Ex/in Australia--anonymous architecture -- In/editorial --In/interviews: F. Soler, J. Ferrier, W.J. Neutelings & M. Riedijk, R. Ricciotti, J. Moussafir, P. Gazeau, C. Hauvette, F. Seigneur, MVRDV, J. Nouvel, D. Lyon & P. du Besset, M. Vitart & J-M Ibos, ACTAR Arquitecura, M. Fuksas, A. Gigon & M. Guyer ,F. Druot, J. Herzog & P. de Meuron -- Ex/exteriors--Road movie -- In/reflexion on the peripherical stance--Paul Ardenne --Ex/exhibitions: Cécile Paris, Stalker, Access local, Anne Frémy --In/interests: University Paris 8 St.-Denis, garden shed, (...) Café musiques, etc. (shrink)

- Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article.

The authors use empirical research into the environmental practices of 31 manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to show that ‚business performance’ and ‚regulation’ considerations drive behaviour. They suggest that this is inevitable, given the market-based decision-making frames that permeate and dominate the industry in which manufacturing SMEs operate. Since the environment is a pillar of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the findings have important implications for CSR policy, which promotes voluntary actions predicated on a business case. It is argued that (...) this approach will not alter the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs significantly because CSR practice will be regarded as an optional and costly ‚extra’ affecting core business activity. Consequently, the use and development of existing regulatory structures, providing minimum standards for many activities covered by CSR, remains the most effective means through which the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs will be changed in the short to medium-term. Another feature of the paper is the distinction made between ‚business performance’ and the ‚business case’ argument. Business performance emphasises cost reductions and efficiency whereas the business case accentuates the benefits to shareholders of good practices as their firms become more attractive to stakeholders and society. Manufacturing SMEs␣try to improve business performance because of the pressures placed on them by market-dominated decision-making frames. These frames do not encourage manufacturing SMEs to undertake voluntary actions for the benefit of wider stakeholders and society. (shrink)

Barry Maguire argues that there are no reasons for affective attitudes. ‘There is no reason for your incredulous reaction to’ this thesis, he claims. In this paper, I argue that we have no reason to accept his thesis. I first examine Maguire's purported differences between reasons for action and so-called reasons for affective attitudes. In each case, I argue that the differences are exaggerated and that to the extent they obtain, they are best explained by differences between actions and affective (...) attitudes, not between kinds of normative support. In closing, I argue that even if Maguire were correct, the extent of the threat to one of his central targets—so-called ‘buck-passing’ views—would remain unclear. (shrink)

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)

I develop an account of naturalness in physics which demonstrates that naturalness assumptions are not restricted to narrow cases in high-energy physics but are a ubiquitous part of how interlevel relations are derived in physics. After exploring how and to what extent we might justify such assumptions on methodological grounds or through appeal to speculative future physics, I consider the apparent failure of naturalness in cosmology and in the Standard Model. I argue that any such naturalness failure threatens to undermine (...) the entire structure of our understanding of intertheoretic reduction, and so risks a much larger crisis in physics than is sometimes suggested; I briefly review some currently-popular strategies that might avoid that crisis. (shrink)

The view defended is one sense externalist on the relation between moral reasons and motivation: A's having a moral reason to do X does not necessarily imply that A has a motivation that would support A's doing X via some appropriate deliberative route. However, it is in another sense externalist in holding that there are the kind of moral reasons there are only if the relevant motivational capacities are generally present in human beings, if not in all individuals. The process (...) of socialization is an attempt to embed the recognition of what we have moral reason to do in the intentional content of one's feelings. E.g., learning that about others' suffering embeds their suffering as a reason to help in the intentional content of incipient compassionate feelings. This endows the reason with motivational efficacy while conferring further direction to the feelings in ways that shape us for social cooperation. (shrink)

Much of the sustained attention on pandemic preparedness has focused on the ethical justification for plans for the “crisis” phase of a surge when, despite augmentation efforts, the demand for life...

There are many ways the world might be, for all I know. For all I know, it might be that there is life on Jupiter, and it might be that there is not. It might be that Australia will win the next Ashes series, and it might be that they will not. It might be that my great-grandfather was my great-grandmother’s second cousin, and it might be that he was not. It might be that copper is a compound, and it (...) might be that it is not. (shrink)

In an important departure from theories of causation, David Owens proposes that coincidences have no causes, and that a cause is something which ensures that its effects are no coincidence. In Causes and Coincidences, he elucidates the idea of a coincidence as an event which can be analysed into constituent events, the nomological antecedents of which are independent of each other. He also suggests that causal facts can be analysed in terms of non-causal facts, including relations of necessity. Thus, (...) causation is defined in terms of coincidence, and coincidence without reference to causation. David Owens challenges the ideas associated with Hume, Davidson and Lewis, constructing a theory which distinguishes nomological necessity and sufficiency from their logical counterparts. He is able to offer novel solutions to the major problems of causation, including the direction of causation, the logical form of causal statements, the distinction betwen causal connections and logical connections, and the relationship between psychological and physical causation. (shrink)

There are three possible justifications of the claim cultural communities make for their right to transmit an identity to their children. A group strategy and a parenting strategy are both defective. More promising is the view that there is value to children in the sharing of a familial life. But parental authority is limited by the requirement that children acquire sufficient autonomy. Some multicultural policies are thus not ruled out by the recognition of the need to accommodate children's interests.

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)

In _Thinking After Heidegger_, David Wood takes up the challenge posed by Heidegger - that after the end of philosophy we need to learn to _think_. But what if we read Heidegger with the same respectful irreverence that he brought to reading the Greeks, Kant, Hegel, Husserl and the others? For Wood, it is Derrida's engagements with Heidegger that set the standard here – enacting a repetition through transformation and displacement. But Wood is not content to crown the new (...) king. Instead he sets up a many-sided conversation between Heidegger, Hegel, Adorno, Nietzsche, Blanchot, Kierkegaard, Derrida and others. Derrida and deconstruction are first critically addressed and then drawn into the fundamental project of philosophical renewal, or renewal _as_ philosophy. The book begins by rewriting Heidegger's inaugural lecture, 'What is Metaphysics?' and ends with an extended analysis of the performativity of his extraordinary _Beitrage_. _Thinking after Heidegger_ will be a valuable text for scholars and students of contemporary philosophy, literature and cultural studies. (shrink)

The question whether two things can be in the same place at the same time is an ambiguous one. At least three distinct questions could be meant: Can two things simpliciter be in the same place at the same time? Can two things of the same kind be in the same place at the same time? Can two substances of the same kind be in the same place at the same time? The answers to these questions vary. In what follows, (...) all three will be discussed in the light both of recent and of classic earlier examinations of the matter. The following theses will be defended. (shrink)

David Chalmers uses Bayesian theories of credence to argue against referentialism about belief. This paper argues that Chalmers’s Bayesian objections to referentialism are similar to older, more familiar objections to referentialism. There are familiar responses to the old objections, and there is a predictable way to modify those old responses to meet Chalmers’s Bayesian objections. The new responses to the new objections are no less plausible than the old responses to the old objections. Chalmers’s positive theory of belief and (...) credence is structurally similar to typical referential theories of those objects, but his theory is more speculative and dubious. (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)

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)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 75-79, Winter 2020.

Maturity and Modernity examines Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault as a distinct trajectory of critical thinking within modern thought which traces the emergence and development of genealogy in the form of imminent critique. David Owen clarifies the relationship between these thinkers and responds to Habermas' (and Dews') charge that these thinkers are nihilists and that their approach is philosophically incoherent and practically irresponsible by showing how genealogy as a practical activity is directed toward the achievements of human autonomy. The scope (...) of the book covers the critical methodologies developed by these thinkers with respect to the analysis of how we have become what we are and the implication which they draw for the possibility of human autonomy in the present. It proceeds by detailed analysis of each thinker in turn showing the structure of their approach, their historical account of the emergence of modernity, and the politics of their attempts to facilitate the achievement of human autonomy. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 1, Page 33-59, Winter 2023.

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)