This collection of essays, many translated into English for the first time, examines Weininger's influence and reception in Western culture, particularly his ...

Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilém Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions—from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning—in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it. These (...) essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures. (shrink)

Part III: Now presents solely, clinical ethics. --.

The ability to produce and understand referring expressions is basic to human language use and human cognition. Reference comprises the ability to think of and represent objects (both real and imagined/fictional), to indicate to others which of these objects we are talking about, and to determine what others are talking about when they use a nominal expression. The articles in this volume are concerned with some of the central themes and challenges in research on reference within the cognitive sciences - (...) philosophy (including philosophy of language and mind, logic, and formal semantics), theoretical and computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology. The papers address four basic questions: What is reference? What is the appropriate analysis of different referring forms, such as definite descriptions? How is reference resolved? and How do speaker/writers select appropriate referring forms, such as pronouns vs. full noun phrases, demonstrative vs. personal pronouns, and overt vs. null/zero pronominal forms? Some of the papers assume and build on existing theories, such as Centering Theory and the Givenness Hierarchy framework; others propose their own models of reference understanding or production. The essays examine reference from a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by different research traditions and employing different methodologies. While the contributors to the volume were primarily trained in one of the four represented disciplines-computer science, linguistics, philosophy and psychology, and use methodologies typical of that discipline, each of them bridges more than one discipline in their methodology and/or their approach. (shrink)

The principle of the anomalousness of the mental (PAM) is one of the most controversial principles in Donald Davidson’s argument for anomalous monism (AM). It states that there cannot be any laws (psychophysical or psychological) on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained. The argument against such psychological laws rests on the claim that psychology is not a comprehensive closed system (though physics is). Here I sketch the argument for AM, focusing on the role of PAM (...) and the concept of closure. I present characterizations of the notion of closure offered by William Stanton and Brian McLaughlin. McLaughlin argues that Stanton’s characterization makes the argument for AM circular. McLaughlin offers a different characterization, but I argue that given Davidson’s criterion of event identity and individuation, the two are equivalent and thus both are subject to McLaughlin’s objection. If I’m right about this, there are still a couple of options open to Davidson and the defenders of Anomalous Monism. However, I conclude by indicating why neither seems promising to me. (shrink)

The Law School Admission Test is a half-day standardized exam designed primarily to test the logical reasoning skills of potential law school students. A traditional course in introductory logic does not adequately prepare students for the LSAT. Here I describe the sections of the test, identifying the relevant logic skills students must develop in order to complete them successfully in the time allotted. Then, drawing on my experience teaching a three-week “Logic for the LSAT” course in May 2005, I discuss (...) the main issues you will need to address should you decide to offer such a course. (shrink)

As concerns about the negative health effects of unhealthy eating, overweight and obesity have increased, so too have policy efforts to promote healthy eating. Federal, state, and local governments have proposed and implemented a variety of healthy eating policies. Many of these policies are controversial, facing objections that range from the practical (e.g., the policy won’t succeed at improving people’s diets) to the ethical (e.g., the policy is paternalistic or inequitable). Especially controversial have been policies limiting the options offered in (...) the marketplace, limiting access to certain options, or providing disincentives for the purchase of certain options. Examples of such policies include proposed .. (shrink)

Science is remarkably reliable. It puts people on the moon, performs laser eye surgery, tells us about ancient civilisations and species, and predicts the future of our climate. What underwrites this reliability? This book argues that the standard answers—the scientific method, rigour, and objectivity—are insufficient for the job. Here we propose a new model of science that places its products front and centre. This is the ‘Tangle of Science’. In this book we show how any reliable piece of science is (...) underpinned by a vast, diverse, and thick network of other scientific products. In doing so we bring back into focus areas of science that have been long neglected, emphasising how every product, from the screws that hold the space shuttle together to ways of measuring the consumer price index to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, work together to support results we can trust. (shrink)

Political philosophy and feminist theory have rarely examined in detail how capitalism affects the lives of women. Ann Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom take up opposing sides of the issue, debating whether capitalism is valuable as an ideal and whether as an actually existing economic system it is good for women. In a discussion covering a broad range of social and economic issues, including unequal pay, industrial reforms and sweatshops, they examine how these and other issues relate to women and (...) how effectively to analyze what constitutes 'capitalism' and 'women's interests'. Each author also responds to the opposing arguments, providing a thorough debate of the topics covered. The resulting volume will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, political theory, women's studies and global affairs. (shrink)

The purpose of this preliminary qualitative research study is to explore the role and function of multiple dynamic interactive aesthetic and intersubjective phenomena in the creative arts therapies process relative to transformation in perception, behavior, relationship, and well-being. A group of doctoral students and faculty studied these phenomena in an analogous creative arts therapies laboratory context using a method called Intrinsic Arts-Based Research. Intrinsic Arts-Based Research is a systematic study of psychological, emotional, relational, and arts-based phenomena, parallel to those emergent (...) in the creative arts therapies, using individual and collective intrinsic immersive and reflective experience in combination with qualitative and arts-based research methods. Our primary goal was to simulate the creative arts therapies experience in order to identify, document, and describe the complex transformative phenomena that occur at the nexus of arts-based expression, reflection, and relationships in the arts therapies. For the purposes of this paper transformation is defined as “.... a significant reconfiguration of perception and thought resulting in the lessening of psychic restraint and pain, allowing for the emergence of new psychological perspectives that contribute to living a more creative life” (Gerber et al. 2012, 45). Through a deductive thematic analysis of written accounts of these simulated creative arts therapies experiences by participant/researchers in the laboratory we identified three primary dynamic and interactive broad constructs that together, with more specific modifying themes, might account for and describe change within the creative arts therapies. These broad dynamic interactive themes are: ruptures, resolutions, and transformation; relationship and intersubjectivity; and, arts-based expressive processes. The more specific modifying themes include dialectical rupture and resolution, relational attunements and ruptures, imaginational flow, transcendence and ruptures, sensory/kinesthetic/embodied ways of knowing, and intersubjective transcendence. We propose that change in the creative arts therapies is driven more by a dynamic system of interactive phenomena the varying combinations of which create conditions for relational attunement, imagination, dialectical tensions and creative resolutions, and the ultimately creative transformation. (shrink)

Researchers developed and tested an online training module with both experienced public relations professionals and newcomers to the field with the hopes of helping them sharpen and refine their ethical decision-making skills. The study found that although most testers reported the Web site was difficult to navigate and/or found the ethical content to be complex, the majority believed their ethical decision-making abilities were improved.

Taking Parenting Public makes a compelling case that parenting has become dangerously undervalued in America today. It calls for a new investment—both personal and public—into the work of raising children and argues that we are all 'stockholders' in the next generation. With a foreword by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, Taking Parenting Public crosses boundaries to bring together thinkers from diverse fields spanning the political spectrum. It features contributions from distinguished experts in economics, political science, public policy, child development, (...) public health, history, and the media. While recent books have focused on working mothers or absent fathers, Taking Parenting Public is the first volume to take a comprehensive look at the common struggles of parents. These essays go beyond the usual chest-beating about busy parents torn between work and family demands to suggest bold solutions. Instead of the typical call for 'parent replacement'—more child care, more after school programs and more mentors—the contributors offer fresh strategies for 'parent replenishment,' ways to put mothers and fathers back into the lives of their children not only as economic providers, but also as emotional and moral providers. (shrink)

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Toward a New Socialism offers a critical analysis of capitalism's failings and the imminent need for socialism as an alternative form of government. Dr. Richard Schmitt joins with Dr. Anatole Anton to compile a volume of essays exploring the benefits and consequences of a socialist system as an avenue of increased human solidarity and ethical principle.

This book updates and adds to the classic Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, showing how social movement theory has grown and changed.

This paper describes the results of a multi-country survey of governance approaches for the use of digital contact tracing (DCT) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the countries in our survey represent two distinct models of DCT governance, both of which are flawed. The “data protection model” emphasizes privacy protections at the expense of public health benefit, while the “emergency response model” sacrifices transparency and accountability, prompting concerns about excessive governance surveillance. The ethical and effective use of (...) DCT in the future requires a new governance approach that is better suited to this novel use of mobile phone data to promote public health.”. (shrink)

Le 23 août 2021, Jean-Luc Nancy s’est éteint, au terme d’une vie intense. On sait sa fécondité philosophique. On sait son œuvre immense, à la fois profonde et joyeuse, mêlant sérieux et jeu, philosophie et goût des mots, érudition et brillance. Il ne fut pas en vain lecteur de Nietzsche. Fidèle en ses amitiés et ses engagements, il prit racine à Strasbourg, ville diagonalement opposée à son lieu de naissance. Penseur entré de son vivant dans le cercle des philosophes (...) immortels, Jean-Luc Nancy... (shrink)

In this article I take a poem by Lisa Bellear as a starting point for theorizing the possibility of a renovated feminism. I argue that the rhetorical questioning of the poem performs a mode of intersubjectivity in which the addressee/reader reflects upon their whiteness. The poem drives directly into the dense affect that saturates the troubled zone of cross-racial relations in contemporary Australia. If this zone is characterized by white anger and anxiety, it is also a zone of intense `feeling' (...) for the indigenous poet. Jean-Luc Nancy defines literature as the act of the `opening [of] community to itself', that is, of communicating our being-in-common. The cross-racial encounter that Bellear brokers between an indigenous and a white woman through the performance of address in this poem is not entirely comfortable or governable. I discuss how my students find this poem so confronting, and the fact that this discomfort underlines the necessity for a pedagogy that accommodates what Spivak refers to as `moments of bafflement'. (shrink)

The 102 dedications composed by the sixteenth-century physician and polymath Conrad Gessner between 1541 and 1565 offer a rich trove of insight into many aspects of his particular career but also into the workings of the Republic of Letters more generally. Although Gessner never benefitted from a major patronage relationship and probably received limited financial support from his dedicatees, he nonetheless managed to publish a number of major works on his initiative, including folio volumes of philology, bibliography, and especially expensive (...) works of illustrated natural history. Crucial to Gessner’s success was his accumulation of smaller contributions in kind from a wide range of people who offered him hospitality or sent him information and specimens, manuscripts and images, which Gessner used in his publications. Gessner rewarded contributors not only by private expressions of thanks, but also in print, and especially visibly in his dedications. Gessner was also unusual in calling attention to the role of learned printers for his work, by composing dedications to them and by advertising that various of his publications were initiated by requests from printers or bequests of manuscripts by recently deceased scholars. Gessner thus used the high visibility of the printed dedication to invite further contributions from learned readers, bequests of unfinished manuscripts, and proposals from printers with which to fuel his remarkable productivity. (shrink)

Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians, University of Michigan Press, ISBN - 9780472102303Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba, Duke University Press, ISBN - 9780822313601Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides’ Traffic in Women, Cornell University Press, ISBN - 9780801428456.

In this volume, leading philosophers of psychiatry examine psychiatric classification systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, asking whether current systems are sufficient for effective diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doing so, they take up the question of whether mental disorders are natural kinds, grounded in something in the outside world. Psychiatric categories based on natural kinds should group phenomena in such a way that they are subject to the same type of causal explanations and respond similarly to (...) the same type of causal interventions. When these categories do not evince such groupings, there is reason to revise existing classifications. The contributors all question current psychiatric classifications systems and the assumptions on which they are based. They differ, however, as to why and to what extent the categories are inadequate and how to address the problem. Topics discussed include taxometric methods for identifying natural kinds, the error and bias inherent in DSM categories, and the complexities involved in classifying such specific mental disorders as "oppositional defiance disorder" and pathological gambling. -/- Contributors George Graham, Nick Haslam, Allan Horwitz, Harold Kincaid, Dominic Murphy, Jeffrey Poland, Nancy Nyquist Potter, Don Ross, Dan Stein, Jacqueline Sullivan, Serife Tekin, Peter Zachar. (shrink)

It is one of Jacques Derrida’s later texts, Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy , wherein one finds his most sustained commentary on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Derrida’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty in this text conceal a significant proximity between his own elaboration of sensibility and that of Merleau-Ponty. Their respective accounts of sensibility are similar in two respects. Firstly, for them both, sensibility is born of a parsing of the self in a hiatus or interval that disrupts the (...) movement of auto-affection. The self can only be known as such through this exposure to alterity. Secondly, this exposure and opening is in no way normative for either thinker, which is to say that their accounts of sensibility are similar not only in structure but also insofar as sensibility for them both is a non-normative opening to ethics; it is an elaboration of embodiment that provokes the question of response but no definitive or prescriptive answer. Hence the structure of sensibility begs the question of ethics, and the problem of response, but can provide little by way of a normative ethics. (shrink)

Parmi les premières interventions philosophiques au sujet du coronavirus, les voix de Giorgio Agamben et de Jean-Luc Nancy se sont confrontées dans un vif débat qui fournit à cette étude ses sources et le champ restreint de sa réflexion. Il s’agit de montrer comment le paradigme de la biopolitique auquel Agamben fait référence pour expliquer la vraie nature de l’épidémie virale s’expose aux dangers totalisants de ce que Nancy nomme un « néo-viralisme » à peine séparable du néolibéralisme. (...) En reconstruisant les arguments des deux côtés, l’analyse situe notamment le concept de la liberté au sein du différend entre les ces deux penseurs, issus de la même famille philosophique et parmi les plus importants de leur génération. Dès lors se verra sévèrement mise en cause l’idée même de la liberté, cette liberté au nom de laquelle se déclarent bien nombre de contestataires contre les mesures qui limitent la liberté individuelle. (shrink)

Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's thinking (...) advances and deepens important discussions at the intersections of feminism, continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and social and political thought. (shrink)