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)

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!

In commemoration of Ferdinand Brunner (1929-1991), a short biography of this important figure in Swiss and French intellectual life.

In this paper I use measures of childhood growth to assess from both an evolutionary theoretical and an applied public health perspective the impact of polygyny on maternal-child welfare among the Datoga pastoralists of Tanzania. I report that the growth and body composition of children varies in such a way as to suggest that polygyny is not generally beneficial to women in terms of offspring quality. Cross-sectional analysis of covariance by maternal marriage status revealed that children of first and second (...) wives in polygynous marriages grow relatively poorly, that this is correlated with maternal physical status, and that the pattern is not modified by household wealth. I discuss how the dynamics of sexual conflicts operating during the formation and maintenance of marriages may be important factors in the etiology of poor child growth in this population, leading to complex patterns of variation in anthropometric indicators of both women and children. The theoretical conclusion is that improved evolutionary models of polygyny should be designed to examine the potential for adaptive tradeoffs between the currencies of offspring quality and quantity for all types of parents in a polygynous population. The practical conclusion is that a better understanding of the relationships between marriage practices and health outcomes would assist in the development of culturally appropriate health and nutrition interventions. (shrink)

Addresses perceived irresolvable paradoxes regarding reality as presented by a number of philosophers.

This article defines Existentialism and Marxism in rather broad terms. It argues that while there are certain redeeming qualities to these philosophies, they suffer from certain insurmountable shortcomings. The article then gives a rather brief account of the merits found among the ancients where an attunement to the idea of “wonder” and philosophical speculations of notions of love, may suggest a way to overcome the negative aspects of both Marxism and Existentialism. And while the latter two philosophies were an attempt (...) to create a better world in many respects-albeit debatably unsuccessful in doing so – the ancients perhaps provide a more robust vision of humantas, a certain wisdom that even today may have significant ramifications. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł składa się z dwóch części. Pierwsza ma charakter wprowadzający i prowadzi do spostrzeżenia, że powstająca etyka hermeneutyczna winna uczynić zadość wezwaniu Nietzschego do „pozostawania wiernym ziemi”. Chodzi o ugruntowanie etyki w działaniu fizycznym. Pewne elementy takiej etyki znajdują się nie tylko w myśli Nietzschego, ale również Diltheya i Heideggera. Zwłaszcza myśl tego ostatniego, mimo jej zgoła „duchowego” charakteru, może stanowić dobry punkt wyjścia dla budowy etyki hermeneutycznej zanurzonej w ludzkiej fizyczności. Wskazując na ograniczenia „etyki hermeneutycznej” Heideggera i przekraczając (...) je, część druga artykułu próbuje ukazać związek hermeneutyki i etyki na poziomie działania fizycznego, odwołując się w tej kwestii do „antropologii teatru” J. Grotowskiego. Wypracowane w jej obrębie zasady dają możliwość działania autentycznego, rozpoczynającego się na poziomie „fizjologii” i kończącego się „duchowym” oświeceniem. (shrink)