Apart from a few exceptions,1 studies of Carl Schmitt in English have not dealt with the legal and constitutional aspects of his work. William Scheuerman's book begins to fill this gap. His work is an important corrective to previous interpretations which, by disproportionally emphasizing the cultural and theological aspects of Schmitt's work, have neglected its central legal character, thus reducing one of the most influential jurists of the 20th century either to a right-wing cultural critic or to a (...) dissatisfied crypto-theologian.2 Among other consequences, this neglect has contributed to disregarding themes that are pivotal to Schmitt's thinking.3 Scheuerman focuses on…. (shrink)

Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular foundings has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. The aim of Andreas Kalyvas' study is to show why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of its beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? (...) Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders. (shrink)

BackgroundIn Parkinson's disease, the side of motor symptoms onset may influence disease progression, with a faster motor symptom progression in patients with left side lateralization. Moreover, worse neuropsychological outcomes after subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation have been described in patients with predominantly left-sided motor symptoms. The objective of this study was to evaluate if the body side of motor symptoms onset may predict motor outcome of bilateral STN-DBS.MethodsThis retrospective study included all consecutive PD patients treated with bilateral STN-DBS at Grenoble (...) University Hospital from 1993 to 2015. Demographic, clinical and neuroimaging data were collected before and 1 year after surgery. The predictive factors of motor outcome at one-year follow-up, measured by the percentage change in the MDS-UPDRS-III score, were evaluated through univariate and multivariate linear regression analysis.ResultsA total of 233 patients were included with one-year follow-up after surgery [143 males ; 121 right body onset; 112 left body onset; mean age at surgery, 55.31 ± 8.44 years; mean disease duration, 11.61 ± 3.87]. Multivariate linear regression analysis showed that the left side of motor symptoms onset did not predict motor outcome.ConclusionsIn this retrospective study, the body side of motor symptoms onset did not significantly influence the one-year motor outcome in a large cohort of PD patients treated with bilateral STN-DBS. (shrink)

This article takes issue with the practical and the cognitive roles of normality within political life and its relevance to the constitution of the groups that comprise a political community. From a practical viewpoint, normality fosters standards of correctness; from a cognitive viewpoint, these standards are what allows individuals to perceive themselves, and to be recognized, as group members. To achieve this aim, the article delves into Carl Schmitt’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of how politics is a field where (...) semantic struggles take place that are meant to impose alternative visions of the social world. Different types of connections and relationships among individuals and groups (which rule out alternative connections and relationships) shore up a specific vision of the social world (which rules out alternative visions). The article concludes by saying that awareness of the normalizing effects of politics is key to producing a counter-politics meant to defy the naturalization and de-historicization that every political representation furthers. (shrink)

McCormick, John, Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (reviewed by Andreas Kalyvas); Caldwell, Peter, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (reviewed by Andreas Kalyvas); Dyzenhaus, David, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller (reviewed by Andreas Kalyvas); Cristi, Renato, Carl Schmitt and Liberal Authoritarianism: Strong State, Free Economy (reviewed by Andreas Kalyvas).

ABSTRACT Carl Schmitt is generally considered as the father of exceptionalism – the theory that the heart of politics lies in the sovereign power to issue emergency measures that suspend everyday normality. This is why his name comes up anytime state governments, whether liberal or not, impose limits on constitutional rights and freedoms to cope with emergencies. This article problematises such a received understanding. It argues that Schmitt held an exceptionalist view for a limited period of time and (...) that even in that period his thinking cannot be regarded as unshakably exceptionalist. This interpretation offers a new entry point to Schmitt’s overall theory. While it can hardly be defended from allegations of reactionary conservatism, it remains a juristic theory of the legal order that tries to answer the question of what ensures the stability of social life. The backdrop of this view is an institutional theory of law and politics that is hardly reconcilable with any form of exceptionalism. In this light, the core of Schmitt’s thinking turns out to be the exaltation of legal science as a jurisgenerative practice that shelters a community’s institutional practices and the traditional identity. (shrink)

This article offers an in-depth analysis of Carl Schmitt's social ontology to explain how and why he came to reject exceptionalist decisionism. To this end, the authors unearth the considerable shifts in terms of social ontology that paved the way for this conceptual turn. The gist of their argument is that Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) espoused a Hobbesian conception of the political as the possibility condition for stable patters of social interaction. Though the first three chapters of Political (...) Theology were originally designed for and published in a posthumous Festschrift for Max Weber, his understanding of the social was indebted to a Hobbesian legacy. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter, he began to revise his conception of the social and to put stress on the organisational dynamics of social institutions as independent of there being a political authority. From 1927 through to 1950, Schmitt never got back to his 1922 exceptionalist view of politics and rather sought to make sense of how the state could and should draw the contents of the legal order from the normative life of social institutions. (shrink)

This article problematizes the recent comeback of the exceptionalist jargon as it is conjured by both critics and sympathizers. While in the last decades governments across the globe had recourse to emergency measures to cope with far-reaching emergencies, from terrorism to the COVID-19 pandemic, the received view has it that political power takes advantage of states of emergency as they put themselves in the position to circumvent constitutional limitations. Carl Schmitt is claimed to be the major advocate of this (...) conception of emergency politics in that he elaborated on the concept of the state of exception as the heart of the state political power. This article contends that the received view is doubly wrong. First, soon after his espousal of exceptionalism, Schmitt realized that emergency legislation is an ineffective and costly governmental device that should be transitory and is as unstable as the crisis it is meant to overcome. Second, the received view neglects how Schmitt came to his model of ultraconservative substantive constitutionalism as he maintained that the main task of politics is to protect the normative life of a limited set of state-sponsored institutions as well as the substantive contents they produce. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt’s critical insights into ‘economic-technical thinking’ and the dominant role that a ‘magical technicity’ is said to assume in the social horizon of his times offers an opportunity to reframe contemporary debates on political and economic theology, exposing a theological core behind technocratic administration. Starting from this premise, the article engages with recent inquiries into so-called ‘debt economy’, assessing the affective function that ‘deferment’ and ‘confession’ perform as dominant operators in the social imaginary of neoliberal governance.

The Winter 2010 issue of Telos has clearly highlighted the relevance of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba to both the interpretation of Schmitt's political theory and Shakespearean criticism. The main thesis concerning Schmitt's intrusion into the literary field deals with the structural relationships between historical context and tragic dimension, between politics and aesthetics; the tragic drama can be properly understood only in relation to the historical context to which it refers and the concrete situation that it aims (...) to re-present. The historical reality that can be glimpsed by focusing on the tragic masks against the light of their contexts represents…. (shrink)

Emergency and exception are central concepts in Schmitt’s theory of decisionism. The present article explores the distinction between the two by focusing on their emergence, i.e. the process by which in times of crisis a potentially alternative or-der comes into existence and becomes visible. The primary aim of the comparison is to provide a more detailed and less conventional account of Schmitt’s excep-tionalist decisionism. In order to achieve this aim, three relevant questions must be raised: How does the (...) sovereign succeed in gaining acceptance, by exploiting what situation, and by convincing whom? Based on the different answers provid-ed by Schmitt over the years, it is possible to distinguish three different phases of his thought: the sovereign decisionism of the early 1920s, the concrete-order thinking of the 1930s, and the jurisprudential institutionalism advanced from 1950s onwards. (shrink)

This article argues that Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty and Gramsci’s notion of hegemony represent two distinct variations on a single theme, namely the idea of the political as the original instituting moment of society. Both Schmitt and Gramsci focused on the sources, conditions, content, and scope of the originating power of a collective will. While the former located it in the constituent power of the sovereign people, the latter placed it in the popular-national will of the modern hegemon. (...) Both thinkers explored the complex and perplexing relationship between radical founding acts and modern democratic politics in a secular age, that is of democratic legitimacy, where with the entrance of the masses into the political sphere, the references to ultimate foundation s of authority and to an extra-social source of political power had begun to appear more dubious than ever. The last section of the article develops a notion of hegemonic sovereignty defined as an expansive and positing democratic constituent prince, aiming, through founding, total decisions, at the overall, radical, explicit, and lucid institution of society. The article briefly shows how the concept of hegemonic sovereignty can solve some problems pertaining to Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty and to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In so doing, the article seeks to establish the mutually reinforcing qualities of the two concepts. (shrink)

Gnothi sauton - Erkenne dich selbst! Das Streben nach Erkenntnis und Selbsterkenntnis, das nach antiker Auffassung der Gott selbst in dieser Aufforderung dem Menschen ans Herz legt, bildet ein zentrales Moment von Arbogast Schmitts jahrzehntelanger Beschaftigung mit antiker Literatur und Philosophie, die zugleich immer auch eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit modernen Konzepten und Positionen darstellt. Die vorliegende Festschrift vereint zwolf neue Beitrage zur antiken Philosophie, Literatur und Literaturtheorie, in denen Schuler, Freunde und Weggefahrten Arbogast Schmitts dieses Erkenntnisstreben beantworten und fortsetzen. Mit (...) Beitragen von: Wolfgang Bernard, Stefan Buttner, Sabine Follinger, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Andreas Kablitz, Michael Krewet, Joachim Latacz, Thomas Leinkauf, Christian Pietsch, Ernst-Richard Schwinge, Rainer Thiel und Gregor Vogt-Spira. (shrink)

There is much disagreement among many commentators of Hannah Arendt's work about whether her contributions to politics and philosophy contain a clandestine version of decisionism or, by contrast, represent an explicit attempt to break away from the elements of voluntarism, arbitrariness, and irrationality, which are considered to be inherent to any theory of the decision. Despite the many disagreements that set apart these two interpretations of Arendt, however, there is a common presupposition that both share. They are in agreement concerning (...) the decision: it is a threat and a vice, intrinsically dangerous and potentially totalitarian in nature, which ought to be expelled from any theory of politics with a normative content. As a result, the terms of the debate pertain solely to whether Arendt was a (crypto-) decisionist and not to the nature and evaluation of the decision as such. This paper argues, contrary to Arendt's critics, that although elements of a theory of the decision can be found scattered throughout many of her writings, she was nonetheless unswerving in her opposition to decisionism. But unlike her defenders, it also argues that had Arendt built on these elements to elaborate a systematic theory of the decision, she would have avoided many of the flaws and inconsistencies that plague her concept of politics. (shrink)

This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene – the ecological nomos of the earth – and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos seemingly ‘natural’ spaces like the biosphere and the atmosphere became politically charged. (...) This challenges the modernist separation between natural facts and political norms. It then underlines the imperial origins of this nomos by introducing the concept of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO2 emissions. Instead of assuming that the ecological nomos represents a transition from a colonial to an ecological and cosmopolitan world order, focusing on air-appropriation highlights forms of ecological imperialism that go along with the new nomos. Accordingly, the article calls for a just redistribution of ecospace that takes into account the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation. (shrink)

This article inquires into the clinical figure of paranoia and its constitutive role in the articulation of the nation-state discourse in Europe, uncovering a central tension between a principle of integrity and a dualist spatial configuration. A conceptual distinction between ‘border’ (finis) and ‘frontier’ (limes) will help to expose the political effects of such a tension, unveiling the way in which a solid and striated organisation of space has been mobilised in the topographic antagonism of the nation, sustaining the phantasm (...) of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient finitude. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Rivalry?Rethinking Community in View of Apocalyptical ViolenceAndreas Oberprantacher (bio)But the republic of crime must also be the republic of the suicide of criminals, and down to the last among them—the sacrifice of the sacrificers unleashed in passion.—Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative CommunityThe Crisis and Apocalyptic Intensification of RivalryAt first it seemed as if the "rivalry between two rates of speed"1 set at the center of Derrida's essay "No Apocalypse, (...) Not Now," published more than twenty years ago in Diacritics, had finally come to an end, at least in the form of a general and unmistakable division of the world into two competing geopolitical units. Following the breakdown of the USSR, the former super-enemy of the industrialized Northwest, that part of the world that claimed and still claims to be the sole referent of the adjective free, the dynamics of ideological rivalry had, at first, lost considerable momentum. After half a century of mostly symmetrical even if undeclared wars, the period from 1989 to 1991 was truly significant, [End Page 175] for it marked a moment of epistemological crisis, a moment when political fractions that derived their identity from a binary tension were all of a sudden stunned: no visible enemy anymore to deter, no willing scapegoat to blame, just eschatological abandonment.The aftershocks of this historical event can be traced in today's commentaries on and analyses of the political situation: It is certainly no coincidence that two of the most influential US-American political analysts, Samuel Huntington and Bruce Hoffman, both at the same time direct their attention toward questions about the conditions of social identity and cohesion, though from inverted perspectives. In his recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004), Huntington bemoans the "deconstruction of the American identity,"2 as it challenges—along with certain political developments—"the substance, and the desirability of this concept of America."3 Huntington's fervent interest in US-American identity and his call for its renewal become readily comprehensible when read against the background of his concern that an existential threat might again be imminent, possibly in the form of jihadist terrorism. In Huntington's argument, however, the United States's potential confrontation with militant Islamist movements—the explicit subtext of his book—is not assessed only in terms of political risks and military expenditures; for Huntington, this confrontation also holds out a unique chance of rediscovering one's own (lost, forgotten) identity. Revealing himself as an attentive reader of Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, Huntington argues that "the absence of an ideological threat produced an absence of purpose.... The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security."4While Huntington is concerned with reaffirming and securing a phantasmagoric vision of the United States's past glory, Hoffman, on the other hand, may be mentioned as a political analyst deeply worried about the inverse aspect of the epistemological crisis, i.e., worried by the fact that "the United States has utterly failed to fulfill the timeless admonition to 'know your enemy'"5 by declaring an all too abstract global war on terrorism. In his commentary, published in March 2007 under the title "Fighting Blind: We Can't Win if We Don't Know the Enemy" in the Washington Post, he argues that a long-term strategy is desperately needed to identify "our adversaries, who are much too elusive and complicated to be vanquished by mere decapitation."6Taking Huntington's and Hoffman's positions seriously as paradigmatic examples of a wider and well-established discursive strategy that calls for a renewed need for binary-opposed collective identities—us/them; the coalition [End Page 176] of the willing/the axis of evil—in order to affirm a state of potentially ubiquitous and highly moralized rivalry, one may well argue with Schmitt that "a new nomos of the earth" is immanent.7 In Schmitt's understanding, such a new paradigm of warfare will no longer be characterized by relative understandings of enmity, but by enemies declared "totally criminal... (shrink)

The essay analyzes the Italian regulation related to the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on the state of emergency and derogations to the rule of law. The most rel-evant aspects to be considered are: the instability due to the excess of norms, to their obscurity and to the continuous change of procedures; the adoption of soft law; the separation between the law itself and the “force of law”, as laid out by Giorgio Agamben. In order to explain the institutionalization of (...) the emergency as a new form of sovereignty, Schmitt’s concept of exception will be called to action. (shrink)

René Girard's stance towards the Western philosophical tradition was somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, he acknowledged that major philosophers had influenced him and had contributed valuable insights on questions of desire, religion, violence, and the sacred. On the other hand, he felt that Western philosophy often, if not always, neglected the founding violence that lies at the origin of culture. The relevance of this contention is the pivotal question of the two volumes of René Girard and the Western Philosophical (...) Tradition. The chapters in these books engage the French anthropologist in a dialogue with key figures in the history of Western philosophy. Volume 1 features chapters on Plato, Augustine of Hippo, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Alexis de Tocqueville, Søren Kierkegaard, as well as René Girard. Volume 2 features chapters on the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, René Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

The author argues that given the dominant logic of the projects of the United States security apparatuses, realities such as Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray cannot be considered merely aberrations, but rather are the logical manifestations of security. In order to make this argument the author explores the concepts of sovereignty, the exception, and homo sacer in the works of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben.

Das Altern ist nicht nur eine biologische, sondern auch eine kulturelle Tatsache. Als Objekt der Verhandlungen zwischen Wissensdiskursen erscheint Alter als ein ebenso heterogenes wie problematisches Phanomen, das von Werturteilen und Weltanschauungen bestimmt wird. Des Weiteren sind Alter und Medizin in der offentlichen Meinung moderner Gesellschaften eng miteinander verbunden. Das interdisziplinare Forschungsprojekt "Kulturelle Variationen und Reprasentationen des Alters" geht von einem erweiterten, die geistes-, sozial- und medizinwissenschaftlichen Diskurse integrierenden Konzept von Alterskulturen und Potentialen des Alters aus. Dies bedeutet, Alter als (...) Gegenstand des Wissens und als Konzept zu begreifen. Alterskonzepte, das heisst Vorstellungen, Wertungen und, Bilder des Alters, sind Deutungsmuster fur elementare Bedurfnisse an der Schnittstelle von individuellem und kollektivem Leben. Mit Beitragen von David Blane und Gopalakrishnan Netuveli, Johannes Siegrist und Morten Wahrendorf, Peter Rusterholz, Anouk Janssen, Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen, Stefanie Knoll, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Gerd Gockenjan, Giovanna Pinna, Hans-Georg Pott, Monika Gomille, Miriam Seidler, Pat Thane, Simone Moses, Heiner Fangerau und Jorg Vogele, Anja Schonlau, Thomas Kupper". (shrink)

Both G.F.W. Hegel and Carl Schmitt took seriously the problem of political sovereignty entailed by liberal political theories. In Dictatorship (1919) and Political Theology (1922), Schmitt rejects liberal political theories that argue for the immediate unity of democracy and legality i.e., popular sovereignty, because he thinks they cannot secure political sovereignty. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel denounces popular sovereignty for similar reasons. Yet given Schmitt’s negative assessment of Hegel their positions are seldom related to one another. (...) I argue in this paper that Schmitt’s analysis of liberal political theories is similar to Hegel’s analysis of Rousseau’s liberal ideas. I contend, however, that Schmitt’s solution, which collapses the distinction between the executive and the legislative power in favor of the former, fails to secure political sovereignty. Contrary to Schmitt, Hegel conceives of the liberal predicament as a basic determination of any political state that rests on the division of the legislative and executive power. Hegel argues that the constitutional monarchy is a genuine instantiation of political sovereignty that can maintain not only the division of these powers, but also their unity. In this regard, I argue that Hegel’s conception of the division of powers provides a more convincing theory of the problem afflicting modern states than Schmitt’s and at least deserves to be taken more seriously by critics of Schmitt’s solution such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Jurgen Habermas, Andreas Kalyvas and Chantal Mouffe. (shrink)

I consider the plausibility of discounting for kinship, the view that a positive rate of pure intergenerational time preference is justifiable in terms of agent-relative moral reasons relating to partiality between generations. I respond to Parfit's objections to discounting for kinship, but then highlight a number of apparent limitations of this approach. I show that these limitations largely fall away when we reflect on social discounting in the context of decisions that concern the global community as a whole, such as (...) those related to global climate change. (shrink)

Relational egalitarianism says that moral equals should relate as equals. We explore how moral unequals should relate.

Confronted with mounting pressure to ensure accountability vis-à-vis customers, citizens and beneficiaries, organizational leaders need to decide how to choose and implement so-called accountability standards. Yet while looking for an appropriate standard, they often base their decisions on cost-benefit calculations, thus neglecting other important spheres of influence pertaining to more broadly defined stakeholder interests. We argue in this paper that, as a part of the strategic decision for a certain standard, management needs to identify and act according to the needs (...) of all stakeholders. We contend that the creation of a dialogical understanding among affected stakeholders cannot be a mere outcome of applying certain accountability standards, but rather must be a necessary precondition for their use. This requires a stakeholder dialogue prior to making a choice. We outline such a discursive decision framework for accountability standards based on the Habermasian concept of communicative action and, in the final section, apply our conceptual framework to one of the most prominent accountability tools (AA 1000). (shrink)

Cognitive functions like perception, memory, language, or consciousness are based on highly parallel and distributed information processing by the brain. One of the major unresolved questions is how information can be integrated and how coherent representational states can be established in the distributed neuronal systems subserving these functions. It has been suggested that this so-called ''binding problem'' may be solved in the temporal domain. The hypothesis is that synchronization of neuronal discharges can serve for the integration of distributed neurons into (...) cell assemblies and that this process may underlie the selection of perceptually and behaviorally relevant information. As we intend to show here, this temporal binding hypothesis has implications for the search of the neural correlate of consciousness. We review experimental results, mainly obtained in the visual system, which support the notion of temporal binding. In particular, we discuss recent experiments on the neural mechanisms of binocular rivalry which suggest that appropriate synchronization among cortical neurons may be one of the necessary conditions for the buildup of perceptual states and awareness of sensory stimuli. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out to defend the claim that a central principle in democratic theory, the all-subjected principle, applies not only when one is subject to a rule by a state but also when one is subject to a rule by a ‘non-state’ unit. I argue that self-government is the value underlying the all-subjected principle that explains why a subjected individual should be included because she is subjected. Given this, it is unfounded to limit the principle to the (...) state, as subjection which threatens self-government occurs in non-state units such as corporations and families. This means that following the all-subjected principle surprisingly implies that we ought to have family and workplace democracy. (shrink)

The impact of large digital corporations on our freedom is often lamented but rarely investigated systematically. This paper aims to fill this desideratum by focusing on the power of social media corporations and the freedom of their users. In order to analyze this relationship, I distinguish two forms of freedom and two corresponding forms of power. Social media corporations extend their users’ freedom of choice by providing many new options. This provision, however, comes with the domination by these corporations because (...) it is based on their power of uncontrolled interference. Users could escape this domination through exit. One reason why they do not choose this option is that they would lose the benefits associated with the network effects provided by social media services. A second reason is that the power of social media corporations runs so deep that they are able to manipulate the autonomous decision-making processes of their users. Users are provided with many new avenues for authentic self-presentation on social media. By using them, however, users need to conform to a web interface that is designed by corporations to undermine self-control. Through these two mechanisms, corporations are able to promote an interest in users to present themselves on their platforms. Insofar as this works, they secure the users’ compliance to their domination through subjectivation. This double conjunction of choice and domination, on the one hand, and autonomy and subjectivation, on the other, makes the case that the very power of corporate social media stems from their intrinsic connection to genuine practices of freedom. (shrink)

This article focuses on problematizing the harmonisation of higher education in Europe today. The overall aim is to analyse the construction of the European citizen and the rationality of governing related to such a construction. The specific focus will be on the rules and standards of reason in higher education reforms which inscribe continuums of values that exclude as they include. Who is and who is not constructed as a European citizen? Documents on the Bologna process produced in Europe and (...) in Sweden are analysed drawing on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, showing a neoliberal rationality of governing. The European citizen needs to become flexible, autonomous and self‐regulating as a way of facing the threats of the constantly changing future. The technique of diversity is a condition of possibility for constructing such a citizen and for harmonising higher education in Europe. Further, the current power relations in the discourse define what is and what is not European, thus constructing ‘the other’, the one who is excluded. (shrink)

It helps ordinary citizens evaluate their options and their responsibility for global institutional factors, and it challenges social scientists to address the causes of poverty and hunger that act across borders.The present volume ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking centre stage in economic growth and business operations alike. Public discourse about the practical and ethical implications of AI has mainly focussed on the societal level. There is an emerging knowledge base on AI risks to human rights around data security and privacy concerns. A separate strand of work has highlighted the stresses of working in the gig economy. This prevailing focus on human rights and gig impacts has been at the expense of a closer (...) look at how AI may be reshaping traditional workplace relations and, more specifically, workplace health and safety. To address this gap, we outline a conceptual model for developing an AI Work Health and Safety (WHS) Scorecard as a tool to assess and manage the potential risks and hazards to workers resulting from AI use in a workplace. A qualitative, practice-led research study of AI adopters was used to generate and test a novel list of potential AI risks to worker health and safety. Risks were identified after cross-referencing Australian AI Ethics Principles and Principles of Good Work Design with AI ideation, design and implementation stages captured by the AI Canvas, a framework otherwise used for assessing the commercial potential of AI to a business. The unique contribution of this research is the development of a novel matrix itemising currently known or anticipated risks to the WHS and ethical aspects at each AI adoption stage. (shrink)

As the final component of a chain of reasoning intended to take us all the way to logical nihilism, Russell (2018) presents the atomic sentence ‘prem’ which is supposed to be true when featuring as premise in an argument and false when featuring as conclusion in an argument. Such a sentence requires a non-reflexive logic and an endnote by Russell (2018) could easily leave the reader with the impression that going non-reflexive suffices for logical nihilism. This paper shows how one (...) can obtain non-reflexive logics in which ‘prem’ behaves as stipulated by Russell (2018) but which nonetheless has valid inferences supporting uniform substitution of any formula for propositional variables such as modus tollens and modus ponens. (shrink)