Tarekat teaches its followers not to glorify conglomerates, to keep their distance from leader, and to live in a way of zuhud, including in the matters of politics. But the Tarekat Qadiriyah wa Naqsyabandiyah in Cukir Jombang was actually involved in practical politics as a supporter of Partai Persatuan Pembangunan. This paper, which was written in the form of ethnographic design according to the concept of the power relations of Foucault to find new perspectives about the actions of (...) Tarekat communities in politics, in this case explaining the pattern of relations that occurred between the Tarekat Cukir and PPP and discovering the factors causing Tarekat Cukir to support PPP. This paper concludes that between Tarekat Cukir and PPP, there is a mutually beneficial pattern of relations in terms of proximity, but in terms of economic politics, the Tarekat Cukir feels disadvantaged. The dominant reason the Tarekat Cukir supports PPP is because of the dependence of Santri on their Mursyid who is a PPP politician. This is reinforced by the history between the two parties and the spiritual ties that connect the teachers who are both PPP politicians and Santris. (shrink)

In this paper, we make explicit the changing configurations of power relations that currently characterize the Brazilian Emergency Care System (SAMU) team in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The SAMU is a recent innovation in Brazilian healthcare service delivery. A qualitative case study methodology was used to explore SAMU’s current organizational arrangements, specifically the power relations that have developed and that demonstrate internal team struggles over space and defense of particular occupational interests. The argument advanced in this paper (...) is that these professionals are developing their work in conditions of exposure, that is, they are always being observed by someone, and that such observational exposure provides the conditions whereby everyday emergency care practices are enacted such that practice is shaped by, as well as shapes, particular, yet recognizable power relationships. Data were collected through the observation of the SAMU’s work processes and through semi‐structured interviews. Research materials were analyzed using discourse analysis. In the emergency care process of work, visibility is actually embedded in the disciplinary context and can thus be analyzed as a technique applied to produce disciplined individuals through the simple mechanisms elaborated by Foucault such as hierarchical surveillance, normalizing judgment, and the examination. (shrink)

Resumo: Ao longo do tempo, tem-se discutido a necessidade de separar a religião da política para não tornar frustrados os nobres objetivos de ambos os fenômenos. Enquanto isso, o inverso tem acontecido e, apesar do fato de a constituição nigeriana proclamar a Nigéria como um estado secular, a religião continua a lançar uma sombra sinistra sobre a governança do país e suas relações de poder inerentes. A religião tornou-se ainda mais uma ferramenta com a qual as pessoas buscam o poder (...) político. Este estudo, portanto, é uma tentativa de examinar a interação entre religião e política dentro da arquitetura de poder do Estado nigeriano. A dimensão que a interação assume faz parte do interesse desta pesquisa, assim como as implicações políticas e de desenvolvimento da politização da religião para o governo, na Nigéria. Para conseguir isso, o trabalho utiliza dados primários e secundários, adotando uma abordagem de análise de conteúdo em sua análise. Descobertas e análises expõem, claramente, as complexidades religiosas dos políticos em seu desespero para vencer e manter seu domínio do poder político por todos os meios, incluindo a manipulação da religião para fins políticos pessoais. As implicações disso, conforme revelado pelos fatos, são a produção de uma safra manipuladora de líderes no governo e a criação de uma crise religiosa artificial entre adeptos de diferentes crenças religiosas. Sanções mais duras são recomendadas para o uso criminoso e a manipulação da religião, para fins políticos, entre todos os quadros da população. (shrink)

This article draws on the conceptual link between power and causality to develop an account of the relational, discursive, and performative dimensions of power. Each proposed dimension of power is grounded in a different understanding of social causes: relational-realist, discursive-hermeneutic, and performative-pragmatic. For the purposes of empirical analysis, this dimensional schema crosscuts the classic sources of power typology developed by Michael Mann and others, thus rendering the conceptual apparatus for pursuing sociological research on power more (...) complex and explanatorily effective. The schema is illustrated by an example from comparative-historical sociology: explaining the storming of the Bastille and its effects. A series of research questions for investigating the relative autonomy of performative power is proposed. Finally, the current schema is situated vis-à-vis classic sociological theories of power, including the arguments of Steven Lukes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 12, December 2024, Page 6-7.

This paper explores how power relations are enacted and negotiated in the largely under-researched non-hierarchal leadership constellation of distributed leadership. Drawing on more than 300 hours of audio-recorded interactions of a corpus of interdisciplinary research group meetings, we analyse how members of a team that does not have an officially assigned leader or chair regularly draw on teasing thereby enacting and reflecting, as well as sometimes challenging existing power relations. Findings show that the highly ambiguous discursive (...) strategy of teasing enables all members, regardless of their official role or position, to contribute to the team’s leadership performance. However, findings also show that although teasing has the potential to facilitate more collaborative approaches to leadership, the ways in which power is actually enacted in our data resembles more traditional hierarchical leadership constellations. (shrink)

When does an interaction between a mental health clinician and a patient cross the line from a reasonable offer of care to coercion? In a classic account of coercion in psychiatry, Szmukler and App...

In "The Rise of Citizen Science in Health and Biomedical Research," Wiggins and Wilbanks present an analysis of the ethics of citizen science (Wiggins and Wilbanks 2019). The breadth of the analysi...

In this article, I explore the ways in which journalists engage with different news sources in Chinese and Australian hard news. Based on the analysis of a comparable corpus of Chinese and Australian hard news reporting on risk events, the study investigates the cultural variability of engagement patterns and indicates how text patterns point to distinctions in the ways the power relations are reproduced in news production processes. Corpus findings show that Chinese and Australian journalists mediate news sources (...) of different statuses in different ways. Chinese journalists tend to close down the dialogic space of elite sources but to open up that of ordinary citizens’ sources. Australian journalists tend to contract the dialogic space of elite sources as much as they expand it. It is argued that such different patterns of engaging with news sources are related to the power relations between journalists and news sources in each context. (shrink)

Peer review of manuscripts has recently become a subject of academic research and ethical debate. Critics of the review process argue that it is a means by which powerful members of the scientific community maintain their power, and achieve their personal and communal aspirations, often at others' expense. This qualitative study aimed to generate a rich, empirically‐grounded understanding of the process of manuscript review, with a view to informing strategies to improve the review process. Open‐ended interviews were carried out (...) with 35 journal editors and peer reviewers in the United Kingdom, the USA and Australia. It is clear from this research that relations of power and epistemic authority in manuscript review are complex and dynamic, and may have positive and negative features, and that even where power is experienced as controlling, restrictive and illegitimate, it can also be resisted. In conclusion, the manuscript review process is best thought of not in terms of simple dominance of reviewers and editors over authors, but rather as a shifting “net” of power relations. These complex power relations need to be understood if reviewers are to be encouraged to participate in the process and to do so in the the most ethical and effective manner. (shrink)

PurposeSocial exclusion as a result of gender, race, and class inequality is perhaps one of the most pressing challenges associated with the development of a diverse information technology workforce. Women remain under represented in the IT workforce and college majors that prepare students for IT careers. Research on the under representation of women in IT typically assumes women to be homogeneous in nature, something that blinds the research to variation that exists among women. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe (...) paper challenges the assumption of heterogeneity by investigating how the intersection of gender, race, and class identities shape the experiences of Black female IT workers and learners in the USA.FindingsThe results of this meta‐analysis offer new ways of theorizing that provide nuanced understanding of social exclusion and varied emancipatory practices in reaction to shared group exposure to oppression.Originality/valueThis study on the under‐representation of women as IT workers and learners in the USA considers race and class as equally important factors for understanding variation among women. In addition, this paper provides rich insights into the experiences of Black women, a group that is largely absent from the research on gender and IT. (shrink)

This study attempts to show the role of translation in giving meaning to conflicts whether by reproducing the dominant political beliefs of a particular media society or by resisting counter-ideologies that come from foreign sources of information. It utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis as an effective method for the analysis of power relations behind news reporting. The research uses a corpus from international media and their equivalent texts into Arabic between 2013 and 2017. The data covers events on conflicts (...) in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, each article reporting issues about conflict and its impact on arenas of struggle. Through this case study of transediting, I will explore how textual analysis can unravel power relations and hegemonic orders of discourse. The study shows that translation is a site of conflict and has much to say about reasons for conflict and the complex relationship between language and power. The proposed tools of analysis in this study are based on functional language analysis and will show how language structuring, in particular transitivity analysis, articulates the logic created by the media outlet regarding reasons for conflict. The case study concludes that different media structure the current wars in the Middle East in different chains of causal dependence that can impact the reading positions of the readers. (shrink)

There has been an increased focus within the AI ethics literature on questions of power, reflected in the ideal of accountability supported by many Responsible AI guidelines. While this recent debate points towards the power asymmetry between those who shape AI systems and those affected by them, the literature lacks normative grounding and misses conceptual clarity on how these power dynamics take shape. In this paper, I develop a workable conceptualization of said power dynamics according to (...) Cristiano Castelfranchi’s conceptual framework of power and argue that end-users depend on a system’s developers and users, because end-users rely on these systems to satisfy their goals, constituting a power asymmetry between developers, users and end-users. I ground my analysis in the neo-republican moral wrong of domination, drawing attention to legitimacy concerns of the power-dependence relation following from the current lack of accountability mechanisms. I illustrate my claims on the basis of a risk-prediction machine learning system, and propose institutional and project-specific solutions to mitigate domination. (shrink)

This paper has arisen from a concern that much recent policy-related research on markets displays misogynistic tendencies. In both the media and academic accounts it would appear as though the blame for social and educational inequalities can now be laid at the door of women - particularly middle-class mothers. Through examining competing perspectives on how we might understand this attribution of blame, this paper argues that their guilt is best explained not through changes in behaviour but through the conjuncture of (...) shifts in education policy and related research. These shifts have turned the attention of research away from the public domain of the state and the organisational and cultural attributes of schools to focus on the private domain of domestic decision-making. But the representations of these public and private domains are underpinned by unexamined gendered and ideological subtexts which have limited our powers of description and explanation. The paper concludes by suggesting strategies through which we might both address the tacit misogyny in research on markets and develop more sophisticated accounts of contemporary changes. (shrink)

While attention to research integrity has been growing over the past decades, the processes of signalling and denouncing cases of research misconduct remain largely unstudied. In this article, we develop a theoretically and empirically informed understanding of the causes and consequences of reporting research misconduct in terms of power relations. We study the reporting process based on a multinational survey at eight European universities. Using qualitative data that witnesses of research misconduct or of questionable research practices provided, we (...) aim to examine actors’ rationales for reporting and not reporting misconduct, how they report it and the perceived consequences of reporting. In particular we study how research seniority, the temporality of work appointments, and gender could impact the likelihood of cases being reported and of reporting leading to constructive organisational changes. Our findings suggest that these aspects of power relations play a role in the reporting of research misconduct. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of research misconduct in an academic context. Specifically, we elucidate the processes that affect researchers’ ability and willingness to report research misconduct, and the likelihood of universities taking action. Based on our findings, we outline specific propositions that future research can test as well as provide recommendations for policy improvement. (shrink)

Many of the contemporary disagreements regarding privacy are conceptual in nature. They concern the meaning or definition of privacy and the analytic basis of distinguishing privacy rights from other kinds of rights recognized within moral, political, or legal theories. The two main alternatives within this debate include reductionist views, which seek a narrow account of the kinds of invasions or intrusions distinctly involving privacy losses, and anti-reductionist theories, which treat a much broader array of interferences with a person as separate (...) and irreducible kinds of privacy invasions. Other theorists have expressed doubts about the prospects for achieving greater analytical precision even within a fairly expansive anti-reductionist approach. However, a reductionist privacy definition is defended in this article, and its primary theoretical virtues are its ability to unify and explain the insights of several competing definitions and its role in developing an account of privacy rights that is both internally coherent and consistent with a plausible understanding of the theoretical basis for a number of related rights. (shrink)

A number of different theories of truthlikeness have been proposed, but most can be classified into one of two different main programmes: the probability-content programme and the likeness programme.1 In Brink and Heidema [1987] we are offered a further proposal, with the attraction of some novelty. I argue that while the heuristic path taken by the authors is rather remote from what they call ‘the well-worn paths’,2 in fact their point of arrival is rather closer to existing proposals within the (...) likeness approach than might at first appear. It is the purpose of this note to outline the logical connections and to assess the reasons which have been offered in favour of the new proposal. (shrink)

Western imperialism and colonialism have tremendously affected the epistemological conception of Africa and Africans. In the same vein, early missionaries did not countenance the cosmologies and lived experiences of the Africans in their interpretation and application of the Bible. On the contrary, they imposed Western epistemologies and theological images on Africa. Although much work has been carried out in these areas, little attention has been devoted to how contextuality, interculturality and decolonisation are exercised in power struggles: the power (...) to define what counts for Africa and Africans as they daily deploy the resources of the Bible. The author argues that contextuality, interculturality and decolonisation are schemes of power relations on the one hand and of owning the Bible on the other, rather than mere methods of biblical hermeneutics in Africa. As schemes of power, they reject imperialist agenda of unequal barter of cultural exchange claimed as civilising the African. Presenting contextuality as a finished product is a violation of the rights of Africans to productively apply the Bible as a text seeking understanding in a different clime from the West; it is also a denial of the reality of interculturality, and thus it ignites the need for decolonisation. By utilising conceptual analysis as a framework, it is argued that these schemes are beyond hermeneutical methods but have the power to resist the suffusing influence of Western theological suffocation in Africa. CONTRIBUTION: This study argues that contextuality, interculturality and decolonisation are not mere hermeneutical methods for studying the Bible in context; they are instruments of struggle to liberate it from Western epistemological stranglehold. (shrink)

Western imperialism and colonialism have tremendously affected the epistemological conception of Africa and Africans. In the same vein, early missionaries did not countenance the cosmologies and lived experiences of the Africans in their interpretation and application of the Bible. On the contrary, they imposed Western epistemologies and theological images on Africa. Although much work has been carried out in these areas, little attention has been devoted to how contextuality, interculturality and decolonisation are exercised in power struggles: the power (...) to define what counts for Africa and Africans as they daily deploy the resources of the Bible. The author argues that contextuality, interculturality and decolonisation are schemes of power relations on the one hand and of owning the Bible on the other, rather than mere methods of biblical hermeneutics in Africa. As schemes of power, they reject imperialist agenda of unequal barter of cultural exchange claimed as civilising the African. Presenting contextuality as a finished product is a violation of the rights of Africans to productively apply the Bible as a text seeking understanding in a different clime from the West; it is also a denial of the reality of interculturality, and thus it ignites the need for decolonisation. By utilising conceptual analysis as a framework, it is argued that these schemes are beyond hermeneutical methods but have the power to resist the suffusing influence of Western theological suffocation in Africa. Contribution: This study argues that contextuality, interculturality and decolonisation are not mere hermeneutical methods for studying the Bible in context; they are instruments of struggle to liberate it from Western epistemological stranglehold. (shrink)

One of the influential contributions to criminalisation theories is Duff’s work on public wrongs, which offers a thin master principle of criminalisation, proposing that we have a reason to criminalise a type of conduct if it constitutes a public wrong; one that violates a polity’s civil order and forms part of that polity’s proper business. The nature of the civil order, the scope of its proper business, and the distinction between the public and private realms of wrongs are context-relative to (...) each polity, structured by their legal, institutional, and informal values and ways of life. Such a context-relative view led to problematic criminalisation examples raised by Duff and his critics. This article engages more fully with the relativism of the civil order and public wrongs in non-democratic and illiberal contexts. It draws on examples such as Saudi Arabi and Iran, and Beetham’s work on the legitimation of power to argue that conceptualising the civil order as an undifferentiated whole that represents a polity’s chosen way of life overlooks the ways in which the civil order’s values and practices are shaped by relations of power and exclusion rules and processes. This, in turn, exposes the theory to the risk of mirroring and legitimising unequal relations of power and impeding efforts to change them. This is also due to the theory’s lack of proper normative guidance on the legitimacy of criminalisation. The potential commitment to – instead of a preference for – democracy and guarantees of equality and freedoms might help strengthen the theory normatively, but it is insufficient to guard against the raised problems. (shrink)

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates a (...) resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the problem of characterizing, in a precise way, situations in which two people collaborate to achieve a common goal. It is suggested that collaboration is normally based on an apparently paradoxical state of mind which I call “mutual intention”. Mutual intention is a concept belonging to the same family as Lewis's and Schiffer's “mutual knowledge”. These concepts have the paradoxical feature that they require, for their definition, an infinite series of propositions of the (...) form X knows p, where X is a single agent and p is a proposition. The source of these infinite series is traced, and it is shown that they can be represented in a plausible and enlightening way by means of a recursive notation. Finally, three applications of the concept of “mutual intention” are given: in the semantic analysis of certain sentences with plural subjects; in the analysis of agreement and related speech acts; and in the clarification of the phenomenon of “implicit agreement”. (shrink)

In 2012, the international PISA survey reinforced the observation that the French educational system is one of the most unequal among OECD countries. The observation of serious inequalities in access to educational success for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds could lead to a pessimistic vision suggesting that any possibility of transformation of the system is doomed to failure. Thus, the fight against inequalities in access to educational success is a form of runaway object which constitutes a challenge for research which treats (...) the social context as evolving and susceptible to significant and novel transformations. Developmental work research aims to support the work of professionals in the re-elaboration of their practices by seeking to go beyond the status quo of an unequal school. Drawing on this framework within an institutional network of schools, we seek to show how the intervention has highlighted power issues inscribed in the structures and how the actors, through their commitment in the research collaborative process, seek to go beyond the power issues inscribed in their work routines and enacted during the research process by different kinds of antagonism. We will argue that the fight against educational inequality involves overcoming systemic power relations crystallized in institution. This systemic power is expressed by a form of episodic power. Our results show restrictive and constructive effect on the expansive learning process and on the construction of a collective in the formative interventions. The restrictive side of epistemic power should be linked to systemic power which is historically inherited. We discuss the results in the light of the emergence of a fourth generation of activity theory. Our research makes it possible to make conceptual and methodological progress in the construction of a fourth generation of activity theory by showing the need for analysis and expansively learn about problematic power relations in heterogeneous collectives. (shrink)

This book explores the important yet neglected relationship between the philosophy of time and the temporal structure of perceptual experience. It examines how time structures perceptual experience and, through that structuring, the ways in which time makes perceptual experience trustworthy or erroneous. -/- Sean Power argues that our understanding of time can determine our understanding of perceptual experience in relation to perceptual structure and perceptual error. He examines the general conditions under which an experience may be sorted into different (...) kinds of error such as illusions, hallucinations, and anosognosia. Power also argues that some theories of time are better than others at giving an account of the structure and errors of perceptual experience. He makes the case that tenseless theory and eternalism more closely correspond to experience than tense theory and presentism. Finally, the book includes a discussion of the perceptual experience of space and how tenseless theory and eternalism can better support the problematic theory of naïve realism. -/- Philosophy of Time and Perceptual Experience originally illustrates how the metaphysics of time can be usefully applied to thinking about experience in general. It will appeal to those interested in the philosophy of time and debates about the trustworthiness of experience. (shrink)

After reviewing some of the insurance-related obstacles to access to health care, some ethical criteria for evaluating proposals aimed at reforming the health insurance marketplace to achieve universal access are developed. The additional reforms needed to eliminate many of the deficiencies in the current health insurance marketplace are discussed. It is suggested that without such substantial reforms some of the other goals such as expanded consumer choice and overall societal health care cost savings may not be effectively promoted.

Narratives of Tampering in the Earliest Commentaries on the Qurʾān. By Gordon Nickel. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 13. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. xx + 244. $146.

This article considers transdisciplinarity from the standpoint of reading and readers, rather than as a collection of texts, concepts or proper names. It argues that the humanism and anti-humanism debates of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly understood through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, was above all a debate about the politics of reading. Understanding transdisciplinarity to relate to a projected model of post-disciplinarity, the article suggests that transdisciplinarity needs to supplement its conceptual and political remit with a (...) theory of reading, such that reading across disciplines simultaneously becomes a question of reading beyond disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LITERAL AND METAPHORICAL USES OF DISCOURSE IN THE REPRESENTATION OF GOD IN HIS SEMINAL work on the theory of signs, Charles Morris affirms that human beings are " the dominant sign-using animals" and that" the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs-if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning." 1 By means of acculturation we learn to use and interpret signs, both linguistic and (...) non-linguistic; and by virtue of these capacities we can appropriately designate the human animal as homo symbolicus, homo loquens, and homo sapiens. Indeed, all forms of human culture presuppose the ability to use and interpret signs, including that form of human culture which leads us to speak of ourselves as homo religious. Over the years I have come to understand and speak of religion as a community with its cultus. There is the community, be it triba1, national, or universal with its polity or structure and ongoing history; and there is the cultus with its organic system of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs, encompassing ·such elements as stories, creeds, scriptures, doctrines, theologies, confessions, prayers, chants, songs, rites, rituals, sacraments, artifacts, etc. Like any other cultural system, scheme or network of signs one can characterize a religious cultus as an inter -subjective set of signs whose usage is determined by the implicit or explicit rules that govern the relations of signs to each other; the relations of the signs to the objects which the signs designate or denote, or stand for in some way; and the relations of signs to the users or interpreters of these signs and to those who are affected by these signs in some way. 1 Charles W. Morris, FoundatioJi of the Theory of Signs, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. I, No. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. L 6~7 628 WILLIAM L. POWER: Given this understanding of community and cultus, one can describe a religion as an organized group of socially interdependent human beings which uses or employs ·a system of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs to represent reality in its various modalities and mixtures of good and evil and to affect human ways of life on the basis of that representation. Altering the terminology somewhat, one could say that a religious community uses its cultus to proclaim, enact, and display a comprehensive worldview.and to form and tr:msform the ethospathos of human beings in their solidarity and solitude. Expressed semiotically, there is the system of signs of a particular community, the intended signification of these signs, and the significance of these signs for those who use and are affected by them. What distinguishes a religion from other forms of human culture is that a rel·igious cultuml sy•stem or a religious community with its cultus is primarily concerned with ultimate or supreme reality or with that which is divine, holy, or sacred and that reality's bearing on and relevance for human life and well-being. In short, a religion is a cultural system which functions to map the whole of re.ality and to acculturate in desirable ways or to civilize. If a religion is a cultural system, then one can identify three distinct yet inseparably related dimensions of every religion. There is 1) the cultural dimension consisting of the interrelruted signs, symbols and expressions of a cultus; 2) the reality and value dimension consisting of the ontological and axiological purport of the cultus; and 3) the experiential dimension consisting of the existential import of the cultus. It is this thioo dimension which has led many in the past and in the present to speak of religion as piety, consciousness of things divine, ultimate concern, religiousness, etc. In the tradition of Peircian semiotics, one can speak of these three dimensions as the syntactic, semantic, and praigmatic dimensions of a religion; and they can be analyzed and studied with the aid of syntactics or syntax, semantics, and pr:agmatics, which as a unity LITERAL AND METAPHORICAL USES OF DISCOURSE 629 constitute the discipline of semiotics. As Peirce recognized, modem semiotics is continuous with the Medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric-the semiotics of almost a millennium a;go... (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has long championed the view, recently dubbed “scientific intentional realism” (Loewer and Ray, 1991, p. xiv), that “a scientifically adequate psychology will contain laws that quantify over intentional phenomena in intentional terms.” On such a view our belief/desire psychology will be “vindicated” through empirical investigation; that is, it will be shown to denote the explanatory (or causally salient) states or events in the production of thought and behavior. That intentional properties, states, or events have causal efficacy---are not mere (...) epiphenomena---is necessary for any such vindication. This paper investigates whether intentional properties can if fact ground or sustain the causal relations empirical psychology aims to reveal. I conclude that intentional properties are not amenable to such an explanatory role, and that, therefore, a different vindication of intentional description is required of the realist. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between feminism, queer theory and the rise of popular debate over maternity and anti-maternity that has arisen in recent years in France. Through the image of ‘queer maternity’, that is to say, of women who question motherhood from the position of already having had children, the article tries to rethink the way in which feminism, queer theory and motherhood could be placed in relation to one another such that by questioning maternity, the symbolic order that (...) places motherhood on the side of the state and futurity can itself be questioned as a whole. This has particular resonances in the French context where a discourse of ‘natural’ motherhood has come to dominate: the ‘queer’ mother who questions her maternal status is thus argued to represent a threat to the futurity of the family, the social contract and the existing order. (shrink)

This book features papers from CEPE-IACAP 2015, a joint international conference focused on the philosophy of computing. Inside, readers will discover essays that explore current issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, and philosophy of science from the lens of computation. Coverage also examines applied issues related to ethical, social, and political interest. -/- The contributors first explore how computation has changed philosophical inquiry. Computers are now capable of joining humans in exploring foundational issues. Thus, we can ponder machine-generated explanation, (...) thought, agency, and other quite fascinating concepts. The papers are also concerned with normative aspects of the computer and information technology revolution. They examine technology-specific analyses of key challenges, from Big Data to autonomous robots to expert systems for infrastructure control and financial services. -/- The virtue of a collection that ranges over philosophical questions, such as this one does, lies in the prospects for a more integrated understanding of issues. These are early days in the partnership between philosophy and information technology. Philosophers and researchers are still sorting out many foundational issues. They will need to deploy all of the tools of philosophy to establish this foundation. This volume admirably showcases those tools in the hands of some excellent scholars. -/- . (shrink)

This research is conducted by the Intellectual Property and Policy Research Group at the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia. It is part of the GE3LS component of the Genome Canada Project "Dissecting Gene Expression Networks in Mammalian Organogenesis," MORGEN, which is located principally at the British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The project is involved in upstream, basic genomic research. Part of this work includes the characterization of gene regulatory mechanisms (...) governing organogenesis with a special focus on the heart, liver and pancreas. This paper serves as an introduction to both the MORGEN case study and the role of alternative mechanisms, such as open source. We discuss interim research results as they relate to our broader study of the relationship between open science, commercialization and technology transfer offices. The role of technology transfer offices is central to our analysis and is viewed as a key factor in implementing Genome Canada policies and principles associated with IP and commercialization. (shrink)

Two studies explored individual differences in appraisal of minor, potentially stressful events. Previous research on appraisal has focused on one or two appraisal dimensions within specific situations rather than on the full range of appraisals or on the stability of appraisal across situations. Goals of the present studies were: (1) to explore stability of individual differences in appraisal across situations; (2) to identify individual differences in general appraisal styles; and (3) to examine how appraisal styles are related to personality constructs. (...) Appraisal was moderately stable across situations and individual differences in appraisal style were related to relevant personality constructs. Primary threat appraisals and secondary appraisals of blame and manageability emerged as particularly important in distinguishing the appraisal styles. Implications of the results for the development of psychopathology are considered. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted food and educational systems, laying bare institutional inadequacies and structural inequalities. While there has been ample discussion on impacts to the food system and higher education institutions separately, there has been little written through the perspective of people who navigate both. Farmers, researchers, graduate students, chefs, and many stakeholders contribute to community engaged scholarship (CES) in food systems, facing novel obstacles and opportunities with the spread of the pandemic. In this article, I utilize institutional ethnography (...) to center the experiences of the people who participated in or led CES projects during the spring and summer of 2020. The goal of this study is to understand how discourse and texts in the academic institution constrain the reality of CES partnerships and identify areas for change. My findings show that tenure and promotion guidelines and funding opportunities constrain CES partnerships, reducing opportunities for relationship building and discouraging innovative models of participation. Quantified evaluation metrics on grant rubrics and tenure and promotion guidelines privilege individual academic researchers growing large programs, writing lucrative grants for the university, and publishing profusely. However, community-led and decentralized projects were able to adapt to community priorities and sustain research projects during the pandemic. COVID-19 created obstacles to community engagement and allowed for creative approaches to community participation. By restructuring academic evaluation and funding processes to support problem-solving models of CES led by community partners, CES projects can support both academic and community priorities in times of disruption and relative stability. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis introductory essay describes some intellectual intersections between the history and sociology of science and the history and sociology of accounting. These intersections suggest a potential field of inquiry that concerns itself explicitly with science and economic calculation, a potential that is partly realized in the essays that follow. It is possible to describe a broad shift from concerns for the scientific credentials of accounting to a recognition of the constitutive role that accounting plays for science. In other words (...) the so-called cultural hegemony of the scientist is giving way to that of the accountant. This shift has a number of loosely related but complementary elements. The first is to be found in some recent historical work that links ideals of scientific objectivity to administrative and political values. A second element is a body of work that is critical of theorydominant approaches to experiment and concerns itself with laboratory practice in social context. A third element is an emerging interest in the economics of science. I argue that such a program is weak where it abstracts from processes of economic calculation, and this suggests the fourth element: a contextual approach to economic calculation to be found in sociologically informed accounting research. In the light of these four elements, the essay concludes by considering directly the implications of accounting for science, particularly given recent initiatives to make science more accountable. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s comment that what can be shown cannot be said has a special resonance with visual representations of power in both Heavy Metal and Fundamentalist Christian communities. Performances at metal shows, and performances of ‘religious theatre’, share an emphasis on violence and destruction. For example, groups like GWAR and Cannibal Corpse feature violent scenes in stage shows and album covers, scenes that depict gory results of unrestrained sexuality that are strikingly like Halloween ‘Hell House’ show presented by neo-Conservative, Fundamentalist (...) Christian churches in the southeastern United States’ ‘Bible Belt’. One group may claim to celebrate violence, the other sees violence as a tool to both encourage ‘moral’ behaviour, and to show that the Christian church is able to ‘speak the language’ of young people who are fans of metal, gore, and horror. Explicit violence, in each case, signifies power relationships that are in transformation. Historically, medieval morality plays and morality cycles had been used as a pedagogical tool. In the modern-day context of fundamentalist religious education, these Hell House performances seek to exclude outsiders and solidify teen membership in the Christian community. Hell House performances are marketed to the young church members, and are seen as a way to reinvigorate conservative Fundamentalist Christianity. Women and girls routinely take part in, and often organize Hell House events. In the context of heavy metal, violent performances do not seek to exclude, but provide an outlet for a variety of socially unacceptable or unpopular feelings. In each context there is an apparent, if not actual, empowering of women who are willing to play particular kinds of roles. The use of violence and gore has a value beyond merely shocking the audience, it is arguably a way that some women find their voice, both for fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist gore metal fans. (shrink)

This chapter concentrates on Peter Olivi’s (ca. 1248–98) theory of the ontological foundations of political power—and, by extension, property and other social institutions. After briefly presenting his view of political power as a relation between a ruler and his subjects (which he presents in his famous Quid ponat ius), the chapter focuses more generally on Olivi’s theory of relations. Drawing from previous works by Alain Boureau, Sylvain Piron, Christian Rode, Robert Pasnau and others, it explores the ontology (...) of relations and endeavors to shed new light on this notoriously difficult aspect of Olivi’s philosophy. A special focus is placed on the non-Aristotelian notion of rationes reales, which Olivi uses to make room between realism and nominalism, as he argues that power relations are real (i.e. they are not mind-dependent) although they are not based on any real properties in the relata. After showing that political power and other institutional facts must be understood in light of this peculiar ontological notion, the final section of the essay argues that the freedom of the human will entails an ability to change social reality. It is also suggested that despite this rather modern aspect of Olivi’s his social ontology, he remains firmly within medieval worldview by grounding the normative aspect of social institutions in the will of God. (shrink)

Studies of food waste claim that its main causes are technological and logistical deficiencies in the first stages of the agri-food chain. The present article discusses this statement using a specific case as a starting point: the production of fruit in Lleida (Catalonia, Spain). Since the 1980s, fruit production in this region has undergone a process of innovation and development. However, the agents who participate in the sector claim that the wasted volume of edible foodstuffs is greater than in previous (...) times. This article argues that studies of food waste do not consider the power relations existing within the agri-food chain. When these relations are asymmetrical, technological innovation and logistics optimisation do not improve the efficiency of the system; rather, they help the hegemonic players to monopolise the commercial margin and transfer some of their running costs to the weaker agents. The ethnographic data for the study were obtained between 2017 and 2019 using qualitative research techniques. (shrink)

One of the oldest conceptions of theology is discourse of the poets about the gods and its philosophical interpretation. Judaism and Christianity borrowed this Greek understanding of theology and revised it only slightly to reflect its own monotheistic vision of God and God’s relations to and with the world of nature and human existence. The question as to which philosophy best explicates and justifies the oral and written mythopoetic discourse of the imaginative bards of Israel and the early Christian (...) community became a fundamental issue and has remained so through the centuries. The aim of this essay is to explore this question once again in the context of post-liberal theology in general, the works of Abraham Heschel, Claude Tresmontant, and the Japanese theologian Tetsaturo Ariga on an implicit biblical philosophy and the explicit metaphysical theism of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The outcome of this exploration will be a rational reconstruction or ideal type of neo-classical theism or what I have chosen to call existential-hayatological theism. (shrink)

To understand how we have become what we are requires, following Foucault, not a theory but an `analytics' which examines how technologies of power and knowledge have, since antiquity, intertwined and developed in concrete and historical frameworks. Distilling from Foucault's oeuvre as a whole a rough periodization of western political rationalities, this article shows how the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution and knowledge-production. Platonic, Stoic and Christian pursuits of (...) self-mastery and self-knowledge, often via the intervention of an external master, were initially confined to an elite, but thereafter were amplified and generalized to encompass entire populations in conjunction with the rise of the modern state. Via techniques of confession and ascetic conduct, faith and empiricism, and selfreflection and everyday reality, western political rationalities, in the form of combined totalization and individualization technologies whereby some (struggle to) discipline others even as all (are exhorted to) discipline themselves, have come to dominate the globe. (shrink)

In 1994 the IRA and Loyalist paramilitary groups declared ceasefires, leading to a more relaxed attitude and cross-community contacts in Northern Ireland. The result was the establishment of a new type of church-based reconciliation group, the Church Fora, intended to improve community relations and promote peace and reconciliation within local areas. This article focuses on the ways in which Church Fora have expanded the methods of such work since 1994. It will assess their effectiveness in promoting peace and reconciliation (...) and developing community relations in Northern Ireland by placing them within the broader framework of church-based reconciliation work. Finally, by assessing how successful Church Fora have been in achieving their aims and objectives, I examine the lessons that could be learned for church-based reconciliation work being carried out within Northern Ireland. (shrink)