Saint Augustin écrit : " Qu'est-ce donc que le temps ? Si personne ne me le demande, je le sais ; mais, si on me le demande et que je veuille l'expliquer, je ne le sais plus.

Résumé Selon la perspective de l’œuvre ouverte développée par Eco, « un texte est un tissu d’espaces blancs, d’interstices à remplir … un mécanisme paresseux qui vit sur la plus-value de sens qui y est introduite par le destinataire » (Eco 1985, Lector in fabula ou la coopération interprétative dans les textes narratifs, Myriem Bouzaher (trad.). Paris: Grasset, 66–67). C’est à cette plus-value de sens, concomitante à l’activité interprétative, que la présente étude s’attardera, et ce, afin d’identifier d’abord des éléments (...) de l’album d’enfance nécessitant l’interprétation d’un lecteur modèle et d’en convoquer par la suite les significations qui peuvent être appliquées au texte. Plus précisément, il s’agira de décrire et d’analyser les mécanismes intertextuels qui enrichissent l’organisation syntaxique et sémantique de quatre albums d’enfance parus au Québec entre 1992 et 2002 et qui nécessitent l’intervention d’un lecteur modèle pour identifier les systèmes de signification et les savoirs qui y sont rattachés. Les albums soumis à l’investigation reprennent le schéma narratif de contes de fée connus et celui d’une nouvelle contemporaine. L’hypothèse est la suivante: si les composantes génériques de l’album dévoilent à un jeune lecteur des univers de références connus et familiers, le processus de l’intertextualité sollicite des contenus qui, soumis à l’interprétation d’un lecteur modèle, font parfois surgir des structures de signification inattendues. (shrink)

There is growing interest in political phenomenology in the role that affectivity and emotions play in the political realm. Broadly speaking, it has been suggested that political emotions fall into two sub-categories: political emotions of allegiance and political emotions of antagonism. However, what makes an emotion one of allegiance or one of antagonism has yet to be explored. In this chapter, we show how work done on the phenomenology of emotions, the phenomenology of sociality, and critical phenomenology, can inform our (...) understanding of political emotions. Inspired by frameworks from each of these fields respectively, we introduce three ‘levels’ of phenomenological analysis with regards antagonistic political emotions: (i) the antagonistic character of the emotion, (ii) the antagonistic role in group dynamics, and (iii) a critical reflection on the very notion of antagonistic. Through this three-pronged phenomenological analysis we show how we can better understand, and critique, the conceptualisation of political emotions of antagonism and allegiance as well as show that whether an emotion is considered one of allegiance or antagonism depends on what level of analysis is employed. (shrink)

Nous présentons ici la traduction d’une conférence donnée par Ernst Cassirer au Cercle linguistique de New York en 1945, intitulée « Le structuralisme dans la linguistique moderne ». Dans ce texte, Cassirer propose une généalogie de l’approche structurale dans la linguistique moderne, en faisant remonter la problématique aux débats épistémologiques des xviiie et xixe siècles sur la constitution des sciences du vivant. La conférence de Cassirer revêt ainsi à nos yeux un double intérêt : d’une part, elle rend compte de (...) l’unité de l’œuvre cassirerienne, puisque l’auteur y mobilise des concepts dont il a posé les premiers jalons dès 1910 dans Substance et fonction ; d’autre part, elle permet de rendre compte de la spécificité méthodologique des sciences de la culture, à partir d’une généalogie conceptuelle de la méthode en train de naître dans les cercles linguistiques de l’époque. Nous tâcherons de présenter les différentes étapes de l’argumentation de Cassirer, allant d’une redéfinition de la nécessité dans le domaine linguistique, en passant par l’analogie entre science du vivant et science du langage, pour finir par interroger la place accordée à la notion de structure dans la philosophie de Cassirer. (shrink)

As John McMillan notes in January’s editorial, 1 many countries are reflecting on how they responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, what went wrong and how responses to such system shocks can be better managed in the future. However, while it is tempting to think that the COVID-19 pandemic is over and that what is now needed is a reflection on how countries could have responded better, some of the underlying issues and problems COVID-19 both highlighted and created are still with (...) us. The legacy of the pandemic has continued particularly for healthcare workers at all levels, who have had to continue providing services with little time to rest and reflect and with new ‘shocks’ to the systems to cope with. For example, in England, industrial action by junior doctors has put already fragile systems under pressure, and the issues that staff are campaigning about remain unaddressed. Many of... (shrink)

After a long period of comparative neglect, in the last few decades growing numbers of philosophers have been paying attention to the startling contrast presented between Kant’s universal moral theory, with its inspiring enlightenment ideas of human autonomy, equality and dignity and Kant’s racism. Against Charles Mills, who argues that the way to make Kant consistent is by attributing to him a threshold notion of moral personhood, according to which some races do not qualify for consideration under the categorical imperative, (...) I argue that Kant cannot be made consistent on race, and that rather than trying to make him so, we should use the example of Kant’s racism to tell us something about the nature of racism. I argue that Kant’s own moral philosophy and moral psychology in fact give some materials for thinking about his racism, and about racism. (shrink)

Using digital technology, in particular social media, is often associated with envy. Online, where there is a tendency for people to present themselves in their best light at their best moments, it can feel like we are unable to turn without being exposed to people living out their perfect lives, with their fancy achievements, their beautiful faces and families, their easy wit, and wide social circles. In this paper, I dive into the relationship between envy and digital technology. I offer (...) an enriched account of envy that aims to establish both the situated nature of envy, as well as (more controversially) the possibility of self-envy. I explore how features of digital technology not only increase the frequency with which we might experience envy directed at others, but also envy directed at other versions of one’s self. For online, we not only encounter idealized versions of others but digitally idealized versions of our selves. Moreover, I argue that digital technology does not only increase the likelihood of experiencing self-envy but makes the experience less cognitively onerous. I conclude by considering how current digital technology shapes _what_ we envy. (shrink)

This chapter critically analyses the ethical and political dimensions of supposedly subtle and non-coercive interventions that aim to ‘prevent crime’ through environmental designs making certain public spaces less attractive for specific groups. Examples include benches designed to discourage sleeping (targeted at homeless people), high-pitched noises or classical music played to deter lingering (targeted at youngsters), and specific lighting to prevent aggression (targeted at nightlife). While these interventions may appear less problematic than more traditional exclusionary measures, they raise ethical and political (...) worries that come into view clearly when we analyse them as instances of nudging, on the one hand, and niche construction and affective scaffolding, on the other. Employing this approach reveals how these exclusionary environmental designs not only risk reinforcing problematic stereotypes and social inequalities and discipline rather than prevent crime, they also can alienate specific groups, constitute affective injustices, and inflexibly reduce the diverse purposes public spaces potentially have. The chapter argues that environments are never neutral as they inevitably support and encourage some bodies, behaviours, moods, and emotions while suppressing and discouraging others. (shrink)

The doctrine of the three orders which distinguishes and hierarchizes flesh, spirit and charity is obviously one of the major themes of Pascal’s thought. But it appears that Pascal meditates as much on the disorder – and dis-order – induced by sin and the corruption of our nature as on the hierarchy and the heterogeneity of these three kinds of reality. In the world he describes, in fact, not only is everything overturned – the lowest order, that of the flesh, (...) now dominating the other two – but also everything is confused – pleasure, for example, obtaining the credence that normally belongs to science, and the flesh invading the order of the spirit through custom and imagination. To maintain then, as several commentators do, that no interference between the orders is possible, so that tyranny can only exist in the state of desire, is in our view to adopt a more Stoic than Pascalian point of view. For to deny disorder is also, according to Pascal, to deny sin by projecting into the second nature the memory of the first. (shrink)

Uptake is typically understood as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. According to one theory of uptake, the hearer’s role is merely as a ratifier. The speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act she might perform. Her hearer can then render this act a success or a failure. Thus the hearer has no power over which act could be performed, but she does have some power over whether it is performed. Call this (...) the ratification theory of uptake. Several philosophers have recently endorsed an alternative theory of uptake, according to which the hearer can determine the nature of the act the speaker performs. According to this theory, if the hearer regards an utterance as illocutionary act y, then it is act y, even if the speaker intended to perform act x. Call this the constitution theory of uptake. The purported advantage of this theory is that it identifies a common but underanalysed way in which speakers can be silenced. I argue that despite its initial intuitive pull, the constitution theory of uptake should be rejected. It is incompatible with ordinary intuitions about speech, it entails a conceptual impossibility, and it has unsavoury political implications, entailing that marginalised speakers barely qualify as agents. (shrink)

This article is concerned with two distinct corporeal logics. In the first, corporeality is founded on joints, tendons, and mobility; in the second, the envelope and its apertures are considered primordial. The first logic is extant in very few works. Although these texts (e.g. The Iliad, Beowulf) clearly share the same, very specific, conception of the body, they belong to different histories. The corporeal logic of the 'jointed body' (corps articulaire) cannot, therefore, be appraised in terms of longue durée. The (...) texts represent, instead, a moment of transition between the psychodynamics of orality and literacy. A problem correlated to this fact is that readers (ancient and modern) no longer think using the same logic as that pertaining to the jointed body. They tend to translate information regarding the logic of the jointed body into data meaningful in their own logic. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

In this paper I present a critique of some aspects of Thad Metz’s attempt to develop an African moral theory grounded on the value of ubuntu. I question the sense in which this theory is African, as well as his attempt to ground human rights on his single value theory of ubuntu. In a number of publications Thad Metz has given a clear, analytic account of what ubuntu is. Metz’s work on ubuntu does two things: 1) explains the content of (...) ubuntu: what the value/virtue is; 2) presents a moral theory according to which appealing to ubuntu as a basic value enables us to explain what makes all actions right or wrong. He calls this an African moral theory. It is the second part I am skeptical about. He makes it plausible that ubuntu is an important value. And he shows how we can give it some clear content. However, I argue that he does not make plausible a single-value ethical theory based on ubuntu; it is not plausible as an ethical theory, and it is not plausible that such a theory is African in any significant sense. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

La réception française d’Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), au début du xxe siècle, s’inscrit tout d’abord au cœur des débats épistémologiques autour de la constitution des sciences historiques et des sciences sociales, ainsi que l’atteste la controverse entre Paul Lacombe et Alexandru Dimitri Xenopol. Le second volet de la réception de Rickert en France concerne la philosophie des valeurs et le lien qu’elle entretient avec les positions épistémologiques défendues par le néokantien de Bade. L’étude de cet aspect de la réception se fera (...) à partir de la lecture qu’en proposent Georges Gurvitch d’une part, et Raymond Aron d’autre part, tous deux formulant, à leur manière, une accusation visant le formalisme de la théorie rickertienne des valeurs. Si les discussions philosophiques des positions du philosophe allemand sont assez rares, elles constituent néanmoins un révélateur pertinent des débats qui animaient la philosophie et les sciences historiques et sociales de l’époque. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch was not only one of post-war Britain's most celebrated and prolific novelists - she was also an influential philosopher, whose work was concerned with the question of the good and how we can see our moral worlds more clearly. Murdoch believed that paying attention to art is a way for us to become less self-centred, and this book argues that cinema is the perfect form of art to enable us to do this. Bringing together Murdoch's moral philosophy and (...) contemporary cinema to build a dialogue about vision, ethics and love, author Lucy Bolton encourages us to view cinema as a way of studying other worlds and moral journeys, and to reflect upon their ethical significance in the world of the film and in our daily lives. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a philosophical analysis of the act of ‘liking’ a post on social media. First, I consider what it means to ‘like’ something. I argue that ‘liking’ is best understood as a phatic gesture; it signals uptake and anoints the poster’s positive face. Next, I consider how best to theorise the power that comes with amassing many ‘likes’. I suggest that ‘like’ tallies alongside posts institute and record a form of digital social capital. Finally, I consider (...) whether ‘likes’ have ultimately improved online discourse. I argue that while the ‘liking’ function itself is relatively innocuous, public ‘like’ tallies introduce a corrosive motivation to online communication. By making the prospect of increased social capital perpetually salient to us, they encourage us to prioritise high levels of engagement over meaningful engagement. (shrink)

Speech act theorists tend to hold that the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by one interlocutor alone: either the speaker or the hearer. Yet experience tells us that the force of our utterances is not determined unilaterally. Rather, communication often feels collaborative. In this paper, I develop and defend a collaborative theory of illocutionary force, according to which the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by an agreement reached by the speaker and the hearer. This theory, which (...) builds upon linguistic and sociological work on adjacency pairs and conversational interaction, can accommodate the complexity of speaker intentions (which may be disjunctive, indeterminate, and/or inconsistent over time), and renders speech act theory more compatible with theories of common ground. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, (...) or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

Publié dans la nouvelle collection « Argentina » des Presses universitaires de Strasbourg dont la vocation est de faire connaître les grands écrits strasbourgeois du xxe siècle, l’ouvrage collectif Georg Simmel : Le social en mouvement présente les actes de journées d’études qui se sont tenues à Strasbourg en novembre 2018 à l’occasion du centenaire de la mort de Simmel. Quatre textes de l’auteur dont deux inédits en français (« L’individualisme de l’époque moderne » (1910) et « Changement de...

Lucy Allais presents an original interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. She argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. Kant is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert (...) the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. On Allais's account, we cannot understand Kant's idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: she understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. This enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. (shrink)

Dans la préface aux Confessions, Rousseau déclare se donner en comparaison pour l’étude des hommes qui reste encore à faire. Plus que le récit d’une vie singulière et plus qu’une plaidoirie, l’entreprise autobiographique rousseauiste aurait donc aussi une vocation anthropologique. Mais comment concevoir un tel procédé comparatif et comment définir la connaissance qu’il vise dans la mesure où Rousseau lui-même ne cesse par ailleurs d’associer comparaison et amour-propre? Dès lors, nous verrons que si l’écriture de soi s’inscrit dans une perspective (...) anthropologique, celle-ci ne saurait être coupée de l’ambition éthique et morale portée par l’auteur. (shrink)

Craig Callender claims that ‘time is the great informer’, meaning that the directions in which our ‘best’ physical theories inform are temporal. This is intended to be a metaphysical claim, and as such expresses a relationship between the physical world and information-gathering systems such as ourselves. This article gives two counterexamples to this claim, illustrating the fact that time and informative strength doubly dissociate, so the claim cannot be about physical theories in general. The first is a case where physical (...) theories inform in directions that we have no reason to regard as temporal. The second is a case where our best physical theories fail to inform in directions that we have independent (pre-theoretic) reasons to regard as temporal. Taking these two cases into account suggests that the connection Callender makes between time and informativeness is perspectival. The second case demonstrates that although scientists often seek information in temporal directions, the behaviour of the physical world can present serious difficulties for finding it. In response, this article proposes a perspectival reading of Callender’s claim, according to which the connection between time and informative strength has more to do with the aims and objectives of science than the workings of the physical world. (shrink)

This book considers the thought and personalities of two popular icons of twentieth century philosophical and psychological thought - Nietzsche and Jung - and reveals the extraordinary connections between them. Through a thorough examination of their work, Nietzsche and Jung succeeds in illuminating complex areas of Nietzsche's thought and resolving ambiguities in Jung's reception of these theories. This demonstration of how our understanding of analytical psychology can be enriched by investigating its philosophical roots will be of great interest to students (...) in psychology, philosophy and religion as well as practising Jungian analysts. (shrink)

Speech act theorists tend to hold that the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by one interlocutor alone: either the speaker or the hearer. Yet experience tells us that the force of our utterances is not determined unilaterally. Rather, communication often feels collaborative. In this paper, I develop and defend a collaborative theory of illocutionary force, according to which the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by an agreement reached by the speaker and the hearer. This theory, which (...) builds upon linguistic and sociological work on adjacency pairs and conversational interaction, can accommodate the complexity of speaker intentions (which may be disjunctive, indeterminate, and/or inconsistent over time), and renders speech act theory more compatible with theories of common ground. (shrink)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users (...) of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we (...) draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. (shrink)

This book argues that philosophy is as practical as plumbing and what we need right now is what philosophers can offer as philosophers to help us all, our species, and beyond, through this ecological emergency, this climate change, this anthropocene. This book is about the meaning and purpose of philosophy as a way of, a practice of, responding to the ecological emergency, which includes climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, habitat destruction, and all the associated impacts that fragment, and threaten to (...) create collapse, among the systems that created and sustain us. There are the related economic and social impacts, the fragmentation of communities and political ideologies through attitude polarisation, and the increasing threats to systems by those who seek to promote further exploitation at the expense of attempts to regain some system of cooperation and an attitude of compassion which is at the heart of our survival strategies as a species. Philosophy has always sought to address questions related both to our place in the universe, and to how to live, given our understanding of our place. Those of us committed to a philosophical life have used a range of metaphors and narratives to enlighten, and to exhort to action, those who would seek to understand what to do, how, and why. Philosophy has played a key role in helping us as a species to respond to the ecological emergency. What, then, is the practice of philosophy, given that we’re in an ecological emergency? This question is the thread, and it forms the framework for the dialogue that runs through the book. (shrink)

This article returns to Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical oeuvre in order to offer a way of thinking beyond contemporary feminist divisions created by ‘gender critical’ or trans-exclusionary feminists. The ‘gender critical’ feminist position returns to sex essentialism to argue for ‘abolishing’ gender, while opponents often appeal to proliferated gender self-identities. I argue that neither goes far enough and that they both circumscribe utopian visions for a world beyond both sex and gender. I chart how Beauvoir’s ontological, ethical and political positions (...) can be used to overcome the material/cultural, sex/gender bind that the contemporary divide perpetuates. I outline Beauvoir’s ‘ambiguous’ non-foundational ontology that attends to both the cultural origins, and material effects, of both sex and gender, and to the extent that humyns are fundamentally social. After outlining Beauvoir’s definition of freedom as purposive action, I then outline how the existence of the humyn-made and intersubjectively-upheld ‘situations’ of both sex and gender delimit this, urging feminists to return to the lost question of eradicating both. I use the utopian impulse in Beauvoir to argue that an ethics of reciprocity is an alternative mode of understanding the self and others. Beauvoir also calls for a political strategy that I call a ‘utopian realism’ that I apply to the contemporary divide. A way forward that is attentive to the concerns of both positions is the pragmatic use of identity politics that is nonetheless mindful of identity’s limits, alongside Beauvoir’s proto-intersectional vision of solidarity politics based not on identity but on a position of alterity and shared political strategy. Ultimately, I use this to argue that feminism would do better to unite around a shared commitment to challenging alterity, rather than further contributing to it. (shrink)

This article looks at the positioning of the aesthetic in microscopy to understand how it can be both side-lined and deployed. It considers the boundary between the pictorial and the notational in current microscopy practice and speculates on a space of mutual relation. Microscopy’s dual threads of capture for data analysis and capture for publication reveal complicated relationships and conflicted stances, reflective of a broader iconoclastic tendency in microscopy where the image as enacted perception is erased while the notation generated (...) and carried by these images is preserved. This article seeks to suggest a space in which phenomena are situated, materially embedded and emergent through imaging practices. I ground my position on experimental imaging of bacterial iridescence to consider the entanglement of microscopy’s living image with its processes of making-seen. Microscopy is instrumental in supporting descriptive-explanatory claims on biological life yet is also implicated in the generation of novel, hybrid phenomena and sensibilities. Exploring both tendencies exposes a microscopy of permeable membranes and suggests alternative orientations through microscopy practice and its images. (shrink)

What is the value of Pyrrhonizing skepticism today? As an epistemologist, I am sympathetic to skepticism, but as a feminist, I am concerned by it. In this short paper, I’ll interrogate the troubled relationship between skepticism and feminism. More specifically, I’ll ask: Can feminists be skeptics? In the first half of the paper, I’ll articulate one feminist objection to skepticism. In the second half, I’ll suggest a pathway forward by which feminists can harness the power of the skeptical method to (...) antiskeptical ends. Part 1 of my analysis engages Brian Ribeiro’s recent book Pyrrhonizers (2021), and Part 2 engages Jennifer Saul’s “Skepticism and Implicit Bias” (2013). (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji’s phenomenology of aidagara (“betweenness”) and use his analysis in the contemporary context of online space. We argue that Watsuji develops a prescient analysis anticipating modern technologically-mediated forms of expression and engagement. More precisely, we show that instead of adopting a traditional phenomenological focus on face-to-face interaction, Watsuji argues that communication technologies — which now include Internet-enabled technologies and spaces — are expressive vehicles enabling new forms of emotional expression, shared experiences, (...) and modes of betweenness that would be otherwise inaccessible. Using Watsuji’s phenomenological analysis, we argue that the Internet is not simply a sophisticated form of communication technology that expresses our subjective spatiality (although it is), but that it actually gives rise to new forms of subjective spatiality itself. We conclude with an exploration of how certain aspects of our online interconnections are hidden from lay users in ways that have significant political and ethical implications. (shrink)

Actor network theory and supply chainmanagement theory provide suggestive researchdirections for understanding regional agri-foodnetworks. These theories claim that relationshipsbased upon trust and cooperation are critical to thestrength and vitality of the network. This means thatexploring and detailing these relationships among thesuppliers, producers, workers, processors, brokers,wholesalers, and retailers within specific regionalgeographies of these networks are critical forfurthering cooperation and trust. Key areas ofcooperation include resource sharing andapprenticeship programs. Employing food networks as akey unit of contextual analysis will deepen ourunderstanding of how (...) to enhance their resiliency andvibrancy. Important questions can be raised about thedifference gender makes for farmers, brokers,entrepreneurs, and workers in local food networks. (shrink)

Law's Judgement elucidates and defends a feature of contemporary law that is currently either overlooked or too glibly dismissed as morally troublesome or historically anachronistic. That feature is the abstract nature of law's judgement and its three components show that, when law judges us, it often does so in ignorance of our particular characters and abilities, on the one hand, and in ignorance of our context and circumstances, on the other. Law's judgement is thus insensitive to all or much that (...) makes us the particular people we are. The book explores various connections between this mode of judgement and some of our most important legal and political values. It shows that law's abstract judgement is closely related to important juristic conceptions of personhood, responsibility and impartiality, and that these notions are not without moral significance. The book also examines the connections between modern law's judgement and three of our most important political values, namely, dignity, equality and community. It argues that, if we value particular conceptions of dignity, equality and community, then we must also value law's judgement. Illuminating these connections therefore serves a double purpose: first, it makes a case against those who counsel liberation from law's abstract judgement and, second, it redirects attention to the task of morally evaluating law's abstract judgement in its own terms. (shrink)

A new therapeutic strategy could break the stalemate in the war on cancer by targeting not all cancerous cells but the small fraction that lie at the root of cancers. Lucie Laplane offers a comprehensive analysis of cancer stem cell theory, based on an original interdisciplinary approach that combines biology, biomedical history, and philosophy.

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding (...) to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. (shrink)

:Space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer experiences. For in order for certain sensations to be related to something outside me , thus in order for me to represent them as outside and next to one another, thus not merely different but as in different places, the representation of space must already be their ground. Thus the representation of space cannot be obtained from the relations of outer appearance through experience, but this outer experience is (...) itself first possible only through this representation. 1Abstract:Der Raum is kein empirischer Begriff, der von äußeren Erfahrungen abgezogen worden. Denn damit gewisse Empfindungen auf etwas außer mir bezogen werden, imgleichen damit ich sie als außer und neben einander, mithin nicht bloß verschieden, sondern als in verschiedenen Orten vorstellen können, dazu muß die Vorstellung des Raumes schon zum Grunde liegen. (shrink)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were put on digital contact tracing, using mobile phone apps to record and immediately notify contacts when a user reports as infected. Such apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as second waves of COVID-19 are raging, these apps are playing a less important role than anticipated. We argue that this is because most countries have opted for app configurations that cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of (...) likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Mathematical modelling suggests that differently configured apps have the potential to do this. These require, however, that some pseudonymised data be stored on a central server, which privacy advocates have cautioned against. We contend that their influential arguments are subject to two fallacies. First, they have tended to one-sidedly focus on the risks that centralised data storage entails for privacy, while paying insufficient attention to the fact that inefficient contact tracing involves ethical risks too. Second, while the envisioned system does entail risks of breaches, such risks are also present in decentralised systems, which have been falsely presented as ‘privacy preserving by design’. When these points are understood, it becomes clear that we must rethink our approach to digital contact tracing in our fight against COVID-19. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

In a recent article, Ethan Bradley and Mark Navin (2021) argue that vaccine refusal is not akin to free riding. Here, I defend one connection between vaccine refusal and free riding and suggest that, when viewed in conjunction with their other arguments, this might constitute a reason to mandate Covid-19 vaccination.

How could the initial, drastic decisions to implement “lockdowns” to control the spread of COVID-19 infections be justifiable, when they were made on the basis of such uncertain evidence? We defend the imposition of lockdowns in some countries by first, and focusing on the UK, looking at the evidence that undergirded the decision, second, arguing that this provided us with sufficient grounds to restrict liberty given the circumstances, and third, defending the use of poorly-empirically-constrained epidemiological models as tools that can (...) legitimately guide public policy. (shrink)

Despite its long history of investigating sociality, phenomenology has, to date, said little about online sociality. The phenomenological tradition typically claims that empathy is the fundamental way in which we experience others and their experiences. While empathy is discussed almost exclusively in the context of face-to-face interaction, I claim that we can empathetically perceive others and their experiences in certain online situations. Drawing upon the phenomenological distinction between the physical, objective body and the expressive, lived body, I: (i) highlight that (...) empathy involves perceiving the other’s expressive, lived body, (ii) show that the lived body is not tied to the physical body and that empathy can take place outside of face-to-face interactions, and (iii) argue that the lived body can enter online space and is empathetically available to others there. I explore two ways in which the other’s lived body enters online space and can be empathetically perceived: first, in cases where our face-to-face encounter is technologically-mediated over video link and, second, by showing how the other’s texts, as speech, can form part of the other’s lived body. Investigating empathy online not only furthers our understanding of online encounters but also leads to a refined conception of empathy more generally. (shrink)

On échange des cadeaux en fin d'année par convention. Ecrire de gauche à droite, rouler à droite ou encore s'arrêter lorsque le feu est rouge sont des conventions. Les conventions sont également mobilisées pour coordonner les individus d'un même groupe de travail, de façon à déterminer le moment et la durée de la pause, mais aussi leur niveau d'effort, comme " ne faire que x pièces à l'heure ", voire la façon dont ils sont rémunérés. Les conventions jouent ainsi un (...) rôle important dans la coordination économique. La notion de convention est un thème d'étude nouveau pour l'économie. Elle fait aujourd'hui l'objet de très nombreuses recherches. Cet ouvrage ambitionne de clarifier tous les usages du terme " convention " en économie, depuis les travaux qui s'appuient sur la philosophie du langage jusqu'aux thèses développées par " l'Economie des conventions ", en passant par la théorie des jeux. Cet ouvrage est le fruit d'un travail collectif qui a associé et mobilisé une équipe de chercheurs an sein de FORUM. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Health Research Council of New Zealand is the first major government funding agency to use a lottery to allocate research funding for their Explorer Grant scheme. This is a somewhat controversial approach because, despite the documented problems of peer review, many researchers believe that funding should be allocated solely using peer review, and peer review is used almost ubiquitously by funding agencies around the world. Given the rarity of alternative funding schemes, there is interest in hearing from the first (...) cohort of researchers to ever experience a lottery. Additionally, the Health Research Council of New Zealand wanted to hear from applicants about the acceptability of the randomisation process and anonymity of applicants.MethodsThis paper presents the results of a survey of Health Research Council applicants from 2013 to 2019. The survey asked about the acceptability of using a lottery and if the lottery meant researchers took a different approach to their application.ResultsThe overall response rate was 39%, with 30% from applicants in the years 2013 to 2018, and 68% for those in the year 2019 who were not aware of the funding result. There was agreement that randomisation is an acceptable method for allocating Explorer Grant funds with 63% in favour and 25% against. There was less support for allocating funds randomly for other grant types with only 40% in favour and 37% against. Support for a lottery was higher amongst those that had won funding. Multiple respondents stated that they supported a lottery when ineligible applications had been excluded and outstanding applications funded, so that the remaining applications were truly equal. Most applicants reported that the lottery did not change the time they spent preparing their application.ConclusionsThe Health Research Council’s experience through the Explorer Grant scheme supports further uptake of a modified lottery. (shrink)

Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This ‘empirical turn’ has provoked extensive debate over how such ‘descriptive’ research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by developing a practical research methodology for the inclusion of data from social science studies into ethical deliberation. This methodology will be based on a (...) naturalistic conception of ethical theory that sees practice as informing theory just as theory informs practice – the two are symbiotically related. From this engagement with practice, the ways that such theories need to be extended and developed can be determined. This is a practical methodology for integrating theory and practice that can be used in empirical studies, one that uses ethical theory both to explore the data and to draw normative conclusions. (shrink)