Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 65-66.

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to express spatial experience through language. This target article explores the language ofobjectsandplaces, asking what geometric properties are preserved in the representations underlying object nouns and spatial prepositions in English. Evidence from these two aspects of language suggests there are significant differences in the geometric richness with which objects and places (...) are encoded. When an object is named (i.e., with count nouns), detailed geometric properties – principally the object's shape (axes, solid and hollow volumes, surfaces, and parts) – are represented. In contrast, when an object plays the role of either “figure” (located object) or “ground” (reference object) in a locational expression, only very coarse geometric object properties are represented, primarily the main axes. In addition, the spatial functions encoded by spatial prepositions tend to be nonmetric and relatively coarse, for example, “containment,” “contact,” “relative distance,” and “relative direction.” These properties are representative of other languages as well. The striking differences in the way language encodes objects versus places lead us to suggest two explanations: First, there is a tendency for languages to level out geometric detail from both object and place representations. Second, a nonlinguistic disparity between the representations of “what” and “where” underlies how language represents objects and places. The language of objects and places converges with and enriches our understanding of corresponding spatial representations. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of posthumous harm based on an account of the harm of murder. I start with the deep-seated intuition that when someone is murdered he (or she) is harmed (over and above the pain of injury or dying), and argue that Feinberg's account that assumes that harm is an invasion of an interest cannot plausibly accommodate this intuition. I propose a new account of the harm of murder: it is an irreversible loss of functions necessary for (...) worthwhile existence. I suggest a (partial) loss analysis of harm in general, and then go on to apply it to posthumous harm and defend the idea that there can be posthumous losses. (shrink)

One main issue within environmental ethics is the so-called Demarcation Problem, i.e. the question of which entities are members of the moral community and hold intrinsic value. I argue that the demarcation problem relies mainly on Kantian moral philosophy. While the Kantian framework offers a strong and immediately deontological argument for moral agents holding inherent moral values, it presents problems when stretched beyond its original scope and lacks an adequate ground for addressing relational complexity and the moral significance of collectives. (...) In this paper I outline an alternative axiological framework ('map of moral significance') that relies on a relational ontology and encompasses intrinsic and relational values as the two equipollent axes of a matrix in which to embed the question posited by the Demarcation Problem. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist-constructivist antirepresentationalism (...) in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. (shrink)

Historically, male sexual fitness was framed by a patriarchal politics of life centred on regeneration, population and nation. In the later 20th century, as successful ageing became promoted by the lifestyle practices of an idealized healthy and active senior citizenry, traditional gerontocratic power over the sexual risks of youth gave way to a medical sexology concerned with sexual functionality across the lifecourse; in particular, erectility. Recently, erectile dysfunction has expanded to become a population-wide health problem with increasingly refined diagnoses based (...) on `phases', `early warning signs' and preventative regimes, especially as Viagra has become so widely available. This article explores a new bodily configuration in the making; arising, on the one hand, from the pharmacological and scientific technologization of male sexuality, and, on the other, from a contemporary politics of life that both contests the late-life ageism of the past and fosters a mid-life ageism in the present. (shrink)

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. This, then, is a book for (...) both sides of the aisle, a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images—or patterns that compress space and time—make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. On the other hand, she compellingly shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums as old and deep-seated as the human urge to imitate, the mapping of inner space, and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to argue for the fruitfulness for linguistic theory of an approach to semantics that has been developed primarily by logicians and philosophers. That the theory of possible worlds semantics has been extremely fruitful for logic and philosophy is widely if not universally accepted, and I will not try to convince remaining skeptics on that score. But the goals of linguistics are sufficiently different from those of philosophy and logic that there are independent and highly (...) reasonable grounds for skepticism about the appropriateness of such a theory for linguistics, and I will address what seem to me the most important of these in addition to offering positive evidence in favor of such an approach to semantics. (shrink)

The origins of Vico's social theory : Vichian reflections on the Neapolitan Revolt of 1701 and the politics of the metropolis -- Vico's cosmopolitanism : global citizenship and natural law in Vico's pedagogical thought -- Vico's social theory : the conundrum of the Roman metropolis and the struggle of humanity for natural rights -- From social theory to philosophy : Vico's disillusions with the Neapolitan magistracy and the new frontier of philosophy.

In this book Barbara Marshall argues that the debates around both modernity and postmodernity neglect the role of women and significance of gender in the formation of contemporary societies.

. . . I should like to review and summarize the preceding general points: 1. For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as related to it.2. Among the narratives that can be constructed in response to a given narrative are not only those that we commonly refer to as "versions" of it but also those retellings (...) that we call "plot summaries," "interpretations," and, sometimes, "basic stories." None of these retellings, however, is more absolutely basic than any of the others.3. For any given narrative, there are always multiple basic stories that can be constructed in response to it because basic-ness is always arrived at by the exercise of some set of operations, in accord with some set of principles, that reflect some set of interests, all of which are, by nature, variable and thus multiple. Whenever we start to cut back, peel off, strip away, lay bare, and so forth, we always do so in accord with certain assumptions and purposes which, in turn, create hierarchies of relevance and centrality; and it is in terms of these hierarchies that we will distinguish certain elements and relations as being central or peripheral, more important or less important, and more basic or less basic.4. The form and feature of any "version" of a narrative will be a function of, among other things, the particular motives that elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was designed to serve. Some versions, such as translation and transcriptions, may be constructed in order to preserve and transmit a culturally valued verbal structure. Others, such as adaptations and abridgements, may be constructed in order to amuse or instruct a specific audience. And some versions, such as "interpretations," "plot summaries," and "basic stories," may be constructed in order to advance the objectives of a particular discipline, such as literary history, folklore, psychiatry—or, of course, narratology. None of these latter versions, however, is any less motivated or, accordingly, formally contingent than any of the other versions constructed to serve other interests or functions. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is professor of English and communications and the director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. "On the Margins of Discourse" was also contributed as an essay to Critical Inquiry in the June 1975 issue. Responses to the present essay are Nelson Goodman's "The Telling and the Told" and Seymour Chatman's "Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith". Both appear in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, “What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition,” proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds, versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions. We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the “what” (...) and “where” systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects’ force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms’ uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations. (shrink)

In a highly original rereading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan, together with works of Freud and others, Cassin shows how psychoanalysis, like the sophists, challenges the very foundations of scientific rationality. In taking seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation, the analyst, like the sophist, allows performance, signifier, and inconsistency to reshape truth.

Building on agency and resource-based view theories, this study investigates the level of environmental disclosure (ED) practices of family versus non-family firms and explores the moderating role of board gender diversity. We test our hypotheses on a 3-year (2018–2020) panel data sample comprising 324 observations of Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises traded on the Euronext Growth Milan. Findings show that, compared to non-family firms, companies with a family firm status are characterized by lower levels of ED. Gender diversity on the (...) board, however, moderates this relationship, reducing this gap, to the extent that the family firm status is associated with higher ED when the number of women directors is high enough to constitute a critical mass. We consequently contribute to the studies on family business, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

A familiar jurisprudential view is that a judicial decision functions as a legal precedent by laying down a rule and that the content of this rule is set by officials. Precedents can be followed only by acting in accordance with this rule. This view is mistaken on all counts. A judicial decision functions as a precedent by being an example. At its best, it is an example both for officials and for a target population. Even precedents outside of law function (...) as examples when they have conduct-guiding significance. Examples may be rule-like in their scope, but need not be. Their import is independent of their justification; this point has implications for coherence theories of precedent meaning. The content and scope of a legal decision’s extension is not set exclusively by officials. It is socially set and depends upon social salience. (shrink)

This paper will examine the effects of gender, age, work experience, academic status and legality on certain ethical decisions. Six scenarios representing ethical dilemmas were presented to both undergraduate and MBA students in an attempt to determine if various demographic factors influenced ethical decision making. While some past studies have suggested that gender has an important effect on ethical decision making, this study does not completely support this conclusion and suggests that age and/or length of work experience should be included (...) in any study of ethical decision making.The legality of the decisions was determined and compared to the reason given by the students for their decisions. In some cases the choice made by a majority of the students was not the one that was supported by the legal authorities which suggests that there may be conflicts between the ethical system of the respondents and the behavior expected of them by society. (shrink)

Nous n'avons pas choisi d'etre aristoteliciens. Nous ne le sommes pas moins que les autres. Le livre Gamma de la Metaphysique accomplit la relegation de la sophistique qui n'a jamais ete achevee par Platon, en instaurant un regime de discours qui fera loi pour toute l'histoire de la metaphysique. Regime que nous appelons semantique, en reference au geste decisif d'Aristote qui fait equivaloir dire et signifier quelque chose. Il faut et il suffit qu'un sophiste lui dise Bonjour! pour qu'Aristote demontre, (...) que bon gre mal gre, il se place sous la juridiction de ce qu'on appelle depuis lors le principe de non-contradiction. La mise en demeure de parler fait office d'arme absolue, et la decision du sens est le foyer de la science de l'etre en tant qu'etre. Pas d'instauration du principe sans adversaire, donc sans stategie: cela suffit pour jeter le soupcon sur l'impression que donne Gamma d'une evidence definitive. (shrink)

Dworkin's theoretical disagreement argument, developed in Law's Empire, is presented in that work as the motivator for his interpretive account of law. Like Dworkin's earlier arguments critical of legal positivism, the argument from theoretical disagreement has generated a lively exchange with legal positivists. It has motivated three of them to develop innovative positivist positions. In its original guise, the argument from theoretical disagreement is presented as ‘the semantic sting argument’. However, the argument from theoretical disagreement has more than one version. (...) This article briefly discusses two versions and the leading replies to them, then focuses on the most influential version, directed at Hartian positivism. The article surveys the leading positivist rejoinders to the recast version, indicating key Dworkinian replies or assessing the strength of these rejoinders, and concludes with a rejoinder of its own, making a new case that the argument from theoretical disagreement isn't fatal for Hartian legal positivism. (shrink)

Landau also pushes the role of syntax and its mapping to semantics in learning what some would consider “easy words”—the simplest spatial prepositions in English, in and on. Taking as a starting point that the syntactic distribution of a word is a reflex of its meaning, Landau shows that careful study of how children and adults linguistically encode a range of containment and support configurations reveals a special status for “core” configurations in each domain. She proposes that children come to (...) learning spatial terms with the expectation that configurations reflecting core concepts of containment and support will be expressed with the maximally simple, unmarked, linguistic expression. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers of law agree that a necessary condition for a decision to be legally justified, even in a hard case, is that it coheres with established law. Some, namely Sartorius and Dworkin, have gone beyond that relatively uncontroversial claim and described the role of coherence in legal justification as analogous to its role in moral and scientific justification, on contemporary theories. In this, I argue, they are mistaken. Specifically, coherence in legal justification is sometimes specific to a branch (...) of law, and there is nothing isomorphic to this in the models of moral and scientific justification. Although Dworkin and Sartorius rely on the concept of coherence, they do not explicate it. In the course of examining their views, this essay offers a partial analysis of coherence on their models. Finally, two canons of relevance, governing when global coherence considerations are appropriate to legal justification, are presented. (shrink)

An analysis of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's statements regarding relativism in his 2005 homily to the conclave meeting to elect the new pope in the context of the charge of "relativism" in 20th-century philosophy. Parts of this essay are adapted from Barbara Herrnstein Smith,"Pre-Post-Modern Relativism," in *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 18 – 45.

Asked to define poetry, one is likely to reply with a sigh, a shrug, a look of exasperation or even one of contempt, indicating not only that the question is oppressive but that anyone who asks it must be something of a fool, a pest, or a vulgarian. Though these uncongenial reactions may be interpreted as the signs of intellectual embarrassment, they are, I think, quite justified. For the nature of definition and the particular historical fortunes of the term poetry (...) conjoin to this effect: that a definition of the term will either be a total chronicle of those fortunes or will constitute merely one more episode in them. In other words, a definition of poetry is bound to be either inadequate to the job or, if adequate, then both unmanageable and uninteresting for any other purpose. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, professor of English and communications at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, for which she received the Christian Gauss and Explicator awards, and the editor of Shakespeare's Sonnets. This article will be part of a book, Fictive Discourse. She has also contributed "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

This chapter explores the different dimensions of domination, including whether it has a structural approach, its relation to race and imperialism, and how non-domination can be institutionalized and achieved at a global level.

One of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit evaluation is to forestall the exhibition and obviate the possible acknowledgment of divergent systems of value and thus to ratify, by default, established evaluative authority. It is worth noting that in none of the debates of the forties and fifties was the traditional academic canon itself questioned, and that where evaluative authority was not ringingly affirmed, asserted, or self-justified, it was simply assumed. Thus Frye himself could speak almost in one (...) breath of the need to “get rid of…all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value-judgments” as “the first step in developing a genuine poetics” and of “the masterpieces of literature” which are “the materials of literary criticism” . The identity of those masterpieces, it seemed, could be taken for granted or followed more or less automatically from the “direct value-judgment of informed good taste” or “certain literary values…fully established by critical experience” .In a passage of particular interest, Frye wrote:Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent ones, from critical practice…The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he will want to waste belaboring the point. [AC, p. 25]In addition to the noteworthy correlation of validity with silence , two other aspects of Frye’s remarks here repay some attention. First, in claiming that it is altogether obvious that Milton, rather than Blackmore, is “a more rewarding and suggestive poet [for the critic] to work with,” Frye begged the question of what kind of work the critic would be doing. For surely if one were concerned with a question such as the relation of canonical and noncanonical texts in the system of literary value in eighteenth-century England, one would find Blackmore just as rewarding and suggestive to work with as Milton. Both here and in his repeated insistence that the “material” of criticism must be “the masterpieces of literature” , Frye exhibits a severely limited conception of the potential domain of literary study and of the sort of problems and phenomena with which it could or should deal. In this conceptual and methodological confinement, however , he has been joined by just about every other member of the Anglo-American literary academy during the past fifty years. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is University Professor of English and communications and director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of, among other works, Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” appeared in the Autumn 1980 issue. The present essay is part of a full-length study of literary and aesthetic value and evaluation. (shrink)

"Australian Feminism: A Companion covers feminist theory, politics, and scholarship, feminist involvement in many facets of government and welfare, and feminist approaches to culture and to daily life. It provides both general and specialist readers with information concerning every aspect of the development of feminism in Australia. The distinctive features of Australian feminism, including its diversity, its engagement with the state, its openness to new ideas, and its connections with ideas and developments overseas, are fully explored."--BOOK JACKET.

Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself. In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light (...) on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, "words, language, and rhetoric do things," creating things like the new "rainbow people." Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community. Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence and today is German. Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new paradigm for the human sciences. (shrink)

Landau introduces the volume with a selective review of Lila R. Gleitman’s intellectual history, emphasizing the theoretical roots of her research. These include influences of Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky, her creation of “The Great Verb Game” (which paved the way for the theory of syntactic bootstrapping), the importance of natural “deprivation” experiments, and how they shed light on understanding what the data for learning really might be, and her life as an empiricist, driven by data to nativist conclusions. The (...) introduction also provides brief summaries of each contributed paper. (shrink)

I consider the contrast between Leibniz's relational concept of spacetime and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. I suggest that there are two interpretations of Leibniz's view, which I call L1 and L2. L1 amounts to saying that there is no real inertial structure to spacetime, whereas in general relativity the inertial structure is dynamical or real in Lande's sense ; i.e., it can be ‘kicked’ and ‘kicks back,’ causing gravitational effects. If there is no real inertial structure to (...) space-time then, as Weyl points out, the concept of the relative motive of several bodies has no more foundation than the concept of absolute motion for a single body. Thus, L1 seems to be untenable. L2 is a more sophisticated view which rejects the geometrical aspect of Newtonian space-time as a container for events, but accepts the existence of a real structure which determines the inertial properties of matter. (shrink)

Older statutes sometimes alter the legal content of newer statutes in a way not apparent from the text of the newer statutes. The puzzle is how, even if a new statute is the choice of the current polis, the legal content created in part by the elderly statute is also the choice of the current polis. I consider several possible answers, including a legislative intent account and Dworkin’s, and argue that none of them is satisfactory. I then offer my own (...) account, the De Re Account, which depends on distinguishing choosing under a description from choosing de re and noting that background norms and conventions sometimes determine what one does. In the case of legislation, because of the pragmatic norms for legal language and conventional practices against which a legislature acts, the legal content of the newer statute is chosen de re. (shrink)

Alter (The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism, GB: Oxford University Pres, 2023) argues for something surprising: despite being widely rejected by philosophers, including Frank Jackson himself, Jackson’s knowledge argument succeeds. Alter’s defense of Jackson’s argument is not only surprising; it’s also exciting: the knowledge argument, if it’s sound, underscores the power of armchair philosophy, the power of pure thought to arrive at substantial conclusions about the world. In contrast, I aim to make a case for (...) something unsurprising and unexciting: that the knowledge argument does not succeed, or, even less far-reaching, that Alter’s defense of it is not persuasive. Mine is a classic file-drawer thesis, but what it has going for it is that it’s true, or so I think, and hope to illustrate why you should too. (shrink)

This volume shows how nanotechnology takes on a wide range of socio-historically specific meanings in the context of globalization, across multiple localities, institutions and collaborations, through diverse industries, research labs, and government agencies and in a variety of discussions within the public sphere itself. It explores the early origins of nanotechnologies; the social, economic, and political organization of the field; and the cultural and subjective meanings ascribed to nanotechnologies in social settings.

SummaryThe paper examines the conditions someone's believing must satisfy in order to be reasonable and argues that an important necessary condition concerns the nature of the origin and sustain‐ment of the belief. This requirement cannot be captured by conditions on logical relations among the believed propositions, but instead concerns the psychological process of reasoning, concluding, or basing one belief on another. The implications of this result for traditional epistemology are examined, and it is concluded that the most important issues are (...) not just those involved in determining the nature of confirmation but include psychological investigation of the process of belief acquisition. (shrink)

Nearly one billionpeople worldwide suffer from hunger. This book examines the question of what inhabitants of wealthy counties owe these people. The author focuses less on the question of how a better world can be created and more on the question of what well-off individuals are obligated to do in light of this obvious injustice and immense suffering. The book argues for a common responsibility to eliminate extreme poverty and speaks to individuals in their roles as citizens, consumers, and even (...) moral subjects. (shrink)

Das Handbuch bildet erstmals den empirischen und theoretischen Problembestand der deutschsprachigen Europasoziologie in seinem ganzen Facettenreichtum ab, benennt und diskutiert kontroverse und offene Probleme. Angelegt als Beitrage zum europasoziologischen state of the art werden die Lemmata zu den einschlagigen Sachproblemen dabei unter den Hauptstrangen "Institutionenbildung und Institutionenpolitik", "Territoriale Restrukturierung", "Sozialstruktur und Sozialpolitik", "Transnationale Verflechtungen" und "Gesellschaftstheoretische Perspektiven" versammelt. Das Handbuch stellt die jeweils zentralen Theorieansatze und Konzepte, die relevanten empirischen Befunde sowie die wichtigsten feldspezifischen Kontroversen konzise dar und diskutiert mit (...) Umsicht das Innovationspotenzial und die kunftigen Herausforderungen. Insbesondere aufgrund des Nachschlagecharakters bietet es damit auch fur Interessierte auaerhalb der Soziologie und fur wissenschaftliche Laien einen kompetenten und aktuellen Uberblick zugleich uber den Wissensfundus und den Diskussionsstand des Faches. (shrink)

The exclusive emergence of value and abstract human labour through exchange of mere products is a fundamental principle within the ‘New Reading of Marx’, especially that of Michael Heinrich. He invokes both Capital and the manuscript Additions and Changes, where Marx revised his value-form analysis for the second edition of Capital. However, this manuscript does not support Heinrich’s view. In the same handwritten manuscript, Marx drafted the subsection on the fetishism of the commodity with two passages that Heinrich claims as (...) evidence for his interpretation. Against this, we elaborate Marx’s understanding of abstract human labour as the specific social character of private labour; it does not result from exchange but rather is its prerequisite. Heinrich’s attempt fails to include demand in the magnitude of value. Finally, he does not explain the value-formation by circulation and production. Rather, his one-sided view of exchange means, by way of its logical implications, that the capitalist production process is no longer the unity of the labour process and the valorisation process, but mere production of use-values. (shrink)

Vorliegender Sammelband widmet sich den politisch sehr heterogenen Europa-Ideen und Liberalismuskonzepten, die von 1900 bis 1950 in Wissenschaft, Literatur und Kulturkritik intensiv diskutiert werden. Die germanistischen, politologischen, ideen- und wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Beiträge entstanden im Zusammenhang eines Forschungsprojekts der Universitäten Heidelberg, Paris-Sorbonne und Venedig, das vom Centre interdisciplinaire d'études et de recherches sur l'Allemagne gefördert wurde. Das Buch befasst sich mit den philosophischen Ursprüngen, intellektuellen Konstellationen und literarischen Artikulationen dieser Europa-Ideen, die den Liberalismus und die Demokratie in einem größeren Zusammenhang mit Kulturdiagnosen (...) der Moderne reflektieren. Gerade in der Zwischenkriegszeit zirkulieren nicht nur pazifistische und demokratische, sondern auch antiliberale und autoritäre Europa-Ideen, die auf den Untergang der Großreiche 1918 mit kontinentalen Größenphantasien reagieren und kaum als demokratische Vorläufer der EU gelten können. Sie werden von der Literatur aufmerksam beobachtet, kommentiert und teils auch in ihr entworfen. (shrink)

Barbara J. Blodgett proposes a practical sexual ethic for adolescent girls based on a discourse of vulnerability and trust rather than one of erotic liberation. Her work directly challenges feminist theologies of the erotic, which seek to establish the erotic as unquestionably freeing and empowering.Blodgett declares that inconsistent worlds of meaning surround girls' moral deliberation about sexual activity despite their sincere yearning for guidance.This ground-breaking book: -- Critiques feminist theologies of the erotic-- Draws upon actual narratives of adolescent girls (...) about sexuality and romance-- Uses a psychoanalytic theory for Christian ethics-- Points the way to an alternative model of sexual ethics in theological ethics, while factoring in the stark realities of gender, power, and cultureBlodgett suggests relationships are either stabilized by the exercise of trust or friendly distrust. (shrink)

This article establishes a dialogue between the philosopher Axel Honneth and the feminist scholars Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. The aim is to emphasize the limits of Honneth’s philosophical reflections on the normative dimension of the family developed in Freedom’s Right. First, I present his ideas on how a normative expectation of social freedom permeates familial relations. According to him, after women entered the labour market, a normative notion of symmetrical participation in the family was produced. I aim to defend (...) here that, whether normative or not, this idea of family is not only limited but also false, since it does not consider the dilemmas of social reproduction whose consequences contradict social freedom. Next, I develop Federici’s and Fraser’s analyses of how families have always faced conflicts concerning the requirements of social reproduction and have produced diverse forms of subjugation that go against the very idea of the family as an unquestioned sphere of freedom. It is necessary to analyse how families produce new forms of subjugation to transform familial relations into truly possible ways of being socially free – and this requires making visible some figures who structure the family, such as nannies, friends and grandparents. (shrink)