This paper outlines briefly care as a formal construct of a highly regulatory approach to being looked after in the setting of foster care. It then moves on to consider care and its expression within the interdependencies and everyday moral ?workings out? between people in caring relationships. These relationships are informed partly by exterior regulation, but also emerge predominantly from care as a social process and daily human activity in which the self exists through and with others. Drawing from an (...) in-depth qualitative study of 10 foster families supported by local authorities or independent agencies in Wales, the paper examines the meaning of care in what is often a nebulous mix of paid and unpaid fostering. The moral texture of the foster family is revealed in regard to three areas of everyday domestic life that are often taken for granted and rarely researched: the symbolism of food, issues of the body, and aspects of touch. The paper concludes with a brief reprise of foster care as relational, constitutive and contextual in contrast with care as a professional and regulatory discipline. (shrink)

This paper raises several concerns about vulnerability as an alternative language to conceptualize injustice and politicize its attendant injuries. First, the project of resignifying “vulnerability” by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity, I suggest, might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who are already injured. Vulnerability scholars, moreover, have yet to elaborate the path from acknowledging constitutive vulnerability to addressing concrete injustices. Second, (...) vulnerability studies respond to, and have been shaped by, debates in the 1980s and 1990s over oppression, identity and agency. This genealogy needs to be acknowledged and evaluated. As I demonstrate, prominent theorists define vulnerability in contradistinction to victimization, adopting neo-liberal formulations of victims and victimhood. Finally, I turn to address the politics of vulnerability. At issue are not simply matters of utility or programmes for implementation, but the fraught relationship among ontology, ethics and politics, which I address through an engagement with Rancière's conception of the political and the case of the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

Users have adopted a wide range of digital technologies into their communication repertoire. It remains unclear why they adopt multiple forms of communication instead of substituting one medium for another. It also raises the question: What type of need does each of these media fulfill? In the present article, the authors conduct comparative work that examines the gratifications obtained from Facebook with those from instant messaging. This comparison between media allows one to draw conclusions about how different social media fulfill (...) user needs. Data were collected from undergraduate students through a multimethod study based on 77 surveys and 21 interviews. A factor analysis of gratifications obtained from Facebook revealed six key dimensions: pastime, affection, fashion, share problems, sociability, and social information. Comparative analysis showed that Facebook is about having fun and knowing about the social activities occurring in one’s social network, whereas instant messaging is geared more toward relationship maintenance and development. The authors discuss differences in the two technologies and outline a framework based on uses and gratifications theory as to why young people integrate numerous media into their communication habits. (shrink)

Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new way to (...) distinguish clinical placebos from standard medical treatments. (shrink)

Regardless of leaders’ efforts to do the right thing and meet performance expectations, they make mistakes, with possible ramifications for followers’ and leaders’ well-being. Some leaders will apologize following transgressions, which may have positive implications for their followers’ and their own well-being, contingent upon the nature and severity of the transgressions. We examine these relationships in two separate studies. In Study 1, leader apologies had a positive relationship with followers’ psychological well-being and emotional health, and these relationships were moderated by (...) the severity of the transgression. In Study 2, leader apologies had a positive relationship with their own psychological well-being, positive emotional health and authentic pride. In addition, the nature of transgressions moderated the relationship between leader apologies and leaders’ positive emotions and authentic pride, while the severity of transgressions moderated the relationship between leader apologies and their positive emotions, psychological health, and authentic pride. Implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

This article unravels the complex set of financial dealings that are at the heart of the Enron story and follows the story through the highs and lows of Enron share prices. The key players are identified and their roles described. Apart from the financial and accounting issues, the Enron story also raises a wide range of ethical issues including corporate governance, organisational culture and ethical leadership and scrutiny. These are discussed in the article. It might be argued that Enron could (...) never have got away with some of its practices if it had been operating in Europe. The article concludes that this view may be naïve, particularly in the light of recent media disclosures of the UK Labour government's continuing flirtation with business donations. The Enron story raises serious considerations in a whole host of financial, economic, political and ethical areas. As the Enron story continues to unfold, an article of this type can only begin to scratch the surface of some of these issues and to lay them out for further investigation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion regulation is a topic of great interest due to its relevance to navigating everyday life, as well as its relevance to psychopathology. Recent research indicates that beliefs about t...

Abstract:The Thesmophoriazousai brims with themes of imitation, from its broader tragic parodies to its finer sonic textures. This study uncovers the functions and effects of imitation on the dramatically crucial (but often neglected) verbal level by means of Echo—a bizarre metatheatrical character who embodies the dynamics of mimicking speech and parody. The aural echo is provided as a conceptual frame, illustrating how verbal mimicry functions to both degrade and bolster identity and status in Echo's scene and elsewhere in the play. (...) Echo's speech patterns ultimately serve to perform, manipulate, and expand forms of mimicry in Old Comedy. (shrink)

Steiner schools have helped carry the flag of liberal, creative, humanistic education through these dark ages and can now act as a beacon. Professor Peter Woods, formerly of the Open University.Contributors to this accessible book will show how Steiner kindergarten practice can offer an understanding of observation and assessment which is strikingly different from approaches found in many nursery and reception classes, and yet it's this understanding that can encourage deep reflection on practitioners' and students' values and principles. Drawing on (...) their extensive research in the field, the contributors, who include experienced Steiner educators and early childhood experts from other traditions, have worked together to explore and understand what is distinctive about Steiner kindergarten practice. Whilst observation and assessment are not the appropriate terms to describe the more relaxed, intuitive and trusting ways in which Steiner teachers aim to meet with children, the researchers used these techniques to present and explore the variety of perspectives on Steiner kindergarten practice. Key aspects of the Steiner philosophy, such as caring for the physical environment, respecting the rhythms and routines in what children do, and creating an environment that allows teachers and children to properly get to know each other are explored. In these chapters, readers will meet with aspects of the Steiner philosophy which will help to inform and expand on their own practice as early years professionals"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going Polyphonic I: With Namita Goswami et al.Alyson Cole and Kyoo LeeThis time around, we go polyphonic.The articles in the next two issues, Vol. 13 and Vol. 14, explore critical questions, paradigm-shifting idseas, and fresh connections arising from the intimately networked fields of intersectional, decolonial, and trans studies today. “Polyphonia,” a term we borrowed from music, is meant to characterize ways in which each piece as in a (...) “note” remains distinctly their own while dialogically and dynamically connected to an evolving ecosystem of ideas and visions in the making. As an umbrella term, it is meant to shelter resonances from each article that speaks directly not only of, but to, theory today by doing it in their own way.In this issue, we are presenting “A Forum on Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter.” It consists of seven responses to Goswami’s pioneering work on intersectionality as exemplified by her recent book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (SUNY Press, 2019) as well as the earlier co-edited volume, Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (Routledge, 2014, co-edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount). What is polyphonic about this assemblage is its interlocutory structure and orientation: each scholar—Al Frankowski, Falguni Sheth, Jennifer Scuro, Lauren Guilmette, Luce deLire, Russell Ford, and Tyler M. Williams, all coming from different angles, perspectives, and positions—discusses their reading of Goswami on intersectionality while showing how and where their own scholarship meets hers. Goswami, in turn, responds to each response while providing a synthesized account of what she gleans from this choral interaction, what she finds inspiring, as well as challenging. The articles in the next issue, [End Page 1] Vol. 14, following the forum, will virtually continue the music, although not in direct response to Goswami’s work.We hope you will join us in this somewhat experimental virtual symposium that is not even on Zoom. We hope you will join us in thinking that this more literalized model of a “scholarly conversation,” actual and virtual, vitally embodies the very spirit of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, intercontinental intersectionality as a conversation, ongoing intellectual encounters among many of us in various “sub-fields,” for the lack of a better word, that, again literally, cannot be neatly contained in any disciplinary terms, boxes, or territories.The tranScripts section in this issue consists of two entries, the first of which is the fourth installment of Mieke Bal’s Moments of Meaning-Making, J–L. Then we have Margaret Carson’s translation of Juliana González on Remedios Varo.Again, this issue has been a labor of collective love. We would like to thank all the brilliant authors and extraordinarily generous and helpful peer reviewers for this issue, not to mention the ever so resourceful and skillful editorial staff at the press we constantly rely on for expert guidance and feedback, all of whom have been inspirations for us editors. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2024 State University of New York... (shrink)

The conventional approach to international development by civil society—that is, the installation of “Western” programs and institutions by “Western” groups in “underdeveloped” regions—has remained largely unchanged since global poverty reduction, whether for political or social justice motivations, gained prominence in public discourse after World War II. Yet poverty rates, literacy, life expectancy, and unemployment in one of the poorest regions of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, has remained the same if not worsened since the 1970s . And, still, the great Development (...) Project continues: Problems in under-resourced areas are identified by well-meaning people from well-resourced areas, proposals to solve those problems are crafted by project managers and submitted to government and nongovernmental agencies, and successful projects are implemented by other well-meaning people who, for the most part, honestly want to make a difference. This is the system in which Priya seems to .. (shrink)

Summary This article discusses the development of German Social Democratic Party strategy in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, as a result of the works of Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky. It ties the evolution of Marxist orthodoxy to the emergence of parliamentary democracy in different European societies. In particular, it discusses the way parliamentary conditions impacted on how the proletarian revolution was imagined. Revolution was newly defined as the establishment through parliamentary (...) means of a new government representing a new social class. Also, the early Marxist strategy of ?permanent revolution?, which had allowed proletarian-socialist minority rule, was abandoned. (shrink)

This article treats Stalin's contributions todialectical and historical materialism. It argues that the latterfound his theses of the `enormous' role of ideas, and of theexistence of social phenomena that do not belong either to thebasis or to the superstructure, in Georgij Plekhanov's `monism'.Nevertheless, Stalin did add some new points of his own.Furthermore, his adopting Plekhanov's monism also helps usunderstand the apparent contradiction between Stalin's emphasison non-economic and non-class factors in human history and hisrejection of `idealist' rudiments in dialectics.

I propose in this article to reconsider, in the light of some recent developments in the theory of knowledge, certain general questions about the nature of duty. In particular, I propose to consider the question of the relation between our moral duties on the one hand, and our knowledge or ignorance of facts and of moral principles on the other.

Even before ‘economic precarity’ became the default explanation for the rise of defensive nationalism globally, scholars had already begun returning to ground their work in the economy and material...

This paper explores the possibilities for strategic maneuvering of the argumentative technique that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame/London, 1969) called dissociation. After an exploration of the general possibilities that dissociation may have for enhancing critical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness, the use of dissociation in the successive stages of a critical discussion is examined. For each stage, first, the dialectical moves that dissociation can be employed in are specified, then, (...) the specific ways in which dissociation contributes to fulfilling the dialectical tasks that are associated with these moves are delineated, and, finally, the rhetorical gain that␣dissociation can bring in the fulfillment of these tasks is discussed. Some general conclusions are drawn for research that aims at understanding the potential of an argumentative technique for strategic maneuvering. (shrink)

The COVID-19 vaccine has been a miraculous, life-saving advance, offering staggering efficacy in adults, and was developed with astonishing speed. The time from sequencing the virus to authorizing the first COVID-19 vaccine was so brisk even the optimists appear close-minded. Yet, simultaneously, United States’ COVID-19 vaccination roll-out and related policies have contained missed opportunities, errors, run counter to evidence-based medicine, and revealed limitations in the judgment of public policymakers. Misplaced utilization, contradictory messaging, and poor deployment in those who would benefit (...) most—the elderly and high-risk—alongside unrealistic messaging, exaggeration, and coercion in those who benefit least—young, healthy Americans—is at the heart. It is important to consider the history of COVID-19 vaccines to identify where we succeeded and where we failed, and the effects that these errors may have more broadly on vaccination hesitancy and routine childhood immunization programs in the decades to come. (shrink)

A distinguished French scholar has recently set himself to delineate the history of Greek thought, from the time of Plato through the formation of the Hellenistic systems to the days of the empire, distinguishing two opposing tendencies, one towards pantheism and the other towards a philosophy of transcendence. But that distinction can be traced also in earlier periods than those with which Fr. Festugière is concerned, and it can be applied to theories of the soul equally with theories of God; (...) this theme I hope to illustrate on a tiny scale in the early part of my paper, drawing attention to tendencies on the one hand to treat the soul as part of nature, on the other to place it outside nature. The former of these is the earlier. (shrink)

This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to (...) Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors of (...) philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

Widely regarded as the most influential proponent of the truth of original sin in the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr worked hard to excise any "literalistic" element from his interpretation of the doctrine. In his attempt to "correct" the Augustinian tradition on original sin by purging it of all "literalistic errors," however, Niebuhr assumed as his starting point the most characteristically modern objection to the doctrine: that birth is a thoroughly natural, animal, and morally meaningless event. As a result, Niebuhr unnecessarily (...) constrained his vision of the dimensions of human freedom, and hence his description of the dynamic of anxiety and freedom that energizes sin. Through a careful reading of Reinhold Niebuhr's writings on original sin, in light of the truth that the end of human life is inseparable from its origins, a reappraisal and recovery of the meaningfulness of the assertion of original sin as a literal inheritance is possible. The result of such a reappraisal and recovery is an amplified insight into the existential anxiety that Niebuhr otherwise described so convincingly. (shrink)