This study examines urban agriculture (UA) in Sacramento, California (USA), the nation's self-branded “Farm-to-Fork Capital,” in order to highlight UA’s distinct yet entangled roots. The study is based on 24 interviews with a diverse array of UA leaders, conducted as part of a five-year transdisciplinary study of UA in Sacramento. In it, we unearth three primary “taproots” of UA projects, each with its own historical legacies, normative visions, and racial dynamics. In particular, we examine UA projects with “justice taproots,” “health (...) taproots,” and “market taproots.” We use this analysis to understand how different kinds of UA projects are embedded in racial capitalism in ways that transform relationships between people, the city, and food systems. Unearthing these entangled roots helps illuminate UA’s underlying politics, showing how these roots grow in both competitive and symbiotic ways within the soil matrix of racial capitalism. We argue that these roots interact differently with racial capitalism, creating disparities in their growth trajectories. In particular, UA projects associated with the justice taproot are historically underrepresented and undervalued. However, we argue that there are some prospects for building alliances between the UA movement’s three roots, and that these are both promising and problematic. (shrink)

In these essays, appearing for the first time in English, Gadamer addresses practical questions about recent politics in Europe, about education and university reform, and about the role of poetry in the modern world. This book also includes a series of interviews that the editors conducted in 1986. Gadamer elaborates on his experiences in education and politics, touching on the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the early Frankfurt School, Heidegger and the Nazis, university life in East Germany, and the prospects (...) for Europe in the coming years. Hans-Georg Gadamer was probably Heidegger’s leading interpreter in Germany, and in the 1950s and 1960s he became the world’s leading exponent of hermeneutics. His hermeneutical theory explains how it is that ancient art and philosophy still speak to us today. His influential idea of the “fusion of horizons” also shows how it is that we understand what is remote form our own culture. (shrink)

Presenting the major schools, movements and traditions in philosophy and the history of ideas since the beginning of the Enlightenment, this work introduces modern hermeneutics through an examination of the ideas of its key philosophical proponents.

This text adresses the timely topic of relativism from the perspective of Gadamer's hermeneutics. This collection of essays explores several of the key issues in contemporary philosophy - the nature of truth, the model of conversation, and the possibility of an ethics in postmodern conditions - in the context of the work of Gadamer. Although centred on Gadamer and including the first English translation of one of his essays, the volume does not narrowly define or defend the approach of philosophical (...) hermeneutics; the contributors present a broad range of views, in some cases championing a Gadamerian perspective, in others challenging it. (shrink)

There are broad and narrow senses of hermeneutic application as well as of hermeneutic praxis. The broad sense of hermeneutic application means using what one has already understood in some later situation. Hermeneutic praxis in the narrow sense refers to an interpreter using a hermeneutic theory to interpret written or spoken language. The narrow sense of hermeneutic application is discussed by Hans‐Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method as the central problem of philosophical hermeneutics. Friedrich Schleiermacher had noted that the lax (...) practice of hermeneutics, which had been previously the main form of hermeneutics, assumes that understanding usually succeeds and that interpretation is only called for in difficult cases where misinterpretation might occur. Usually, after one has understood, interpreted, and applied an order to the concrete situation, one would carry out that order as it was understood. This action that follows from understanding is hermeneutic praxis in the broad sense. (shrink)

Over the last decades, educational programs involving age simulation suits emerged with the ambition to further the understanding of age-related loss experiences, enhance empathy and reduce negative attitudes toward older adults in healthcare settings and in younger age groups at large. However, the impact of such “instant aging” interventions on individuals’ personal views on aging have not been studied yet. The aim of the current study is to address possible effects of ASS interventions on multiple outcomes related to views on (...) aging, i.e., aging-related cognitions, awareness of age-related change and age stereotypes. Moreover, we explore effects on broader constructs with relevance to aging, i.e., perceived obsolescence, risk perceptions, as well as desired support through technology. In a within-subjects design, N = 40 participants went through a series of established geriatric assessments with and without an ASS. Views on aging constructs were assessed in standardized questionnaires before and after the ASS intervention. Changes in aging-related cognitions were observed, with more negative expectations regarding social integration and continuous development after wearing the ASS. AARC and age stereotypes did not change from pre- to post-assessment, but participants reported an increased susceptibility to age-associated impairments and stronger feelings of obsolescence. Those participants who exhibited higher difficulties in geriatric assessments while wearing the suit reported higher openness to be supported by intelligent assistive devices or robots afterwards. We conclude that ASS interventions should only be combined with education on losses and gains during the aging process to prevent negative effects on individual views on aging. On the other hand, potentials regarding technology acceptance and formation of intentions to engage in prevention and health behaviors among middle-aged to young-old adults are discussed. (shrink)

André Naud was a French‐Canadian Catholic theologian who served as a peritus or advisor to Cardinal Leger, the Archbishop of Montreal at the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. Naud’s entire theological career was informed by the teachings of the Council. This was the reason why during the Papacy of John Paul II after 1978 he became alarmed at the expansion and the distortion of the authority of the magisterium. Over the last fifteen years of his life, he wrote (...) three remarkable books on this theme. In the last book (2002) entitled Les Dogmes et le Respect de l’Intelligence: Plaidoyer Inspiré par Simone Weil (The Dogmas and the Respect for Intelligence: An Argument Inspired by Simone Weil), he undertook an in‐depth analysis of Simone Weil, who had argued in the 1940s that Catholicism was in need of a philosophical cleaning up. This paper elaborates and explains the particular ways that Weil’s writings helped Naud to reformulate in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council the role of the magisterium with regard to dogmatic formulations, the manner of the reception of that teaching, the inspiration of scripture, the interpretation of miracles and the understanding of the Church itself. (shrink)

This book offers a bold challenge to modern liberal ethics by exposing its inability to confront the inexorable advance of technology. Contemporary books on technology generally fall into three categories: those that offer optimist projections of a glorious future, those that provide radical critiques of specific techniques, and those that express alarm about the dehumanizing effects of a culture dominated by technology. The End of Ethics in a Technological Society offers a deeper assessment of the modern West's commitment to technological (...) progress. It argues that modern technology, ethics, and politics are all expressions of the enlightenment view that there are no principles of truth or goodness higher than the free human will. Technological advances are, on this view, merely extensions of the range of human freedom. Modern ethics thus fails to give voice to our often inchoate moral intuition that, in the realm of techno science, some possibilities simply ought not to be pursued. The authors develop their challenge by examining typical ethical approaches to such urgent contemporary concerns as environmental degradation, nuclear energy, high tech militarism, and fetal genetic testing. They relate our social crises to the transformation of ethics that has taken place as technology has become the house in which we all live. (shrink)

Mutations in the CEBPA gene are present in 10–15% of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients. The most frequent type of mutations leads to the expression of an N‐terminally truncated variant of the transcription factor CCAAT/enhancer‐binding protein alpha (C/EBPα), termed p30. While initial reports proposed that p30 represents a dominant‐negative version of the wild‐type C/EBPα protein, other studies show that p30 retains the capacity to actively regulate gene expression. Recent global transcriptomic and epigenomic analyses have advanced the understanding of the distinct (...) roles of the p30 isoform in leukemogenesis. This review outlines direct and indirect effects of the C/EBPα p30 variant on oncogenic transformation of hematopoietic progenitor cells and discusses how studies of N‐terminal CEBPA mutations in AML can be extrapolated to identify novel gain‐of‐function features in oncoproteins that arise from recurrent truncating mutations in transcription factors. (shrink)

In this book, internationally recognized scholars in philosophical hermeneutics discuss various aspects of language and linguisticality. The translations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's two recent essays provoke a preliminary discussion on the philosopher's polemic claim in Truth and Method—"Being that can be understood is language." Topics addressed by the contributors include the relationship of rituals to tradition and the immemorial; the unity of the word; conversation; translation and conceptuality; and the interrelationship between the art of writing and linguisticality. This work is of (...) critical importance to anyone interested in Gadamer's claims regarding the boundaries of language, the transition from the prelinguistic to linguistic realms, and the role of rituals in this transition. (shrink)

Avec un taux de 31 % de députées au Bundestag, l’Allemagne est loin de la parité en politique. Cet article vise à éclairer les raisons, tant institutionnelles que discursives, qui participent de cet état de fait. Dans un premier temps, il sera question des mécanismes qui freinent l’accès des femmes à la députation : la femme cantonnée à la sphère privée, l’image de la femme apolitique, les pratiques au sein des partis ainsi que le mode de scrutin. Au niveau institutionnel, (...) des solutions concrètes émergent, à l'image des quotas paritaires mis en place au sein des partis. D’autres solutions sont actuellement discutées, notamment un éventuel changement du mode de scrutin. Dans un second temps, nous verrons que même une fois ce premier pas vers la députation franchi, l’activité des députées demeure liée à des problématiques spécifiques de genre qui se manifestent sur le plan linguistique, par exemple au travers d'interruptions sexistes pendant leurs discours. (shrink)

This article analyzes two works by Claudio Magris published in dialogue with two Nobel Prize laureates: Letteratura e ideologia [Literature and ideology] (2012) with Gao Xingjian, and La letteratura è la mia vendetta [Literature is my revenge] (2012) with Mario Vargas Llosa. These transnational and transcultural dialogues on writing practices can be understood as paradigm shifts on at least two levels: Magris’s European perspective of border poetics expands into a global perspective; and this leads to a decolonization of the concept (...) of irrationality, which in modernity has mostly been attributed to alterity. The article illustrates the legitimacy of irrationality as part of human existence through a discussion of Vargas Llosa’s El Hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989) and Magris’s novel Non luogo a procedere (2015; Blameless, 2017), and the collection of stories Croce del Sud. Tre vite vere e improbabili [Southern cross: Three real and improbable lives] (2020). (shrink)