Computer simulation of an epistemic landscape model, modified to include explicit representation of a centralized funding body, show the method of funding allocation has significant effects on communal trade-off between exploration and exploitation, with consequences for the community’s ability to generate significant truths. The results show this effect is contextual, and depends on the size of the landscape being explored, with funding that includes explicit random allocation performing significantly better than peer review on large landscapes. The article proposes a (...) way of incorporating external institutional factors in formal social epistemology, and offers a way of bringing such investigations to bear on current research policy questions. 1Introduction2Theoretical Background3Model Description4Simulation Details 4.1Simulating the epistemic landscape4.2Simulating agents4.3Simulating communal knowledge4.4Simulating funding strategies4.5Simulating merit dynamics5Results and Discussion 5.1Experiment 1: The winner-takes-it-all mechanism only5.2Experiment 2: All dynamic mechanisms5.3Experiment 3: Adding a new funding mechanism 5.4Experiment 4: Varying the degree of myopia5.5Experiment 5: Variability of individual epistemic gain5.6Experiment 6: Likelihood of renewal6Discussion7Conclusion. (shrink)

Computer simulation of an epistemic landscape model, modified to include explicit representation of a centralized funding body, show the method of funding allocation has significant effects on communal trade-off between exploration and exploitation, with consequences for the community’s ability to generate significant truths. The results show this effect is contextual, and depends on the size of the landscape being explored, with funding that includes explicit random allocation performing significantly better than peer-review on large landscapes. The paper proposes a way (...) of incorporating external institutional factors in formal social epistemology, and offers a way of bringing such investigations to bear on current research policy questions. (shrink)

The current debate on recreational drug policy is roughly a contest between prohibition advocates and legalization advocates. This paper offers a third alternative that is a compromise between those two. The centralized-use compromise can secure the autonomy interests that are important to defenders of legalization, and it can prevent harms to others that are the focus of prohibition arguments. The centralized-use compromise also offers a possible way to reduce the black market while also reducing the rate of addiction (...) and the associated debasing harms to self. (shrink)

This paper presents a study of gatekeeping in the U.S. political blog “Daily Kos.” Open online collectives like Daily Kos use relational mechanisms, such as gatekeeping, to manage organizational boundaries and filter the contributions of participants. However, neither prior theories of gatekeeping nor the existing analyses of open online collectives account for the character or implications of gatekeeping in the Daily Kos community. Using qualitative evidence as well as statistical analysis of a large sample of comment threads on the site (...) from 2008, I argue that gatekeeping on Daily Kos takes centralized and decentralized forms, and that both modes depend critically on relational boundary work among site participants. Centralized gatekeeping proceeds through actions by high-status members of the community. Decentralized gatekeeping, by contrast, consists of more numerous and small-scale interactions between community members, who filter and moderate each other’s participation. Both forms of gatekeeping enhance the ability of site leaders and incumbent community members to regulate access to privileges and agenda-setting responsibilities on the site. These findings imply that the egalitarian ethos of open online collectives exists in tension with the mechanisms through which participation and status inequalities emerge among participants. How collectives engaged in mobilization and discursive production resolve this tension will shape the long-term impact of online participation and blogs on the political and public spheres. (shrink)

Through an examination of the official teaching of the Church I show how the increased mobility of large masses of Catholics since World War II has led to continuing efforts by the Holy See to follow and, to a certain extent, to control these fluxes of people. In turn, global human mobility has had an influence on institutional structures and on the self-understanding of the Church. While this evolution has contributed to the globalization of the Catholic Church, the trend towards (...) centralization of power in Rome has hindered the development of more inclusive and democratic reforms and the participation of local churches in the decision-making process. (shrink)

With the delegation of ethical checking mechanisms to the institutional review boards (IRBs), flexible interpretations of overarching research ethics principles differed across scientific and cultural settings. This article is a comparative case study of ethical frameworks for social research in the Philippines and Taiwan. Justifications in choosing the two cases preponderantly focused on data trends regarding research and development (R&D) policy and practice. This article compared the elements observed in the two frameworks, specifically in terms of: national regulations, curricular requirements, (...) procedures for IRB review application, and other arrangements. Findings revealed that the Philippine academe enjoys relative autonomy or described as more fragmented, unlike Taiwan institutions that strictly follow centralized and country-wide standardization. The intensification of research ethics in Taiwan did not, however, hamper R&D efforts. On the contrary, the Taiwan model may have strengthened the current research ecosystem and bolstered confidence in the different sectors, thus generating multi-sectoral funding and collaborations. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois successfully organized a sociological research lab in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Atlanta. By examining his practice as a research organizer, as well as the philosophical principles which undergirded much of his scientific work, we can draw lessons about how to solve pressing problems of social epistemology—that is to say, problems with how we produce and disseminate knowledge through collective inquiry. Many of the problems we deal with in contemporary science are caused by problems in our institutional or incentive structures. For (...) instance, we do not sufficiently replicate past work in large part because we have not organized scientific inquiry so as to encourage this. The lessons Du Bois may teach us can thus speak directly to contemporary issues. (shrink)

. Vindicating Archer’s concepts of educational systems – centralized and decentralized – as exemplars of critical realist theorizing. Journal of Critical Realism: Vol. 18, Sustainability, Interdisciplinarity and Transformative change: A Critical Realist Response to the Crisis System, pp. 453-473.

Organizational networks are a widely used approach to deal with the “wicked problems” of disasters. However, current studies are insufficient in examining what strategies organizations actually employ to select partners in a complex environment of disaster, particularly in the centralized administrative context. This case study uses exponential random graph models to explore different partnering strategies that organizations used to form organizational networks in response to the Tianjin Port blast, a well-known disaster in China. Results demonstrate that participating organizations prefer (...) the bonding structure strategy to form “reciprocity” and “transitive clustering,” the power concentration strategy to work with popular organizations, and the homophily strategy to work with similar attribute organizations. However, contextual backgrounds influenced organizational attributes and strategies. This study discusses the implications of the findings and offers recommendations for enhancing collaboration among organizations. (shrink)

In this reply, I focus on the question of whether Cannon’s theory was a “centralized” version of James’s. Due to space limitations, I briefly present six observations that problematize this assertion. One of my guiding principles is that theories acquire their meaning within a particular context. From this historical perspective, and in their historical contexts, the theories were quite distinct.

Norman Finkelstein, a prominent political scientist specializing in the Palestine-Israel conundrum, on which he has authored five highly praised books, was denied tenure at DePaul University by the President, Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, on June 8, 2007. After examining the particulars of the case, it strikes me as so obviously wrong to deny him tenure that the tenure procedure at DePaul constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of a university system which allows such a thing to happen.

First, the authors should be congratulated for bringing our attention to this important issue. They have made important observations about what may be holding us back in efforts to make progress in...

The reasons for assuming an established orthodox Stoic school with scholarchs are considered and refuted. The traditional line of Stoics is a diadochic device to link Panaetius, and later, Posidonius, back to Zeno of Citium, using a chain of teachers and pupils. These Stoics were independent teachers sharing a general worldview but differing to a greater or lesser extent in the details.

Project selection by funding bodies directly influences the division of cognitive labour in scientific communities. I present a novel adaptation of an existing agent-based model of scientific research, in which a central funding body selects from proposed projects located on an epistemic landscape. I simulate four different selection strategies: selection based on a god's-eye perspective of project significance, selection based on past success, selection based on past funding, and random selection. Results show the size of the landscape matters: on small (...) landscapes historical information leads to slightly better results than random selection, but on large landscapes random selection greatly outperforms historically-informed selection. (shrink)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users (...) of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies. (shrink)

Originating in the Anglo-American management literature, stakeholder thinking embraces a set of common reasoning and rests on a range of assumptions that pay little attention to the institutional variations across countries and regions with different economic systems. Our aim in this article is to contribute to the stakeholder literature by discussing the significance and implications of this institutional diversity for the stakeholder model.

This chapter first outlines the three main phases of the development of the single market, together with the impetus and philosophy underpinning it. The idea behind the original European Economic Community (EEC) Treaty was simple: barriers to free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital would be removed through the use of treaty provisions that prohibited obstacles to free movement. One aspects of the single market have been reformed following the crisis, notably financial services. The legislature is increasingly moving towards (...) the use of regulations, rather than directives, to ensure greater uniformity and maximum as opposed to minimum harmonization to remove the possibility of national variation. The chapter then examines some of the challenges facing the single market. The challenges essentially concern questions of competence, sovereignty and effectiveness. There are two main approaches to attaining a common market, namely decentralized model and centralized model. (shrink)

China is moving from a centralized to a market economy to bring about efficiency in its economy and to form a business partnership with the West. With its reform adopting an open-door policy, there may be a need to assure its partners in the western world that appropriate steps would be taken to develop and foster a business culture with which the western countries and the Chinese businesses can work. The present study attempted to find whether there has been (...) a change in business ethical culture, accounting system and practice in the Chinese business between 1978 and the present, and the degree of similarity in the Chinese ethics and guidelines compared to Western ethics and guidelines. The result of the study has been analyzed from an institutional perspective to explore institutional change. The result showed that there is general growing support of Chinese management toward change in business ethical culture and practice. It was observed that there was not much similarity in the documents used for ethical guidance and control with those of the West. The findings of the paper are expected to be relevant to international investors and executives interested in investing or working in China. (shrink)

Centralized, democratic rules are often asserted as a superior basis for rationing than individualized physician discretion. This article counters this prevailing wisdom by exploring the deficiencies of rule-based rationing. Rules are too imprecise to accurately reflect all the nuances of physical and mental impairment and the complexity of medical science, particularly considering the widely varying personal values that different patients attach to medical risk and benefit. Rule-based rationing also suffers from the biasing effects of interest group pressure on political (...) processes and the tendency to absolve physicians from any moral responsibility for the rationing decisions they implement. Internalizing cost constraints is a more socially and professionally acceptable means of rationing and, in any event, it is inevitable since even a preponderance of rule-based rationing will leave considerable areas of discretion for physician judgment in the implementation and interpretation of the rules. As a consequence, despite the flaws of bedside rationing, it is foolhardy to dispense with it entirely in favor of an exclusively rule-based system. Keywords: Bedside rationing, cost-constraints, rule-based rationing CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

BackgroundLarge-scale, centralized data repositories are playing a critical and unprecedented role in fostering innovative health research, leading to new opportunities as well as dilemmas for the medical sciences. Uncovering the reasons as to why citizens do or do not contribute to such repositories, for example, to population-based biobanks, is therefore crucial. We investigated and compared the views of existing participants and non-participants on contributing to large-scale, centralized health research data repositories with those of ex-participants regarding the decision to (...) end their participation. This comparison could yield new insights into motives of participation and non-participation, in particular the behavioural change of withdrawal.MethodsWe conducted 36 in-depth interviews with ex-participants, participants, and non-participants of a three-generation, population-based biobank in the Netherlands. The interviews focused on the respondents’ decision-making processes relating to their participation in a large-scale, centralized repository for health research data.ResultsThe decision of participants and non-participants to contribute to the biobank was motivated by a desire to help others. Whereas participants perceived only benefits relating to their participation and were unconcerned about potential risks, non-participants and ex-participants raised concerns about the threat of large-scale, centralized public data repositories and public institutes, such as social exclusion or commercialization. Our analysis of ex-participants’ perceptions suggests that intrapersonal characteristics, such as levels of trust in society, participation conceived as a social norm, and basic societal values account for differences between participants and non-participants.ConclusionsOur findings indicate the fluidity of motives centring on helping others in decisions to participate in large-scale, centralized health research data repositories. Efforts to improve participation should focus on enhancing the trustworthiness of such data repositories and developing layered strategies for communication with participants and with the public. Accordingly, personalized approaches for recruiting participants and transmitting information along with appropriate regulatory frameworks are required, which have important implications for current data management and informed consent procedures. (shrink)

We first present a reconstruction of James’s theory of emotion (JATE) and then argue for four theses: (a) Despite constructivist elements, James’s views are overall in line with basic emotions theory. (b) JATE does not exclude an influence of emotion on intentional action even in its original formulation; nevertheless, this influence is quite limited. It seems possible, however, to repair this problem of the theory. (c) Cannon’s theory of emotion is a centralized version of JATE that inherits from the (...) latter theory a potentially fatal flaw, the insufficient physiological differentiation of emotions. (d) The core claim of JATE, that emotions are bodily feelings, is very likely false. (shrink)

Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment. From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and 'wetware', Sarah Kember demonstrates how this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of (...) information systems. As well as offering suggestions for the evolution of [cyber]feminism in Alife environments, the author identifies the emergence of posthumanism; an ethics of the posthuman subject mobilized in the tension between cold war and post-cold war politics, psychological and biological machines, centralized and de-centralized control, top-down and bottom-up processing, autonomous and autopoietic organisms, cloning and transgenesis, species-self and other species. Ultimately, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of life-as-it-could-be. (shrink)

Computational systems are traditionally approached from control-oriented perspectives; however, as soon as we move from centralized to decentralized computational infrastructures, direct control needs to be replaced by distributed coordination mechanisms that are on par with institutional constructs observable in human societies (contracts, agreements, enforcement mechanisms, etc.). This paper presents a formalization of Hohfeld's framework building upon a logic whose language includes primitive operators of ability and parametric deontic operators. The proposal is meant to highlight the fundamental interaction between deontic (...) and potestative concepts and contains proofs of soundness and completeness with respect to a class of relational models. (shrink)

Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare these two (...) accounts of organization and argue that understanding biological organisms as cohesively integrated systems benefits from insights from both. To bring together the two accounts, we focus on the notions of control and regulation as bridge concepts. We start from a characterization of biological mechanisms in terms of constraints and focus on a specific type of mechanism, control mechanisms, that operate on other mechanisms on the basis of measurements of variables in the system and its environment. Control mechanisms are characterized by their own set of constraints that enable them to sense conditions, convey signals, and effect changes on constraints in the controlled mechanism. They thereby allow living organisms to adapt to internal and external variations and to coordinate their parts in such a manner as to maintain viability. Because living organisms contain a vast number of control mechanisms, a central challenge is to understand how they are themselves organized. With the support of examples from both unicellular and multicellular systems we argue that control mechanisms are organized heterarchically, and we discuss how this type of control architecture can, without invoking top-down and centralized forms of organizations, succeed in coordinating internal activities of organisms. (shrink)

This article argues that centralized wage bargaining alters the causal logic in explanations of wage inequality, in the sense that common explanatory factors have different effects, given the degree of bargaining centralization. The evidence presented supports the theoretical argument. Using aggregate time-series cross-country data from fifteen capitalist democracies, the article shows that—given decentralized bargaining—trade with less developed countries, resources devoted to research and development, and government employment have inegalitarian effects on the wage distribution, whereas leftist governments and unionism compress (...) wages. However, given centralized wage bargaining these effects gradually disappear or, in some cases, change direction. (shrink)

"Liberalism" is widely used to describe a variety of social and political ideas, but has been an especially difficult concept for historians and political scientists to define. Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville define one type of liberal thought. They share an aristocratic liberalism marked by distaste for the masses and the middle class, opposition to the commercial spirit, fear and contempt of mediocrity, and suspicion of the centralized state. Their fears are combined with an elevated ideal of human personality, an (...) ideal which affirms modernity. All see their ideals threatened in the immediate future, and all hope to save European civilization from barbarism and militarism through some form of education, although all grow more pessimistic towards the end of their lives. Aristocratic Liberalism ignores the national boundaries that so often confine the history of political thought, and uses the perspective thus gained to establish a pan-European type of political thought. Going beyond Burckhardt, Mill, and Tocqueville, Aristocratic Liberalism argues for new ways of looking at nineteenth-century liberalism. It corrects many prevalent misconceptions about liberalism, and suggests new paths for arriving at a better understanding of the leading form of nineteenth-century political thought. The new Afterword by the author presents a novel description of liberal political language as the "discourse of capacity," and suggests that this kind of language is the common denominator of all forms of European liberalism in the nineteenth century. Aristocratic Liberalism will be valuable to students of history, political science, sociology, and political philosophy. (shrink)

Contemporary critics of the administrative state are right to highlight the dangers of vesting too much power in a centralized bureaucracy removed from popular oversight and accountability. Too often neglected in this literature, however, are the dangers of vesting too little power in a centralized state, which enables dominant groups to further expand their social and economic advantages through decentralized means. This article seeks to synthesize these concerns, understanding them as reflecting the same underlying danger of state capture. (...) It then articulates a set of heuristics for the design of public and administrative institutions, which aim at minimizing the risks of capture from both public and private sources. By following these heuristics, it claims, we can successfully employ the administrative state as a weapon against concentrated private power, rather than allowing it to serve as a tool of dominant groups. (shrink)

In the absence of centralized human rights leadership in an increasingly fragmented global health policy landscape, regional health offices have stepped forward to advance the rights-based approach to health. Reviewing the efforts of the Pan American Health Organization, this article explores the evolution of human rights in PAHO policy, assesses efforts to mainstream human rights in the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, and analyzes the future of the rights-based approach through regional health governance, providing lessons for other regional health offices (...) and global health institutions. This article explores PAHO's 15-year effort to mainstream human rights through PASB technical units, national capacity-building, the Inter-American human rights system, and the PAHO Directing Council. Through documentary analysis of PAHO policies and semi-structured interviews with key PASB stakeholders, the authors analyze the understandings and actions of policymakers and technical officers in implementing human rights through PAHO governance. Analyzing the themes arising from this narrative, the authors examine the structural role of secretariat leadership, state support, legal expertise, and technical unit commitment in facilitating a rights-based approach to the health in the Americas. Human rights are increasingly framing PAHO efforts, and this analysis of the structures underlying PAHO's approach provides an understanding of the institutional determinants of the rights-based approach to health, highlighting generalizable themes for the mainstreaming of human rights through regional health governance. With this regional-level understanding of health governance, future national-level research can begin to understand the causal forces linking regional human rights work with national policy reforms and public health outcomes. (shrink)

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, SETLcoin, Ether, Solar Coin, or Liberty Reserve exist since 2009. Because of their decentralized control, they are often considered a threat or alternative to the conventional centralized banking system. While the technological implication of some such currencies, especially of Bitcoin, has attracted much attention, so far there is little discussion about the entire field of cryptocurrencies and very little academic literature addressing its ethical significance. In this article, we thus address the impact of “blockchain technology” (...) on the nature of financial transactions from a business ethics perspective. We begin with a survey on relevant literature from neighboring disciplines. Next, we work towards a 3 × 3 framework for current debates on the ethics of cryptocurrencies : we combine the micro, meso, and macro levels of business and society with assessments of the potential ethical impact of cryptocurrencies as morally beneficial, detrimental, and ambiguous. In addition, we highlight possible avenues for future research, such as the changing roles of the miners and regulators, the prosocial use of cryptocurrencies, the antisocial use for shadow banking and transactions in the ‘dark net’ and cryptocurrencies’ effect on inflation and deflation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 119-134 [Access article in PDF] The Constitution of Rhetoric's Tradition Maurice Charland Rhetoric is not a discipline. That is to say, as a domain of theoretical and practical knowledge, rhetoric is weakly institutionalized, lacking a centralized arbiter and standardized set of procedures for establishing truth claims. It also lacks the basic characteristics that Michel Foucault defines as disciplinary, for while we can identify (...) "groups of objects, methods, their corpus of properties considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools," these are neither universally admitted, nor do they "constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without their being any question of their meaning" (1972, 222). On the contrary, despite the fact that rhetoric is usually figured as offering practical and, indeed, positive knowledge, the meaning of its terms is always being questioned and at stake. While we might, by considering terms loosely, seek to identify rhetoric in terms of objects such as "persuasion," or "discourse," these are not exclusively its province. Furthermore, the ends of rhetoric are themselves unclear. Is rhetoric really the art of discovering the available means of persuasion? Or is it an art of citizenship? Or a method of enquiry? It has at times been defined as each. Consequently, none of these methods can fix its identity. At most, we can say that "rhetoric," as a domain of knowledge, signals a commitment to the idea of agency in discourse.Rhetoric, while not disciplinary, nevertheless "hangs together" as a domain of knowledge even though it does not cohere conceptually. It is, or comes close to being, a "discursive formation." That is to say, we can identify a field that produces statements concerning discourse and its operations, which is characterized by certain regularities that articulate with the term rhetoric itself. The first such regularity is the gesture of negation. Rhetoric refuses philosophy (or acts out having been refused by philosophy). [End Page 119] Rhetoric further is defined against other intellectual genres: rhetoric is not poetics, is not political science, is not ethics, though it may "speak" to them. Ultimately, though, this tells us very little about the nature of rhetoric's difference, for while refusal is effective in positing the existence of a boundary between rhetoric and other domains, the location of that boundary and what it contains remains unspecified. Rhetoric must also be attributed an at least provisional sense. This is accomplished by rhetoric's second gesture, which initially appears more substantial. Rhetoric is framed in terms of the positivity of a foundational "tradition." Indeed, the gesture toward tradition is ubiquitous. Consider, for example, both the title and principles of organization of Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's (1990) anthology, George Kennedy's (1998) recursion to the idea of "tradition" even as he attempts to present rhetoric as a natural and cross-cultural phenomenon, recent feminist works that explicitly address "the tradition," 1 the routine citation of Classical authorities and examples, the recurrence of "new" rhetorics, including Burke's dramatism, Perelman's theory of argumentation, as well as Barthes' semiotics, which are offered as supplements to tradition's lacks, and, finally, the energy devoted to the study of the history of rhetoric. The rhetorical tradition, as something bequeathed or put in play by ancient teachers, appears to offer rhetoric a substance, a literature, and a set of problems, particularly through variants of two other principles of discursive formation identified by Foucault, commentary and the author-function. Even so, the gesture toward tradition does not imply the existence of a historically rooted and fixed corpus or model: "Tradition" is a vague term, there is no unproblematic canon of texts to be commented upon, and tradition itself, rather than Aristotle, Plato, or Cicero, stands as "author." What we debate is the meaning of the "tradition," the uneasy relationship between Socrates and Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, but as positions rather than personae. Furthermore, in the name of rhetoric, ancient and modern texts are often read against the grain, and what is... (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 O presente Artigo tem como centro de sua reflexão a espiritualidade centrada no dinheiro. O referido objeto é “ferramenta de Deus” presente nos cultos diários das igrejas neopentecostais. E como tal compõe o arsenal das coisas ofertadas em altar. É símbolo religioso a costurar a relação vertical Deus-igreja-fiel. Mas, não está selecionado como objeto qualquer a tomar parte, como mediação, dessa relação. O dinheiro não é danação ou algo considerado como tal, mas é (...) santificado, quando imolado para se tornar oferta e, assim, contribuir para multiplicar as obras de Deus. Alguns textos – e contextos – tenderiam a afirmar que a penetração do dinheiro, no campo do sagrado, seria para profaná-lo, destruí-lo. Seria verdadeiro ? O dízimo é dinheiro, é algo que pertence a Deus. Percebe-se uma mística que se desenvolve a partir de um processo constante de ressignificação. A perspectiva simbólica compõe a análise compreensiva desse objeto chamado dinheiro que, no espaço de culto neopentecostal, ganha importância e expressividade na fé dos que buscam vitória, conquista, prosperidade. PALAVRAS-CHAVES : Espiritualidade; Dinheiro; Neopentecostalismo; Vinculo social; Dádiva.This Article is centered, in its reflection, SPIRITUALITY CENTRALIZED IN MONEY. The above-mentioned object money is an instrument in god’s hands, present in Neo-pentecostal churches daily cult. And in such a perspective, it – money – coumponds things arsenal, offered at altar. It is a religious symbol fitting to sew GOD – CHURCH – FAITHFUL vertical rapport . But it is not selected as any object at all in order to take part, as a kind of mediation, in this rapport. Money is not a curse, but, sanctified, when immolated to be offered and to multiply the work of God. Some would tend to say that, the entry into the money into the space of the sacred would be to profane God, to destroy him. Can this be so? The tithe is money. It is something that belongs to God. One perceives a certain Mystic, developed fron a resignification constant process. Symbolical perspective compounds this object, called, nominated money, comprehensive analysis, money that, in neo-pentecostal cult space, increases in inportance and expressiveness in faith regarding to those ones who look for victony, conquest, prosperity. KEYWORDS: Spirituality; Money; Social Bond; Gift; Neopentecostalism. (shrink)

_Factory of Strategy_ is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory. Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need to destroy (...) capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the proletariat's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien Régime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class configurations in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figuration in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. He ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally--not anarchically--dismantle centralized power. (shrink)

This book focuses on material culture as a subject of philosophical inquiry and promotes the philosophical study of material culture by articulating some of the central and difficult issues raised by this topic and providing innovative solutions to them, most notably an account of improvised action and a non-intentionalist account of function in material culture. Preston argues that material culture essentially involves activities of production and use; she therefore adopts an action-theoretic foundation for a philosophy of material culture. Part 1 (...) illustrates this foundation through a critique, revision, and extension of existing philosophical theories of action. Part 2 investigates a salient feature of material culture itself—its functionality. A basic account of function in material culture is constructed by revising and extending existing theories of biological function to fit the cultural case. Here the adjustments are for the most part necessitated by special features of function in material culture. These two parts of the project are held together by a trio of overarching themes: the relationship between individual and society, the problem of centralized control, and creativity. (shrink)

When central authority fails in socially crucial tasks, mutual aid, solidarity, and grassroots organization frequently arise as people take up slack on the basis of informal networks and civil society organizations. We can learn something important about the possibility of horizontal organization by studying such experiments. In this paper we focus on the rationality, care, and effectiveness of grassroots measures to respond to the pandemic and show how they illustrate core elements of anarchist thought. We do not argue for the (...) correctness of any version of anarchist politics, nor claim that the bulk of this grassroots work was done with anarchist ideas explicitly in mind. Nonetheless, the current pandemic, like many social crises before it, serves as a sort experiment in political implementation. -/- Two things have been striking in the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic: the chaos, incompetence, irrationality, and often cruel misguidedness of the centralized government response; and the rationality, care, and effectiveness of grassroots measures in many parts of the country. In this paper we focus on the latter—especially the case of Washington, DC—to illustrate core features of anarchist politics. We do not argue for the correctness of any version of anarchist politics here, but merely illustrate guiding ideas that have been a part of anarchist theory and practice for well over a century. We also do not claim that the bulk of this grassroots work was done with anarchist ideas in mind, or explicitly out of a commitment to anarchist politics. Some was, and some arises out of related ideological commitments, but most simply functions out of no more than a desire to support one another. -/- The current pandemic, like many social crises before it, rather than providing a stand-alone argument or functioning as an implementation of any political theory, serves as a sort of laboratory experiment. When central authority fails in socially crucial tasks, mutual aid, solidarity, and grassroots organization frequently arise as people take up slack on the basis of informal networks and civil society organizations. We can learn something important about the possibility of horizontal organization by studying such experiments, including how it arises through spontaneous action. If political thought is best illustrated through its implementation in practice, the functioning of grassroots individuals and organizations in a time of crisis is one way to understand the political mechanisms core to anarchist thought. (shrink)

Existing approaches to campaign ethics fail to adequately account for the “arms races” incited by competitive incentives in the absence of effective sanctions for destructive behaviors. By recommending scrupulous devotion to unenforceable norms of honesty, these approaches require ethical candidates either to quit or lose. To better understand the complex dilemmas faced by candidates, therefore, we turn first to the tradition of “adversarial ethics,” which aims to enable ethical participants to compete while preventing the most destructive excesses of competition. As (...) we demonstrate, however, elections present even more difficult challenges than other adversarial contexts, because no centralized regulation is available to halt potential arms races. Turning next to recent scholarship on populism and partisanship, we articulate an alternative framework for campaign ethics, which allows candidates greater room to maneuver in their appeals to democratic populations while nevertheless requiring adherence to norms of social and political pluralism. (shrink)

A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain – spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and neurophysiology to clinical data – is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection, action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the vertebrate brain can be seen to form (...) a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain – culminating in the cerebral cortex of mammals – came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity, sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone. (Published Online May 1 2007) Key Words: action selection; anencephaly; central decision making; consciousness; control architectures; hydranencephaly; macrosystems; motivation; target selection; zona incerta. (shrink)

Purpose: Despite various comparative studies in the field of cultural heritage protection in the world, there is still a significant lack of comparative research on policies related to the legal system of countries' governance. The purpose of this study is to address the comparative policies in Iran and Italy, with a particular focus on the results of the executive experiences of two different types of policies in the cities of Oroumieh (North-West of Iran) and Turin (in North-West of Italy). Design/methodology/approach: (...) Utilising the comparative, analytical, bibliographic and descriptive historical research methodology, which is based on the study of the local, national and international comprehensive review of regulations and policy-making of cultural heritage preservation policies in Iran and Italy. In this research, the related documents in three languages (Persian, Italian and English) have been examined to compare profoundly and comprehensively the policies and regulations adopted in these two countries to be able to analyze the national and transnational regulations and local policies in the cultural heritage sector. Findings: In addition to many cultural similarities and numerous commonalities, especially in the multiplicity of urban cultural heritage in historical centers, the results suggest that the legislation structure in Iran is much more centralized than in Italy. Also, the findings suggest that Italy focuses on aligning its previously centralized national legislative system in line with contemporary European heritage and preservation policies. Originality/value: The paper outlines how to use historical and cultural similarities through comparative study to benefit the experiences of two historical countries in urban heritage conservation and policy-making part despite their differences. (shrink)