Despite the generally positive reception of Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, it has been pointed out that DeLanda's reconstruction of Deleuze's ontology has concentrated almost exclusively on the processes of becoming actual, and has thus far failed to address the processes of becoming virtual. In this article, I suggest a way of reading DeLanda which recovers for mathematical practice a capacity to clarify the meaning of events as they arise within a synthetic process of becoming interdisciplinary. First, I (...) attempt to show that modern mathematical practices can be understood as already characterized by a denial of essentialism in just the way required by Deleuze. Second, I argue that mathematical practice, so understood, is of a piece with literary practice, in the sense that both can be understood as the free and transformative production of concepts within the space of what Deleuze has characterized as a form of the comedic. I conclude with an outline of an argument showing that the transformative and the comedic can be embraced within a realist philosophy of the kind so clearly evident in DeLanda's reconstruction of Deleuze's ontology. (shrink)

In this essay, my point of departure is Bernard Hodgson’s analysis of neo-classical economic theory and his demonstration that neo-classical economic thought is already a branch of normative theory. I undertake to broaden the demonstration by showing that other contemporary conceptions of economics are also irreducibly normative. The essay begins with an overview of Hodgson’s argument strategy, and a discussion of his thesis that economics is a moral science. This illustrates in what way moral presuppositions are at play as core (...) principles that both positivist and normativist economics take for granted. My strategy is to show that alternative conceptions of economics, in particular Schumpeterian accounts of evolution/innovation, and orthodox versions of ecological economics, share with classical and neo-classical economics normative assumptions about the common good, extending Hodgson’s thesis to one about moral science . For then these assumptions (both moral and scientific ) commit economics to unworkable notions of social and environmental optimization that ignore the pure historical contingency of physical, economic, social and cultural conditions. It is concluded that the relationship between facts and values must be fundamentally retheorized. (shrink)

- Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article.

One. Hundred. Years. of. Homosexuality. I. In 1992, when the patriots among us will be celebrating the fivehundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, our cultural historians may wish to mark the centenary of  ...

Philosophy and anthropology need to integrate their accounts of what a morality is. I identify three desiderata that an account of morality should satisfy: (1) it should recognize significant diversity and variation in the major kinds of value, (2) it should specify a set of criteria for what counts as a morality, and (3) it should indicate the basis for distinguishing between more or less justifiable moralities, or true and false moralities. I will discuss why these three desiderata are hard (...) to satisfy at the same time, and why they are controversial. Anthropologists and philosophers will differ on which ones they are inclined to reject. I argue that all three should be accepted and can be satisfied. (shrink)

In the eyes of many “classical” phenomenologists, Kantianism has seemed to invite individuals to leave the rich, complexly motivated environment of lived experience in favor of a shadowy, formal kingdom of abstract duties and rights. Yet there have been notable attempts within the phenomenological tradition to articulate a richer vision of Kantian moral consciousness and to exhibit, from a first-person perspective, the shape of mental life and the standing dispositions that befit membership in a Kantian kingdom of ends. Here I (...) offer two such competing paradigms of Kantian moral consciousness: on the one hand, the responsive, situational Kantian moral consciousness that recent commentators have reconstructed from Martin Heidegger’s work, and on the other hand, the very different, explicitly cosmopolitan Kantian moral consciousness traced in Hannah Arendt’s conception of an “enlarged mentality.” While each is arguably a legitimately Kantian view, these alternative models of moral consciousness offer considerably different spirits of Kantianism with different benefits and detriments, and each places very different cognitive and moral burdens on agents. (shrink)

How far does a researcher’s responsibility extend when an incidental finding is identified? Balancing pertinent ethical principles such as beneficence, respect for persons, and duty to rescue is not always straightforward, particularly in neuroimaging research where empirical data that might help guide decision making are lacking. We conducted a systematic survey of perceptions and preferences of 396 investigators, research participants, and Institutional Review Board members at our institution. Using the partial entrustment model as described by Richardson, we argue that our (...) data supports universal reading by a neuroradiologist of all research MRI scans for incidental findings and providing full disclosure to all participants. (shrink)

I develop an account of how mathematized theories in physics represent physical systems, in response to the frequent claim that any such account must presuppose a non-mathematized, and usually linguistic, description of the system represented. The account I develop contains a circularity, in that representation is a mathematical relation between the models of a theory and the system as represented by some other model --- but I argue that this circularity is not vicious, in any case refers in linguistic accounts (...) of meaning and representation, and is simply a consequence of the fact that we have no unmediated, representation-independent access to the world. (shrink)

Fragments of Modernity provides a critical introduction to the work of three of the most original German thinkers of the early 20th century. In their different ways, all three illuminated the experience of the modern in urban life, whether in mid-19th-century Paris or in Berlin at the turn of the century or later as the vanguard city of the Weimar Republic. They related the new modes of experiencing the world to the maturation of the money economy (Simmel), the process of (...) rationalization of capital (Kracauer), and the fantasy world of commodity fetishism (Benjamin) - in each case focusing on those fragments of social experience that could best capture the sense of modernity.David Frisby is Reader in Sociology at Glasgow University. Fragments of Modernity is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

Nothing can kill a promising research program in ethics more quickly than a plausible argument to the effect that it is committed to a morally repellent consequence. It is especially troubling when a theory one favors is jeopardized in this way. I have this worry about Harry Frankfurt's theory of free will, autonomous agency and moral responsibility, for there is a very plausible argument to the effect that aspects of his view commit him to a version of the late Stoic (...) thesis that acting freely is a matter of ‘making do,’ that is, of bringing oneself to be motivated to act in accordance with the feasible, so that personal liberation can be achieved by resigning and adapting oneself to necessity. In this paper I try to determine whether the theory does in fact commit Frankfurt (and adherents like me) to this result and, if so, what can be done to prevent it. (shrink)

This is the first of David Pears's acclaimed two‐volume work on the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy, covering the pre‐1929 writings. Part I of the first volume consists in a brief but eloquent overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole; Part II critically examines the earlier system, delineating and evaluating the central ideas (logical atomism, picture theory of meaning, and solipsism) with intellectual rigour and clarity. Pears succeeds in both offering an original realist interpretation of Wittgenstein's earlier thought, one that (...) has found many followers, and in demarcating a structural framework that makes the internal organization of Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole more accessible. (shrink)

This title was first published in 2003. This book critically examines the moral and political status of the child by a consideration of three interrelated questions: What rights if any does the child have? What rights over and duties in respect of a child do parents have? What rights over and duties in respect of a child does the state have? David Archard adopts three areas for particular discussion on the practical implications of the general theoretical issues: education, child (...) protection policy, and the medical treatment of children. Providing a clear legal context and a sharper, contemporary discussion of the question of rights, this book presents a clear introduction to the key issues in the moral and political status of children. (shrink)

This book aims to reinvigorate discussions of moral arguments for God's existence.

Revenant sur la question des vérifacteurs, D. Armstrong demande ici d'abord comment concilier le maximalisme et la relation de nécessitation. L'A. examine quel sens métaphysique donner à la notion d'implication, et s'il y a un sens à admettre une contingence de re. Il traite à ce niveau des possibilités pures, examine le cas des aliens chez David Lewis, puis pose la question de savoir s'il est contingent de dire qu'il y a de l'être plutôt que rien. L'exposé le conduit (...) à traiter du cas des vérifacteurs pour les vérités nécessaires, mais adopte une thèse possibiliste pour les sujets de la science démonstrative. Il se clôt par un examen du genre de nécessité transcatégorielle qui est implicite à la généralisation des vérifacteurs. The A. wants to reconcile maximalisme about truthmakers and the relation of necessitation. He investigates the metaphysical sense of the implication and whether one can admit de re contingency. He examines the pure possibilities and the case of alien properties according with David Lewis and studies whether it is contingent that there is something rather than nothing. He analyses the truthmakers of necessary truths and adopts a possibilist thesis for matters of demonstrative science. He concludes with the transcategorial necessity which is implicit in the generalization of truthmakers. (shrink)

There are many people who think that deconstruction has run its course, has had its day, and that it is now time to return to the important business of philosophy, or perhaps to serious ethical, social and political questions. Derrida's work, it is said, leads nowhere but a sterile philosophy of difference that in its de-politicized, de-historicized abstractness is a form of conservatism little better than the kinds of identity thinking to which it seems to be so radically opposed. In (...) short, we must go ‘beyond’ deconstruction. (shrink)

According to a widespread contention, individuals are among the basic building blocks of the world. The contention, however, raises a perennial problem. If individuals are basic, they cannot be fully accounted for in terms of their empirically detectable qualities. But then, how can we detect, or know, or identify, individuals? Shamik Dasgupta has influentially argued that considerations along these lines, together with a lesson from the history of physics, should make us reject any picture on which individuals are basic constituents (...) of reality. In this paper, I defend such a picture against Dasgupta’s argument. (shrink)

The Jubilee Centre’s new report, Virtuous Character for the Practice of Law, sets about trying to examine the place of character and values in the legal profession in Britain. The report draws its findings from a UK focused survey of 966 lawyers and aspiring lawyers at varying stages of their careers. It is one of the largest pieces of research carried out in Britain focusing on issues of character and virtue within a specific industry sector.

In the 1990s, Russia and Argentina both tied their currencies to the dollar to combat inflation. They later devalued under pressure, but only after an extremely costly delay, and only after an explosive spread of monetary surrogates substituting for official currency. This article explains these puzzling developments using an institutional-sociological approach to money, which relates exchange-rate preferences to financial context rather than sectoral position, as is common. It proposes a “lock-in” mechanism explaining delayed devaluation in both cases, as well as (...) Argentina’s greater delay, and explores the linkages between exchange-rate policy and the origins of monetary surrogates. (shrink)

In this new textbook two Catholic ethicists with extensive teaching experience present a moral theology based on vision. David Matzko McCarthy and James M. Donohue draw widely from the Western philosophical tradition while integrating biblical and theological themes in order to explore such fundamental questions as What is good? The fourteen chapters in Moral Vision are short and thematic. Substantive study questions engage with primary texts and encourage students to apply theory to everyday life and common human experiences. The (...) book is accessibly written and flexible enough to fit into any undergraduate or seminary course on ethics. (shrink)

Terry Eagleton is the foremost Marxist cultural theorist of our time. In the first book-length study of this highly influential figure, David Alderson provides detailed discussions of Eagleton's Marxism and his engagements with postmodernism, as well as an evaluation of his interventions in Irish Studies. Each of the chapters in this important intervention in current theoretical debates offers accessible contextualization of the key issues and provides detailed analyses of Eagleton's literary criticism. Alderson shows that the complex relations between nature, (...) culture and ideology, body, subjectivity and authority are at the heart of Eagleton's ethical and political concerns. He goes on to demonstrate that these relations inform the theorist's critical examinations of such literary works as Wuthering Heights and The Merchant of Venice, and his treatment of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)

Naturalistic ethics is the reigning paradigm among contemporary ethicists; in God and Cosmos, Baggett and Walls argue that this approach is seriously flawed. This book canvasses a broad array of secular and naturalistic ethical theories in an effort to test their adequacy in accounting for moral duties, intrinsic human value, prospects for radical moral transformation, and the rationality of morality. In each case, the authors argue, although various secular accounts provide real insights and indeed share common ground with theistic ethics, (...) the resources of classical theism and orthodox Christianity provide the better explanation of the moral realities under consideration. Among such realities is the fundamental insight behind the problem of evil, namely, that the world is not as it should be. Baggett and Walls argue that God and the world, taken together, exhibit superior explanatory scope and power for morality classically construed, without the need to water down the categories of morality, the import of human value, the prescriptive strength of moral obligations, or the deliverances of the logic, language, and phenomenology of moral experience. This book thus provides a cogent moral argument for God's existence, one that is abductive, teleological, and cumulative. (shrink)

BackgroundReturning neuroimaging incidental findings may create a challenge to research participants’ health literacy skills as they must interpret and make appropriate healthcare decisions based on complex radiology jargon. Disclosing IF can therefore present difficulties for participants, research institutions and the healthcare system. The purpose of this study was to identify the extent of the health literacy challenges encountered when returning neuroimaging IF. We report on findings from a retrospective survey and focus group sessions with major stakeholders involved in disclosing IF.MethodsWe (...) surveyed participants who had received a radiology report from a research study and conducted focus groups with participants, parents of child participants, Institutional Review Board members, investigators and physicians. Qualitative thematic analyses were conducted using standard group-coding procedures and descriptive summaries of health literacy scores and radiology report outcomes are examined.ResultsAlthough participants reported high health literacy skills, 67 % did not seek medical care when recommended to do so; and many participants in the focus groups disclosed they could not understand the findings described in their report. Despite their lack of understanding, participants desire to have information about their radiology results, and the investigators feel ethically inclined to return findings.ConclusionsThe language in clinically useful radiology reports can create a challenge for participants’ health literacy skills and has the potential to negatively impact the healthcare system and investigators conducting imaging research. Radiology reports need accompanying resources that explain findings in lay language, which can help reduce the challenge caused by the need to communicate incidental findings. (shrink)

According to a certain conception of language, any sentence can, when used on an occasion, have any of indefinitely many truth-conditions. Such a conception of language gives us reason to think that the question of whether the notion of truth has a distinctive content cannot be settled by looking solely at the predication of truth. By focusing on the predicate ‘true’ when trying to determine the significance of the notion of truth, we may have been looking in the wrong place.

In its many interwoven traditions, continental philosophy has a distinctive focus on what escapes the concept—experience, change, agency, responsibility, the future, the Other. The challenges that face us in the future are many: reaffirming and renewing what has already been thought and needs repeating, responding to emergent questions. None could be more urgent than the question of the animal and the fate of the planet. Addressing each of these requires that we suspend our normal conceptual assurances and think anew.

A real but typical case of identity fraud is used to open up the complex web of identification systems in Brazil. It is argued that identification has two poles related to the nature of citizenship—repression and inclusion—and that reactions from citizens to new identification schemes can be attributed to how they view the purpose of the cards in these terms. In Brazil, a sense of inclusion and citizenship based on a fear of anonymity and exclusion predominates leading to widespread support (...) amongst even critics of state activities. However, this may be undermined by the lack of state preparation for an information society, particularly the absence of meaningful data protection laws. (shrink)

Acidophilic autotrophic thiobacilli, which are able to oxidize metal and solubilize sulphide ores, are used industrially to leach metals from mineral ores. Genetic manipulation of the thiobacilli has the potential for the production of leaching bacteria with desirable characteristics for industry. In this review we examine the development of genetic systems in the thiobacilli and the present status of molecular genetics in the group.

Almost five million Americans volunteered to serve in the U.S. armed forces between 2001 and 2021 and returned home as discharged veterans. Among them, 30,177 men and women have taken their own lives, an awful toll that is more than five times the number of Americans killed in combat in our twenty-first century wars. As part of the roundtable, “Moral Injury, Trauma, and War,” this essay argues that the reasons are many, but one major factor may be the moral pain (...) that many experience in wartime and the vast emptiness they often encounter when their military service ends. Our society has an obligation to the post–9/11 veterans to understand their experiences and truly welcome them back. The rising toll of veteran suicides suggests there is little time to lose. (shrink)