Sideløbende med arbejdet med sine tre store Kritikker skrev Kant en række mindre afhandlinger om politik og historie. To af dem, 'Ide til en almen historie med verdensborgerlig hensigt' og 'Besvarelse af spørgsmålet: Hvad er oplysning?', publiceredes i 1784 med blot en måneds mellemrum i henholdsvis november- og decemberhæftet af Berlinische Monatsschrift.

Det er efterhånden en udbredt antagelse, at Jean-Jacques Rousseau i mange hen- seender kan betragtes som den (ikke særligt) skjulte bagmand bag meget af det, vi i vore dage generelt betegner som populisme. I dette paper undersøger jeg den påstand. For det første argumenterer jeg i forlængelse af Quentin Skinner for, at det i det hele taget er problematisk at indordne klassiske tænkere i kategorier, de ikke selv kendte til. For det andet argumenterer jeg for, at dette problem i særlig (...) grad gælder Rousseau, hvis tænkning i høj grad synes at modsætte sig enhver form for klassifikation. Ikke desto mindre forsøger jeg for det tredje at besvare spørgsmålet om, hvorvidt Rousseau faktisk var populist – og ender med at konkludere, at det er en tvivlsom påstand. Artiklens egentlige konklusion er imidlertid, at det egentligt givtige ved at genbesøge Rousseau snarere ligger i, at han tvinger os til at gentænke vores politiske vokabularer på en måde, der rokker ved hævdvunde forestillinger. (shrink)

An introductory guide to some of the most significant perspectives on the subject of power within social and political theory. Contains extracts from such leading contemporary thinkers as Giddens, Lukes and Bourdieu alongside recent conceptions of power from important twentieth century figures including Weber, Arendt and Foucault. Each chapter concentrates on an individual theoretical perspective, and contains a substantial article or extract with its own comprehensive introduction which places the work in context. An excellent point of departure for understanding more (...) about social and political power. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a normative account of development expertise. Although extending expertise beyond the traditional development experts to include local stakeholders, this normative account aims to delimit legitimate forms of expertise. I label this normative view third wave development expertise. Third wave expertise is distinguished from both the technocratic and the social constructivist views of development expertise. In particular, I discuss the notions of contributory and interactional expertise. Contributory expertise denotes the extent to which a group of agents (...) possesses knowledge which can make a significant contribution to development decision-making, while interactional expertise denotes the extent to which they are able to communicate this knowledge meaningfully. While local stakeholders may possess contributory expertise in matters of their own development, they may lack interactional expertise to communicate this knowledge. Resolving this issue, I argue, requires a mediator who can interact with and between external experts and local stakeholders. (shrink)

Many philosophers and medical scientists assume thatdisease categories or entities used to classify concrete cases ofdisease, are often defined by disease mechanisms or causalprocesses. Others suggest that diseases should always be definedin this manner. This paper discusses these standpoints criticallyand concludes that they are untenable, not only when `diseasemechanism' refers to an objective mechanism, but also when`mechanism' refers to a pragmatically demarcated part of thetotal ``objective'' causal structure of diseases. As an alternativeto principles that use the concept of disease mechanism (...) oranalogous concepts, a pragmatic approach is suggested anddescribed. This approach has been suggested before, but inproblematic or inadequate versions. This paper proposes a versioncompiled of two ``pragmatic principles'' and shows that they aremuch more adequate than the principle of disease mechanism. Withreference to a case study of a still ongoing internationaldiscussion of various candidates for a classification system formalignant lymphomas, including REAL (Revised European–AmericanClassification of Lymphoid Neoplasms) in which the concept ofdisease mechanism or analogous concepts plays a very small part,it is shown just how pivotal these two pragmatic principles canbe in actual discussions of definitions of diseases. Finally, itis pointed out that with regard to modern philosophy of languageit may, at least in some cases, be problematic to distinguishbetween the two pragmatic principles as they stand. (shrink)

This article is the guest editors’ introduction to the special issue in Business & Society on “SMEs and CSR in Developing Countries.” The special issue includes four original research articles by Hamann, Smith, Tashman, and Marshall; Allet; Egels-Zandén; and Puppim de Oliveira and Jabbour on various aspects of the relationship of small and medium enterprises to corporate social responsibility in developing countries.

Morten Frederiksen explores Carl Gustav Jung's elusive notion of synchronicity from a transrational perspective and relates synchronicity to the transpersonality of the "All-One". This is done by expanding the content and meaning of Wolfgang Dietrich's layers of Elicitive Conflict Mapping (ECM) through re-relating them to Ken Wilber's model of the structures of consciousness; with synchronicity as the literal connecting principle. The result, then, is an expanded notion of the transrational peace philosophy which includes Wilber's model of stages shorn of (...) its evolutionary slant and fathoms synchronicity in its theoretical outlook and practical application. Contents A Transrational Approach to Peace Studies through processing the Topic of Synchronicity Jungian Psychology and his Concept of Synchronicity Transrational Peace Philosophy and Consciousness Development Seven different Structures of Consciousness Consequences of Synchronicity for a transrational-oriented Peace Philosophy and Practice Target Groups Lecturers and Students of Psychology, Peace Students and Conflict Transformation Researchers Practitioners in the Field of Elicitive Conflict Transformation About the Author Morten Frederiksen is a Peace Researcher from the MA Program in Peace, Security, Development and International Conflict Transformation at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Coordinator of the Danish Development Aid Agency "U-landsforeningen Svalerne". (shrink)

The essay attempts to contextualize the German-Scandinavian tradition of Critical Psychology (GSCP) that bases on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory in today's critical psychologies. It is argued that adding to a psychology and ideology critique the positive dimension of ”foundational” theory is important to counteract the currently prevailing “negative” ideology of liberalism. It is also claimed that an ”instrumental” version of critical psychology, which takes up elements from psychology for tactical purposes will remain dependent on the given discipline of psychology and unable (...) to reflect on its own subject position. GSCP is then rendered as developing the Marxist ontology of social practice (rather than its utopianism) toward a concept of a subjectivity constituted in social practice but with the criteria of action potency and productive needs on the part of the individual. It is suggested that this approach solves important problems in contemporary critical psychology. Finally, it is described how GSCP, too, might grow from the encounter, by developing a theory of collective subjectivity to include – us. (shrink)

This book sets out to theoretically delineate the relationship between agency, structure and power. The author offers an original appraisal and critique both of the work of power theorists, such as Lukes and Clegg and of structuration theory as represented in the work of Giddens.

Blindsight is classically defined as residual visual capacity, e.g., to detect and identify visual stimuli, in the total absence of perceptual awareness following lesions to V1. However, whereas most experiments have investigated what blindsight patients can and cannot do, the literature contains several, often contradictory, remarks about remaining visual experience. This review examines closer these remarks as well as experiments that directly approach the nature of possibly spared visual experiences in blindsight.

'Behavioral Methods in Consciousness Research' is the first book of its kind, providing an overview of methods and approaches for studying consciousness. The chapters are written by leading researchers and experts who describe the methods they actually use in their own studies, along with their pitfalls, problems, and difficulties.

The paper encircles the subjectivity of drug taking as one form of contemporary practice in which fundamental theoretical issues are dealt with. In particular, following Mariana Valverde's genealogy of alcohol regulation (Valverde, 1998), the question of the free will, and the paradox of the simultaneous being and non-being of the autonomous subject, are viewed as present in various approaches to drugs. The current neo-pragmatist wave substitutes low-key practical notions of habits for a dichotomy of free will or determinism. The concept (...) of objectification promises to overcome that dichotomy by externalizing it; in terms of this concept, we can distinguish the abstract-imagined 'fix' from a genuinely transforming realization, and suggest that ours is the age of the fix, of instrumental commodities that change us in ways we do not intend. But, it is claimed, an inescapable issue of the self-dissolution of the subject remains; perhaps in the definitive shape of a suicide, or in the minor shapes of fixes such as a tactics of feigned surrender, New Age Higher Powers, or imagined communities. Determined to realize the idea of a benevolent surrender of the subject, the paper ends in an attempt to contribute to the coming to an understanding of herself and with herself of a person who finds herself at the troublesome intersection of Narcotics Anonymous and a social work development network of Copenhagen City called Wild Learning. (shrink)

This article explores the conditions of possibility for democracy through the analysis of power and authority. Political power, as distinct from coercion, is the key to democracy, as a set of institutions for managing conflict. These institutions presuppose authority, which constitutes a performative act that is validated relative to local perceptions of reasonableness. Democratic power constitutes a nonzero-sum institutionalization of conflict reproduced through the structuring of authority relative to certain principles that allow for repeat play, including equality, impartiality and separation (...) of spheres. This presupposes a democratic subject who is restrained and accountable. (shrink)

ABSTRACTStories pervade sport. In elite spectator sport, stories play out in packed stadiums while being broadcast simultaneously to immense TV audiences. These stories, which present controversial...

The pursuit of happiness is a preoccupation for many people — and probably has been ever since the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens. The scientific understanding of the brain basis of happiness and its pursuit is, however, still in its infancy. Here we focus on recent scientific research on the closely related concepts of pleasure and desire, and discuss their underlying neural mechanisms and their roles in happiness. We also speculate on potential contributions of the brain's default networks to orchestrating (...) cognitive aspects of meaningfulness that are important to happiness. Finally, we discuss how the lack of pleasure, anhedonia, is a central feature of emotional disorders such as depression and thus perhaps the most important obstacle to happiness for many people. (shrink)

Despite the commonly held view that confessing to doping is morally right, few former elite athletes who have doped confess to doping. In this paper, I ask whether elite athletes who have d...

PurposeAs interest in technology ethics is increasing, so is the interest in bringing schools of ethics from non-Western philosophical traditions to the field, particularly when it comes to information and communication technology. In light of this development and recent publications that result from it, this paper aims to present responds critically to recent work on Confucian virtue ethics (CVE) and technology.Design/methodology/approachFour critiques are presented as theoretical challenges to CVE in technology, claiming that current literature insufficiently addresses: overall applicability, collective ethics (...) issues, epistemic overconfidence within technology corporations and amplification of epistemic overconfidence by the implementation of CVE. These challenges make use of general CVE literature and work on technology critique, political philosophy, epistemology and business ethics.FindingsImplementing CVE in technology may yield some benefits, but these may be outweighed by other outcomes, include strengthening hierarchies, widening inequities, increasing, rather than limiting, predictive activity, personal data collection, misinformation, privacy violations and challenges to the democratic process.Originality/valueThough not directly advocating against CVE, the paper reveals hitherto unidentified and serious issues that should be addressed before CVE are used to inform ethics guidelines or regulatory policies. It also serves as a foundation for further inquiry into how Eastern philosophy more broadly can inform technology ethics in the West. (shrink)

This book responds to the need for new ways of defining the aims and forms of education, in an age that has seen the ideals of progress and growth lead the planet and its inhabitants to the brink of extinction. Arguing that contemporary ideas of performance and accountability counter 'the heart' of education, the book calls for a retuning of education that encourages the young generation to study objects and ideas for their own sake, rather than to appease established and (...) conventional notions in society - therefore stepping into a common space of reflection and study. Chapters examine exactly why and how we educate, and offer the alternative of engaging with educational questions, not determined by the logic of progress and growth but with an objective of creating a relation to the world around us. Using the works of Hannah Arendt combined with the tradition of Allgemeine Pädagogik to argue for a new conception of Bildung, the book encourages a method that emphasises outrospection over introspection. Ultimately questioning modern-day education, the book redirects and retunes education away from being wholly concerned with achievement and growth, and will therefore be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the fields of philosophy of education, education and curriculum studies, education policy and politics, and sociology of education. (shrink)

Om en pilgrimsvandring med fire utilpassede unge med anden etnisk baggrund hvor filosofien udgjorde rummet for samvær, udvikling og integration. Et integrationsprojekt der også er dokumenteret i tv-udsendelsen "Bossen og bøllerne".

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change (...) are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics. (shrink)

This paper presents an integrated discussion of methods and ethics by drawing on participatory research with children in Ethiopia and Kenya. It examines the complex social, ethical, practical and methodological dilemmas of research with HIV-affected children, and explores how we confronted some of these dilemmas before, during and after fieldwork. The paper interrogates the role and limitations of ‘global’ ethical standards in childhood research, and the ways in which the researchers’ gender, ethnicity/race, material power, knowledge and insider-outsider position all intersect (...) to affect: (a) the level of children's involvement in the research process; (b) the generation of knowledge about the field; and (c) the negotiation of ethics in collaborative ways. We argue that doing ethical research with HIV-affected children should not be based solely on dominant and de-contextualised understandings of ethics, knowledge and social relations, but should be negotiated reflexively and through dialogue with participants, including the children, their guardians and ‘local’ community members—all with the aim of doing good and avoiding harm in the research process. (shrink)

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...) a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with “Right-First-Time”; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is “Chunk-and-Pass” processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution. (shrink)

This paper explores a redescription of ‘fair play’ as loyalty. Focusing on the context of elite sport and the case of anti-doping, the paper develops an adaptation of Richard Rorty’s call to dispen...

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an (...) interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’. (shrink)

Recent works on the concept of dignity have opened up the otherwise quite deadlocked debate about assisted death (AD). Rather than just reinforcing already fixed positions, it seems to me that these conceptions of dignity make room for a moderate and normatively richer position on the moral permissibility of AD. I do not think that we have seen the full potential of the said conceptions and interpretations. I try in this article to contribute my part. First, I briefly recapitulate some (...) of the paradoxical ways in which dignity is typically invoked in the debate and try to clear up some of the obvious confusions. Then, I go on to explore a particular Kantian line of thought in some recent works on dignity and AD that seems to pave the way for a moderate position with a more principled foundation than the usual compromise positions. (shrink)

This book reassesses Gadamer's hermeneutics by bringing it into a dialogue with John McDowell's minimal empiricism. It employs the resources of McDowell's minimal empiricism to address the transcendental and ontological presuppositions for objective experience and understanding, while retaining Gadamer's emphasis on the historicity of understanding. By means of the dialogue with McDowell, the book develops a hermeneutical conception of objectivity and perceptual experience, which also entails reinterpretations of Gadamer's notions of tradition, practical wisdom and meaning. The book explores the philosophical (...) space beyond the analytic-Continental divide and demonstrates that hermeneutics is not limited to a reflection on understanding as it is practiced in the human sciences, but can be revived as a distinct and cogent philosophical approach with a transcendental and ontological dimension. Thaning's book is a richly detailed, well-argued and coherent presentation of a defensible, and potentially very important, philosophical position. It demonstrates an impressively deep understanding of the literature both from the phenomenological tradition and from the part of the analytical tradition, inspired by Wilfred Sellars, to which John McDowell belongs. Being a substantial philosophical achievement in its own right, the book raises far-reaching questions that will be of interest to a wide audience. Dr. Steven Crowell, Rice University, Houston (USA) Morten Thaning's book is an important contribution to the discourse of philosophical hermeneutics. Thaning extensively discusses a topic, which recent debates have touched upon, but which up to now has not been the subject matter of concentrated scholarly work: the relation between Gadamer's hermeneutics and McDowell's empiricism. With Thaning's interpretation Gadamer' work can be read anew as concerning the problem of hermeneutical objectivity. Prof. Dr. Günter Figal, University of Freiburg (Germany). (shrink)

In this review article, Christiansen provides a historical perspective on the two research traditions, implicit learning and statistical learning, thus nicely setting the scene for this special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science. In this “tale of two literatures”, he first traces the history of both literatures before sketching a framework that provides a basis for understanding implicit learning and statistical learning as a unified phenomenon.

Naturally occurring speech contains only a limited amount of complex recursive structure, and this is reflected in the empirically documented difficulties that people experience when processing such structures. We present a connectionist model of human performance in processing recursive language structures. The model is trained on simple artificial languages. We find that the qualitative performance profile of the model matches human behavior, both on the relative difficulty of center‐embedding and cross‐dependency, and between the processing of these complex recursive structures and (...) right‐branching recursive constructions. We analyze how these differences in performance are reflected in the internal representations of the model by performing discriminant analyses on these representations both before and after training. Furthermore, we show how a network trained to process recursive structures can also generate such structures in a probabilistic fashion. This work suggests a novel explanation of people's limited recursive performance, without assuming the existence of a mentally represented competence grammar allowing unbounded recursion. (shrink)

This article proposes to approach issues around the self and its derivate concepts such as motivation through a methodology of rearticulation. For this, we build on the idea developed in the Vygotskian tradition of the self as mediated by cultural artifacts in activity, viewed as a transformative social process that reconfigures sense and meaning. We aim at suggesting these potentials by rearticulating activities in which people display their motives. Most contemporary ‘motivational technologies’ stage a pragmatic self-calculation. For some, these technologies (...) confirm a common-sense, managerial self; others read them as a ‘poetics of practice’ that performs and produces new motives and selves in a liminal space of discursive creativity. These two readings are superseded as we – with art theory from Vygotsky through Brecht to Groys, Bourriaud and Rancière – consider drug counsellors’ experiments with aesthetic practices of self-display in which sense is reconfigured as dis-sensus, as meaning deferred. Aesthetics provide a lense through which we can appreciate how an artifact-mediation can be also a struggle for recognition that reconstitutes emerging selves, senses, and motives. (shrink)