Medieval philosophers had a predilection for using the correlative pair father and son as an illustrative example in their discussions of relations. The use of this example has sometimes led to charges of confusion on the grounds that fatherhood and sonship are not proper converses. The present article shows how a group of twelfth-century philosophers from the milieu around the logician Alberic of Paris handled the problems arising from the use of this illustrative example which they had inherited from their (...) ancient and late-ancient predecessors. (shrink)

This special issue grew out of a small conference The Known & the Unknown: Exploring Twelfth-Century Philosophy, which was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, hosted by the Saxo Institute, and held at the University of Copenhagen in April 2018. Its central topic was the many, mostly unexplored, commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry that constitute the key textual evidence for a fascinating phenomenon that, although it played a pivotal role in the philosophical revival of Western Europe, remains frustratingly underexplored to (...) this day: the logical schools of the twelfth century. The present introduction has two parts. In the first part, John Marenbon lays out the background to this special issue of Vivarium as a whole, explaining both what the philosophical project pursued by twelfth-century logicians was and how, and how far, the historical project of understanding it has progressed over the last two hundred years. In the second part, Heine Hansen briefly presents the issue and its contents. (shrink)

This article concerns existents as a contentious issue in contemporary Abelardian scholarship. More precisely, it concerns the ontological standing of forms in Abelard’s metaphysics. Take, for example, the apple on my desk. What ontological standing does its redness have? Is it an actual entity over and above the apple or is it in some sense “reducible” to it? Abelard, famously, was a nominalist, so the question is not about some purported universal redness. Rather, it is about the particular redness of (...) the particular apple on my desk. The issue is contentious in that the best current accounts of Abelard’s metaphysics disagree strongly about how to answer this question. Here, rather than focusing on Abelard’s own writings – which so far have yielded no definitive answer – I will consider some anonymously transmitted and mainly unedited logical texts from the twelfth century and show how his contemporaries understood Abelard’s view and how the followers of his philosophical nemesis, Alberic of Paris, reacted to it. (shrink)

If Sophroniscus is the father of Socrates, then Socrates is the son of Sophroniscus. If Socrates is similar to Plato, then Plato is similar to Socrates. But how many relations does Sophroniscus and Socrates being so related involve? How many does Plato and Socrates being thus related? Is there a difference between the two cases? These are questions that have featured prominently in discussions of relations in recent years, but they are by no means new. Focusing on a text by (...) the later Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby, this paper explores some of the replies and main arguments advanced by a number of philosophers working in the Latin west in the mid-to-late thirteenth century. (shrink)

Collection of articles on medieval logic and semantics. Introduction by Sten Ebbesen and 24 contributions by scholars in the history of medieval theories of language. The papers in this volume treat several aspects of the history of theories of language from the 12th to the 14th century, aspects that have in a way or another been dealt with by Ebbesen himself.Festschrift in honor of Sten Ebessen in the occasion of his 65th birthday.

Aristoteles' (384-322 f.Kr.) mange filosofisk-videnskabelige værker er blevet studeret og kommenteret i over 2.000 år, men aldrig så intensivt som i tiden mellem 1100 og 1600, hvor de var rygraden i den såkaldt "skolastiske" lærdomskultur, der skabte det europæiske universitetssystem. Der forskes stadig i Aristoteles verden over, men moderne fortolkere drager kun sjældent nytte af den rige ældre tradition. Denne bog beskriver og sammenligner fortolkningsmetoder og publikationsstrategier hos skolastikerne og nutidens aristotelikere. Der argumenteres for, at dele af den gamle metodik (...) med fordel kunne genoptages, og det vises, at der i konkrete tilfælde kan findes værdifulde fortolkningsforslag, som ikke ses i den nyere litteratur. (shrink)

"The twelve chapters of this volume all began their existence as contributions to workshops held between 2009 and 2011 by a Danish-Swedish research network called The Aristotelian Tradition: The reception of Aristotle's works on logic and metaphysics in the Middle Ages, headquartered in Gothenburg and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Most of them were written by members of the network, some by invited speakers. While the volume amply illustrates the set of scholarly approaches characteristic of the "Copenhagen (...) School of Medieval Philosophy" (notably a strong philological foundation and an interest in ancient as well as medieval and Greek as well as Latin texts), its thematic diversity reflects the network's breadth of interests. What unites the chapters in this respect is simply a concern with different historical manifestations of Aristotelian thought on logical and metaphysical matters. The volume includes studies of texts by, among others, Apuleius, Boethius, Anonymus Aurelianensis III, Michael of Ephesus, Averroes, Anonymus Cantabrigiensis, Nicholas of Paris, Robert Kilwardby, Anonymus O, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Francisco Suárez, relating to themes and passages in Aristotle's Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics 1, Posterior Analytics 1, Sophistical Refutations and Metaphysics A and Z. The last two chapters consist of a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the first part of a fiercely anti-Aristotelian work, which has been described as the starting-point for Renaissance Platonism and Aristotelianism alike: George Gemistos Plethon's On Aristotle's Departures from Plato."--. (shrink)

Is the term ‘racist’ being applied so widely that it is losing its moral force? Theorists and pundits from across the political spectrum think that it is. They call such a change of meaning “conceptual inflation” and argue that we should try to stop it by restricting the use of ‘racist’ or replacing ‘racist’ with new expressions. But what evidence do we have that ‘racist’ is inflated? Economists do not track currency inflation with mere vibes; they use measurements such as (...) the consumer price index. For example, using CPI, it is observable that there has been considerable US dollar inflation over the last three decades or so: $1.00 in 1989 has the purchasing power of $2.54 in 2024. If ‘racist’ has undergone a similar transformation, as critics of conceptual inflation contend, how could that be measured? Before plunging into the normative debate about whether conceptual inflation is good or bad, we should gather systematic empirical evidence about whether the purported conceptual inflation of ‘racist’ is in fact happening. That is what we do in this paper: we use an apparent time study, a technique drawn from sociolinguistics, to measure whether ‘racist’ is undergoing conceptual inflation. An apparent time study looks at the linguistic behavior of people of different ages as a way of measuring linguistic variation over time. We distinguish two processes that constitute conceptual inflation: extension expansion and intensity bleaching. Across three studies, we found some equivocal evidence that ‘racist’ has undergone extension expansion—its reference class may have slightly expanded—but no evidence that it has undergone intensity bleaching—its moral force remains the same. By comparing ‘racist’ with other terms that have plausibly undergone meaning change, like ‘queer’, we argue that claims about the conceptual inflation of ‘racist’, as they are standardly understood, are overblown. (shrink)

This paper sets out the felicity conditions for metalinguistic proposals, a type of directive illocutionary act. It discusses the relevance of metalinguistic proposals and other metalinguistic directives for understanding both small- and large-scale linguistic engineering projects, essentially contested concepts, metalinguistic provocations, and the methodology of ordinary language philosophy. Metalinguistic proposals are compared with other types of linguistic interventions, including metalinguistic negotiation, conceptual engineering, lexical warfare, and ameliorative projects.

When experimental participants are given the chance to reflect and revise their initial judgments in a dynamic conversational context, do their responses to philosophical scenarios differ from responses to those same scenarios presented in a traditional static survey? In three experiments comparing responses given in conversational contexts with responses to traditional static surveys, we find no consistent evidence that responses differ in these different formats. This aligns with recent findings that various manipulations of reflectiveness have no effect on participants’ judgments (...) about philosophical scenarios. Although we did not find a consistent quantitative effect of format (conversation vs. static survey), conversational experiments still provide qualitative insights into debates about how participants are understanding (or misunderstanding) the scenarios they read in experimental studies, whether they are replacing difficult questions with questions that are more easily answered, and how participants are imagining the scenarios they read in ways that differ from what is explicitly stated by experimenters. We argue that conversational experiments—"Socratic questionnaires"—help show what is going on “under the hood” of traditional survey designs in the experimental investigation of philosophical questions. (shrink)

Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...) on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives ("tall", "wide") behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role. (shrink)

This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally (...) misguided. I describe Baz’s project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions (“know”, e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language. (shrink)

J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of (...) his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments. (shrink)

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers (...) were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success. (shrink)

With regard to organ donation, Germany is an ‘opt-in’ country, which requires explicit consent from donors. The relatives are either asked to decide on behalf of the donors’ preferences, if these are unknown or if the potential donor has explicitly transferred the decision to them. At the core of this policy lies the sociocultural and moral premise of a rational, autonomous individual, whose rights require legal protection in order to guarantee a voluntary decision. In concrete transplantation practices, the family plays (...) an even more important role. Potential donors and their families decide while being embedded in relations, a point which does still not gain full recognition. This particular discrepancy between policy and practice creates conflicts, which remain taboos of academic inquiry and public discourse. Our analysis shows a plurality of the family’s role in the transplantation process, which reveals an inner tension of the organ donation system. This tension provokes epistemic opacity on the one hand and different collective strategies as responses to discursive exclusion on the other. In future deliberations about organ donation, it is important to create spaces for open discussion, but also practices of communicative engagement, which take care of the needs and emotions attached to taboos. (shrink)

In a previous paper linking Simondon to biological and systems-theoretical discourses in autopoiesis and debates about contemporary technogenesis, I have argued that Simondon’s ontology of individuation furnishes a basis to theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.1 In concert with researchers like Andy Clark and N. Katherine Hayles, I embrace the “technical distribution” of cognition and perception as a way of understanding (...) the complex couplings between humans and machines that are typical in our contemporary world, but that have, in fact, been part of human techno-genesis since .. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that ambiguity plays in influencing (...) responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed. (shrink)

This article argues, contra-Derrida, that Foucault does not essentialize or pre-comprehend the meaning of life or bio- in his writings on biopolitics. Instead, Foucault problematizes life and provokes genealogical questions about the meaning of modernity more broadly. In The Order of Things, the 1974-75 lecture course at the Collège de France, and Herculine Barbin, the monster is an important figure of the uncertain shape of modernity and its entangled problems (life, sex, madness, criminality, etc). Engaging Foucault’s monsters, I show that (...) the problematization of life is far from a “desire for a threshold,” à la Derrida. It is a spur to interrogating and critiquing thresholds, a fraught question mark where we have “something to do.” As Foucault puts it in “The Lives of Infamous Men,” it an ambiguous frontier where beings lived and died and they appear to us “because of an encounter with power which, in striking down a life and turning it to ashes, makes it emerge, like a flash [...].”. (shrink)

The structure of ethics work in a hospital is complex. Professional ethics, research ethics and clinical ethics committees (CECs) are important parts of this structure, in addition to laws and national and institutional codes of ethics. In Norway all hospital trusts have a CEC, most of these discuss cases by means of a method which seeks to include relevant guidelines and laws into the discussion. In recent years many committees have received more cases which have concerned questions of principle. According (...) to Ellen Fox and co-authors the traditional CEC model suffers from a number of weaknesses. Therefore, in their organization a separate body deals with organizational matters. In this paper, we discuss what is gained and what is lost by creating two separate bodies doing ethics consultation. We do this through an analysis of detailed minutes of CEC discussions in one CEC during a 6-year period. 30 % of all referrals concerned matters of principle. Some of these discussions originated in a dilemma related to a particular patient. Most of the discussions had some consequences within the hospital organization, for clinical practice, for adjustment of guidelines, or may have influenced national policy. We conclude that a multiprofessional CEC with law and ethics competency and patient representation may be well suited also for discussion of general ethical principles. A CEC is a forum which can help bridge the gap between clinicians and management by increasing understanding for each others’ perspectives. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungAdipositas ist eine weltweite Herausforderung für die Gesundheitssysteme. In Zeiten des demografischen Wandels sind auch immer mehr ältere Menschen davon betroffen, was sowohl die Akut- als auch die Langzeitpflege vor erhebliche Herausforderungen stellt. Bislang fehlt eine detaillierte Analyse der vielfältigen Gruppe der über 65-Jährigen in diesem Bereich. Weder die Bedürfnisse der Pflegebedürftigen noch der Pflegekräfte und Einrichtungen werden beobachtet, analysiert oder systematisch bewertet. Darüber hinaus sind die ethischen Implikationen der professionellen Pflege von älteren Menschen mit Adipositas in Forschung und Politik (...) noch nicht diskutiert worden. Wir argumentieren, dass ein bedürfnisorientierter Ansatz angemessen ist, um diese ethische Komplexität anzugehen. Dafür sollte eine breite und umfassende Analyse der ethischen Aspekte aus einer interdisziplinären Perspektive erfolgen. Daher führen wir ein systematische Literaturrecherche (Scoping Review) und eine thematische Fallanalyse durch, um den aktuellen Stand der Forschung aus professionellen Pflegeeinrichtungen in europäischen und nordamerikanischen Institutionen zusammenzufassen. So gewinnen wir Einblicke in die direkten Erfahrungen von Leistungserbringern und adipösen Patient*innen im Pflegebereich. Wir kommen zu dem Schluss, dass auch in Deutschland ein erheblicher Forschungsbedarf an der Schnittstelle ethischer Herausforderungen von Langzeitpflege, Alter und Adipositas besteht. Aus der begrenzten Anzahl von (Fall‑)Studien, die sich finden lassen, geht eine Reihe von ethischen Bedenken hervor, die direkte Auswirkungen auf den Zugang, die Inanspruchnahme und die Qualität der Versorgung haben. Ein empirisch-ethischer Ansatz kann die künftige Forschung und Pflegepraxis im Bereich der Adipositas und der Altenpflege leiten. Schwerpunkte der zukünftigen Mixed-methods-Forschung sollten sein: die Bedürfnisse adipöser älterer Menschen und ihrer Pfleger*innen, Kriterien für die Abwägung von Bedürfnissen und Ressourcenallokation sowie praktische Lösungen für mehrfach stigmatisierte Menschen. (shrink)

An anthology of the most important historical sources, classical and modern, on the subjects of presumptions and burdens of proof In the last fifty years, the study of argumentation has become one of the most exciting intellectual crossroads in the modern academy. Two of the most central concepts of argumentation theory are presumptions and burdens of proof. Their functions have been explicitly recognized in legal theory since the middle ages, but their pervasive presence in all forms of argumentation and in (...) inquiries beyond the law--including politics, science, religion, philosophy, and interpersonal communication--have been the object of study since the nineteenth century. However, the documents and essays central to any discussion of presumptions and burdens of proof as devices of argumentation are scattered across a variety of remote sources in rhetoric, law, and philosophy. Presumptions and Burdens of Proof: An Anthology of Argumentation and the Law brings together for the first time key texts relating to the history of the theory of presumptions along with contemporary studies that identify and give insight into the issues facing students and scholars today. The collection's first half contains historical sources and begins with excerpts from Aristotle's Topics and goes on to include the locus classicus chapter from Bishop Whately's crucial Elements of Rhetoric as well as later reactions to Whately's views. The second half of the collection contains contemporary essays by contributors from the fields of law, philosophy, rhetoric, and argumentation and communication theory. These essays explore contemporary understandings of presumptions and burdens of proof and their role in numerous contexts today. This anthology is the definitive resource on the subject of these crucial rhetorical modes and will be a vital resource to all scholars of communication and rhetoric, as well as legal scholars and practicing jurists. (shrink)

This article argues that late Heidegger’s analyses of the Fourfold can be used as a methodological starting point for discourse analyses. It argues that the Fourfold points out elements or foundations of discursive structures that orient us to differing, and to some extent opposing, directions that are at the same time mutually interdependent. A discursive analysis of how the Fourfold is at play in prevailing discursive exchanges and structures will thus be a matter of situating ourselves in a conceptual space (...) beyond existing practices and structures, from which we get a picture of their inadequacies. As such, the article contributes to a critical understanding of discourse analysis. It will be argued that through understanding the Fourfold, we can better understand the problems with various aspects of ‘measuring’, which are founded upon the (concealed) instability of elements of the Fourfold – which shapes practical discursive engagements. By foregrounding this structural instability we can approach it critically. I demonstrate how this approach might be used in an analysis of a debate between Greta Thunberg and Bjørn Lomborg. (shrink)

We argue that Recanati burdens his otherwise salutary “Mental File” account of singular thought with an “Actualist” assumption that he has inherited from the discussion of singular thought since at least Evans, according to which singular thoughts can only be about actual objects: apparent singular thoughts involving “empty” terms lack truth-valuable content. This assumption flies in the face of manifestly singular thoughts involving not only fictional and mistakenly postulated entities, such as Zeus and the planet Vulcan, but also “perceptual inexistents,” (...) e.g., Kanizsa figures, rainbows, words and phonemes, as well as hosts of at best metaphysically problematic “objects,” such as properties, numbers, ceremonies, contracts, symphonies, “the sky,” “the rain.” Indeed, reflection on what seems to be the boundless diversity of “things” about which we seem to be able to have singular thoughts strongly suggests that there may be no general metaphysics of objects, much less “acquaintance” and “epistemically rewarding” relations that would distinguish singular from non-singular thought. We recommend that Recanati and other mental file theorists confine the theory to a metaphysically neutral account of singular thought as specific kind of internally “focused” computational state, and not seek any general account of the relation of thought to reality. (shrink)

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or (...) finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning. (shrink)

The significance of colonialism and decolonization for the dawning of European integration and their subsequent bearing on notions of European identity still constitute a largely unexplored field within research. In seeking to problematize and amend this state of things, this article embarks on charting a set of historical developments which provide a case for arguing that theoretical and empirical studies on the nexus of European integration and European identity need to pay much closer attention to questions pertaining to colonialism and (...) decolonization. As such, the article seeks to offer a glimpse of what it takes to be a critical background against which scholarly debates on contemporary notions of European identity need to be considered. Such an approach, it is suggested, should be of particular value for research trying to come to terms with Brussels' current endeavour to foster a collective sense of European identity in the Union. In expanding on this exact point, the article also broaches the question concerning all those `non-European' territories in Africa, South America and elsewhere that are incorporated into the present-day European Union, but which, nevertheless, hardly ever surface as such in studies on the EU and its politics of European identity. (shrink)

Socrates defends justice against the attack mounted by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, but it isn’t easy to say what the defense consists of. A careful reading shows that Thrasymachus himself is deeply though unselfconsciously attached to justice. Thrasymachus admires skillful artisans and thinks that devoting oneself to one’s art makes one a good man, worthy of good things. He feels that the skillful and unjust deserve to get the better of the artless and weak, which is to say he unselfconsciously (...) believes in a form of distributive justice. Moreover, his surprising attachment to justice resembles and casts light on the attachment to justice that most people feel. (shrink)

Visual Associative agnosia is a rare perceptual impairment generally resulting from lesions in the infero temporal cortex. Patients suffering from associative agnosia are able to make accurate copies of line drawings, but they are unable to visually recognize objects - including those represented in line drawings - as belonging to familiar high-level kinds. The Rich Content View claims that visual experience can represent high-level kind properties. The phenomenon of associative agnosia appears to present us with a strong case for the (...) Rich Content View. There are reasons for thinking that the experiences of an agnosic patient differ from those of a healthy subject. Given that there is a phenomenal contrast between the experiences of an associative agnosic and those of a healthy perceiver, one may argue that this contrast is due to differences in abilities to represent high-level kinds. I claim that there is indeed a phenomenal contrast between the visual experiences of an agnosic and those of a healthy perceiver. However, the explanation of this contrast that best fits the empirical data is compatible with the view that visual experience does not represent high-level kinds. (shrink)

Prozac has been lauded by Peter Kramer for instilling potentially “liberating” personality traits in women such as assertiveness, resilience, and confidence. Witnessing these effects, Kramer declares that there is a sense in which antidepressants like Prozac are “feminist.” In this paper, we scrutinize Kramer’s claim from myriad angles. We evaluate putatively “feminist” uses of antidepressants in both women who are diagnosed with clinical depression and women thought to use them instead for “enhancement” purposes. We conclude that there are, indeed, some (...) ways in which Prozac is feminist, and some ways in which it is decidedly antifeminist. (shrink)

A primary intention of our original manuscript was to provide examples of both harmful and helpful influences of one cultural artifact—depression memoirs—on who female readers take their selves to be, and who they may actually end up being. Bradley Lewis beautifully articulated our strategy as “chart[ing] out … conflicting vectors” : that is, delineating select examples of how certain outer narratives conveyed in depression memoirs may kindle sexist and sanist modes of being. Our hope was that making these vectors explicit (...) could ultimately be liberating for some individuals by “opening up... (shrink)

To address the multiple grand challenges facing humanity, there is an urgent need for businesses to become more sustainable. This study explores the implementation of sustainability initiatives through an interview-based single case study of an organization in the food and beverage industry. Specifically, this study adopts a Natural-Resource-Based View of the firm to examine the role of organizational culture and structure in the implementation process. It argues that to successfully implement sustainability initiatives, a flexible structure and a green organizational culture (...) grounded in a shared sustainability vision are essential. The findings reveal that, despite the in-practice flat organizational structure of the case organization, there was limited knowledge of the organization's sustainability vision among organizational members across all organizational levels. This could be attributed to a lack of internal communication within the organization, which constitutes a barrier to the successful dissemination of green values throughout the organization's family-like, inclusive, and diverse work environment. This study proposes a three-part approach for practitioners attempting to implement sustainability initiatives: (1) enhance organizational awareness and communication of the sustainability vision; (2) cultivate a green organizational culture; and (3) advocate for a collaborative, inclusive and decentralized approach to fostering sustainability. This approach is vital not only for sustaining the organization's competitive advantage but also for achieving improved environmental and social outcomes. (shrink)

This article studies the Islamic State's only remaining periodical, Al-Naba, identifying the most common tropes and patterns in the periodical's Sub-Saharan Africa coverage, and on Mozambique in particular. The Islamic State's increasingly important coverage of Africa focuses on terror attacks, military campaigns and on the fight against Christianity. However, it also employs more traditional anti-colonial arguments that have been used by other, more accepted, political actors during the struggle for decolonisation. Al-Naba also functions as a 'shamer' of non-African Muslims, to (...) get them to join jihad by pointing to the African successes of the organisation and set these successes up as examples to be followed. In this sense, the article illustrates how African jihadist branches can have global agency. (shrink)

I begin by looking at passages in Mill's System of Logic that circumscribe the range of logic as he understood the subject. His logic is clearly too narrow to be the arbiter of the extended arguments presented in his Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women. Looking at Mill's argumentative practice in those works we see that he is noticeably concerned to deal with objections, more so even than in giving arguments for his position. His practice is shown to (...) be consistent with his professed views about how opinions outside science and mathematics are to be justified. These views are stated primarily in On Liberty where Mill gives a standard of justification and proclaims the importance of dealing with objections as part of that standard. Given Mill's characterization of an art, or practice - also found in the Logic - it turns out that a case can be made that Mill's views on argumentation fit the criteria for an art, pretty much on a par with ethics as an art. In the sense that I give to 'argumentation theory' it seems entirely appropriate to say that implicitly Mill held a theory of argumentation, a theory distinct from other proposed theories of argumentation, and a theory worth further study and development. (shrink)