This volume sets out to re-imagine the theoretical and epistemological presuppositions of existing scholarship on identities. Despite a well-established body of scholarly texts that examine the concept from a wide range of perspectives, there is a surprising dearth of work on multiple, heterogeneous forms of identity. Numerous studies of ethnic, linguistic, regional and religious identities have appeared, but largely in isolation from one another. Rethinking 'Identities' is a multi-authored project that is original in providing - in distributed and granular mode (...) - a hyper-contemporary and wide-ranging applied analysis that questions notions of identity based on nation and region, language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or even 'the human'. The volume achieves this by mobilizing various contexts of identity (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation) and medium (art, cinema, literature, music, theatre, video). Emphasizing the extreme contemporary (the twenty-first century) and the challenges posed by an increasingly global society, this collection of essays builds upon existing intellectual investigations of identity with the aim of offering a fresh perspective that transcends cognitive and geographical frontiers. (shrink)

"À l'ère postmoderne des incertitudes économiques et des défis identitaires qui sont ceux du XXIe siècle, penser l'être humain, c'est aussi explorer ou définir les univers non humains qui l'entourent. Toutefois, cette exploration est le plus souvent abstraite, figurative ou illustrative et reflète quasi exclusivement des intérêts humains. Elle instrumentalise ainsi les animaux, relégués à un rôle accessoire ou symbolique au profit d'une analyse concernée par l'humain et sa 'différence'. Cet ouvrage se départ de cette tendance pour considérer les responsabilités (...) humaines en regard des souffrances animales. Ce thème est en effet négligé par la pensée contemporaine, qui suit la trace anthropocentrique des priorités humaines d'une part, et par ailleurs rechigne à mener de front réflexion et militantisme. À travers une approche interdisciplinaire audacieuse, philosophes, vétérinaires, juristes, artistes, critiques littéraires, sociologues et historiens font ici part de leur désir de bouleverser les traditions humaines qui perpétuent l'oppression des animaux. Ils communiquent le fruit de leur expérience et de leur réflexion tout en exprimant l'urgence de leur engagement. En rompant le silence qui légitimise l'exploitation insensée de tous les êtres non humains, ils examinent certaines des conséquences de ces traditions, mais montrent également comment de nouvelles voies/x peuvent être prises, clamées et entendues afin de rendre possible la connexité de 'différents modes d'existence' (Bruno Latour)." [Source : 4e de couv.]. (shrink)

Розкрито сутність поняття «рейтинг». Доведено значущість рейтингової оцінки для суб’єктів фінансового ринку, зокрема для страхових компаній, потенційних страхувальників, інвесторів та кредиторів.

The large-scale and intensive collection and analysis of digital data (commonly called “Big Data”) has become a common, popular, and consensual research method for the social sciences, as the automation of data collection, mathematization of analysis, and digital objectification reinforce both its efficiency and truth-value. This article opens with a critical review of the literature on data collection and analysis, and summarizes current ethical discussions focusing on these technologies. A semiotic model of data production and circulation is then introduced to (...) problematize the view that digital data has ceased to stand for a formalization method (a possible kind of representation among others), and effectively “becomes the world itself” (a direct presentation of the world outperforming all other modes of representation). Following Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics and pragmaticist philosophy, we characterize digitalization as a hypersymbolic semiotic process, and we highlight the naturalization of meaning, the illusion of iconicity, and rhetorical efficiency on which data’s truth value relies within the context of its large-scale, profit-driven, and results-oriented research uses. This outlines some epistemological and ethical implications of data’s visualization, use, and authority, and indicates avenues for critical semiotics of contemporary data science and analysis. (shrink)

Gynaecological self-help, a well-known and historical feminist practice from the Second Wave movements which aims at embodying a radical alternative to traditional reproductive politics, is resurging today in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Drawing on empirical observations and interviews, this article questions the links between feminist memory of self-help, the shaping of nostalgia and the production of a political feminist ‘we’. Born at the end of the 1960s in the United States, feminist self-help travelled internationally and was appropriated differently depending on (...) national contexts. This ‘glorious’ history of self-help and, more importantly, its narrated memory, is central to contemporary European self-help activism, as observed in the three national contexts. Drawing on this insight, this article reveals the active memory-oriented emotional work of self-help activists. It examines the ways in which nostalgia for an imagined and lost past is actively and practically produced and encouraged in social movement practices, and highlights the specificity of the kind of collective feminist identity that it shapes and promotes in contemporary self-help politics. (shrink)

Inner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties. Along dialogality, inner speech can be monologal, when we engage in internal soliloquy, or dialogal, when we recall past conversations or imagine future dialogues involving our own voice as well as that of others addressing us. (...) Along intentionality, it can be intentional (when we deliberately rehearse material in short-term memory) or it can arise unintentionally (during mind wandering). We introduce the ConDialInt model, a neurocognitive predictive control model of inner speech that accounts for its varieties along these three dimensions. ConDialInt spells out the condensation dimension by including inhibitory control at the conceptualization, formulation or articulatory planning stage. It accounts for dialogality, by assuming internal model adaptations and by speculating on neural processes underlying perspective switching. It explains the differences between intentional and spontaneous varieties in terms of monitoring. We present an fMRI study in which we probed varieties of inner speech along dialogality and intentionality, to examine the validity of the neuroanatomical correlates posited in ConDialInt. Condensation was also informally tackled. Our data support the hypothesis that expanded inner speech recruits speech production processes down to articulatory planning, resulting in a predicted signal, the inner voice, with auditory qualities. Along dialogality, covertly using an avatar’s voice resulted in the activation of right hemisphere homologues of the regions involved in internal own-voice soliloquy and in cerebellar deactivation, consistent with internal model adaptation. Switching from first-person to third-person perspective resulted in activations in precuneus and parietal lobules. Along intentionality, compared with intentional inner speech, mind wandering with inner speech episodes was associated with greater bilateral inferior frontal activation and decreased activation in left temporal regions. This is consistent with the reported subjective evanescence and presumably reflects condensation processes. Our results provide neuroanatomical evidence compatible with predictive control and in favor of the assumptions made in the ConDialInt model. (shrink)

Call generalism about children’s and adults’ wellbeing the thesis that the same theory of wellbeing applies to both children and adults. Our goal is to examine whether generalism is true. While this question has not received much attention in the past, it has recently been suggested that generalism is likely to be false and that we need to elaborate different theories of children’s and adults’ wellbeing. In this paper, we defend generalism against the main objections it faces and make a (...) positive case for it. (shrink)

This article explores the critical role of emotions and bodies in the individual dynamics of engagement as well as the construction of collective identities and action in women’s groups in the 1970s in France. Much literature on emotion work in feminist organizations has tended to discuss emotions stemming from women’s dominant socialization processes as, above all, alienating, thereby as barriers to their activism. The Movement for the liberty of abortion and birth control offers essential insights into how gendered dispositions can (...) be primary determinants of feminist collective identity formation, and even spur innovative protest practices. With their specific organizational settings and action, some ‘dissident MLACs’ in Aix-en-Provence, Lille, Lyon and Paris – those which continued to practice abortion despite its legalization and in defiance of the 1975 law which forbade them to do so – mobilized reciprocal emotions and bodily experiences to sustain engagement and serve a political project. Drawing on a wide array of biographical interviews and archival sources centred on abortion practices, the article examines the distinctive emotion culture these groups constructed. Its anchoring in bodies, commitment to emotions like tenderness and compassion, but also domestic and relational skills consecrated a gendered repertoire of action which therefore notably appealed to women whose social properties did not predispose them to collective action. (shrink)

This paper's purpose is to assess how management's perceptions regarding certain aspects of environmental reporting relate to the firm's actual reporting strategy. Toward that end, we propose a model where a firm's environmental disclosure is conditional upon executive assessments of corporate concerns. The study relies on a survey that was sent to environmental management executives from European and North American multinational firms enquiring about the determinants of corporate environmental disclosure. Responses from these executives were then contrasted with their firms' actual (...) environmental reporting practices, which was measured using a comprehensive multi-criteria grid. Results show that there is a relationship between environmental managers' attitudes toward various stakeholder groups and how those managers respond to the stakeholders via the decision to disclose and the actual disclosures made. Our model provides a perspective as to how a firm responds to the numerous stakeholders to whom it must be accountable. This accountability in turn relates to how the company communicates its actions to society in order to achieve or maintain its social legitimacy. (shrink)

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Saving Animals, a study of three different kinds of animal sanctuaries, is the first major ethnography to describe how sanctuaries “unmake” the notion of animals as property that reduces them to “bare life.” The study relies on numerous engaging narratives about rescue animals, their mutual interactions, and their interactions with the people who care for them—narratives that illustrate how the sentience and subjectivity of animals provide a firm ground for the author's ethical considerations. An animal sanctuary is ideally an intentional (...) community of cocitizens whose pragmatic and symbolic value resides in its ability to lay the foundation for a broad challenge to all violent practices of exploitation “targeted at a range of different others.” The patient, incremental work of sanctuaries has implications not only for the future of human-animal relations but more broadly for the future of humans on the planet. The ultimate vision of sanctuaries is a world outside that mirrors the world inside, a pantopia where there will be no “others,” only “us.”. (shrink)

This book offers a critical introduction to the work of American philosopher D. G. Leahy (1937-2014). Leahy's fundamental thinking can be characterized as an absolute creativity in which all creating is 'live' -- a happening occurring now that manifests a supersaturated polyontological actuality that is essentially created by the logic that characterizes it. Leahy leaves behind the categorial presuppositions of modern thought, eclipsing both Cartesian and Hegelian subjectivities and introducing instead an essentially new form of thinking founded in a nondual (...) logic of creation. The new thinking delineates the absolute unicity of existence as a creative interactivity beyond all traditional dichotomies (such as one vs. many, unity vs. plurality, identity vs. change): a fully "digitized" actuality that is nothing but newness, which inherently implies nothing but change. Through this new form of thinking, change itself is revealed to be the very essence of reality and mind. Any reader looking for a quantum leap beyond the thrall of modern and postmodern fixations is invited to hear and apprehend this new thinking that refuses to be conditioned by paradigms, categories, species, genera, walls, bridges, boundaries, or abstractions: an essentially free thinking that embodies creative novelty itself. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Language and Cognition - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Cognitive Science Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 4 Seiten: 313-343.

In recent years, many scholars have offered innovative accounts of social categories such as gender, race, and disability. By contrast, comparatively little work has been done on the category of children. The goal of our paper is to offer a new account of what children are. We start by discussing the two main accounts that have been put forward so far in the literature: naturalistic accounts and normative accounts. According to the former, to be a child is a matter of (...) possessing, or lacking, some ‘natural’ and ‘objective’ properties. According to the latter, to be a child is to possess a particular normative status. We argue that both naturalistic and normative accounts are subject to a variety of objections. We then propose our own social constructivist account. According to it, to be a child in any given society is to be regarded by the dominant ideology of that society as the target of a set of broadly paternalistic norms, in virtue of the possession of a cluster of natural properties such that, according to the dominant ideology of that society, it is justified to subject that individual to such norms. We conclude our paper by showing that our account meets the criteria of success for an account of what it is to be a child and by addressing some objections. (shrink)

Two centuries after Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, it lines the shelves of military colleges around the world and even showed up in an Al Qaeda hideout. Though it has shaped much of the common parlance on the subject, On War is perceived by many as a “metaphysical fog,” widely known but hardly read. In War as Paradox, Youri Cormier lifts the fog on this iconic work by explaining its philosophical underpinnings. Building up a genealogy of dialectical war (...) theory and integrating Hegel with Clausewitz as a co-founders of the method, Cormier uncovers a common logic that shaped the fighting doctrines and ethics of modern war. He explains how Hegel and Clausewitz converged on method, but nonetheless arrived at opposite ethics and military doctrines. Ultimately, Cormier seeks out the limits to dialectical war theory and explores the greater paradoxes the method reveals: can so-called “rational” theories of war hold up under the pressures of irrational propositions, such as lone-wolf attacks, the circular logic of a “war to end all wars,” or the apparent folly of mutually assured destruction? Since the Second World War, commentators have described war as obsolete. War as Paradox argues that dialectical war theory may be the key to understanding why, despite this, it continues. (shrink)

Le dépassement phénoménologique du substantialisme métaphysique devrait permettre aujourd’hui d’envisager une refondation de la notion de personne, laquelle s’était quelque peu immobilisée depuis Boèce. Sur ce nouvel horizon, le retour à la fondation première, celle d’Augustin, s’impose. Celui-ci est le premier en effet, pour l’essentiel dans son traité de la Trinité, à avoir clairement pensé la personne comme relation et non comme substance. La réduction augustinienne de la personne à l’ego ou à « l’homme intérieur » ouvre la possibilité d’ (...) « analogies subjectives » avec la Trinité : pensée, amour, connaissance ; mémoire, intelligence, volonté. Cependant, la spéculation augustinienne trouve sa limite en échouant à penser une personne de chair – et, qui plus est, une telle personne comme « en relation ». Ce qui était relation en Dieu reste, en l’homme, substance pensante, seule face à son Dieu.Phenomenology has overcome the old substance of metaphysics and then should permit us today to refound the idea of the person which was in a way, since Boethius, brought to a standstill. Therefore we must to go back to St. Augustine who was actually the first, in his De Trinitate, to conceive, the person as a relation and not as a substance. The person so confined to the ego or to the « inner man » allows some possible « subjective analogies » with the Trinity : thought, love, knowledge, memory, intelligence and will. However the Augustinian theory fails to conceive first the person in her own flesh and blood – a bodily person – and secondly such a person as being « in relation » : man is a thinking substance, alone facing her God. (shrink)

The old and yet unanswered question of the precise nature of light, although completely and deliberately neglected nowadays, is reexamined by several new methods, both theoretical and experimental. The wave-corpuscle duality of light then appears somewhat different, and a new hypothesis on the process of electromagnetic interaction may be proposed in an attempt to untangle the dilemma and reach a more realistic description.

Charles Sanders Peirce complained that James allowed pragmatism to become "infected" with "seeds of death" like the idea that truth is mutable. The Truth is What Works is an attempt to defend James's pragmatic theory of truth from a wide range of critics including Peirce, Betrand Russell, Hilary Putnam, and Cornel West. Cormier runs the gauntlet of historical and contemporary criticism in an attempt to show, not that Jamesian pragmatism does in fact contain a perfectly good theory of objective (...) reality after all, but rather that it doesn't, and is still a kind of realism anyway because it does not leave individuals and their subjective desires behind in an attempt to describe the real world. (shrink)