This study explored possible changes in family functioning from the perspective of parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thirty-four parents/guardians of children under 18 years completed a semi-structured interview, average length 47 min. Interviews focussed on changes in different aspects of family functioning including family roles, routines, and rules; parenting practices; communication and relationships; and strengths, challenges, and tensions. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis applied in an idiographic and inductive manner to reduce the loss of individual experiences and perspectives. (...) Four superordinate themes were identified: shifting family roles and boundaries throughout the pandemic; impacts on routines and relationships; opportunities and resourcing; and, experiences of support and unity. Gender differences were evident across some themes, particularly changing roles, workload and work-home boundaries. Challenges and tensions were frequently highlighted, particularly by “vulnerable” family groups such as those with children with disabilities. Parents also described a renewed sense of family and community that underpinned adaptive coping responses. The results highlight the importance of family connectedness in times of need. (shrink)

Can social phenomena be understood by analyzing their parts? Contemporary economic theory often assumes that they can. The methodology of constructing models which trace the behavior of perfectly rational agents in idealized environments rests on the premise that such models, while restricted, help us isolate tendencies, that is, the stable separate effects of economic causes that can be used to explain and predict economic phenomena. In this paper, I question both the claim that models in economics supply claims about tendencies (...) and also the view that economics, when successful, necessarily follows this method. When economics licenses successful policy interventions, as it did in the case of the Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions, its method is not to study tendencies but rather to study the phenomenon as a whole. Key Words: economic models • tendencies • economic experiments • policy making • John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

The nature of the self is an important point at which philosophy and literature intersect. Text, Body and Indeterminacy acknowledges this connection by forging a link between the philosophical concept of the self and the category of the literary character. The philosophical horizon of Text, Body and Indeterminacy is delineated by the neo-pragmatist debate on selfhood. The book entwines the ideas of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman by stressing similarity in their aestheticizing of ethics and by showing the difference in (...) their understanding of the self as textual or bodily. The characters created by Pater and Wilde are freshly assessed within this dual philosophical perspective. Their doppelgngers are seen as the forerunners of postmodernist concepts: the cerebral fl[neur is reflected in Rortys model ironist, and the sensuous aesthete returns through Shustermans notion of the somatic self. Text, Body and Indeterminacy establishes how Pater renders his protagonists through discursive patternstropes of Decadence, philosophical theorems, and mythsonly to subvert these vocabularies and to emphasize the reality of the body, the extra-textual dimension of the self. It also shows how Wildes sensuous personae, both bodily and indeterminate, transcend the vocabularies available to the Wildean fl[neurs. Through its interpretations, Text Body and Indeterminacy uniquely combines literary portraits by Pater and Wilde, highlights interlocking themes and, in every reading, points to the ethical gains of tilting the idea of selfhood into the somatic realm. (shrink)

This study focuses on the definition of regions in post-industrial areas (Old Industrial Cities) and the method of cluster analysis as the technique for estimating the degree of depression of a coal region. At times of global economic crisis, it makes sense to study the economic experience of depressed regions, dominated by mono product economies, in order to assess ways to overcome the consequences of the crisis.

The times of restricting reading to just sitting with a book in a cozy armchair are gone. If you ask a modern teenager or university student how they would prefer to do it, the chances are fairly high that the answer you’ll get is a computer screen or an iPad. Digital technologies have become an ordinary tool for everybody dealing with literature, including common readers, students in the field, and professional scholars who have dedicated their lives to literary research. This (...) means the time has come to simultaneously revise the way literature is taught and explored, and this is where the volume Literary Education and Digital Learning: Methods and Technologies for Humanities Studies, edited by Willie van Peer .. (shrink)

Whatever societies accept as "knowledge" is embedded in specific epistemological, political and economic power relations. How is knowledge produced and functionalized? What is the difference between knowledge and the sciences? Can there be science without universal truth claims? Questions like these, all of them highly relevant, are discussed in twelve essays from the perspective of Sociology, Law, Cultural Studies and the Humanities.

Rhetoric concerns how in speech human beings open up a place for civil possibility, a place where, as a community of speakers and hearers, they engage with questions of how best to conceive and respond to challenges arising out of the world that they share. In rhetoric the community of speakers and hearers is not only called into being but so too the nature of the topos or place that is shared, a determination that is timely or historical. The recent (...) publication of Heidegger’s 1924 lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric explores this idea of rhetoric. These lectures raise questions for how and whether Heidegger sustained this conception in his later work, and also questions for how this conception may have influenced Arendt’s approach to political thought. Arendt’s conception of the role of the spectator who engages in the activity of understanding in order to “try to be at home in the world” is especially pertinent here. Arendt’s writing, so far as it calls into being a rhetorical relationship between her “speech” and her hearers/readers, is best appreciated as rhetoric. (shrink)

This monograph examines the origins of modern and modernist moral confusion and the deterioration of the Judeo-Christian values and contemporary boundaries between Right and Wrong. It traces the ethical shift to the ideas of Hobbes and Bentham, the peculiar universe of Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky, the new religion of Tolstoy and the destroyed God of Nietzsche, ending with the psychoanalytical commandments of Freud and the mire of sexual identity of Foucault and Paglia.

A review of Susan E. Babbit's book: Jose Marti, Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Global Development Ethics: The Battle for Ideas.

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) offer much-needed collaborative spaces to address socio-ecological problems. Yet it is unclear if and how CSPs activities contribute to transformative innovation (TI) that addresses these problems and creates socio-ecological impact. Understanding how CSPs can contribute to TI is essential for CSP practitioners and researchers in order to address pressing socio-ecological problems. To better understand how CSPs can contribute to TI and socio-ecological impact, I conducted a multiple case-study of eight CSPs in the field of sustainable, circular packaging. (...) The findings—based on the novel Transformative Innovation Process framework this article introduces—reveal three innovation pathways with different potentials for contributing to socio-ecological impact. Of the three, the complementary pioneering and adapting pathways have the greatest potential for contributing to socio-ecological impact, and the consolidating pathway has the least potential. This article makes theoretical contributions to the CSP literature as well as practical contributions for CSPs. (shrink)

Is power the essence of divinity, or are divine powers distinct from divine essence? Are they divine hypostases or are they divine attributes? Are powers such as omnipotence, omniscience, etc. modes of divine activity? How do they manifest? In which way can we apprehend them? Is there a multiplicity of gods whose powers fill the cosmos or is there only one God from whom all power(s) derive(s) and whose power(s) permeate(s) everything? These are questions that become central to philosophical and (...) theological debates in Late Antiquity (roughly corresponding to the period 2nd to the 6th centuries). On the one hand, the Pagan Neoplatonic thinkers of this era postulate a complex hierarchy of gods, whose powers express the unlimited power of the ineffable One. On the other hand, Christians proclaim the existence of only one God, one divine power or one 'Lord of all powers'. -/- Divided into two main sections, the first part of Divine Powers in Late Antiquity examines aspects of the notion of divine power as developed by the four major figures of Neoplatonism: Plotinus (c. 204-270), Porphyry (c. 234-305), Iamblichus (c.245-325), and Proclus (412-485). It focuses on an aspect of the notion of divine power that has been so far relatively neglected in the literature. Part two investigates the notion of divine power in early Christian authors, from the New Testament to the Alexandrian school (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius the Great) and, further, to the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa), as well as in some of these authors' sources (the Septuagint, Philo of Alexandria). The traditional view tends to overlook the fact that the Bible, particularly the New Testament, was at least as important as Platonic philosophical texts in the shaping of the early Christian thinking about the Church's doctrines. Whilst challenging the received interpretation by redressing the balance between the Bible and Greek philosophical texts, the essays in the second section of this book nevertheless argue for the philosophical value of early Christian reflections on the notion of divine power. The two groups of thinkers that each of the sections deal with (the Platonic-Pagan and the Christian one) share largely the same intellectual and cultural heritage; they are concerned with the same fundamental questions; and they often engage in more or less public philosophical and theological dialogue, directly influencing one another. (shrink)

‘Is being one only one? – The Argument for the Uniqueness of Platonic Forms’ Abstract: Each Form is unique in number; no two numerically distinct Forms can share the same nature. Plato argues for this claim in Republic X. I identify the metaphysical principles Plato presupposes in the premises of the argument, by examining the reasoning behind them, and offer a reconstruction of the argument showing the principles in use. I argue that the metaphysical significance of the argument’s conclusion is (...) to establish that if a Form F were not unique, if there were many Forms F, their nature would alter along with their number: a Form cannot recur without change in its constitution. This is why there can be only one Form for each character in the world. (shrink)

The main theme of the paper is the role of the mass media in the production, creation, retention, protection and defense of a social order, or in carrying out revisions, or cosmetic and extensive changes to it. In the first section, the author explains the Power of the Mass Media by looking at Foucauldian leprosy/plague management. The second part, Docile Mass Media Producers Under Panoptic Control, deals with the routinization of the mass media craft. Finally, the Social Order of Docile (...) Individuals who Feel Freedom takes a closer look at the social order and how it is created by mass media producers (as professionals in their craft). (shrink)

Si la praxéologie mérite aujourd’hui notre attention, c’est parce qu’elle permet de remonter aux origines des « théories de l’action », des sociologies de l’action ou des philosophies de l’action qui ont marqué le xxe siècle. Que veut dire, au fond, étudier l’action, en proposer ensuite une théorie, à visée soit descriptive soit normative? Dans ce qui suit, on va étudier la question en compagnie de Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886-1981), philosophe analytique, et de Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011), sociologue hétérodoxe. Ce texte défend (...) l’idée selon laquelle parmi les conséquences les plus marquantes du travail de Garfinkel se trouve la démystification de la « théorie de l’action », et que certaines intuitions similaires sont déjà très présentes chez Kotarbiński (dont les travaux sur l’action constituent, selon Garfinkel, un « échec extrêmement important »). La praxéologie chez les deux auteurs n’est pas une discipline, mais une façon de voir la pratique étudiée comme un tout, à l’instar des recherches menées par les théoriciens de la Gestalt. La dimension athéorique de l’étude de l’action humaine proposée ici permet d’espérer qu’un jour, les phénomènes qui nous entourent vont pouvoir être étudiés pour ce qu’ils sont, et non pas pour ce qu’une théorie élégante permet d’en dire. (shrink)