The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor during the post-metaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. In this book Jaeggi draws on phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, along with recent work in the analytical tradition, to reconceive of alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, which manifests itself in feelings of helplessness and the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and expectations. A revived approach to alienation helps (...) critical social theory engage with phenomena, such as meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference, which have broad implications for issues of justice. By severing alienation's link to a problematic conception of human essence while retaining its social-philosophical content, Jaeggi provides resources for a renewed critique of social pathologies, a much-neglected concern in contemporary liberal political philosophy. Her work revisits the arguments of Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, placing them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles Taylor. (shrink)

We spend our lives protecting an elusive self - but does the self actually exist? Drawing on literature from Western philosophy, neuroscience and Buddhism (interpreted), the author argues that there is no self. The self - as unified owner and thinker of thoughts - is an illusion created by two tiers. A tier of naturally unified consciousness (notably absent in standard bundle-theory accounts) merges with a tier of desire-driven thoughts and emotions to yield the impression of a self. So while (...) the self, if real, would think up the thoughts, the thoughts, in reality, think up the self. (shrink)

The goal of the current study was to examine novice researchers’ views about online ethics education and to identify the instructional design components that may foster ethical practice. Applying the mixed methods approach, data were collected via a survey and semi-structured interviews among M.Sc. and Ph.D. students in science and engineering. The findings point to the need for rethinking the way conventional online ethics courses are developed and delivered; encouraging students to build confidence in learning from distance, engaging them in (...) online active and interactive experiences, and providing them with personalized support and adaptive guidance. The novice researchers identified the synergistic integration of collaborative, case-based, and contextual learning, as the instructional design components that may foster not only ethical knowledge but also ethical practice in a fully online course. (shrink)

Each well-known proposed solution to the mind-body problem encounters an impasse. These take the form of an explanatory gap, such as the one between mental and physical, or between micro-subjects and macro-subject. The dialectical pressure to bridge these gaps is generating positions in which consciousness is becoming increasingly foundational. The most recent of these, cosmopsychism, typically casts the entire cosmos as a perspectival subject whose mind grounds those of more limited subjects like ourselves. I review the dialectic from materialism and (...) dualism through to panpsychism, suggesting that explanatory gaps in the latter stem from assuming foundational consciousness to be perspectival. Its renunciation may yield the notion of an aperspectival, universal, “non-dual” consciousness that grounds all manifestation and is unstructured by subject, object or any differentia. Not only is such consciousness suggestive of a natural successor to cosmopsychism, but it has also been reported to be the direct experience of mystics who claim to have transcended the individual perspective. Their purported insight — that our aperspectival conscious nature is identical to the ground of all being — has been termed “the Perennial Philosophy”. Believing this Perennial Philosophy to offer the most promising way forward in the mind-body problem, I construct from it the foundations of a metaphysical system that I call “Perennial Idealism”. This attempts to account for manifestation in terms of dispositional, imagery-bound subjects. I then address an age-old “Parmenidean” conundrum that I refer to as “the problem of the one and the many”: How can an undifferentiated substratum ground differentia without the ground itself differentiating? The proposed solution takes its cue from mystico-philosophical writings in the Advaita Vedānta tradition, known as the ajāta doctrine. (shrink)

For many liberals, the question "Do others live rightly?" feels inappropriate. Liberalism seems to demand a follow-up question: "Who am I to judge?" Peaceful coexistence, in this view, is predicated on restraint from morally evaluating our peers. But Rahel Jaeggi sees the situation differently. Criticizing is not only valid but also useful, she argues. Moral judgment is no error; the error lies in how we go about judging. One way to judge is external, based on universal standards derived from ideas (...) about God or human nature. The other is internal, relying on standards peculiar to a given society. Both approaches have serious flaws and detractors. In On the Critique of Forms of Life, Jaeggi offers a third way, which she calls "immanent" critique. Inspired by Hegelian social philosophy and engaged with Anglo-American theorists such as John Dewey, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, immanent critique begins with the recognition that ways of life are inherently normative because they assert their own goodness and rightness. They also have a consistent purpose: to solve basic social problems and advance social goods, most of which are common across cultures. Jaeggi argues that we can judge the validity of a society's moral claims by evaluating how well the society adapts to crisis--whether it is able to overcome contradictions that arise from within and continue to fulfill its purpose. Jaeggi enlivens her ideas through concrete, contemporary examples. Against both relativistic and absolutist accounts, she shows that rational social critique is possible.--. (shrink)

The growing trend of shifting from classroom to distance learning in ethics education programs raises the need to examine ways for adapting best instructional practices to online modes. To address this need, the current study was set to apply a social constructivist approach to an online course in research ethics and to examine its effect on the learning outcomes of science and engineering graduate students. The study applied a pre-test post-test quasi-experimental research design within a framework of a mixed-methods approach. (...) The study compared the learning outcomes of students who participated in a social constructivist online course with those who studied in a conventional online course. The data were collected via questionnaires and interviews. The findings indicated that both the conventional and the social constructivist online learners gained knowledge of facts and regulations. Yet, the social constructivist learners were more successful in demonstrating knowledge of practices that are used to establish research ethics, and in understanding the importance of conducting research in a responsible manner. The social constructivist online learners were also more successful in demonstrating awareness of ethical dilemmas, by identifying ethical dilemmas and providing solutions to ethical problems. (shrink)

Panpsychism is viewed by its advocates as resolving the main sticking points for materialism and dualism. While sympathetic to this approach, I locate two prevalent assumptions within modern panpsychism which I think are problematic: first, that fundamental consciousness belongs to a perspectival subject and second, that the physical world, despite being backed by conscious subject, is observer-independent. I re-introduce an argument I’d made elsewhere against the first assumption: that it lies behind the well-known combination and decombination problems. I then propose (...) a new argument against the second assumption: that it leads to an equally pernicious difficulty I call the “Inner-Outer Gap Problem.” The variant of panpsychism I continue to develop and defend, Perennial Idealism, avoids these assumptions and their problems, allowing real progress on the mind-body problem. Perennial Idealism is a type of panpsychist idealism rather than panpsychist materialism. (shrink)

For nursing, the idea of bearing witness is of utmost importance. Nurses are present with persons who experience changes in their health and quality of life and who live intense and profound moments of struggling, questioning, and finding meaning. Nurses are also with persons from moment to moment as their lives unfold, and when joy, serenity, contentment, vulnerability, sadness, fear, and suffering are experienced. In this paper, it is proposed that bearing witness is a moral way of engaging in the (...) nurse–person relationship. Based on Levinas’s ethics of the face, it is claimed that bearing witness is enacting one’s moral responsibility, which arises from the encounter with the other. Drawing on Parse’s human becoming theory, ways of witnessing and bearing witness are defined and discussed. It is suggested that bearing witness is a human‐to‐human way of being‐relating, a mode of human coexistence. Bearing witness is being present and attentive to the truth of another’s experiences. Moreover, in this paper, the ways nurses enact their moral agency and bear witness to others placed in their care, or turn away, are explored. Nurses’ moral agency is located in the constrained moral space of contemporary health care. Hence, the creation of a moral space, which allows nurses to enact their moral responsibility of bearing witness to other persons’ experiences of health and quality of life, is called for. In doing so, it is suggested that the act of bearing witness needs a specific nursing knowledge base and a recognition that being present and being with another is a valuable nursing practice that is utterly meaningful for persons who are living through difficult times. (shrink)

G.E. Moore alludes to a notion of consciousness that is diaphanous, elusive to attention, yet detectable. Such a notion, I suggest, approximates what Bina Gupta has called `witness-consciousness'--in particular, the aspect of mode-neutral awareness with intrinsic phenomenal character. This paper offers a detailed definition and defence of the appearance and reality of witness-consciousness. While I claim that witness- consciousness captures the essence of subjectivity, and so must be accounted for in the `hard problem' of consciousness, it is not to be (...) confused with the more commonly defended notion of `for-me-ness'. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 8, Page 1123-1139, October 2022. Major debates on democratic renewal suggest two ways of eliciting social change: either by strengthening vertical practices of representation or by expanding horizontal forms of participation. The article develops an argument for why there is a need to rethink democratic resistance beyond the vertical–horizontal divide. If contemporary forms of resistance encompass a strategic interplay between vertical and horizontal practices, then an alternative framework is required to capture this logic. (...) Filling this gap, the article introduces the concept of ‘horizontal experimentalism’. Such an idea comprehends an understanding of political means and ends as a continuum and as adjusting each other in an ongoing process of experimental inquiry. (shrink)

This book examines the centrality of ideas such as satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), humility, and respect for understanding moral life in the complex milieu of human existence. It provides a comprehensive view of how Gandhian ideas have both a temporal and spatial universality significantly different from Western modern philosophy's universality claims. The chapters represent different styles of philosophy but with a common purpose, offering insights into how the global debates on religion, morality, and politics are assessed from Gandhi's point of (...) view. Written in language accessible to general readers with an interest in Gandhian thinking, the book will appeal to academics and philosophers. (shrink)

In this book Jaeggi draws on phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, along with recent work in the analytical tradition, to reconceive of alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and ...

Major debates on democratic renewal suggest two ways of eliciting social change: either by strengthening vertical practices of representation or by expanding horizontal forms of participation. The article develops an argument for why there is a need to rethink democratic resistance beyond the vertical–horizontal divide. If contemporary forms of resistance encompass a strategic interplay between vertical and horizontal practices, then an alternative framework is required to capture this logic. Filling this gap, the article introduces the concept of ‘horizontal experimentalism’. Such (...) an idea comprehends an understanding of political means and ends as a continuum and as adjusting each other in an ongoing process of experimental inquiry. (shrink)

Imagine a character, Mary Analogue, who has a complete theoretical knowledge of her subject matter: the illusory nature of self. Suppose that when presenting her paper on no self at a conference she suffers stage-fright – a reaction that implies she is under an illusion of the very self whose existence she denies. Might there be something defective about her knowledge of no self? The Buddhist tradition would claim that Mary Analogue, despite her theoretical omniscience, lacks deep ‘insight knowledge’ into (...) the reality of no self. The only way for her to gain insight, and thereby improve her epistemic status, would be to divest her mind of the self-illusion. In this paper, I offer an analysis of what could be epistemically involved in the process of acquiring such insight knowledge whereby one becomes, in Buddhist parlance, ‘awakened’. (shrink)

There has been a surge of interest over cases where a subject sincerely endorses P while displaying discordant strains of not-P in her behaviour and emotion. Cases like this are telling because they bear directly upon conditions under which belief should be ascribed. Are beliefs to be aligned with what we sincerely endorse or with what we do and feel? If belief doesn’t explain the discordant strains, what does? T.S. Gendler has recently attempted to explain all the discordances by introducing (...) a controversial new cognitive category—associative clusters called ‘alief’. Others think that belief explains all the discordancy cases, while others argue that in-between belief does the trick, and so on. Most advocates of the different positions, indeed, assume that their favoured analysis will explain the whole range of discordancy cases. This paper defends what I call the ‘contextual view’, where I argue that overturning this assumption of uniformity leads to more nuanced account of belief-ascription. On the contextual view, which analysis applies to which case depends on the discordancy case at hand. Perhaps a height-phobic stepping on a glass platform deserves different treatment to a hesitant stepper. I ground the contextual view in a biologically functional account of the alief/belief distinction, which construes alief as a real cognitive category but without the explanatory reach Gendler gives it. This functional distinction yields a principled strategy for determining the correct application of analysis to discordancy case. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy; early works to 1800.

This paper presents an approach for monitoring exercises of hand rehabilitation for post stroke patients. The developed solution uses a leap motion controller as hand-tracking device and embeds a supervised machine learning. The K-nearest neighbor methodology is adopted for automatically characterizing the physiotherapist or helper hand movement resulting a unique movement pattern that constitutes the basis of the rehabilitation process. In the second stage, an evaluation of the patients rehabilitation exercises results is compared to the movement pattern of the patient (...) and results are presented, saved and statistically analyzed. Physicians and physiotherapists monitor and assess patients’ rehabilitation improvements through a web application, furthermore, offer medical assisted rehabilitation processes through low cost technology, which can be easily exploited at home. Recorded tracked motion data and results can be used for further medical study and evaluating rehabilitation trends according to patient’s rehabilitation practice and improvement. (shrink)

In the contemporary globalized economy, multinational companies have come to hold considerable power that may previously have rested with nation states. However, state structures remain relevant. With Brexit, the year 2016 featured an exemplary case in which the ongoing importance of nation states came to the fore. Preceding the British referendum to exit the European Union, discourses of national identity were deployed to promote a vote for the anti-globalization campaign. It is against this background that this research investigates how the (...) relationship between multinational corporations and nation states is constructed in news discourse. The underlying assumption is that news actively construct rather than merely reflects the nature of this relationship. Drawing on Social Actor Analysis and Transitivity as a theoretical framework, this study examines news coverage of the BP oil spill that occurred in the United States in 2010 but was caused by a multinational company headquartered in the United Kingdom. The main research question is ‘How does the media establish a link between multinational corporations and nation states?’. To address this central question, this study investigates how corporate responsibility is assigned, the role of the nation state is portrayed and victim status is allocated in the news. Findings show that the nature of the problem is constructed differently according to diverging national interests or priorities of the two nations represented by the media sources analyzed. The study indicates that the discourse around British nationality emphasized in the political struggle around Brexit was already mobilized extensively in the years leading up to the referendum. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays by Dr. Seyed Javad Miri as he attempts to expand the sociological canon by exploring the works of Dr. Ali Shariati, an Iranian sociologist.

What is the problem with capitalism? Is it wrong, unjust, irrational, or bad? Is it evil or dumb—or is it just not working? While critiques of capitalism have become commonplace—particularly since the most recent global economic crisis—it is often unclear what exactly is being condemned. Likewise, the normative presuppositions and criteria of such criticisms have been left unspecified. In this paper, I distinguish between three approaches to the critique of capitalism, distinguishing a functional, a moral, and an ethical argumentative strategy (...) and paying special attention to the distinctive types of argumentation they mobilize. First, I consider the “functional” critique, typically directed against capitalism's straightforward dysfunctions or crises. We will find, however, that this sort of criticism presupposes a normative criterion that is frequently unarticulated, namely: the implied “purpose” of a well‐functioning economic system. Second, I examine a common “moral” critique, that is, that capitalism is premised on exploitation. Yet, the concept of exploitation, too, introduces certain difficulties, since the kind of moral wrong associated with it—unequal exchange—is hardly obvious to everyday observation and must be derived systematically. Third, I introduce and address the “ethical” critique, broadly, that capitalism constitutes a bad form‐of‐life. However, while I object to some of the forms this criticism has taken—in particular, I argue that much “alienation” diagnosis is tainted by nostalgia and naiveté—I nonetheless recommend developing a critique of capitalism as a form‐of‐life that would include ethical and functional criteria. I conclude with some remarks in this direction. (shrink)

Books reviewed: Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. By Geoff Eley.. Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity. By Robert Strozier.. Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. By Albert O. Hirschman. Twentieth‐anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Robert H. Frank.

This article examines the notion of vulnerable political subjectivity in Judith Butler’s theory of vulnerability. The paper aims to contribute to critical discussions of Butler’s political theory by offering an account of how the ontological, ethical, and political aspects of vulnerability shape political subjectivity in her work. The first part of the paper analyzes the features of vulnerable political subjects. The second part critically assesses to what extent Butler offers an alternative to the association of vulnerability with a damaged capability (...) to act politically. The third part argues that Butler offers only a partial account of vulnerability as a transformative desire, which is crucial to explaining how and under what conditions vulnerability inspires subjects to engage politically with the conditions that shape their precarity or the precarity of others. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Dans «Objectivism and the Evolutionary Value of Colour Vision», Don Dedrick suggère qu'une conception raffinée de la valeur adaptative en matière de vision des couleurs conduit à une explication non objectiviste de la couleur. Le raffinement, en l'occurrence, consiste à prendre en considération le rôle que jouent les processus perceptuels internes, contraints par les exigences de l'adaptation, dans la répartition des couleurs selon les catégories familières de rouge, violet, bleu, etc. L'objectivisme, par contraste, est présenté par Dedrick comme la (...) position selon laquelle les catégories de couleur sont proprement déterminées par des facteurs externes à l'esprit — une thèse qu'il attribue à Mohan Matthen. Mon objectif dans cet article est de souligner que les éléments internalistes de l'explication de Dedrick, qui sont rappelés à la section 1, sont parfaitement compatibles avec l'objectivisme chromatique. Cet objectivisme, cependant, n'est pas la thèse que Dedrick entend mettre en cause. Je distingue, dans la section 2, la version critiquée par Dedrick, que j'appelle «l'objectivisme fort», de «l'objectivisme modéré», qui est la thèse selon laquelle la couleur elle-même est indépendante de l'esprit bien que les catégories de couleur soient déterminées par des facteurs internes. La doctrine principale de l'objectivisme même, selon ce que je soutiens, demeure neutre eu égard aux versions fortes ou modérées. Dans la section 3, cette notion centrale d'objectivisme est réconciliée avec une explication de la vision des couleurs qui fait référence à la valeur adaptative en contexte évolutionnaire. (shrink)

The article discusses a notion of form as reflection in Benjamin and Adorno that can be traced back to early German Romanticism. A reading of Novalis’s Hymns to the Night exemplifies the notion and shows that form-as-reflection amounts to a mimetic relation between Dargestelltem and Darstellendem in a work of art. It is further argued that Husserl’s theory of the image, too, discusses this relation and allows to clarify the account of form in Benjamin and Adorno. The article thus reveals (...) a neglected development of a romantic paradigm of form in 20th century image theory and aesthetics. (shrink)