This book intervenes in the field of intersectionality studies: the integrative examination of the effects of racial, gendered, and class power on people’s lives. While “intersectionality” circulates as a buzzword, Anna Carastathis joins other critical voices to urge a more careful reading. Challenging the narratives of arrival that surround it, Carastathis argues that intersectionality is a horizon, illuminating ways of thinking that have yet to be realized; consequently, calls to “go beyond” intersectionality are premature. A provisional interpretation of intersectionality (...) can disorient habits of essentialism, categorial purity, and prototypicality and overcome dynamics of segregation and subordination in political movements. -/- Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, Carastathis urges analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this widely traveling concept. Intersectionality’s roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects—specifically Black feminism—must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so its radical potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted. (shrink)

Is open-mindedness a moral virtue? Surprisingly, this question has not received much attention from philosophers. In this paper, we fill this lacuna by arguing that there are good grounds for thinking that it is. In particular, we show that the extant account of open-mindedness as a moral virtue faces an objection that appears to show that exercising the character trait may not be virtuous. To offset this objection, we argue that a much stronger argument can be made for the case (...) that open-mindedness is a moral virtue by appealing to the notion of moral understanding. Specifically, we provide a new rationale as to why we should exercise open-mindedness and offer several arguments to allay the concern that doing so can at times cause us to be in an epistemically and morally weaker position. (shrink)

Human and automated tutors attempt to choose pedagogical activities that will maximize student learning, informed by their estimates of the student's current knowledge. There has been substantial research on tracking and modeling student learning, but significantly less attention on how to plan teaching actions and how the assumed student model impacts the resulting plans. We frame the problem of optimally selecting teaching actions using a decision-theoretic approach and show how to formulate teaching as a partially observable Markov decision process planning (...) problem. This framework makes it possible to explore how different assumptions about student learning and behavior should affect the selection of teaching actions. We consider how to apply this framework to concept learning problems, and we present approximate methods for finding optimal teaching actions, given the large state and action spaces that arise in teaching. Through simulations and behavioral experiments, we explore the consequences of choosing teacher actions under different assumed student models. In two concept-learning tasks, we show that this technique can accelerate learning relative to baseline performance. (shrink)

The present article looks at the lexical elements from Russia in the speech of the Volga Germans in Argentina. For this data recollected during the field study conducted in the context of the PhD of the author is analyzed. After a brief theoretical introduction into language contact studies, the article will give an overview of the sociohistorical context of the group in question. Then the Slavisms found in the study will be analyzed in regards to their semantics and their phonetical (...) and morphological adaptation to the German variety spoken by the Volga Germans in Argentina. All in all this study contributes with over 100 new lexical units from Russian to the current state of research on the influence of Russian on the Volga German variety in Argentina. (shrink)

The main purpose of the paper is to justify the thesis that the presence of biological information is conditional for existence and persistence of life. We will begin with the notion of biological information. In this proposition information is identified with impact, and it is shown the dependence of its location and functioning on the level of organization of animate matter. In accordance with a suggestion of Thomas Aquinas, it seems that precisely information is the reason for the appearance of (...) socalled immanent activities where new life appears. (shrink)

The questions "What is the purpose of religious ethics?" and "What is the rationale behind the field?" are addressed in this research study. The aim of research is determining the ethics and divinity the research study also explain the moral philosophy through the lens of religious traditions in the European context. It first illustrates how Christian ethicists have provided justifications for conducting research in the area to pinpoint an Anti-Reductive Paradigm that an Egalitarian Imperative informs. The work in the sector (...) is guided by that imperative, which serves as a thin, minimal morality of equality and inclusivity. Second, the essay examines the goals of the field. Here, the emphasis moves from values that influence the field's practices to values that can characterize the goals of the field. The research study based on philosophical theories also that explain the traditions context related to religious. This change necessitates that we consider a thick morality rather than a thin one that prioritizes substantive virtues over procedural ones. Within the framework of Critical Humanism, the essay presents a practical, significant idea. The study of religious ethics is justified by critical humanism as an endeavour to broaden one's moral imagination by exposing oneself to diversity. Four ideals influence it: environmental responsibility, social critique, post-critical thinking, and cross-cultural fluency. Third, the paper explains how to relate these goals to the flimsy morality of equality and inclusion, unifying the argument's two halves. The research study goal is to make us consider the power of scholarship in the guild and morals, which is why it focuses on the politics and ethics of religious ethics. (shrink)

The authors proposes a philosophical hinterland of nomological type for various conceptions of alethic modalities. Differences among these conceptions are explained by the fact, that moda­lizators can be relativized to various types of laws. Thus one can speak respectively about logic and definitional, ontical and physical, technical and dispositional, psychological and methodo­logical, and finally deontic modalities. The authors shows that in their conceptual appa­ratus modal logics find intuitive interpretation more clear and ontologically more cautious than the semantics of possible worlds (...) philosophically interpreted. The nomological explication of main notions of this semantics (like “possible world” and “accessibility relation”) is also given. (shrink)

Pojęcia były zawsze jednym z najważniejszych obiektów badań filozoficznych. Szczególnie duży wkład do teorii analizy pojęć wnieśli przedstawiciele polskiej gałęzi XX-wiecznej filozofii analitycznej, czyli Szkoły Lwowsko-Warszawskiej. Badaniom filozoficznym w tej szkole przyświecał postulat jasności myślenia i mowy. Analiza i doskonalenie pojęć oraz języka filozoficznego jako ich nośnika były naturalnym wyrazem programu metodologicznego, jaki formacji tej nadał jej założyciel, Kazimierz Twardowski. W artykule przedstawiona jest procedura rekonstrukcji pojęć, stosowana powszechnie w szkole Twardowskiego. Okazuje się, że pomimo głębokich niekiedy różnic między poszczególnymi (...) przedstawicielami SLW da się wskazać pewne rysy wspólne prowadzonych w szkole badań nad pojęciami. Są to przede wszystkim moment kategorialny i moment konstrukcyjny, ze względu na który całą procedurę najlepiej określić właśnie jako „rekonstrukcję”. Bliżej zostały omówione dwa przykłady rekonstrukcji pojęć: praca Jana Łukasiewicza dotycząca pojęcia przyczyny oraz wyniki Alfreda Tarskiego dotyczące pojęcia prawdy. (shrink)

This article presents proposals for a new social settlement – a framework for deciding how people live together and what they expect from government, now and for the future. The proposed settlement has three goals: social justice, environmental sustainability, and a more equal distribution of power. To achieve these goals we have identified a set of objectives too often ignored in mainstream debates: achieving prosperity without depending on economic growth; shifting investment and action upstream to prevent harm rather than coping (...) with the consequences; strengthening the “core economy” of unpaid work, everyday wisdom, and social connections; and fostering solidarity and an understanding of how individuals depend on each other to achieve shared goals. The article draws on a report from the New Economics Foundation, which focuses on the United Kingdom but offers a framework for developing policy and practice that may be useful in other countries, especially in the developed world. (shrink)

In the past years, the relevance of Thomas Aquinas's theory of cognition for contemporary debates on epistemology has been widely discussed. That theory claims that mind and world are formally identical and that this relationship overcomes various problems associated with scepticism concerning mental representation. The proposal, however, is grounded on the idea that the world can act on the mind through a relation of formal causation. This thesis attempts to develop a Thomistic theory of formal causation which may be suitable (...) for a realist account of mental representation and which may meet the requirements prompted by current discussions. The suggested view is grounded on Aquinas's metaphysics, according to which the world is constituted of substances. The claim that change is possible since substances are hylomorphically constituted is defended. Aquinas's claim that some substances have forms which may act independently of matter is also supported. The paradigmatic examples are human souls, i.e. the forms of human beings, whose higher cognitive capacity, i.e. thinking, can be in principle carried on without the need of any material organ. A Thomistic theory of causation is subsequently proposed. It is argued that hylomorphism explains the distinction among four species of causes. Aquinas's attempt to explain causal relations conditionally is developed along the lines suggested by John Mackie's INUS conditional analysis. Jaegwon Kim's implementation of Mackie's proposal through an object-based metaphysics of events is then adapted to the hylomorphical account of substances. On these grounds, a theory of formal causation can be proposed and applied to Aquinas's theory of mental representation. The ensuing proposal is offered not in the spirit of historical exegesis but as a substantive philosophical account and it is Thomistic only in the broad sense that it is built on Aquinas's metaphysics and is consistent with his claims on causation. (shrink)

Ordinary competent language speakers experience difficulty in paraphrasing words such as ‘the’, ‘but’ or ‘however’ as compared to words such as ‘chair’ or ‘run’. The difficulty experienced in the first case is sometimes called descriptive ineffability. In recent debates about meaning types in pragmatics and philosophy of language, descriptive ineffability has been used as a test for the presence of expressive (as opposed to descriptive) meaning, or procedural (as opposed to conceptual) meaning. However, the notion of descriptive ineffability is controversial (...) and in need of further clarification. In this paper I provide two arguments that descriptive ineffability is not a good criterion for distinguishing between types of meaning. First, I show that the effability/ineffability divide does not line up with distinctions in meaning type. Second, I argue that several effability/ineffability patterns are best explained not by the meaning types of words but by differences in the range and scope of speakers’ metalinguistic ability to paraphrase, as it is shaped by experience throughout their lives. (shrink)

Cybernetic Bacteria is an ongoing transdisciplinary investigation that brings together art, philosophy, microbiology and digital technology to examine the relationship of the emerging science of bacterial communication to our own digital communications networks, looking in particular at ‘packet data’ and bacterial quorum sensing. The project seeks to compare philosophical notions of the sublime with a kind of bacterial sublime, demonstrating the greater complexity of the interactions taking place at a microscopic level, when compared to human communication technologies such as the (...) World Wide Web (with particular focus on scale-free networks). The first artwork in the series employed a clear plastic tube of liquid agar jelly planted into earth to allow the soil bacteria beneath to grow upwards and become visible. A total of 100 µL of Homoserine Lactone, a hormone used by bacteria for quorum sensing (a form of bacterial communication), was then added by the artist as part of a performance lecture, with her in effect saying: ‘I’m here’ to the bacteria below. The microbes that have been communicated to then pass the signal on to their neighbours and so on. In theory this enables the signal to travel around the planet. However, the main issue with this work is one of Hermeneutics; the bacteria, which receive the communication, will not identify the artist as human – simply as another (albeit very large) bacterium. The project has subsequently evolved into a multiple screen digital artwork showing network traffic taking place in real time (web traffic, RFID and Bluetooth), a film of bacterial communication in progress (using two strains of genetically modified bacteria) and an interactive conceptualisation of the data from both sources generated using artificial life. The project continues. (shrink)

By the 1990s the dynamic array of creative direct action tactics used against militarised technologies that emerged from women’s anti-nuclear protest camps in the 1980s became largely eclipsed by cyberfeminism’s focus on digital and online technologies. Yet recently, as robots and algorithms are put forward as the vanguards of new drone execution regimes, some are wondering if now is the time for another Greenham Common. In this article I return to cyborg feminism and anti-nuclear activisms of the 1980s to explore (...) what drone feminism might look like today. I examine how anti-nuclear protesters infused affect and techné, creating innovative images of, and tactics for, material resistance. I argue that Greenham women’s cyborg feminisms arose from their material entanglements with the military base. In their efforts to reveal and undermine the national and imperial myths upon which warfare is based, protesters re-imagined technological possibilities based upon a global accountability for ‘earthly survival’. (shrink)

William Selinger’s Parliamentarism: from Burke to Weber aims to redefine our understanding of what it means to live in a free state. It displaces the concept of “democracy” as a (supposedly) central concern for a range of canonical nineteenth-century authors, and demonstrates that another concept, that of “parliamentarism”, stood at the core of many European liberal writers’ quest for liberty. Selinger shows that Montesquieu’s description of a “balanced” English constitution protected by a system of checks and balances was challenged by (...) a number of contemporary observers of British politics (including Jean-Louis de Lolme and Edmund Burke), who elaborated rival accounts emphasizing instead the dominant position of a powerful representative assembly which mirrored the nation it represented. The resulting doctrine of “parliamentarism”, the book demonstrates through a series of case studies that include Tocqueville, Mill and Weber, subsequently became the “dominant paradigm of a free state across Europe” (p. 9) in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

The cinematic technique of point-of-view shots is meant to give spectators a film character’s point-ofview. In ‘Imagining from the Inside’, Murray Smith claims that point-of-view shots allow viewers to ‘imagine seeing as the character does’ and this imagining in turn promotes imagining the character ‘from the inside’, thereby fostering empathy with the character. I argue, against Smith, that the cinematic technique of point-of-view shots does not prompt viewers to ‘imagine seeing as the character does’ for two reasons: first, such shots (...) do not give us a character’s perspective in any literal sense, but what I call a ‘symbolic perspective’; second, the very concept of ‘imagining seeing’ is problematic in that it places us on the same ontological level as that of fictional characters. I agree with Smith that point-of-view shots promote a qualitatively different emotional engagement in spectators and that they are powerful prompts to ‘imagining from the inside’, while I show that he conflates this Waltonian notion with Currie’s ‘personal imagining’ and with the idea of empathizing with a character. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo criticar a teoria do modelo ocidental de guerra, proposta por Hanson, a partir do que a historiografia tem identificado como seus principais problemas: a alegada continuidade da arte da guerra ocidental através dos séculos, começando com os gregos antigos; e o chamado “contraste asiático”, com alguns dos seus desdobramentos. Assim, o texto está dividido em três seções: 1) a apresentação e os méritos da teoria de Hanson; 2) suas bases clássicas, ou a ênfase da arte (...) da guerra grega na batalha decisiva como uma “escolha cultural”; 3) as críticas pertinentes. (shrink)

Biopolitics and dystopia: genomics in Michael Crichton’s Next Resumen: En este artículo se busca demostrar que, mientras el desarrollo científico es propulsado por el pensamiento tecno-optimista, el discurso prevalente sobre genómica en la cultura de masas es pesimista y tiene potencial para impedir la construcción de respuestas adecuadas a los desafíos biopolíticos por parte de los sistemas políticos y jurídicos. Aquí se sostiene que la utopía genómica es la única propuesta optimista que estimula las investigaciones científicas y que permite pensar (...) en las posibles regulaciones y los cambios necesarios para la conceptualización de la idea de propiedad. Estos problemas son ilustrados con la ayuda del libro de Michael Crichton, Next, que proporciona numerosos ejemplos distópicos. Summary: The article seeks to demonstrate that while scientific development is pro- pelled by technooptimistic thought, the prevalent discourse about genomics is pessimistic, which has the potential to forestall the construction of an adequate answer on the part of political and legal systems. It is shown that genomic utopia is the only optimistic proposition which stimulates scientific research as well as enables thinking about regulations and the necessary changes in the conceptualization of the idea of property. These problems are illustrated with the help of Michael Crichton’s book Next, which provides numerous dystopian examples. Palabras clave: biopolítica, distopía, genómica, sociedad abierta, autopropiedad, Crichton. Keywords: biopolitics, dystopia, genomics, open society, self-ownership, Crichton. (shrink)

Museums establish specific contexts, framings, which distinguish them from viewing the world face-to-face. One striking aspect of exhibition in so-calledparticipatorymuseums is that it echoes and transforms the limits of its own frame as a public space. I argue that it is a mistake to think of the meaning of an exhibit aseitherdetermined by the individual viewer's narrativeoras determined by the conception as presented in the museum's ‘authoritative’ narrative. Instead I deploy the concept of amodel of comparisonto illuminate the philosophical significance (...) of perspective in understanding the idea of objectivity in museum narratives. (shrink)

Research related to indigenous peoples in Sweden and elsewhere has a history marked by discriminatory practice and unequal research processes. Sweden has still not been very visible in terms of openly debating, developing and implementing ethical strategies specifically suited for indigenous research. The present study explores how research ethics is discussed among scholars within the Sami research field in contemporary Sweden. Fifty-six research proposals deriving from eight different research institutions and 160 individual researchers are analyzed, discovering how scholars relate to (...) research ethics when planning for new research projects related to the indigenous Sami. The results demonstrate that ethical guidelines for research are often referred to, but that a common view on what guidelines to use is lacking, leading to a notable variety between different researchers. Ethical discussions are present in the vast majority of the proposals, however there are notable differences between the theories around how to proceed in a culturally safe, ethical manner, and the proposed methods that are to be used to implement theory in practice. In conclusion, there exists a great uncertainty among scholars on where to seek ethical guidance, how to relate to current legislation around research ethics and at the same time act ethically in a culturally appropriate manner. This uncertainty leads to questioning whether discussions of ethics are relevant in the first place, what they are supposed to include, how they are meant to be undertaken and what consequences can be expected from the presence or absence of ethics in indigenous research. (shrink)

Recent health legislation in Norway significantly increases access to specialist care within a legally binding time frame. The paper describes the contents of the new legislation and introduces some of the challenges with proliferations of rights to health care. The paper describes some of the challenges associated with the proliferation of legal rights to health care. It explains the benefits of assessing the new law in the light of a rights framework. It then analyses the problematic aspects of establishing additional (...) priority rules as solutions to rights conflicts. It then defends adequacy criteria for acceptable priority rules when such rules are unavoidable. It finally defends our proposed method and explores concrete applications. (shrink)

This paper discusses the representation of foreign gods as demons found in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It investigates the category of δαιμόνιον in some Septuagint texts against the background of the Hellenistic literature, and the relationship between the notion of demon and that of idol. In doing this, it shows the relevance of the Septuagint for a better understanding of religious notions emerging during the Hellenistic period. Moreover, focusing on some uses of εἴδωλον in the Pentateuch, the (...) paper proposes a new interpretation for the word in the Greek version of the decalogue, in light of papyrological evidence. (shrink)

Human individuals often exhibit important differences in their sensitivity to ionising radiation. Extensive literature links radiation sensitivity with impaired DNA repair which is due to a lack of correct functioning in many proteins involved in DNA‐repair pathways and/or in DNA‐damage checkpoint responses. Given that ionising radiation is an important and widespread diagnostic and therapeutic tool, it is important to investigate further those factors and mechanisms that underlie individual radiosensitivity. Recently, evidence is accumulating that telomere function may well be involved in (...) cellular and organism responses to ionising radiation, broadening still further the currently complex and challenging scenario. BioEssays. BioEssays 28: 1172–1180, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)