Dans la Querelle des femmes, il n’y a guère d’auteur plus connu et disputé que F. Poulain de la Barre. Il était pourtant impossible de lire ses textes dans une édition moderne, surtout son traité (ironique) sur l’excellence des hommes. Fort à propos, Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin nous présente une édition complète et commentée des trois textes de cet auteur, pourvue d`une introduction aussi bien informée qu’informative. Cette quarantaine de pages sur « Poulain de la Barre : Un féminisme philosop...

Il est peu d’ouvrages associés à la « querelle des femmes » européenne qui aient apporté un regard aussi novateur que le traité de Poullain de la Barre De l’Egalité des deux sexes. En introduisant une argumentation inédite dans un débat alors pluriséculaire, il a en effet réussi à donner une impulsion nouvelle à la discussion savante et politique sur (l’égalité entre) les sexes. En dépit de l’importance du texte pour l’histoire de l’idée d’égalité en général et pour l’histoire des (...) femmes et d... (shrink)

L’homme, la revue autrichienne qui se définit comme une « revue européenne d’histoire féministe », a consacré un numéro aux crises de la masculinité. Cette publication est issue d’une journée d’études organisée en Suisse en 2007 par Claudia Opitz. Elle s’est fixé pour but d’interroger la pertinence du concept de « crise de la masculinité ». Rappelons que c’est le sociologue américain Michael Kimmel qui a forgé cette notion. Celle-ci a connu depuis une belle carrière épistémologique dans la (...) me... (shrink)

Das Sammelwerk legt umfassend den Stand der Staatstheorie dar und arbeitet die Beiträge der bedeutendsten Staatsdenker und der wichtigsten Strömungen des Staatsdenkens zum heutigen Staatsverständnis exemplarisch heraus.Renommierte Philosophen, Historiker, Sozial-, Kultur- und Rechtswissenschaftler aus Universitäten und Forschungseinrichtungen in ganz Europa stellen in 15 gleichgewichteten Kapiteln das Staatsdenken von der Antike bis zur Postdemokratie facettenreich heraus. Jedes Kapitel firmiert unter einem Schwerpunkt, angefangen beim klassischen und konservativen über das liberale und feministische bis hin zum anarchistischen und religiösen Staatsdenken. Einen besonderen Stellenwert (...) nimmt dabei das Staatsdenken in anderen Kulturen ein, darunter China, Indien, die arabische Welt sowie das vor- und das postkoloniale Afrika.Die Schlussbetrachtung zum "Staat der Zukunft" bilanziert die Probleme von Souveränitätsverlust, Staatszerfall und Postdemokratie vor dem Hintergrund von Globalisierung, Ökonomisierung und Individualisierung.Praktische Querverweise und ein umfassendes Literaturverzeichnis erleichtern den Zugriff, detaillierte Stichwort- und Personenregister runden das Werk ab.Mit Beiträgen von:Helga Albrecht, Andreas Anter, Olaf Asbach, Friedrich Balke, Ernst Baltrusch, Michael Becker, Hannah Bethke, Karl-Heinz Breier, Michael Brie, Norbert Campagna, Lars Distelhorst, Sabine Doyé, Dominik Finkelde, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Alexander Gantschow, Eva Geulen, Gerhard Göhler, Dieter Grimm, Martin Gronau, Gregor Hain, Hendrik Hansen, Leonhard Harding, Oliver Hidalgo, Wilhelm Hofmann, Frauke Höntzsch, Dana Ionescu, Matthias Jestaedt, Dirk Jörke, John Kannankulam, Stefan Koslowski, Oliver W. Lembcke, Rochus Leonhardt, Roland Lhotta, Mathias Lindenau, Marion Löffler, Gundula Ludwig, Günter Maschke, Jean-Christophe Merle, Dominique Fabian Miething, Andreas Niederberger, Claudia Opitz-Belakhal, Henning Ottmann, Gregor Paul, Thore Prien, Walter Reese-Schäfer, Claudia Ritzi, Samuel Salzborn, Stefano Saracino, Birgit Sauer, Peter Seyferth, Thomas Schölderle, Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, Ulrich Seeber, Veith Selk, Harald Sippel, Tine Stein, Kazuhiro Takii, Ulrich Thiele, Andreas Vasilache, Rüdiger Voigt, Christian Wendt, Stefanie Wöhl, Joachim Wurst, Holger Zapf und Barbara Zehnpfennig. (shrink)

The opportunities to become a good person are not the same for everyone. Modern European ethical theory, especially Kantian ethics, assumes the same virtues are accessible to all who are capable of rational choice. Character development, however, is affected by circumstances, such as those of wealth and socially constructed categories of gender, race, and sexual orientation, which introduce factors beyond the control of individuals. Implications of these influences for morality have, since the work of Williams and Nagel in the seventies, (...) raised questions in philosophy about the concept of moral luck. In The Unnatural Lottery, Claudia Card examines how luck enters into moral character and considers how some of those who are oppressed can develop responsibility. Luck is often best appreciated by those who have known relatively bad luck and have been unable to escape steady comparison of their lot with those of others. The author takes as her paradigms the luck of middle and lower classes of women who face violence and exploitation, of lesbians who face continuing pressure to hide or self-destruct, of culturally Christian whites who have ethnic privilege, and of adult survivors of child abuse. How have such people been affected by luck in who they are and can become, the good lives available to them, the evils they may be liable to embody? Other philosophers have explored the luck of those who begin from privileged positions and then suffer reversals of fortune. Claudia Card focuses on the more common cases of those who begin from socially disadvantaged positions, and she considers some who find their good luck troubling when its source is the unnatural lottery of social injustice. (shrink)

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift. Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse (...) effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques. (shrink)

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I (...) take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

Book Description\n\nIn Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy, Claudia Baracchi demonstrates\nthe indissoluble links between practical and theoretical wisdom in\nAristotle's thinking. Baracchi shows how the theoretical is always\ninformed by a set of practices, and, specifically, how one's encounter\nwith phenomena, the world, or nature in the broadest sense, is always\na matter of ethos. \n\nAbout the Author\n\nClaudia Baracchi is a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Universit...\ndi Milano-Bicocca, Italy and the author of Of Myth, Life, and War\nin Plato's Republic.

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to (...) criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

Social death, central to the evil of genocide, distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

Conducting large multi-site research within universities highlights inconsistencies between universities in approaches, requirements and responses of research ethics committees. Within the context of a social science research study, we attempted to obtain ethical approval from 101 universities across England to recruit students for a short online survey. We received varied responses from research ethics committees of different universities with the steps to obtaining ethics approval ranging from those that only required proof of approval from our home institution, to universities that (...) facilitated fast-track applications to those that required a full ethics review. Some universities also completely refused. After contacting all 101 universities in England, 60 universities gave clearance to our study. In this article, we present the different approaches universities adopted in response to our application to sample from students in their institution. We consider a number of conceptual and ethical issues pertinent to considering ethics approval for researchers from other universities in England and critically discuss three possible models of ethics governance that would cover all universities in England. (shrink)

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of contextual dependence: the one affecting pure indexicals, the one affecting demonstratives and "contextual expressions", and the one affecting all linguistic expressions. The third type of dependence (...) is top-down: context, and not only linguistic material, shows which variables must be instantiated, relying on context itself. The generalization of underdetermination to all linguistic expressions is in fact a kind of metadependence: the mode of dependence itself depends on context. (shrink)

This essay examines the concepts of ‘professionalism’ and ‘ethics’ as they are used in health professions education and, in particular, medical education. It proposes that, in order to make sense of the construct of ‘professional ethics,’ it would be helpful to conceive of professionalism and ethics as overlapping but not identical spheres. By allowing for areas of professionalism that are not directly pertinent to ethics, and areas of ethics that are not directly pertinent to the professional sphere, ‘professional ethics’ as (...) a focus of medical education can come into sharper relief. The essay argues that professional ethics should be understood not only in relation to major ethical issues such as end-of-life decisions, but also in relation to everyday actions and decisions. The essay ends by raising questions about how and by whom professional ethics is best taught. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the relations existing between four deductive systems that have been called categorial grammars and have relevant connections with linguistic investigations: the syntactic calculus, bilinear logic, compact bilinear logic and Curry''s semantic calculus.

J’ai souvent songé que le propre du clerc dans l’âge moderne est de prêcher dans le désert. Je crois que j’y suis passé maître.Julien Benda Faute de savoir dans quelle catégorie vous classer, on ne vous inscrit dans aucune.Louis Rougier.

According to postmodern scholars, subjects are defined only through their relationship to power. However, if we are only political subjects insofar as we are subjected to existing power relations, there is little hope of political transformation. To instigate change, we need to draw on collective power, but appealing to a particular type of subject, whether "working class," "black," or "women," will always be exclusionary. Recent work in political and feminist thought has suggested that we can get around these paradoxes by (...) eliminating the idea of political subjects entirely or else thinking of political identities as constantly shifting. In this book, I argue that these are both failed ideas. Instead, I suggest a novel idea of a subject in outline as the agent of socio-political change. This subject moves within the tension of coherence necessary for an agency (the subject) and permanent openness necessary to counter the exclusionary character of a political collectivity based on identity (the outline). I also develop the idea of the moment of the limit, which refers to those moments when power structures fail to subject us, and transformative agency becomes a possibility. While I reject the idea of political autonomy, I show that there is always a moment in which subjects can contest the power relations that define them. Throughout the book, I ground these concepts in work by Adorno, Lacan, and Marx - the very theorists who are often seen as denying the subject's agency. (shrink)

The construct of autonomy appears in the literature associated with individual psychological wellbeing. In Ryff's model, autonomy is presented as one of the dimensions of wellbeing, along with self-acceptance, positive relationships with others, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. The present study compared the levels of autonomy and psychological wellbeing between Spanish and Colombian young people. Ryff's Scale of Psychological Wellbeing and the Transition to Adulthood Autonomy (EDATVA according to its initials in Spanish) scales were used on a (...) sample of 1,146 young people aged between 16 and 21; 506 Spanish and 640 Colombian. Results showed differences in autonomy and in two of the four dimensions proposed by the EDATVA: self-organization and critical thinking. Similarly, important differences were observed in the subscales of positive relations and purpose in life. The importance of contextual factors in the development of psychological well-being and autonomy in young people in transition to adulthood is discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Marx's central concern, consistent throughout his works, is to challenge and overcome hierarchical oppositions, which he considers as the core of modern, capitalist societies and the cause of alienation. The young Marx critiques the hierarchical idealism/materialism opposition. In this opposition, idealism abstracts from and reduces all material elements to the mind (or spirit), and materialism abstracts from and reduces all mental abstractions to the body (or matter). The mature Marx sophisticates this critique with his (...) theory of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish abstracts the exchange-value (the mind) from the commodity's use-value (the body). Although Marx aims to challenge capitalism by abolishing the hierarchical relation among binary oppositions, I show that in his early and later writings on the working-class woman, he reinforces hierarchical binaries, pointing at the gendered unconscious structure of capitalism. (shrink)

In recent years the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has addressed the predicament of artists and curators who, in their eagerness to convey a critical message or engage their viewers in an emancipatory process, end up predetermining the outcomes of the experience, hence blocking its critical or emancipatory potential. In this essay I consider Rancière’s writing on this topic and draw out the parallels with the predicament of teachers and curriculum designers who have critical and emancipatory objectives. The risk of education (...) that strives for emancipation is that it can become so directive in steering students to the “right” outcomes that it does not leave these students any intellectual room. Rancière’s work is helpful in reminding us that teachers and curricula with explicitly critical, political, emancipatory objectives can defeat their own purposes and become stultifying if they do not leave the student room to use her or his own intelligence. (shrink)

The reassessment of intentionality as “tendency” or “drive,” already important when the intentionality at stake designates the directedness of lived experiences toward a particular object, might be even more crucial when the orientation toward others is concerned. How do drives and affects intermingle within our intersubjective life and fashion our relations to others? The present paper will address this question by focusing on a particular or even primary kind of intersubjectivity: the mother–child relationship, that received a particular, yet still insufficiently (...) noticed attention in early phenomenology. Scheler and Husserl both analyse this relationship, indeed, in terms that imply drive intentionality as well as affective intentionality (that is, for what concerns the mother, maternal instinct and maternal love). In their view, this relation also has a crucial ethical significance, and may even be taken to be paradigmatic for ethical relationships as such. Accordingly, drive intentionality is understood as an instinctive orientation toward others, that love takes up and develops, thus providing an affective and even instinctive ground for ethical behaviour. All this imples the depart from an ethics grounded on the primacy and sufficiency of reason. (shrink)

In this article, I draw on Adorno's concept of the non-identical in conjunction with Lacan's concept of the Real to propose a "theoretical outline of the subject" as central for feminist political theorizing. A theoretical outline of the subject recognizes the limits of theorizing, the moment where meaning fails, and we are confronted with the impossibility of grasping the subject entirely. At the same time, it insists on the importance of a coherent subject to effect transformations in the sociopolitical sphere. (...) Since the non-identical is more grounded in the material world than the Real, and the Real allows us more than the non-identical to grasp the anxieties and desires that lead to totalizing theories, a complementary Adornian-Lacanian theoretical framework holds a central promise for feminist political theorizing. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the dynamic of social change in the domain of food consumption and seeks to understand the role played by social representations in the transformation of daily food practices. It rests on a model of change that hinges on the processes of cultivation and naturalization of new components of practices. Social representation theory is used to enhance the understanding of the ways that representations contribute to these processes of cultivation and naturalization. Using a visual and multimodal (...) framework for analyzing online environments, the research looked at 984 Instagram posts published by 34 actors who have an interest in promoting alternative proteins in the Canadian context. Results show an emergent subfield of food consumption defined by representations of alternative proteins actively and fluidly intertwined with those of their meat and dairy counterparts. This interplay emerges as being confrontational in the cultivation phase of the model for changing practices –where alternative proteins are presented as being better than meat and dairy – but becomes much more conciliatory during its naturalization phase, in which alternative proteins are presented as being as good as meat and dairy. (shrink)

Margaret Walker's Moral Understandings offers an “expressive-collaborative,” culturally situated, practice—based picture of morality, critical of a “theoretical-juridical” picture in most prefeminist moral philosophy since Henry Sidgwick. This essay compares her approach to ethics with that of John Rawls, another exemplar of the “theoretical-juridical” model, and asks how Walker's approach would apply to several ethical issues, including interaction with animals, social reform and revolution, and basic human rights.

The paper discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought in relation to the German Bildung tradition. For many, Bildung still signifies a valuable achievement of modern educational thought as well as a critical, emancipatory ideal which, frequently in a rather nostalgic manner, is appealed to in order to delineate problematic tendencies of current educational trends. Others, in an at times rather cynical manner, claim that Bildung through its successful institutionalization has shaped vital features of our present educational system and has thus served (...) its time and lost its critical potential. When thinking through Emerson’s variations on Bildung I argue against the nostalgic appeals to Bildung that the criticism against it has to be taken seriously. Against the cynical assessment of Bildung having run its course, I will hold that with Emerson we can develop the idea of an ‘aversive education’ as a call for Bildung to be turned upon itself, allowing to revive it as a conceptual tool for transformation, drawing particular attention to its political dimension. (shrink)

Esports is a rapidly growing industry worldwide, and it is making significant inroads in Hong Kong as well. However, owing to debates regarding the distinction between Esports and video gaming and the potential negative effects of engaging in Esports, its development in Hong Kong is still in its infancy. Therefore, this qualitative study investigated the perceptions and attitudes of teenagers and young adults toward Esports development and engagement, using the theory of planned behavior. Twenty-five teenagers and young adults participated in (...) this study, with their ages ranging from 15 to 29 years. Our results revealed the views of Hong Kong teenagers and young adults on the beneficial and deleterious outcomes, subjective norms, and barriers and facilitators of participating in Esports. Additionally, the results of this qualitative study may contribute toward a deeper understanding of Hong Kong Esports players to develop a theory of planned behavior construct for capturing the beliefs and perceptions of Hong Kong teenagers toward Esports. (shrink)

Is it true that utilitarianism can accommodate the modern belief that human beings have certain moral rights against everybody ‘just in virtue of their human nature?’ I should have thought the most a utilitarian could grant was that we had rights just in virtue of the utility of respecting such rights, not just in virtue of our human nature. In fact, that is more like the view Professor Brandt actually supports. What he argues is that there is not the a (...) priori difficulty with the idea of utilitarian moral rights that some philosophers have thought there was. However, I think the possibility of utilitarian moral rights is not the same as the view that we all have human rights against everybody just in virtue of our human nature. As I hear it, ‘just in virtue of our human nature’ is an alternative to a utilitarian basis for rights. I'll return to that. (shrink)

Most of us spend much of our time trying to get other people to act as we would like them to act, trying to influence them in some way to further our purposes or advance our ends. In this enterprise, we make use of a wide array of motivational levers; we take advantage of various sources of others’ susceptibility to influence. Much of this, I submit, is morally unproblematic. There is no moral reason why we should eschew all attempts at (...) influence and pursue our projects unassisted or why we should in turn resent others’ efforts to shape our own beliefs, desires, and ends. To maintain otherwise is to insist on a peculiar kind of individualistic isolationism. Nonetheless, the details of exactly how we influence others matter morally— what motivational levers we pull and the ways in which we pull them. I maintain—although I cannot defend this claim here—that it is difficult to offer general guidelines for assessing various motivational strategies, beyond saying, of course, that one should try to motivate others toward good ends and in ways that are not proscribed by our other moral rules. For the rest, we shall need to look at each kind of motivational strategy individually, with close attention to the details of its own particularity, to appraise whether it can survive moral scrutiny. (shrink)