Over the course of the past few decades, comparative political theory has acquired a measure of institutional legitimacy and intellectual recognition as part of the ongoing, interdisciplinary challenge to prevailing academic categories, coordinates, and borders. This arrival has been accompanied by a conspicuous focus on methodology both by those who claim the mantle of comparative political theory and those who reject it. The following reflections read this focus symptomatically, as revealing intellectual, institutional, and professional exigencies rather than as distinct to (...) any particular scholar, argument, or publication. Neither a “state of the field” nor a proprietary defense of what comparative political theory is or should be, these observations toggle back and forth between reflections on my own engagement and disengagement with the topic of comparative political theory on the one hand and, on the other, concerns about how this preoccupation with method simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the displacement of politics in the very field that aims to understand it. Among the questions I raise are: What might be driving this disproportionate focus on methodological arguments in and about comparative political theory? What are the stakes of such a focus, particularly for younger scholars in political science departments decreasingly hospitable to political theory? Finally, what does this augur for the future of the study of politics broadly understood within disciplines dedicated to the scientific study of human behavior? (shrink)

How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to recent work by contemporary philosophers. (...) The authors take on the question of persistence by examining three broad approaches: perdurantism, which holds that change over time is analogous to change over space; exdurantism, according to which identity over time is analogous to identity across possible worlds; and endurantism, which holds that ordinary objects persist by enduring. Each of these approaches appears to be coherent, but each also has its own metaphysical problems. Persistence includes papers that argue for perdurantism, exdurantism, or endurantism, as well as papers that explore some metaphysical difficulties challenging each account. In this way the collection allows readers to balance the trade-offs of each approach in terms of intuitiveness, theoretical attractiveness, and elegance.Contributors:Yuri Balashov, William Carter, Graeme Forbes, Sally Haslanger, Katherine Hawley, H. S. Hestevold, Mark Hinchliffe, Mark Johnston, Roxanne Marie Kurtz, David K. Lewis, Ned Markosian, D. H. Mellor, W. V. O. Quine, Theodore Sider, Richard Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman. (shrink)

We develop a model of ideals-based accountability which we have witnessed at work in several long-thriving family businesses. The owners and managers of these firms eschew individualism and materiality in the pursuit of ethical ideals such as supporting democracy and bettering the human condition. Although accountability is to these ideals, not for outcomes such as profitability or even reputation, IBA has resulted in outstanding reputations for some firms. We characterize IBA according to its missions, leadership, culture, and stakeholder relationships. We (...) also contrast it with traditional forms of accountability and differentiate IBA from related stakeholder, stewardship, and CSR perspectives. Finally, we examine its manifestations within five long-lived family enterprises, in the process generating propositions to advance the concept. (shrink)

In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Oxford University Press, 2021), Daniel Groll argues why people who use donated sperm or eggs to have children ought to use a known donor. His main argument for this position is that a child conceived in this way will have a foreseeable, significant interest in acquiring genetic knowledge. However, Groll addresses issues that are of interest to anyone who thinks about the nature of families and parent‐child relationships. (...) For example, what obligations or responsibilities does a parent have to their child? What makes someone a parent? And what is the significance to one's identity of knowing about one's genetic origins? While a claim about access to genetic knowledge lies at the heart of Groll's book, he is all too aware of the social forces that influence people to care about their genetic origins. His prescriptions, ultimately, reflect this reality. (shrink)

A union ultrafilter is an ultrafilter over the finite subsets of ω that has a base of sets of the form ${\text{FU}}\left$, where X is an infinite pairwise disjoint family and ${\text{FU}} = \left\{ {\bigcup {F|F} \in [X]^{ < \omega } \setminus \{ \emptyset \} } \right\}$. The existence of these ultrafilters is not provable from the $ZFC$ axioms, but is known to follow from the assumption that ${\text{cov}}\left = \mathfrak{c}$. In this article we obtain various models of $ZFC$ that (...) satisfy the existence of union ultrafilters while at the same time ${\text{cov}}\left = \mathfrak{c}$. (shrink)

Andre Breton discusses the meaning, aims, and political position of the Surrealist movement.

The weight of trace, that drips from structure. A memory encased in material – the constant desire to contain, to orchestrate the transient. Is memory. Flesh against the hardest material. What becomes of the energies that move against form?

Every human community creates its own representation of its surrounding world and of the men who constitute that world. It sets out in an orderly fashion the raison d’être of social and cultural organisation, it ritualises the ties between men and their relationship with their environment. Man creates the world while the world creates man, through a relationship which varies with each society; ethnography shows us innumerable versions. Human cultures consist of symbols. It is always a matter of reducing the (...) world to the human factor, but in line with a social imaginary quantity specific to a particular group, which is itself the tributary of its past and the possible influence of other groups. (shrink)

Islamist rhetoric about the humiliation of Islam and American rhetoric about national humiliation have been energized by disparate events in recent years, from the photographs of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia to the invasion of Iraq, the “Innocence of Muslims” video to the attacks on 9/11. At the same time, there’s been an explosion of scholarship on humiliation as a driver of international conflict and political violence in general, and in relation to the bodies and minds of Muslims in particular. (...) The link between humiliation and Muslims is thus a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke it and scholars from various disciplines and regions who regularly posit it. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse; minimal effort to anatomize the ways in which this experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action; and no attempt to theorize more broadly about patterns and discontinuities in how different rhetorics construct humiliation. This article takes up the following questions: What is the substantive content of humiliation in such rhetoric and analysis? Do these different rhetorics of humiliation articulate the same understanding of it, as an act and an experience? What does close analysis of Islamist discourse on humiliation in comparative perspective reveal about the political stakes and affective resonances articulated and energized by it in this particular moment in history? Finally, what do the answers to these questions say about the reach and limits of the dominant account of humiliation as the violated dignity or injured self-respect of a generic individual? (shrink)

In the context of [Formula: see text], we analyze a version of Hindman’s finite unions theorem on infinite sets, which normally requires the Axiom of Choice to be proved. We establish the implication relations between this statement and various classical weak choice principles, thus precisely locating the strength of the statement as a weak form of the [Formula: see text].

Many amateur sportsmen in the West, have today started undertaking long and intensive ordeals where their personal capacity to withstand increasing suffering is the prime objective. Running, jogging, the triathlon and trekking are the sorts of ordeal where people without any particular ability are not pitting themselves against others but are committed to testing their own capacity to withstand increasing pain. Constantly called upon to prove themselves in a society where reference points are both countless and contradictory and where values (...) are in crisis, people are now seeking a one-to-one relationship by redical means, testing their strength of character, their courage and their personal resources. Going right on to the end of a self-imposed ordeal gives a legitimacy to life and provides a symbolic plank that supports them. Performance itself is of secondary significance; it has a value only to the individual. There is no struggle against a third party, only a method for reinforcing personal will-power and over-coming suffering by going right to the limit of a personally imposed demand. The physical limit has come to replace the moral limit that present-day society is failing to provide. Overcoming suffering tempers the individual, providing a renewed significance and value to his life. (shrink)

Studies linking religion to CSR have produced conflicting findings due to a failure to draw distinctions among religious influences and different CSR practices, and to theorize their connection. Drawing on social identity theory and the theory of planned behavior, we first argue that religion will influence CSR when ethical values from a CEO’s religious social identification resonate with an aspect of CSR. Second, CEO attitudes congruent with those values and forms of CSR—interpersonal empathy and proactiveness—will strengthen that relationship. Third, the (...) relationship between religious social identification and CSR will be strengthened by a CEO’s ability to enact CSR policies, a function of personal and firm market power. Our research on 270 CEOs from 242 publicly traded US firms from 2007 to 2020 supports these relationships. (shrink)

The desert is an experience before it is a figure or a concept. The experience of the desert is prior to any figure or concept, and in itself it is without figure or concept. Yet its emptiness is not therefore abstract but, to the contrary, vital. The emptiness of the desert, like the emptiness of God, coincides with an immeasurable plenitude. The words and actions that we live from presuppose the desert in which they are at once indispensable and unsatisfying.

Nothing is more mysterious for man than the substance of his own body. Every society has attempted in its way to give a particular answer to this primary enigma in which man has his roots. Innumerable theories of the body that have followed each other during the course of history or that still coexist today are directly connected to the world views of these different societies. Even more, they are dependent on the conceptions of the person. The modern view of (...) the body, that which anatomo-physiology incarnates, is a direct function of the emergence and development of individualism within the European societies of the Renaissance, especially in the 17th century, that marks a crystallization, very clear at the social level, of this tendency. Moreover, the explosion of the present knowledge of the body that makes anatomophysiology one theory among others, even though it is dominant, denotes another stage in individualism, a yet stronger falling back on the ego: the emergence of a society in which the atomization of individuals has become an important fact, an atomization submitted to or desired, according to the case, which does not appear in contradiction to present research in new ways of socializing, new forms of tribalism and so on, as is clearly indicated by what we agree to call the associative phenomenon. This is a characteristic of societies in which individualism is a structural fact: the development of an infinitely plural and polyphonic character. In these societies, in fact, the initiative is assumed by individuals or groups more than it is in a culture that tends to become a simple formal framework. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between feminist theologies and women’s poetry and fiction. Using Sheila Hassell Hughes’ work on this same relationship as a point of departure, I contend that feminist theologians rely on literature by women for a variety of reasons, and I focus on how literature by women offers feminist theologies a multitude of examples of women’s experience, embodied experience in particular. If women’s experience is the starting point for a truly feminist theology, women’s writing seems an obvious (...) source of the theologian’s materialist and semiotic quest. (shrink)

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been identified as posing risks to reproductive health and may have intergenerational effects. However, responses to the potential harms they pose frequently rely on medicalised understandings of the body and normative gender identities. This article develops an intersectional feminist framework of intergenerational justice in response to the potential risks posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We examine critiques of endocrine disruptors from feminist, critical disability and queer standpoints, and explore issues of race and class in exposures. We argue that (...) responding to the risks posed by endocrine disruptors such as brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and phthalates requires developing a theory of intergenerational justice that recognises relationality and transcorporeality, and that also recognises harm in terms of suffering, not in terms of difference. (shrink)

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman’s 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism’s past that is steeped (...) in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were ‘a time when everything seemed possible’. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which ‘fear corrodes even the young’. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms’ pasts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis play is based on the author’s ethnographic and archival research on the French philosopher Henry Corbin’s years in Tehran, Iran. Corbin taught in Tehran between 1947 and 1978 at the Institute of Philosophy, which he founded. The play is a dialogue between a fictional university student, Ali, and his mentor, the French philosopher Henry Corbin, with interjections from the angel of history. Ali is trying to come to grips with his love of Islamic mystical philosophy and its dangerous appropriation (...) by political actors of the time, as well as with a deeply personal mourning. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. (shrink)

The Iran–Iraq war, which took place from 1980 to 1988, was one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars in the history of the last century. The war was also the largest mobilization of the Iranian population and was achieved primarily by producing and promoting a culture of martyrdom based on religious themes found in Shi'i Islam. It was the war that created and consolidated what we know today as the Islamic republic of Iran. For years there have been two (...) popular public discourses in post-war Iran: the secular discourse, which is to evade, to ignore, to escape to the Caspian; and then the state's discourse, of the strong, mourning women and the heroic martyrs. It is the group of women who exist betwixt the dominant discourses of the secular versus the religious and the idea of womanhood versus motherhood that I am interested in exploring here by looking at the most recent work of a secular female filmmaker, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. (shrink)

Mill n’a pas pensé la sécularisation comme un simple affaiblissement des religions traditionnelles, mais s’est préoccupé de leur remplacement comme fondement de la stabilité sociale. La Religion de l’Humanité doit réorienter sur le progrès humain les aspirations religieuses. Liée à la neutralisation de la portée morale des religions théistes et surnaturelles sur le plan métaphysique, en cohérence avec l’engagement pour une éducation nationale séculière, la dimension religieuse de l’utilitarisme éloigne aussi Mill de Bentham. La comparaison avec la version comtienne de (...) la religion de l’humanité permet d’aborder quelques difficultés soulevées par ce projet. (shrink)

La vida de Siháb al-Din al-Suhrawardi es oscura. Datos aislados referentes a sus estudios, viajes y contactos se encuentran en breves noticias de los diccionarios biográ-ficos de los siglos xn y xm. Estas noticias permiten esbozar una biografía de al-Suhrawardi desde sus comienzos hasta la oposición de que fue objeto por parte de los Memas de Alepo y su trágica muerte, interpretada en el marco y el contexto de la ciu-dad. Todo este material de los diccionarios biográficos es sólo relativamente (...) fidedigno e incluso los textos contemporáneos incluyen datos erróneos. = Shiháb al-Din al-Suhrawardi's life is obscure. Some clues regarding his studies, travels and encounters are found in short biographical notices of the 12th and 13th centuries. These notices can provide the means to sketch al-Suhrawardi's biography: his early life, his coming to Aleppo, the mounting opposition of the Memas of Aleppo, and the final moments that led to his tragic death. The sociopolitical context of Aleppo provides a good framework for the interpretation of the data provided by the biographers. All these biographical works are, however, of relative reliability. Even the most contemporary texts are in fact not devoid of erroneous elements. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate experimentally the extent to which children’s novel word learning and story comprehension from eBooks depends on the relevance of interactive eBook features. A story was created in the lab to incorporate novel word-object pairs. The story was read to preschoolers (3-5 years old, N = 103) using one of the three books: noninteractive control, interactive-relevant, interactive-irrelevant. Novel word learning and story comprehension were assessed with posttests in which children picked target objects from (...) an array and sorted story events into sequences, respectively. Findings indicate that word learning and story comprehension were similar across all three books, suggesting that simple interactive features – whether relevant or irrelevant to the story – had little impact on learning in this controlled experiment. (shrink)

Representations of the body depend on a social framework, a vision of the world and a definition of the person. The body is a symbolic construction and not a reality in its own right. A priori, its characterization seems to be self-evident, but ultimately nothing is less comprehensible. Far from being unanimously accepted by human societies, making the body stand out as a reality in some way distinct from man seems an uneasy effort, contradictory between one time and place and (...) another. Many societies do not retain it as part of their vision of the world. They do not detach man from his body in the dualist fashion so common to Western man. We might recall here the incident recounted by Maurice Leenhardt, who asked an elderly Kanak what the West had contributed to Melanesia. The answer surprised him. “What you brought us is the body”. With the intrusion of cultural and social values and forms from the Western world that tend to individualism, there came an awareness of the body as a barrier and a boundary distinguishing each person from every other person. In the societies to which we refer, the components of a person include the flesh without setting this off separately. The body itself is an abstraction. On the phenomenological level, only a person whose body gives him a face and establishes his presence in the world can exist. Man is indiscernible from the flesh that models him. (shrink)

In 1866, six Inuits were taken to the United States for the purpose of serving as specimens to American scientists at the Natural History Museum. Shortly after their arrival in New York, four of them had died. One of the survivors returned to the Arctic, while the sixth, Minik, now alone, fought to make possible the return of the remains of his dead companions to their village. Since the latter were being exhibited, as was then often the case (and happens (...) even today in many museums), in order to offer visitors examples of the Inuk people, Minik protested in vain. In 1909 he returned to Greenland when the scientists denied that the remains of his friends still existed. Several years later, still pursuing the issue, he went back to the United States to take up the fight against the bureaucracy for the repatriation of the bodies. He died in the United States in 1918. It was only in 1993 that he won out and that the remains of the four were returned to the Arctic homeland. (shrink)

Care has increasingly been promoted as an element of successful management practice. However, an ethic of care is a normative theory that was initially developed in reference to intimate relationships, and it is unclear if it is an appropriate normative standard in business. The purpose of this review is to bridge the social scientific study of care with philosophical understandings of care and to provide a theoretical justification for care as a managerial value. We review the three different forms of (...) care advanced by the ethics literature: caring relations, organizational care, and care as a virtue. We compare these forms of care to the management litertature. In doing so, we integrate what has previously been a scattered, yet growing, body of research on care. Our review of the literature reveals that care has increasingly been studied in management in relation to an ethic of care. Yet, many of the properties of care have also played a role in other established research domains (e.g., leadership). We discuss and critique the management and ethics literatures on care, paying attention to areas of agreement or disagreeement between the two. We go on to provide a normative justification of care as a value in business. Finally, we close by suggesting directions for future research. (shrink)

Shihàb al-Dîn al-Suhrawardfs life is obscure. Some clues regarding his studies, travels and encounters are found in short biographical notices of the 12th and 13th centuries. These notices can provide the means to sketch al-Suhrawardfs biography: his early life, his coming to Aleppo, the mounting opposition of the ulemas of Aleppo, and the final moments that led to his tragic death. The ociopolitical context of Aleppo provides a good framework for the interpretation of the data provided by the biographers. All (...) these biographical works are, however, of relative reliability. Even the most contemporary texts are in fact not devoid of erroneous elements. (c) Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. (shrink)