Praised as a panacea for resolving all societal issues, and self-evidently presupposed as technological innovation, the concept of innovation has become the emblem of our age. This is especially reflected in the context of the European Union, where it is considered to play a central role in both strengthening the economy and confronting the current environmental crisis. The pressing question is how technological innovation can be steered into the right direction. To this end, recent frameworks of Responsible Innovation (RI) focus (...) on how to enable outcomes of innovation processes to become societally desirable and ethically acceptable. However, questions with regard to the technological nature of these innovation processes are rarely raised. For this reason, this paper raises the following research question: To what extent is RI possible in the current age, where the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed as technological innovation? On the one hand, we depart from a post-phenomenological perspective to evaluate the possibility of RI in relation to the particular technological innovations discussed in the RI literature. On the other hand, we emphasize the central role innovation plays in the current age, and suggest that the presupposed concept of innovation projects a techno-economic paradigm. In doing so, we ultimately argue that in the attempt to steer innovation, frameworks of RI are in fact steered by the techno-economic paradigm inherent in the presupposed concept of innovation. Finally, we account for what implications this has for the societal purpose of RI. (shrink)

In this landmark work of economic sociology, Lucien Karpik introduces the theory and practical tools needed to analyze markets for singularities. Singularities are goods and services that cannot be studied by standard methods because they are multidimensional, incommensurable, and of uncertain quality. Examples include movies, novels, music, artwork, fine wine, lawyers, and doctors. Valuing the Unique provides a theoretical framework to explain this important class of products and markets that for so long have eluded neoclassical economics. With this innovative (...) theory--called the economics of singularities--Karpik shows that, because of the uncertainty and the highly subjective valuation of singularities, these markets are necessarily equipped with what he calls "judgment devices"--such as labels, brands, guides, critics, and rankings--which provide consumers with the credible knowledge needed to make reasonable choices. He explains why these markets are characterized by the primacy of competition by qualities over competition by prices, and he identifies the conditions under which singularities are constructed or are in danger of losing their uniqueness. After demonstrating how combinations of the numerous and multiform judgment devices can be used to identify different market models, Karpik applies his analytical tools to the functioning of a large number of actual markets, including fine wines, movies, luxury goods, pop music, and legal services. (shrink)

Lucien Sève (1926–2020) was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of the Parti Communiste Français. An indomitable opponent of both structural and humanist Marxism, his 1973 article reprinted below represents the core of his conception of alienation. For Sève, whilst the mature Marxism of Das Kapital is fundamentally distinct from the speculative humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts in placing capital, not abstract labour, at the heart of alienation, this reinforces, rather than replaces, the role of alienation at the centre (...) of Marx’s mature thought, and hence of Marxism itself. (shrink)

Artists and humanists who work in universities are generally ambivalent about the idea of defending their enterprises in terms of social utility: on the one hand they do not want to claim that the Arts and Humanities are such exalted and selfjustifying endeavors that no one need bother explainingwhy such things are worth pursuing, yet on the other hand they are rightly skeptical that cost-benefit analyses of academic labor will do justice to disciplines devoted to the varieties of human cultural (...) expression rather than to the research and development of patentable forms of knowledge. This essay explores this ambivalence and suggests an alternative way of thinking about the ‘utility’ of cultural work. (shrink)

Le concept d’ Aufhebung, repris par Marx de Hegel et réélaboré par lui, pose un problème notoire de traduction. Lucien Sève conteste le principe de sa traduction systématique par « abolition », pratique aujourd’hui constante, et plaide pour le recours en nombre de cas au mot « dépassement », position que Patrick Theuret dénonce dans un livre comme un révisionnisme sémantique et politique. Étudiant de près la question telle qu’elle se pose dans les Grundrisse, Lucien Sève montre que (...) la traduction par dépassement est maintes fois imposée par le texte même. Sémantiquement, il n’est pas vrai que dépassement fasse perdre de vue le « travail du négatif ». Politiquement, réduire la conception marxienne de la révolution à une abolition la mutile gravement. Question de vive actualité, quand l’obsolescence patente du capitalisme en appelle non à une révolution à l’ancienne mais à un dépassement de nouvelle sorte. (shrink)

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

Cette étude a un double objectif: 10 dégager les grandes lignes de l'ouvrage de Georges de Lagarde, La Naissance de l'Esprit laïque au Moyen Age, tout spécialement du volume V, Guillaume d'Ockham, Critique des structures ecclésiales; 20 retracer les origines de la doctrine actuelle de la laïcité de l'État et ses incidences dans la Constitution dogmatique de l'Église. En un temps où l'Église catholique prend pleinement conscience d'elle-même et approfondit le message qu'elle doit transmettre au monde, l'histoire des manifestations de (...) l'esprit laïque, à une époque qui passe pour avoir réalisé mieux qu'aucune autre l'idéal de la chrétienté, mérite de retenir l'attention. Car cette histoire se prolonge jusqu'à nous. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wisdom's Flowering Cherry:William Johnston's Charismatic ZenLucien Miller Click for larger view View full resolutionIn 1976, when I was about to leave Taiwan after a sabbatical in Taiwan, I happened upon a tattered poster on a telephone pole: [End Page 133]CHRISTIAN-ZEN RETREAT DIRECTOR: WILLIAM JOHNSTON, S.J. ST. BENEDICT'S CONVENT, TAMSUI, TAIWANSunday-FridayI knew that Father Johnston was the well-known Irish Jesuit theologian at Sophia University in Tokyo, widely honored for his (...) studies of mysticism and his major contributions to the development of Buddhist-Christian encounter. I was totally intrigued. Instantly, I decided to attend the retreat.1day oneI was late when I arrived at Saint Benedict's chapel, where the retreat was underway, announcing my presence with a mighty thud of its door to a full gathering of retreatants sitting silently in the pews. Suddenly, here I was, the sole layman among a group of Catholic priests and sisters, most of them American-born, who were serving as missionaries in Taiwan. I looked and felt like a misfit, especially since Father Johnston had to wait to begin the retreat because of me. The chapel setting was Far Eastern in its simplicity and decor. Square in shape, it had a low altar in its center, about a foot and a half high. A plain, muted oil lamp hung to one side, softly gleaming in the semidarkness of late afternoon. Tatami mats and cushions were placed on the spacious floor around the front and two sides of the altar, so that after today's introduction, participants could sit on cushions according to zazen form and face the altar.As I dashed into a pew and looked up, I experienced a Catholic's shock. To my utter surprise, Father Johnston appeared in black Japanese yukata robes, instead of a priest's black suit. He bowed deeply before the altar, where he placed the Eucharist in a ciborium in plain view instead of in the tabernacle where it belonged. Turning to face us, he sat zazen style with his legs crossed on a Zen cushion with the ciborium behind his back. There was no "In the Name of the Father" or "let us pray." We simply maintained a long silence. In imitation of Japanese monks, many of the religious women and men retreatants were wearing robes, while the priests among them had on cassocks. Everyone but me had dressed appropriately for a Zen sesshin. I guessed many were fellow neophytes like me, as we all awkwardly sat zazen with legs crossed as best we could. We would quickly discover together that, for the uninitiated Westerner, zazen would initially prove a painful affair.Father Johnston was partly bald with longish hair at the temples, bushy white eyebrows, and wore a gray-brown beard and radiant smile. While born in Ireland and definitely Irish, you could tell by his clothing, carriage, and bearing that he had been profoundly touched by Japanese culture and language through his long years in Japan. Nonetheless, you readily knew by his sparkling blue eyes amidst his ruddy complexion that the Irish remained in the Japanese.I had brought my Zen sitting cushion all the way from my home in Pelham, MA, to Taiwan, and had practiced daily morning zazen in our Japanese-styled residence while teaching and researching at Tunghai University near Taichung. But feeling late and a bit shy about being up front with esteemed Father Johnston and among the clergy and [End Page 134] religious, I placed my cushion at the back of the chapel, sat down, and crossed my legs. Father Johnston noticed that I was off by myself, and came over. "Good," he laughed, complimenting my sitting posture. "But pretty hard to sit on a marble floor!"He explained to the participants that the schedule he set would be followed beginning the next morning, and that it was entirely voluntary. You could practice crosslegged zazen on your cushion and mat on the chapel floor or sit in the pews. The general atmosphere would be both disciplined, Zen-style, and relaxed. "Please keep silence at all times," he requested. Morning zazen was very early—from... (shrink)

This essay is a reply to Martha Nussbaum's “Capabilities and Disabilities.” It endorses Nussbaum's critique of the social‐contract tradition and proposes that it might be productively contrasted with Michael Walzer's critique of John Rawls in Spheres of Justice. It notes that Nussbaum's emphasis on surrogacy and guardianship with regard to people with severe and profound cognitive disabilities poses a challenge to disability studies, insofar as the field tends to emphasize the self‐representation of people with disabilities and to concentrate primarily on (...) the aesthetic and political representation of physical disability. The essay concludes with an account of a recent exchange with Peter Singer on the question of our social expectations of people with Down syndrome. (shrink)

For many years questions have been posed about the way ethics is taught in accounting education. The teaching of ethics is often criticized for emphasizing the legal dimension to the detriment of the moral one, among other reasons. This case study focuses on an accounting course intended to develop and stimulate students’ critical thinking on accounting and its role in daily life. The investigation is based on an empirical study that took place in the 2015–2016 academic year, when the first (...) author undertook non-participant observation and examined the final term assignment (a short essay) of the great majority of the 120 students enrolled in this course. One of the course’s main features was to expose the students to critical thinking, through analyses and discussions of the roles of accounting and accountants in organizations and society—using research articles as a backdrop to stimulate analysis and discussion. Our investigation suggests that the course is able to sensitize students to professional ethics and responsibilities. Our argument, broadly supported by an empirical case analysis, is that a course centered on a dialogical approach and critical thinking on the role of accounting and accountants in society may impact the development of ethical sensitivity in future accounting practitioners. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our (...) operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts. (shrink)

This article features a comprehensive interview with Vincent Blok, renowned author of “The Critique of Management: Towards a Philosophy and Ethics of Business Management”, published in 2022. The interview is structured around four core themes: (1) Philosophical Context, (2) Methodology, (3) Theory and Application, and (4) Future of Management. Firstly, we explore the contextual significance and urgency for a philosophical investigation on the essence of management. Secondly, we delve into Blok’s distinctive philosophical method. Thirdly, we examine the theoretical foundations and (...) practical applications of his work. Finally, we engage in a broader discussion on how Blok’s insights resonate with the future landscape of management, addressing topics ranging from business education to the rise of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

À première vue, les choses sont simples. Comme l’anthropologie en témoigne, les hommes ont partout et toujours imposé leur domination à leurs compagnes et, comme l’histoire de la pensée scientifique et philosophique le révèle, c’est au nom même de la raison que, d’Aristote à Freud, en passant par Spinoza1, on s’est évertué, jusqu’à une date récente, à perpétuer cette..

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

The novel gives us access to fictional universes in a fundamentally unfinished mode, which allows the reader to give free rein to his or her imagination, in a freedom that is nevertheless monitored and controlled by rules. This article tries to understand the nature of this incompleteness, by discussing some classical readings. How does this specific dimension of fiction relate to Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work” or to the idea, developed by the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, that literary works (...) are “schemas” destined to be “concretized” in the consciousness of the reader? How does Hans Robert Jauss’s aesthetics of reception help us to think about the incompleteness of the work in the proper time of its different readings? Through the fruitful dialogue of these different theories, it is a question of highlighting two important points. First, these theories, while discussing the respective roles of the author and the reader, neglect a a third character who is nevertheless essential to the fictional narrative, the narrator. However, taking into account the latter sheds light on the problems encountered. Secondly, this relationship between the incompleteness of the narrative and the narrator’s position is not in itself specific to fiction. It is not absent from scientific texts, when they are thought of as narratives about reality susceptible of different readings in their history. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...) ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (shrink)

Le commun imagine mal que les philosophes, gens. austères et graves, puissent s abandonner au rire, ou même qu'ils daignent, s'interroger sur la signification et la désirabilité de ce comportement frivole.t pourtant si, comme l'observa le premier Aristote, " rire est le propre de l'homme ", il faut bien que les philosophes sachent rire, comme tout à chacun, et même qu'ils s'inquiètent des raisons d'être du rire, de sa finalité, d'autant plus que leur propre démarche et leurs ambitions ont depuis (...) toujours prêté à rire aux profanes. Rire est-il pour l'homme un privilège ou une tare? Si les dieux d'Homère s'esclaffent dans l'Olympe, Jésus lui n'aurait jamais ri. Repoussant les réserves de Descartes, Spinoza a pris résolument le parti du rire. Et si Nietzsche nous demande de rire à la vie, c'est par contre au nom de la vie que Bergson intente un procès au rire. Tout se passe comme si ces appréciations contradictoires du rire, loin d'être dune importance secondaire, traçaient une nette ligne de partage entre les philosophes, révélant peut-être des divergences décisives entre leurs options fondamentales. (shrink)