Now commonly accepted as the point of reference for musicians in the Western world, A 440 hertz only became the standard pitch during an international conference held in 1939. The adoption of this norm was the result of decades of negotiations between countries involving performers, composers, diplomats, physicists, and sound engineers. Although musicians and musicologists are aware of the variability of musical pitches over time, as attested by the use of lower frequencies to perform early music repertoires, no study has (...) fully explained the invention of our current concert pitch. In this book, Fanny Gribenski draws on a rich variety of previously unexplored archival sources and a unique combination of musicological perspectives, transnational history, and science studies. Tuning the World demonstrates the aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and political contingencies underlying the construction of one of the most "natural" objects of contemporary musical performance, itself the result of a cacophony of competing views and interests. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than (...) asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene of birth, I argue that we have to insist on the very characteristics Cavarero attributes to it—ones, as this essay aims to show, that are ultimately missing in the Arendtian account thereof. (shrink)

Often celebrated as a model of development in Africa, Botswana nonetheless endured a severe HIV epidemic. This article describes the singularity of the Botswana experience in facing AIDS and creating the widest possible access to antiretroviral medications for its citizens. Through exploration of different sets of actors and the construction of their ethics of treatment, it is possible to examine how free and universal access was created within the national antiretroviral program. This article underscores the importance of the site and (...) the local dynamics in the advent of an ethics of access to treatment for Botswana citizens. At the intersection of national citizenship, pharmaceutical philanthropy, and biomedical collaborations, Botswana is an exemplary case (one of the first and unique in its kind) of global health programs for access to drugs in which patients' rights are tied to science and pharmaceutical development. As such it also bears some limitations and concerns over its sustainability. (shrink)

Ethical decisions are contextualized in the dialectic of a multidimensional system, including situation, setting, culture, and generation. There may be further gaps between the ethical considerations of professionals and folk values. The experience of promoting equal opportunities in Hong Kong illustrates some of these challenges. Whereas the rule of law under a Western legal system advocates human rights, the traditional emphasis on harmony and preference for balancing in conflict resolution underlie the gaps in the interpretation of these ideals. The case (...) of the Hong Kong secondary school places allocation system highlights the conflicting perspectives of law, gender stereotypes, psychological knowledge, as well as ethical principles of justice and fairness in promoting equal opportunities in educational assessment and placement. The cultural perspective highlighted in this case illustrates the complex contexts of ethical decisions. (shrink)

En commandant à Rubens un cycle exclusivement consacré à sa gloire, Marie de Médicis entend affirmer à toute l’Europe son retour au pouvoir. Au-delà du récit biographique, l’œuvre picturale délivre un message politique fort qui justifie, et légitime, la reine mère dans le gouvernement. Pour parvenir à ses fins, et donner d’elle-même l’image d’une souveraine toute puissante sans transgresser ouvertement les principes monarchiques, Marie de Médicis joue de toutes ses qualités, de femme, de reine, de mère, dans un cycle complexe (...) qui articule le registre narratif sur le registre institutionnel, et mêle figures allégoriques et compositions historiques. En ce début de XVIIe siècle, c’est bien le problème de la représentation d’une femme de pouvoir qui est alors posé. (shrink)

New and classic essays on Antigone and feminist philosophy.

Boston Medical Center/Boston University Medical Campus recently reduced certain requirements for human subjects research where this could be done without adversely affecting the rights and welfare of participants, in anticipation of changes in the Final Common Rule. Modifications affected exempt and expedited categories, approval periods, ceding review, Quality Improvement/Quality Assessment activities, and some requirements for pregnant women, prisoners, and children. This case study may assist other institutions in responding to the Final Common Rule.

Pour Xavier Vigna, faire l’Histoire des ouvriers en France au xxe siècle, ce n’est « plus suivre les organisations de la classe, mais les hommes et les femmes dans leur quotidien, au travail et à leur domicile, dans leurs mobilisations comme dans leurs loisirs » (p. 10). Il nous propose alors une « histoire des expériences ouvrières dans le siècle » (p. 10). S’il ne choisit pas d’écrire cette histoire au prisme du genre, l’auteur sensible à la « multiplicité des (...) ouvriers » (p. 10), ne se cont... (shrink)

In this chapter, the authors wish to study the transformation of online profiles created during a user’s lifetime into the profile of a deceased person. To this end, they first focus on the possibilities available to the bereaved to maintain the deceased’s profile and how they manage this. When these perpetuated profiles are taken in hand, they undergo changes. This phenomenon of transformation is what the authors have termed “profilopraxy,” whereby the deceased’s profile is changed so that it complies with (...) the idea that the bereaved have of the person, and/or the affixment of death stigmas to make the profile recognizable as that of a dead person. As the most obvious way of affixing these stigmas involves announcing the death of the deceased, the authors analyze this announcement. They identify the enunciators who make the announcement, the places where it appears and the way it is formulated. On this basis, the authors show that the characteristics of social networking sites profoundly upset traditional hierarchies, since friends and family both intervene on the profile pages to affix death stigmas and shape them for posterity. As a result, the transformation of a living person’s profile into a dead person’s profile stems from a co-enunciation involving viewpoints that are not always similar. Tensions may even be expressed among the co-enunciators active on a profile. Moreover, some choose to use other spaces in which to produce a representation of the deceased, thus creating an image that better fits the one they wish to see handed down to posterity. (shrink)

Metamorphosis in frogs is a critical developmental process through which a tadpole changes into an adult froglet. Metamorphic changes include external morphological transformations as well as important changes in the wiring of sensory organs and central nervous system. This review aims to provide an overview on the events that occur in the visual system of metamorphosing amphibians and to discuss recent studies that provide new insight into the molecular mechanisms that control changes in the retinal growth pattern as well as (...) the formation of new axonal pathways in the central nervous system. BioEssays 23:319–326, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Focusing on the way in which sexual difference is articulated in Sophocles' Antigone , I offer a reading that reverses the dialectic most commonly ascribed to the play. While most interlocutors of this classic tragedy connect its heroine to divine law and the private realm and see Creon as a representative of human law and politics, I trace what I call a Sophoclean reversal at the core of the play, suggesting that, through a series of negations and contaminations, things are (...) the opposite of what they seem to be. Using Hannah Arendt's distinction between the private and public realms as my main point of departure, I show how such a reading reveals the internal contradiction and inherent impossibility of a society whose foundation is the exclusion of women from political life. Such a society, just like Antigone, is an anti seed : it carries within it the necessity of its own downfall. (shrink)

Love cannot be everlasting, much as we might desire it to be so. So, what is love in a life that begins and ends? How does it feel to love as a finite being, imperfectly as we may? In Western philosophy and religious thought, love has often been characterized as a source of constancy and commitment. Love in Time reveals the opposite to be true. From the ways our beloveds (and their qualities that endear them to us) change over time, (...) to the possibility of our feelings toward our beloveds-or their feelings toward us-changing, love, Bialek shows, is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty. Yet it is that very uncertainty that entices us to our beloveds. Love is not a refuge from the vagaries of worldly life, impervious to its changing conditions. Rather, it is an orientation to a future that we do not yet know. In this book, Fannie Bialek explores the temporal experience of lovers spending time with their beloveds. Love in time, like any temporal experience, is composed of moments of not knowing what will happen next. It is an experience of vulnerability in this way, the lover exposed to an unknown future and waiting to see how it plays out. Attending to these vulnerabilities, Love in Time develops a fresh ethics of love that centers uncertainty and humility. It is an ethics of love that speaks to the uncertainty of the present and beyond. (shrink)

War often comes down to one thing: money. The role of economics in the study of both peace and war is arguably then the most important single factor when it comes to the study of defence. This excellent new book from Fanny Coulomb will be of interest not only to those involved in the burgeoning field of defence economics - it will also be of vital interest to students and academics from international relations, defence studies, philosophy and political science (...) backgrounds. (shrink)

Moral distress among nurses is well researched and well documented, but there is limited research on the moral distress experienced by care leaders, who serve as intermediaries between patient care nurses and higher levels of administration. Healthcare professionals experience moral distress daily in the context of older adult care. The aim of this scoping review was to evaluate recent literature on moral distress in older adult care with the goal of revealing how care leaders’ experiences of moral distress in older (...) adult care have been conceptualized in earlier studies. The research questions were: How is the concept of moral distress as experienced by care leaders in older adult care defined in the existing literature? How is the concept of moral distress conceptualized in the literature? The research has been conducted in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the Finnish National Advisory Board on Research Ethics TENK. We saw that consensus on how moral distress is defined is lacking. Care leaders in older adult care experience substantial moral distress, which could be linked to the duality of their leadership role. Moral distress can be caused by a complex interplay of individual and structural factors and the challenging complex moral issues inherent to older adult care. Moral distress could impact care leaders’ emotional health, job performance, overall job satisfaction and result in higher turnover rates, absenteeism, decreased quality of patient care, and increased organizational costs. Addressing moral distress on the individual, team, and organizational levels is crucial for enhancing care leaders’ well-being and improving the overall quality of care for older adults. A focus on the identification of strategies whereby care leaders can be supported, exploration of the long-term effects of moral distress on healthcare professionals in general, and the organizational outcomes associated with moral distress should be included in future research. (shrink)

It is often acknowledged that mindfulness facilitates emotion regulation on a long-term scale. Only few empirical studies support the hypothesis that even a brief mindfulness induction among subjects without previous experience of meditation allows an effective reduction of both positive and negative emotions. To the best of our knowledge, this hypothesis has never been tested when comparing mindfulness to other regulation strategies known to be effective. The current study investigates the effects of mindfulness, reappraisal and expressive suppression during the regulation (...) of positive emotions. Forty-five participants without previous meditation experience watched four positive video clips while applying a specific regulation strategy: mindful attention, reappraisal, expressive suppression or no strategy. Video clips were matched for intensity and positive emotions index. Each of them was evaluated on two dimensions, valence and arousal. Moreover, participants’ facial expressions were recorded during the presentation of the video clips. Results showed that participants report less positive affect in reappraisal and mindful attention conditions compared to expression suppression and a control condition; and the facialexpression – activation of AU12 and AU6 – varies with the regulation strategy applied. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of mindfulness in decreasing both the evaluative judgment of positive video clips and the related facial expression, among participants without previous mindfulness experience. (shrink)

La pratique du copier-coller chez les étudiant.e.s est assimilée à du plagiat et la réponse apportée par l’institution se résume à « surveiller et punir ». Cette pratique mérite cependant d’être interrogée dans le cadre des littératies universitaires par rapport à la nécessaire prise en compte des littératies numériques. Le fait qu’elle soit conçue comme une « méconduite » d’un point de vue déontologique est à comprendre par rapport à un cadre normatif qui en appelle à l’honnêteté académique et institue (...) l’auteur et les sources comme des composantes essentielles des écrits de savoirs, sans guère en expliciter les enjeux. Comment penser le copier-coller et qu’en faire? En quoi peut-on passer de l’inacceptable au didactisable, et que prendre en compte? Dans la perspective d’une réflexivité critique dans le champ des littératies universitaires, nous proposons des éléments de contextualisation qui permettent de problématiser le copier-coller, en tant que geste d’écriture, en tant qu’objet de débats, et de manière à mieux outiller les étudiant.e.s face aux attentes universitaires et en termes de compétences littéraciques en général. Nous nous intéressons à la réception du copier-coller, à l’énonciation par copier-coller et aux confusions qui entourent les attentes à l’égard des écrits des étudiant.e.s. Le contexte est compris comme un cadre interprétatif qui sert à construire un objet didactique en tant que tel. (shrink)

Le sens du nom grec de φύσις, et celui de la physique aristotélicienne, sont au cœur de la compréhension heideggerienne de la métaphysique, qu’il s’agisse, dans les années 1920, de refonder celle-ci en retrouvant ses possibilités initiales, ou, à la fin des années 1930, de l’assumer pour pouvoir la dépasser, puis de la laisser. De part et d’autre du tournant, la φύσις, dans sa surabondance et dans son dépliement, permet en effet de rendre compte de l’émergence de deux domaines, ceux (...) de la physique et de la métaphysique. Toutefois, la plurivocité diachronique et synchronique de φύσις, telle qu’elle est mise en lumière en 1929-1930, se trouve ensuite comprise de manière plus radicale. Il ne s’agit plus de repérer l’évolution du sens de φύσις et la coexistence de significations contemporaines, mais de mettre au jour le télescopage, dans la pensée aristotélicienne, de deux significations qui diffèrent de manière historiale. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction: Why Birth?Fanny SöderbäckWhen asked to put together a special international issue of philoSOPHIA, I was faced with the task of picking a topic that would touch and interest feminist scholars of all continents. Birth—and, by extension, pregnant embodiment, motherhood, reproductive technologies, a woman’s right to choose, and other related topics—stood out to me as an issue that has concerned, and that continues to concern, feminist thinkers from (...) across the world. Since Simone de Beauvoir’s early analysis and critique of patriarchy as a system that reduces women to mothers and confines them to the realm of reproduction, feminists have been wrestling with the question of whether birth and motherhood pose a threat to or promote women’s liberation. Many of the topics so pertinent to feminist debates—from emancipatory issues such as abortion rights, the right to work, and women’s health, to more conceptual concerns such as embodiment, desire, sexual difference, and female subjectivity—force us to return to the question of birth, and to what it means that women can, and do, give birth.It was only after I had settled on a topic and invited the six authors included here to contribute that I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. More than any scholarly project I have embarked on before, this one has, as a consequence, been deeply personal. For each step of the editorial process, for each new batch of drafts, peer reviews, discussions with authors, and copyedits, I have witnessed my body change, the baby growing and moving inside me, her little feet exploring my inside, her face looking back at me from ultrasound screens, her presence causing numbness in my hands, swelling in my feet, uncomfortable nights, and, of course, unprecedented joy and anticipation. I have negotiated my maternity leave, taken birthing classes, read books about breastfeeding and parenting, fought with obstetricians and resisted their [End Page 1] tendency to medicalize my experience, gone through phases of intense nesting, and faced fears and strengths I did not know I harbored. I have, in short, experienced some version of what generations of pregnant and birthing women have experienced before me, and yet for me it has all been new and unknown, frightening and exhilarating all at once.Never before have I been so acutely aware of the important role experience holds in feminist scholarship. If (male) philosophers for millennia have been concerned with death, and if death is the one event those writing about it have yet to experience, birth is perhaps the only experience we all—constitutively—share, insofar as we have all been born. And without resorting to biological determinism or heterosexism, it is worth noting that women have a special relationship to birth. Insofar as we live in a society that expects us to do so, we either give birth, choose not to give birth, or struggle to be able to give birth. As several of the essays included here will testify, each of these paths has become increasingly marked by technological advancements. In the first instance, every woman who gives birth has to respond to a series of wanted or unwanted technological interventions—or the lack thereof. From ultrasounds and genetic screenings to the possibility of inducing labor, giving surgical birth, and accessing various pain medicines during labor—or, as in the case of many nations in the developing world, the sometimes dire consequences that are the result of limited access to such technological-medical tools—pregnant women across the globe are in different ways shaped by the technology that accompanies their journey of gestation. In the second instance, the access to contraception and the victories won in the fight for abortion rights constitute a revolution in the lives of women—perhaps the most important of all gains that make up our emancipation. And finally, in the third instance, reproductive technologies have revolutionized our capacity not only to reproduce, but to do so later in life, outside of a heterosexual framework, and across national borders. Much of this can be framed as progress, but, as should be expected, these technological advancements not only force us to confront... (shrink)

Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about different religious and philosophical traditions. This paper argues that the increasing welcome of feminist ethics in the JRE also reveals a tension in the field between inclusion and critique: where feminist ethics is included as another tradition of ethical inquiry, its critical claims can be escaped by appeal to difference from the traditions it seeks to engage. The response to feminist critique should not be to applaud (...) its inclusion without responding to its claims. Where this occurs, religious ethicists must renegotiate the terms of inclusion and the borders of difference. Feminist critique thus requires a return to founding questions of this journal, and the field, about the terms on which different traditions can be discussed and engaged in a common, critical conversation of religious ethics. (shrink)

Dans la mesure où il achève l’histoire de la philosophie, Hegel se voit conférer un rôle tout à fait singulier dans la lecture heideggerienne d’une telle histoire. Penser après Hegel, c’est donc penser la fin de cette histoire, et par conséquent aussi son autre limite, à savoir son commencement. Or, la signification et la portée de celui-ci se voient bouleversés de part et d’autre de ce qu’il est convenu de nommer le tournant ( Kehre ) de la pensée heideggerienne. Dans (...) un premier temps, le dépassement de Hegel consiste à se recentrer pour mettre en lumière la temporalité constitutive de cet étant pour lequel il y a être, le Dasein, c’est-à-dire son écart fondamental. Dans un second temps, ce que Heidegger tâche, après Hegel, de rejoindre, répond à l’impensé du premier commencement grec, c’est-à-dire avant que la métaphysique, avec Platon, ne débute. Le chemin est alors paradoxalement celui qui, à travers le plus grand éloignement, tente de penser l’être-commençant. (shrink)

This study examines the socio-cultural significance of dolls as Roman girls' toys. It focuses on a sample of ivory, bone, and cloth dolls, many of which have ornate hairstyles, molded breasts and, in some cases, delineated genitalia. As the only explicitly gendered toys from the Roman world, these constitute unique bodies of evidence for exploring questions of socialization and identity formation, and assessing ancient ideals. Often treated as relatively straightforward objects that prepared girls for futures as wives and mothers, this (...) study argues instead that they were more complex and conveyed mixed messages to their young owners. By isolating three specific features of the dolls , situating these in their historical and ideological milieux, and linking them with expectations for girls known from literary sources, the dolls' multivalence as artifacts of gender and status is revealed. (shrink)

Introduction The digital age has revolutionized the way we think, communicate, work, and enjoy life. Technology has increased the pace of life at an ...

In his essay "Différance," Derrida suggests that "the privilege granted to the present . . . is the ether of metaphysics."1 And in "Ousia and Grammé," he expresses this same idea, noting that "the entire history of philosophy" has "been authorized by the 'extraordinary right' of the present" and that "from Parmenides to Husserl, the privilege of the present has never been put into question."2 All temporal modes are ultimately thought in the form of presence (ousia): "The past and the (...) future are always determined as past presents or future presents" (OG 34). Being is "already determined as being-present" (OG 47), yet this determination, according to Derrida, remains unthematized within the tradition.The question of .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Motherhood According to KristevaOn Time and Matter in Plato and KristevaFanny SöderbäckThe state of the maternal has been disputed among feminists for quite some time. Julia Kristeva, whose work will be my focus of attention here, has been criticized for her emphasis on the maternal, particularly with regards to her alleged equation of maternity with femininity. Critics have suggested that such equation risks reducing woman to the biological function (...) of motherhood. Judith Butler, to give an example to which I will return at length, speaks of a “compulsory obligation on women’s bodies to reproduce” (Butler 1999, 115; I will refer to this text as GT for the remainder of this essay). Kristeva herself has noted that “it seems... difficult to speak today of maternity without being accused of normativism, read: of regression” (Kristeva 2003, 207).I will argue that Kristeva by no means reduces woman to the function of motherhood. Rather, she returns to the maternal body at least in part to free woman from this very reduction. By bringing the mother out of the shadows, she provides women with a past (a genealogy of their own, a community of women, a history hitherto repressed) and, simultaneously, with a future (in the sense of liberating them from predefined roles and positions—from motherhood as the only form of subjectivity available to them). It is exactly the future that is at stake when Kristeva speaks of the maternal, and more specifically, it is the possibility of temporal change that depends on it. The maternal body to which she urges us to return must, as I see it, be understood qua temporalization : that to which we return is temporal, moving, displacing, renewing. The return is neither nostalgic nor aimed at preserving some essential notion of motherhood—it makes possible [End Page 65] new beginnings, allowing for a future pregnant with change and transformation. Butler ends her critique of Kristeva with the following remark—one that is meant to describe what would happen if we stopped focusing on the mother in the way Kristeva has done hitherto: “The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities” (GT, 119). I will attempt to show that these words in fact capture Kristeva’s own project, that such “open future” is exactly what she is aiming at through her continuous return to the maternal body.The implication of this retrieval of the maternal is twofold: First, it situates Kristeva within a materialist tradition and allows her to articulate and inscribe a morphological-phenomenological legacy of embodiment contra merely constructionist or discursive narratives.1 Second, it gives her ground to rearticulate time as inseparable from space and thus to challenge and overcome the deep-rooted tradition that divides time and space alongside a mind-body dualism. Surprisingly, perhaps, she establishes this ground by returning to a thinker who for many feminist scholars is the example par excellence of the very dualism that is put into question: Plato. This essay aims at carefully tracing Kristeva’s engagement with Plato, and I will argue that the breakdown of the distinction between time and space is to be found at the core of his writing. If, as I will argue here, the maternal body to which Kristeva returns must be understood not only as corporeal but also as a temporal principle, then we are forced to think through the intimate relation between temporality and materiality in ways that will come to challenge and renew the very materialist tradition that Kristeva herself most often is understood to represent.Kristeva’s earliest thematization of the maternal appears in her doctoral dissertation, Revolution in Poetic Language. It is here that she first articulates her notion of the semiotic chora, associating it with the maternal body and early heterogeneous drives.2 Kristeva herself picks up the Greek term chora from Plato’s Timaeus; a dialogue that more than anything deals with the question of beginnings, as it narrates the story of how the cosmos and its living creatures were created. I will turn both to the Platonic text and to... (shrink)

Julia Kristeva’s work on the concept of revolt is marked by a temporal analysis that takes revolt to be a movement of return into the past that makes possible change, rebirth, and an open future. Such temporal revolt is, according to Kristeva, intimate, in that it touches on unconscious psychic structures and operates on the level of thought and creativity. But Kristeva simultaneously inherits Freud’s notion that the unconscious is timeless. How, I ask, can revolt be defined as a temporal (...) movement of return while at the same time being rooted in timelessness? I examine both Freud’s and Kristeva’s discussions of the timelessness of the unconscious and suggest that it needs to be understood not as non-temporal or outside of time, but rather as a temporal structure that challenges traditional philosophical conceptions of time. As such, the timelessness of the unconscious is far from being yet another instantiation of metaphysical presence. Rather, I see it as offering a challenge to both metaphysical presence and linear time, and indeed as making possible the retrospective movement of return that revolt for Kristeva must be. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of mineral resources’ governance and trading rules. In doing so, it takes a closer look at the 2012 World Trade Organization case pertaining to Chinese exportation quotas of rare earth elements and other minerals. It argues that the current governance system based on national responsibility over resources control and global trading rules is not well adapted to a sustainable and fair management of mineral resources, and concludes by suggesting two paths towards a better governance of (...) such resources. (shrink)

Recently, scholars across disciplines raised ethical, legal and social concerns about the notion of human intervention, control, and oversight over Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. This observation becomes particularly important in the age of ubiquitous computing and the increasing adoption of AI in everyday communication infrastructures. We apply Nicholas Garnham's conceptual perspective on mediation to users who are challenged both individually and societally when interacting with AI-enabled systems. One way to increase user agency are mechanisms to contest faulty or flawed AI (...) systems and their decisions, as well as to request redress. Currently, however, users structurally lack such mechanisms, which increases risks for vulnerable communities, for instance patients interacting with AI healthcare chatbots. To empower users in AI-mediated communication processes, this article introduces the concept of active human agency. We link our concept to contestability and redress mechanism examples and explain why these are necessary to strengthen active human agency. We argue that AI policy should introduce rights for users to swiftly contest or rectify an AI-enabled decision. This right would empower individual autonomy and strengthen fundamental rights in the digital age. We conclude by identifying routes for future theoretical and empirical research on active human agency in times of ubiquitous AI. (shrink)

Fantastic Antigones : The Tragic Legacy of Trans Grief.

This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a reading of Alex Haley's novel Roots, and the recent television adaptation of that book. If Cavarero has insisted throughout her work that we need to challenge the philosophical privileging of abstract universality and focus instead on the irreducibility of embodied singularity, and if such a move in her work has always relied on a feminist analysis of the role women play in such a drama, I argue that attention (...) to issues of race and the institution of slavery both supports and complicates her analysis in meaningful ways. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to uncover the metaphysical assumptions implicit in the otherwise highly scientific contemporary identity theories. 1) the identity statement, Being a philosophical interpretation of dualistic psychophysical correspondence, Requires for its support a justificatory ontological or linguistic premise. 2) the conception of the mental as the hidden, Unobservable, Subjective and private is a metaphysical distortion with historical roots in an empiricist and positivist interpretation of the cartesian dichotomy of thinking and extended thing. 3) acceptance of an artificial (...) dichotomy and reliance on a narrow conceptual framework lead identity theorists to misrepresent the nature of the mental-Physical relation and to see ontological reductionism as the only solution. 4) alternative explanations are possible which bypass the shortcomings mentioned and propose the irreducibility of mind to body without postulating a dualistic ontology; merleau-Ponty's and wittgenstein's theories are good examples of an ontological monism which allows for the reality and meaningfulness of the mental within the scope of the physical. (edited). (shrink)