ABSTRACT Utopias in Africa is an emerging academic field. While we are witnessing an increasing number of fictional and ideological utopias, little attention is paid to lived utopias. The Green Camp Gallery Project is such a lived utopia, which predominantly strives for realizing desired future imaginations in daily practices. Localized in the urban context of Durban, in a derelict house in the industrial area, the Green Camp strives for a “simple post-growth life,” which is closely related to nature and the (...) philosophy of Ubuntu. In so doing, the Green Camp responds to the overlapping crisis of urbanity and offers an alternative future aspiration. The Green Camp is not perfect and it is not able to solve the deep problems of South African society, but it offers an “island” of hope and imagination in a challenging urban environment. At the same time the lived utopia reveals the agency of the urban marginalized and contradicts widespread assumptions concerning environmentalism. Based on a qualitative study, the article takes an unusual perspective by analyzing the imagination of lived utopia in an emerging utopian hotspot—Africa. (shrink)

Hire Leser-oderim Theater: die Znschauer - zum Laehen zu bringen ist cines der wichtigsten, allerdings wenig anerkannten Ziele der Literatur. So baufig Lachen remer Ubermut oder ein verlachendes Spotten ist, so sehr Kann man aber auch lachend sehr wie bereits Lessings Minna von Barnhelm wusste. Den unterschiedlichen Typen und Sprachformen des Laehens geht der vorliegend Band an Beispielen der deutschen and earopaischen Literatur naeh, von der antiken Komodie bis zum neuesten Detektivroman.

I argue that neutral free logic and existence hedging are incompatible. Primarily, I respond to proposals by James Pryor intended to reconcile the two. Consideration of those proposals will reveal that on any neutral free logic either some existence hedges will entail some undesired existence claims, or they will not entail some desired existence claims.

Bruineberg et al. provide compelling clarity on the roles Markov blankets could (and perhaps should) play in the study of life and mind. However, here we draw attention to a further role blankets might play: as a hypothesis about cognition itself. People and other animals may use blanket-like representations to model the boundary between themselves and their worlds.

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political theory methods and methodologies, as well as by those critics who assert that political theory is too abstracted from actual political contestation. Our aim is to unearth this (...) grounded normative theory (GNT) approach – to identify its definitive practices and highlight its potential significance. We detail four overlapping commitments characteristic of GNT. These include commitments to expanding the comprehensiveness of input for normative arguments through original empirical research and/or analysis, recursivity in the development of normative claims, attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing, and accountability to those engaged by the theorist in empirical contexts. We discuss methodological distinctions within GNT, including between more- and less-solidaristic approaches. We discuss how GNT answers calls for theorists to engage more closely with empirical political dynamics and we consider responses to possible critiques. (shrink)

Przekaz legendarnego Orfeusza już przez autorów starożytnych identyfikowany był z niejasną i trudną symboliką. Język ten, pomimo swojej niejasności, był najlepszą drogą do komunikacji pomiędzy bogami a ludźmi. Niniejszy artykuł jest kolejną próbą, na podstawie starożytnych przekazów, współczesnej literatury krytycznej i refleksji autora, opisania orfizmu: starożytnego fenomenu łączącego ze sobą przekaz religijny, filozoficzny, antropologię i teologię. Zjawisko to wciąż nie jest dostatecznie rozumiane, mimo, że odgrywa kluczową rolę w kształtowaniu się mentalności i duchowości współczesnego człowieka. Orfizm jako starożytna via-religia do (...) zbawienia i samopoznania wymaga nieustających studiów bazujących wyłącznie na oryginalnych greckich tekstach, stanowiących niezgłębioną kopalnię wiedzy na temat religijności starożytnych Greków. (shrink)

Hertwig and Ortmann (H&O) rightly criticize the usage of deception. However, stationary replication may often have no ecological validity. Many economic experiments are not interactive; when they are, there is not much specifically validating H&O's psychological views on script enactment. Incentives in specific market structures may scaffold even zero rational decision-making, but this says very little about individual psychology.

ABSTRACTThe notion of immunity to error through misidentification has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM (...) that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM. (shrink)

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and (...) Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

This article attempts to understand and develop the morality of everyday activities in organizations. Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, practical wisdom, is utilized to describe the morality of the everyday work activities at two call centres of an Australian insurance company. The ethnographic data suggests that ethical judgements at the lower level of the organization are practical rather than theoretical; emergent rather than static; ambiguous rather than clear-cut; and particular rather than universal. Ethical codes are of limited value here and it (...) is argued that by developing phronesis members of the organization can improve their capacity to deal with this ethical complexity. (shrink)

In recent decades, issues that reside at the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry have been absorbed into a scientific framework variously identified as "brain science," "cognitive science," and "cognitive neuroscience." Scholars have heralded this development as revolutionary, but a revolution implies an existing method has been overturned in favor of something new. What long-held theories have been abandoned or significantly modified in light of cognitive neuroscience? _Consciousness and Mental Life_ questions our present approach to the study of consciousness and (...) the way modern discoveries either mirror or contradict understandings reached in the centuries leading up to our own. Daniel N. Robinson does not wage an attack on the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Rather, he provides the necessary historical context to properly evaluate the relationship between issues of consciousness and neuroscience and their evolution over time. Robinson begins with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and continues through to René Descartes, David Hume, William James, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Derek Parfit. Approaching the issue from both a philosophical and a psychological perspective, Robinson identifies what makes the study of consciousness so problematic and asks whether cognitive neuroscience can truly reveal the origins of mental events, emotions, and preference, or if these occurrences are better understood by studying the whole person, not just the brain. Well-reasoned and thoroughly argued, _Consciousness and Mental Life_ corrects many claims made about the success of brain science and provides a valuable historical context for the study of human consciousness. (shrink)

Finding myself writing this introduction on the same day that Greta Thunberg is addressing the United Nations, it seems impossible not to understand her parrhesia concerning the biospheric crisis a...

Disagreements about the morality of markets, and about self-interested behavior within markets, run deep. They arise from perspectives within economics and political philosophy that appear to have nothing in common. In this book, Daniel Finn provides a framework for understanding these conflicting points of view. Recounting the arguments for and against markets and self-interest, he argues that every economy must address four fundamental problems: allocation, distribution, scale, and the quality of relations. In addition, every perspective on the morality of (...) markets addresses explicitly or implicitly the economic, political, and cultural contexts of markets, or what Finn terms 'the moral ecology of markets'. His book enables a dialogue among the various participants in the debate over justice in markets. In this process, Finn engages with major figures in political philosophy, including John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, as well as in economics, notably Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchannan. (shrink)

A principle endorsed by many theories of objective chance, and practically forced on us by the standard interpretation of the Kolmogorov semantics for chance, is the principle that when a proposition P has a chance, any proposition Q that is necessarily equivalent to P will have the same chance as P. Call this principle SUB (for the substitution of necessary equivalents into chance ascriptions). I will present some problems for a theory of chance, and will argue that the best way (...) to resolve these problems is to reject SUB, and similar principles e.g. for the chances of outcomes or the chances of events. Objective chance, it turns out, carves things more finely than necessary equivalence does. (shrink)

Widespread commercial use of the internet has significantly increased the volume and scope of data being collected by organisations. ‘Big data’ has emerged as a term to encapsulate both the technical and commercial aspects of this growing data collection activity. To date, much of the discussion of big data has centred upon its transformational potential for innovation and efficiency, yet there has been less reflection on its wider implications beyond commercial value creation. This paper builds upon normal accident theory to (...) analyse the broader ethical implications of big data. It argues that the strategies behind big data require organisational systems that leave them vulnerable to normal accidents, that is to say some form of accident or disaster that is both unanticipated and inevitable. Whilst NAT has previously focused on the consequences of physical accidents, this paper suggests a new form of system accident that we label data accidents. These have distinct, less tangible and more complex characteristics and raise significant questions over the role of individual privacy in a ‘data society’. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the risks of such data accidents might be managed or mitigated. (shrink)

This 1997 work is a book-length treatment of the unique nature and development of Nietzsche's post-Zarathustran political philosophy. This later political philosophy is set in the context of the critique of modernity that Nietzsche advances in the years 1885–1888, in such texts as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. In this light Nietzsche's own diagnosis of the ills of modernity is subject to the same (...) criticism that he himself levelled against previous philosophies; that it is an involuntary symptom of the age it represents. Nietzsche is seen to be aware of his own decadence and of his complicity with the very tendencies that he dissects and deplores. By relating the political philosophy, the critique of modernity and the theory of decadence Daniel Conway has written a powerful book about Nietzsche's own appreciation of the limitations of both his writing style and of his famous prophetic 'stance'. (shrink)

BackgroundPrevious studies suggested a circadian variation of migraine attack onset, although, with contradictory results – possibly because of the existence of migraine subgroups with different circadian attack onset peaks. Migraine is primarily a brain disorder, and if the diversity in daily distribution of migraine attack onset reflects an important aspect of migraine, it may also associate with interictal brain activity. Our goal was to assess brain activity differences in episodic migraine subgroups who were classified according to their typical circadian peak (...) of attack onset.MethodsTwo fMRI studies were conducted with migraine without aura patients (n= 31 in Study 1,n= 48 in Study 2). Among them, three subgroups emerged with typical Morning, Evening, and Varying start of attack onset. Whole brain activity was compared between the groups in an implicit emotional processing fMRI task, comparing fearful, sad, and happy facial stimuli to neutral ones.ResultsIn both studies, significantly increased neural activation was detected to fearful (but not sad or happy) faces. In Study 1, the Evening start group showed increased activation compared to the Morning start group in regions involved in emotional, self-referential (left posterior cingulate gyrus, right precuneus), pain (including left middle cingulate, left postcentral, left supramarginal gyri, right Rolandic operculum) and sensory (including bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right Heschl’s gyrus) processing. While in Study 2, the Morning start group showed increased activation compared to the Varying start group at a nominally significant level in regions with pain (right precentral gyrus, right supplementary motor area) and sensory processing (bilateral paracentral lobule) functions.ConclusionOur fMRI studies suggest that different circadian attack onset peaks are associated with interictal brain activity differences indicating heterogeneity within migraine patients and alterations in sensitivity to threatening fearful stimuli. Circadian variation of migraine attack onset may be an important characteristic to address in future studies and migraine prophylaxis. (shrink)

Language did not evolve only in the distant past. Our shared understanding of the meanings of words is ever-changing, and we make conscious, rational decisions about which words to use and what to mean by them every day. Applying Charles Darwin's theory of "unconscious artificial selection" to the evolution of linguistic conventions, Daniel Cloud suggests a new, evolutionary explanation for the rich, complex, and continually reinvented meanings of our words. The choice of which words to use and in which (...) sense to use them is both a "selection event" and an intentional decision, making Darwin's account of artificial selection a particularly compelling model of the evolution of words. After drawing an analogy between the theory of domestication offered by Darwin and the evolution of human languages and cultures, Cloud applies his analytical framework to the question of what makes humans unique and how they became that way. He incorporates insights from David Lewis's Convention, Brian Skyrms's Signals, and Kim Sterelny's Evolved Apprentice, all while emphasizing the role of deliberate human choice in the crafting of language over time. His clever and intuitive model casts humans' cultural and linguistic evolution as an integrated, dynamic process, with results that reach into all corners of our private lives and public character. (shrink)

Die Metamathematik der reellen Zahlen kann durch verschiedene formale Theorien der reellen Zahlen entwickelt werden. Ausgehend von der Theorie der reell abgeschlossenen Körper werden Erweiterungen beweistheoretisch untersucht und mit anderen typischen mathematischen Theorien mittels der Relation der Interpretierbarkeit verglichen. Die Ergebnisse bestimmen die logischen Ressourcen jener Theorien und begründen ein eigenes Reduktionsprogramm.

When Bernard Williams died in 2003, the Times newspaper hailed him ‘as the greatest moral philosopher of his generation’. This outstanding collection of specially commissioned new essays on Williams's work is essential reading for anyone interested in Williams, ethics and moral philosophy and philosophy in general. _Reading Bernard Williams_ examines the astonishing scope of his philosophy from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy. An international line up of outstanding contributors discuss, amongst others, (...) the following central aspects of Williams's work: Williams's challenge to contemporary moral philosophy and his criticisms of 'absolute' theories of morality reason and rationality the good life the emotions Williams and the phenomenological tradition philosophical and political agency moral and political luck ethical relativism Contributors : Simon Blackburn; John Cottingham; Frances Ferguson; Joshua Gert; Peter Goldie; Charles Guignon; Sharon Krause; Christopher Kutz; Daniel Markovits; Elijah Millgram; Martha Nussbaum; Carol Rovane. (shrink)

The role of the facilitator within Communities of Philosophical Inquiry has often been allocated to structuring group interactions and/or affirming participants' contributions. In this paper, however, it will be argued that facilitators must take a far more active role in dialogue than has hereto been recognized. This is the case because, when left to its own devices, CPI dialogue often devolves into mere opinion tourism, becomes obscure, and/or is drowned by an excess of irrelevant content. It will be argued that (...) these effects, in turn, pose a serious threat to agent investment. That is, by muddying dialogue, these effects can sever the link between agents' motivational sets and the subject matter at hand and, consequently, may cause agents to internally disengage from the discussion underway. Given the danger that unchecked dialogue poses to agent investment, it will be argued that facilitators must be vigilant in attending to the health of the linguistic environment that both they themselves and participants occupy. That is, it will be argued that facilitators have a responsibility to care for participants by intervening in dialogue and pushing for rigour and clarity. This ecocentric model of care, interestingly, often directly contends with the more intuitive, or biocentric position, that a facilitator must directly care for participants affective or emotional welfare by celebrating their contributions for contribution's sake. Instead, it suggests that facilitators can indirectly care for participants by strategically prompting them to make their contributions logically sound, concise and clear. Moreover, this ecocentric perspective also conflicts with the often purported view that a facilitator is a temporary figure that should eventually become obsolete in a CPI. To the contrary, the ecocentric perspective suggests that a facilitator's role is indispensable to a CPI's success, insofar as it helps create and maintain the necessary conditions for agent investment, and helps ensure the continued health of the linguistic ecosystem, upon which everybody's welfare crucially depends. (shrink)

This chapter defends the moral right of national communities to self‐determination, but examines the problems involved in institutionalizing such a right, and the problem of perverse consequences in exercising the right.

Introduction De prime abord, interpréter une œuvre d’art peut s’entendre de deux façons : 1) la réaliser, en en livrant une version propre, par exemple dans le cas d’une mise en scène théâtrale ou du montage d’une œuvre lyrique, voire d’une chanson (le « chanteur » n’est souvent que l’interprète, précisément, d’un texte dont, en réalité, il n’est pas l’auteur) ; 2) lui donner une signification - en d’autres termes dire ce qu’elle dit ou, mieux, ce qu’elle montre -, par (...) exemple dans le cas d’u... (shrink)

New C. elegans studies imply that lipases and lipid desaturases can mediate signaling effects on aging. But why might fat homeostasis be critical to aging? Could problems with fat handling compromise health in nematodes as they do in mammals? The study of signaling pathways that control longevity could provide the key to one of the great unsolved mysteries of biology: the mechanism of aging. But as our view of the regulatory pathways that control aging grows ever clearer, the nature of (...) aging itself has, if anything, grown more obscure. In particular, focused investigations of the oxidative damage theory have raised questions about an old assumption: that a fundamental cause of aging is accumulation of molecular damage. Could fat dyshomeostasis instead be critical? (shrink)

Why would businesses advocate for a tax increase? They may take such a position, this article argues, when tax cuts threaten their long-term economic interests. In 2012, Kansas eliminated taxes on many business owners but destabilized the economy and exposed small business to the harshness of market forces. Small businesses rely more on state services than large businesses and are more situated in local communities. The literature suggests two main reasons for small businesses’ “enlightened self-interest” perspective. First, many benefited only (...) marginally from the tax cuts. Second, the savings were offset by fiscal damage to state services that small businesses rely on. They advocated for higher taxes on themselves neither out of altruism nor entirely out of self-interest but recognizing that they had to pay taxes in order to stabilize the economic environment. In that position, small businesses in Kansas may occupy the moderating political role once occupied by a now-fractured corporate elite. (shrink)

This article, Based on a study of the "euthyphro," "apology" and "crito," suggests that for socrates (and therefore, Presumably, The young plato) piety is service to the dialectic, And that for socrates the dialectic itself takes over the position reserved in the popular religion for the gods (thus making socrates guilty, At least metaphorically, Of the charge of believing in "other new divine powers"). Part one seeks to establish that the dialectic controls the pious man's beliefs; part two, That it (...) controls his destiny; and part three, That it controls his identity. Failure to engage in, Or disobedience to the dialectic "leads to the worst forms of immorality, And brings down judgments that reduce the gods to low comedy, Men to tragedy." it is further argued that because socrates held the dialectic to be fundamental, He also held that the only just form of government is democracy. (shrink)

This article argues that the defamiliarization caused by extensive repetition, termed ‘semantic satiation’ in psychology, was used by ancient poets for specific effects. Five categories of repetition are identified. First, words undergo auditory deformation through syllable and sound repetition, as commonly in ancient etymologies. Second, a tradition of emphatic proper-name repetition is identified, in which the final instance of the name is given special emphasis; this tradition spans Greek and Latin poetry, and ultimately goes back to the Nireus entry in (...) the Catalogue of Ships. Third, repetition is used for wordplay, where the final instance of the repeated term not only is emphasized but also incurs some change to its meaning or shape. Fourth, the incantatory repetition of divine names in hymns and cultic invocations amplifies a sense of divine presence behind and beyond the repetend. Fifth, repetition of half and full lines by different speakers in Old Comedy serves to undercut and parody the original sense of the repeated words. Extensive repetition in ancient literature was never merely ornamental but was used for a range of specific auditory and semantic effects with distinct and identifiable structures. (shrink)

We seem to suffer from a case of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, we seem to have almost unanimously rejected as hopeless or incoherent the aim of a unified science. On the other, we passionately debate about the prospects of research programs which, if successful, would considerably enhance the prospects of unification: from particle physics to cognitive neuroscience, from evolutionary theory to logical modeling or dynamic systems, a common motivation seems to be the quest for unity1. The purpose of (...) this paper is to relieve the dissonance. I will defend a moderate form of unity, one which is compatible with the diversity and open-endedness of science, for which I can think of no better name than federalism, as it combines plurality and the construction of a common epistemic area. This view is not original: Otto Neurath himself espoused it, albeit in a context which is in certain respects quite unlike ours2. (shrink)

Medo e esperança aparecem na história da filosofia como problemas situados na dimensão temporal da existência. Espinosa acompanha essa tradição, bem como o uso da filosofia como uma medicina animi, porém reserva para si algumas diferenças. Ressaltando o papel da imagem na constituição de medo e esperança, demarca a via pela qual estes dois afetos são necessariamente produzidos pela limitação da imaginação à duração dos corpos. No entanto, quando livre dos impedimentos à sua potência, a mente é capaz de ordenar (...) e concatenar as afecções do corpo, considerando a si mesma sem relação ao corpo, sob uma nova perspectiva. O tratamento do problema do medo, portanto, não se localiza no tempo presente, mas sim na eternidade. (shrink)

We address how trait self-control and trait concern for others relate to the concepts of monitored and intrinsic Welfare Tradeoff Ratios (WTRs), respectively, and how recent work on personality, revenge, and forgiveness are informed by the adaptationist perspective proposed in the target article. We also discuss how the proposed adaptationist perspective provides clues to some previously puzzling findings on revenge.

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

Unreasonable expectations about the nature and character of scientific knowledge support the widespread political assumption that predictive scientific assessments are a necessary precursor to environmental decision making. All too often, the practical outcome of this assumption is that scientific uncertainty becomes a ready-made dodge for what is in reality just a difficult political decision. Interdisciplinary assessments necessary to address complex environmental policy issues invariably result in findings that are inherently contestable, especially when applied in the unrestrained realm of partisan politics. (...) In this article, the authors argue that predictive scientific assessments are inherently limited in the extent to which they can guide policy development and that rigorous scientific assessments can be much more valuable in the role of ex post policy evaluation than they can in the context of ex ante policy formulation. (shrink)