In recent debates surrounding World Health Organization reform, international lawmaking has received unprecedented attention as a future priority function of the Organization. Although WHO's constitutional lawmaking authority was historically neglected and even resisted by WHO and its Member States until the adoption of its first treaty a decade ago, the widespread consensus in favor of a central role for lawmaking in visions of a reformed WHO reflects the crystallization of contemporary approaches to global health governance. Today it is widely recognized (...) that the trends toward globalization that have restricted the capacity of sovereign states to protect health through unilateral action alone have made innovative mechanisms to promote global cooperation and coordination, including international lawmaking, an essential component of governance of public health. (shrink)

In Karl Jaspers' Theory of Irrationality, Daniel Adsett explains how a Jaspersian view of irrationality makes better sense of the irrationality of delusions and worldviews than competing views, offering a novel contribution to contemporary debates about the character of reason.

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the (...) main focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

Daniel, Michael E Review of: Words from the wound: selected addresses, letters and homilies of archbishop mark coleridge, by Mark Coleridge, edited by Anthony Ekpo and David Pascoe, pp. 342, $24.95.

The issue of climate change has become an ethical and political controversy of the first magnitude. This is a very eloquent case of what might be called “complex justice”, both by the difficulty of assessing the causes and impacts, and the fact that in the controversies that come into play there are different conceptions of justice and due to the complexity and the number of institutions involved in its governance, markets and states, public sector and private sector, science and politics.

If we understand modernity as the construction of a distinction –i.e. subjectivity vs. objectivity– postmodernity can be considered the abolition of that distinction, after the experience of its apories. In this paper the interest points towards a non disjunctive direction, towards a kind of thought that may embrace both ambigüity and the relative indiscernibility of the opposites.

El artículo busca profundizar en las elaboraciones de Freud respecto de la agresividad y la inconvertibilidad de la violencia, con el objeto de indagar en los posibles aportes que la perspectiva psicoanalítica puede realizar frente a los problemas sociopolíticos contemporáneos. Este trabajo se detiene en las problemáticas referidas a la naturalización de las identidades, la radicalización de las retóricas comunitarias y los escenarios de exclusión. Sostiene, en este sentido, la importancia de los procesos sublimatorios en el trabajo de diferimiento frente (...) al empuje pulsional. (shrink)

This note argues for the presence of an allusion to Ennius “Annales” 1 Sk. (Musae, quae pedibus magnum pulsatis Olympum) at Appendix Vergiliana “Dirae” 48 (undae, quae uestris pulsatis litora lymphis). This has ramifications not only for the interpretation of the poem, but also for the dating of the “Dirae”, and for the question as to whether Enn. Ann. 1 Sk. is in fact the first line of Ennius’ epic poem.

This paper investigates the evaluation of ritual frame indicating expressions (RFIEs) in two groups of L2 learners: British English learners of Chinese and Mainland Chinese learners of English. RFIEs are expressions by means of which speakers confirm their awareness of rights and obligations in a particular standard situation. Previous research in applied linguistics has largely ignored the production and evaluation of such forms, despite the fact that they are pragmatically-loaded and, as such, are very important for the development of the (...) (meta)pragmatic competence of L2 learners. In our study, we have conducted an experiment in which we exposed our learners to both authentic and constructed uses of RFIEs. The evaluation of their (meta)pragmatic competence has revealed notable linguacultural differences between the two groups of L2 learners. (shrink)

Je défends la classification carnapienne des disciplines sémiotiques en montrant qu'elle permet de caractériser adéquatement la nature de la pragmatique. J'indique, en particulier, comment une notion de système pragmatique pourrait être développée par analogie avec celles de système syntaxique et de système sémantique.I defend Carnap's classification of semiotic disciplines by showing that it leads to an adequate characterization of the nature of pragmatics. In particular, I indicate how a notion of pregmatic system could be constructed on the analogy with those (...) of syntactic system and semantic system. (shrink)

How do people adapt to technology? This study examines one mechanism people may be using to personalize technology—talking to machines. Communicating to machines is similar to other forms of personalization and can be explained using attribution theory. Characteristics of machines (such as relationship to emotions, predictability, and familiarity) may affect people's willingness to communicate. A survey study that examined people's communication to machines showed that people do communicate to some machines, and hypotheses about the characteristics of machines were supported. A (...) second survey study examined the differences between communicating with cars and computers, comparing issues such as frequency, emotionality, and the perceived gender of the machines. Overall, these studies show some of the ways people are adapting to their increasingly computerized, technological environment. (shrink)

Ensaio visual produzido a partir de uma série de fotografias através de um inventário catalográfico amoroso da caixa de ferramentas do meu pai e das relações afetivas que estabeleci com ele através destas peças.

Laçaço foi uma ação colaborativa e "tática" coletiva que surgiu do questionamento da relação entre arte, corpo, cidade e do afrouxamento dos laços de afeto aí implicados. Trata-se de uma documentação fotográfica e expansão visual da intervenção performática de apropriação simbólica do Forte dos Reis Magos, marco inicial da cidade de Natal.

Im Großstadtdiskurs um 1900 spielte die Frage, ob das sensorische Regime der urbanen Moderne lediglich alte Lebensrhythmen auflösten oder auch neue hervorbrachte, eine zentrale Rolle. Der Essay verfolgt zwei unterschiedliche Antworten auf diese Frage einerseits in der Kultursoziologie Georg Simmels und andererseits in der Geräuschkunst des italienischen Futurismus und stellt sie einander gegenüber.

The topic of research ethics is assuming an increasingly more central role when preparing research proposals, with Institutional Review Boards being instructed to oversee more and more research activities. Graduate students, especially, should be educated about ethical and unethical research practices, for they will be taking over the research enterprise in the not-too-distant future. An ethics benchmark is outlined, and numerous research examples involving the themes of plagiarism, deception, fraud, confidentiality, and informed consent are discussed here. This narrative emphasizes that (...) the canons of good scholarship require research and data collection for research to be conducted in an ethical fashion. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a new aporia, the aporia of perfection. This aporia includes three claims: (1) Ought implies possibility, (2) We ought to be perfect, and (3) It is not possible that we are perfect. All these propositions appear to be plausible when considered in themselves and there are interesting arguments for them. However, together they entail a contradiction. Hence, at least one of the sentences must be false. I consider some possible solutions to the puzzle and discuss (...) some pros and cons of these solutions. I conclude that we can avoid the contradiction that follows from (1) – (3) and still hold on to our basic intuitions, if we instead of (1) – (3) accept some slightly different propositions. (shrink)

Summary This article seeks to address the question how the Tetrarchic system of four rulers could be presented as legitimate in a society that had never seen this political constellation before. What were the different modes of presenting Tetrarchic rule and how did they help in making the new system acceptable? The article argues that new power structures needed to be formulated in familiar terms, not only for the rulers to legitimate their position, but also for the ruled to understand (...) such new systems. As a result, imperial messages during the Tetrarchic period were strongly influenced by traditional modes of representation from earlier periods. Traditions which were inherent in specific media and locations were determining factors for the way in which a new political system could be presented. The result was a much less coherent ideological Tetrarchic message than is often assumed. The image of group identity was regularly lost in a more complex and messy mode of formulating power. The new and innovative aspects of a collegiate rule by four emperors was less important than linking the power of those rulers to what was traditionally expected of the portrayal of Roman emperorship. (shrink)

Perennialists regarding the phenomenology of mysticism, like Walter Stace, feel that all Christian mystical experiences are fundamentally similar to each other and to experiences described by mystics across religious traditions, cultures and ages. In his seminal work, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism, Nelson Pike convincingly argues that this extreme position is inadequate for capturing the breadth of experiences described by the canonical Medieval Christian mystics. However, Pike may have leaned too far away from perennialism in claiming (...) that all the experiences of (Christian) mystic union are essentially theistic. Here, I argue that Pike did not successfully establish this point and that union without distinction, often described as the pinnacle of union by Christian mystics, remains a viable candidate for an instance of a trans-traditionally type-identical mystical experience. (shrink)

Stanovich & West's target article undervalues the power of implicit learning (particularly reinforcement learning). Implicit learning may allow the learning of more rational responses–and sometimes even generalisation of knowledge–in contexts where explicit, abstract knowledge proves only of limited value, such as for economic decision-making. Four other comments are made.

Two elderly sisters embroider the house of their childhood at either end of a white bedspread, each as she remembers it, with results that surprise them.

Oui, vous m'avez bien culpabilisé, Pierre Bourdieu, comme vous avez culpabilisé tous mes confrères journalistes. Cela fut sans doute salutaire, mais il est temps aujourd'hui de relever la tête. Même le journalisme a droit à un traitement médiatique équitable!