage was assessed as rather high, with differences between countries and populations. These differences and associations between moral courage and ethics education require further research. (shrink)

Concepts like testimonial injustice (Fricker, 2007) and testimonial violence (Dotson, 2011) articulate that marginalized epistemic agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers when dominant agents cannot or will not hear, understand, or believe their testimony. This paper turns attention away from these constraints on uptake, and towards pragmatic, social, and political constraints on how dominant audiences receive and react to testimony. I argue that these constraints can also be sources of testimonial injustice and epistemic violence. Specifically, I explore a kind of (...) injustice that I call testimonial withdrawal, which occurs when a would-be speaker chooses to remain silent because they know or reasonably expect that there is pragmatic risk associated with speaking, given their unjust marginalization. I argue that this unjustly undermines epistemic agency, and that expanding Fricker and Dotson’s umbrella concepts to accommodate this idea results in a better understanding of the moral and epistemic contours of both testimonial withdrawal and these broader categories. (shrink)

In this thoughtful and provocative work, scholar Emily Herman explores the ideas of two of the most important philosophers of the 20th century and their relevance to Christian thought. From the concept of time to the nature of human existence, this book offers important insights into some of the most pressing questions of our time. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work (...) is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The continued rise of populism and authoritarianism throughout the world has witnessed an alarming attack on basic democratic freedoms and led to a divided political and social world. Few thinkers have done as much as Jürgen Habermas to understand and critique these problems, perhaps most famously through his notions of the public sphere, deliberative democracy and discourse ethics. In this fascinating book, Emilie Prattico considers the crisis of democracy from a Habermasian standpoint via engaging interviews with an outstanding line up (...) of leading philosophers and thinkers. The following key topics are unpacked and explored: Can some basic rights and liberties be given up to safeguard democracy? With Hauke Brunkhorst, How does actual deliberation confer legitimacy to democratic decisions? With Cristina Lafont, Why is "fake news" a crisis of democracy? With Michael Lynch, How can we build a public sphere together and share it in a world characterized by divisiveness and tribalism? With Barbara Fultner, Can democracy survive without the voice of experts? With Kenneth Baynes, How dangerous are the current forms of authoritarianism we are seeing take hold all over the world? With Maria Pia Lara, What does the public sphere look like with new technologies? With Gertrud Koch, What duties do we owe descendants of slaves and how do we reckon with our antidemocratic and oppressive past? With Lorenzo Simpson. Also including a Foreword by Habermas himself, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the challenges facing democracy and liberalism today. It will be of great interest to those in philosophy, sociology and politics as well as related fields such as religion and law. (shrink)

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by "world literature" as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided-and continues to provide-a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection (...) of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun's book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China. (shrink)

Explainable AI (xAI) methods are important for establishing trust in using black-box models. However, recent criticism has mounted against current xAI methods that they disagree, are necessarily false, and can be manipulated, which has started to undermine the deployment of black-box models. Rudin (2019) goes so far as to say that we should stop using black-box models altogether in high-stakes cases because xAI explanations ‘must be wrong’. However, strict fidelity to the truth is historically not a desideratum in science. Idealizations (...) – the intentional distortions introduced to scientific theories and models – are commonplace in the natural sciences and are seen as a successful scientific tool. Thus, it is not falsehood qua falsehood that is the issue. In this paper, I outline the need for xAI research to engage in idealization evaluation. Drawing on the use of idealizations in the natural sciences and philosophy of science, I introduce a novel framework for evaluating whether xAI methods engage in successful idealizations or deceptive explanations (SIDEs). SIDEs evaluates whether the limitations of xAI methods, and the distortions that they introduce, can be part of a successful idealization or are indeed deceptive distortions as critics suggest. I discuss the role that existing research can play in idealization evaluation and where innovation is necessary. Through a qualitative analysis we find that leading feature importance methods and counterfactual explanations are subject to idealization failure and suggest remedies for ameliorating idealization failure. (shrink)

El propósito del presente estudio consiste en pensar la ambivalencia con que Zambrano aborda el género de la novela. De un lado, las reflexiones en La confesión, género literario posicionan a Zambrano próxima a las críticas de Benjamin y Adorno a propósito de la cosificación de la novela como género burgués de consumo. De otro lado, sus exposiciones en El sueño creador conciben la novela como la actualización del sueño de la libertad mediante el que el hombre pensarse desbordando la (...) medida de lo humano. Esta ambivalencia del género revela el relato como la condición de posibilidad e imposibilidad de una temporalidad incalculable, no cuantitativa, lo que vinculará las reflexiones de Zambrano con el pensamiento de Derrida. The aim of this study is to think the ambivalence with which Zambrano tackles the novel’s gender. On the one side, her thesis in La confesión, género literario bring Zambrano closer to Benjamin, and Adorno’s critique to the novel as a bourgeois and consumable gender. On the other side, Zambrano’s statements in El sueño creador depict the novel as the fulfillment of a dream of freedom, where man can question himself beyond the limits of the human. In this ambivalence, the narrative gender shows both the conditions of possibility and the conditions of impossibility of a non-quantitative temporality. This aporetic character of the novel opens a discussion between Zambrano and Derrida’s thought. (shrink)

El propósito de este estudio consiste en mostrar la crítica de Kierkegaard a la metafísica de la lectura a través de su problematización de la noción de autor y su revisión de la noción de público en su obraDos épocas. Una recensión literaria. Para ello, se rechazará la interpretación habitual de esta obra, basada en la distinción público/privado, y se valorará la propuesta de Kierkegaard mediante las nociones de cuerpo e intimidad. Ello implicará una redefinición del lenguaje desde el secreto (...) y el silencio, y apuntará hacia una relación compleja entre la literatura, el cuerpo, la subjetividad y la religión. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to develop a postmetaphysical conception of reading by following Kierkegaard’s Either/Or Part I (1843) through such Derridian concepts as secret, hospitality, and spectrality. The work focuses on the three essays addressed to the Symparanekromenoi (“the community of the dead”), a fellowship neither young nor old with an aphoristic way of life (2010b, pp. 137–225) that can be understood as a figure of alterity. Special attention is paid to paratextual features of the book: the texts (...) are actually presented as old papers found in a secretary desk by a pseudonymous editor (“Victor Eremita”), which suggests that every text is a posthumous paper, that is to say, it will always be read after the death of its author. Instead of finding a solid author who holds the semantic weight of the text, these papers are based in a blank of sense, a specter, a secret: if they are sustained on its author, then they are sustained in a mystery, not in a sort of revelation of meaning. (shrink)

In this contribution we will approach language and images in different modalities: speech and face, anticipated and imagined movements, illusions on the sound by the image. It will be the opportunity for us to revisit the Gestalt concepts which were considered obsolete since structuralism in Humanities. As instantiated by Gilbert Durand in The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (1999, French 1st ed. 1960), we shall recall that Gestalt is not—even implicitly—an exclusively static approach to cognition. On the contrary we will (...) emphasize that forms can emerge from movements and stabilize in memory, thence morphology. And for speech, we will consider phonology as the stabilized outcome from audible and visible gestures of the mouth—caught in the time-course of a flow of some four in six syllables by second—via the perception of motor coordinations: which is necessary to master the most common expression of language between humans. We will adopt here also for the perceptual flows of spoken language, Multimodal Scene Analysis, the ongoing legacy of Gestalt Theory, including one of our main research topics: the gestural expression of the face and the hand for Deaf people, who practise as an augment French LPC (Langue française Parlée Complétée), adapted in 1967 from Cued Speech by its originator Dr Richard Cornett. (shrink)

Dementia patients in the moderate-late stage of the disease can, and often do, express different preferences than they did at the onset of their condition. The received view in the philosophical literature argues that advance directives which prioritize the patient’s preferences at onset ought to be given decisive moral weight in medical decision-making. Clinical practice, on the other hand, favors giving moral weight to the preferences expressed by dementia patients after onset. The purpose of this article is to show that (...) the received view in the philosophical literature is inadequate and is out of touch with real clinical practice. I argue that having dementia is a cognitive transformative experience and that preference changes which result from this are legitimate and ought to be given moral weight in medical decision-making. This argument ought to encourage us to reduce our confidence in the moral weight of advance directives for dementia patients. (shrink)

The role and value of science within sport increases with ever greater professionalization and commercialization. Scientific and technological innovations are devised to increase performance, ensure greater accuracy of measurement and officiating, reduce risks of harm, enhance spectatorship and raise revenues. However, such innovations inevitably come up against epistemological and metaphysical problems related to the nature of sport and physical competition. This special issue identifies and explores key and contemporary philosophical issues in relation to the science of sport and exercise. The (...) opening four chapters focus on the nature of scientific evidence, and causation in sport; the middle four chapters on the influence of science and technology and its relationship to sport officiating; whilst the final three chapters consider the way in which science affects the construction of sport. It brings together scholars working on philosophical problems in sport to examine issues related to the values and assumptions behind sport and exercise science, key problems that result, and provide recommendations for improving its practice. (shrink)

Joaquín M. Fuster is an eminent cognitive neuroscientist whose research over the last five decades has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural structures underlying cognition and behaviour. This book provides his view on the eternal question of whether we have free will. Based on his seminal work on the functions of the prefrontal cortex in decision-making, planning, creativity, working memory, and language, Professor Fuster argues that the liberty or freedom to choose between alternatives is a (...) function of the cerebral cortex, under prefrontal control, in its reciprocal interaction with the environment. Freedom is therefore inseparable from that circular relationship. The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity is a fascinating inquiry into the cerebral foundation of our ability to choose between alternative actions and to freely lead creative plans to their goal. (shrink)

Durante los 2000, la música “indie” se volvió relativamente central en la zona metropolitana de Buenos Aires. En este artículo, estudiamos el “indie” de la ciudad de La Plata y afirmamos que no es un género musical y tampoco puede definirse sólo desde criterios estilísticos. Lo hacemos desde una investigación etnográfica que privilegió la observación participante, complementada con entrevistas abiertas y en profundidad realizadas a músicos y otros participantes de la escena “indie” en La Plata. Entendemos que el “indie” es (...) una manera de hacer, es la manifestación de una nueva relación con la música y con los medios de producción de música. ¿Con qué parámetros entender el “indie” dado que su lógica escapa a la instaurada por la apropiación identitaria de los géneros musicales? Describimos la música “indie” en La Plata entre 2009 y 2015 y mostramos su historia y evolución. Exploramos las discusiones sobre los usos de la música en el medio local, desde la mirada subculturalista hasta el más reciente abordaje pragmático, dentro del cual destacamos el concepto de mediación musical. De esta manera, proponemos una reformulación del concepto de música de uso para alcanzar una mejor comprensión del “indie” y de otros fenómenos musicales contemporáneos. (shrink)

In this pa per I will try to of fer a syn the sis be tween two con flict ing epistemological po si - tions on the re cent philo soph i cal scene: pos i tiv - ism, whose her i tage sur vives as the be lief that sci ence is the most gen u ine form of knowl edge, and the de fend ers of incommensur..

En Creazione e anarchia, Giorgio Agamben distingue dos posiciones divergentes en la filosofía contemporánea heredera del pensamiento de Heidegger. Mientras que califica de “interpretación anárquica” el trabajo de Reiner Schürmann y el suyo propio, designa como “interpretación democrática” el trabajo de Jacques Derrida. El propósito del presente estudio consiste en valorar el alcance de estas designaciones, que se basan en los distintos sentidos de arché como origen y como principio, para comprender en qué medida puede resultar de interés para la (...) historia de la filosofía reciente tildar al pensamiento de Jacques Derrida como una interpretación democrática de Heidegger, y hasta qué punto la lectura agambeniana se muestra sesgada o limitada. Sostendremos que el gesto “democrático” de Derrida descansa en una cierta concepción de la literatura y de la performatividad de la que Agamben no aborda una lectura suficientemente crítica y precisa. La concepción literaria de la democracia por Derrida, aplicada a distintos aspectos como el tiempo, la muerte o la negatividad del lenguaje, opera una deconstrucción de la ontología heideggeriana y constituye el espacio democrático, así como el lenguaje, como momentos de espera para la irrupción de la alteridad. In creazione e anarchia, Giorgio Agamben distinguishes two divergent positions in the contemporary philosophy received from Heidegger’s thinking. While qualifying his own work and that of Reiner Schürmann’s as “anarchical interpretation”, he qualifies Jacques Derrida’s work as “democratic interpretation”. The purpose of this present study aims at valuing the scope of these designations, which are based on the different senses of arché as origin and as principle, in order to understand to which extent it is of any interest for the recent history of philosophy to name Jacques Derrida’s thinking as a democratic interpretation of Heidegger, and also, to which extent the agambenian reading seems biased or limited. We contend that Derrida’s “democratic” gesture lies on a given conception of literature and of performability of which Agamben does not undertake a sufficently critical and accurate reading. The literary conception of Derrida’s democracy applied to different aspects such as time, death o negativity of language, operates a deconstruction of the heideggerian ontology and embodies the democratic space, as well as the language, as moments of wait for the irruption of the otherness. (shrink)