El artículo trata de acometer una aproximación intelectual al concepto de teoría conspirativa, a fin de explorar tentativamente posibles cartografías para una adecuada comprensión de su significatividad y pregnancia contemporáneas. Para ello, se procederá a un somero repaso de las aportaciones recientes al estudio de las teorías conspirativas desde una pluralidad de disciplinas (estudios culturales, teoría política, psicoanálisis, psicología social o filosofía) y a una exploración de sus mecanismos de funcionamiento y sus posibles funciones dentro del campo de fuerzas configurado (...) alrededor de la relación existente entre neoliberalismo y populismo. Finalmente, se propone una concepción de la teoría conspirativa contemporánea como una forma de teodicea, en cuanto a que cumple funciones de explicación del mal y de desplazamiento de la responsabilidad. (shrink)

Despite many attempts to achieve an adequate definition of living systems by means of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, the opinion that such an enterprise is inexorably destined to fail is increasingly gaining support. However, we believe options do not just come down to either having faith in a future success or endorsing skepticism. In this paper, we aim to redirect the discussion of the problem by shifting the focus of attention from strict definitions towards a philosophical framework (...) that allows conceiving of living systems as a natural kind, but whereby natural kinds are not to be defined by fixed necessary and sufficient conditions. We argue for a property-cluster kind approach according to which living systems constitute a natural kind with vague boundaries, capable of changing, and whose members do not need to instantiate every property. We draw from Boyd’s homeostatic property-cluster theory and introduce two modifications, one regarding homeostatic mechanisms and another related to the scientific role of kinds. Thus, our view overcomes some difficulties of Boyd’s theory and we are able to account for the natural kindhood of living things. We also emphasize the most appealing features of our approach for specific research fields and address three objections to this sort of approach. (shrink)

Environmental historians are not sufficiently aware of the extent to which mid twentieth-century thinkers turned to medical geography—originally a nineteenth-century area of study—in order to think through ideas of ecology, environment, and historical reasoning. This article outlines how the French–Croatian Mirko D. Grmek, a major thinker of his generation in the history of medicine, used those ideas in his studies of historical epidemiology. During the 1960s, Grmek attempted to provide, in the context of the Annales School’s research program under the (...) leadership of Fernand Braudel, a new theoretical framework for a world history of disease. Its development was inspired by several sources, most notably the French–American Jacques M. May, who was then pioneering an opening up of medical geography and movement towards the concept of disease ecology. The cornerstone of Grmek’s “synthetic approach” to the field was the notion of “pathocenosis”. The diverse uses of this notion in the course of time—from his early agenda focused on a longue durée history of diseases in Western Antiquity to his last, relating to the new epidemiological threat of emerging infectious diseases, specifically HIV/aids—enables us firstly, to note how concepts of ecology sat uneasily alongside those of medical geography; secondly, to assess the reach and limits of his theoretical contribution to historical epidemiology; and thirdly, to understand better the uneven fortunes of his concept of pathocenosis at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. (shrink)

The acceptability of sentences in natural language is constrained not only grammaticality, but also by the relationship between what is being conveyed and such factors as context and the beliefs of interlocutors. In many languages the critical element in a sentence (its focus) must be given grammatical prominence. There are different accounts of the nature of focus marking. Some researchers treat it as the grammatical realization of a potentially arbitrary feature of universal grammar and do not provide an explicit account (...) of its origins; others have argued, however, that focus marking is a (grammaticalized) functional solution to the problem of efficiently transmitting information via a noisy channel. By adding redundancy to highlight critical elements in particular, focus protects key parts of the message from noise. If this information‐theoretic account is true, then we should expect focus‐like behavior to emerge even in non‐linguistic communication systems given sufficient noise and pressures for efficiency. We tested this in an experiment in which participants played a simple communication game in which they had to click cells on a grid to communicate one of two line figures drawn across the grid. We manipulated the noise, available time, and required effort, and measured patterns of redundancy. Because the lines in many cases overlapped, meaning that only some parts of each line could be used to distinguish it from the other, we were able to compare the extent to which effort was expended on adding redundancy to critical (non‐overlapping) and non‐critical (overlapping) parts of the message. The results supported the information‐theoretic account of focus and shed light on the emergence of information structure in language. (shrink)

Panic buying of toilet rolls in Australia began in early March 2020. This was related to the realisation that the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country. To the general population the impact of the virus was unknown. Gradually the federal government started closing the country’s borders. The panic buying of toilet rolls was not unique to Australia. It happened across all societies that used toilet paper rather than water to clean after defecation and urination. However, research suggests that the (...) panic buying was most extreme in Australia. This article argues that the panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation. This is the fear manifested in the perceived threat posed by the virus. (shrink)

Smythe and Murray presented the basic ethical issues in narrative research in a comprehensive, well-reasoned, and direct manner. In this critique, we highlight 3 issues. Two matters appear to challenge the internal inconsistency of the assumptions of NR: privileging some voices over others and a potential inherent conflict of interest for some researchers. We also examine some issues regarding the protection of research participants and conclude with modest recommendations.

Standard accounts of semantics for counterfactuals confront the true–true problem: when the antecedent and consequent of a counterfactual are both actually true, the counterfactual is automatically true. This problem presents a challenge to safety-based accounts of knowledge. In this paper, drawing on work by Angelika Kratzer, Alan Penczek, and Duncan Pritchard, we propose a revised understanding of semantics for counterfactuals utilizing machinery from generalized quantifier theory which enables safety theorists to meet the challenge of the true–true problem.

Tome I: Afrikaans to Dutch -- Tome II: English -- Tome III: Estonian to Hebrew -- Tome IV: Hungarian to Korean -- Tome V: Latvian to Ukrainian -- Tome VI: Figures A-H -- Tome VII: Figures I-Z.

ABSTRACTThe basis of my argument is that the cultural trauma now identified as the Holocaust occupied a latency period of around thirty years, or one generation, before surfacing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alongside theorists such as Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander I argue that cultural trauma, the trauma experienced by a social group, functions in a similar way to individual trauma. In this article I examine a number of texts that exhibit expressions of the trauma of the (...) Holocaust before that trauma was identified and narrativised. These texts include the television series Hogan’s Heroes, the film The Producers, and the musical Fiddler on the Roof. My approach to the texts has been through the idea of haunting as developed by Jacques Derrida. I argue that during the period of latency texts are haunted in various ways by the traumatic events that were later integrated as the Holocaust. (shrink)

This paper provides a game-theoretic analysis of contrastive focus, extending insights from recent work on the role of noisy communication in prosodic accent placement to account for focus within sentences, sub-sentential phrases and words. The shared insight behind these models is that languages with prosodic focus marking assign prosodic prominence only within elements which constitute material critical for successful interpretation. We first take care to distinguish the information-structural notion of focus from an ontologically distinct notion of givenness marking, and then (...) outline the core properties of focus. We then introduce a signaling game between a speaker and hearer in which the goal is to transmit semantic content with the smallest signal possible. We apply the Iterated Best Response method of Franke to find equilibrium strategies in this game, where a unique equilibrium strategy in this case picks out the “critical information” of an utterance, which by hypothesis constitutes its focus. We show that iterating this game at different syntactic levels of a sentence makes correct predictions about the role of contrast in determining stress within words and phrases, and can be extended to account for association and second occurrence focus effects. (shrink)

Jon Elster surveys and classifies a wide range of literature that informs the study of justice. He positions Michael Walzer's theory of justice in relation to the three main categories into which he believes studies of justice fall: descriptive, explanatory, and normative. In comparing Walzer's and his own account of the relevance of empirical findings for normative analysis, Elster aims to show that the complexity of the relationship between the two is not accurately captured by Walzer.

The purpose of critical thinking, according to this text, is rethinking: that is, reviewing, evaluating, and revising thought. The approach of Critical Thinking for College Students is pragmatic and pluralistic: truth is viewed in terms of public confirmation and consensus, rather than with regard to naive realism, relativism, or popular opinion. The value of empathy and the legitimacy of diverse points of view are stressed. Nevertheless, it is necessary to use specific linguistic, logical, and evidential standards in order to evaluate (...) thought. (shrink)

The global pandemic and resultant lockdowns are challenging our traditional assumptions about the times and spaces of labour and leisure - but how were these norms established and why have they had such an enduring appeal? In this paper, we take a long view to investigate the philosophical and historical roots of the binary distinction between work and play and outline ways in which these long-held ideas are being increasingly challenged. As lockdown measures are relaxed, we urgently need to develop (...) more nuanced conceptions of the spatial and temporal conditions of work and leisure to ensure a more equitable and compassionate post-lockdown world. (shrink)

Hegel is known for coining the word “phenomenology” as a description of the methodological approach that he pursues in the famous work that bears this title. It has long been an open question the degree to which the later philosophical school of phenomenology in fact follows the actual method developed by Hegel or if it merely co-opted the name and applied the term in a new context. While Husserl was dismissive of Hegel, the French phenomenologists were generally receptive to Hegel’s (...) conception of phenomenology. This chapter argues that there are in fact some important points of continuity and that the French phenomenological school’s understanding of Hegel as a forerunner of their movement is quite legitimate. (shrink)

Ovid: Of Love and Exile: Kierkegaard's Appropriation of Ovid -- Sallust: Kierkegaard's Scarce Use of a Great Roman Historian -- Seneca: Disjecta Membra in Kierkegaard's Writings -- Suetonius: Exemplars of Truth and Madness: Kierkegaard's Proverbial uses of Suetonius' Lives -- Tacitus: Christianity as odium generis humani -- Terence: Traces of Roman Comedy in Kierkegaard's Writings -- Valerius Maximus: Moral Exempla in Kierkegaard's Writings -- Virgil: From Farms to Empire: Kierkegaard's Understanding of a Roman Poet -- Index of Persons -- Index (...) of Subjects. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception -- Hannah Arendt: Religion, Politics and the Influence of Kierkegaard -- Alain Badiou: Thinking the Subject after the Death of God -- Judith Butler: Kierkegaard as Her Early Teacher in Rhetoric and Parody -- Jürgen Habermas: Social Selfhood, Religion, and Kierkegaard -- Martin Luther King, Jr.: Kierkegaard's Works of (...) Love, King's Strength to Love. (shrink)

Jean Wahl: Philosophies of Existence and the Introduction of Kierkegaard in the non-Germanic World -- Index of Persons -- Index of Subjects.

The Easybeats’ 1960s career is viewed as being in two halves. In the first, they played pop songs composed by Stevie Wright and George Young. The group was incredibly successful in Australia spawning the term Easyfever to describe the adulation heaped on them by mainly teenage girls. In the second half, the group go to England and Young starts writing with Harry Vanda. The group had one huge international hit ‘Friday On My Mind’ and then their popularity declines as their (...) audience loses interest in the group’s more complex music and seemingly sophisticated lyrics. In this article I argue that the earlier songs can be read in terms of power pop avant la lettre and that a continuity can be discerned between the earlier songs and certain key later songs as Vanda and Young begin to develop a harder melodic rock sound anchored in power pop aesthetics that will be the template for AC/DC, a group that included Young’s two younger brothers, and which helped define the generic form of Oz rock. I argue for the importance of Snowy Fleet’s Merseybeat experience in the creation of the early sound, analyse the group’s appeal for teenage girls and discuss the later song ‘Good Times’ as a melodic hard rock precursor of the kind of music played by AC/DC. (shrink)

With contributions by scholars from different religions and specializations, this volume explores the potential of nondualism as a fundamentally unifying concept. In every case, we find that nondualism is universal in its relevance yet distinctive and original in its contribution.

We revisit the notion of vicarious causation in Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in order to first show that Harman has articulated two iterations of his account that are in tension with one another; one is found in his earlier paper “On Vicarious Causation,” while the other is contained in his later writings following the publication of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. This involves a critical assessment of his developing theory of metaphor in a way that encourages sympathetic (...) revision in the service of improving his non-correlationist view of intra-objective relations. (shrink)

En el cristianismo, un elemento se eleva por sobre los demás en su darse: la gracia, dación gratuita que Dios otorga a su criatura. Principalmente, la gracia se entiende y estudia como aquel don dado a la naturaleza de la criatura para su complementación o perfección. Sin embargo, el tema no encuentra su agotamiento ahí, pues la gracia también puede ser dispensada para la finalización de un designio intrahistórico, tal como narran los Evangelios.

Hesiod: Kierkegaard and the Greek Gods -- Homer: Kierkegaard's Use of the Homeric Poems -- Plutarch: A Constant Cultural Reference -- Sophocles: The Tragic of Kierkegaard's Modern Antigone -- Index of Persons -- Index of Subjects.

In his different analyses of ancient Egypt, Hegel underscores the marked absence of writings by the Egyptians. Unlike the Chinese with the I Ching or the Shoo king, the Indians with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Persians with the Avesta, the Jews with the Old Testament, and the Greeks with the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the Egyptians, despite their developed system of hieroglyphic writing, left behind no great canonical text. Instead, he claims, they left their mark by means (...) of the architecture and art. This paper explores Hegel’s analysis of the Egyptians’ obelisks, pyramids, sphinxes, etc. in order to understand why he believes that these are so important for understanding the Egyptian spirit. This analysis illustrates Hegel’s use of history and culture in the service of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Alienation is a key theme in both the philosophical tradition of the 19th century that begins with Hegel and Marx and in the heterogenous school of existentialist thought in the 20th century. Kierkegaard is often included in narratives of these philosophical traditions, but his contribution to this topic is problematic. Unlike figures such as Marx or Sartre, he almost never uses the term “alienation” explicitly. The question then becomes one of interpretation: what ideas in Kierkegaard bear a meaningful family resemblance (...) to the concept as it is found in other thinkers in these traditions? In this article I have identified three different texts from Kierkegaard in which concepts are discussed that I believe can be rightfully designated as forms of alienation: “The Unhappiest One,” from Either/or, “The Present Age” from A Literary Review, and the different stages of despair in The Sickness unto Death. The goal is simply to use these texts as the basis or starting point for developing an understanding of Kierkegaard’s concept of alienation. This will then in turn help us to determine more precisely his contribution to the development of philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. (shrink)

The VIDAS data set presents data from 200 participants from different countries and language backgrounds. They completed an oral expression and interaction test in the context of a Spanish certification exam for adult migrants. The aim of the VIDAS data set is to provide researchers in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition with a Spanish spoken corpus of traditionally marginalized and underrepresented learners, providing a compelling data set of oral interactions by migrants and refugees. The corpus contains more than 29 h (...) of recordings of the oral interactions of the participants with trained interviewers, as well as background information about the participants. It furthermore contains the scores obtained by the participants in the oral expression and interaction exam. The VIDAS corpus allows for the development of studies on L2 spoken language comprehension and processing, as well as for comparative analyses of language acquisition between different L1 groups at different linguistic levels. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 207-221.

Urban areas are prime targets for international terrorists given the array of valuable physical and social infrastructure they contain. Whereas traditionally governmental, financial, critical infrastructure or military targets have been attacked, increasingly terrorism is targeted at everyday crowded urban spaces which are by their very nature difficult to defend. Subsequently this has led to a wave of pre-emptive and anticipatory counter-terrorism policy in the West in an attempt to secure the defence of the future city. In such policy-making urban terror (...) attacks are viewed as inevitable and unavoidable, but the nature of such attacks is seen as fluid. Notably, recent commando-style attacks against non-western cities — in Mumbai and Lahore in late 2008 and early 2009 respectively — and against soft, unprotected targets has led to a reassessment of western urban security strategies and an assumption that such terrorist modus operandi will migrate to western cities. Such an uncritical reading, as exemplified by the western bias in media reporting in the aftermath of these events, highlights the need for scholars and policy-makers to engage with alternative readings of these events and illuminate the contextual factors underlying terrorism and its tactics, and target selection in particular locations. In developing a more rounded and reflexive understanding of terrorism as a method, planners and policy-makers might be in a better position to progress more nuanced security strategies that aim to tackle the underlying causes of terrorism rather than simply reacting through militarizing an increasing array of urban spaces. (shrink)

Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I show how broader attention to Dummett's writings on the theory of meaning allows one to discern, and formalize, a valid argument for logical revision. Then, after correctly providing a rigorous statement (...) of the argument, I am able to delineate four possible anti-Dummettian responses. Following recent work by Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright, I conclude that progress in the anti-realist's dialectic requires greater clarity about the key modal notions used in Dummett's proof. (shrink)

"Jon Elster har en posisjon i internasjonal filosofi og samfunnsforskning som ingen annen norsk akademiker. I denne boken, som utkommer til hans 70-årsdag, gis det et bilde av Elsters virke som analytisk vitenskapsfilosof, venstreradikal folkeopplyser og kontroversiell debattant. Elster selv kommer til orde gjennom to selvbiografiske skisser, 'Going to Chicago' og 'Paris tur-retur', samt en rekke mindre artikler om bl.a. dagdrøm, dialektikk, frustrasjon, Hegel, Marx, viljesvakhet og ønsketenkning. Debattanten Elster dokumenteres med ulike innlegg om vitenskapelig obskurantisme. Elsters vitenskapsteoretiske verktøykasse diskuteres (...) av filosofer, sosiologer, statsvitere og økonomer, med tilsvar fra Elster selv. Bokens redaktør har skrevet det innledende portrett: 'Høyt henger han, og sur er han?'"--Dust jacket. (shrink)