A traditional argument based on Leibniz’s Law concludes that, for example, a statue and the piece of marble of which it is made are two different objects. This is because they have different properties: the statue can survive the loss of some of its parts but the piece of marble cannot. Lynne Rudder Baker adds that the piece of marble constitutes the statue. In this paper I focus on what I think is the most powerful objection to Baker’s account of (...) the constitution relation, which has to do with her notion of circumstances. I present the objection following Derk Pereboom’s formulation and, afterwards, I analyse Baker’s answers to the criticism. I conclude that they make her overall project less attractive. Finally, I propose a new answer to the criticism. This will suppose a new formulation of the constitution relation, albeit done in the spirit of Baker’s account. (shrink)

I defend the claim that in psychological theories concerned with theoretical or practical rationality there is a constitutive relation between normative and descriptive theories: Normative theories provide idealized descriptive accounts of rational agents. However, we need to resist the temptation to collapse descriptive theories with any specific normative theory. I show how a partial separation is possible.

According to the so-called "standard account" regarding the problem of material constitution, a statue and a lump of clay that makes it up are not identical. The usual objection is that this view yields many objects in the same place at the same time. Lynne Rudder Baker's theory of constitution is a recent and sophisticated version of the standard account. She argues that the aforementioned objection can be answered by defining a relation of being the same P (...) as (sameP). In this paper I shall examine consequences of her response and show that sameP has wrong formal properties, as a result of which this solution cannot be accepted. (shrink)

We respond to Jack Vromen’s critique of our discussion of the missing micro-foundations of work on routines and capabilities in economics and management research. Contrary to Vromen, we argue that inter-level relations can be causal, and that inter-level causal relations may also obtain between routines and actions and interactions; there are no macro-level causal mechanisms; and on certain readings of the notion of routines and capabilities, these may be macro causes.

Donald Davidson argues that ‘the stabbing of Caesar’ and ‘the killing of Caesar’ are two descriptions of the one event whereas Jaegwon Kim contends events are more fine-grained and two events occurred, related by supervenience. I argue that neither solution is satisfactory and, inspired by Lynne Rudder Baker, I develop a constitution relation governing cooccurring, co-located events such that the stabbing of Caesar comes to constitute the killing of Caesar when the stabbing occurs in the appropriate circumstances. According (...) to my view, the stabbing of Caesar is metaphysically distinct from the killing of Caesar such that the killing is dependent on the stabbing, yet is not identical to it. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an understanding of recognition in terms of individuals’ capacity for conflict. Our goal is to overcome various shortcomings that can be found in both the positive and negative conceptions of recognition. We start by analyzing paradigmatic instances of such conceptions—namely, those put forward by Axel Honneth and Judith Butler. We do so in order to show how both positions are inadequate in their elaborations of recognition in an analogous way: Both fail to make intelligible the (...) fundamental nexus between relations of recognition and individuals’ capacity for conflict. We then move on to reconsider aspects of Hegel's view of recognition—ones that, from our viewpoint, have been unjustly neglected in the debate about recognition: his focus on the constitution of relations of recognition in conflict and on the status of being an author of acts of recognition. On this basis, we then spell out in a more systematic way what we take to be a more convincing conception of recognition. This puts us in the position to gesture at some consequences of this conception in practical contexts, above all with regard to the justification, role and structure of political institutions. (shrink)

Providing a theory of moral practice for a contemporary sociological audience, Owen Abbott shows that morality is a relational practice achieved by people in their everyday lives. He moves beyond old dualisms—society versus the individual, social structure versus agency, body versus mind—to offer a sociologically rigorous and coherent theory of the relational constitution of the self and moral practice, which is both shared and yet enacted from an individualized perspective. In so doing, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in (...) Practice not only offers an urgently needed account of moral practice and its integral role in the emergence of the self, but also examines morality itself within and through social relations and practices. Abbott’s conclusions will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers of morality, those working with pragmatic and interactionist approaches, and those involved with relational sociology and social theory. (shrink)

In Buchanan’s broad “constitutional contractarian” framework ultimate justification depends on the institutional arrangements under assessment being universally accepted. Accordingly, market arrangements have the same status as in-period collective decision-making rules: both equally hang or fall on whether they emerged from constitutional consensus. The paper underlines this ‘equivalence’ by showing that the constitutional calculus over market ‘rights’ follows the same analytic structure as the derivation of in-period collective decision rules. This means that Buchanan’s view of the virtues of markets is essentially (...) rooted in a collective decision and despite his self-professed “classical liberal” inclinations, his relation to standard defences of the market order is at best equivocal. (shrink)

The principle of sustainability is generally taken as a good, but what does sustainability really mean? The notion of sustainability has been at the center of global governance debates for more than a decade and many countries across the world include sustainability in their constitutions. This paper argues that in order to understand the concept of sustainability in a constitutional context, we need to turn to the notion of dignity. The paper explores the concepts of sustainability and dignity and their (...) meanings in the framework of climate justice and related questions and by discussing them in the context of Kantian and republican theory. In addition, the paper looks at intriguing court cases on the importance of nation states meeting their climate law duties. The paper concludes by exploring new uses of the sustainability concept. EU constitutional law will serve as a laboratory in testing these questions. (shrink)

This article is a review and reflection of the new elements of rights and laws, applied to the principle of justice and sovereignty, but above all in the demonstration that law as a science once again allows us to conceive that as a science it evolves and must be modified according to the new conducts that the State and society require, such is the case of the constitutional recognition that this type of rights have. In the last decades, human beings (...) have evidenced that the way in which they interact with nature is causing serious consequences to the ecosystems that compose it. In the past, these consequences were not yet evident and, therefore, the environmental awareness that exists today did not exist. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and reflect on certain conditions of this right in Ecuador. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural constitution? At what level of neural activity is consciousness constituted in the brain and what might be learned from well-studied phenomena like binocular rivalry, attention, (...) memory, affect, pain, dreams and coma? What should the science of consciousness want to know and what should explanation look like in this field? How should the constitution relation be applied to brain and mind and are other relations like identity, supervenience, realization, emergence and causation preferable? Building on a companion volume on the constitution of visual consciousness, this volume addresses these questions and related empirical and conceptual territory. It brings together, for the first time, scientists and philosophers to discuss this engaging interdisciplinary topic. (shrink)

Through the work of philosophers like Sellars, Davidson and McDowell, the question of how the mind is related to the world has gained new importance in contemporary analytic philosophy. This book demonstrates that Husserl's phenomenological analyses of the structure of consciousness can provide fruitful insights for developing an original approach to these questions.

Analyzing the constitutionality of a law is a process of constitutional interpretation which does not limit itself to comparing two texts in order to see whether they are concordant or not. The nature of constitutional interpretation is the subject of this article, a subject that is dealt with from the perspective of the dispute between originalism and non-originalism (interpretivism) prevalent within the contemporary philosophy of law, especially the American one. The article offers a synthetic view on some of the most (...) controversial issues pertaining to the theory and methodology of contemporary constitutional interpretation, such as: whether the interpretation of the Constitution is guided by the founders’intentions or by the text’s own words; whether the meaning of the Constitution is determined by the intentions, aims or values of the founders’ generation or by those of the contemporary generation? What are the grounds that justify the authority of the constitutional text, in other words, does this authority derive from its constraining capacityorfromitsabilitytobestowdemocraticlegitimacy?Constitutional interpretation must concentrate on the text or on the interpreter? Do the judges discover or build the constitutional meaning? In other words, is it the past or the present that guides the interpretation? Is the original interpretation the legitimate one or are legitimate the later interpretations of the constitutional text? (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt to study the acts and intentions which set up for the subject, and for the community of subjects, a set of values and disvalues which impose themselves as valid upon everyone, and which everyone must tend to prescribe, or to warn against, for everyone. The acts which set up a formal apophantic and ontology have been studied by Husserl in his Formal and Transcendental Logic , but he has not set out a comparable theory (...) of the acts which set up a universally valid system of values and disvalues. He has not done so because he does not believe in such a system, because his thought goes no further than the values set up for and felt to hold in a given group or society. It is my view that there is an ineluctable progress from these relativistic group-values to a set of values and disvalues holding for everyone, and that moreover in their relation to everyone, and that these values and disvalues have definite and undeniable shapes and locations, even if these shapes also have somewhat nebulous contours. The views I am expounding on this occasion are not new: they are fully set out in my Values and Intentions and my Axiological Ethics and in other writings. Ideas, however, require restatement at intervals, with a suitable change of idiom and emphasis. And I feel my views on this topic to have a claim to truth simply because, quite differently from my views on other topics, and despite constant reflection, they have hardly changed over the last two decades. The inspiration for these views was only in part Husserlian, as I do not think that the emotional and the axiological are really Husserl's strong suit. Strangely enough, that dry thinker Meinong would seem to have had a much richer emotional life and the ability to frame a theory to fit it, than the much easier and at times effusive thinker Husserl. Meinong's 1917 Austrian Imperial Academy treatise, On Emotional Presentation , recently translated for the Northwestern Phenomenology series, is a much more systematic investigation of the presuppositions of value-theory than any writing of a professed phenomenologist. What I have to say will build considerably on Meinong, always a major influence in my thought. But I have also been much influenced in my approaches to value-theory by the transcendental methods of Kant. Kant, I think, could very well have worked out a transcendental deduction of the heads of value and disvalue, a deduction much more illuminating than the dogmatic intuitionism of Scheler and Hartmann, instead of producing the arid triad of categorical imperatives that were all that he actually deduced. Imperatives, I consider, are secondary structures in value-constitution: the primary structures are the ultimate objects of necessary, rational pursuit and avoidance which Kant wrongly thought of as involving heteronomy and a corruption of pure form by matter. There is, I shall argue, nothing more free from extraneous, pathological material than the objects of the pursuits and avoidances in question. (shrink)

In this paper I defend and develop Bernard Williams’ claim that the ‘constitutive thought’ of regret is ‘something like “how much better if it had been otherwise”’. An introductory section on cognitivist theories of emotion is followed by a detailed investigation of the concept of ‘agent-regret’ and of the ways in which the ‘constitutive thought’ might be articulated in different situations in which agents acknowledge casual responsibility for bringing about undesirable outcomes. Among problematic cases discussed are those in which agents (...) have caused harm through no fault of their own, or have been constrained to choose the lesser of two evils or to act against their moral values. R. Jay Wallace’s ‘bourgeois predicament’ and related cases, in which we recognize that our present advantages have flowed from regrettable antecedents, further show that regret is often not a simple emotion, and it is argued that conflicted regrets are sometimes unavoidable. Finally, the paper looks at Descartes’ account of regret as a form of sadness engendered by the recollection of irrecoverable happy experiences, to which the ‘constitutive thought’ does not readily apply. It is suggested that what Descartes is discussing is a different genre of emotion for which ‘nostalgia’ might be a better name. (shrink)

Infertility constitutes an essential source of stress in the individual and couple’s life. The Infertility-Related Stress Scale is of clinical interest for exploring infertility-related stress affecting the intrapersonal and interpersonal domains of infertile individuals’ lives. In the present study, the IRSS was translated into Brazilian–Portuguese, and its factor structure, reliability, and relations to sociodemographic and infertility-related characteristics and depression were examined. A sample of 553 Brazilian infertile individuals completed the Brazilian–Portuguese IRSS, and a subsample of 222 participants also completed the (...) BDI-II. A sample of 526 Italian infertile individuals was used to test for the IRSS measurement invariance across Brazil and Italy. Results of exploratory structural equation modeling indicated that a bifactor solution best represented the structure underlying the IRSS-BP. Both the general and the two specific intrapersonal and interpersonal IRSS-BP factors showed satisfactory levels of composite reliability. The bifactor ESEM solution replicated well across countries. As evidence of relations to other variables, female gender, a longer duration of infertility, and higher depression were associated with higher scores in global and domain-specific infertility-related stress. The findings offer initial evidence of validity and reliability of the IRSS-BP, which could be used by fertility clinic staff to rapidly identify patients who need support to deal with the stressful impact of infertility in the intrapersonal and interpersonal life domains, as recommended by international guidelines for routine psychosocial care in infertility settings. (shrink)

Transformation of the Constitutional System of the Slovak Republic Purpose of the article is to analyze the Constitutional Act No. 356/2011 Z. Coll. amending the Constitution of the Slovak Republic in terms of its compatibility of the constitutional system of the Slovak Republic. The article analyzes the potential impact of amendment to the Constitution of the Slovak Republic on the Parliamentary form of the government of the Slovak Republic and examine the consistency of Art. 115 Para 3 of (...) the Constitution of the Slovak Republic with another provisions that relate to it. The purpose of the article is to identify some problems that brought amendment to the Constitution of the Slovak Republic by the Constitutional Act No. 356/2011 Coll. of Art. 115 Para 3 and points out its incompatibility with the constitutional text. This article also discusses a possible shift in the parliamentary constitutional system of the Slovak Republic which the Constitutional Act brought.Methodology/methods used in the article is the analysis of the Constitutional Act No. 356/2011coll. by induction from the concrete wording of Art. 115 Para 3 of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic to the conclusions in relation to the entire text of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic and to the whole constitutional system of the Slovak Republic Scientific aim is to point to the shortcomings of the Constitutional Act No. 356/2011 Z. Coll., not only from the perspective of constitutional interpretation, but potentially also in terms of practice and also show the wrong trend of breaking the internal unity and coherence of the constitutional system of the Slovak Republic by half-baked changes to the text of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic Findings are specific and severe systemic disorders that brought the amendment to the Constitution of the Slovak Republic by the Constitutional Act No. 356/2011 Coll. of Art. 115 Para 3. The Article identifies three concrete problems and the subsequent practice may bring some other issues that were not known at the time of processing of this Article Conclusions are directed to the fact, that the Constitutional Act No. 356/2011 Coll. means internal disturbance of the constitutional system of the Slovak Republic, brings more problems than constructive solutions and potentially deflects the parliamentary constitutional system of the Slovak Republic to the semi-presidential. (shrink)

Mechanistic approaches are very common in the causal interpretation of biological and neuroscientific experimental work in today’s philosophy of science. In the mechanistic literature a strict distinction is often made between causal relations and constitutive relations, where the latter cannot be causal. One of the typical reasons for this strict distinction is that constitutive relations are supposedly synchronic whereas most if not all causal relations are diachronic. This strict distinction gives rise to a number of problems, however. Our end goal (...) in this paper is to argue that it should be given up, at least in the context of the biological and the psychological sciences. To that effect, we argue that constitutive relations in this context are diachronic, thus undermining the aforementioned reason. We offer two cases from scientific practice in which constitutive relations are regarded as both diachronic and causally efficacious, review three existing ways of dealing with the apparent diachronic nature of interlevel relations in mechanisms and propose a new account of diachronic, causal constitutive relevance. (shrink)

Antonio Negri’s article explores the relationship between the juridical categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and the political concept of the common through the theme of the ‘material constitution’ defining actual relations of power which defy the crystallization of ‘formal constitutions’. The financial convention shaping the material constitution of contemporary capitalism refers to the rise of what Foucault called biopower, where value is no longer the expression of a mere quantity of commodities but of a set of activities and (...) services, which are immediately cooperative. In this context, any form of measure cannot but be political and hence it must be established through new forms of economic governance. The social relation of capital becomes immediately political once money displaces labour as rule, norm and measure of value. As a result, processes of political subjectivation within the Eurocrisis combine de-stituent and con-stituent movements: requests for insolvencies, social occupations, commoning and mutualization are the means through which social struggles formulate the multitudes’ demands for ‘equality as a condition of freedom’. (shrink)

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

We enter here upon a history of conversational traffic between the respective departments of philosophy and law in the old academy of liberalism, where lawyers hear much from philosophers, yes-and philosophers hear from lawyers, too, in what has fruitfully been a both-ways exchange. Our philosophical protagonist is John Rawls. This book comprises a study of the rise and workings, within the Rawlsian political-liberal philosophy, of the idea of a country's higher-legal constitution as a public platform for the justification of (...) political coercion. A study of Rawls on constitutionalism can help us, I believe, in scoping out and managing a cluster of constitutional lawyers' debates-interminable ones, it seems, in the constitutional-democratic precincts of our times-that I will catalogue soon below. But conversely, I believe, those seeking the best and truest readings of Rawls might have something to learn from the controversies of the lawyers. My approach to Rawls has accordingly been that of a critically leavened (while no doubt broadly sympathetic) exegesis, while with the legal-discursive materials I take more of a diagnostic turn. My hope is that a treatment of these two discourses in relation to each other will prove an aid to both political-philosophical and legal-practical reflection. (shrink)

This book develops a new conception of political economy at the interface of economic and political theory. Political economy is constituted by the interdependence between the economy and the polity that rest on the complex relations of society in which both are embedded. Effective policymaking depends on reflecting this embedding.

This paper solves the special composition question for solid objects and discusses the properties of wholes in relation to the properties of their parts, including emergent properties. By considering the causal properties of solid objects, this paper argues that it is possible for objects that are undoubtedly ontological units (called atoms) to combine to form a whole that is also an ontological unit of the same standing. It begins by considering the various different kinds of property that a whole (...) object could possess and the ways in which those properties could be related to the properties of its atoms, where some of the properties of the whole could be called emergent properties. There are properties of the whole that are determinate relative to the properties of the atoms, where the atoms’ possessing certain properties, being arranged spatially in a certain way, and with certain forces connecting them determine the instantiation of a specific property of the whole. There are also properties of the whole that are merely determinate as to kind, where the properties of the atoms merely determine that some property belonging to a certain kind will be instantiated. Further distinctions are made between properties of the whole that cannot be possessed by the atoms and properties of the whole that can. These distinctions are illustrated by a few physical examples. A number of different arguments are then given to show that a whole object composed of atoms possesses monadic properties of its own that are causally significant. Next a “real boundary condition for solid objects” is proposed, where the appropriate sort of boundary is both a spatial and an energetic boundary, one having to do with energy states. The paper concludes with a simple example of a solid object that is used to show that the description of the action and motion of the whole cannot be reduced to the descriptions of the actions and motions of its atoms. (shrink)

For all post-1970s effort expended on the topic, the most central and important question about vagueness—what it is: what, specifically, something’s being a borderline case of a vague expression consists in—has seldom been tackled with the theoretical explicitness necessary if issues expectably downstream of it, like the nature of valid inference among vague statements, or the Sorites paradox, are to receive a properly motivated treatment. The great interest of Chapter V of The Things We Mean is that it points the (...) way towards a new kind of approach, according to which vagueness is constitutively a psychological phenomenon, grounded in the characteristic propositional attitudes of practitioners of vague discourse. It’s uncontroversial that a vague expression is one whose presence in a sentence contributes towards there being, at least in principle, situations which present borderline cases of its truth; for Schiffer, it is the status of such a situation as a borderline case that is grounded in the characteristic psychology of thinkers who appraise the sentence in that situation. (shrink)

The article examines Hans Kelsen's and Carl Schmitt's lines of thought concerning the relationship between constitutional and international law, with the aim of ascertaining their respective ability to capture developments affecting that relationship, even those of a contradictory nature. It is significant that, while the rise of wars of humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era has evoked Schmitt's concept of the bellum iustum, the evolution in the direction of the “constitutionalisation of international law” has drawn attention to Kelsen's theoretical (...) approach. However, these assumptions rely heavily on the opposing objectives that the two authors claimed to pursue, such as, respectively, the search for the ultimate seat of political power and a pure theory of law. Things are more complicated, both because these objectives by no means exhaust Kelsen's and Schmitt's lines of thought, and because the conception of sovereignty as omnipotence, at the core of the Weimar controversy, is now behind us. (shrink)

It has become an academic self-evidence that space can only inadequately be conceptualized as a material or earth-bound base for social processes. This could commend a theoretical view of space as the outcome of action, which brings both social production practices and bodily deployment into focus. The action-theoretical perspective allows the constitution of space to be understood as taking place in perception. Not only are things alone perceived but also the relations between objects. This article develops a space-theoretical concept (...) according to which space is constituted through acts as the outcome of synthesis and positioning practices. This opens up a theoretical perspective defining atmospheres as an external effect, instantiated in perception, of social goods and human beings in their situated spatial order/ing. Exclusion and inclusion are accordingly comprehended in terms of perception of the attunement of places. With reference to Anthony Giddens, this article discusses how space can be understood as a duality of structural ordering and action elements. (shrink)

At the dawn of the modern era, philosophers reinterpreted their subject as the study of consciousness, pushing the body to the margins of philosophy. With the arrival of Husserlian thought in the late nineteenth century, the body was once again understood to be part of the transcendental field. And yet, despite the enormous influence of Husserl’s phenomenology, the role of "embodiment" in the broader philosophical landscape remains largely unresolved. In his ambitious debut book, _Phenomenology and Embodiment,_ Joona Taipale tackles the (...) Husserlian concept—also engaging the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Henry—with a comprehensive and systematic phenomenological investigation into the role of embodiment in the constitution of self-awareness, intersubjectivity, and objective reality. In doing so, he contributes a detailed clarification of the fundamental constitutive role of embodiment in the basic relations of subjectivity. (shrink)

For all post-1970s effort expended on the topic, the most central and important question about vagueness—what it is: what, specifically, something’s being a borderline case of a vague expression consists in—has seldom been tackled with the theoretical explicitness necessary if issues expectably downstream of it, like the nature of valid inference among vague statements, or the Sorites paradox, are to receive a properly motivated treatment. The great interest of Chapter V of The Things We Mean is that it points the (...) way towards a new kind of approach, according to which vagueness is constitutively a psychological phenomenon, grounded in the characteristic propositional attitudes of practitioners of vague discourse. It’s uncontroversial that a vague expression is one whose presence in a sentence contributes towards there being, at least in principle, situations which present borderline cases of its truth; for Schiffer, it is the status of such a situation as a borderline case that is grounded in the characteristic psychology of thinkers who appraise the sentence in that situation. (shrink)

The article discusses Lynne Rudder Baker's view in Persons and Bodies and how it relates to animalism.

Austin's distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts has offered a fruitful way of focussing the relation between language and communication. In particular, by adopting the distinction we attend to linguistic and communicative subjects as actors, not just processors or conduits of information. Yet in many attempts to explicate the constitution of illocutionary acts the subject as actor is subsumed within the role of linguistic rules or conventions. I propose an account of illocutionary acts in which rules or conventions (...) are secondary to what I call communicative skills. These skills are taken as the primary component of communicative competence. They are derived from the principle that linguistic communication is not ultimately a linguistic matter, but relates instead to the way a communicator uses language. This principle is found in the work of Donald Davidson, but Davidson has tended to concentrate on semantics, and leaves the details of linguistic communication for pragmatics. The aim of this paper is to defend the general principle and supply some pragmatic details. (shrink)

A sociological conceptualisation of space moves beyond the material to the relational, to consider space as a social process. This paper draws on research that explored the reproduction of legitimated knowledge and power structures in intensive care units during encounters, between patients, who were experiencing mental illness, and their nurses. Semi‐structured telephone interviews with 17 intensive care nurses from eight Australian intensive care units were conducted in 2017. Data were analysed through iterative cycling between participants' responses, the literature and the (...) theoretical framework. The material and relational aspects of space in this context constitute a dynamic process that is concerned with the reproduction of everyday life, the preservation of the biomedical authority of intensive care, and the social othering of people experiencing mental illness. The work of theorists such as Löw, Harvey and Foucault underpins the exploration of space as a multi‐dimensional, malleable social process that both produces and is the product of social interaction and the social world. In this paper, we argue that the performative work of knowledge and power production and reproduction, considered here in relation to intensive care spaces, enables ongoing othering and disenfranchisement of people experiencing mental illness. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the significance of the key notions of coordination, constitution and convention. My aim in so doing is to provide a better understanding of their relation to conventionalism and to evaluate the prospects for a version of the relativized a priori based on a refinement of the notion of coordination. I stress the Kantian roots of all three concepts. Moreover, I argue that the link between the early logical positivist requirement for the uniqueness of (...) coordination and the Kantian account of empirical objectivity provides an interpretive key that sheds light on the alleged incompatibility between constitutive principles and conventionalism. (shrink)

This article traces recent developments in European social theory and psychoanalysis on the theory of the human subject. Critically examining the recent psychoanalytic departures of Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche on the status of primary repression as a condition for the constitution of subjectivity, an analysis is presented of the state of the subject in its unconscious relational world. The article suggests ways in which the analyses set out by Kristeva and Laplanche can be further refined and developed, partly (...) through a reconsideration of the intertwining of unconscious representation and repression as developed in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Thomas Ogden and others. For existing psychoanalytical accounts the article suggests we should substitute the concept of ‘rolling identification’, the psychical basis of the shift from self-referential representational activity to an elementary form of inter-subjectivity. Rolling identifications are defined as a representational flux that permits human subjects to create a relation to the self-as-object and pre-object relations. Such primal identification, the article suggests, operates through a ‘representational wrapping of self and others’. The article concludes with a consideration of the cultural significance of primary repression, and the politicization of identification. (shrink)

This essay argues that there is an important analogy between the hierarchically ordered divisions of the divided line in Republic Book VI and the hierarchy of constitutions described in Books VIII-IX. Imagination corresponds to tyranny, belief to democracy, mathematical understanding to oligarchy, and dialectical reason to timocracy. The unhypothetical principle disclosed through the activity of dialectic, the idea of the Good itself, corresponds to the aristocratic rule of philosopher kings.

Kantian constitutivists, like Velleman and Korsgaard, argue that there are norms internal to individual agency. Yet as Gilbert and others have argued there may be norms internal to shared agency as well. Might political principles of justice be norms of this second kind? I turn to the history of philosophy for an answer, focusing on Rousseau’s classic work the Social Contract. Rousseau is much better known as a social contract theorist – but I argue that he is also a constitutivist (...) about group agency. This means he is a thinker for whom success or failure in realizing the demands of justice is nothing other than success or failure in acting together. Unjust regimes, e.g. despotic ones, are ones whose members fail to genuinely act together. Interpretively, this approach has the advantage of explaining away the appearance of totalitarian tendencies in Rousseau’s thinking (‘the general will is always right’). Philosophically, it has the advantage of revealing in Rousseau’s writings what I believe is a unique type of social contract theory, resolutely non-hypothetical and normatively robust. In the closing sections, I revisit the oft-raised question of Rousseau’s relation to Rawls in light of the interpretation of the former proposed here. (shrink)

Our epistemic access to mathematical objects, like numbers, is mediated through our external representations of them, like numerals. Nevertheless, the role of formal notations and, in particular, of the internal structure of these notations has not received much attention in philosophy of mathematics and cognitive science. While systems of number words and of numerals are often treated alike, I argue that they have crucial structural differences, and that one has to understand how the external representation works in order to form (...) an advanced conception of numbers. The relation between external representations and mathematical cognition will be discussed by drawing on experimental results from cognitive science and mathematics education, and I argue for the constitutive role of external representations for the development of an advanced conception of numbers. (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from (...) metaphysics and epistemology towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’sRadical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

The work of Foucault and Elias has been compared before in the social sciences and humanities, but here I argue that the main distinction between their approaches to the construction of subjectivity is the relative importance of space and time in their accounts. This is not just a matter of the “history of ideas,” as providing for the temporal dimension more fully in theories of subjectivity and the habitus allows for a greater understanding of how ways of being, acting and (...) feeling in different spaces are related but largely unintended. Here I argue that discursive practices, governmental operations and technologies of the self (explanatory claims of both Foucault and the Foucauldian tradition) take shape as processes within the continuities of the figurational flow connecting people across space and time. Continuity should not be understood as stability or sameness over time, but as the contingent relations between successive social formations. As Elias argues, there is a structure or order to long-term social change, albeit unplanned, and this ultimately provides the broader social explanation for the historicity of the subject. Though discursive practices happen in particular spaces, we must recognise these spaces, and the practices therein, as socially constructed over time in response to largely unplanned moral and cultural developments. (shrink)

This article proposes an empirical approach to understanding the life of an organism that overcomes reductionist and dualist approaches. The approach is based on Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the cognitive conditions required for the recognition of an organism: the concept of teleology and the assumption of a formative power of self-generation. It is analyzed how these two criteria are applied in the cognition of a developing organism. Using the example of a developmental series of a plant leaf, an active and (...) relational process between observer and developing organism is shown, within which the teleology and self-generating power of the organism can be empirically observed through the mental faculties of understanding and will. Furthermore, it is emphasized that, according to Kant, even physical objects are not readily given, but are actively constituted through the unification of sense perceptions with concepts. This Kantian mode of objectification facilitates cognition of the physical properties of an organism. It can be supplemented with a participatory and co-constitutive mode of realization, in which the life of the organism (its teleologically organizing and self-generating power) can become an object of empirical research. Furthermore, it is argued that the participatory mode also facilitates an expanded conception of nature that allows for the existence of living beings within it. Finally, an analogy to Goethe’s approach to the living organism is highlighted. In summary, it is stated that to understand life, one must consciously participate in it. (shrink)

This essay examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Logic and its interpretation of Kant's “science of transcendental analysis” as a theory of the cognitive faculties and their “inherent forms” or “several functional powers”. I explain why Coleridge characterises transcendental analysis as an “investigation into the constitution and constituent forms” of the faculties, and consider the reasons behind his schematic division of such inquiry into “transcendental [ … ] Æsthetic, Logic, and Noetic”. I argue that Coleridge's claims about the forms, operations, and (...) contents that derive from different cognitive powers, and the philosophical method that enables us to prove such derivation, are based on Kant's theory of “transcendental reflection”. I also explain how Coleridge's facultative conception of transcendental analysis relates to recent scholarship on Kant's accounts of (i) our cognitive capacities and (ii) the purposes of transcendental reflection. My essay does not aim to defend Coleridge's interpretation of Kant, but rather to provide a clearer picture of how this interpretation informs Coleridge's analysis of cognitive activity and mental content in Logic, including his “transcendental noetic”, which seeks to explain the possibility of the kind intellectual intuition that Kant explicitly denies. (shrink)

In “Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory,” I propose that stereotyping someone—even if you manage to keep your thoughts hidden and don’t act on them—can constitute a form of discrimination (2021b). What, Alex Madva asks, are the practical implications of this claim? Even if I am correct that stereotyping constitutes a form of discriminatory treatment, it’s still possible that people should keep on speaking and acting as if “discrimination” refers exclusively to behaviors and policies. He invites me to (...) explore the “potential payoffs and perils” of referring to thoughts and perceptions as discriminatory, especially as they relate to legal practice and social-scientific inquiry (2021, 46). (shrink)

The advent of techniques of sex selection that rely on assisted reproduction led to a questioning of whether sex selection should be deemed always and everywhere unethical. While China and India are normally associated with condemned practices, they are also implicated in processes that constitute globally stratified sex selection inclusive of its more valued form, often referred to as family balancing. Through an application of Ong and Collier’s concept of global assemblage, I demonstrate how family balancing, which has taken on (...) a “global form,” is tied to an “assemblage” of factors related to the anti-natal, population control contexts that have been pervasive in Asia. Three simultaneously occurring processes since the mid-1990s constituted stratified sex selection: the surfacing of China and India as figurative counter examples in deliberations of ethics on new techniques; active national surveillance of sex ratios as well as denunciation and criminalization of sex selective abortion in China and India; and the role of China and India in neoliberalizing population control and developing globalized markets in reproduction. Accounting for globally stratified sex selection requires a more robust interpretation of ethics that rethinks disciplinary approaches just as much as relativist ones in which respect for individual autonomy tends to overtake all other concerns. (shrink)

Kant's response to ‘Hume's problem’ in his analysis of the a priori structure of causality as law-governed succession in the Second Analogy of Experience has unquestionably overshadowed the account of simultaneity (Zugleichsein), which follows in the Third Analogy. The analysis of simultaneity in the first Critique relies entirely upon that of succession and is ultimately no more than a more complicated variant of the causal dependence of substances: two objects are experienced as simultaneous only when each of those objects grounds (...) some determination of the other, that is when they are reciprocally determined in dynamic community. By investigating Kant's remark in the third Critique that the experience of the sublime “makes simultaneity intuitable” this paper develops a Kantian analysis of simultaneity that is irreducible to the more prominent analysis of causal succession. This more robust account of simultaneity is then seen to play an essential role in the constitution of the objects of perception (and not only the regulation of their relations) as thematized in the Axioms of Intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo tem o objetivo de compreender a disseminação e a consolidação de um signo ideológico de resistência, a partir da análise de um enunciado verbo-visual, uma fotorreportagem publicada no jornal português Expresso. A matéria, por meio de uma série de fotografias e um breve texto, mostra uma manifestação ocorrida em Lisboa, em junho de 2020, contrária ao assassinato de George Floyd por policiais nos EUA. A Análise Dialógica do Discurso, advinda da obra de Mikhail Bakhtin e o Círculo, (...) fundamenta teórica e metodologicamente o trabalho, mobilizando especialmente as noções de signo ideológico e relações dialógicas. A partir de uma das fotos, referida no título da reportagem, a análise levantou sentidos produzidos nos diversos diálogos axiológicos que ocorreram entre enunciados espacial e temporalmente distintos, com a utilização de palavras, imagens e gestos compartilhados por ocasião das manifestações de protesto. As cadeias dialógicas de enunciados mostram como se constitui um discurso de resistência ao racismo e outras desigualdades sociais, expresso em um signo ideológico. (shrink)

The paper is a critical survey of the last ten years of research on the principles of legitimacy of constitutional democracy and their application in practice in Europe and North America. A constitutional democracy is legitimate if it meets the test of two principles: the principles of democracy or popular sovereignty and of constitutionalism or the rule of law. There are three contemporary trends which tend to conflict with the principle of democracy and thus diminish democratic freedom. There are three (...) responses to the lack of legitimacy of these three trends. The first is to downplay the principle of democracy in order to endorse the three trends. The second is to uphold the principle of democracy, in the form of deliberative constitutional democracy, in order to criticise aspects of the three trends and to call for further democratisation. The third trend deepens this critical response by tying the test of democratic legitimacy more closely to case studies of attempts by citizens to exercise their democratic freedom. (shrink)

Constitutionalism is a typically modernist project in that it seeks to dictate social order by means of institutional design. This project, however, fails in two ways. Empirically, constitutionalism is confronted with the fact that constitutions have limited control over their social environment. Epistemologically, constitutionalism has great difficulty in finding a convincing foundational relation between abstract constitutional provisions and constitutional norms for concrete situations. On the basis of this poor record, it is hard to comprehend how constitutionalism remains such an (...) influential factor in our polity. This article tries to explain our adherence to the philosophy of constitutional ordering by analysing its function in constitutional discourse. (shrink)

By focusing on the exchange between Descartes and Hobbes on how the self is related to its activities, Berkeley draws attention to how he and Hobbes explain the forensic constitution of human subjectivity and moral/political responsibility in terms of passive obedience and conscientious submission to the laws of the sovereign. Formulated as the language of nature or as pronouncements of the supreme political power, those laws identify moral obligations by locating political subjects within those networks of sensible signs. When (...) thus juxtaposed with Hobbes, Berkeley can be understood as endorsing a theologically inflected version of deontological ethics in which moral laws are linked directly to the constitution of the self. (shrink)