Roughly three years after the creation of his mandate, United Nations Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai reflects on the global state of assembly and association rights. Although the mandate was created against the backdrop of shrinking space for civil society, a massive and growing global protest movement has grabbed most of the headlines since 2011. Kiai argues that the mandate has made a measurable impact – it has helped raise awareness of repressive NGO laws, provided technical assistance to governments to strengthen (...) assembly and association rights and developed soft law. But perhaps, the most important work of the mandate has been its contribution to a better understanding of just how important the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association are. Assembly and association rights are a powerful tool to promote dialog, pluralism, broadmindedness, tolerance and civic participation; they satisfy people's fundamental desire to take control of their own destinies. And if anything, the past few years have taught us that the worst turmoil comes when this desire is suppressed. When people are denied something so fundamental, rage inevitably follows. When people have no outlet for that rage, it can ultimately manifest itself as something much more chaotic than a street protest. (shrink)

The study of expertise is difficult to do in a laboratory environment due to the challenge of finding people at different skill levels and the lack of time for participants to acquire mastery. In this paper, we report on two studies that analyze naturalistic gameplay data using cohort analysis to better understand how skill relates to practice and habit. Two cohorts are analyzed, each from two different games. Our work follows skill progression through 7 months of Halo matches for a (...) holistic perspective, but also explores low-level in-game habits when controlling game units in StarCraft 2. Players who played moderately frequently without long breaks were able to gain skill the most efficiently. What set the highest performers apart was their ability to gain skill more rapidly and without dips compared to other players. At the beginning of matches, top players habitually warmed up by selecting and re-selecting groups of units repeatedly in a meaningless cycle. They exhibited unique routines during their play that aided them when under pressure. (shrink)

In Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, authors pose exciting challenges and provide fresh opportunities for scholars, scientists, environmental activists, and musicians to consider music and sound from ecological standpoints. The book covers topics such as how environment enables music and sound, how music and sound relate to Western environmental science, and mutidisciplinary collaborations among scholars.

Without complete and accurate status information, a project manager’s ability to monitor progress, allocate resources effectively, and detect and respond to problems is greatly diminished, and this can lead to impaired project performance. Many different factors can contribute to intentional misreporting of status information by project members to the project manager. In this study, the impact of organizational ethical climate was assessed through the analysis of responses from 228 project members drawn from a variety of ongoing information systems projects. Our (...) results revealed that project members who perceived their organization to be one in which rules are followed strictly tended to misreport less, while those operating in an environment dominated by personal self-interest tended to misreport more. Somewhat surprisingly, the existence of a caring, team-spirited environment did not appear to have an impact on misreporting behaviors. Implications for researchers and project managers are discussed. (shrink)

The change in shape of the C. elegans embryo from an ovoid ball of cells into a worm-shaped larva is driven by three events within the cells of the hypodermis (epidermis): (1) intercalation of two rows of dorsal cells, (2) enclosure of the ventral surface by hypodermis, and (3) elongation of the embryo. While the behavior of the hypodermal cells involved in each of these processes differs dramatically, it is clear that F-actin and microtubules have essential functions in each of (...) these processes, whereas contraction of actomyosin structures appears to be involved specifically in elongation. Molecular analysis of these processes is revealing components specific to C. elegans as well as components found in other systems. Since C. elegans hypodermal cells demonstrate dramatically different behaviors during intercalation, enclosure and elongation, the study of cytoskeletal dynamics in these processes may reveal both unique and conserved activities during distinct epithelial morphogenetic movements. BioEssays 23:12–23, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In the paper it is argued that the conceptual resources of Christianity topple the hiddenness argument. According to the author, the variability of the divine love cast doubt on the soundness of Schellenberg’s reasoning. If we understood a perfect love as a maximal and equal concern and identification with all and for all, then a divine love would entail divine impartiality, but because of conflicts of interest between human beings the perfect, divine love cannot be maximal.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 6, Page 724-727, July 2022.

A crucial part of William Rowe’s evidential argument from evil implies that God, like a loving parent, would ensure that every suffering person would be aware of his comforting presence. Rowe’s use of the “loving parent” analogy however fails to survive scrutiny as it implies that God maximally loves all persons. It is the argument of this paper that no one could maximally love every person; and whatever variation there is in the divine love undercuts the claim that every suffering (...) person would be aware of the divine presence. (shrink)

In 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy's heart gave out. In one of the first such procedures in France, a stranger's heart was grafted into his body. Numerous complications followed, including more surgeries and lymphatic cancer. The procedure and illnesses he endured revealed to him, in a more visceral way than most of us ever experience, the strangeness of bodily existence itself and surviving the stranger within him. During this same period, Europe began closing its borders to those seeking refuge from war and (...) poverty. Alarmed at this trend and drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been living for years, Nancy set out in The Intruder to articulate how intrusion--whether of a body or a border--is not antithetical to one's identity but constitutive of it. In 2004, Claire Denis adapted The Intruder into a film already hailed among the most important of our century. This edition includes Nancy's and Denis's accounts of turning philosophy into film and the text of a shorter collaboration between the two of them. Throughout, Nancy and Denis push us to recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against exoticism, enforced assimilation, and confidence in our own self-identity. (shrink)

This paper argues that sustained attention to the highlighted structure of William James's “The Will to Believe” yields surprising insights into the essay. “Highlighted structure” includes James's announcements of his intentions, his section breaks, and, especially, patterns of repetition and contrast within the work. Particular attention is paid to a criticism to which James frequently returns, viz. that evidentialists are driven by their passions to adopt evidentialism. I argue that James does not take this to constitute an objection to evidentialism (...) as such. This is because James construes evidentialism more charitably than has been recognized. Evidentialism, as James understands it, claims, not that our willing nature should play no role in our believings, but instead that the cognitive role of our willing nature should be minimized. Consequently, I argue that the thesis of James's famous essay has generally been misidentified and mischaracterized. (shrink)

In his most recent work on John Dewey, John Shook explores Dewey’s political thought in order to illuminate Dewey’s conception of democracy and demonstrate the interlocking quality of his democratic and educational theories. As the book’s subtitle indicates, Shook sees democracy and education as inseparable enterprises for Dewey, with democracy being fundamentally defined by the continuous education of individuals, and with specifically educational spaces serving to directly promote this definitive purpose of democracy. The particular educational goal that Shook identifies in (...) Dewey’s thought is the cultivation of “social intelligence,” a quality that allows individuals to effectively engage.. (shrink)

Grice is often taken to have delivered a decisive blow against the tendency on the part of ordinary language philosophers to suspect that the presence of particular circumstances is requisite for philosophically interesting expressions to be in order, even to make sense, when deployed in particular cases. Grice’s attack has three parts. He argues that the presence of those particular circumstances isn’t bound up with the meaning of the expressions in question—the suggestion that those circumstances are present is merely a (...) “conversational implicature”. He offers examples designed to show that utterances of the expressions at issue may be true or false even when the circumstances alleged to be requisite are nowhere to be found. And he identifies what he sees as a collection of rules of conversation the violation of which accounts for the oddity attending those expressions uttered in the absence of the circumstances in question. Here I try to show that each of these parts of Grice’s attack against the ordinary language philosophers fails and that Grice’s blow isn’t decisive at all. (shrink)

Pascal is best known among philosophers for his wager in support of Christian belief. Since Ian Hacking’s classic article on the wager, three versions of the wager have been recognized within the concise paragraphs of the Pensées. In what follows I argue that there is a fourth to be found there, a version that in many respects anticipates the argument of William James in his 1896 essay “The Will to Believe.” This fourth wager argument, I contend, differs from the better-known (...) three in that it has as a premise the proposition that theistic belief is more rewarding than non-belief in this life, whether God exists or not. As we will see, this proposition provides a way of circumventing the many-gods objection. From the four wagers found in Pascal’s Pensées, I argue, one can salvage the resources for a version of the wager, Pascalian in nature, even if not in origin, immune to the many-gods objection. A brief comment on the apologetic role Pascal intended for the wagers played is our first task at hand. (shrink)

Pragmatic arguments seek to justify the performance of an action by appealing to the benefits that may follow from that action. Pascal’s wager, for instance, argues that one should inculcate belief in God because there is everything to gain and little to lose by doing do. In this chapter I critically examine Pascal’s wager and William James’s famous “Will-to-Believe” argument by first explaining the logic of each argument and then by surveying the objections commonly arrayed against them. Finally, I suggest (...) that among the various versions of the wager found in Pascal’s Pensées is a neglected version that anticipates the Jamesian argument and that avoids the many-gods objection. (shrink)

In a number of brief discussions, Cheryl Misak has presented a reading of Peirce's "The Fixation of Belief " that preserves both the essay's ambitious naturalism and its sensible normativism. This essay fleshes out Misak's proposal, formulates some challenges to it, and articulates an alternative. Misak's argument rests on the plausible claim that "it is very hard really to settle beliefs". As she interprets this claim, it could also be expressed as "it is very hard really to settle beliefs." She (...) argues, on textual and philosophical grounds... (shrink)

“Peirce and the Socratic Tradition” is a bold and suggestive paper. In it, Joseph Ransdell draws out a particular tradition of modesty allegedly exemplified by Socrates, Peirce, and few others in philosophy. At its heart, this tradition involves a clear-headed acceptance of some surprising implications of an obvious fact, viz. that human wisdom cannot involve taking a god’s eye view of things. The elenchus of Socrates and the doubt-belief theory of Peirce, Ransdell thinks, accurately reflect the starting points and aspirations (...) appropriate to inquiring creatures like us. This linkage of Peirce and Socrates is surprising enough to be exciting and yet intuitively plausible enough to be promising. Ransdell’s.. (shrink)