It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker’s belief to his or her audience. If this is right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. We call this thesis entitlement equality. We argue here that entitlement equality is false, because our everyday notion of belief is unambiguously a (...) weak one. Believing something is true, we argue, is compatible with having relatively little confidence in it. Asserting something requires something closer to complete confidence. Specifically, we argue that believing a proposition merely requires thinking it likely, but that thinking that a proposition is likely does not entitle one to assert it. This conclusion conflict with a standard view that ‘full belief’ is the central commonsense non-factive attitude. (shrink)

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind? Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and (...) all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities. Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world. (shrink)

Categories We Live By makes several claims about Judith Butler's Gender Trouble which Butler seeks to contest, while remaining in fundamental agreement with most of the conclusions in Asta Sveinsdottir's book. At issue is whether or not performativity can rightly be restricted to what is called an exercitive in J. L. Austin's sense, whether Butler is a radical constructivist or a qualified one, and whether unauthorized speech acts have a power to bring a reality into being that is different (...) from those authorized by legal regimes. Along the way, Butler suggest that establishing facts takes place within variable historical schemes and that this argument is neither a denial or facts nor of materiality. Finally, an individualist idea of freedom is subject to criticism in order to make way for an historically constrained freedom, collective in nature. (shrink)

The unlivable is the most extreme point of human suffering and injustice. But what is it exactly? How do we define the unlivable? And what can we do to prevent and repair it? These are the intriguing questions Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms discuss in a captivating dialogue situated at the crossroads of contemporary life and politics. Here, Judith Butler criticizes the norms that make life precarious and unlivable, while Frédéric Worms appeals to a "critical vitalism" as a (...) way of allowing the hardship of the unlivable to reveal what is vital for us. For both Butler and Worms, the difference between the livable and the unlivable forms the critical foundation for a contemporary practice of care. Care and support, in all their aspects, make human life livable, that is, "more than living." To understand it, we must draw on the concrete practices of humans who are confronted with the unlivable: the refugees of today and the witnesses and survivors of past violations and genocide. They teach us what is intolerable but also undeniable about the unlivable, and what we can do to resist it. Crafted with critical rigor, mutual respect, and lively humor, the compelling dialogue transcribed and translated in this book took place at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on April 11, 2018, at a time when close to two thousand migrants were living in nearby makeshift camps in northern Paris. The Livable and the Unlivable showcases this 2018 dialogue in the context of Butler's and Worms's ongoing work and the evolution of their thought, as presented by Laure Barillas and Arto Charpentier in their equally engaging introduction. It concludes with a new afterword that addresses the crises unfolding in our world and the ways a philosophically rigorous account of life must confront them. While this book will be of keen interest to readers of philosophy and cultural criticism, and those interested in vitalism, new materialism, and critical theory, it is a far from merely academic text. In the conversation between Butler and Worms, we encounter questions we all grapple with in confronting the distress and precarity of our times, marked as it is by types of survival that are unlivable, from concentration camps to prisons to environmental toxicity, to forcible displacement, to the Covid pandemic. The Livable and the Unlivable at once considers longstanding philosophical questions around why and how we live, while working to retrieve a philosophy of life for today's Left. (shrink)

Questioning the dominant view that Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq draws on unpublished primary sources and current scholarship in English and French to bring them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared concern with the transcendental conditions of thought.

What is immediately strange about Sartre’s controversial preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is its mode of address. To whom is this preface written? Sartre imagines his reader as the colonizer or the French citizen who recoils from the thought of violent acts of resistance on the part of the colonized. Minimally, his imagined reader is one who believes that his own notions of humanism and universalism suffice as norms by which to assess the war for independence in (...) Algeria and similar efforts at decolonization. Sartre’s address to his audience is direct and caustic: “What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks”. At one point, he seems to take his implied readers aside, addressing the preface to them directly. (shrink)

In _Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers?_, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg investigates whether non-human animals share complex socio-cognitive abilities like culture, language and theory of mind with humans. She questions our supposedly human uniqueness and explores how cognitive kinship matters for animal ethics.

This article posits that in Foucault’s later work we find not a forgetting of literature, but a reformulation of the role that literature had come to occupy in his work, and that, in this later work, there is a trace of the texts on literary thought that he wrote from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Drawing upon Foucault’s later work, I reconsider the key question: What relationship does literature, as literature, have with the political dimension of discourses? This necessarily goes (...) hand-in-hand with the classic question concerning the truth of literature: How does literature tell the truth? (shrink)

This is an analysis of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, first written in the early eighteenth century when she travelled to the Ottoman Empire, and finally ‘published’ in 1763. As well as producing ‘the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient’, Montagu is a pioneer in introducing the Turkish women's practice of inoculation against smallpox into England. This article sets out the long-standing critical debate over the rights and wrongs of the (...) Letters, particularly focusing on the period since the 1970s when feminist and post-colonial readings have presented or questioned Montagu's credentials with respect to the politics of sex, sexuality, race, religion and class. It concludes that Montagu describes how she is received with considerable, if conditional, hospitality by Turkish women in their bagnio and ‘harems’, and that her writing is, in turn, conditionally hospitable towards them. She is explicitly concerned not to fall into the Orientalizing clichés of Early Modern men's travel writing, which typically represents Muslim women as imprisoned in harems, enslaved, starved of sex and sexually voracious. By careful consideration of the historical, political and social context of the societies which Montagu knew, and could make comparison between, a modern reader too can act hospitably in taking Montagu's narrative into her own. (shrink)

Lamb, Judith Australian Catholic women religious have played a significant role in the spread of the Gospel and in the provision of services, especially in education and health care, from the middle of the nineteenth century. One such group is the Congregation of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. From their base in Sydney in 1885, missionaries were sent to remote communities in Australia, Papua New Guinea and beyond. In 2011, as part of the celebration of (...) the centenary of the promulgation of the Australian Province, the Provincial Council invited sisters to tell their stories in a series of interviews. These interviews have been used to provide personal perspectives on the challenges and rewards of missionary life. (shrink)

While several recent evaluation studies have shown the efficacy of parent training programs for children with neurodevelopmental disorders, manual-based training in German is still scarce. To address this gap, we developed a specific modularized training program for parents of children from preschool to pre-adolescent age with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The overarching purpose of the FETASS intervention is to enhance social communication behavior and quality of life of the child by coaching parents. As a proximal target, the FETASS training aims to (...) provide families with behavior management and communication strategies. The development of the training was influenced by published behavioral parent trainings and autism-specific interventions. The training comprises eight weekly sessions and targets families whose children have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder without intellectual and language impairments. As a preliminary pilot study, the purpose was to evaluate the acceptability of the training. Furthermore, the study aimed at initially evaluating social communication behavior, quality of life of the child, parental stress level, and parenting after training in comparison to a treatment as usual group. Exploratively, long-term effects were investigated after 6 months of training as well. In total, 57 families participated. Questionnaires about social communication behavior and quality of life of the child, parental stress, and parenting were administered at three time points. Primary outcome measures were the social communication behavior of the child and the parent’s proxy report on quality of life of the child. Secondary outcome measures were changes in parental stress and parenting behavior. Acceptability of the training was very high and we had almost no dropouts during training. Results for the primary outcome measure of social communication behavior, overall quality of life of the child, and long-term effects on social communication behavior were not significant. While long-term findings for parent stress reduction and for the quality of life of the child are promising, further research has to be done in a future randomized controlled trial. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Deception and Dishonesty A Right to Know? Media Bias Is Neutrality a Virtue?

“Postularse como un ser radicalmente autogenerado, ser el autor de la propia voluntad y conocimiento, es negar que uno está constituido en y por lo que es infinitamente más grande que el individuo humano. Kierkegaard llamará a esta fuente más grande que todo lo humano 'Dios' o 'el infinito'. Negar que uno está constituido en lo que es más grande que uno mismo es, para Kierkegaard, estar en una especie de desesperación”.

This paper examines the controversy that followed the 1987 publication of Joseph Greenberg's book, Language in the Americas, attending to the role of language and linguistic research within overlapping disciplinary traditions. With this text, Greenberg presented a macro‐level tripartite classification that opposed then dominant fine‐grained analyses recognizing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct language families. His proposal was the subject of a landmark conference, examining strengths and weaknesses, the unpublished proceedings of which are presented here for the first time. For (...) specialists in the anthropological and comparative‐historical study of Indigenous American languages, Greenberg's intervention highlighted the tension between language, conceived as an abstract object of study, and languages, understood to be carriers of specific cultural knowledge. For physical anthropologists and archaeologists, his theory was initially fortuitous on programmatic, substantive, and methodological grounds. The essay will show how interdisciplinary appeals were figured by supporters as a virtue, and by critics as a vice. The essay further highlights ethical reasons for integrating historical narratives of science and the humanities. (shrink)

The West has lost its traditional spiritual anchors following the rise of science and the social revolution of the sixties. Healing and wholeness begins with reclaiming the spiritual forms that gave rise to Western culture to provide grounding to meet the challenges of meaning in the era global cultural interchange.

Philosophie und Psychoanalyse unterhalten seit Sigmund Freuds Lebzeiten ein spannungsvolles Verhältnis. Die damit einhergehenden Diskussionen tendieren dazu, die Disziplinen gegeneinander auszuspielen oder sie aneinander anzugleichen. Das vorliegende Buch stellt sich der Herausforderung, einen disziplinenübergreifenden Standpunkt jenseits solcher Einseitigkeiten zu identifizieren. Philosophische wie psychoanalytische Perspektiven können in Hinblick auf ihr ethisches Denken und ihr kritisches Selbstverständnis hiervon profitieren. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet ein Unbehagen gegenüber philosophischen Ansätzen, die ein Ideal praktischer Vernünftigkeit und Selbstbestimmung propagieren, das sich primär auf die reflexive Distanznahme beruft. (...) Es wird dafür argumentiert, dass dieses Ideal der Vielfalt des Handelns nicht gerecht wird, was auch mit dem Fehlen methodologischer Selbstreflexion zusammenhängt. Der erste Punkt wird anhand praktischer Irrationalität diskutiert, deren Bedeutung von dem Ideal nicht angemessen erfasst wird. Der zweite Punkt führt zu einer Konfrontation des philosophischen Standpunkts mit psychoanalytischer Theorie und Praxis. Dies impliziert eine Perspektive, deren Erkenntnisgewinn sich gerade in der Kritik ihrer Rationalitätsansprüche entfaltet. So legt eine philosophisch-ästhetische Erkundung psychoanalytischer Erzählungen schließlich das Potential von Irrationalität frei, Selbstbestimmungen als Wagnis zu bereichern. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

John White is one of the leading philosophers of education currently working in the Anglophone world. Since first joining the London Institute of Education in 1965, he has made significant contributions to the landscape of the discipline through his teaching, research and numerous publications. His academic work encompasses a broad range of rich philosophical issues, ranging from questions surrounding the child's mind, through the moral and pedagogical obligations of teachers and schools, to local and national questions of educational policy. In (...) this volume, international contributors address key issues in the philosophy of education, touching on significant contemporary concerns and demonstrating the breadth and influence of John White's work. Each chapter critically examines, builds on, and pays tribute to John White's unique contribution, considering how his work has impacted on the discipline of education as we know it today. Topics covered include: - policy and the role of philosophy of education - liberal education - the aims of education - moral education - leadership. Education, Philosophy and Wellbeing will appeal to postgraduate students and academics in the fields of history, policy, education studies, and philosophy, as well as to policy-makers, educational administrators and teachers. (shrink)

This article establishes the benefits of applying renewable energy and analyzes the main difficulties that have stood in the way of more widely successful renewable energy for rural areas in the developing world and discusses why outcomes from these technologies fall short. Although there is substantial recognition of technological, economic, institutional, and other supply-side barriers that have generally interfered with success, the household and other stake-holders have been left outside the scope of evaluation. This article first discusses the usefulness of (...) renewable energy for encouraging sustainability in rural, poor areas, analyzes barriers that have often interfered with the promotion and delivery of expected outputs of installed modern energy technology in remote communities, and finally presents findings from a survey on the actual performance state of the renewable energy technology and degree of satisfaction with it. (shrink)

Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich aus philosophischer Perspektive mit der kontroversen öffentlichen Diskussion zur documenta fifteen. Einigen Stellungnahmen in dieser Debatte liegen implizit Prämissen einer kantisch geprägten ästhetischen Theorie zugrunde; ihnen stehen anders situierte Diskussionsstrategien aus außereuropäischen Kontexten gegenüber. Im Text wird der kantische universalistische Gedanke eines ästhetischen Gemeinsinns kritisch im Sinne einer postkolonialen Kritik gelesen. Gibt es andere universale Annäherungen an künstlerisches Arbeiten, die stärker von einer Haltung des Zuhörens geprägt sind? Entsprechend den in diesem Feld möglichen Differenzen variiert auch (...) das Verständnis, was es bedeutet, in einem Künstler:innenkollektiv zu arbeiten. (shrink)

Barristers in England are obliged to follow the ‘cab rank rule’, according to which they must take any case offered to them, as long as they have time in their.