I argue that Samantha Vice understates the moral resources white people have available to them to minimize their falling into distorted ways of perceiving and responding to the world caused by bare white advantage. In doing so, she paints an unjustifiably pessimistic picture of white civic involvement in South Africa, and anywhere where white people are unjustly advantaged, such as the United States. I delineate two similar but distinct antiracist moral identities the 'white ally' and the 'person committed to racial (...) justice'-that can guide civic engagement, as well as provide a counterweight to the distortions of whiteness. I argue that Vice's recommendation of withdrawal from public engagement in humble silence is not the most morally appropriate response to white privilege. (shrink)

Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253 ce) is one of the most revered figures in the history of Japanese culture. A Zen master regarded by the Sōtō School as its spiritual founder, Dōgen is also considered by many to be Japan's greatest philosopher. (The other major contender is kūkai, with whose philosophy Dōgen's shares a number of features.) Possessed of a prodigious and subtle intellect, and master of a strikingly poetic style, he surely ranks among the world's most formidable thinkers.

The study of biodiversity spans many disciplines and includes data pertaining to species distributions and abundances, genetic sequences, trait measurements, and ecological niches, complemented by information on collection and measurement protocols. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in biodiversity science suggests that existing standards such as the Darwin Core terminology are inadequate for describing biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. Existing ontologies, such as the Gene Ontology and others in the Open (...) Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry library, provide a semantic structure but lack many of the necessary terms to describe biodiversity data in all its dimensions. In this paper, we describe the motivation for and ongoing development of a new Biological Collections Ontology, the Environment Ontology, and the Population and Community Ontology. These ontologies share the aim of improving data aggregation and integration across the biodiversity domain and can be used to describe physical samples and sampling processes (for example, collection, extraction, and preservation techniques), as well as biodiversity observations that involve no physical sampling. Together they encompass studies of: 1) individual organisms, including voucher specimens from ecological studies and museum specimens, 2) bulk or environmental samples (e.g., gut contents, soil, water) that include DNA, other molecules, and potentially many organisms, especially microbes, and 3) survey-based ecological observations. We discuss how these ontologies can be applied to biodiversity use cases that span genetic, organismal, and ecosystem levels of organization. We argue that if adopted as a standard and rigorously applied and enriched by the biodiversity community, these ontologies would significantly reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among biodiversity resources and researchers. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted data collection for longitudinal studies in developmental sciences to an immeasurable extent. Restrictions on conducting in-person standardized assessments have led to disruptive innovation, in which novel methods are applied to increase participant engagement. Here, we focus on remote administration of behavioral assessment. We argue that these innovations in remote assessment should become part of the new standard protocol in developmental sciences to facilitate data collection in populations that may be hard to reach or engage due (...) to burdensome requirements. We present a series of adaptations to developmental assessments and a detailed discussion of data analytic approaches to be applied in the less-than-ideal circumstances encountered during the pandemic-related shutdown. Ultimately, these remote approaches actually strengthen the ability to gain insight into developmental populations and foster pragmatic innovation that should result in enduring change. (shrink)

Carol Blum's book is an extraordinarily important and beautifully written work for which I have the deepest admiration. No one seriously interested in the French Revolution or in eighteenth-century political language and theory can afford not to read it.

L’élaboration d’une théorie de l’objet sert de guide à la doctrine de la science en général, et à l’élaboration formelle du statut de la métaphysique en particulier. L’étude de Paul Richard Blum porte sur l’objet de la métaphysique selon Bartholomaeus Mastrius : l’auteur y dégage les principales positions de Mastrius, débouchant, à la suite de son modèle scotiste, sur une ontologie formelle totalement détachée de la physique, à la différence de la tradition thomiste.The elaboration of the theory of object (...) directs the theory of science in general, and specifically the formal elaboration of the status of metaphysics. Paul Richard Blum’s study deals with the object of metaphysics according to Bartholomaeus Mastrius : the author outlines Mastrius’ principal positions. His metaphysics leads, according to its Scotistic model, to a purely formal ontology, completely severed from physics, contrasting with the Thomistic tradition. (shrink)

En juin 1959, Elena Spirgevičienė, de Kaunas (Lituanie), saisit le comité central du parti communiste d’Union soviétique d’une plainte contre l’attribution à titre posthume du titre de Héros de l’URSS au partisan Alfonsas Čeponis. En 1944, affirme-t-elle, cet homme faisait partie d’une bande qui a assassiné sa sœur, l’a violée elle-même, et a tenté de violer puis a tué sa fille. Fondé en particulier sur des documents d’archives originaux publiés dans ce même numéro de Clio, cet article retrace les différentes (...) étapes de l’affaire et les récits contradictoires qu’elle met en jeu. Il oppose la figure du héros soviétique Čeponis à sa déconstruction par la plaignante qui le dépeint comme un bandit. Il montre le retournement qui a lieu lors de l’examen de la plainte par le Comité central du parti communiste de Lituanie : non seulement le viol commis contre la plaignante est nié, mais c’est elle qui se retrouve en position d’accusée. Enfin, il retrace comment la tentative de viol de la fille, suivie de son assassinat, est utilisée par le discours lituanien dissident dans les années 1970, dominant aujourd’hui, pour construire une nouvelle figure de martyre. (shrink)

This paper raises serious problems for the commonly held claim that races are socially constructed. The first section sketches out an approach to our construction of institutional phenomena that, taking Searle’s general approach, restricts social construction proper to cases where we adopt rules that bind relevant parties to treat things of a type in certain ways, thus constituting important roles in, and parts of, our social lives. I argue this conception, construction-by-rules, helps distinguish genuine construction from other activities and relations (...) and also solves a problem raised against simplistic conceptions. The second shows why and how Sally Haslanger, Linda Alcoff, and Glenn Loury have explained race as a social construct. The next points out problems for their and other accounts, including circularity, difficulties arising from conceptual and linguistic history, and non sequiturs. After returning to Haslanger in more detail, I proceed critically to engage work by Ian Hacking, Lawrence Blum, Luc Faucher and Edouard Machery, and Charles Mills. The following sections move from specific accounts in the literature to offer general arguments that viewing races as products of social construction threatens to mislead in numerous ways. At the end, I discuss the significance of the issue and challenge whether social constructionist accounts are genuinely liberating. (shrink)

Qu’en est-il aujourd’hui de l’idée de socialisme1 ? Nous disons bien de l’idée et non pas de l’idéologie qui en est le simulacre, si ce n’est le cadavre2. À la différence de l’idéologie, l’idée est portée par le souci de sa cohérence interne, de sa teneur conceptuelle mais aussi de son adéquation avec la réalité. Très longtemps le socialisme a été assimilé à une..

A recent study by P.R. Blum suggests the hypothesis of an ideal line from Scotus to Mastri, passing through Perera, which would tend towards a new concept of metaphysics attainable through the use of abstraction by indifference. This essay intends to test this hypothesis starting from the way in which Perera questions the unity of metaphysical abstraction through a series of innovative interpretations that are widely received in both Catholic and Reformed and Protestant domains. A first interpretation, less radical, (...) advances a model of metaphysical abstraction, taken up by Mastri and Micraelius, which maintains the unity of metaphysics; a second interpretation, more radical, breaks the methodological unity of metaphysics through a clear distinction between ‘real’ abstraction from matter (secundum rem et rationem) and ‘mental’ abstraction by indifference (secundum rationem tantum) and, consequently, between metaphysics and ontology. (shrink)

« Premier achat de notre nouveau couple : un tandem rouge, magnifique. Je l’ai encore. » Il n’est pas étonnant que Louis-Pascal Jacquemond ait reproduit (p. 305) ce témoignage d’une femme ayant vécu 1936, ni que Michelle Zancarini-Fournel l’ait mis en exergue de sa préface à ce « panorama » sur la question des femmes à l’époque du Front populaire. Cela correspond si bien aux images de « l’embellie » célébrée par Léon Blum, ou de « l’euphorie » citée (...) par ce témoin, Marie-Françoise Spannente :... (shrink)

We reduce to a standard circuit-size complexity problem a relativisation of the $P = NP$ question that we believe to be connected with the same question in the model for computation over the reals defined by L. Blum, M. Shub, and S. Smale. On this occasion, we set the foundations of a general theory for computation over an arbitrary structure, extending what these three authors did in the case of rings.

Let f be a function from N to N that can not be computed in polynomial time, and let a be an element of a differential field K of characteristic 0. The problem of large powers is the set of tuples x̄ = (x 1 ,..., x n ) of K so that x 1 = a f(n) , and the problem of large roots is the set of tuples x̄ of K so that x f(n) 1 = a. These (...) are two examples of problems that the use of derivation does not allow to solve quicker. We show that the problem of large roots is not polynomial for the differential field K, even if we use a polynomial number of parameters, and that the problem of large powers is not polynomial for the differential field K, even for non-uniform complexity. The proofs use the polynomial stability (i.e., the elimination of parameters) of field of characteristic 0, shown by L. Blum. F. Cucker. M. Shub and S. Smale, and the reduction lemma, that transforms a differential polynomial in variables x̄ into a polynomial in variables x̄. and their derivatives. (shrink)

On the fictional level, La Route des Flandres deploys a world in the process of complete disintegration. The manifestly privileged situation is the debacle of the French army in 1940 in which a number of the novel's protagonists are involved: George, the narrator; his cousin, Captain de Reixach; Iglésia, previously the Captain's jockey, now his orderly; Blum, Wack, and their horses. The havoc wrought by the military debacle can be subdivided into five categories. With the dissociation and decimation of (...) the army . . . and the disintegration of the discipline which had consolidated it . . . an entire military order is in the course of demolition. The breakdown of the military organization is accompanied by a parallel dissolution of the social order. Scattered along the roads, the civilians have lost their essential function, their trade. And, in an incident which occurs in front of the captain, when a peasant threatens the deputy mayor with his hunting rifle, we detect a direct reversal of the civic order. In the mechanical order, the all but dismembered automobiles . . . and the dismantlement of their motors contribute to the general tide of dilapidation and decay. The spatial order, represented here by the traditional military space, endowed with significance and hierarchically divided into front and rear, becomes depolarized with the disappearance of the battle lines and the inextricable entanglement of the two armies . . . The temporal order, the chronological arrangement of events, is subject to a similar vitiation. Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including L'Observatoire de Cannes , La Prise de Constantinople , Les Lieux-dits , and his criticism, including Problèmes du Nouveau Roman , Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman , and Le Nouveau Roman ."ARTISTS ON ART: Birth of a Fiction" appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian, philosophy and modern literature from the University of Paris and the University of Geneva. (shrink)

Le cinéma est à plus d'un titre un art des relations : on ne comprend pleinement un film qu'en le situant dans l'histoire des formes (genre, série, reprise), dans celui de la pensée qu'il engendre chez le spectateur-philosophe (chacun de nous dans nos bons moments), ou dans l'étude de la mise en contact d'aires culturelles distinctes (la présence des Européens à Hollywood, par exemple). Ainsi, la poétique historique des films, la " cinéphilosophie " et l'approche du cinéma en termes de (...) transferts culturels sont autant de chemins qui aident à explorer dans le présent ouvrage ce territoire relationnel. Mais au sein même de ces approches, un film, un texte, un penseur, un cinéaste franchissent des frontières décidément poreuses, donnant extension et valeur d'égide au procédé filmique qui mêle et relie à la fois les images : le fondu-enchaîné. Ainsi font retour au long du livre les Accords Blum-Byrnes, le film noir et la comédie américaine, Stanley Cavell et Gilles Deleuze, Albert Laffay et le baudrier du roi dans La Veuve joyeuse de Lubitsch, Lettre d'une inconnue de Max Ophuls et Tout ce que le ciel permet de Douglas Sirk, la cinéphilie française et le CinemaScope, Walden de Thoreau et l'expression " ça, c'est du cinéma! " ce qui ne doit pas vraiment surprendre car avec ces Fondus enchaînés, la collection " Poétique"s'ouvre au septième art. (shrink)

TAINE ( 1828-1893 ), HISTORIEN ET POLITOLOGUE DU XIXE SIECLE, ASSOCIE HISTOIRE ET POLITIQUE, TRADITION ET NATION, ET RELANCE LE COURANT DE PENSEE CONTRE-REVOLUTIONNAIRE ET TRADITIONALISTE. DISCIPLE DE SPINOZA ET DE HEGEL, IL LAICISE LE TRADTIONALISME EN REJETANT LA REFERENCE A DIEU POUR LE PRIMAT DE LA SCIENCE. COMTISME, POSITIVISME ANGLAIS DE STUART MILL ET BUCKLE, SCIENTISME, NATURALISME ET DARWINISME LE CONDUISENT A ADOPTER UNE METHODE HISTORIQUE DETERMINISTE REPOSANT SUR LES CONCEPTS DE "RACE, MILIEU ET MOMENT". DE CETTE METHODE, TAINE (...) ENTEND FONDER UNE SCIENCE DE LA POLITIQUE NATURELLE, HISTORIQUE ET EXPERIMENTALE. PAR AILLEURS, LA PENSEE POLITIQUE DE TAINE EST DE TYPE DUALISTE, ENTRE TRADITIONALISME ET LIBERALISME. TAINE POSE LA QUESTION DE LA PLACE DE L'INDIVIDU FACE AU POUVOIR. IL SE MONTRE LIBERAL EN PRECONISANT UNE MONARCHIE CONSTITUTIONNELLE ET UN REGIME PARLEMENTAIRE. FACE A L'ETAT, QU'IL SOUHAITE LIMITE, IL DEFENT LES DROITS ET LES LIBERTES DE L'INDIVIDU. IL PROPOSE D'AMENAGER LE SUFFRAGE UNIVERSEL EN LE RENDANT INDIRECT MAIS ACCEPTE CEPENDANT LA FORCE DU NOMBRE. LA PENSEE POLITIQUE DE TAINE APARAIT AINSI TRES ORIGINALE; C'EST CE QUE MONTRE SA POSTERITE PUISQU' ELLE INSPIRE LES PENSEURS NATIONALISTES COMME BARRES MAIS EGALEMENT LES HOMMES DE GAUCHE DE LA IIIE REPUBLIQUE COMME HERRIOT ET BLUM. (shrink)

Racism as an independent topic of investigation in philosophy has considerably developed since the 1990s, when it appeared as part of growing debates that, on the one hand, investigated the political meaning of race and, on the other, its ontology and whether it existed at all. Likewise, with the idea of racism, its broadly normative meaning is critiqued by some philosophers, while others ask how best to conceive of it and identify its immorality. There were a few early and significant (...) forays in philosophy about the nature of racism, of which three works stand out because of the way they set the terms of the debate: David Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture, Charles W. Mills’ The Racial Contract, and Jorge L.A. Garcia's “The Heart of Racism.”1 This collection reacts to the latter fork in the discussion but does so in ways that significantly touch on the former.The collection begins with Jorge L. Garcia's “Virtue Ethics in Social Theory: Defending a Volitional Analysis of Racism from Tommie Shelby's Challenges.” It is a clarification and defense of his influential volitional analysis of racism (VAR) from three prominent objections: that VAR inadequately accounts for the immorality of racism because it relies on the assumed wrongness of racism built into ordinary usage of the term ‘racist;’ that it mistakenly separates intention from belief; and that it does not fully account for the racism of some troubling mental states that cannot be traced back to a racist ill-will. Garcia's account of racism as fundamentally rooted in racist ill-will, along with Lawrence Blum's, is representative of agent-centered theories of racism. Not only do they attempt to explain individual or personal racism, but they also hold that racism in institutions, structures, or systems traces back to the racism of persons.Current accounts of structural racism, however, claim that it exists and operates independently of infection from intentionally racist persons, that the focus on racist persons cannot adequately account for how racism works in society, and that, instead, we should concentrate on structures and ideologies. Amelia Wirts sharply defends this view in her, “What does it mean to say ‘The Criminal Justice System is Racist’?” She explains how structural racism applies to America's criminal justice system and other “intermediate” (between individual and societal level) structures. Wirts argues that personal accounts of racism, and in particular Garcia's VAR, do not adequately account for the patterns of racial disparity in the criminal justice system or its disproportionate harm to black people. She advocates, instead, for a patterned view of structural racism, the patterns of which operate “as if it were designed to disproportionately harm” some racialized group. Additionally, Wirts adds that such patterns are particularly racist when they fuel racist ideological symbols, as the criminal justice system does in relation to the idea of the black criminal.Structural analyses of racism are powerfully instructive, and Alisa Bierria, in “Structural Racism Within Reason,” offers an account that takes an epistemic turn that advances our understanding of their meaning. More than the idea that personal and structural racism beget each other in continuous looping effects, and more than the view that racism is best understood as an ideology that provides the content to racist attitudes or policy proscriptions, she argues that structural racism structures reason. Drawing on the 2012 case of Marissa Alexander, who unsuccessfully tried to use Florida's Stand Your Ground Law to justify her firing a warning shot at her estranged, abusive husband to protect herself from his murderous threat, Bierra argues that structural racism extends constructed and controlling intentions onto its targets, and, as in the case she discusses, it uses those constructed and fictional intentions to justify their punishment and depriving them of equal justice.Structural analyses of racism are essential additions to the philosophical understanding of racism that have appropriately challenged the centrality of agent-centered accounts. The increasing academic focus on structural explanations, however, along with the current overuse of “systemic racism” in popular discourse, threatens to eclipse the value of accounts of agent-centered accounts. In “Is Racism Essentially Systemic?” Michael Hardimon counsels against this trend. He reminds us that racism is not essentially systemic, and that the dominance of structural explanations could obscure its other forms and even the proper understanding of structural racism. Indeed, structures once constructed might operate independently of human intention, but they are designed, initiated, and often operated by persons.After considering the direction of the current philosophical discussion about the meaning of racism and its immorality, the next set of articles expands the discussion into matters of class, xenophobia, and white nationalism. Lawrence Blum's “Race and Class Together” starts it off. Blum builds class into his analysis of racism and critiques its absence in anti-racist theory. He argues that paying attention to class is required to secure justice for the victims of racism because pursuing justice is often a matter of both. Blum contends that race and class are “normatively distinct axes of injustice” and that, depending on the question, racial injustice needs to be addressed separately. However, there are aspects of racial injustice that can only be dealt with through a class analysis and require class or combined class–race focused policies. Pointing to the fact that many of the members of groups targeted by racism (he considers blacks, Indigenous peoples, and Latinxs) share cross-class interests, which includes shared interests with some whites, which they do not share with more economically privileged members of their own groups, Blum argues that these interests should be addressed through “class-focused policies,” in a manner that will secure justice for disadvantaged racial groups.Shifting from the class-race analysis, José Jorge Mendoza, in “‘Go Back to Where You Came From!’ Racism, Xenophobia, and White Nationalism,” turns our attention toward white nationalism to examine whether it is best understood as an expression of racism or xenophobia. Although he recognizes the importance of xenophobia in white nationalism, Mendoza does not neglect its connections with racist ideas. However, he acknowledges that emphasizing the role of race in condemnations of white nationalism risks overextending the concept of race, i.e., in regards to pan-racial groups, because some members of those groups are racially identified as white. Thus, the charge of racism against white nationalism in such cases may not clearly apply. To deal with those cases, Mendoza cleverly decouples the ideas of “radicalization” and “racial formation,” and he puts forward a new concept, “racial disintegration,” to account for the operation and shifting targets of white nationalism.In the final piece, David H. Kim and I discuss xenophobia and racism in the case of “Anti-Asian Racism.” We move from general theories of racism to inquire about what is at the base of anti-Asian racism. Little is said in contemporary accounts of racism about anti-Asian racism. This is due, in part, to the high level of abstraction in those discussions but also because much of the literature takes anti-blackness as the model of racism. Our piece addresses this lacuna in a manner not beholden to the black-white binary. We discuss how the idea of anti-Asian racism is a conceptual problem in the American context dominated by that binary. We then argue that xenophobia as a form of civic ostracism, and to some extent xenophilia, play a particular role in how anti-Asian racism functions and its immorality.The pieces in this collection resonate with current events and controversies involving racism and illustrate the potential of the debate to relate to and speak those events, not just to the specialized interests of a cloistered academic conversation. Each piece demonstrates the potential for extending vital lines of debate and discussion that touches the raw nerve of the public discussion of racism. (shrink)

We consider language models for the Lambek calculus that allow empty antecedents and enrich them with constants for the empty language and for the language containing only the empty word. No complete calculi are known with respect to these semantics, and in this paper we consider several trivalent systems that arise as fragments of these models? logics.

It sometimes happens that a philosopher will develop a view on some topic and then later come to reject it. J. L. Austin was perhaps unique in that he not only rejected a philosophical view of which he himself was the author, he patiently developed the view and then showed it to be ultimately unsatisfactory within the compass of the same work. And he did this not once but three times, in material intended for publication. I am thinking, of course, (...) of his notion of performative utterances: the view that there is a class of utterance, the members of which would on standard grammatical grounds be classed as statements, yet whose proper business is not to state anything but to perform some act. For example, to say ‘I promise to be there’ is to promise to be there, and not to state that one promises nor even to state that one will be there. (shrink)

It remains unclear what patient advocacy actually entails and what values it ought to embody. It will be useful to ascertain whether advocacy means supporting any decision the patient makes, or if the advocate can claim to represent the patient by asserting well-intentioned paternalistic claims on the patient's behalf. This is especially significant because the position of advocate brings with it certain privileges on the basis of of presumed insight into patient-perceived interests, namely, entitlement to take part in clinical decision (...) making and increased professional standing. Three issues related to patient advocacy will be explored: are patient advocates necessary; what does advocacy entail, and who ought to represent patients in this way—arguments for and against prospective candidates will also be covered. The paper considers whether advocates are necessary since not only can they be dangerously paternalistic, but the salutary values advocacy embodies are already part of good professional health care. (shrink)