Ulrich Steinvorth ('Marx's Analysis of Commodity Exchange?, Inquiry, Vol. 19 [1976]) and C. J. Arthur ('Labour: Marx's Concrete Universal?, Inquiry, Vol. 21 [1978]) rely on the two?fold character of labour in arguing that the mysteries of money and profit have been correctly interpreted by Marx. However, Marx's own arguments for his distinction between abstract and concrete labour are faulty, as is his identification of labour and material products. They also claim that the exchange of (...) commodities and distribution of resources in capitalist society validate Marx's theory that the determination of value by labour?time is the ?secret? behind capitalist crises. These claims are insufficiently justified, and provide no additional reason for accepting the two?fold character of labour. (shrink)

This paper is about non-fictional objects in fictions and their role as narrators. Two central claims are advanced. In part 1 it is argued that non-fictional objects such as you and me can be part of fictions. This commonsensical idea is elaborated and defended against objections. Building on it, it is argued in part 2 that non-fictional objects can be characters and narrators in fictional narratives. As a consequence, three fundamental and popular claims concerning narrators are rejected. In particular, it (...) is shown that some fictional narratives have non-fictional internal narrators, some have no internal fictional narrator, and, most controversially, that the author of a fictional narrative can be identical to its internal narrator. (shrink)

Researchers working on children's moral understanding maintain that the child's capacity to distinguish morality from convention shows that children regard moral violations as objectively wrong. Education in the moral domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, one traditional way to cast the issue of objectivism is to focus not on conventionality, but on whether moral properties depend on our responses, as with properties like icky and fun. This paper argues that the moral/conventional task is inadequate for assessing whether children regard moral (...) properties as response-dependent. Unfortunately, children's understanding of response-dependent properties has been neglected in recent research. Two experiments are reported showing that children are more likely to treat properties like fun and icky as response-dependent than moral properties like good and bad. Hence, this helps support the claim that children are moral objectivists. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 209-240.

Within the Gricean framework in pragmatics, communication is understood as an inferential activity. Other approaches to the study of linguistic communication have contended that language is argumentative in some essential sense. My aim is to study the question of whether and how the practices of inferring and arguing can be taken to contribute to meaning in linguistic communication. I shall suggest a two-fold hypothesis. First, what makes of communication an inferential activity is given with its calculability, i.e. with the (...) possibility to rationally recover the assigned meaning by means of an explicit inference. Secondly, the normative positions that we recognize and assign each other with our speech acts comprise obligations and rights of a dialectical character; but this fact does not entail nor presuppose an argumentative nature in language or speech. Both inferring and arguing are needed, however, in the activity of justifying and assessing our speech acts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Road to RedemptionAnonymous TwoI “am Dr X.* and I am a trained and board certified neonatologist with some years of experience in a high volume NICU with complex pathologies. I have been dismissed from the care of your baby by the fetal surgeon who is not trained in what he’s attempting to do,” that was how I felt when I left the operating room (OR), after performing initial (...) resuscitation on a newborn with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) with very poor prenatal prognostic indices. CDH is a diaphragm abnormality that allows abdominal organs to move into the chest and restrict lung development. The better part of me knew not to make such a statement and chose not to do so, as this was about the family and a very sick baby, not the professional wrangling of two medical teams or the expression of frustration by a neonatologist who was morally conflicted.I work in a level four Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and a very large one by any standard. Staff turnover had been an almost nonexistent issue in previous years because of the very conducive work environment of the NICU. Every team member (physician, nurse, respiratory therapist, pharmacist, etc.) felt like a stakeholder in providing optimal outcomes for the vulnerable neonates in the NICU.As change is the only constant thing in life, the hospital management decided to explore new frontiers and open a center for fetal medicine, with the hope of being a referral center in the region. They brought in a surgeon who came highly recommended for clinical acumen, but not for interpersonal relationship skills (unbeknownst to me). This surgeon, Dr Y., was hired to oversee the fetal center and build it into a center of excellence. Since this had to be a collaborative effort, other specialties (and subspecialties) had to be involved to make this a success. A representative from each of these specialties, including bioethics, was assigned to the fetal center team.The first inkling of a major problem occurred with the very first patient. The team met for the weekly meeting, reviewed the patient’s history and made a tentative plan, which included multidisciplinary counseling. This would require either a joint meeting with the patient or individual consults with the patient at her convenience. The following week at the weekly meeting, Dr Y. informed the group that he had met with the patient and counseled her and she had agreed to an extraordinary procedure for an oral lesion. In my opinion (and that of others), this lesion was not obstructive and could be immediately dealt with at delivery by an Otolaryngologist (ENT) surgeon, without putting the mother at risk for complications arising from the procedure being offered. There was a long discussion about why this was inappropriate [End Page E1] and why further imaging, discussion between the subspecialties and counseling should have been done prior to making this delivery plan. All felt this delivery plan could be remedied prior to delivery. However the surgeon had made plans with the obstetric team (who were at his mercy for financial/ political reasons) to continue with this plan. On the day of delivery, the NICU resuscitation team was called to another operating room instead of the labor and delivery room. I was even more appalled when I realized that the oral lesion was the size of a peanut! I felt like I failed in my obligation of veracity by avoiding the mother’s questions regarding the necessity of the procedure. Every member of my team felt the same and on several occasions I had to reassure concerned nurses that this was an aberrant occurrence that would not repeat itself... so I thought.I informed my departmental chairperson, Dr Z., who had a conversation with the fetal surgeon, Dr. Y., to inform him of my concerns and the effect of Dr. Y.’s actions on my group (physician, nurse practitioner, nurses). This led to being labeled unsupportive of Dr Y.’s goals and caused a less than cordial relationship towards me and the entire NICU group. The next week a picture of Dr Y. and the parents with the baby was on the front page... (shrink)

In a letter to Engels (24 August 1867), Marx says that the best of his book (Capital) are (i) the “dual character of the labour embodied in commodities” and (ii) the surplus value theory. Marx's vindication of first point is the subject of the present article.1 We contend that the « dual character of the labour embodied in commodities » is a fundamental and specific property of a commodity society. Marx is right when he calls our (...) attention to it...... (shrink)

We claim the climate crisis is the proper baseline for establishing the terms of debate about the viability of a post-work future. In this paper, we aim to assess the viability of a post-work future in which automation replaces a significant portion of human labor. We do this by laying out the possible outcomes of what such a future will look like based on three related axes: technological capacity, politics and social distribution, and alternative conceptions of the good. The purpose (...) in tracking these outcomes is to have a clear picture of those outcomes we should be pursuing in contrast to those we ought to avoid. Put another way, to achieve a post-work future that is egalitarian in character will require ensuring that technological capacity is used to improve the prospects for all humanity. The argument proceeds along the following lines. First, we summarize the scientific consensus about the causes and consequences of climate change, as well as the tools of mitigation and adaptation it recommends. The causes are primarily rooted in the global system of production and consumption that has developed over the last century. We refer to this pattern of development as the “Growth Model” since it primarily relies on energy created from burning fossil fuels and the exponential consumption of resources to promote more growth (Rose 2020). Second, we construct a range of possible outcomes regarding the climate crisis that are based on different trajectories of development. We do so by examining each of two cases located on the poles of three different axes. These axes include technology, political organization and social distribution, and conceptions of the good, yielding eight possible outcomes. The point of considering these cases and how they intersect along these axes is two-fold: to clarify the features that define them and compare their merits and drawbacks, enabling us to formulate the means for avoiding some outcomes and strive for others. Third, we then consider the viability of a post-work future in terms of these outcomes. Some of these outcomes point in a direction where automation replaces labor, and its benefits are shared widely. Others indicate a future in which some groups benefit at the expense of others, while some appear to preclude the emergence of such a future altogether. Finally, we conclude with some observations about the viability of a post-work future given our evaluation of these outcomes. (shrink)

This essay centres on the English translation of Georg Lukács’s Tailism and the Dialectic. Lukács is generally heralded as a founding theoretician of a ‘Western Marxism’, in opposition to ‘Eastern’ Soviet Marxism, and his most impressive and most influential work, History and Class Consciousness, is generally treated as having rehabilitated Marxist concern with questions of subjectivity. It might therefore come as a surprise when Lukács in Tailism states that the purpose of History and Class Consciousness was to demonstrate ‘that the (...) organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism’. In my view, however, this should already be abundantly clear from History and Class Consciousness. For Lukács’s absorption with proletarian subjectivity was motivated by an obsession with what he saw as its immaturity. And he coined the category of ‘reification’ in order to explain his disappointed expectations, to explain, that is, why the proletariat did not make a ‘socialist’ revolution in the ‘objectively ripe’ situation of an ‘imperialist war’ created by ‘moribund capitalism’. In short, Lukács did raise anew the question of the subjective, but only to then declare that workers, not even ‘the most revolutionary among them’, could never attain proper class consciousness, which he attributed instead to the ‘revolutionary party’ bearing the properly revolutionary theory. For this reason I agree with Slavoj Žižek’s characterisation of Lukács as the ‘ultimate philosopher [my emphasis] of Leninism’ – although I do think that Lenin himself would have found, as he did in connection with one of Lukács’s other works, Marxism ‘present only at a verbal level’. My concern is two-fold: with a critique of the methodological short-cuts that Lukács made in his purely conceptual derivation of the concept of reification, and his purely conceptual attribution of it as the necessary form of working-class consciousness ‘in its immediacy’; and with the dangerous political consequences that Lukács derived from his assessment of the reified character of working-class subjectivity, mainly a theoretical guarantee that the party with the proper revolutionary theory must always be right, or at least more right than anyone else. (shrink)

This article focuses on emotions, conceptualised as emotional labour, evoked during data practices used to repurpose and enable healthcare data journeys for Finnish public healthcare. Combined approaches from critical data studies and the sociology of emotions were used to contribute to a better understanding of the mundane but often invisible work of the emotions of experts involved in data practices, such as facilitating data journeys and building data technologies. The article is based on a two-and-a-half-year ethnographic study conducted in (...) a Finnish regional public healthcare and social service organisation. The study results were derived from the analysis of 39 interviews and fieldnotes produced by observing 170 h of various meetings, events and work activities performed by experts. The results were organised into three forms of observed experts’ emotional labour related to three phases of healthcare data journeys: caring for data production and preparing data for travel, managing excitement and frustration in data processing for continually building the data management system, and reassuring users in making sense of obtained data analytics. The results contribute to a greater understanding of the emotions and emotional labour generated by healthcare data journeys and in relation to the volatile nature of healthcare data and the collaborative character of data practices. This work advocates for a better recognition of the emotional aspects of data practices and their implications on data-based knowledge and datafication processes in healthcare. (shrink)

In this article, the master-servant figure in the Phenomenology of Spirit is analyzed against the background of Hegel’s ontology of life as an embodied process. It is therefore argued that the theme of this figure is the question of domination in general, understood as a social relationship of subjection that can take on different historical configurations. Domination is understood as a relationship of disparity of status between dominant and dominated subjects. Therefore, domination would have an intersubjective aspect, as constituted by (...) asymmetric relations of recognition, and a material one, as this disparity in recognitive status enacts the extraction of physical and symbolic resources from subordinated subjects. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is three-fold: first, to argue that Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s state-of-mind has implications for a Heideggarian understanding of social atmosphere or “mood,” itself understood as the domain in which we realize our meaningful attachment to the world; second, to link Heidegger’s account of Dasein to sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s analysis of affective labour in order to underscore Hochschild’s critique of affective labour by showing it to occur at the very site of our (...) free and meaningful involvement in the world; third, to demonstrate the relevance of Heidegger’s analysis to concrete sociological analysis. I begin by arguing that Heidegger’s existential account of affective life reveals affective life as: an accomplished attachment to worldly specificities, grounded on socially constituted significance, and our responsibility. Second, showing Hochschild’s account of emotions to be compatible with Heidegger’s work, I consider Hochschild’s analysis of airline stewardesses, clarifying how the affective lives of individuals and the shared, public dimension of affective life are both undermined by affective labour, specifically in terms of the way that communicative interactions are manipulated in commercial settings. Resulting from the manipulation of affective life by companies are various challenges to our freedom: an inability to find meaningful projects; a lack of substantial measures in terms of which to choose our projects; and the inability to recognize such choices as constitutive of affective life and as our responsibility. Connecting these consequences to the three aspects of affective life noted above, it is concluded that affective labour threatens the inherently social character of freedom and also suppresses and inhibits the existential involvement in the world through which we realize meaningfully our freedom. (shrink)

This chapter explores Nagel’s polemics. It shows these have a two-fold character: (i) to defend liberal civilization against all kinds of enemies. And (ii) to defend what he calls ‘contextual naturalism.’ And the chapter shows that (i-ii) reinforce each other and undermine alternative political and philosophical programs. The chapter’s argument responds to an influential argument by George Reisch that Nagel’s professional stance represents a kind of disciplinary retreat from politics. In order to respond to Reisch the relationship between (...) Nagel’s philosophy of science and his politics is explored and this chapter shows how both are anchored in what Nagel once called his ‘contextual naturalism’—a metaphysics that resists imposing the unity of the world and treats all entities as embedded in a wider network of entities. Part of the argument traces out how Nagel’s views on responsible speech and professionalism reflect a distinct understanding of the political role of philosophers of science. (shrink)

The two-fold image as Dostoevsky’s creative principle has been repeatedly observed and described from different perspectives in accordance with different research tasks. In this article, attention will be focused on the description of the two-fold image, its structure and functions, by Dostoevsky himself within the framework of his reflection on his creative method, as part of what can be called his own theory of creativity. In 1876, Dostoevsky describes the structure of a two-fold image from three different (...) angles on three occasions over a short period of time: from the point of view of the structure as such; from the point of view of its manifestation and revelation in a work of fiction; from the point of view of its application as a working construct in a particular case for a particular person. Dostoevsky understands the two-fold image as a profound insight about the world and man, a fundamental philosophy of personality that provides the reader with clues to a personal transformation. At the same time, he always speaks about the second component of the image absolutely transparently to himself—but covertly to the reader, assuming that it is the enigmatic nature of its deep core that compels the reader to look at and listen to the implicit concept, making the image a working, transforming tool. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.2 (2001) 3-8 [Access article in PDF] The Two Secrets of the Fetish Jean-Luc Nancy "Commodity fetishism": Marx's formula has been imprinted on the largest and most resistant of cultural memories. It has become almost anonymous, or rather synonymous with Marx's very name, as is the case with certain coined terms(cogito, categorical imperative...). This privilege could only be due to a very particular virtue. Such a virtue is (...) that which not only consists in characterizing, in the strict sense of the word (to typify a property or an essence), but even in characterizing in such a way that the character (the stamp, the seal) is somehow inscribed on the thing itself and can no longer be detached from it, or at least without some loss in the substance of the thing.In Kantian terms: the intuition presented under the word "fetishism" is printed or traced indelibly onto the concept of "commodity," giving rise to a schema "commodity," from which a new image, and thus a new idea, ensues. Not just the commodity as the fetish—as if this were one of its traits or one approach among others—but rather the essence of the commodity revealed as fetish, so that the fetish character would remain once the approach was shifted or the "secret" of its "mystical character" was revealed. (As we know, these are all Marx's own terms.)As is also known, the secret consists in that the commodity value (or exchange value) of the object (or product), which seems to be its intrinsic or immanent property (parallel in this way to its use value, which is extrinsic and completely relative to its utilization in a given sociotechnical context) only covers, masks or represses the origin of its pure or absolute value—this last value being nothing other than the living human labor of the producer, which the act of production incorporates into the product. But the commodity value deflects this incorporated creative life toward equivalence within an exchange, where the producer (the worker) finds himself surreptitiously stripped of the part of the value that the mercantile calculation does not exchange for the maintenance of its labor force, but rather sets to the account of capital. * * * Here we are not concerned with addressing the problems associated with the evaluation or the appreciation of living work as it is related to the intensification or the very creation of value ("the surplus-value"), nor with respect to the extortion suffered by the creator of value (the valuable and value-making man, the living man as maker, as giver of prices in an absolute fashion) to the benefit of the one who accumulates value in the form of general equivalence, creating mercantile prices through a common currency. Currency is the fetish, where fetishism is fixed: belief in the value of the market price itself. The critique of political economy—that is, the critique of the economy as politics—reveals the inanity of this belief, and if this critique cannot measure the hidden and mysticized or mystified value in monetary terms, the principle of this critique remains [End Page 3] no less, but even more so, the incommensurability of the value creator and the marketed product.Alienation is not measurable. It is at the same time the principle of the critique and its impasse from the moment that we would like to, and indeed that we should, oppose one measure to another: the critical measure of the fetish against the mercantile measure through the fetish.In contrast, what we would like to sketch out here would have the following hypothesis as a point of departure: does not the strength of Marx's formula derive from a power other than that of the only critique thus broached? Is there not another energy, and another enigma, slipped into the first, adding itself to the revelation of the secret, even exceeding this revelation and perhaps in this fashion displacing just a bit the secret itself (precisely because it is not measurable)?This other power would derive from "fetishism" itself. That is to say... (shrink)

Throughout Western history there have been two sharply differentiated beliefs about the character of creativity. However, one of these beliefs—Judaeo-Christian and neo-Platonic—has occupied such a dominant position that the very existence of the other has been obscured and ignored. Yet the evidence for this second belief is no less extensive or vivid. It has never been formulated in the same way as the first and so has never constituted a tradition as such; yet it has existed over as long (...) a period of time and can therefore be called a tradition. Moreover, this second belief seems to bear a closer relation to the character of creativity displayed by people regarded as ‘creative’, as well as to what we have learnt about creativity in this century from psychologists. Attitudes to creativity in the modern period have generally been based on the first tradition, but the activities of creative people have borne out the validity of the second tradition. The attitudes, in other words, have been based on false expectations. To recover the lost tradition, therefore, may enable us to see more accurately what we may or may not achieve by being creative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive UtopianismAntonis Balasopoulos (bio)It is well known that the decline of programmatic or so-called blueprint utopias and utopianism came on the heels of a widespread and concerted attack against them during the first two decades of the Cold War. In the writings of thinkers like Hayek, Popper, Talmon, Kolakowski, and many others, program became synonymous with hubris.1 It was construed as (...) a dangerous effort to regulate the diversity of human subjectivity and the complexity of the social organism, a repressive will-to-order and predictability that tainted utopias by associating them with Totalitarianism. In Popper’s exemplary exposition:The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint for society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship. [...] [Utopia] claims to plan rationally for the whole of society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitious claim.2 [End Page 489]Yet, though this view of how Utopia, to recall Robert C. Elliott, became “a bad word,” is accurate in itself, it also reflects only the negative or destructive side of Cold War anti-utopianism, a trend whose logical inconsistencies and ideological biases have already been ably dissected in the work of Russell Jacoby, Marc Olssen, and Darren Webb, to name but a few.3What one could term the “positive” or “productive” side of anti-utopian denunciations of the dogmatically programmatic character allegedly inherent in utopias went well beyond the exigencies of generating a geopolitical and ideological enemy image. It involved an effort to reconcile western subjects to seismic and highly consequential shifts within postwar, late-capitalist societies themselves. If, as I have argued elsewhere, utopian fictions (and, indeed, nonfictions) before the Cold War period can be read as fictions of organization—of everything from architecture and urban planning, to production, sexuality and biological reproduction, clothing, or diet—it is also the case that in them, “organization” is a response, a reaction to traumatic historical experiences of disorganization, from the decline of the ancient city-state in the case of Platonic utopianism; to the impoverishment and dislocation of rural communities in the era of Thomas More; to the experience of the fracturing of religious community during the religious, civil, and international wars that marked the seventeenth century; to the dramatic impact of early nineteenth-century industrialization on artisanal and agrarian communities, on family cohesion and on the rhythms of the premodern working day.4My argument is, then, that the anti-utopian denunciation of blueprint and program was not simply motivated by the liberal capitalist attack against the planned and highly regulated character of economy and society in the countries of so-called actually existing socialism. It was also motivated by the ideological need to normalize and legitimize the transition, within western capitalist societies themselves, to what Scott Lash and John Urry called “disorganized capitalism.” Lash and Urry’s book, originally published during the decade of the triumphant rise of neoliberalism, in 1987, launches its investigation by tellingly quoting the passage of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto that focuses on the creatively destructive aspects of capitalist social transformation: the bourgeoisie, Lash and Urry observe, is a class “with vested interest in change, crisis and chaos”; the social world over which it presides is one “which swings wildly out of control, menacing and destructive.”5 In their introduction, the authors outline the basic features of the postwar shift from the organized capitalism of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its disarticulated successor formation during the rise of [End Page 490] neoliberal governance. Under the rubric of “disorganization” (which is to say, of a mutation within the western capitalist economic and social order), they include de-industrialization and the decline in the absolute and relative size of the working class in the core capitalist economies; the rise of flexible forms of labor organization in the place of defunct Taylorist principles; the weakening of trade unionist organization; the increasing decoupling of large monopolies from the control and regulation... (shrink)

The arithmetical -- Tripartite city, tripartite soul -- The one, the two, and the three -- The arithmetical character of Kallipolis -- Eros -- Intimations of Eros -- The three waves -- Kallipolis v. The republic -- Democracy, psychology, poetry -- Democracy -- Narrative psychology -- Psychological narrative -- Appendix -- The meaning of "dialectical" -- The technical meaning of "dialectic" -- The non-technical of "dialectic" -- Dialectic in The republic.

This study provides an overview of the different forms of labor contracting in the Philippines, as found in the “formal” economy, i.e., the traditional sectors of Agriculture, Industry, and Services, as well as the “informal” or gig economy. It also discusses similarities and differences between the “formal” and “informal” economy, as well as the increasing precarity of labor contracting, regardless of industry sector and the nature of work. The paper concludes with recommendations to address the precariousness and inequality of labor (...) contracting within the immediate future. (shrink)

I propose a solution to a problem raised by E.G. West’s paper “Adam Smith’s Two Views on the Division of Labour.” Smith seems committed to the views that the division of labour makes people more and less intelligent.

This chapter explores Nagel’s polemics. It shows these have a two-fold character: to defend liberal civilization against all kinds of enemies. And to defend what he calls ‘contextual naturalism.’ And the chapter shows that reinforce each other and undermine alternative political and philosophical programs. The chapter’s argument responds to an influential argument by George Reisch that Nagel’s professional stance represents a kind of disciplinary retreat from politics. In order to respond to Reisch the relationship between Nagel’s philosophy of (...) science and his politics is explored and this chapter shows how both are anchored in what Nagel once called his ‘contextual naturalism’—a metaphysics that resists imposing the unity of the world and treats all entities as embedded in a wider network of entities. Part of the argument traces out how Nagel’s views on responsible speech and professionalism reflect a distinct understanding of the political role of philosophers of science. (shrink)

Above mentioned article was funded by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF).

The present contribution defends that remittances should be taken into account and integrated into an ethical framework on migration. This main thesis is two-fold. First, we argue that if a normative approach to migration is to claim practical relevance, it should integrate remittances as a relevant empirical parameter into an ethical framework. The empirical assessment of the scientific evidence available on remittances therefore proves to be extremely important. Secondly, assuming that remittances have to be taken seriously, we consider their (...) positive and negative impacts against two backgrounds. First, we emphasize the increased autonomy of persons who pull themselves and their dependents out of economic hardship. Second, affluent states who enable this process through their labor legislation contribute to the fulfillment of their duty of assistance. In this respect, our thesis is to claim that remittances should be considered as an amplifying factor for normative arguments in favor of a liberalization of labor migration. Remittances stand for a liberal way of fulfilling a responsibility to help, namely through the elimination of obstacles which in turn allow people to support themselves and lead an autonomous life. (shrink)

The question of the division of cognitive labor has given rise to various models characterizing the way scientists should distribute their efforts. These models often consider the scientific community as a self-governed sphere constituted by rational agents making choices on the basis of fixed rules. Such models have recently been criticized for not taking into account the real mechanisms of science funding. Hence, the question of the utility of the DCL models in guiding science policy remains an open one. In (...) this paper, we show that two unconsidered dimensions would have to be taken into account. First, DCL studies miss the existence of distinct levels of epistemic objectives organizing the research process. Indeed, the scientific field is structured as a system of hierarchical, interconnected practices which are defined both by their inherent purposes and by various superposed external functions. Second, I criticize the absence of ontological considerations, since the epistemological significance of pluralism is highly dependent on the nature of the object under study. Because of these missing dimensions, current DCL models might have a limited usefulness to identify good practices of research governance. (shrink)

The present contribution defends that remittances should be taken into account and integrated into an ethical framework on migration. This main thesis is two-fold. First, we argue that if a normative approach to migration is to claim practical relevance, it should integrate remittances as a relevant empirical parameter into an ethical framework. The empirical assessment of the scientific evidence available on remittances therefore proves to be extremely important. Secondly, assuming that remittances have to be taken seriously, we consider their (...) positive and negative impacts against two backgrounds. First, we emphasize the increased autonomy of persons who pull themselves and their dependents out of economic hardship. Second, affluent states who enable this process through their labor legislation contribute to the fulfillment of their duty of assistance. In this respect, our thesis is to claim that remittances should be considered as an amplifying factor for normative arguments in favor of a liberalization of labor migration. Remittances stand for a liberal way of fulfilling a responsibility to help, namely through the elimination of obstacles which in turn allow people to support themselves and lead an autonomous life. (shrink)

I examine Bernard Lonergan's approach to the problem of evil. I look to determine whether his solution, which is based on the conjugate forms of faith, hope, and charity, and culminates in a heuristic where forgiveness plays an essential role in moving beyond the problem of evil is adequate. I examine the distinction between basic sin, moral evil, and physical evil as well as his claim that from the viewpoint of the unrestricted act of understanding the non-systematic vanishes.

The question of the division of cognitive labor has given rise to various models characterizing the way scientists should distribute their efforts. These models often consider the scientific community as a self-governed sphere constituted by rational agents making choices on the basis of fixed rules. Such models have recently been criticized for not taking into account the real mechanisms of science funding. Hence, the question of the utility of the DCL models in guiding science policy remains an open one. In (...) this paper, we show that two unconsidered dimensions would have to be taken into account. First, DCL studies miss the existence of distinct levels of epistemic objectives organizing the research process. Indeed, the scientific field is structured as a system of hierarchical, interconnected practices which are defined both by their inherent purposes and by various superposed external functions. Second, I criticize the absence of ontological considerations, since the epistemological significance of pluralism is highly dependent on the nature of the object under study. Because of these missing dimensions, current DCL models might have a limited usefulness to identify good practices of research governance. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the sophistic method of "two-fold arguments" (antilogic). The traditional understanding of antilogic understood as an expression of agonistic and eristic tendencies of the sophists has been in recent decades, under the influence of G.B. Kerferd, replaced by the understanding of antilogic as an independent argumentative technique, having its own sources, essence, and goals. Following the interpretation of G.B. Kerferd, according to which the foundation of the antilogic is the opposition of two logoi resulting from (...) contradictions or opposites, necessarily associated with the contradictory character of the sensual world, in the paper it is argued that the philosophical basis of antilogic should be sought in the presentation of the views attributed to Protagoras and "adherents of flux" in Plato's dialogue Theaetetus. (shrink)

The present contribution defends that remittances should be taken into account and integrated into an ethical framework on migration. This main thesis is two-fold. First, we argue that if a normative approach to migration is to claim practical relevance, it should integrate remittances as a relevant empirical parameter into an ethical framework. The empirical assessment of the scientific evidence available on remittances therefore proves to be extremely important. Secondly, assuming that remittances have to be taken seriously, we consider their (...) positive and negative impacts against two backgrounds. First, we emphasize the increased autonomy of persons who pull themselves and their dependents out of economic hardship. Second, affluent states who enable this process through their labor legislation contribute to the fulfillment of their duty of assistance. In this respect, our thesis is to claim that remittances should be considered as an amplifying factor for normative arguments in favor of a liberalization of labor migration. Remittances stand for a liberal way of fulfilling a responsibility to help, namely through the elimination of obstacles which in turn allow people to support themselves and lead an autonomous life. (shrink)

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion that constitutes the (...) ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other. (shrink)

This paper develops and critiques the two-dimensionalist account of mental content developed by David Chalmers. I first explain Chalmers's account and show that it resists some popular criticisms. I then argue that the main interest of two-dimensionalism lies in its accounts of cognitive significance and of the connection between conceivability and possibility. These accounts hinge on the claim that some thoughts have a primary intension that is necessarily true. In this respect, they are Carnapian, and subject to broadly Quinean attack. (...) The remainder of the paper advances such an attack. I argue that there are possible thinkers who are willing to revise their beliefs in response to expert testimony, and that such thinkers will have no thoughts with necessary primary intensions. I even suggest that many actual humans may well be such thinkers. I go on to argue that these possible thinkers show that the two-dimensionalist accounts fail. (shrink)

The Character of Mind provides a sweeping and accessible general introduction to the philosophy of mind. Colin McGinn covers all of the main topics--the mind-body problem, the nature of acquaintance, the relation between thought and language, agency, and the self.In particular, McGinn addresses the issue of consciousness, and the difficulty of combining the two very different perspectives on the mind that arise from introspection and from the observation of other people. This second edition has been updated with three new (...) cutting-edge chapters on consciousness, content, and cognitive science to make it the reader of choice on this vital topic. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Dialectic of Praxis -- I. Philosophy of Subjectivity and -- Historical Materialism 7 -- A. What is the "Toposical Tachiba"? 7 -- B. The Present and Past of Umemoto's Theory of Subjectivity 17 -- C. The Basis and Structure of Degeneration 36 -- II. Confused 'Dialectic of the Subject of Cognition' 48 -- A. Destruction of the Logic of Origo 48 -- 1. Summary of Umemoto's Epistemology 49 -- 2. Umemoto's Defect in Epistemology 56 -- 3. (...) Reversed Hegelianism 60 -- B. Objective Cognition and the Logic of Self-Awareness 68 -- 1. Ontology and Epistemology 68 -- 2. Negation of "Two Circular Structures" 76 -- 3. Objective Cognition and Value Consciousness 82 -- C. Evaporation of Praxiology 89 -- 1. Alienation and Self-Awareness 89 -- 2. Objectivization of Praxis 96 -- 3. Strained Interpretation of Uno's Theory 99 -- 4. Political Economy, Materialist Outlook of History, -- and Praxiology 107 -- 5. A Domain Proper to the Theory of -- Revolutionizing Praxis 116 -- III. Defects in Criticism of Uno's Economics 131 -- A. Problem Awareness 132 -- B. Fall into a "View that the Principles are Lost -- in the Historical Process" 137 -- C. Historicistic Remedy for the Theory of the -- Circulation Form 155 -- 1. Beautification of a Distorting Tendency to -- Emphasize the Circulation Form 156 -- 2. Complementation of the 'Theory of Form -- without the Logic of Substance' 169 -- 3. On the Trans-Historicization of the -- 'Dual Character of Labour' 178 -- IV. Political Economy and -- Materialist Outlook of History 195 -- A. 'Anatomy of Bourgeois Society' and -- 'Anatomy of History' 195 -- B. Consolidation with Reversed Hegelianism 202 -- C. 'Logic of Circularity' and 'Logic of History' 218 -- V, Political Economy and the -- Logic of Revolutionization 231 -- A. Defects in the Understanding of Political Economy 232 -- B. Distortion of 'Labour-Power Commodity' 255 -- 1. On the Dialectic: Commodity Market and the -- Production Process 255 -- 2. Private Property and Capitalist Property 261 -- 3. Negation of the Negation: Sublation of the -- Commoditization of Labour-Power 268 -- C. Capitalist Thingivation and the -- Logic of its Revolutionization 282 -- Afterword 301 -- Supplementary Notes to the English Edition 303 -- Index 309. (shrink)