It is argued here that large-scale organization and networked computing enable new divisions of communicative work aimed at shaping the content, direction, and outcomes of societal conversations. The challenge for argumentation theory and practice lies in attending to these new divisions of communicative work in constituting contemporary argumentative realities. Goffman’s conceptualization of participation frameworks and production formats are applied to articulate the communicative work of organizations afforded by networked computing that invents and innovates argument in all of its senses—as product, (...) process, and procedure. Communicative work, however, may be scaffolding argumentative contexts and practices that are quite different than what has constituted past argumentative realities. The computerization of argument happens as organizations invent and innovate argument practice relative to the demands and opportunities of interorganizational communication. The cases and examples examined here suggest that argument practice is evolving around the logic of conversation and the principle of personalization. The analysis challenges argumentation theory to seriously engage with the construction of communicative contexts and the realization of ideas about disagreement management in organizational practice and information infrastructures. Directions for integrating insights from a design perspective on argument with insights from organizational and information systems theory are proposed for coming to terms with an era of large-scale organization and computerization, in particular the evolution of argument practice, the inscription of argument in the built environment, and the absorption of socio-cultural argument practices by organizations and computation. (shrink)

Research on medical interactions shows how the discursive construction of the clinical case impacts diagnostic reasoning and treatment recommendations. Drawing on an ethnographic study in an intensive care unit, we illustrate how this process is at play in a ward that adopts an extreme, guideline-divergent policy as to the use of antibiotics. The article focuses on how physicians assemble the case as ‘treatable’ or ‘not yet treatable’, and how in doing so they ‘talk into being’ two contrastive policies on (...) antibiotics and position themselves toward the one adopted in the ward. The analysis identifies the discursive resources displayed by physicians to both project an infectious disease diagnosis and resist this treatment-implicative trajectory. We argue that the physicians’ contentious discursive construction of the case has crucial consequences in the way the ward’s extreme policy is jointly accomplished as a highly reflexive process sensitive to the contingencies of any particular case. (shrink)

While social geographers have convincingly made the case that space is not an external constant, but rather is produced through inter-relations, anthropologists and sociologists have done much to further an understanding of time, as itself constituted through social interaction and inter-relation. Their work suggests that time is not an apolitical background to social life, but shapes how we perceive and relate to others. For those interested in exploring issues such as identity, community and difference, this suggests that attending to how (...) temporal discourses are utilised in relation to these issues is a key task. This article seeks to contribute to an expansion of the debate about time and sociality by contributing an analysis of a variety of ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa utilises temporal concepts as part of her work of rethinking social identity and community. In particular, I suggest that in contesting homogeneous identity, Anzaldúa also implicitly contests linear temporal frameworks. Further, in creating new frameworks for identity, I suggest the possibility of discerning an alternative approach to time in her work that places difference at the heart of simultaneity. I suggest that the interconnection between concepts of time and community within Anzaldúa’s work indicates, more broadly, that attempts to rework understandings of relationality must be accompanied by reworked accounts of temporality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Books ReceivedThe Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China. By G.E.R. Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 175. Price not given.The Art of the Han Essay: Wang Fu's Ch'ien-Fu Lun. By Anne Behnke Kinney. Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1990. Pp. xi + 154. Paper $10.00.The Autobiography of Jamgön Kongtrul: A Gem of Many Colors. By Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrön (...) Thayé and translated by Richard Barron (Chökyi Nyima). Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2003. Pp. xxii + 549. Price not given.Awesome Nightfall: The Life, Times, and Poetry of Saigyō. By William R. LaFleur. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. Pp. xiii + 173. Paper $14.95.Becoming the Compassion Buddha: Tantric Mahamudra for Everyday Life. By Lama Thubten Yeshe, edited by Robina Courtin, and foreword by Geshe Lhundub Sopa. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. Pp. xi + 194. Paper $14.95.Between Two Worlds East and West: An Autobiography. By J. N. Mohanty. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 134. Hardcover RS 525.00.The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ. Edited by Roman Malek, S.V.D. Sankt Augustin, Germany: Institut Monumenta Serica and China-Zentrum; and Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag, 2002. Pp. 391. EUR 40.00.Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis. By Volker Scheid. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 407. Hardcover $69.95. Paper $23.95.Confucian Feminist: Memoirs of Zeng Baosun (1893-1978). Translated and adapted by Thomas L. Kennedy. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002. Pp. xxi + 170. Price not given.Consciousness Studies: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. By K. Ramakrishna Rao. Jefferson (North Carolina) and London: McFarland and Company, 2002. Pp. 367. Hardcover $65.00.Constituting Communities: Theravāda Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia. Edited by John Clifford Holt, Jacob N. Kinnard, and Jonathan S. Walters. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 224. Hardcover $65.50. Paper $21.95.Developments in Indian Philosophy from Eighteenth Century Onwards: Classical and Western. By Daya Krishna. Volume X Part 1 of History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, edited by D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New [End Page 110] Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2001. Pp. xxiii + 417. Hardcover RS 1200.East and West: Identità e dialogo interculturale. By Giangiorgio Pasqualotto. Venezia: Marsilo Editori, 2003. Pp. 210. EUR 16.00.Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. By Edward Slingerland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 352. Price not given.Encountering Kā lī: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West. Edited by Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xviii + 321. Hardcover $55.00, £37.95. Paper $21.95, £15.95.Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy. Edited by Antonio S. Cua. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xx + 1020. Hardcover $150.00.Essays on Indian Philosophy. By J. N. Mohanty and edited by Purushottama Bilimoria. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xxxvii + 347. Paper RS 525.00.Faith, Humor, and Paradox. By Ignacio L. Götz. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002. Pp. 136. Hardcover $61.95.Four Illusions: Candrakīrti's Advice for Travelers on the Bodhisattva Path. Translated by Karen C. Lang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 240. Price not given.The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory. By David R. Loy. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. Pp. 223. Paper $16.95.The Hidden History of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. By Bryan J. Cuevas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 328. Price not given.Huang Di nei jing su wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text. By Paul U. Unschuld. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 520. Hardcover $75.00, £52.00.In Dewey's Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction. Edited by William J. Gavin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. vi + 249. Hardcover $71.50. Paper $23.95.Knowledge and Freedom in Indian Philosophy. By Tara Chatterjea. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002. Pp. xvi + 159. Hardcover... (shrink)

This paper starts with questioning the traditional approach to the so-called intercultural communication. Most students of intercultural communication, it seems, use the categories characterising a cultural or ethnic identity, such as Western, Indian, European, Aboriginal and the like, as parameters by reference to which some distinctive phenomena observed in conversational materials should be explained. Even though they may apply these categories correctly, they do not take into account the relevancy of these categories in each interaction.The aim of this paper is (...) to demonstrate that being a Japanese is achieved interactively and that interculturality of intercultural communication is constituted in and through the actual course of the interaction. In the analysis of interviews conducted with foreign students in Japan, it can be seen that the interviewer and the interviewee had to keep on coordinating their conduct throughout the development of their interaction in order that they could be a Japanese and a foreigner relevantly. In this way, what, in the studies of intercultural communication, is presupposed to be simply given, that is, the fact of a person being a Japanese or the like, is shown to be analysable and investigable as an interactive phenomenon in its own right. (shrink)

When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory and (...) predictive roles of attitude attribution. The primary goal of this thesis is to fill this lacuna and to articulate the indispensability of such reactions – agreement/disagreement and endorsement/disapproval – for social cognition. In the process of doing it I also show how these initial reactions ground certain further possible responses in intersubjective communication: manipulation, negotiation or adoption of attributed attitudes. The second aim of this thesis is to explicate what is it about belief and desire attributions that makes the responses I’ve described possible. Because one can agree or disagree both with beliefs and assertions and endorse or disapprove both desires and requests, I argue that we should understand belief attributions in terms of assertions and desire attributions in terms of requests. When we think what someone believes and wants, we treat her as a conversation partner because her attitudes call for the same responses as speech acts do, even if she hasn’t made any explicit assertion or request herself. In short, beliefs and desires have communicative significance. Given such significance, we can also see what one needs to take into consideration when attributing these attitudes to another. My answer in the thesis is that belief and desire attributions have to be grounded in facts about the behaviour and well-being of attributees and that these facts also constitute the nature of beliefs and desires. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 1. A year has passed and continent. has sedimented an annual strata into the geological record of the Internet. During the winter months we gratefully received donations from our readership and we've applied these funds to offset some of the costs of maintaining our tidy corner of the Web. Specifically, we've used these funds to renew our accounts at Flickr, Soundcloud, and Vimeo. We also bought a snippet of code. We continue to accept donations at our WePay (...) account so that we can upgrade our server space, which is currently being donated to us. For this, our fifth issue, we offer varve as our constellating theme. From the Swedish varv , whose semantic web includes notions of “revolution,” accretion “in layers,” and “circle,” a varve is that precise geologic formation referring to the whole of any annual sedimentary layer. We didn't need to rely on Einstein alone to relativize space and time; all of the build-up of matter accrued by the passage had already accomplished that—the spatialization of time. Scaling the term up, we recall ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene to refer to the extent to which human impact upon the Earth had come to constitute a new geological era. Today the time we take for reflection plumbs an unprecedented ecology and brings to consciousness undiscovered contingencies. As material and medium for making, remaking, archeologizing, and archiving thought, varves (and/as/or journals) are species of the broader category of rhythmites . Secret-ing the rhythms of deep time, every record, geologic or otherwise, is subject to all the effects of interpretation and rhetoric that the contemporary DJ has at their disposal—reverberated, delayed, stuttered, syncopated, beat-juggled, back-spun, cross-faded from one epoch to another. The record itself, however, is hyperspecific: referring to moments of passing contexts, communities, and histories. But as such, a record constitutes the possibility of a long view, chronicling changes in climates, movements of occupation, and the long counts of calendars. As always, continent. welcomes excavations transdisciplinary and media-agnostic in nature and scope. We look forward to accepting yours through May 15. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that the distinction between biological life and political life as found in Hannah Arendt’s reading of Aristotle and later repeated and elaborated by Giorgio Agamben under the headings of and, is in fact a fertile point of entry to, and the only viable option in order the grasp what constitutes the political as such for Aristotle. By hashing out the conceptual steps necessary for the establishment of what can be called a “political community”, I (...) seek to illuminate how the distinction upon which much of Arendt’s and Agamben’s works rests, does indeed play a vital role in the work of Aristotle. By clarifying the nature of a “political community” according to Aristotle, this paper thus seeks to make a proper assessment of the thought of both Arendt and Agamben possible. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that the distinction between biological life and political life as found in Hannah Arendt’s reading of Aristotle and later repeated and elaborated by Giorgio Agamben under the headings of (“bare life”) and (“qualified life”), is in fact a fertile point of entry to, and the only viable option in order the grasp what constitutes the political as such for Aristotle. By hashing out the conceptual steps necessary for the establishment of what can be called (...) a “political community”, I seek to illuminate how the distinction upon which much of Arendt’s and Agamben’s works rests, does indeed play a vital role in the work of Aristotle. By clarifying the nature of a “political community” according to Aristotle, this paper thus seeks to make a proper assessment of the thought of both Arendt and Agamben possible. (shrink)

In a thought experiment we want to test how the emergence of adult neural stem cells could constitute an example for a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. In his major work, The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (Kuhn 1996), the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, states that scientific progress is not a cumulative process, but new theories appear by a rather revolutionary sequence of events. Kuhn built his theory on landmark events (...) taken from chemistry and physics, lacking examples from biology. Beginning with Ramon y Cajal’s famous quote, no new neurons after birth , from the early years of the twentieth century, and Reynolds and Weiss’s conflicting finding in 1992 of adult neural stem cells giving rise to new neurons, we will test how the finding of neural stem cells in the adult brain matches with Kuhn’s theory. The pivotal problem of defining a paradigm will be our main focus, since the emergence of adult neural stem cells has been acclaimed by the scientific community as the rebuttal of Ramon y Cajal’s paradigm. (shrink)

This paper proposes an analysis of the European Constitution from the perspective of its conditions of possibility. The focus is on the conditions that subtend the European constitution, the conditions, the premises that make the European Constitution possible. In the present context of discourse “possibility” is understood in the sense of Kantian critique. But here critique is based on Reasonableness rather than on Reason—in fact a thesis orienting this essay is that the human being to survive (...) and to survive well must quickly change from a rational animal into a reasonable animal. Is the European constitution possible? Where must we search for the necessary conditions that support the European constitution (1) in common historical and cultural traditions, in common practices, in common social behaviours or (2) merely in a shared decision, an accord, a contract, a convention? There exists a third possibility: the idea that Europe has no future without a European constitution founded on awareness that all European Nations participate in a common destiny, which in the era of globalization is the destiny the whole world, indeed of life over the whole planet. Such participation must be based on the logic of otherness and reasonableness of which the human being alone as a semiotic animal is capable. As a semiotic animal, that is, an animal capable of metasemiosis, reflection and critical consciousness, the human being is responsible for all of life over the planet. (shrink)

Adopting a communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective on ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) invites us to create the conditions of a dialogue, discussion, or debate between various stakeholders, who can then try to confront their respective positions on a given issue, and possibly come to a decision regarding how a situation should be evaluated and/or responded to. As shown in this article, getting human stakeholders to voice their concerns about a specific situation is a way not only (...) to rationally confront multiple viewpoints on what should be done about it (à la Habermas) but also to allow elements of this situation to reveal themselves in a discussion. This is why any ethical decision has to experience a form of undecidability and surprisability. When beliefs and opinions can be called into question, it means that participants are ready to become attentive to what a situation might surprisingly call for. Communication is therefore a matter of ventriloquism, as human participants should also be considered the means by which elements of a situation manage to express themselves in a discussion, dictating specific courses of action over others. This concretely means that multiple voices can be heard in such a scene: not only the voices of the human stakeholders who speak to each other but also the voices of facts, principles, future generations, ecosystems, populations that are made to say things through these various turns of talk. (shrink)

It is demonstrated that Maxwellian electrodynamics was created as a result of the old pre-Maxwellian programmes’s reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampère–Weber, the wave theory of Young–Fresnel and Faraday’s programme. Maxwell’s programme finally superseded the Ampère–Weber one because it assimilated the ideas of the Ampère–Weber programme, as well as the presuppositions of the programmes of Young–Fresnel and Faraday. Maxwell’s victory became possible because the core of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology. Maxwell put forward as a basic synthetic principle (...) an idea that radically differed from that of rival approaches by its open, flexible and contra-ontological character. “Action at a distance”, “incompressible fluid”, “molecular vortices” were contrived analogies for Maxwell, capable only of directing the researcher to the “right” mathematical relations Kantian epistemology subsequently enabled Helmholtz and Hertz to arrive at a version of Maxwell’s theory that served as a heuristical basis for the discovery of radio waves. Finally, though neither of Einstein’s relativistic ideas came directly from Kant, they were made possible by the Kantian worldview that had permeated Einstein’s thinking. The Maxwellian revolution can be described in terms of Habermas’s communicative rationality encouraging the establishment of mutual understanding between the various scientific communities. Maxwell’s programme constituted a progressive step in respect to its rivals because it constituted a basis of communication and interpenetration between the main paradigms of 19th century physics. (shrink)

The influence of pragmatism—and of Dewey in particular—upon Lipman’s conception of the classroom Community of Inquiry is pervasive. The notion of the Community of Inquiry is directly attributable to Peirce, while Dewey maintained that inquiry should form the backbone of education in a democratic society, conceived of as an inquiring community. I explore the ways in which pragmatic conceptions of truth and meaning are embedded in the Community of Inquiry, as well as looking at its Deweyan moral and social commitments. (...) I show that Peirce’s and Dewey’s notions of truth are in perfect alignment with the philosophical Community of Inquiry, as is Dewey’s tie between meaning and ideas that bring our inquiries to a satisfactory conclusion. The Deweyan notion that moral values are justified by their utility in solving problems in social life is also to be found in the Community of Inquiry, as arguably is his view that moral values are to be regarded as working values that face the tribunal of experience in much the same way as hypotheses in science. Again, the focus in the classroom on open inquiry into issues and problems, the active participation of the students in building upon one another’s ideas, the sense of shared responsibility, and the growth and development of the intellectual and social powers of the individual, all mirror Dewey’s pragmatic conception of democracy. Given this allegiance, it may be argued that the Community of Inquiry faces a pragmatic problem of its own. While it aims to be a philosophically open encounter with all kinds of issues and ideas, pragmatic conceptions are so constitutive of it that they may skew the pitch philosophically. I also address this issue. (shrink)

This book offers a polyphonic theory of protest as a mechanism for political communication, group constitution, and epistemic empowerment. The book analyzes the communicative power of protest to break social silences and disrupt insensitivity and complicity with injustice. Medina also elucidates the power of protest movements to transform social sensibilities and change the political imagination. Medina’s theory of protest examines the obligations that citizens and institutions have to give proper uptake to protests and to communicatively engage with protesting publics (...) in all their diversity, without excluding or marginalizing radical voices and perspectives. Throughout the book, communicative and epistemic arguments are given for the value of imagining with protest movements and for taking seriously the radical political imagination exercised in social movements of liberation. Medina’s theory sheds light on the different ways in which protest can be silenced and the different communicative and epistemic injustices that protest movements can face, arguing for forms of epistemic activism that resist silencing and communicative/epistemic injustices while empowering protesting voices. While arguing for democratic obligations to give proper uptake to protest, the book underscores how demanding listening to protesting voices can be under conditions of oppression and epistemic injustice. A central claim of the book is that responsible citizens have an obligation to echo (or express communicative solidarity with) the protests of oppressed groups that have been silenced and epistemically marginalized. Studying social uprisings, the book further argues that citizens have a duty to join protesting publics when grave injustices are in the public eye. (shrink)

BackgroundHIV prevention research in resource-limited countries is associated with a variety of ethical dilemmas. Key amongst these is the question of what constitutes an appropriate standard of health care (SoC) for participants in HIV prevention trials. This paper describes a community-focused approach to develop a locally-appropriate SoC in the context of a phase III vaginal microbicide trial in Mwanza City, northwest Tanzania.MethodsA mobile community-based sexual and reproductive health service for women working as informal food vendors or in traditional and modern (...) bars, restaurants, hotels and guesthouses has been established in 10 city wards. Wards were divided into geographical clusters and community representatives elected at cluster and ward level. A city-level Community Advisory Committee (CAC) with representatives from each ward has been established. Workshops and community meetings at ward and city-level have explored project-related concerns using tools adapted from participatory learning and action techniques e.g. chapati diagrams, pair-wise ranking. Secondary stakeholders representing local public-sector and non-governmental health and social care providers have formed a trial Stakeholders' Advisory Group (SAG), which includes two CAC representatives.ResultsKey recommendations from participatory community workshops, CAC and SAG meetings conducted in the first year of the trial relate to the quality and range of clinic services provided at study clinics as well as broader standard of care issues. Recommendations have included streamlining clinic services to reduce waiting times, expanding services to include the children and spouses of participants and providing care for common local conditions such as malaria. Participants, community representatives and stakeholders felt there was an ethical obligation to ensure effective access to antiretroviral drugs and to provide supportive community-based care for women identified as HIV positive during the trial. This obligation includes ensuring sustainable, post-trial access to these services. Post-trial access to an effective vaginal microbicide was also felt to be a moral imperative.ConclusionParticipatory methodologies enabled effective partnerships between researchers, participant representatives and community stakeholders to be developed and facilitated local dialogue and consensus on what constitutes a locally-appropriate standard of care in the context of a vaginal microbicide trial in this setting.Trial registrationCurrent Controlled Trials ISRCTN64716212. (shrink)

Brand image constitutes one of the most salient, over-defined, heavily explored and multifariously operationalized conceptual constructs in marketing theory and practice. In this Chapter, definitions of brand image that have been offered by marketing scholars will be critically addressed in the context of a culturally oriented discussion, informed by the semiotic notion of iconicity. This cultural bend, in conjunction with the concept’s semiotic contextualization, are expected both to dispel terminological confusions in the either inter-changeable or fuzzily differentiated employment of such (...) terms as brand image, symbol, icon, as well as to address the function of brand image at a deeper level than a mere construct to be operationalized in quantitative studies of purchase drivers. This shift in focus is coupled with a critical turn from the cogito-centric view of the consuming subject through the cognitivist lens of the AI metaphor as decision-making centre at the origin of largely conscious meaning-making, in favor of a psychoanalytically informed approach that considers figurativity as an essential process whereby brand image is formed. In these terms, brand image will be intimately linked to brand images as figurative multimodal expressive units and rhetorical tropes, as figurative syntax, that are responsible for shaping an idiolectal brand language, as well as to distinctive levels of iconicity as textual condition of possibility of a brand language. In order to understand the role of iconicity as fundamental condition of brand textuality, rather than just a procedure for spawning brand images, the discussion is contextualized in a wider framework involving the culturally situated source of brand images, how they become correlated with brand image concepts and how correlations between brand images and brand image result in brand knowledge structures (Keller 1998). This opening up of the discussion on iconicity is enacted against the background of what I call the Brand Imaginarium which involves: (i) a critical engagement with the dominant cognitivist perspective in branding research that prioritizes individual memory in brand knowledge formation, through a cultural branding lens that involves two additional types of memory, viz. communicative and cultural (ii) a critical engagement with the cognitivist perspective on brand knowledge formation that prioritizes conscious processing of stimuli (as ‘brute facts’, rather than as already semiotized expressive units) in a cognitive mechanism from which the faculty of imagination has been expelled, by restoring the importance of imagination in brand knowledge formation, and, concomitantly, by showing that the highly figurative language of brands may not be researched thoroughly unless imagination is posited anew as processing correlate (iii) the adoption of an expansionist approach to the role of the imaginary in brand knowledge formation, from cognitive (or psychic) faculty, to a more sociologically inclined process of inter-subjective mirroring, and concomitantly as imaginary social significations (Castoriades 1985) that are shared by culturally conditioned and habituated subjects that engage in meaningful cultural practices, rather than individual processing monads. (shrink)

This paper explores Husserl's phenomenological description of the constitution of the alter ego within the sphere of transcendental subjectivity. It is important at the start to point out that the Other plays a crucial role in securing the intersubjective nature of the experienced world. Although Husserl goes on in the "Fifth Cartesian Meditation" to consider the constitution of an objective world common to all subjects and the establishment of a community of monads, my primary focus in this paper (...) will be the examination of the initial steps whereby the sense, "other ego," is constituted by the transcendental ego. My main task, then, will be to examine the reduction to the sphere of ownness, the appresentative transfer of sense from ego to alter ego, and the criterion of harmonious behavior. My primary criticisms will center around certain difficulties inherent in the attempt to uncover a primordial sphere of ownness and problems that arise from a shift in concern from the life-world (everyday) attitude to the attitude following the performance of the epoché. Part I of the paper will consist of a general discussion of Husserl's phenomenological project, Part II will be a detailed study of the alter ego, and Part III a general statement of problems and objections. (shrink)

The problem of identity is one of the milestones of philosophical thinking. It is a complex question, a prism with multiple vertices. In this paper I will focus on two key-concepts related to identity, namely, death and community. Death stands as end of life, but as a possibility of it. The ghost "appears", then, in a privileged position for the dialogue and the understanding of this phenomenon. Moreover, as social beings, neither individuals can be separated from the community in which (...) they are registered; nor it is possible to distance the ghosts and functions historically fulfilled in this respect. Throughout the text I will discuss the functions that have been and those that would be of ghosts; understanding ghosts as a referring dialogic and therapeutic constitution of identity. El problema de la identidad constituye uno de los hitos fundamentales de pensamiento filosófico. Es una cuestión compleja, un prisma con múltiples vértices. El presente artículo se centrará en dos hitos fundamentales relacionados con la identidad, a saber: muerte y comunidad. La muerte se sitúa como fin de la vida, pero como posibilidad de la misma. "Aparece", entonces, el fantasma en una posición privilegiada para el diálogo y la comprensión de este fenómeno. Además, en tanto seres sociales los individuos no pueden ser separados de la comunidad en la que se inscriben. Tampoco es posible distanciar a los fantasmas y las funciones cumplidas históricamente en este aspecto. A lo largo del texto se examinarán cuáles han sido y pueden ser estas funciones a cumplir por los fantasmas entendidos como referente dialógico y terapéutico de la constitución de la identidad. (shrink)

Contemporary protest movements are skeptical of mainstream media outlets, and so to communicate, they make extensive use of social media such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. Most research to date has considered how protest movements, as preexistent entities, use such social media to communicate with stakeholders, but little, if any research, has considered how a protest movement is constituted in and through communication. Using the Montreal School’s ventriloquial approach to communication and using YouTube video footage of the gilets jaunes – (...) a contemporary French protest movement – in action, the purpose of this article is to explicate how a protest movement that resists the state’s authority is constituted in and through a textual artifact. Findings indicate that the protest movement is not only discursively constructed through the commentary that accompanies the video, but it is also constituted by non-human actants such as space, buildings and clothing. The protest movement mobilizes networks of human and non-human actants that invoke a moral authority that resists legally authorized state-sponsored networks which are also made up of human and non-human actants. (shrink)

This essay re-examines Hegel's account of Greek culture in the section of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ devoted to “ethical action”. The thrust of this section cannot be adequately grasped, it is argued, by focusing on Hegel's references to either Sophocles' _Antigone_ or Greek tragedy as a whole. Taking into account Hegel's complex use of literary sources, the essay shows in particular that Hegel draws on Aristophanes' comedies to comprehend the collapse of Greek culture, a collapse he considered to result from (...) the tragic conflict constitutive of Greek culture as a whole. The essay thus aims to shed light on Hegel's abstruse remarks on womanhood and, more generally, to demonstrate that Hegel's peculiar employment of literary sources constitutes an essential element of the method he employs throughout the _Phenomenology of Spirit_. (shrink)

Because of a widespread criticism of the Enlightenment sense of reason for its unilateral privileging of unity and its solipsistic conception of the thinking subject, many turn to postmodern difference as a remedy. But an alternative can also be found in a renewed appropriation of the tradition. This essay is an attempt at such an appropriation, through a philosophical analysis of Heraclitus' conception of logos. A new interpretation of Heraclitus is offered, which affirms the equiprimordiality of unity and difference. This (...) view is shown to have implications first of all for the mode of reasoning: thought, in its most genuine sense, cannot be accomplished in isolation but is an essentially joint act. Further, the view has implications for the content or object of thought: the 'seat' of intelligibility is not the abstract idea which the mind assimilates to itself but rather the concrete whole, the complex 'one-many' structure in the world, in which minds constitutively participate. An attempt is made, at the end of the essay, to show how the convergence of form and content, and the concrete sense of rationality it implies, comes to dramatic expression in Heraclitus' style. (shrink)

To stress the subjectivity of the analyst is to accept the centrality of countertransference in the analytic relationship. Psychoanalysts have long recognized the importance of transference in the analytic setting—that is, the analysand's way of relating to the analyst in terms of his strong, ambivalent unconscious feelings for earlier figures , a process whose successful resolution constitutes the psychoanalystic "cure." But, since the patient's transference is only experienced by the analyst through his countertransference responses, recent theorists have come to emphasize (...) the importance of countertransference in psychoanalysis. In what Otto Kernberg calls its "totalistic" definition, countertransference refers to "the total emotional reaction of the psychoanalyst to the patient in the treatment situation."1 It is, therefore, a source of both empathic understanding and defensive misunderstanding, of distortion and insight. Hans Loewald remarks: "Since a psychoanalytic investigation can be carried out only by a human mind, we cannot conceive of one in which the analyst's [counter] transference and resistance are not the warp and woof of his activity."2 · 1. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism , p. 49. · 2. Hans Loewald, "Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 25 : 56. Cf. Heinz Kohut, "Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 : 459-83. For a clear discussion of the background of the countertransference concept in Freud, see Humberto Nagera, et. al., Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on Metapsychology, Conflicts, Anxiety and Other Subjects , pp. 200-206. Two surveys of the literature on the topic are particularly useful: Douglas Orr, "Transference and Countertransference: A Historical Survey," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2 : 621-70, and Kernberg, pp. 49-66. Arthur F. Marotti, associate professor of English at Wayne State University, has written a number of essays on Ben Jonson, John Donne, Thomas Middleton, and Edmund Spenser. He is completing a book-length social-historical and psychoanalytic study of Donne's poetry and a book on Jonson; some of the theoretical assumptions behind both projects are discussed in this article. See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

In the last two centuries, our world would have been a safer place if philosophers such as Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche had not given intellectual encouragement to the radical ideologies of Jacobins, Stalinists, and fascists. Maybe the world would have been better off, from the standpoint of sound practice, if philosophers had engaged in only modest, decent theory, as did John Stuart Mill. Yet, as Ronald Beiner contends, the point of theory is not to think safe thoughts; the point is (...) to open intellectual horizons. In Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, Beiner reflects on the dualism of theory and practice. The purpose of the theorist is not to offer sensible guidance on the conduct of social life but to test the boundaries of our vision of social order. Whereas the liberal citizen should embody the practical virtues of prudence and moderation, the theorist should be radical, probing, and immoderate. Looking back at the liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s, Beiner recognizes that the antidote to our spiritless times lies neither in the embrace of community over individualism nor of individualism over community: both individual and community need to be submitted to radical questioning. It is by exposing ourselves to the challenge of fearless thinking encountered at the philosophical extremities that we are most likely to understand our own world at a deeper level. In this collection of essays and reviews, Ronald Beiner helps us to think critically about the thought-worlds of our foremost contemporary thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, J¦rgen Habermas, Will Kymlicka, Christopher Lasch, Richard Rorty, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer. (shrink)

We are currently witnessing a fundamental structural transformation of the scientific public sphere, characterized by processes of specialization, metrification, internationalization, platformization and visibilization. In contrast to explanations of this structural transformation that invoke a technological determinism, we demonstrate its historical contingency by drawing on analytic concepts from organization theory and the case of the Open Access transformation in Germany. The digitization of academic journals has not broadened access to scientific output but narrowed it down even further in the course of (...) the ‘serials crisis’. For a long time, research institutions were not able to convince large academic publishers to adopt less restrictive forms of access to academic journals. It was only through the emergence of new and in part illegal actors (shadow libraries and preprint servers) that the existing path could be broken, and an Open Access path constituted. Following this analysis, we discuss consequences of the Open Access transformation for the public spheres of science and democracy. We conclude that Open Access publishing can only help to transform both communicative spaces towards the normative ideal of a public sphere when complemented by systematic support for non-profit publication infrastructures. (shrink)

The idea that a simple unilateral promise, until it is accepted, is not binding according to natural law is defended by Grotius in his major work with an argumentation drawn directly from Lessius, an important source of inspiration for the Dutch jurist, who in turn solves the dispute rooted in the tradition of ius commune. This article aims to reconstruct, in its essential stages, an itinerary through the main positions of medieval and early modern civil and canon lawyers about this (...) controversial issue. These sources constitute the background of early modern scholastics and Grotius as well. The paper analyses some of the principal texts of both bodies of law, highlighting arguments and adding new findings. Notably it is shown that Lessius’s and Grotius’s statements represent a turning point, as far as they react against the resumption of the theory of the binding force of simple unilateral promises in the sixteenth century. With Lessius and Grotius, on the other hand, acceptance became a necessary requirement for every transfer of rights and duties to be enforceable. (shrink)

The following examination explores the relationship between ethics, writing, finitude, spacing and sharing as they are presented in Nancy’s ‘The Free Voice of Man’ and ‘The Inoperative Community’ and in Derrida’s ‘Poetics and Politics of Witnessing’ and ‘Rams’. The interconnection between these events of being cannot be easily untangled since each moment is radically implicated with the others, defying both foundation and chronology. We are in a realm in which being must rather be understood as a series of (...) singular ruptures or interruptions that precisely and radically turns away from any sense of grounding or order. The discussion of being that follows is contextualized by the notion that there is a discursively inaccessible imperative to all philosophical discourses that ultimately implicates being in and as writing, finitude and spacing. This project thus exposes the manner in which being is fundamentally intertwined with the exhaustion of the philosophical endeavour. (shrink)

For Charles Peirce, the project of inquiry is a social one. Though inquiry, the passage from genuine doubt to settled belief, can be described on the individual level, its significance as a human activity is manifested in collective action. For any individual, Truth transcends experience and inquiry. But it does not transcend experience and inquiry altogether: is a fixed limit, an ideal, towards which a properly functioning community converges. What, in principle, makes the cohesion of such a community possible? Why (...) did Peirce believe that convergence towards an ultimate conclusion was the necessary end of unlimited scientific inquiry? This essay examines Peirce's notion of community to answer these questions and suggests that the presence of genuine doubt not only makes convergence possible, but also constitutes the starting point for almost all inquiry. The exception is philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Together, the code and inferential models of communication are often thought to range over all cases of communication. However, their prevailing versions seem unable to fully explain what I call underdeterminacy without ostension. The latter is constituted by communication where stimuli that are not (nor appear to be) produced with communicative or informative intentions nevertheless communicate information underdetermined by the relevant codes. Though the prevailing accounts of communication cannot fully explain how communication works in such cases, I suggest that some (...) version of the inferential model can—if we allow it to extend to non‐ostensive, non‐intentional behaviors. (shrink)

By tracing some of the historical and hermeneutical influences of Augustine on Martin Heidegger and his 1927 magnum opus, this article argues that Being and Time has an “Augustinian constitution.” While Heidegger’s philosophical terms are in a certain sense original, many of them have their conceptual origins in Augustine’s Christian thought and in his philosophizing from experience. The article systematically revisits all of Heidegger’s citations of Augustine, which reveals not only the rhetorical influence of Augustine on the organization (...) of Being and Time, but also the fact that the conceptual inspiration of the work and the development of its philosophicalterms are significantly indebted to Augustine. Further, an original synthesis of Heidegger’s methodology with Augustine’s thought on restlessness and conversion is developed in order to demonstrate the philosophical compatibility between Heidegger and Augustine. This synthesis results in what the author considers the foundations for an Augustinian phenomenology. (shrink)

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

There is nowadays consensus in the community of didactics of science regarding the need to include the philosophy of science in didactical research, science teacher education, curriculum design, and the practice of science education in all educational levels. Some authors have identified an ever-increasing use of the concept of ‘theoretical model’, stemming from the so-called semantic view of scientific theories. However, it can be recognised that, in didactics of science, there are over-simplified transpositions of the idea of model. In this (...) sense, contemporary philosophy of science is often blurred or distorted in the science education literature. In this paper, we address the discussion around some meta-theoretical concepts that are introduced into didactics of science due to their perceived educational value. We argue for the existence of a ‘semantic family’, and we characterise four different versions of semantic views existing within the family. In particular, we seek to contribute to establishing a model-based didactics of science mainly supported in this semantic family. (shrink)

In March 2008, the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) has passed an important, even though preliminary, decision concerning data retention. The GFCC’s decision accepts the storage of data, but greatly restricts their use to serious offenses like murder and organized crime. From an ethical point of view, it is particularly interesting to look at the justification given by the GFCC, which relies heavily on the argument that the “impartiality” (Unbefangenheit) of communication will be thoroughly damaged if feelings of being (...) watched spread in a society. This argument is examined in view of two contrasting theoretical approaches: Discourse ethics and evolutionary contractarian theory. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Heidegger affirms that being-with or Mitsein is an essential constitution of Dasein but he does not submit this existential to the same rigorous analyses as other existentials. In this essay, Jean-Luc Nancy points to the different places where Heidegger erased the possibility of thinking an essential with that he himself opened. This erasure is due, according to Nancy, to the subordination of Mitsein to a thinking of the proper and the improper. The polarization (...) of Being-with between an improper face, the Anyone, and a proper one, the people, which is also, as Nancy shows, a polarization between everydayness and historicity, between a being-together in exteriority (indifference and anonymity) and a being-together in interiority (union through destiny), between a solitary dying and the sacrificial death in combat, leaves the essential with unthought. This essay shows not only the tensions that arise out of Heidegger’s own analyses of Mitsein and affect the whole of Being and Time but also underlines in the end a “shortfall in thinking” inherent not only to Heidegger’s work but, as Nancy claims, to our Western tradition, a shortfall which Nancy has attempted to remedy in his Being Singular Plural. (shrink)

The author analyzes the deconstruction of the community carried out by Jean-Luc Nancy. For Nancy, the aim of the community has been historically accomplished by its self-destruction in the “work of death” of totalitarianism. This does not lead him to renounce the notion of community, like Derrida, but to highlight its paradoxical (im-)possibility. This is why Nancy proposes the concept of a “community without community” which would retain only the cum of the communitas, the with of being-with or (...) class='Hi'>being in-common. The author shows that this approach is subject to aporias. Indeed, Nancy wants to base being-with on an ontology of bodily touch. As he considers touching as distancing, displacement, he fails to understand the cum, that is to say the possibility of constituting a community. (shrink)

Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, (...) offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how “political articulation” has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline. (shrink)

Originally the constitution was expected to express and channel popular sovereignty. It was the work of freedom, springing from and facilitating collective self-determination. After the Second World War this perspective changed: the modern constitution owes its authority not only to collective authorship, it also must commit itself credibly to human rights. Thus people recede into the background, and the national constitution becomes embedded into one or other system of 'peer review' among nations.This is what Alexander Somek argues (...) is the creation of the cosmopolitan constitution. Reconstructing what he considers to be the three stages in the development of constitutionalism, he argues that the cosmopolitan constitution is not a blueprint for the constitution beyond the nation state, let alone a constitution of the international community; rather, it stands for constitutional law reaching out beyond its national bounds. This cosmopolitan constitution has two faces: the first, political, face reflects the changed circumstances of constitutional authority. It conceives itself as constrained by international human rights protection, firmly committed to combating discrimination on the grounds of nationality, and to embracing strategies for managing its interaction with other sites of authority, such as the United Nations. The second, administrative, face of the cosmopolitan constitution reveals the demise of political authority, which has been traditionally vested in representative bodies. Political processes yield to various, and often informal, strategies of policy co-ordination so long as there are no reasons to fear that the elementary civil rights might be severely interfered with. It represents constitutional authority for an administered world. (shrink)

In this collection of essays Béatrice Longuenesse considers the three aspects of Kant's philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, his moral philosophy and his aesthetic theory, under one unifying standpoint: Kant's conception of our capacity to form judgements. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world - what Kant calls the 'human point of view' - have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgements. Her discussion ranges (...) over Kant's account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgements, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant and his thought. (shrink)

This paper is an ethical exegesis of the biblical story of Gibeah, which concludes the Book of Judges (19–21), to show the catastrophic failure of the anti-political politics of the “community of virtue”, i.e., the rejection of power for the sake of moral society, such as proposed by libertarians, neo-liberals, anarchists and utopians. I consider Kant’s statement of the political problem: given humanity’s unsocial sociality, where each person is tempted to act as an exception to universal law, humans need rulers, (...) but how to obtain rulers who are not themselves ruled by power, and become tyrannical, rather than being ruled by justice? The solution proposed by “the community of virtue” would reject power altogether and replace it with society regulated exclusively according to the moral virtue of its members. The Bible’s story of Gibeah shows graphically and conclusively the failure of any such attempt. Instead, as with normative political philosophy, the Bible endorses the rule of a king, i.e., the rule of the state, and a politics whereby power is disciplined to serve justice because it is rooted in Torah, i.e., a fundamental covenant, charter or constitution, aware and vigilant regarding the ambiguities and temptations of sovereignty, and therefore, ideally, always open to critique. As exemplified by biblical prophets, political protest against injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the least—widow, orphan, stranger—is at once religious obligation and true patriotism. (shrink)

Since the mid Nineties the impact of virtual technology has rapidly changed the architectural profession. This change has altered even the most mundane normative practice. Also it has drastically altered the nature of the architectural avant-garde. Its direction has progressed from the affected nihilism of the ‘deconstructive’ era of the eighties to paradigms of responsiveness. The basic premise of this work is that objects and events can be made to respond to the specifics of sites, the evolutionary emergent imperative, users (...) and viewers, manufacturing processes and virtual tectonics. This notion gives rise to six fundamental paradigms that responsive architecture with any virtual component must deal with. The impact of virtuality and advanced remote sensing devices should lead architects to reassess Surrealist and Pataphysical concepts of space. There are many similarities between these modes of creativity and the way an architect might perceive, interact and make connections between their architecture and the myriad machinic and natural ecologies that constitute the sites of our contemporary architecture. (shrink)

The exponential digitization of medical data has led to a transformation of the practice of medicine. This change notably raises a new complexity of issues surrounding health IT. The proper use of these communication tools, such as telemedicine, e-health, m-health the big medical data, should improve the quality of monitoring and care of patients for an information system to "human face". Faced with these challenges, the author analyses in an ethical angle the patient-physician relationship, sharing, transmission and storage of medical (...) information, setting pins to an ethic for the digitization of medical information. Drawing on good practice recommendations closely associated with values, this model is developing tools for reflection and present the keys to understanding the decision-making issues that reflect both the technological constraints and the complex nature of human reality in medicine. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas takes the realization of rights through the democratic self-organization of legal communities to be the normative core of emancipatory politics. In this article I explore the implications of this claim in relation to the requirements of justice. I argue that Habermas's discourse theory of democratic legitimacy resupposes a substantive principle of justice that demands the equalization of effective communicative freedom for all structurally constituted social groups in any constitutional state. This involves the elimination of a range of structural (...) injustices rooted in the complex interrelationships between political, economic and cultural orders. In the final section I sketch briefly the implications of this analysis in the context of ongoing globalization processes. It is suggested that the most effective way to establish a just system of global governance is to equalize effective communicative freedom among nation-states. (shrink)

The constitutional subject : singular, plural or universal? -- The constitutional subject and the clash of self and other : on the uses of negation, metaphor, and metonymy -- Reinventing tradition through constitutional interpretation : the case of unenumerated rights in the United States -- Recasting and reorienting identity through constitution-making : the pivotal case of Spain's 1978 Constitution -- Constitutional models : shaping, nurturing, and guiding the constitutional subject -- Models of constitution making -- The constitutional (...) subject and clashing visions of citizenship : can we be beyond what we are not? -- Can the constitutional subject go global? imagining a convergence of the universal, the particular, and the singular. (shrink)

According to the Standard Picture of how law works, the content of the law that is created by legal texts such as statutes and constitutional provisions is determined by the meaning of these texts. Most proponents of this picture claim more specifically that the relevant notion of meaning in play is the communicative content of legal texts and that communicative content is itself determined by considerations of the intentions of legal authorities. In recent years, the Standard Picture has become the (...) subject of heated philosophical debate. Focusing on statutes as the paradigmatic type of legal texts, this thesis aims to contribute to this debate in two central ways. First, it argues that the aforementioned ‘intention-based’ versions of the Standard Picture lack convincing responses to three important objections that have been raised by critics. First, they lack an adequate account of how legislative bodies can be reasonably ascribed the intentions that they would need according to such versions. Second, they fail to explain important aspects of legal practice. Third, they provide at best a parochial theory of the content of the law that is generated by statutes. The second contribution is to provide a more sustained defence of the Standard Picture by developing a new ‘commitment-based’ version of this view. This version is based on an alternative theory of communication and claims that communicative content is not determined by considerations of intentions but rather by the commitments that are incurred by means of communicative acts. It is argued that this version can deal with the objections that have been raised by critics and therefore provides a more robust version of the Standard Picture. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of linguistic content based on the active inference framework. While ecological and enactive theorists have rightly rejected the notion of content as a basis for cognitive processes, they must recognize the important role that it plays in the social regulation of linguistic interaction. According to an influential theory in philosophy of language, normative inferentialism, an utterance has the content that it has in virtue of its normative status, that is, in virtue of the (...) set of commitments and entitlements that the speaker undertakes by producing this utterance. This normative status is determined by the normative attitudes shared by members of the utterer’s linguistic community. I propose here an account of such normative attitudes based on the ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. I explain how social normativity can be understood in that framework as the way in which members of a group shape their social niche to make it more predictable. Finally, I apply this account of social normativity to basic communicative practices, thereby explaining how social normative expectations can emerge to regulate these communicative practices, eventually leading to the institution of the sort of normative statuses constitutive of linguistic content. (shrink)

I experience the world as comprising not only pluralities of individual persons but also interpersonal communal unities – groups, teams, societies, cultures, etc. The world, as experienced or "constituted", is a social world, a “spiritual” world. How are these social communities experienced as communities and distinguished from one another? What does it mean to be a “community”? And how do I constitute myself as a member of some communities but not of others? Moreover, the world of experience is not (...) constituted by me alone, nor am I myself the final arbiter of what is true or false about it, of what is good or bad about it, etc. Constitution is an intersubjective achievement: “we” – I with others – constitute the world. Thus, the world is not only constituted as including interpersonal communal unities, but it is also constituted by these communities: groups, teams, societies, cultures, etc. are themselves "we-subjects”, Husserl says, communally constituting the world of their common engagement. But what is communal, as opposed to individual, constitution and how is it achieved? And what sense is to be made of the notion of plural, collective, "we-subjects", communally constituting a common world? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 81 CAUSATION: A PREMATURELY DEPOSED MONARCH? Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa stratof{[email protected] Huw Price and Richard Corry, eds. Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited. Oxford: Clarendon P.; New York: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. x, 403. isbn: 978-0-19-927819-0. £58 (hb); £19.99 (pb.). us$35 (pb). In 1911 the Aristotelian Society elected Bertrand (...) Russell its president, and in November of 1912 Russell’s presidential address to the Society was “On the Notion of Cause”, which, in addition to being published in the Society’s Proceedings, was later included in Russell’s book Mysticism and Logic. Russell’s address to the Aristotelian Society occurred during an interesting, brief era in the history of physics. This was a stage after the science of gravitational astronomy had beneWted from the use of diTerential equations but before the British physics community was aware of the German physicists’ advances. Less than three years after Russell delivered “On the Notion of Cause”, Einstein revolutionized the Weld of gravitational astronomy; and the quantum physicists were to eventually unearth phenomena that proved to be especially recalcitrant to comprehensive mathematical analysis. At the time of “On the Notion of Cause”, though, physics was understood as providing a thorough account of all the phenomena within its domain. In this address, Russell speaks of how Certain diTerential equations can be found, which hold at every instant for every particle of the system, and which, given the conWguration and velocities at one instant, or the conWgurations at two instants, render the conWguration at any other earlier or later instant theoretically calculable. … This statement holds throughout physics, and not only in the special case of gravitation. But there is nothing that could be properly called “cause” and nothing that could be properly called “eVect” in such a system.… [T]here is merely a formula. (ML, p. 194, Papers 6: 202; my emphasis) Russell further remarked: All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word ‘cause’ never occurs…. To me it seems that … the reason September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 82 Reviews why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such things. The law of causality, … like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (ML, p. 180; Papers 6: 193). What Russell has in mind here when saying “in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word ‘cause’ never occurs” is that it is rash to infer from the observation of particular uniformities that there necessarily is a legitimate apriori category of causality (ML, p. 205; Papers 6: 209). Rather, “the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed in science” (ML, p. 207; Papersz 6: 210). Huw Price and Richard Corry’s Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisitedz features thirteen chapters from diTerent contributors (except for Huw Price who authors one and co-authors another) who address diTerent aspects of this matter. Price and Corry explain: One key theme of the volume turns on the possibility that in presenting philosophy with a stark choice between Wnding causation in physics and rejecting it altogether, Russell missed an important range of intermediate views. In particular, he missed what, by a natural extension of his own constitutional analogy, we may call the republican option. In the political case, rejecting the view that political authority is vested in our rulers by God leaves us with two choices: we may reject the notion of political authority altogether ; or we may regard it, with republicans, as invested in our rulers by us. Arguably, the republican option exists in metaphysics, too. Causal republicanism is thus the view that although the notion of causation is useful, perhaps indispensable, in our dealings with... (shrink)

Punishment and restitution are usually viewed as separate paradigms of criminal justice. However, in this dissertation I suggest that a practice of legal punishment can be justified in the context of a criminal justice system based exclusively on the criminal's obligation to make restitution for the losses he has wrongfully inflicted on others. My strategy is to show first that those who commit crimes bring about a significant loss for the members of their community in addition to harming the immediate (...) victims of their crimes, and second, that a practice of legal punishment constitutes a means by which criminals can make restitution to the members of the community for this loss. I suggest, then, that the members of the community are morally justified in instituting a practice of legal punishment in order to exact restitution for the loss they suffer as a result of criminal violations. ;The dissertation provides a reasonably systematic development of a restitutive theory of punishment. I begin by critically examining the major approaches that have been taken to the justification of punishment in order to provide some preliminary justification for taking a particular approach to this issue. I then outline a conception of justice that forms the basis of the theory of punishment I suggest. The central chapter contains an analysis of the different types of losses that result from criminal violations and a moral argument that justifies requiring criminals to make restitution for all of these losses. I also argue that given certain conditions, legal punishment constitutes a legitimate means by which the members of the community can exact restitution for the loss they have suffered. In the remainder of the dissertation I show that a restitutive theory of punishment both captures and illuminates much of the retributivist position, and I work out several of the specific implications of this analysis for the way in which a practice of legal punishment ought to be articulated. (shrink)