In recent years, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have turned their attention to how the rise of digital technologies is reshaping political life in contemporary society. Here, we analyze this issue by distinguishing between two classification technologies typical of pre-digital and digital eras that differently constitute the relationship between individuals and groups. In class-based systems, characteristic of the pre-digital era, one’s status as an individual is gained through membership in a group in which salient social identities are shared (...) in common with other group members. In attribute-based systems, characteristic of the digital era, one’s status as an individual is determined by virtue of possession of a set of attributes that need not be shared with others. We argue that differences between these two types of classification technologies have important implications for how persons attach (or fail to attach) to groups, and therefore what kinds of political mobilization are possible. We illustrate this argument by examining contention over the use of gender as a variable in the pricing of risk in insurance and credit – two markets in which individuals directly encounter class-based and attribute-based systems of classification, respectively. (shrink)

This essay develops an ecofeminist, environmental justice perspective on the shortcomings of “choice” rhetoric in the politics of women’s reproductive self-determination, specifically around fertility-enhancing technologies. These new reproductive technologies (NRTs) medicalize and thus depoliticize the contemporary phenomenon of decreased fertility in first-world industrialized societies, personalizing and privatizing both the problem and the solution when the root of this phenomenon may be more usefully addressed as a problem of PCBs, POPs, and other toxic by-products of industrialized culture that are degrading our (...) personal and environmental health. The NRTs’ rhetoric of choice is implicitly antifeminist: it blames the victim by attributing rising infertility rates to middle-class women who delay childbearing while struggling to launch careers; it conceals information about adverse health effects and solicits egg donation and gestation services from women disadvantaged by economic status, nation, and age; and it offers no choice at all for the millions of female animals—chicks, cows, turkeys, pigs, and others—whose fertility is regularly manipulated and whose offspring are commodified as products for industrialized animal food production. An intersectional analysis shifts the discourse away from reproductive choice to a framework of ecological, feminist, and reproductive justice. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler highlights many of the problems faced by education with respect to the ‘bringing forth’ of knowledge on an individual, collective, and technical level in the Anthropocene. These problems include the short-circuiting of dreams, automatization of thought, and toxic digital networks. Stiegler’s φάρμακον seeks to treat the toxicity of the Anthropocene with a care-ful hermeneutic approach that is directed towards the disautomatized, inventive, co-individuating knowledge act. This paper first explores Stiegler’s Anthropocene and his development of Heideggerian ποίησις in terms (...) of the challenge of the ‘bringing forth’ of knowledge acts, which are illustrated by free software. It then explores, through the additional example of free radio, of Félix Guattari’s work in free radio, the problem and possibility of creative co-individuating ex-pression in the Anthropocene by expanding on Stiegler’s emphasis on the importance of hermeneutics. This raises the question of how to read Stiegler’s own ex-pression of the future of knowledge. Next, the paper reviews Stiegler’s educational project involving a dis-automatizable hermeneutic web. Finally, the paper gives an autoethnographic account of an attempt to ‘bring forth’ learning through the implementation of free software in local, online classrooms. The free software example does not solve the problem of the Anthropocene but does raise the question of our responsibility to choose our digital tools care-fully and the importance of maintaining the possibility of co-individuating ex-pression like the kind that is remembered in song and which online education should remind us of. (shrink)

Conventions and leaders are believed to be the two pillars of justice and order in society. This paper evaluates this proposition and draws attention to two intriguing ways in which these pillars can malfunction. The argument is constructed by creating two new games, Greta’s Dilemma and the Incarceration Game. An awareness of these problems can help us use our ‘moral intention’ to reexamine our own collective behavior and to design prior conventions, which limit the power of the leader.

De Synthèse breaks with the concept of the organic body as a producer of meaning. By dividing identity and opening it up to the transcendent, the novel challenges the fundamental Cartesian distinction between a singular body and a soul. Using everything in her power, the protagonist-narrator aspires to complete liberation from her organic body. For the protagonist, blood and flesh gradually become more abstract than the virtual augmented bodies she creates for herself. Instead of defining her individuality through her organic (...) body, the protagonist transfers her existence to a virtual place, degrading her organic body into a body-machine that is definitively outside her subjectivity. In the end, the protagonist’s effort to transform herself into an image merely distracts from the fact that the story in fact follows the most classic pattern of novels, that of the family quest. (shrink)

This article examines the organizational prerequisites of competitive labor markets through an account of the restructuring of Mexico's export tomato industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Agricultural labor markets are typically taken as paradigm cases of competitive labor markets, the closest real-world approximation to the spot market of economic theory. Yet, this case demonstrates that such markets are deeply structured through the activities of producer associations and the state, suggesting that disorganization in a labor market can only be sustained through (...) organization. (shrink)

Erik Olin Wright’s scholarship is often considered to be formed by two entirely disjoint projects represented by his early work on class analysis and his later writings on “real utopias.” This essay uses Michael Burawoy’s recent formulation of the “two Marxisms” thesis as a foil to argue for the continuities rather than discontinuities in the body of work produced by Wright. More particularly, the critical spirit of the real utopias project infused Wright’s work on class analysis from its inception. It (...) is further argued that the limitations Wright encountered in realizing those critical aims directly seeded the search in his later work for institutional design principles and an explicit articulation of normative values that could undergird alternatives to capitalism. (shrink)

The paper analyzes Gadamer’s interpretation of Heidegger’s text Die Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. The author believes that there are few analysis of Heidegger’s text that can attain the completeness of Gadamer’s interpretation. And also there are few analysis that assign to Heidegger’s text the imp..

In 1995, when I was actively speaking and organizing in the U.S. Greens, a lesbian delegate from Colorado approached me with a dilemma: her state had put forth a constitutional amendment that would strip civil rights protections from gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. She felt passionate about environmental politics but feared for her life if this amendment passed. Where should she direct her political energy? Which part of her identity should she prioritize: her ecological self, or her lesbianism?When progressive political movements (...) fail to recognize the intersections of oppression, we lose political power: coalitions become less stable, and activists are forced to choose their "first emergency" while backgrounding .. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of the Federal Reserve’s shift to transparency for recent debates about neoliberalism and neoliberal policymaking. I argue that the evolution of US monetary policy represents a specific instance of what I term the “neoliberal dilemma.” In the context of generally deteriorating economic conditions, policymakers are anxious to escape responsibility for economic outcomes, and yet markets require regulation to function in capitalist economies (Polanyi 2001). How policymakers negotiate these contradictory imperatives involves a continual process of institutional (...) innovation in which functions are transferred to markets, but under the close control of the state. Thus, under transparency, Federal Reserve officials discovered innovations in the policy process that enabled “markets to do the Fed’s work for it.” These innovations enlisted market mechanisms, but did not represent a retreat from the state’s active role in managing the economy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“What Is Actually Being Measured?”: Causality and Underlying Scientific Thinking Process in the Assessment of DepressionGreta Kaluzeviciute-Moreton, PhD (bio)Depression is a complex mental health phenomenon due to its multifaceted nature. For one, depression is thought to have a significant genetic component, with studies suggesting that heritability is a significant factor in the development of the disorder (Sullivan, Neale, Kendler, 2000). In clinical psychology, environmental factors such as childhood trauma, (...) chronic stress, social isolation and negative life events (e.g., the loss of a loved one) have been documented as significant risk factors for the development of depression or as trigger events for depressive episodes (Fu & Parahoo, 2009; Kendler, Kuhn, & Prescott, 2004; Neitzke, 2016). Despite this, causal theories of mental health conditions are often tricky and/or scarcely reflected in both diagnostic and rating scales. For instance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies mental health disorders primarily based on observable symptoms and behaviors, rather than on the underlying psychological and neurobiological processes that may contribute to these symptoms (Kendler, 2006).Similarly, rating scales for depression are typically designed to assess the severity of symptoms, rather than their underlying causes, that is, most rating scales are used as screening tools to identify individuals who may require further evaluation and treatment. Some rating scales may include items related to causal factors, such as the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) includes an item that asks about “loss of interest in sex,” which could be related to either biological or psychological factors. Several rating scales include items assessing risk factors for depression, such as family history of depression or personal history of trauma. This may be indicative of both genetic and environmental risk factors, such as the Patient Health [End Page 255] Questionnaire-9, includes an item that asks about family history of depression. However, while risk and causal factors are related, they are distinct in the assessment of depression. Risk factors refer to factors that increase the likelihood of developing depression, while causal factors refer to factors that directly contribute to the development of the condition. The presence of a risk factor does not necessarily mean that an individual will develop depression (Peterson & Seligman, 1984). However, the two are frequently blurred and equated in psychotherapy research (Westen & Bradley, 2005).As such, the historical issues of rating and diagnostic scales, aptly depicted by the Le Moigne (2023) as full of “composite, if not contradictory, heritage, weaving together the classificatory and discontinuous tradition of psychiatry, on the one hand, and the psychometric and continuous tradition of psychology, on the other” (p. XX ), suffer from an epistemological oversight when it comes to the assessment of causal factors in complex mental health conditions, such as depression. In turn, this contributes to a wider psychometric issue: what is actually being measured? Le Moigne’s detailed overview predominantly focuses on “superficial” symptomatology of depression (which contributed to two distinct forms of evaluation: hetero- and self-evaluation), and its subsequent impact on the classification and taxonomy of depression throughout history. However, the overarching conceptualization of depression (including a more detailed consideration of causal factors and their assessment) and the usefulness of rating scales in applied research (such as psychotherapy) remain in the background.The question of “what is actually being measured” is obviously not new in psychometrics. However, it is important to continuously revisit this issue, given that rating scales (such as the BDI) are considered to be universally applicable “evidence-based” tools (Rogers, Adler, Bungay, & Wilson, 2005) as well as a common and well-accepted form of scientific thinking in psychotherapy research (Kaluzeviciute & Willemsen, 2020). From an epistemological point of view, a scientific thinking style entails not only cognitive operations common to methodology, but also practices of generating, sharing, assimilating and transforming knowledge(Hacking, 2012).Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that any scientific tool, including rating scales, encompasses not just what but also how researchers find out about their studied phenomena (i.e., a scientific thinking style conveys a performative quality) (Kaluzeviciute & Willemsen, 2020). As identified by Le Moigne (2023), taxonomy leads toward a category-based logic in that it considers the examined phenomenon to be shared by only a... (shrink)

Four species of fish (Danio rerio, Xenotoca eiseni, Carassius auratus and Pterophyllum scalare) were tested in a detour task requiring them to temporarily abandon the view of the goal-object (a group of conspecifics) to circumvent an obstacle. Fishes were placed in the middle of a corridor, at the end of which there was an opaque wall with a small window through which the goal was visible. Midline along the corridor two symmetrical apertures allowed animals to access two compartments for each (...) aperture. After passing the aperture, fishes showed searching behavior in the two correct compartments close to the goal, appearing able to localize it, although they had to temporarily move away from the object's view. Here we provide the first evidence that fishes can solve such a detour task and therefore seem able to represent the “permanence in existence” of objects, which continue to exist even if they are not momentarily visible. (shrink)

Pandemics first and foremost hit those who are most vulnerable, and the COVID-19 pandemic is not different. Although the infection rate in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods is twice as it is in th...

I provide a critical review of Moti Mizrahi's The Relativity of Theory, expounding on the book's strengths and then providing an extended argument that Mizrahi mischaracterizes the epistemic attitude of concern to antirealism about science as well as the practical stakes involved in adopting the antirealist position.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has strongly affected oncology patients. Many screening and treatment programs have been postponed or canceled, and such patients also experience fear of increased risk of exposure to the virus. In many cases, locus of control, coping flexibility, and perception of a supportive environment, specifically family resilience, can allow for positive emotional outcomes for individuals managing complex health conditions like cancer. This study aims to determine if family resilience, coping flexibility, and locus of control can mitigate (...) the negative affect caused by the pandemic and enhance positive affect in breast cancer patients. One hundred and fifty-four female patients with breast cancer completed the Walsh’s Family Resilience Questionnaire, the Perceived Ability to Cope With Trauma Scale, the Positive-Negative Affect Schedule, and the Mini Locus of Control Scale. Family resilience and internality of locus of control contribute significantly to positive affective responses. Family resilience is responsible for mitigating the negative affect perceived during the pandemic and is enhanced by external locus of control. Evidence suggests that clinical psychologists should develop and propose programs to support oncology patients’ family resilience, coping flexibility, and internal locus of control, allowing for decreased stress and improved adaptability for effectively managing cancer treatment during the pandemic. (shrink)

BackgroundFew studies have paid attention to ethical responsibility related to malnutrition in elder care. The aim was to illuminate whether politicians and civil servants reason about malnutrition in elder care in relation to ethical responsibility, and further about possible causes and how to address them.MethodEighteen elected politicians and appointed civil servants at the municipality and county council level from two counties in Sweden were interviewed. They worked at a planning, control and executive level, with responsibility for both the elder care (...) budget and quality of care. Qualitative method was used for the data analysis.ResultsTwo themes emerged from their reasoning about malnutrition related to ethical responsibility. The theme assumed role involves the subthemes quality of care and costs, competent staff and govern at a distance. Old and ill patients were mentioned as being at risk for malnutrition. Caregivers were expected to be knowledgeable and stated primary responsible for providing adequate nutritional care. Extended physician responsibility was requested owing to patients' illnesses. Little was reported on the local management's role or on their own follow-up routines. The theme moral perception includes the subthemes discomfort, trust and distrust. Feelings of discomfort concerned caregivers having to work in a hurried, task-oriented manner. Trust meant that they believed for the most part that caregivers had the competence to deal appropriately with nutritional care, but they felt distrust when nutritional problems reappeared on their agenda. No differences could be seen between the politicians and civil servants.ConclusionNew knowledge about malnutrition in elder care related to ethical responsibility was illuminated by persons holding top positions. Malnutrition was stressed as an important dimension of the elder care quality. Governing at a distance meant having trust in the staff, on the one hand, and discomfort and distrust when confronted with reports of malnutrition, on the other. Distrust was directed at caregivers, because despite the fact that education had been provided, problems reappeared. Discomfort was felt when confronted with examples of poor nutritional care and indicates that the participants experienced failure in their ethical responsibility because the quality of nutritional care was at risk. (shrink)

This article describes the education portion of an ongoing grant-sponsored education and research project designed to help graduate students in all engineering disciplines learn about the basic ethical principles, rules, and obligations associated with engineering practice in the United States. While the curriculum developed for this project is used for both domestic and international students, the educational materials were designed to be sensitive to the specific needs of international graduate students. In recent years, engineering programs in the United States have (...) sought to develop a larger role for professional ethics education in the curriculum. Accreditation requirements, as well as pressures from the private sector, have helped facilitate this shift in focus. Almost half of all engineering graduate students in the U.S. are international students. Further, research indicates that the majority of these students will remain in the U.S. to work post-graduation. It is therefore in the interest of the profession that these students, coming from diverse backgrounds, receive some formal exposure to the professional and ethical expectations and norms of the engineering profession in the United States to help ensure that they have the knowledge and skills—non-technical as well as technical—required in today’s engineering profession. In becoming acculturated to professional norms in a host country, international students face challenges that domestic students do not encounter; such as cultural competency, language proficiency, and acculturation stress. Mitigating these challenges must be a consideration in the development of any effective education materials. The present article discusses the project rationale and describes the development of on-line instructional materials aimed at helping international engineering graduate students acclimate to professional engineering ethics standards in the United States. Finally, a brief data summary of students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the content and instructional interface is provided to demonstrate the initial effectiveness of the materials and to present a case for project sustainability. (shrink)

This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex.

In a brief essay, “For an Ethics of the Cinema”, Giorgio Agamben names the film star as the twentieth century figure representing an elision of what is individual and what is collective. It is impo...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist DesireStories by Ding Ling, Alice Munro, and Eileen ChangYuhui Bao (bio) and Ian Dennis (bio)Desire has a history and, for a literary criticism inflected by mimetic theory, novelistic prose fiction offers a privileged view of its unfolding. We study novelistic fiction, as opposed to various romance genres, to grasp that history, for what its authors have been able to see, understand, and dramatize—this (...) is the procedural model, indeed the authority established by René Girard and that has largely governed such criticism thereafter.1 But of the three short fictions we consider here—two Chinese and one Canadian—only two are fully novelistic in character, in that they attempt to describe and diagnose—rather than merely express—emergent and changing desires. Students of Girard, of course, recognize here the distinction between the romanesque and romantique. to which one might add the understandings of genre developed by a number of other theorists.2However, we might also concede that all fictions are invariably and to some degree romantic—some desire, necessarily mediated, is always operative, in writers and readers alike, before or even as it is demystified, if indeed it is. Furthermore, a passionate fictional commitment to that which Girard boldly [End Page 131] designated the mensonge romantique may actually reveal or clarify, at least for later readers, that which the author seeks half- or unconsciously to conceal. It is with this possibility in mind that we propose to consider our other subject fiction, "Miss Sophie's Diary" (莎菲女士的日记 sha fei nv shi de ri ji; 1927) by the pioneering Chinese woman writer Ding Ling (丁玲 ding ling).3 "Miss Sophie's Diary," to be clear, is no simple romance; it is at least hybrid, and in its brave if perhaps only partially successful pursuit of the truth of desire, subtly revelatory. Miss Sophie (莎菲 sha fei), chronically ill with tuberculosis and half-separated from a human world she both longs for and despises, with her aggrieved sense of superiority and desperate, shameful longing for those she passionately feels to be her inferiors, with her loquacious rationalizing and constant, perverse reversals of attitude, is a kind of Dostoyevskian "underground woman," afflicted as well with a touch of the "nausea" later made prestigious by J.-P. Sartre.4 She is clearly a harbinger of her own culture's precipitation into the world of internally mediated, indeed, metaphysical desire, what we might also call the market world, the modernity Girard credits the great European novelists from Stendhal onward with diagnosing. This story has long been described as an unprecedented and "frank" revelation "of a Chinese woman's sexual feelings and contempt for conventional views," expressing an "outspoken and unrelenting individualism."5 At the same time, it has been seen as a product of the fatally compromised and ultimately unsuccessful May Fourth literary movement,6 and not necessarily representative of its author's overall fictional production. From an orthodox Girardian critical perspective, however, the crucial interpretative question might be the degree to which Ding Ling is aware of the sources of the newly enfranchised desires her heroine wrestles with, or, as we might also put it, the degree of separation between the author's understanding and that of Miss Sophie. But such a question is perhaps easily enough answered. Ding Ling clearly does not share Girard's "novelistic" perspective on the operation of desire. But from our current perspective, does her best-known work nonetheless offer, however imperfectly, certain now-recognizable insights into historical processes of desire that our other two writers more fully realize?"Miss Sophie's Diary" is famous in China for the delicacy, depth, and explicitness with which those bold and passionate sexual desires of Sophie are exposed, even as such desires are (perhaps reassuringly) defeated, or at least revealed as illusory. Clearly the story reflects a period of cultural and personal crisis. "I was extremely confused at that time," she wrote in a later phase of self-critique. "On one hand, I was radically rebellious, believing blindly in social revolution; on the other hand, I indulged myself in a petty bourgeoisie sense, departing from revolution, so I was trapped in loneliness, struggle and misery [End... (shrink)

Since the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon has arisen on the global stage, as girls have increasingly begun to raise their voices. In an effort to achieve new philosophical understandings of contemporary childhoods in a post-truth era, the present article examines this Girl Rising movement from an existential perspective. In doing so, the article aims to problematise children’s right to be heard and listened to, as enshrined in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. (...) More specifically, the article explores children as rights-holders and their rights-subject position and how these positions are supported (or not) by adults in different ways. Throughout the analysis, Greta Thunberg is used as a case study to illustrate the phenomenon under study. This new movement highlights children’s right to be heard as a valuable right. The defence of this view relies on the claim that at the heart of adult’s acknowledgement lies the uniqueness of each child and the implications of this uniqueness. Taking into consideration the realisation of children’s rights, powerful stakeholders who seek to silence children’s voices are also identified, as are worldwide adult acknowledgements intended to empower girls to exist ‘in’ and ‘with’ the world in a ‘grown-up’ way. (shrink)

Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name “Garbo” and officially registered the change from Greta Gustafsson to Greta Garbo at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4 December 1923. The name had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the nature of her screen presence. The Swedish meaning of garbo, “wood nymph,” suggests the association with otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the Spanish meaning of the word, “animal grace sublimated,” combines (...) the animal passion and spiritual grace that were part of her power.1 And yet in most accounts of Garbo’s life and work the legend still persists that it was Swedish director Mauritz Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-century Hungarian king. The extent to which the legend has obscured Garbo’s initial act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency in film theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes his own signature.What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks the evidence. In her article “Gish and Garbo: The Executive War on the Stars,” Louise Brooks suggests that the popular image of Garbo—the “dumb Swede” transformed by Stiller’s art—was perpetuated by Hollywood executives eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited in the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent . “The whole MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director, watched the daily rushes with amazement as Garbo created out of the stales, thinnest material the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul upon the screen.” Although recent accounts of Garbo’s life and work have advanced beyond the “dumb Swede” publicity of Photoplay magazine, critics still reveal a similar, almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative power. “Her contribution,” states Kenneth Tynan, “is calm and receptiveness, an absorbent repose which normally, in women, coexists only with the utmost vanity. Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he needs” . Comparing Garbo to a “watermark in a blank sheet of paper,” David Thomson says in an essay in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday: “She must be no one in herself if she is to signify so much to so many others…. All the moods and moments of love are encompassed because the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to flesh it out.” In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the impress of male voyeuristic fantasy. Betsy Erkkila, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth and editor of Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception. She is currently working on a book, Whitman the Political Poet, and a collection of essays, American Women Poets Musing. (shrink)

In this microhistorical study of the Swedish Mission to the Jews (Svenska Israelsmissionen) in Vienna, I explore the everyday life and work of the deaconess Greta Andrén (1909–71) during the time of the Nazi occupation of Austria. Andrén’s actions are presented and related to the parts of her faith that are revealed in the sources. From this I distil a triad of meaningful categories, namely her work, the children she worked with, and God. These resulted in her sustaining an (...) on­­going state of over-exertion during her wartime refugee work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory has gained traction in recent years as a valid approach to moral education. Insufficient attention has so far been paid to questions about who we should count among exemplary people to be emulated. In this paper, we make the case for considering the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as one moral exemplar for the contemporary world. Since Thunberg is a controversial figure, we not only argue in positive terms why Thunberg would make a (...) good exemplar, but also respond to a number of objections that could be made to her exemplarity based on popular discussions. Our argument is however not limited to showing why Thunberg should be considered a moral exemplar. Through our discussion, we also exemplify the kind of critical discussions that in our view should be part of how exemplarism is utilized as a theory of moral education. (shrink)

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Their answers are classified into four main themes and corresponding sections. The first section, ‘As we bake the earth, let's try and bake it from scratch’, gathers wider (...) philosophical considerations about the intersection between environment, education, and the pandemic. The second section, ‘Bump in the road or a catalyst for structural change?’, looks more closely into issues pertaining to education. The third section, ‘If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you’, focuses to Greta Thunberg’s messages and their responses. The last section, ‘Towards a new normal’, explores future scenarios and develops recommendations for critical emancipatory action. The concluding part brings these insights together, showing that resulting synergy between the answers offers much more then the sum of articles’ parts. With its ethos of collectivity, interconnectedness, and solidarity, philosophy of education in a new key is a crucial tool for development of post-pandemic education. (shrink)

This article is based on a distinctive study that seeks to analyse the nascent role of teenagers’ activism and protests for climate change action. With the increasing realisation of children's rights to participation, the past few years have marked the rise of the new dispensation of climate activism and protests in which teenagers have occupied the centre stage. We pay specific reference to Greta Thunberg, a Swedish child climate activist, in as much as she can set a framework upon (...) which Africa can draw parallels, lessons and insights for climate activism and protests. Even though the context may be different, the paper attempts to inform vibrant climate action through activism by children and ultimately climate policies, laws and management for environmental sustainability in Africa. We engaged document review and thematic approaches, and it emerged that children climate activism and protests in Africa are not as vibrant as they should be given the prevalence of climate inaction across the continent. Therefore, there is much to learn from Thunberg by pushing national governments and regional organisations to increase the decision-making space of children in the fight against climate change. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a childist reading of school strikes for climate in an overheated world. We argue that school strikes can be understood as offering a dynamic counterweight to formal education, by providing opportunities for children to self-educate, and for others, especially adults, to learn from them. We suggest that taking school strikes seriously as sites of political appearance—which highlight interdependencies and vulnerabilities in the face of crises in Anthropocene neoliberalism requires rethinking the boundaries of democratic participation and (...) education. In particular, we highlight that school strikes for climate serve as an invitation for adults to let children contribute to their own ongoing formation. A childist philosophical attitude that emphasises mutual teaching—i.e. the adult capacity to see and hear what children show and say—can expand through an engagement with, rather than against school strikes. Children’s political appearance on streets to influence political priorities from an intergenerational global justice point of view is a gift for adults and adultist structures. It is a passage to grasp deep interdependence and to assume appropriate responsibility. If ‘education’ is a beacon of hope in times of overheated despair, then the hope is in educational philosophies that have room for mutual teaching. The philosophical assumption that it is adults who must always, and necessarily, teach children to prepare them for a better future would have to be discarded. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make (...) explicit another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

This article explores how cinema’s material discontinuity can stimulate the attention of a distracted audience and prompt reflectionon historical violence. By examining Yasujiro Ozu’s Sanma no aji (1962) and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), it argues that ellipsis is a powerful technique used to construct an argument about the relationship between war and women’s social roles. Specifically, the article analyses how these films use the ellipsis to enhance the resistance of women who act against the official thread of History. (...) Finally, the findings highlight the potential of cinema to challenge dominant narratives and encourage alternative approaches to representing violence and social roles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Considering AnimalsKheel's Nature Ethics and Animal Debates in EcofeminismNoël Sturgeon (bio)How we treat the use of animals by humans for sport, experimentation or food has been controversial within ecofeminism. While it is fair to say that all ecofeminists agree that factory farming and cruel treatment of animals is morally wrong, universal arguments for vegetarianism or veganism have been, if one forgives the metaphor, a bone of contention. Attached to (...) these disagreements are important philosophical and political debates about ecological holism, individualistic frameworks, cultural difference, social privilege and ethics of care, which are consequential above and beyond evaluating our treatment of animals. Thus, ecofeminist discussions of animal issues have been formative for environmental ethics and politics, while remaining a delicate matter when disagreement occurs among a relatively small group of thinkers, activists and scholars who tend towards solidarity.Val Plumwood, the important Australian philosopher whose work and life are celebrated in this volume, was especially cognizant of all of this. In April 1998, Plumwood presented an early version of what became two articles on animal/human relationships (Plumwood 1999, 2000) at the Ecofeminist Perspectives Conference at the University of Montana. [End Page 153] The presentation, which occurred early in the conference, was, typical of Plumwood, straightforwardly contentious, a bold challenge to the position of some ecofeminists at the time that veganism was the only morally acceptable diet. In it, she suggested that what she called "ontological veganism" was a position that was both culturally ethnocentric and dualistic, two accusations guaranteed to deeply disturb this particular audience. The conference, organized by Deborah Slicer (whose 1996 article, "Your Daughter or Your Dog?" argued against animal experimentation), was also attended by Marti Kheel (who, along with Carol Adams, was an early proponent of "ontological veganism"). Present also were thinkers with more nuanced positions on the issue, such as Lori Gruen, Greta Gaard, and Karen Warren. Thus, Plumwood's provocation felt personal, and produced lively debate at the conference, and an even livelier argument on email afterwards.1 Stung by being portrayed as racist, several ecofeminists reacted with anger at Plumwood, with the result that she publicly rejected the label "ecofeminist," and from then until her untimely death, preferred the category "critical feminist eco-socialism" to describe her framework.Despite the hurt feelings, this debate (and Plumwood's subsequent articles and sections in her 2002 book, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason), moved ecofeminist treatment of the issues of animals and morally sound eating practices considerably forward. Plumwood argued that to avoid the dualism of human/nature, humans should recognize themselves as prey as well as predator, an approach she brilliantly portrayed in her article on the experience of surviving a crocodile attack. (Plumwood 1995) In her view, any position that eliminated the possibility of using some animals as food necessarily relied upon a rights-based, individualistic approach that retained the status of some living beings as excluded from moral consideration. Yet, Plumwood argued, from a contextualized moral position, which respected both continuity and difference between different groups of living beings, one could make ethical claims about the moral problems of eating animals. She was particularly interested, both philosophically and from a politically strategic perspective, in arguing against the practice of factory farming. Karen Warren, in her book Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000), also followed and expanded Plumwood's discussion by emphasizing the advantages of a contextualized ethic of care in the treatment of animals as food, arguing (and as such agreeing with Plumwood's conference presentation), that it was ethnocentric [End Page 154] to insist on universal standards in evaluating whether some cultural groups, such as the Inuit, could morally refrain from eating animals. Greta Gaard's thoughtful article on the indigenous Makah whale hunt (2001) took on the charge of ethnocentrism directly, as in some ways an answer to Plumwood's provocation.Given this background, it is interesting to read Marti Kheel's important new book and see how her promotion of veganism as a moral position is articulated. A longtime feminist, vegan, and animal advocate, Kheel is a co-founder of the activist group Feminists for Animal Rights, and the author of an important early critique of deep... (shrink)

In this paper we take as our starting point Greta Thunberg’s message to an audience of adults at a recent climate change summit: ‘This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!’ We take Thunberg at her word and endeavour to investigate what is wrong and how it might be wrong. Through this investigation (...) we consider how education may be implicated in the problem to which Thunberg alludes: a problem about both climate change and intergenerational change. We draw upon Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, ‘A Crisis in Education’, to consider how an ecological crisis coincides with an educational crisis symptomatic of an inversion of the traditional adult and child relationship in which education serves to introduce the young to the world – a public world, which is distinct from the ecological world. Arendt’s position on education, we argue, reveals concerns that movements like School Strike for Climate expose young people prematurely to the risks of indoctrination that attend adult, public life, and hinders their renewal of the world. Science too may add to these risks. (shrink)

This article argues that climate change puts excessive demands on the psyche. The omnipresent specter of climate change and global warming cannot be processed by individual psyches because there is little – if anything – that individual people can do to stop the devastation that hovers on the horizon. Unlike other disasters and calamities that have affected humans (war, genocide, nuclear destruction, pandemics, despotism) climate change presents unique challenges to the human psyche as it engages traumatic temporality on a global (...) scale. The inexorably real threat of climate change threatens the psyche’s ability to establish a rational relation to reality. The scale and speed of the catastrophic destruction underway calls for a reconsideration of the force and quality of the denial that accompanies it. Some of the most ‘wellmeaning’ forms of denial may turn out to be the most insidious as they attempt to rationalize, humanize and normalize actions and events that ought to force us to reckon with what we cannot bear to know. (shrink)

This article argues that late Heidegger’s analyses of the Fourfold can be used as a methodological starting point for discourse analyses. It argues that the Fourfold points out elements or foundations of discursive structures that orient us to differing, and to some extent opposing, directions that are at the same time mutually interdependent. A discursive analysis of how the Fourfold is at play in prevailing discursive exchanges and structures will thus be a matter of situating ourselves in a conceptual space (...) beyond existing practices and structures, from which we get a picture of their inadequacies. As such, the article contributes to a critical understanding of discourse analysis. It will be argued that through understanding the Fourfold, we can better understand the problems with various aspects of ‘measuring’, which are founded upon the (concealed) instability of elements of the Fourfold – which shapes practical discursive engagements. By foregrounding this structural instability we can approach it critically. I demonstrate how this approach might be used in an analysis of a debate between Greta Thunberg and Bjørn Lomborg. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a semiotic analysis of environmental law and youth protests. More precisely, drawing on speech act theory this article regards both as types of communication and teases out the inherent voice and message, specifically with regard to the interests of future generations. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the article looks into speaker and speech of environmental law and argues that it speaks, as legislation does, in the first-person plural voice of a ‘we’. Second, the (...) article examines a speech of Greta Thunberg through the lens of Stanley Cavell’s theory of passionate utterances. This interpretation will unlock the political stakes of Thunberg’s speech as she claims standing with those responsible for enacting environmental law. Finally, the consequences of this reading will be analysed by relating message and voice of environmental law. As youth protests question ordinary forms of political representation, new ways of safeguarding the interests of future generations are called upon. (shrink)

This article explores relationships of youth power in a set of threads leading to the potential of today’s youth activism to combat the climate crisis. Following an introduction featuring Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, the threads are these: First from an American context is history of youth development, with one emphasis on the construction of adolescence. Second is learning experience about the US environment with its own national ‘exceptionalist’ history. Third is the role of inspiring youth movements, from history and contemporary (...) times. Fourth is a turn to climate activism by youth as central to democracy. One general thematic about youth power across the article is that it oftentimes takes on a mythical character. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek’s latest book, A Left That Dares to Speak Its Name, is an anthology composed of 34 of the philosopher’s recent and, of course, polemical interventions into the public media. With topics ranging from Greta Thunberg to ‘rights for sexbots’ and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to #MeToo, each intervention is typical of Žižek’s tendentious style and offers acute insight into an aspect of the current ‘global mess’.

My Back Is To A Life Passed. A year, maybe more, in liminal space. Waiting. For a vaccine. For better therapeutics. For a political climate to shift. All the while, the actual climate turns against us.The waters rise in the East. Fires rage in the West.My back is to a life passed. Retirement, just before the pandemic. Post-retirement and lockdown, simultaneous. A turn to a writing life—solitary, self-directed, coming at a time when my options are limited. My go-to places for (...) connection and inspiration—museums, coffeehouses, lectures, and readings—all off-limits. The natural world, my cathedral, also inaccessible. The fires rage, and the air is unbreathable.Over morning coffee, in our quiet house, the windows shut against dangerously high particulates and a darkened sky, I read an article by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker, “When a Virus Becomes a Muse.” He reviews the work of Hervé Guibert, the French writer who died from AIDS in 1991. Guibert focused on the body. His young, sexual body, with its confounding insistence. His failing body, ravaged by disease. AIDS was his muse, blasting him into a wildly creative few years, writing four books in the last three years of his life (Lucas).How will this virus, the novel coronavirus, serve as muse? The pandemic sets limits: Where can I go? Who can I see? I live within constructs and limitations imposed much like the rules of poetic form. Within those—the sonnet, the haiku—how is language wrought? How sharp, how bright, its expression? If I cannot hug you, how do I show my devotion? In my separate state, how do I live connection? I have a new expression. Mouth and nose covered, only my eyes showing, framed by glasses I need in order to see, I punctuate exchanges at the checkout counter, and with the health-check staff at the entrance to my daughter's physical therapy facility, by forcing my eyes into a warm, glad squint. I want them to beam. From people's responses—the moment of recognition, the tender mirroring, the body tilting to the side, eyes crinkled, head nodding—I can tell that the beam is working. It took time to develop this new way. I learned that I have to smile with my mouth, with my whole face, even when it can't be seen, for my feelings to show.Life, like art, requires structure, the boundaries of form. How to structure a day? It could be embodied. Filled. Wasted. Or used. My back is to a life where hours and minutes had a particular meaning. I am no longer expected at work by a certain hour, nor to put in three hours before my morning break. The collective future, where we tossed plans, goals, places we would see—again, or for the first time!—cannot be reached over the smoothed and worn stepping-stones of, say, weeks until a holiday. The broad swaths of the day become the new metric. The slow, mounting morning. A walk, or a longer one, before getting to the bulk of the day's writing. The noontime pivot, heat of the day rising, the birds quiet. Lunch, and a few chores. Essential errands. Medical appointments.The downslope of afternoon, with its nagging refrain, in the time you have left... The swirling, heated world. Greta Thunberg, 16 years old, sails from Europe to the United States to address a conference on climate change. She sails, rather than flies, so as not to add to her carbon footprint. It takes time, that voyage. She waits on deck while moving toward her future. The past recedes. The stormy Atlantic rises.Is it any clearer now that the food chain originates not in boardrooms but in hot fields, that the first essential worker drops from the back of a truck before sunup with a knife and a crate held in roughened, swollen hands?At night, sitting on the sofa, we watch television, the police procedurals that offer entertainment. Escape and relief. The day has passed. These are the rewards for getting through another day of uncertainty, managing the anxiety of risking exposure in order to get groceries and prescriptions and to bring my daughter to physical therapy. The TV detectives we favor work in teams as they interview suspects, talk to witnesses, confer with one another as they refine their theories and move photographs and bits of evidence around on the bulletin board. Our shows always tie up nicely in the end. In my life now, without the team or the interviews or the meetings that keep the detectives connected, I pretend that I am one of them, that my notebooks and plot maps and drawings and time lines are all clues to a mystery that I will solve. Despite my enervated state, I get up, I work, I look at and handle all the materials I have acquired. The day passes. Each night, a reward for getting through the day. Another day. Standing between worlds. Waiting. (shrink)

Humans face wide ranging and global challenges in the Anthropocene, the most prominent of which is anthropogenic climate change. One initial pivot towards sustainability, particularly in my home country of the United States, has been to rely heavily on technological innovation powered most obviously by engineers. Using the climate activist Greta Thunberg's speech at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference as my inspiration, I try to show how some of the technology based solutions only entrench what I call (...) the “Bestance” mentality, that is, the fundamental stance or orientation toward the natural world in the Anthropocene wherein all entities show up as mere resources. Upon showing the various ways in which traditional ethical approaches and environmental philosophical approaches have proved unhelpful in navigating the challenges of the Anthropocene, I try to demonstrate and how a Heideggerian ecophenomenological approach can help us not only understand how the world appears to many of us in the Anthropocene, but also what a more graceful way of being might look like in Heidegger's concept of “dwelling.” Using specific examples of current technologies pervasively normalized in the United States, including hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, desalination, and artificial nitrogen based fertilization, I use Heidegger's philosophical concepts to show how the land, sea, and air can show up as Bestand in the Anthropocene, that is, merely materials on hand to be manipulated in order to serve human interests. (shrink)

Axiological foundations of free speach. Belandria, Margarita y González R., Javier Voluntad, ausencias, y normas: el sustrato histórico del positivismo en el derecho. Will, absences and norms: the historical background of positivism in law. Carpintero Benítez, Francisco Nominalismo jurídico, escolástica española y tradición republicana. Juridical nominalism, spanish scholasticism and republican tradition. Casanova Guerra, Carlos El primer principio de la razón práctica en la teoría de la ley natural de John Finnis. The first principle of practical reason in John Finnis´s natural (...) law theory. Hocevar G., Mayda G. El derecho a una educación integral de calidad, ¿utopía o posibilidad?. The right to an integral education of quality: utopia or possibility?. López de Cordero, Mery La muerte de la imagen. The death of the image. Peña, Edilio Karl Jaspers: autorreflexión y "existenzerhellung". Karl jaspers: self-reflection and "existenzerhellung". Portuondo Pajón, Gladys L. Derechos humanos y positivismo moderado. Human rights and temperated positivism. Ramos Pascua, José Antonio De la libertad y sus apariencias. On liberty and its appearances. Ramis Muscato, Pompeyo Pensamiento y vida: la "guía" zambraniana. Thought and life: zambrano's "guide" Rivara Kamaji, Greta Interdisciplinares Las mujeres en la ciencia de la salud. Women in the health sciences. Alcaraz Ariza, María Ángeles Cultura arquitectónica y crisis de la contemporaneidad. Architectural culture and crisis of the contemporary. Arellano Spinetti, Leonardo Recensiones Homenaje al filósofo venezolano Alberto Rosales. Walton, Roberto Informaciones Índice acumulado. (shrink)

Ours is an age of general automation. The factory that produced proletarians now extends to the biosphere; consequently, disautomatization is needed, which is the real meaning of autonomy. Autonomy and automatism must be reconceived as a composition rather than an opposition. Knowledge depends on hypomnesic automatisms that open up the possibility of what Socrates called “thinking for oneself”; digitalization thus requires a new epistemology that entails questions of political and libidinal economy. Today, automatization serves the autonomization of technics more than (...) noetic autonomy, but reconceiving the latter necessarily involves reconsidering the meaning and character of desire. Greta Thunberg’s diagnosis of the irresponsibility of the generation before hers exposes the fact that the knowledge necessary to combat the consequences of contemporary technological development has been destroyed. The only possible counter to this irresponsibility lies in the reconstitution of knowledge, understood as the means by which humans struggle against entropy and anthropy. (shrink)