In his recent political writings, Habermas has opposed his cosmopolitan project to that of the Bushite neoconservatives. However, this article argues that in some respects Habermas's works come closer to the neoconservative agenda than he realizes and that this poses a potential danger of its being appropriated by precisely the camp he opposes. These problems particularly come to the fore in his analysis of Islamic fundamentalism, democracy and the Middle East, but also in his recommendations concerning UN-based internationalism and his (...) appeals to Woodrow Wilson. By tracking these problematic areas in Habermas's work, this article argues that Habermas needs to engage in a more carefully articulated, concrete and empirical analysis if he is to avoid these problems. (shrink)

We argue that multiple levels of trauma were present in Egypt before, during and after the 2011 revolution. Individual, social and political trauma constitute a triangle of traumatisation which was strategically employed by the Egyptian counter-revolutionary forces – primarily the army and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood – to maintain their political and economic power over and above the social, economic and political interests of others. Through the destruction of physical bodies, the fragmentation and polarisation of social relations and (...) the violent closure of the newly emerged political public sphere, these actors actively repressed the potential for creative and revolutionary transformation. To better understand this multi-layered notion of trauma, we turn to Habermas’ ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ thesis which offers a critical lens through which to examine the wider political and economic structures and context in which trauma occurred as well as its effects on the personal, social and po... (shrink)

Using the example of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, and especially the writings of Sayyid Qutb, this article raises questions about discourse ethics as a mode of conflict resolution. It appears that discourse ethics is only relevant when all parties have already agreed to settle disputes deliberatively and already share the notions of rational deliberation and individual autonomy. This raises questions not only about the capability of discourse ethics to incorporate a deep plurality of worldviews, but also about its capability to successfully (...) solve disputes. When confronting situations where the willingness to deliberate is absent, discourse ethics is left standing empty handed. This, I argue, is due to both the conceptual distinction between communicative action and strategic action, as well as the abstracted nature of Habermas's discourse ethics. (shrink)

This article explores Habermas’s recent political writings in which he proposes a thin post-national model of political integration for Europe. Whilst sympathetic to Habermas’s undertakings, this article argues that there are certain unresolved tensions within these writings between his thin proceduralist model of European integration and his appeals to a thicker European self-understanding. The conclusion to be drawn from this, the author argues, is that Habermas should have remained faithful to his thin proceduralist account rather than turning to the question (...) of European identity. (shrink)

In this article we, the authors, outline the thematic concerns of our special issue of the Journal of Global Ethics . We argue for a need to engage with notions of violence from an interdisciplinary and transformative perspective. The theoretical framework that provides such a perspective is critical theory, broadly construed. Critical theory has always been concerned with the relation between practice and theory, as well as notions of violence. It is therefore surprising to note that in the current critical (...) theoretical debates a sustained engagement with the theme of violence has largely been sidelined. We argue that critical theory is not only fruitful for the study of conflict and violence, but also that such practical issues can shed and help further develop critical theory itself. (shrink)

In this article, the authors examine the circumstances under which scholars can become effective figures of identification in medicine, after whom prizes or institutions are named – and under which circumstances scholars cannot or can no longer fulfill such a role. Trends and changes in professional cultural memory are examined, illustrated by the biographies and receptions of the human geneticist Hans Nachtsheim, the circulatory researcher Rudolf Thauer, the urologist Dora Teleky as well as the dentists Karl Häupl and Elsbeth von (...) Schnizer. This study shows that the evaluation criteria themselves are historically changeable and that gender is an important influencing factor. While formal criteria (e. g., membership in parties and organizations) have traditionally been important evaluation criteria, the authors advocate that actions in research and clinical practice be given even greater attention in the future. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Adam Smith contains essays by some of the most prominent philosophers and scholars working on Adam Smith today. It is a special issue of The Adam Smith Review, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Introduction Part 1: Moral phenomenology 1. The virtue of TMS 1759 D.D. Raphael 2. The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the inner life Emma Rothschild 3. The standpoint of morality in Adam Smith and Hegel Angelica Nuzzo Part 2: Sympathy (...) and moral judgment 4. Smith and Rousseau in dialogue: sympathy, pitié, spectatorship and narrative Charles L. Griswold 5. Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy and its contemporary interpretations Bence Nanay 6. Smith’s ambivalence about honour Stephen Darwall 7. Sentiments and spectators: Adam Smith’s theory of moral judgment Geoffrey Sayre-McCord 8. Smith’s anti-cosmopolitanism Fonna Forman-Barzilai 9. Resentment and moral judgment in Smith and Butler Alice MacLachlan Part 3: Economics, religion, aesthetics and value theory 10. Adam Smith’s problems: individuality and the paradox of sympathy Robert Urquhart 11. Scepticism and naturalism in Adam Smith Ryan Patrick Hanley 12. Adam Smith’s solution to the paradox of tragedy Arby Ted Siraki 13. Smithian intrinsic value Patrick Frierson Memoir on Adam Smith’s life 14. Adam Smith’s smile: his years at Balliol College, 1740–6, in retrospect Ian Simpson Ross. (shrink)

Adam Smith’s contribution to economics is well-recognised but in recent years scholars have been exploring anew the multidisciplinary nature of his works. The Adam Smith Review is a refereed annual review that provides a unique forum for interdisciplinary debate on all aspects of his Adam Smith’s works, his place in history, and the significance of his writings for the modern world. It is aimed at facilitating debate between scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, thus emulating the transdisciplinary reach (...) of the Enlightenment world which Smith helped to shape. The fourth volume of the series contains contributions form a multidisciplinary range of specialists, including, Henry C. Clark, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Ryan Patrick Hanley, Neven B. Leddy, David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Robert Mankin, Leonidas Montes, James R. Otteson, Andrew S. Skinner, and Gloria Vivenza, who discuss: the sources and influences of Smith’s work in the classics, the Scottish Enlightenment and eighteenth-century France the Glasgow Edition of Smith’s Works and the Wealth of Nations. (shrink)

Remind little ones that God will always be there to love, support, and comfort them--no matter the situation--with this uplifting, reassuring board book. This powerful little book is filled to the brim with hope and comfort. Simple, child-friendly verse outlines relatable moments of crisis, uncertainty, and fear common to a child's life, and asks who helps us in each of those scenarios. "God, that's who" is the reliable answer, forming a pattern kids will quickly pick up on. Each answer reinforces (...) the book's deeply comforting message: God is always there for us. He loves us, He knows us, and He cares about our needs. As they listen to the book and look at the reassuring illustrations, little ones will learn that they can lean on God when they are upset or frightened, or anytime at all. (shrink)

As late twentieth-century discourses of modernity and postmodernity invoke their Enlightenment heritage in a search for the origins of their present achievements and predicaments, Adam Smith's works are still seen as a canonic representative of that heritage. Smith has long been evoked as the ‘father’ of economics and the original proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, but the political changes in recent decades have reconstituted his iconic status. With the full range of Smith's published and unpublished writings and lectures now widely available, (...) there has been a huge growth in the scholarly literature on Smith which has subjected this traditional view to searching questions. The overwhelming conclusion to emerge is that Smith's works display a subtlety and complexity that is at odds with the received image of Smith as the spokesman of modernity, but the diversity of interpretation raises some difficult methodological issues. (shrink)

There is an increasing amount of empirical work investigating the sense of agency, i.e. the registration that we are the initiators of our own actions. Many studies try to relate the sense of agency to an internal feed-forward mechanism, called the ‘‘comparator model’’. In this paper, we draw a sharp distinction between a non-conceptual level of feeling of agency and a conceptual level of judgement of agency. By analyzing recent empirical studies, we show that the comparator model is not able (...) to explain either. Rather, we argue for a two-step account: a multifactorial weighting process of different agency indicators accounts for the feeling of agency, which is, in a second step, further processed by conceptual modules to form an attribution judgement. This new framework is then applied to disruptions of agency in schizophrenia, for which the comparator model also fails. Two further extensions are discussed: We show that the comparator model can neither be extended to account for the sense of ownership (which also has to be differentiated into a feeling and a judgement of ownership) nor for the sense of agency for thoughts. Our framework, however, is able to provide a unified account for the sense of agency for both actions and thoughts. (shrink)

This paper adds to our understandings of women’s post-separation experiences of coercive control through the introduction of a new concept—custody stalking. It is defined as a malevolent course of conduct involving fathers’ use of custody and/or child protection proceedings to overturn historic patterns of care for children. The experience of custody stalking is explored through three composite narratives derived from twelve mothers who participated in an exploratory, qualitative study on the involuntary loss of maternal care time following separation. The losses (...) suffered caused these mothers tremendous grief, damaged their psychological wellbeing and had a detrimental effect on their mothering relationships. Yet custody stalking, as a form of malevolent attack, is not well recognised and mothers’ resultant losses are largely culturally invisible. This is in marked contrast to paternal filicides, another form of post-separation avenging attack committed by some fathers that also leads to maternal loss experiences, albeit more absolute. (shrink)

In today's society some have argued that the legal profession's codes of conduct are a hodgepodge of rules without any clear ethical basis. In this text, Boon and Levin systematically address this compelling issue. Some of the major questions raised are as follows: Is self-regulation crucial to the survival of the legal profession? What fundamental philosophical principles govern ideas of professional conduct? Are the present codes regulating solicitors and barristers consistent with these principles? And, looking forward, are they appropriate (...) when the legal profession faces radical social, political and economic change? While this text focuses on the dynamics of the justice system in England and Wales, the overall issue of ethics and conduct in regards to law holds worldwide interest. Students, teachers and practitioners will find this the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide to and analysis of professional conduct and ethics. (shrink)

In The Politics of Vibration, cultural theorist Marcus Boon offers both an anthropological and theoretical account of vibrational ontology. Boon focuses on the work of three contemporary musicians-Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop creator, DJ Screw-each emerging from a different but entangled set of musical traditions or scenes, whose work is ontologically instructive. Written as a series of improvisations on the life and work of these musicians, The (...) Politics of Vibration expands in the direction of considering the vibrational nature of music more generally. Vibration is understood in multiple ways, as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological/psychoanalytic determinant of subjectivity. (shrink)

The neurocognitive structure of the acting self has recently been widely studied, yet is still perplexing and remains an often confounded issue in cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology and philosophy. We provide a new systematic account of two of its main features, the sense of agency and the sense of ownership, demonstrating that although both features appear as phenomenally uniform, they each in fact are complex crossmodal phenomena of largely heterogeneous functional and representational levels. These levels can be arranged within a gradually (...) evolving, onto- and phylogenetically plausible framework which proceeds from basic non-conceptual sensorimotor processes to more complex conceptual and meta-representational processes of agency and ownership, respectively. In particular, three fundamental levels of agency and ownership processing have to be distinguished: The level of feeling, thinking and social interaction. This naturalistic account will not only allow to “ground the self in action”, but also provide an empirically testable taxonomy for cognitive neuroscience and a new tool for disentangling agency and ownership disturbances in psychopathology. (shrink)

Roles and values -- Institutions and organisations -- Regulation and discipline -- The relationship -- Conflicts of interest -- Confidentiality and privilege -- Thir parties (non-clients) -- Social responsibility -- Professional responsibility -- Litigation and advocacy -- Settlement -- Commercial practice.

Though contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism—a surprising lack, given Buddhism’s global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. This volume fills that gap, focusing on “nothing”—essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy. Through an elaboration of emptiness in both critical and Buddhist traditions; an (...) examination of the problem of praxis in Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis; and an explication of a “Buddhaphobia” that is rooted in modern anxieties about nothingness, Nothing opens up new spaces in which the radical cores of Buddhism and critical theory are renewed and revealed. (shrink)

Functional robustness refers to a system’s ability to maintain a function in the face of perturbations to the causal structures that support performance of that function. Modularity, a crucial element of standard methods of causal inference and difference-making accounts of causation, refers to the independent manipulability of causal relationships within a system. Functional robustness appears to be at odds with modularity. If a function is maintained despite manipulation of some causal structure that supports that function, then the relationship between that (...) structure and function fails to be manipulable independent of other causal relationships within the system. Contrary to this line of reasoning, I argue that functional robustness often attends feedback control, rather than failures of modularity. Feedback control poses its own challenges to causal explanation and inference, but those challenges do not undermine modularity—and indeed, modularity is crucial to grappling with them. (shrink)

Aotearoa New Zealand is a small, island nation located on the rim of Oceania. Since colonisation by British settlers in the mid-1800s, the internationalisation of higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand has reflected shifting notions of nationhood – from an extension of Great Britain, to a bicultural nation, to a player in the global knowledge economy. Since the late 1980s, internationalisation policy has reflected the primacy of market concerns; the internationalisation of HE has been imagined primarily as a means to (...) attract export revenue and human capital to Aotearoa New Zealand, and to increase brand recognition. However, internationalisation, as the movement of people and knowledge between places, can also be seen as pre-dating the development of nations, particularly in the Oceania context.Within mātauranga Māori, or Māori epistemological traditions, place is central to identity. To be human is to be part of something bigger than oneself; care for the land is care both for ancestors and the wellbeing of future generations. In this paper, we consider internationalised HE in light of three questions that are central to mātauranga Māori: “Who am I? What is this world that I exist in? What am I to do?”. After tracing the connections between internationalisation, colonisation, and nationhood in Aotearoa New Zealand,we consider how attention to Māori place-based epistemologies and values drawn from mātauranga Māori might challenge, stretch and ground contemporary internationalisation policies and practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. (shrink)

Ethics 101 offers an exciting look into the history of moral principles that dictate human behavior. This easy-to-read guide presents the key concepts of ethics in fun, straightforward lessons and exercises featuring only the most important facts, theories, and ideas. Ethics 101 includes unique, accessible elements such as explanations of the major moral philosophies, including utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and eastern philosophers including Avicenna, Buddha, and Confucius; and unique profiles of the greatest characters in moral philosophy.

This article is based on interviews with a small number of cohabitants who are critical of conventional marriage. It examines some of the ways in which the distinction between heterosexual cohabitation and marriage is rendered in the New Zealand context. Culturally available distinctions, like that between cohabitation and marriage, are used in the production of resistant counterdiscourses. However, difference can be rewritten as deviance and in this form is central to the exercise of disciplinary power. Contextual shifts in the assertion (...) of a cohabitational self and a marital self contribute to the blurring of the distinction, further exposing the dilemmas of resistance based on difference. (shrink)

The past twenty-five years have seen an explosion of interest in nationalism and nationality in the social sciences - the past ten also in cultural studies. These two disciplinary areas define their objects of study differently, but both have recently started to converge in the pervasive use of the term `national identity', which in turn relies on the term `cultural identity'. Although theoretical complications entailed by the use of `identity' as a concept have been noted, the theorization of identity as (...) culture has occurred almost by default, with the term `culture' merely designating what needs to be explained, and the inherent circularity of `cultural identity' as a category remaining unaddressed. The two approaches differ in their understanding of the crucial categories of `culture' and `politics' in their accounts of nation and national identity. Cultural studies accounts focus on politics in terms of cultural politics, and thus fail to take on board important aspects of the social science accounts which they take as standard reference points. Both approaches ultimately rely upon `culture' as an all-inclusive category of social subjectivity, which remains undertheorized in both approaches, albeit in significantly contrasting ways. The place of culture in recent work on European identity functions differently, and provides a useful counterpoint to these difficulties. (shrink)

In 1611 the King James Bible was printed with minimal annotations, as requested by King James. It was another of his attempts at political and religious reconciliation. Smaller, more affordable, versions quickly followed that competed with the highly popular and copiously annotated Bibles based on the 1560 Geneva version by the Marian exiles. By the nineteenth century the King James Bible had become very popular and innumerable editions were published, often with emendations, long prefaces, illustrations and, most importantly, copious annotations. (...) Annotated King James Bibles appeared to offer the best of both the Reformation Geneva and King James Bible in a Victorian context, but they also reignited old controversies about the use and abuse of paratext. Amid the numerous competing versions stood a group of Victorian scholars, theologians and translators, who understood the need to reclaim the King James Bible through its Reformation heritage; they monumentalized it. (shrink)

Although current educational priorities tend to avoid strong moral positions, one of the world's most venerable yet persistently influential moral traditions not only lays out a number of major moral principles but also incorporates them into its pedagogy. Confucius teaches us about the importance of seeking knowledge, learning how to learn, applying ancient wisdom to contemporary situations, valuing virtue over material gain, following the Golden Rule, and living by our principles. He also has ways of assessing his own students' progress (...) in these matters. Confucius' pedagogy is an interesting model to consider and contrast with contemporary models. This chapter introduces these principles and assessments from the Analects and draws out some comparisons to and contrasts with two alternative theories in western moral thought, Augustine and John Dewey. -/- The accepted version of the paper is included here. Pagination does not match the published version. (shrink)

Thinking, making and doing -- Collective action -- Forms of repetition -- Discipline(s).

Advances in psychopharmacology raise the prospects of enhancing neurocognitive functions of humans by improving attention, memory, or mood. While general ethical reflections on psychopharmacological enhancement have been increasingly published in the last years, ethical criteria characterizing physicians’ role in neurocognitive enhancement and guiding their decision-making still remain highly unclear. Here it will be argued that also in the medical domain the use of cognition-enhancing drugs is not intrinsically unethical and that, in fact, physicians should assume an important role in gating (...) their usage. For finding normative orientation, concepts of disease, normality or medicine will not be helpful since—due to their cryptonormative nature—they rather hamper than allow targeted discussion and decision-making. As an alternative, the common and widely accepted bioethical criteria of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and distributive justice allow a clinically applicable, highly differentiated context- and case-sensitive approach. By embedding decision-making in a participative physician–patient relationship extrinsic objections against neurocognitive enhancement (e.g. invalid perceptions about efficacy, benefit or risk; questionable voluntariness; restrained decision-making capacity) can be curtailed. (shrink)

Recent work has demonstrated that the sense of agency is not only determined by efference-copy-based internal predictions and internal comparator mechanisms, but by a large variety of different internal and external cues. The study by Moore and colleagues [Moore, J. W., Wegner, D. M., & Haggard, P. . Modulating the sense of agency with external cues. Conscious and Cognition] aimed to provide further evidence for this view by demonstrating that external agency cues might outweigh or even substitute efferent signals to (...) install a basic registration of self-agency. Although the study contains some critical points that, so we argue, are central to a proper interpretation of the data, it hints at a new perspective on agency: optimal cue integration seems to be the key to a robust sense of agency. We here argue that this framework could allow integrating the findings of Moore and colleagues and other recent agency studies into a comprehensive picture of the sense of agency and its pathological disruptions. (shrink)

In medias res: the life of Claude de Seyssel -- The scholar diplomat -- The translator of histories -- Seyssel in Italy : a scholar looks at war -- The scholar and the state -- Seyssel, the church, and the ideal prelate.