Husserl and Spatiality is an exploration of the phenomenology of space and embodiment, based on the work of Edmund Husserl. Little known in architecture, Husserl's phenomenology of embodied spatiality established the foundations for the works of later phenomenologists, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty's well-known phenomenology of perception. Through a detailed study of his posthumously published and unpublished manuscripts, DuFour examines the depth and scope of Husserl's phenomenology of space. The book investigates his analyses of corporeity and the 'lived body,' extending to (...) questions of intersubjective, intergenerational, and historical spatial experience, what DuFour terms the 'environmentality' of space. Combining in-depth architectural philosophical investigations of spatiality with a rich and intimate ethnography, Husserl and Spatiality speaks to themes in social and cultural anthropology from a theoretical perspective that addresses spatial practice and experience. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Brazil, DuFour develops his analyses of Husserl's phenomenology through spatial accounts of ritual in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé. The result is a methodological innovation and unique mode of spatial description that DuFour terms a 'phenomenological ethnography of space.' The book's profoundly interdisciplinary approach makes an incisive contribution relevant to academics and students of architecture and architectural theory, anthropology and material culture, and philosophy and environmental aesthetics. (shrink)

Trois délires politiques mortifères hantent notre époque. Dans le premier, le délire occidental, la pléonexie (vouloir toujours plus) à l'oeuvre dans le néolibéralisme se transforme en risque de tout perdre (dislocation des subjectivités, déchirure du lien social, épuisement de la planète, destruction des bases mêmes de la vie sur terre). Le second, le délire théo fasciste de l'islamisme djihadiste prétend, contre l'égoïsme érigé en système et la démesure caractérisant l'Occident, restaurer une pureté absolue. Or, quand cette pureté originaire revendiquée se (...) réalise, elle se transforme en souillure et en horreur absolues. Le troisième, le délire identitaire néo-fasciste (qui monte aujourd'hui partout en Europe) se présente comme le seul rempart possible contre les deux premiers. Contre la mondialisation néo-libérale, il prône un retour à la patrie. Non pas une patrie fondée sur un principe universaliste (du type "liberté, égalité, fraternité"), mais une patrie refermée sur elle-même, désignant des boucs émissaires, les étrangers, pour que des acolytes réputés "amis" se regroupent et décrètent contre ces "ennemis" l'"état d'exception". Ces trois délires tendent de plus en plus à former système : on ne sort de l'un que pour entrer dans l'un des deux autres. Puisqu'aucun des garde-fous démocratiques (État, médias et université) ne fonctionne plus, il faut songer à tout refonder à partir des principes de dignité et de commune humanité, également bafoués par ces trois délires. Il se pourrait bien que le travail actuellement fourni par Les Convivialistes puisse fournir les bases de cette reconstruction probablement une des dernières possibles avant la catastrophe annoncée."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. A philosophical question arises about the nature of gendered embodied experience and materiality: How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through a reading of Claudia Llosa's film The Milk of Sorrow ( La teta asustada ) (2009). The film, we show, reworks racial, (...) gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism and its attendant figuration of resistance by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young Indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who, in encounter with popular culture and the global marketplace, renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her young town and country. We signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination. (shrink)

Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social life. She shows how address props up finely hewn modalities of relationality, agency, and normativity. Address exceeds a one-on-one pairing of cultural productions with their audiences. As ardently energizing tiny slippages and snippets as fueling larger impulses in the society, it activates and reaestheticizes registers of race, gender, class, coloniality, and cosmopolitanism. In readings of writers (...) and artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Under the banner of a unified concept of address, Hume, Kant, and Foucault strike up conversations with Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Fanon, Anzaldúa, and Butler. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address's significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it. (shrink)

Surrealism in North Africa and Western Asia : crossings and encounters -- Multiple surrealisms -- Surrealist encounters.

Emmanuel Lévinas et Henri Meschonnic : tout semble les séparer, et pourtant tous deux parlent de littérature, d'éthique et de Dieu.

Qu'est-ce qui permet de juger de la qualité d'un film? Sur quels critères? Cette question fait écho à la question plus générale du beau dans l'art : qu'est-ce que le beau? Cet ouvrage tente d'y répondre en proposant une réflexion sur ce qui fait la valeur d'un film et sur la façon de l'estimer. Contextes artistique et sociopolitique, référents cinématographiques et historiques sont bien entendu des débuts de réponse, mais l'auteur nous apprend surtout qu'il n'y pas de "bons films" ou (...) de "beaux films", c'est-à-dire des films qui posséderaient une valeur et d'autres pas.0Selon lui, tous les films ont une valeur dès lors qu'ils impactent notre vie d'une façon ou d'une autre. Pour étayer son propos, l'auteur s'appuie sur une analyse philosophique des concepts abstraits et subjectifs du "jugement", du "goût" et de la "valeur", ainsi que sur une analyse factuelle basée sur de nombreux exemples de films. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the effect of sound on visual motion perception. One model involves the illusion created when two identical objects moving towards each other on a two-dimensional visual display can be seen to either bounce off or stream through each other. Previous studies show that the large bias normally seen toward the streaming percept can be modulated by the presentation of an auditory event at the moment of coincidence. However, no reports to date provide sufficient evidence to (...) indicate whether the sound bounce-inducing effect is due to a perceptual binding process or merely to an explicit inference resulting from the transient auditory stimulus resembling a physical collision of two objects. In the present study, we used a novel experimental design in which a subliminal sound was presented either 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence of two disks moving towards each other. The results showed that there was an increased perception of bouncing when the subliminal sound was presented at or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence compared to when no sound was presented. These findings provide the first empirical demonstration that activation of the human auditory system without reaching consciousness affects the perception of an ambiguous visual motion display. (shrink)

Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural (...) boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach. (shrink)

Increasing privacy concerns are arising from expanding use of aggregated personal information in health practices. Conversely, in light of the promising benefits of data driven healthcare, privacy...

Evoquant au passage l'axolotl, ce poisson mexicain qui nous ressemble, comme le jaguar de la brousse brésilienne ou le loup des contes enfantins, discutant avec Platon, Albert Einstein ou... Michael Jackson, se prenant à l'occasion pour Sherlock Holmes, le narrateur écrit dix lettres à sa " belle amie". Qui correspondent à autant de moments clés du " voyage" à travers le temps accompli par cette étrange espèce animale qu'on appelle les hommes. Contrairement à l'idée reçue, notre espèce se caractérise non (...) pas par sa supériorité sur le reste de la création mais par sa forme inachevée, sa faiblesse "naturelle" constitutive. Un "manque de nature ", donc, que seule peut compenser la culture, autrement dit les discours et récits comme les sciences et techniques qui permettent à l'être humain d'agir sur le monde pour mieux l'habiter. A moins qu'en voulant construire une " surhumanité " réservée à quelques-uns l'on ne mette en jeu la survie même de l'espèce... Peut-être n'est-il pas trop tard pour non seulement s'indigner mais aussi résister, nous dit Dany-Robert Dufour en conclusion de ce beau texte lisible par tout le monde. A travers lequel il poursuit en philosophe son travail de critique radicale mais constructive du monde contemporain. (shrink)

I analyze the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector's novella, The Hour of the Star, in terms of the entwinements of beauty with economic mobility and abandonment, . . . with constructions of cultural citizenship and liminality.

The term “emotional practices” is gaining currency in the historical study of emotions. This essay discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of this concept. A definition of emotion informed by practice theory promises to bridge persistent dichotomies with which historians of emotion grapple, such as body and mind, structure and agency, as well as expression and experience. Practice theory emphasizes the importance of habituation and social context and is thus consistent with, and could enrich, psychological models of situated, distributed, and (...) embodied cognition and their approaches to the study of emotion.It is suggested here that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. Emotion-as-practice is bound up with and dependent on “emotional practices,” defined here as practices involving the self , language, material artifacts, the environment, and other people. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the essay emphasizes that the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical. Four kinds of emotional practices that make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific social settings and power relations are sketched out—mobilizing, naming, communicating, and regulating emotion—as are consequences for method in historical research. (shrink)

Et si l'on osait reparler d'espoir? Et pas seulement en parler, mais le vivre à nouveau. Dorénavant, l'avenir fait peur au lieu de faire envie. Chacun nourrit toujours des espoirs intimes, mais les grands espoirs collectifs sont en panne. Comment redonner un avenir à l'espoir? Voilà ce que nous cherchons. En explorant d'abord ses sources grecques, juives et chrétiennes. En suivant ses tribulations occidentales, du mythe de Pandore au siècle des révolutions, qui le révèlent tour à tour ambigu, religieux, politique, (...) continûment orienté par un désir de futur. Pourtant, dans notre monde obsédé par l'immédiat et le seul présent, l'espoir en vient à manquer d'horizon, de temps, d'action, de pensée vivifiante. Nous proposons de reprendre l'espoir au sérieux, de lui redonner sa place et ses chances, d'en refaire l'apprentissage. Contre tous les philosophes qui s'en sont méfiés ou l'ont rejeté, nous jugeons vitale cette singulière émotion pensante. Sans un espoir lucide et bien tempéré, l'humanité perdrait sa dignité. (shrink)

Lire les Dialogues de Platon avec en tete les questions soulevees par Nietzsche m'a fait saisir en eux une force et une etrangete usees par des myriades d'interpretations. Verifier combien Nietzsche platonise- m'a permis de percevoir une pensee qui, par-dela Oui et Non, accumule hypotheses et points d'interrogation. Ce livre tente d'expliciter une evidence jusque-la souterraine: la parente existant entre leurs manieres de philosopher. Qui reduit leurs philosophies a un ensemble de doctrines peut seulement voir ce qui les oppose: pensee (...) du devenir contre metaphysique de l'etre, interpretation contre recherche dialectique de la verite, corps pensant contre corps tombeau, la liste n'est pas close. Pour mettre en question ces oppositions, il fallait rappeler que penser est pour eux une aventure, une pluralite d'experiences joyeuses ou penibles ouvrant sur des chemins a explorer. La methode du contrepoint rigoureux, superposition de deux lignes melodiques qui n'exclut pas les dissonances, etait donc la plus indiquee. La mise en regard de leurs textes fait certes apparaitre des renversements, mais surtout des echos ou des chiasmes.Le Socrate musicien- qu'etait Platon et le Dionysos philosophos- dont Nietzsche se disait le disciple sont les figures croisees d'un philosophe que l'un invente et l'autre reinvente - d'un philosophe qui, ni metaphysicien ni anti-metaphysicien, est capable d'interroger impitoyablement comme de chanter au-dessus de la vie. Cette autre maniere de philosopher est, peut etre, ce dont la philosophie a aujourd'hui besoin. M. D. (shrink)

L'histoire de la philosophie a toujours vu en Plotin un metaphysicien. Porphyre ne dit-il pas de son maitre qu'il connaissait parfaitement la geometrie, l'arithmetique, la mecanique, l'optique et la musique, mais qu'il n'etait pas enclin a approfondir davantage ces disciplines? Ce peu de gout pour les mathematiques et la physique n'a pourtant pas empeche Plotin de rediger quelques traites exclusivement connsacres a des questions de physique et de cosmologie, traites qui furent les grands oublies des etudes neioplatoniciennes. Parmi ceux-ci, le (...) traite Sur le ciel est d'une importance capitale aussi bien en raison du sujet qu'il aborde que du debat philosophique qu'il engage avec la tradition. La vision plotinienne du monde et du ciel doit en effet trouver sa place au sein des theories cosmologiques dominantes de son epoque: celles transmises par le Timee de Platon, le De Caelo d'Aristote et la vision stoicienne de l'univers. Il va sans dire que Plotin se veut un exegete des doctrines platoniciennes, mais le present traite montre peut-etre plus que tout autre la difficile cohabitation de l'independance d'esprit et de la fidelite aux textes du maitre. Ce qui se presente comme une exegese du Timee devient en fait une trahison des enseignements qui y sont contenus. Le traite II, 1 [40] fut le theatre d'une rebellion, celle d'un interprete platonicinen qui tente de lire dans le Timee une theorie qui ne s'y trouve pas. (shrink)

On trouvera dans ce Lectures de Platon une diversité d'interprétations liées à différents choix méthodologiques. Des lectures "analytiques" voisinent avec des lectures "contemplatives" et quasi mystiques, des partisans d'un système caché de doctrines non écrites côtoient des philologues qui tiennent pour préalables indispensables les décisions quant à la chronologie des oeuvres écrites, mais un trait commun se dégage avec évidence, à savoir que lire Platon, c'est être sensible aux risques pris, à la diversité des chemins frayés, aux "digressions" qui se (...) révèlent être les seules voies possibles, aux différences de vitesse d'une pensée déroutante que ne décourage ni petit ni grand problème, et qui reconnaît dans sa liberté la condition de sa rencontre avec la vérité. La nature du texte de Platon possède cette singulière puissance : forcer chacun, quand il s'efforce de l'interpréter, à dévoiler la manière dont il se représente ce que c'est que penser, et, au-delà, à révéler ce qu'il attend de la philosophie. (shrink)

Xenotransplantation pits clinical research ethics against public health needs because recipients must undergo long-term, perhaps life-long, surveillance for infectious diseases. This surveillance requirement is effectively an abrogation of the right to withdraw from a clinical trial. Ulysses contracts, which are advance directives for future care, may be an ethical mechanism by which to balance public health needs against limitation of individual rights.

Xenotransplantation is defined as “any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation, or infusion into a human recipient of either live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or human body fluids, cells, tissues or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues, or organs.” Xenotransplantation has been viewed by desperate patients and their surgeons as a solution to the problem of the paucity of human organs available for transplantation. Foes of xenotransplantation argue that (...) the use of animal organs degrades the human race and should be avoided.In this paper, we briefly review the cultural context of xenotransplantation and explore the infectious disease risk of xenotransplantation. The United States Code of Federal Regulations requires life-long surveillance of a xenotransplantation recipient due to the largely unknown risk of novel infectious disease transmitted across species, known as xenogeneic infectious disease. We argue that despite being in the interest of protecting the public health, the imposition of lifelong surveillance requirements on xenotransplant recipients effectively abrogates the right to withdraw from a clinical trial after the transplantation has taken place. Moreover, we argue that a waiver of the right to withdraw should be made explicit in the interest of full disclosure, out of respect for the research subject’s right of self-determination. (shrink)

Concepts for sustainable bioeconomy systems are gradually replacing the ones on linear product chains. The reason is that continuously expanding linear chain activities are considered to contribute to climate change, reduced biodiversity, over-exploitation of resources, food insecurity, and the double burden of disease. Are sustainable bioeconomy systems a guarantee for a healthy planet? If yes, why, when, and how? In literature, different sustainability indicators have been presented to shed light on this complicated question. Due to high degrees of complexity and (...) interactions of actors in bioeconomy systems, trade-offs and non-linear outcomes became apparent. This fueled the debates about the normative dimensions of the bioeconomy. In particular, the behavior of actors and the utilization of products do not seem to be harmonized according to the environmental, social, and economic pillars of sustainability. Potential conflicts require a new conceptual framework that is here introduced. It consists of a ‘sustainability’ cylinder captured between an inner-cylinder, representing order, and an outer-cylinder for chaos, based on the laws of physics and complex adaptive systems. Such a framework permits (bioeconomy) systems to propagate in the sustainability zone only if they follow helical pathways serving as the new norms. Helices are a combination of two sinusoidal patterns. The first represents here the sustainable behavior of interacting actors and the second the balanced usage of resources and products. The latter counteracts current growth discourses. The applicability of the conceptual cylinder framework is positively verified via 9 cases in Europe, which encompass social-organizational and product-technological innovations. –. (shrink)

Dans cet ouvrage, Monique Lauret retrace l'histoire du mouvement psychanalytique en Chine qui ne cesse de croître depuis les années 1980, analyse l'influence de la pensée chinoise sur la théorisation de Lacan, et établit des passerelles entre pensée chinoise et psychanalyse. Il existe un passage inattendu entre pensée chinoise et psychanalyse autour de la question de l'humanisation et du rêve. Lacan s'intéressa en particulier à trois notions de la philosophie chinoise: la nature, le désir et la sagesse (discernement). Il (...) reprit les concepts clés de Mencius, fils spirituel de Confucius: le Xing (nature ou sexuel) et le Ming (décret du Ciel ou destin) à partir desquels il conçut la nature de l'être parlant soumis aux lois du Ciel, c'est-à-dire celles de son désir et de sa jouissance. Il porta aussi un regard neuf sur la langue et l'écriture idéographique chinoises: il y découvrit un système de signifiance révélant le mécanisme subtil de l'inconscient structuré comme écriture, ce qui lui permit d'approfondir les concepts de jouissance, d'identification et de Trait unaire. Enfin, il dénonça l'effondrement de la ' sagesse ' de l'humanité à l'origine de nos maux contemporains: une précipitation dans la haine et l'archaïque, la haine étant le plus puissant vecteur de la pulsion de mort. Par ce dialogue entre deux pensées civilisationnelles qui défendent l'idée que l'homme ne peut être humain que dans sa relation à l'autre, cet ouvrage propose une position de discernement face à l'essor de la révolution techno-numérique et au malaise dans la civilisation. (shrink)

Le verbe croire renvoie à des réalités diverses et contradictoires. Croire c'est à la fois être certain, tenir pour vrai, adhérer avec conviction, mais c'est aussi, penser, admettre comme probable, envisager comme possible, et donc ouvrir la voie au doute, à l'opinion, au débat. Le verbe croire possède de multiples usages. Songeons que l'on croit en Dieu alors que l'on croit au diable. On croit à, on croit en, on croit que. Les historiens mobilisés dans cet ouvrage s'interrogent sur ces (...) modalités complexes de la croyance dans tous les domaines du champ social. Privilégier les temps de ruptures, de déconstruction des croyances, les seuils épistémologiques fut le fil conducteur de cette recherche entre "croire" et "ne pas croire". (shrink)

Un regroupement de textes qui analysent le platonisme, ainsi que l'antiplatonisme de l'époque moderne et contemporaine. [SDM].

Uncovers in the works of Plato and Nietzsche, not some royal road to truth, but rather the intensity of their love and commitment to the life of thought, whatever it discovers and wherever it might lead.

In the present research we investigated gender-specific beliefs about emotional behaviour. In Study 1, 180 respondents rated the extent to which they agreed with different types of beliefs (prescriptive, descriptive, stereotypical, and contra-stereotypical) regarding the emotional behaviour of men and women. As anticipated, respondents agreed more with descriptive than with prescriptive beliefs, and more with stereotypical than with contra-stereotypical beliefs. However, respondents agreed more with stereotypical beliefs about the emotional behaviour of women than with those about men. These results were (...) replicated in Study 2 with a sample of 75 students and 80 nonstudents. In Study 3, a sample of 279 respondents rated the extent of agreement with the same items, this time with respect to then own emotional behaviour. A similar pattern of results was obtained, although agreement rates were higher than in Study 1 and 2. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for philosophers to name disinterestedness, or some like feature, as an essential characteristic of love. Such theorists claim that in genuine love, one’s concern for her beloved must be non-instrumental, non-egocentric, or even selfless. These views prompt the question, “What, if any, positive role might self-interestedness play in genuine love?” In this paper, I argue that attachment, an attitude marked primarily by self-focused emotions and emotional predispositions, helps constitute the meaning and import of at least some (...) kinds of adult reciprocal love. In this way, attachment represents a type of self-interestedness that not only contributes positively to such relationships but is also essential to them. (shrink)

We often use the term “attachment” to describe our emotional connectedness to objects in the world. We become attached to our careers, to our homes, to certain ideas, and perhaps most importantly, to other people. Interestingly, despite its import and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the topic of attachment per se has been largely ignored in the philosophy literature. I address this lacuna by identifying attachment as a rich “mode of mattering” that can help to inform certain aspects of agency (...) and emotion. First, drawing on insights from Ancient stoicism and developmental and clinical psychology, I suggest that the relevant form of attachment involves a felt need for its object and a particular relationship between the object and the attached agent’s sense of security. I then argue that these features serve to distinguish the attitude from the more philosophically familiar notion of caring. Finally, I show that recognizing this form of attachment as a distinct mode of mattering has important implications for understanding grief. (shrink)

This article develops a sociology of worth that blurs the traditional disciplinary divide between economic value and social values. Through ethnographic study of a new media startup in Manhattan's Silicon Alley, we examine how a new firm in an emerging industry negotiates an uncertain environment where metrics gauging performance remain illusive as the industry itself gropes toward a clearer definition of its content and contours. Faced with complex foresight horizons, new media firms must develop an organizational capacity for learning, innovation, (...) and flexible adaptation to constantly changing requirements. We examine how the clash of evaluative criteria guiding the work of cross-disciplinary project teams becomes a source for innovation and a resource for learning when deliberation across evaluative principles is combined with an organizational and administrative structure that relies on lateral accountability. (shrink)

Baselines are commonly used to enable harm identification. The temporal, the counterfactual and the duty-based normative baselines are the most prominent. Each of these captures an aspect of common conceptions of what it is to harm and be harmed. However, each baseline also fails to deliver workable identifications of harm when presented with certain types of case. Problematic cases are found readily in childhood, a venue in which harm identification is often called for. Without a reliable means of identifying harm (...) in childhood, harm cannot properly play a central role in normative assessments of parental practices and state intervention. This paper presents childhood cases in which the prominent baselines fail and offers an alternative: the interest-based normative baseline. Should the interest-based normative baseline replace its rivals and reign supreme? I argue not, presenting a case for maintaining a suite of baselines for use in varying contexts. (shrink)

In 2017 and 2018, the English courts were asked to decide whether continued life‐sustaining treatment was in the best interests of three infants: Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans and Isaiah Haastrup. Each infant had sustained catastrophic, irrecoverable brain damage. Dignity played an important role in the best interests assessments reached by the Family division of the High Court in each case. Multiple conceptions of dignity circulate, with potentially conflicting implications for infants such as Charlie, Alfie and Isaiah. The judgements do not (...) explicate the conceptions of dignity upon which they rely. This article reconstructs the conceptions of dignity invoked in these judgements, finding that a broadly Kantian, agential conception dominates, under which human dignity requires the prospect of agency. This conception is situated within the broader body of thought on dignity, and the potentially adverse implications of applying the reconstructed conception in best interests assessments for infants with severely restricted consciousness are discussed. (shrink)