Art world talk of “blurred boundaries” and “hybrids” between art and craft, suggests that the philosophy of art needs to rethink the concept of craft. This can best be done by adopting four strategies: first, distinguish between craft as a set of disciplines, and craft as a process and practice; second, keep in mind the differences among craft practices such as studio, trade, ethnic, amateur, and DIY; third, recognize that craft’s relationship with design is as important as its relationship (...) to art; fourth, attend to the role digital design and fabrication are playing in craft and art today. At the core of the craft process are three contested characteristics found in most craft practices: hand, material, and skill, although these are better understood as body, medium, and mastery. After discussing a fourth contested characteristic of many craft and design practices, function, I show that none of the four characteristics is a requisite condition for artistic practice today, yet none are excluded from contemporary art, despite its current “post‐studio” or “post‐disciplinary” tendencies. I conclude that the boundary between art and craft conceived as a set of disciplines defined by materials and techniques has not become blurred, it has all but disappeared. On the other hand, I show through an analysis of some references to “mere craft” by Stephen Davies and Arthur Danto, that craft conceived as a process and practice can be understood as distinct from art, but in a non‐invidious sense. (shrink)

This paper seeks to challenge the “fixed line” between disciplines by exploring the interconnections of Sociology and Caribbean Literature. It highlights the Caribbean author as a social activist and policymaker whose aim is to agitate for improvement in various social conditions. The writings of three Caribbean authors—Erna Brodber of Jamaica, as well Frank McField and Roy Bodden of the Cayman Islands—are examined. Through their published and unpublished works, through their fiction and non-fiction, the interconnection between Sociology and Caribbean Literature is (...) explored. Their writings become alternative narratives that address various sociological issues, as the writers are lauded for their social activism which gave a small community in Jamaica its history and which pleads for the youth and agitates for education in the Cayman Islands. These writers, some of whom are trained sociologists, use their training and knowledge in this field and their expertise in creative writing to demonstrate that the lines of demarcation between the disciplines are becoming increasingly blurred. The paper concludes that this fusing of the disciplines means Caribbean authors can be viewed as social activists and policymakers whose works posit new thoughts and present new possibilities to ailing Jamaica and Cayman societies. (shrink)

The insurance industry’s practice of producing comprehensive insurance policies can have unforeseen and negative ethical consequences. Insurance policies express promises from the insurer to the insured, to the effect that the insurer should be trusted to appropriately assist the insured in case of accident. The relation is seriously undermined when the content of the promise is blurred, containing clauses and condition which are ambiguous or hidden in fine print. This paper contains an investigation of (1) the sources of the (...) fine print policy practice, (2) its immediate effects on the degree to which the policies are understandable to the insured, (3) the ethical consequences that can follow from blurring the true content of the insurer’s promise to the insured and (4) the measures insurers can take in order to develop a more constructive ethical relationship with its customers. (shrink)

In this monograph-length article, which inaugurates a multipart symposium titled “Fuzzy Studies,” the significance and virtues of blur are investigated through the whole history of Chinese intellectual tradition. In the Western tradition, the blur of becoming seems to disqualify an object for knowledge; nothing can be an object of knowledge until the blur is resolved and clarity attained. Chinese tradition offers suggestive examples of the thought that blur, so far from being incompatible with knowledge, might be its condition of possibility (...) and the explanation of its value. This article traces the development of this thought (the compatibility of knowledge and original becoming) in the work of the classical Confucian and Daoist thinkers, the art-of-war literature, Chan Buddhism, and medieval Neoconfucianism, with an eye to its usefulness for Western philosophy of knowledge. (shrink)

Social care responses to extra-familial harm require social workers to work across the binaries of welfare and justice, victim and perpetrator, parent and professional, risk and protection. This paper examines the ethical consequences of working in this manner, through qualitative data (focus groups, interviews, observations, case file analysis and documentary review) from three children's social care organisations in England who trialled new child protection pathways for significant harm outside of family homes/relationships. The extent to which these pathways created five conditions (...) for a welfare response to extra-familial harm are considered, before these results are brought into conversation with Bourdieu’s meta theory of capital, habitus and doxa, and Fenton's practice theory of ethical stress. The challenges identified evidence of the importance foregrounding social work values in the pursuit of welfare-based response to extra-familial harm. They also offer a rationale for studying theories of care ethics in social work in the context of interagency practice. (shrink)

Abusive supervision has long been found to have remarkably negative impacts on individual and organizational outcomes. Accordingly, prior studies have explored many organizational and supervisory predictors of abusive supervision and offered several interventions to reduce it. However, extant research lacks the bottom-up perspective to explore how employees can act to reduce abusive supervision, which is an important factor that enriches abusive supervision literature and helps employees protect themselves from being abused. Drawing on self-disclosure theory, we develop a model of whether (...) and how employee boundary blurring behavior may protect them from being abused by their supervisors. Specifically, we conducted two studies to test the theoretical model, including a scenario-based experimental study and a multi-source, multi-wave field study. The results reveal a negative indirect effect of employee boundary blurring behavior on abusive supervision via supervisor liking toward the employee. By uncovering employee boundary blurring behavior as an antecedent of abusive supervision, we enrich the abusive supervision literature with a bottom-up behavioral strategy for employees to proactively protect themselves from being abused. We hope our findings will encourage future studies to identify boundary conditions and other solutions for employees to minimize the risk of being abused. (shrink)

A paper by Schulz (Philos Stud 149:367–386, 2010) describes how the suppositional view of indicative conditionals can be supplemented with a derived view of epistemic modals. In a recent criticism of this paper, Willer (Philos Stud 153:365–375, 2011) argues that the resulting account of conditionals and epistemic modals cannot do justice to the validity of certain inference patterns involving modalised conditionals. In the present response, I analyse Willer’s argument, identify an implicit presupposition which can plausibly be denied (...) and show that accepting it would blur the difference between plain assumptions and their epistemic necessitations. (shrink)

It has been reported that behavior of experts and novices in various sporting tasks is impervious to the introduction of blur. However, studies have used diverse methods of blurring the visual stimulus, and tasks that did not always preserve the normal perception-action coupling. In the current study, we developed a novel experimental protocol to examine the effect of different levels of Gaussian blur on interception performance and eye gaze data using an immersive VR task. Importantly, this provided a realistic simulation (...) of a real-world boxing scenario in which expert combat athletes experienced a first-person, adaptive viewpoint of the visual environment, which could be blurred according to their gaze location. We found that participants exhibited similar interception performance in the presence of central blur or peripheral blur compared to a control condition with no blur. However, interception performance was significantly better with a central blur compared to peripheral blur. Eye gaze data indicated that although participants fixated at similar areas of interest irrespective of the presence of blur, fixation duration was significantly longer with a strong level of blur in the peripheral viewing condition than all levels of central blur and the control condition. These findings can be explained by relocating attention to different areas of the environment, which thereby influenced the perception of salient information. Participants also performed better on the first punch of a sequence preceded by a foot feint compared to arm feint or no feint. Still, irrespective of feint type, performance was significantly better on the second and third punch compared to the first punch. These findings are consistent with participants using additional information from the opponent's body movements and situational probabilities to increase performance as the sequence of punches developed. Overall, these are the first evidence for the use of VR as a means to examine gaze-contingent manipulations of the environment, and hence highlight the potential for facilitating learning and transfer to a real sporting situations. (shrink)

Every discipline of inquiry takes certain tasks for granted. They are not seen as the big questions that inspire and guide the field, even though they have been the practices that shape and imprint its deepest presuppositions. The question of translation, having been the focus of other humanist disciplines for decades, has come to the history of science only as of late. This essay, as a final review of the issues raised in a Focus section entitled “Historians of Science Translating (...) the History of Science,” discusses the underlying struggle between elegant renditions and literal accuracy and opens up larger and comparative questions about the reflexive capacity of a discipline, its conditions for knowledge, and the historical mishaps and shared labor that can connect or thwart the process beyond local origins. The essay offers comparative cases in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China as a counterpoint, where the Western history of science became world knowledge through unintended readership. (shrink)

Critical posthumanists have observed that technoscientific developments are in the process of rewriting human ontology, fundamentally changing what it means to be human. While they argue that the posthuman breaks with the Cartesian liberal subject and embraces a more decentered ontology, their analyses remain firmly situated in a Cartesian world that marginalizes if not completely ignores questions about natality. This essay examines two filmic texts, Blade Runner 2049 and the AMC television show Humans, that are situated firmly in a posthuman (...) environment in which technoscience is seemingly rewriting the conditions of being human and blurring the boundary between human and machine, but which focus on natality and childhood and emphasize themes of parenting and growth and development. In doing so, they disclose shortcomings in critical posthumanism that can only be addressed when we give more serious attention to how natality shapes being human. (shrink)

Digital communication between a patient and their clinician offers the potential for improved patient care, particularly for young people with long term conditions who are at risk of service disengagement. However, its use raises a number of ethical questions which have not been explored in empirical studies. The objective of this study was to examine, from the patient and clinician perspective, the ethical implications of the use of digital clinical communication in the context of young people living with long-term conditions. (...) A total of 129 semi-structured interviews, 59 with young people and 70 with healthcare professionals, from 20 United Kingdom -based specialist clinics were conducted as part of the LYNC study. Transcripts from five sites were read by a core team to identify explicit and implicit ethical issues and develop descriptive ethical codes. Our subsequent thematic analysis was developed iteratively with reference to professional and ethical norms. Clinician participants saw digital clinical communication as potentially increasing patient empowerment and autonomy; improving trust between patient and healthcare professional; and reducing harm because of rapid access to clinical advice. However, they also described ethical challenges, including: difficulty with defining and maintaining boundaries of confidentiality; uncertainty regarding the level of consent required; and blurring of the limits of a clinician’s duty of care when unlimited access is possible. Paradoxically, the use of digital clinical communication can create dependence rather than promote autonomy in some patients. Patient participants varied in their understanding of, and concern about, confidentiality in the context of digital communication. An overarching theme emerging from the data was a shifting of the boundaries of the patient-clinician relationship and the professional duty of care in the context of use of clinical digital communication. The ethical implications of clinical digital communication are complex and go beyond concerns about confidentiality and consent. Any development of this form of communication should consider its impact on the patient-clinician-relationship, and include appropriate safeguards to ensure that professional ethical obligations are adhered to. (shrink)

This study examines the implications of practical reason for entrepreneurial activities. Our study is based on Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of such virtue, with a particular focus on the partition of practical reason in potential parts such as synesis, or common sense, and gnome, or perspicacity. Since entrepreneurial acts and actions deal with extremely uncertain situations, we argue that only this perspicacity, as the ability of correctly judging in exceptional cases, has the power to find wisdom under such blurred conditions. (...) Perspicacity frees entrepreneurs from their cognitive schemata rendering them able to be truly entrepreneurial. Based on this vision and thanks to a semantic analysis of the meaning of the Greek word gnome, we construct an interpretative model for entrepreneurial judgment composed of three dimensions, specifically, knowledge-cognitive, external-affective and personal-reflective. The model highlights how a ‘successful’ entrepreneurial judgment is also such from a holistic point of view. (shrink)

This paper replies to objections from perceptual distortion against the representationalist thesis that the phenomenal characters of experiences supervene on their intentional contents. It has been argued that some pairs of distorted and undistorted experiences share contents without sharing phenomenal characters, which is incompatible with the supervenience thesis. In reply, I suggest that such cases are not counterexamples to the representationalist thesis because the contents of distorted experiences are always impoverished in some way compared to those of normal experiences. This (...) can be shown by considering limit cases of perceptual distortion, for example, maximally blurry experiences, which manifestly lack details present in clear experiences. I argue that since there is no reasonable way to draw the line between distorted experiences that have degraded content and distorted experiences that do not, we should allow that an increase in distortion is always accompanied by a change in content. This applies to perceptual distortions due to blur, double vision, perspective, and illumination conditions. (shrink)

The thesis that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities has putatively been refuted many times by so-called ‘triviality results’, although it has also enjoyed a number of resurrections. In this paper I assault it yet again with a new such result. I begin by motivating the thesis and discussing some of the philosophical ramifications of its fluctuating fortunes. I will canvas various reasons, old and new, why the thesis seems plausible, and why we should care about its fate. I (...) will look at some objections to Lewis’s famous triviality results, and thus some reasons for the pursuit of further triviality results. I will generalize Lewis’s results in ways that meet the objections. I will conclude with some reflections on the demise of the thesis—or otherwise. (shrink)

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

Apotemnophilia, a disorder that blurs the distinction between neurology and psychiatry, is characterized by the intense and longstanding desire for amputation of a speci¢c limb. Here we present evidence from two individuals suggestive that this condition, long thought to be entirely psychological in origin, actually has a neurological basis. We found heightened skin conductance response..

This article focuses on foundational issues in dynamic and static semantics, specifically on what is conceptually at stake between the dynamic framework and the truth-conditional framework, and consequently what kinds of evidence support each framework. The article examines two questions. First, it explores the consequences of taking the proposition as central semantic notion as characteristic of static semantics, and argues that this is not as limiting in accounting for discourse dynamics as many think. Specifically, it explores what it means for (...) a static semantics to incorporate the notion of context change potential in a dynamic pragmatics and denies that this conception of static semantics requires that all updates to the context be eliminative and distributive. Second, it argues that the central difference between the two frameworks is whether semantics or pragmatics accounts for dynamics, and explores what this means for the oft-heard claim that dynamic semantics blurs the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

Supersymmetry (SUSY) is a proposed symmetry between bosons and fermions. The structure of the space of SUSY generators is such that the distinction between internal and spacetime symmetries is blurred. As a result, there are two viable candidates for the correct spacetime setting for a flat supersymmetric field theory---Minkowski spacetime and superspace. an extension of four- dimensional Minkowski spacetime to include (at least) four new dimensions, coordinatised by mathematical objects known as supernumbers. These objects are, in one significant way, (...) quite different from real or complex number---some of them have the property that their order of multiplication makes a difference; in mathematical terms, they are said to have nontrivial commutation properties. This paper argues for two theses: first, that one standard set of arguments, related to universality of symmetry behaviour, that motivate a particular choice of spacetime structure in familiar spacetime theories motivates the choice of superspace as the appropriate spacetime for SUSY field theories. And second, that the metaphysical utility of the concept of spacetime requires more than just the satisfaction of this universality condition; in supersymmetric theories, the spacetime concept is not as useful as in special relativity. (shrink)

Forty-three years ago Max Weber observed that “the belief in the value of scientific truth is not derived from nature but is a product of definite cultures.” We may now add: and this belief is readily transmuted into doubt or disbelief. The persistent development of science occurs only in societies of a certain order, subject to a peculiar complex of tacit presuppositions and institutional constraints. What is for us a normal phenomenon which demands no explanation and secures many ‘self-evident’ cultural (...) values, has been in other times and still is in many places abnormal and infrequent. The continuity of science requires the active participation of interested and capable persons in scientific pursuits. This support of science is assured only by appropriate cultural conditions. It is, then, important to examine those controls which motivate scientific careers, which select and give prestige to certain scientific disciplines and reject or blur others. It will become evident that changes in institutional structure may curtail, modify or possibly prevent the pursuit of science. (shrink)

In psychiatry there is no sharp boundary between the normal and the pathological. Although clear cases abound, it is often indeterminate whether a particular condition does or does not qualify as a mental disorder. For example, definitions of ‘subthreshold disorders’ and of the ‘prodromal stages’ of diseases are notoriously contentious. -/- Philosophers and linguists call concepts that lack sharp boundaries, and thus admit of borderline cases, ‘vague’. Although blurred boundaries between the normal and the pathological are a recurrent theme (...) in many publications concerned with the classification of mental disorders, systematic approaches that take into account philosophical reflections on vagueness are rare. This book provides interdisciplinary discussions about vagueness in psychiatry by bringing together scholars from psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, history, and law. It draws together various lines of inquiry into the nature of gradations between mental health and disease and discusses the individual and societal consequences of dealing with blurred boundaries in medical practice, forensic psychiatry, and beyond. -/- Part I starts with an overview chapter that helps readers to navigate through the philosophy of vagueness and through the various debates surrounding demarcation problems in the classification and diagnosis of mental illness. Part II encompasses historical and recent philosophical positions on gradualist approaches to health and disease. Part III approaches the vagueness of present psychiatric classification systems, and the debates concerning their revisions by scrutinizing controversial categories, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, and the difficulties of day-to-day diagnostic and therapeutic practice. Part IV finally focuses on social, moral, and legal implications that arise when being mentally ill is a matter of degree. (shrink)

The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving (...) this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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Whatever we take “life” to mean, it must involve an attempt to describe the objective reality beyond scientists’ biases. Traditionally, this is thought to involve comparing our scientific categories to “natural kinds.” But this approach has been tainted with an implicit metaphysics, inherited from Aristotle, that does not fit biological reality. In particular, we must accept that biological categories will never be specifiable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or shared underlying physical structures that produce clean boundaries. Biology blurs (...) all lines and failure to embrace this unique feature has blocked attempts to reach consensus on the meaning of “life.” Thus, while the three classical accounts all fall short of offering a complete definition, their advocates fail to realize that they share the same view of life’s ultimate, functional hallmark: its uniquely rich adaptive capacity. I develop an account of life as adaptive capacity that sidesteps debates about the relative importance of specific mechanisms and the precise location of boundaries to bring the three classical accounts together under a shared conceptual framework. (shrink)

For centuries, philosophers, political scientists, and jurists have struggled to understand the possibilities for justice and peace among a multiplicity of sovereign states. Like Dante, who sought to organize the world under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, many theorists have tried to explain how sovereign states should be governed to ensure stability and peace in the absence of any established higher authority. Theories of World Governance traces the various conceptual approaches to world harmony from the close of the (...) Middle Ages to today. Considering the immediate problems of order in a decentralized world community, Cornelius F. Murphy, Jr., outlines what he believes are the essential long-term conditions for world peace. Covering a wide range of disciplines -- from theology and philosophy to jurisprudence, ethics, and sociology -- Murphy explores how theorists have reflected upon the necessary components of an effective global order. At the outset, the thought of Christian Europe was shaped by a belief in a natural order established by the Creator of the universe. However, with the advent of the Enlightenment, the connections between the human and the transcendent were severed. There was a movement from a theocentric understanding of the powers of the human mind to an intellectual outlook that blurred the distinctions between the divine and human. This study in the history of ideas examines the profound effects of the fundamental shift from transcendence to immanence upon the development of international theory. Murphy discusses the thought of Leibniz, Wolff, Kant, Hegel, and Phillip Allott, among others. The study concludes with an extended reflection on the importanceof a sound political philosophy to the future well-being of the global community. Possible improvements in the existing arrangements, such as reform of the United Nations, are discussed. Murphy suggests that in order for a society of sovereign states to be transformed into a world political community, human rights and self-governance within states must first be strengthened and, at the same time, individuals of all states must begin to realize their responsibilities toward the whole human family. (shrink)

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is widely regarded as a "masterpiece of modern cinema" and is regularly ranked as one of the great films of all time. Set in a dystopian future where the line between human beings and ‘replicants’ is blurred, the film raises a host of philosophical questions about what it is to be human, the possibility of moral agency and freedom in ‘created’ life forms, and the capacity of cinema to make a genuine contribution to our engagement (...) with these kinds of questions. This volume of specially commissioned chapters systematically explores and addresses these issues from a philosophical point of view. Beginning with a helpful introduction, the seven chapters examine the following questions: How is the theme of death explored in Blade Runner and with what implications for our understanding of the human condition? What can we learn about the relationship between emotion and reason from the depiction of the ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner ? How are memory, empathy, and moral agency related in Blade Runner ? How does the style and ‘mood’ of Blade Runner bear upon its thematic and philosophical significance? Is Blade Runner a meditation on the nature of film itself? Including a brief biography of the director and a detailed list of references to other writings on the film, Blade Runner is essential reading for students – indeed anyone - interested in philosophy and film studies. Contributors: Colin Allen, Peter Atterton, Amy Coplan, David Davies, Berys Gaut, Stephen Mulhall, C. D. C. Reeve. (shrink)

This thesis is a philosophical contribution to the theories on risk communication. The topic of risk communication is approached from several different angles, but with a normative focus on equality and vulnerability. Essay I is a comment on risk perception theory and the psychometric model in particular. In risk perception research individual risk taking is described as either a result of valuing the benefits from risk taking or a failure of comprehending the severity or probability of risks. The essay argues (...) that sometimes individuals take risks simply because they are in a vulnerable position and have no other choice. Four factors are identified as crucial in risks from vulnerability: poor outset conditions, lack of reasonable options, hope and liability to disinformation. Essay II addresses the democratic approach to risk communication and the ideal of risk communication as a dialogue between more or less equal stakeholders. The Essay argues that even the more innovative and dialogue oriented approaches to risk communication are unequal. This is often blurred by the confusion between the described ideal and the description of these newer approaches. This inequality is analysed in a three-fold way: influence over the communication process; influence over and access to information; and influence over risk decisions. The Essay develops a typology of different risk communication practices and influence distributions and concludes that the form of risk communication most commonly referred in the literature is the most imbalanced kind where all three types of influence falls to the same party. Essay III explores the concept of trust, an often-mentioned objective for risk communication. The concept of trust is analyzed from previous philosophical approaches, and the idea of trust as comfortable defocusing is introduced. It is argued that not only the gains for the trustee but also the gains and risks for the truster, generally and in the case from risk communication, can be explained by this notion. It is concluded that public trust for institutions or organizations need not be framed on an individual level. Instead, the vulnerability of trusting can be counter-acted by a delegation of different stances, including both control and trust, among different individuals and institutions in society. (shrink)

The ubiquitous pathways of positive feedback in the human brain are generally held to be a necessary condition for the phenomenon of conscious sensation. However, no dynamic mechanism, no causal link has been established between the physical brain and its mental attributes, our sensations, thoughts, our consciousness. I suggest that the missing link between the world of neurons and that of mind is to be found in the transformations the brain performs on the coordinates of physical space and time. In (...) particular, the convolution of past, present and future, that characterizes subjective sensations, blurs the distinction between cause and effect, and allows the emergence of a self-generated phenomenon of consciousness. (shrink)

This paper describes a Bayesian method for constructing a super-resolved surface model by combining information from a set of images of the given surface. We develop the theory and algorithms in detail for the 2-D reconstruction problem, appropriate for the case where all images are taken from roughly the same direction and under similar lighting conditions. We show the results of this 2-D reconstruction on Viking Martian data. These results show dramatic improvements in both spatial and gray-scale resolution. The Bayesian (...) approach uses a neighbor correlation model as well as pixel data from the image set. Some extensions of this method are discussed, including 3-D surface reconstruction and the resolution of diffraction blurred images. (shrink)

It is 2 a.m. I am very sick. I am not sure how long I have been hospitalized. The last two or three days have been a blur, a parade of procedures and people. I had a bloody debridement for a severe, large, and grossly infected stage four wound‐the first wound I have had since I was paralyzed in 1978. I know the next six months or longer are going to be exceedingly difficult. I will be bedbound for months, dependent (...) upon others for the first time in my adult life. As these thoughts are coursing through my mind, a physician I have never met and the registered nurse on duty appear at my door. As they put on their gowns I am weary but hopeful. Surely there is something that can be done to stop the vomiting. The physician examines me with the nurse's help. Like many other hospitalists that have examined me, he is coldly efficient. At some point, he asks the nurse to get a new medication. What transpired after the nurse exited the room has haunted me. Paralyzed me with fear. The hospitalist asked me if I understood the gravity of my condition. He grimly told me I would be bedbound for at least six months and most likely a year or more. That there was a good chance the wound would never heal. If this happened, I would never sit in my wheelchair. I would never be able to work again. Not close to done, he told me I was looking at a life of complete and utter dependence. He went on to tell me I was on powerful antibiotics that could cause significant organ damage. He informed me I had the right to forego any medication, including the lifesaving antibiotics. If I chose not to continue with the current therapy, I could be made very comfortable. I would feel no pain or discomfort at all. Although not explicitly stated, the message was loud and clear. I can help you die peacefully. (shrink)

In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a (...) speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker’s knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use. But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality – often context bound – by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages. (shrink)

The plainness of the title need not mislead as to the depth and breadth of the content of the question for it is almost anyone’s knowledge that the question of ontological being is over time the main pillar of philosophical inquiry, in fact the groundwork on which have been generated, elaborated and vindicated various ontological theories starting from the Greek antiquity to our days. And yet what is significantly shaping the discussion in our days is that one can hardly engage (...) and progress in philosophy without taking into account the current epistemological edifice. In a certain sense and to the extent that a host of current scientific theories transcend what a pragmatically minded scientist would affirm as science proper, i.e. the body of knowledge conditioned on a number of empirically founded verifiable laws together with the corpus of the laws of analytical logic or its modifications according with the observational context, the boundaries between science and philosophy have become so blurred that one possibly needs to deal at least to some extent with the question of absolute being in the light of current epistemology. (shrink)

Derek Parfit defends the Imprecise Lexical View as a way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Allowing for ‘imprecise equality’, Parfit argues, makes it possible to avoid some well-known problems for the Lexical View. It is demonstrated that the Lexical View has stronger implications than envisaged by Parfit; moreover, his assumption of Non-diminishing Marginal Value makes the Lexical View collapse into a much stronger view, which lets the two appear incompatible. Introducing imprecise equality does not address the latter problem. But it (...) does makes it possible for the Imprecise Lexical View to soften the discontinuities it would otherwise face, at the cost of blurring the difference between options.However, if Non-diminishing Marginal Value is rejected, the remaining complications for the resulting most plausible version of the Imprecise Lexical View, including a confrontation with Arrhenius’ Non-Elitism Condition, may be within a range where the view largely remains defensible. (shrink)

This paper explores the perversion of reality in the context of advanced technologies, such as AI, VR, and AR, through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality and the precession of simulacra. By examining the transformative effects of these technologies on our perception of reality, with a particular focus on the usage of digital avatars, the paper highlights the blurred distinction between the real and the simulated, where the copy becomes more ‘real’ than the original. Drawing on Baudrillard’s (...) concept of hyperreality, the paper delves into the perversion of reality as individuals seek refuge in virtual pleasure paradises and embrace artificial pleasures through their digital avatars, disconnecting from genuine human experiences. The convergence of AI, VR, and AR technologies amplifies this hyperreal condition, where digital avatars mimic or surpass the depth of human relationships, challenging our understanding of what is real. In line with Baudrillard’s theory, the paper explores the objectification and commodification of reality within digital spaces, specifically examining the digital avatars’ role in the erosion of genuine human connections. It explores the implications of these avatars in terms of consent, exploitation, and loss of authenticity, echoing Baudrillard’s concerns about the distortion of reality in contemporary society. Recognizing the implications of these technologies, the paper calls for a critical reflection on their transformative power. It emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of the hyperreal condition and ethical responsibility in engaging with AI, VR, and AR, particularly in relation to the usage of digital avatars. By resisting the seductive allure of digital escapism and preserving genuine human connections, we can navigate the perversion of reality and cultivate empathy, compassion, and meaningful interactions that transcend the simulated experiences offered by technology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William James’s Ethical RepublicTrygve ThrontveitFor William James (1842–1910), all philosophical problems were ultimately ethical. In Pragmatism (1907), James invoked the logical theory of his friend Charles Peirce to argue that the “meaning” of any belief consisted solely in “what conduct it is fitted to produce.” There was “no difference in abstract truth,” he elaborated, “that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon (...) that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen.” Indeed, James concluded that truth was not just reflected in the consequences of conduct but shaped by them: “Truth is made,” he wrote, “just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”1 This major thesis of Pragmatism distilled a career spent describing an unfinished world, in which human thoughts and actions made differences for which thinkers and actors were responsible. As early as 1878, James insisted that beliefs imply action to advance goals, creating effects valued in light of those goals. The mind, he reiterated in his 1890 masterpiece The Principles of Psychology, is a “fighter for ends,” and thinking, a “moral act.” Later, in “The Will to Believe” (1896), James argued that when evidence is inconclusive, belief might create conditions in which hypotheses could be verified and potential goods realized—or lost. That frank (if often overlooked) assessment of the moral risks as well as rewards of intellectual life echoed James’s most explicitly ethical work, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” [End Page 255] (1891), where he asserted that when choosing what to believe, it is “simply our total character and personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life.”2In short, James, as John Dewey elegized in 1910, “was everywhere and always the moralist.”3 Yet for much of the twentieth century critics deemed James’s philosophy ethically vacuous, a warrant for moral solipsism. In 1909, Bertrand Russell criticized James for privileging belief over suspension of judgment, and thus encouraging people to live in private moral universes rather than seek objective grounding for common values. Today, some intellectual historians continue to echo Russell and likeminded contemporaries, judging ethical pragmatism tantamount to moral relativism, even moral apathy.4 Others, acknowledging James’s impassioned pronouncements on lynching, industrial conflict, imperialist expansion, and other public moral issues, have interpreted them as expressing a particularly cosmopolitan but otherwise unremarkable American liberalism, rather than a coherent moral philosophy.5These criticisms are unfounded, but understandable. They reflect a general [End Page 256] antipathy toward James’s broader conceptions of knowledge, truth, and experience, and frustration with his unorthodox mode of philosophizing. In Pragmatism, James followed Peirce in arguing that beliefs are not copies of reality, but “rules for action” resembling the probabilistic predictions guiding scientific inquiry. James, however, extended Peirce’s argument, claiming there is no static reality that beliefs can once-for-all describe. A self-proclaimed “radical empiricist,” James held that the universe is pluralistic, and the only reality accessible to human minds is constantly changing—not least through the ceaseless flux of human consciousness, a fact as natural and consequential as any other.6 This blurring of subject-object distinctions scandalized contemporaries. It also underpinned James’s equally scandalous claim that ideas not only demonstrate their meaning through conduct, but derive both meaning and value from their origins and verification in human activity. To ask what is true in such a world was to ask which ideas, moral or otherwise, allow people to navigate it successfully—which “carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part”—and which do not.7 Because of these commitments James never made hard distinctions between ethics and other branches of inquiry, or defined his ethics as a separable component of his philosophy easily analyzed on its own terms. Meanwhile, his further refusal to dislodge theory from practice has frustrated those conceiving ethics as a logically and temporally consistent program of conduct. Instead, James insisted that ethical principles emerge organically from individuals’ collective experience in... (shrink)

The conceptual basis of Hellenic theology was theoretical reflection on the essence of myth, the philosophy of mythology. Several stages can be distinguished in the history of Hellenic theology. The subject of this article is the Hellenic theology of the epoch of the high classics (Vt. half of the V century BC). The cultural roots of the High Classics go back to the ancient Enlightenment, which formed the rational attitude of the ancient consciousness to the world. The main event of (...) the era of High Classics is the Peloponnesian War, which accelerated the crisis of the polis system, its way of life, and cultural ideals. The war led to the rupture of social ties, accelerated the individualization of the consciousness of the individual, forced to seek new social and spiritual supports. Serious shifts have taken place in the existential foundations of Hellenic religion, the understanding of man's dependence on the will of the Olympian gods and the measure of human influence on them has changed. If at the beginning of the epoch of the High Classics there was a semantic harmony of the relations between the human and the divine, then by the end of the epoch it was replaced by the confrontation and alienation of the sacred and profane. Ideas about the dependence of man on the world of the gods and the possible influence on the sacred have "blurred", have become extremely uncertain. This tendency manifested itself in various forms - in the strengthening of the influence of sophistry with its skepticism, the opposition of Chthonic and Olympic mythologies, the actualization of the motive of the birth of new gods (while the old ones do not die at all), stories about the deification of bright personalities, etc. Including in the theology of the Hellenic religion, concentrated expressed by the plots and images of the ancient drama (Sophocles, Euripides). The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane made Hellenic religion meaningless, led it to self-denial. Under these conditions, Hellenic theology was faced with the need to transform the image of the sacred world. Firstly, by giving the otherworldly reality an abstract-conceptual transcendence. Secondly, through the ultimate generalization of mythological images of the gods, up to monotheism. These tasks were solved by the next epoch - the late classics. (shrink)

Many philosophers consider favouritism toward humans in the context of moral choice to be a prejudice. Several terms are used for it – ' speciesism ', 'human chauvinism', 'human racism', and 'anthropocentrism' – with somewhat varying and often blurred meanings, which brings confusion to the issue. This essay suggests that only one term, ' speciesism ', be used, and it attempts a conceptual clarification. To this end it proposes a set of conditions of adequacy for a concept that would (...) be acceptable to the parties of the controversy. Through an examination of various forms of alleged speciesism it eventually proposes a rather precise concept. On this definition some positions believed not to be speciesist perhaps should be so called, and some positions believed to be speciesist perhaps should not be so called. The latter would better be referred to as 'humanistic ethics' or 'non-speciesist humanism'. (shrink)

Perceptual Confidence is the view that perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. After introducing, clarifying, and motivating Perceptual Confidence, I catalogue some of its more interesting consequences, such as the way it blurs the distinction between veridical and illusory experiences, a distinction that is sometimes said to carry a lot of metaphysical weight. I also explain how Perceptual Confidence fills a hole in our best scientific theories of perception and why it implies that experiences don't have objective accuracy conditions.

Background: Hospital nurses are frequently the first care givers to receive a patient’s request for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide (PAS). In France, there is no consensus over which medical practices should be considered euthanasia, and this lack of consensus blurred the debate about euthanasia and PAS legalisation. This study aimed to investigate French hospital nurses’ opinions towards both legalisations, including personal conceptions of euthanasia and working conditions and organisation. Methods: A phone survey conducted among a random national sample of (...) 1502 French hospital nurses. We studied factors associated with opinions towards euthanasia and PAS, including contextual factors related to hospital units with random-effects logistic models. Results: Overall, 48% of nurses supported legalisation of euthanasia and 29%, of PAS. Religiosity, training in pallative care/pain management and feeling competent in end-of-life care were negatively correlated with support for legalisation of both euthanasia and PAS, while nurses working at night were more prone to support legalisation of both. The support for legalisation of euthanasia and PAS was also weaker in pain treatment/palliative care and intensive care units, and it was stronger in units not benefiting from interventions of charity/religious workers and in units with more nurses. Conclusions: Many French hospital nurses uphold the legalisation of euthanasia and PAS, but these nurses may be the least likely to perform what proponents of legalisation call “good” euthanasia. Improving professional knowledge of palliative care could improve the management of end-of-life situations and help to clarify the debate over euthanasia. (shrink)

Philosophers exploring the ethical implications of closeness, or ‘given intersubjectivity’, favor an essential human predicament over an essential sexual dualism to explain their positions on responsibility for and response to the Other. This article proposes a feminist ethical ontology that rejects an essentialist base, turning instead to semiotics as a tool for describing the condition of human agency in a context of oppression. The discussion attends to the problems of downplaying the importance of difference and of blurring the distinction between (...) necessary and accidental actions and occurrences. In challenging the contention that response to the Other is beyond the realm of choice and will, this article considers the ethical implications in how this givenness substantiates inequality and gendered embodiment. The effects of hierarchical ontological dualism should not be ignored or misconstrued in an effort to isolate the definitive nature of human response. (shrink)

A modified Young double-slit experiment proposed by Wootters and Zurek is considered in which a system P of parallel plates covered with a photographic emulsion has been set up in the region where we would normally expect the central interference fringes. Because under certain conditions P makes it possible to conclude with much more than50% certainty through which of the two slits each particular photon passed, the relevant interference pattern becomes blurred. It is proved that this implies a retroactive (...) effect because the setup of P and the interaction of photons with P appear to influence the momentum transferred to the photons by the edges of the slits at an earlier stage of the experiment. (shrink)

The frequent opposition of “philosophy in Russia” and “Russian philosophy” is consid­ered by the author as a counterproductive dilemma that prevents the natural interaction of the cultural and historical originality of national philosophizing and world philosophi­cal culture. The most important point in this regard is the need of depoliticization and dei­deologization of discussions about the Russian philosophical heritage. One of the key problems in this regard is the circumstance that the contemporary history of Russian phi­losophy continues to use the self-description (...) language of Russian philosophy of the first half of the 20th century. It causes, on the one hand, the uncritical use of philosophical ideas, categories, concepts of the past in the modern cultural and historical context, on the other hand, the fundamental rejection of work with this conceptual apparatus. The most characteristic examples in this regard are the concepts of “sobornost’” and so called “Russian idea”. The inclusion of the Russian philosophical heritage in the subject field of modern philosophy is hampered, in turn, by a number of circumstances caused both by the fragmentation of modern philosophical knowledge and the blurring of its dis­ciplinary boundaries, and by the specifics of the formation of the Russian professional philosophical community. Historical reasons have necessarily led to a significant gap be­tween the Russian philosophical heritage of the 19th–20th centuries and the conceptual and methodological space of modern philosophical thought. Awareness of this gap, in turn, caused a kind of corporate rift within the Russian philosophical community – its di­vision into groups dealing with issues that claim to be relevant, and a community focused on the study of the Russian philosophical heritage. Overcoming this conceptual gap and corporate rift turns out to be necessary prerequisites for the genuine actualization of the Russian philosophical heritage in modern conditions. (shrink)

ESSENCES VERSUS REFLEXIVITY According to Rosemary Ruether, women throughout history have not been particularly concerned to create transcendent, overarching, all-powerful entities, or like classical Greek Platonism and its leisured misogynist mood, with projecting a pristine world of abstract essences. 15 Women’s spirituality has focused on the immanent and intricate ties among nature, body, and personal intuition. The revival of the goddess, for example, is a celebration of these material bonds. Ecofeminist pleas that men, formed under patriarchal relations, look inside themselves (...) first before constructing new cosmologies have been dismissed, for example, by Fox, in “The Deep Ecology: Ecofeminism Debate and its Parallels,” as a recipe for inward-looking possessive parochialism and, hence, ultimately war!16 But that would surely only be the case if deep ecologists failed to shrug off their conditioning as white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-professional property holders, which they assure us, they are very keen to do. Interestingly, the universalizing, cosmopolitan stance of this particular protest by Fox is somewhat at loggerheads with the deep ecologists’ own professed commitment to bioregionalism. In the name of “theoretical adequacy,” Fox’s article disregards history. Consequently, his prose blurs who has done what to whom, over the centuries and on into the present. To quote: [Certain] classes of social actors have... habitually assumed themselves to be more fully human than others, such as women (“the weaker vessel”), the “lower” classes, blacks, and non-Westerners (“savages,” “primitives,” “heathens”).... That anthropocentrism has served as the most fundamental kind of legitimation employed by whatever powerful class of social actors one wishes to focus on can also be seen by considering the fundamental kind of legitimation that has habitually been employed with regard to large-scale or high-cost social enterprises such as war, scientific and technological development, or environmental exploitation. Such enterprises have habitually been undertaken not simply in the name of men, capitalists, whites or Westerners, for example, but in the name of God (and thus our essential humanity... ).... (This applies, notwithstanding the often sexist expression of these sentiments in terms of “man,” “mankind,” and so on, and not withstanding the fact that certain classes of social actors benefit disproportionately from these. (shrink)

What, if anything, can realism say about the normative conditions of political legitimacy? Must a realist political theory accept that the ability to successfully employ coercive power is equivalent to the right to rule, or can it incorporate normative criteria for legitimacy but without collapsing into a form of moralism? While several critics argue that realism fails to adequately differentiate itself from moralism or that it cannot coherently appeal to normative values so as to distinguish might from right, this article (...) seeks to help develop a realist account of legitimacy by demonstrating how it can successfully and stably occupy this position between moralism and Realpolitik. Through this discussion, however, the article also argues that political rule necessitates the use of coercive power which is (at best) imperfectly legitimated, and that this blurs the distinction between politics and successful domination which lies at the heart of many recent accounts of political realism. In at least this sense, realism retains important and under-acknowledged affinities to Realpolitik. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies:Human Nature in UtopiaGorman BeauchampIUtopists view man as a product of his social environment. Nothing innate in the psychic make-up of man—no inherent flaw in his nature, no inheritance of original sin—prevents his being perfected, or at least radically ameliorated, once the social structure that shapes character can be properly reordered. Utopists, in short, deny that there is such a thing as "human nature"—if, as (...) John Plamenatz suggests, to say that something is human nature is just another way of saying that it cannot be changed.1 To accept the psychic constitution of man as fixed, immutable, is anathema to utopists, who agree rather with Ortega y Gasset: "Man has no nature. What he has is history."2 The social conditions that have obtained historically, that is to say, have made man what he has been—anything but utopian; but if man's history could be changed, so could his "nature." The idea of Progress, so pervasive in the West from the seventeenth century on, lends some credence to this contention. W. D. Howells's Altrurians, their creator notes, "get some sad amusement out of the fact that the capitalist world believes human nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things were once human nature, which is always changing...."3 Utopia is merely a means, then, of imaginatively expediting, directing, culminating the historically progressive creation of a morally exemplary race of men.The environmentalist psychology espoused by utopists springs from one of two anterior assumptions (although in the creation of many fictional idola the distinction between them is often blurred). The first [End Page 280] assumption is formulated most famously by Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality: that "man is naturally good, and only by his institutions is he made bad."4 The second assumption is formulated most famously by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding: that the mind—and by extension the character—is a tabula rasa that takes impression from the stimuli exerted by the external world and thus is neither innately good or bad, but plastic, malleable.5 An intriguing conflation of these two theories operates, for instance, in the psyche of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the long middle section of the book, where the monster's side of the story is presented sympathetically, his character develops in a text-book demonstration of Lockean psychology; yet, at the same time, this lumbering tabula rasa quivers with enough benevolence (the implausible provenance of which mystifies) to put most saints to shame. He becomes evil and destructive only after being persecuted unmercifully for his misshapen appearance.6 Indeed, the criminal career of Mary Shelley's monster rehearses the common utopian argument that society's injustice to man (or monster) is the source of his crimes. "With our present state of society," writes James Casey in A New Moral World (1885), "we manufacture criminals and then punish them for being so."7 H. G. Wells, in A Modern Utopia (1905), concurs: "Crime and bad lives are the measure of the State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."8 And both are but restating the charge of Sir Thomas More's Raphael Hytholoday, leveled several centuries earlier in the original Utopia (1519): "If you allow people to be badly brought up and their habits to be corrupted little by little from childhood and if you then punish them for crimes to which their early training has disposed them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it?"9 Evil deeds, then, to reiterate the utopist's point, result not from some vicious mole in human nature, but from the malfunctioning of society itself. Utopia, by contrast, is—or theoretically ought to be—a world without crime.Rousseau's concept of the innate goodness of man and the evil of his institutions most often informs primitivist models of utopia, exotic worlds inhabited by noble savages uncorrupted by civilization. The idealized Indians of Montaigne's essay... (shrink)

The following describes the concept of apoliticism, distinguishing it from indifference, which is also considered a negative attitude toward politics. Whereas apoliticism is the rejection of the official political institutions, possibly with the plan of an alternative system, the indifferent rejects politics altogether and is politically disinterested. If reflective negativism rejects politics as mechanism, the indifferent rejects it as a pursuit. I also distinguish between the extra-political, as the condition of being outside of any environment in which free deliberation and (...) public engagement is possible, and the supra-political condition, as blurring the line between public political activities and rites prescribed by the state on the one hand and the private sphere of the individual on the other hand. If different, both are forms of political poverty. These concepts may serve as means for a more nuanced understanding of the structure of apolitical attitudes. (shrink)

In the second half of the twentieth century, humanism— namely, the worldview that underpinned Western thought for several centuries—has been severely critiqued by philosophers who highlighted its theoretical and ethical limitations. Inspired by the emergence of cybernetics and new technologies such as robotics, prosthetics, communications, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, there has been a desire to articulate a new worldview that will fit the posthuman condition. Posthumanism is a description of a new form of human existence in which the (...) boundaries between humans and nature and humans and machines are blurred, as well as a prescription for an ideal situation in which the limitations of human biology are transcended, replaced by machines. The transition from the human condition to the posthuman condition will be facilitated by transhumanism, the project of human enhancement that will ultimately yield the transformation of the human species from the human to the posthuman. As an intellectual movement, transhumanism is still very small, but transhumanist ideas exert deep and broad influence on contemporary culture and society. This essay highlights the religious dimension of transhumanism and argues that it should be seen as a secularist faith: transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance. Science‐Religion Studies is the most appropriate context to explore the cultural significance of transhumanism. (shrink)

This Article examines the implicit assumptions about the state and state-society relations that pervade the literature on legal pluralism. I argue that much of this literature rests on an underlying conception of the state as a monolithic entity which is clearly and objectively differentiated from society. Most notably, John Griffiths’ influential distinction between "weak" legal pluralism, which exists within the boundaries of the state, and "strong" legal pluralism, which involves both state and non-state legal orders, reflects such assumptions. I contend (...) that an alternative conceptualization of the state, which acknowledges the internal diversity and contradictions within the state and the blurred boundaries between state and society, can serve as a more productive basis for the study of legal pluralism. Such an approach draws attention to the socially constructed character of the boundaries between state and non-state legal orders, to the social significance of intra-state legal pluralism, to the points of view of individual litigants who maneuver between different courts of law, and to the institutional level of analysis, namely, the complex interrelations between different courts under conditions of legal pluralism. (shrink)