Climate change and decarbonization raise complex justice questions that researchers and policymakers must address. The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the IPCC. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations. Here we propose a conceptual framework grounded in philosophical theory for this purpose. We apply this framework to climate mitigation scenarios (...) literature as proof of concept, enabling a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice. We identify areas of future research, including new metrics of service provisioning essential for human well-being. [Can be freely read by clicking the ReadCube link below.]. (shrink)

_The Arcades Project_, the monumental unfinished work of cultural criticism by Walter Benjamin, is the German philosopher’s effort to comprehend urban modernity through the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcade. _The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin_ combines artworks with archival materials and poetic interventions to form an original, multifaceted response to this collagelike cultural text. Jens Hoffmann astutely pairs works by thirty-six well-known and emerging artists, including Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, and Cindy Sherman, with the thirty-six “Convolutes,” or (...) themes, in Benjamin’s text. Bound into the main volume is a graphic novelette, from the imagination of Vito Manolo Roma, of Benjamin’s dream the night before he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Scholarly essays by Hoffmann and Caroline A. Jones, texts selected by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, reproductions of Benjamin’s handwritten notes, and a list of the main Paris arcades discussed by him round out this extraordinary publication. (shrink)

Le verbe croire renvoie à des réalités diverses et contradictoires. Croire c'est à la fois être certain, tenir pour vrai, adhérer avec conviction, mais c'est aussi, penser, admettre comme probable, envisager comme possible, et donc ouvrir la voie au doute, à l'opinion, au débat. Le verbe croire possède de multiples usages. Songeons que l'on croit en Dieu alors que l'on croit au diable. On croit à, on croit en, on croit que. Les historiens mobilisés dans cet ouvrage s'interrogent sur ces (...) modalités complexes de la croyance dans tous les domaines du champ social. Privilégier les temps de ruptures, de déconstruction des croyances, les seuils épistémologiques fut le fil conducteur de cette recherche entre "croire" et "ne pas croire". (shrink)

A crucial problem of conflict management is that whatever happens in negotiations will be interpreted and framed by stakeholders based on their different belief-value systems and world views. This problem will be discussed in the first part of this article as the main cognitive problem of conflict management. The second part develops a general semiotic solution of this problem, based on Charles Peirce's concept of "diagrammatic reasoning." The basic idea is that by representing one 's thought in diagrams, the conditions (...) that determine interpretations can become visible, we can "experiment" with them, and we can change them eventually. The third part, finally, focuses on a concrete tool, called Logical Argument Mapping , that can be used in conflict management to perform such diagrammatic reasoning and to cope with the cognitive problems discussed in the first part. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the sovereignty over Jerusalem will be used as an example to show how LAM could work in practice. (shrink)

Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom. This volume, first published in 2010, examines Rousseau's many approaches to the concept of freedom, in the context of his thought on literature, religion, music, theater, women, the body, and the arts. Its expert (...) contributors cross disciplinary frontiers to develop thought-provoking new angles on Rousseau's thought. By taking freedom as the guiding principle of their analysis, the essays form a cohesive account of Rousseau's writings. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a growth of single-issue campaigns in western democracies and a proliferation of groups attempting to exert political influence and achieve social change. In this context, it is important to consider why individuals do or don't get involved in collective action, for example in the trade union movement and the women's movement. Social psychologists have an important contribution to make in addressing this question. The social psychological approach directly concerns the relationship between the individual and (...) society and a number of theories have been developed in the field, particularly by contemporary European researchers. Yet, surprisingly, there has never been, until now, a concerted attempt to bring these various strands of research together in a coherent, detailed presentation of the social psychological approach to collective action. The authors of _The Social Psychology of Collective Action _review and integrate a number of theories developed in this field as well as presenting their own original research and data. The research discussed in the book ranges over a number of different contexts, with a particular focus on women's groups organizing around issues of gender. Questions addressed include: why do women get involved in women's groups? What part is played by experiences of discrimination in the family and in the workplace? What are the benefits of group involvement? How are feminist activists perceived by others who choose not to get involved? Findings from questionnaires and interviews are integrated with contemporary social psychological theory, especially social identity theory. (shrink)

Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of ...

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

The success of fecal microbiota transplantation as a treatment for Clostrioides difficile infection has stirred excitement about the potential for microbiota transplantation as a therapy for a wide range of diseases and conditions. In this article, we discuss vaginal microbiota transplantation as “the next frontier” in microbiota transplantation and identify the medical, regulatory, and ethical challenges related to this nascent field. We further discuss what we anticipate will be the first context for testing VMT in clinical trials, prevention of the (...) recurrence of a condition referred to as bacterial vaginosis. We also compare clinical aspects of VMT with FMT and comment on how VMT may be similar to or different from FMT in ways that may affect research design and regulatory decisions. (shrink)

To determine and describe ‘mainstream US culture’ responses to the Schwartz Values Survey version 57 were collected and analyzed amongst two samples, one from 49 states, disregarding state of residence, and another from 27 US states comparing samples by state, with the 27-state populations representing about 82 % of the total US population. Statistical comparisons indicate that the responses of the samples categorised by the total US and state of residence samples and Schwartz’ ten individual cultural values show a cohesive (...) mainstream US culture of the White, generally middle class population, having high motivational value priorities for self-direction, universalism and benevolence, with lowest priorities for power and achievement. We found significant value priority differences between urban and rural residents, but minimal differences relating to gender. (shrink)

"The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning."--from _The Ecstasy of Communication _First published in France in 1987, _ The Ecstasy of Communication_ was Baudrillard's summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the Sorbonne: a dense, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down two decades of radical, provocative theory into an aphoristically eloquent (...) swan song to twentieth-century alienation. Baudrillard's quixotic effort to be recognized by the French intellectual establishment may have been doomed to failure, but this text immediately became a pinnacle to his work, a mid-career assessment that looked both forward and back. By carefully distilling the most radical elements of his previous books, Baudrillard constructed the skeleton key to all of the work that was to come in the second half of his career, and set the scene for what he termed the "obscene": a world in which alienation has been succeeded by ceaseless communication and information. _The Ecstasy of Communication_ is a decisive, compact description of what it means to be "wired" in our braver-than-brave new world, where sexuality has been superseded by pornography, knowledge by information, hysteria by schizophrenia, subject by object, and violence by terror. The Ecstasy of Communication is an anti-manifesto that confronted and dispensed with such influences as Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Georges Bataille. It is an essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion piece to any and all of Baudrillard's books. Twenty-five years after its original publication, it remains not only a prescient portrait of our contemporary condition, but also a dark mirror into which we have not yet dared to look. (shrink)

The nature of architecture Building Architecture and Religion The sense of the past Following the example of antiquity.

Engineers fine-tune the design of robot bodies for control purposes; however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent, and optimization of morphology is lagging behind the development of controllers. This has become even more prominent with the advent of compliant, deformable or ‘soft’ bodies. These carry substantial potential regarding their exploitation for control—sometimes referred to as ‘morphological computation’. In this article, we briefly review different notions of computation by physical systems and propose the dynamical systems framework as the (...) most useful in the context of describing and eventually designing the interactions of controllers and bodies. Then, we look at the pros and cons of simple versus complex bodies, critically reviewing the attractive notion of ‘soft’ bodies automatically taking over control tasks. We address another key dimension of the design space—whether model-based control should be used and to what extent it is feasible to develop faithful models for different morphologies. (shrink)

Based on a typology of five basic forms of abduction, I propose a new definition of abductive insight that empha sizes in particular the inferential structure of a belief system that is able to explain a phenomenon after a new, abductive ly created component has been added to this system or the entire system has been abductively restructured. My thesis is, first, that the argumentative structure of the pursued problem solution guides abductive creativity and, second, that diagrammatic reasoning—if conceptualized according (...) to the requirements defined by Charles Peirce—can support this guidance. This support is mainly possible based on the normative power of the system of representation that has to be used to construct diagrams and to perform experiments with them. (shrink)

Most books about ethics focus either on the origins of ethics, or on the application of ethical thinking to a single form of therapy. This book sets out to span a range of very different forms of therapy and explores the similarities and the differences between the ethical thinking of the practitioners concerned. By looking at ethical issues in different therapeutic settings the reader is challenged to reconsider the working assumptions which underpin familiar therapeutic practice. Readers of Forms of Ethical (...) Thinking in Therapeutic Practice are offered the unique opportunity to gain insights into the ethical thinking of experienced practitioners offering strikingly different services to their clients and working in contrasting contexts. Essential reading for all practitioners in counselling and the therapies, students, trainers, supervisors and providers of therapeutic services. (shrink)

The model companion of the theory of fields with valuation and automorphism exists. A counterexample shows that the theory of models of ACFA equipped with valuation is not this model companion.

In this guest column, the medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum uses her recent experiences as a hospital volunteer advocate for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence in New York City to meditate on the progressive politics of her younger days in the 1960s, on her current doubts about the efficacy of political action, and on the virtue of silent listening.

Platons Lehre von der Weltseele.--Methexis und Metaxy bei Platon. --Der historische Ursprung des Satzes vom Widerspruch.

Written in clear, non-technical language, Nothing So Absurd is a succinct and accessible introduction to topics in the history of Western philosophy. In seven concise chapters, the author introduces the reader to the central topics within the discipline. In some cases he adopts a historical approach, while in others the focus is as much on contemporary issues as it is on historical developments. In each area, he presents material of great intrinsic interest in a fashion that also provides a sense (...) of the broad sweep of the discipline. This book provides a fair-minded exposition of a wide-range of viewpoints throughout, and dwells, in its final chapter, on the virtues of philosophical realism, thus presenting the reader with the opportunity to engage with a direct philosophical argument. A guide to further reading will assist readers new to philosophy. (shrink)

This argument map represents the argumentation of Sparrow, R. . "Just say No" to Drones. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, M 1932-4529/12, 56-63. doi: 10.1109/MTS.2012.2185275. The argument map is open for debate in AGORA-net, search for map ID 9712.