This article seeks to reimagine the relationship between sustainability and financial performance in sustainable investing. Employing a utopian lens, I show how sustainability is constantly negotiated in a process of imagining and actualizing sustainable investing. For this purpose, I explore a fin-tech start-up’s endeavors to democratize sustainable investing through digitalization. Empirically, this article contributes a detailed account of the organizational process of––and the complexities involved in––establishing a sustainable investment organization, to this end focusing on the relationship between sustainability and financial (...) performance. The article further provides a novel theoretical perspective (utopianism) on sustainable investing, one offering a processual approach that uses both external and internal factors in its understanding of the practice. I conclude that a utopian mindset of possibility paves the way for an experimentational attitude and future-oriented thinking. Such a mindset could generate new approaches to the relationship between sustainability and financial performance, thus shining a light on the new and innovative solutions needed to establish financial markets oriented to the common good. (shrink)

Building on critical approaches that understand algorithms in terms of communication, culture and organization, this paper offers the supplementary conceptualization of algorithms as organizational figuration, defined as material and meaningful sociotechnical arrangements that develop in spatiotemporal processes and are shaped by multiple enactments of affordance–agency relations. We develop this conceptualization through a case study of a Danish fintech start-up that uses machine learning to create opportunities for sustainable pensions investments. By way of ethnographic and literary methodology, we provide an in-depth (...) analysis of the dynamic trajectory in and through which the organization gives shape to and takes shape from its key algorithmic tool, mapping the shifting sociotechnical arrangements of the start-up, from its initial search for a viable business model through the development of the algorithm to the public launch of its product. On this basis, we argue that conceptualizing algorithms as organizational figuration enables us to detail not only what algorithms do but also what they are. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate, if there is a principal disagreement between Husserl's early concept of expression and his later discussions on gestures. In the early work Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Husserl quite bluntly excludes gestures from the category of meaningful expressions; thirty years later (1928), in the second volume of Ideas, he argues to the contrary that gestures are meaningful and expressive in the very same way as linguistic units, words and sentences. The question of this paper (...) is: What happened in Husserl's thinking in the two decades between Investigations and the last versions of Ideas II? I argue that the disagreement between Husserl's early statement and his later discussion on gestural expressions is due to a refinement in his account of embodiment. I claim that Husserl did not abandon his concept of expression, but dismissed his early analysis of embodiment as simplistic and as motivated by a certain preconception about the relationship between nature and spirit. This change became possible for him as he developed conceptual and methodic tools for distinguishing between different meanings of the body: the physical thing or the mere material body, the perceived body, and the sensuous body. The difference between the body as a physical thing and the body as a sensuous-spiritual unit proves to be crucial to the understanding of gestural expressions. (shrink)

This essay contends that postcolonial migrants have a right to enter their former colonizing nations, and that these should accept them. Our novel argument challenges well-established justifications for restrictions in immigration-policies advanced in liberal nationalism, which links immigration controls to the nation’s self-determination and the legitimate preservation of national identity. To do so, we draw on postcolonial analyses of colonialism, in particular on Edward Said’s notion of “intertwined histories,” and we offer a more sophisticated account of national identity than that (...) of liberal nationalists. In our view, the national identity of former colonizing nations cannot be understood in isolation from their ex-colonies. This entails that liberal nationalists cannot justify the restriction on the entrance of members of the nation’s former colonies by resorting to an argument about the preservation of national identity: the former colonized constitute an inseparable element of that national identity, because they are already historically part of it. (shrink)

This paper throws some light on the nature of argumentation, its use and advantages, within the setting of doctor–patient interaction. It claims that argumentation can be used by doctors to offer patients reasons that work as ontological conditions for enhancing the decision making process, as well as to preserve the institutional nature of their relationship with patients. In support of these claims, selected arguments from real-life interactions are presented in the second part of the paper, and analysed by means of (...) a model of argumentation borrowed from classical rhetoric, and refined according to the modern orientation of the pragma-dialectic approach. (shrink)

This book discusses feature films that enrich our understanding of doctor-patient dilemmas. The book comprises general clinical ethics themes and principles and is written in accessible language. Each theme is discussed and illuminated in chapters devoted to a particular film. Chapters start with a discussion of the film itself, which shares details behind the making of the film; critical reception; casting and other facts about production. The chapter situates the film in a history of medicine and medical sociology context, analyzes (...) ethical issues raised in the film from a clinical ethics lens, and explains to readers how to use each film as a teaching aid for clinical ethics. Readers will understand how each film in this collection served to bring particular clinical ethics issues to the public’s attention, or reflected medico-legal issues that were part of the public discourse. The book is a perfect instructor's guide for anyone teaching bioethics, healthcare ethics, medical sociology, medical history, healthcare systems narrative medicine, or nursing ethics. (shrink)

Adaptationism has for decades been the topic of sophisticated debates in philosophy of biology but methodological adaptationism has not received as much attention as the empirical and explanatory issues. In addition, adaptationism has mainly been discussed in the context of evolutionary biology and not in fields such as zoophysiology and systems biology where this heuristic is also used in design analyses of physiological traits and molecular structures. This paper draws on case studies from these fields to discuss the productive and (...) problematic aspects of this heuristic in different research practices, in functional as well as evolutionary studies on different levels of biological organization. Gould and Lewontin’s Spandrels-paper famously criticized adaptationist methodology for implying the risk of generating ‘blind spots’ with respect to non-selective effects on evolution. Some have claimed that this bias can be accommodated through the testing of evolutionary hypotheses. Although this is an important aspect of overcoming naïve adaptationism, I argue that the issue of methodological biases is broader than the question of testability. I demonstrate the productivity of adaptationist heuristics but also discuss the deeper problematic aspects associated with the methodological imperialism that is part of the strong adaptationist position. (shrink)

This far-ranging collection of essays represents a conference of the same name held at Emory University in conjunction with a meeting of the “Rethinking Plato’s Parmenides” seminar sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature.In embracing authors as diverse as Plato himself, Epictetus, Ralph Cudworth, Yeats, and Levinas, to name a few of the Platonists identified herein, the volume clearly and deliberately stretches the meaning of this rubric to its outer limits. This review will reprise some of the articles from each (...) of the book’s sections—Ancient, Late Antique, Renaissance and Modern, and Post-modern Platonisms—in an effort to help readers gauge the argument of the book, which may or may not be endorsed by each of the individual contributors. The editors, at least in compiling this anthology, do so in the belief that Platonism might better be considered “as an inexhaustible mine of possible trajectories each of which helps us to see the richness of Platonic texts,” rather than “as a series of determinate doctrines” .Thomas Slezak opens the volume with a rehearsal of his programmatic way of reading Plato’s dialogues, involving two possibly competing claims: what Plato means by philosophy is not contained within the. (shrink)

Abstract:AbstractWomen's Liberation was a radical, multiracial feminist movement that grew directly out of the New Left, civil rights, antiwar, and related freedom movements of the 1960s. Its insight that “the personal is political,” its intentionally decentralized structure, and its consciousness raising method allowed it to grow so fast and with such intensity that it swept up liberal feminist organizations in a wildfire of change. Though women's liberation was fundamental to the emergence of a mass feminist movement, the persistent stereotypes of (...) this feminist upsurge as white, middle-class, anti-motherhood, and anti-sex have obscured the creative radicalism of this early period and erased the presence of women of color and working class women. In a period of extreme racial polarization, feminist efforts to articulate the intersections of gender with race, class, and sexuality were often deeply flawed, but they began a conversation on which later generations could build. As scholars unearth the complex history of this dynamic and revolutionary moment they complicate narratives of the so-called “second wave.”. (shrink)

El consumo sexual de mujeres a cambio de dinero es, por desgracia, una práctica masculina muy habitual en nuestra sociedad. La mayoría de los hombres de edades entre los 40 y los 60 años se han iniciado en la sexualidad a través de una práctica de poder y de abuso como es la prostitución. La compra del cuerpo de las mujeres ha sido normalizada para demasiados hombres y poco cuestionada socialmente.

The model of feminism as humanist in practice and postmodern in theory is inadequate. Feminist practice and theory directly inform each other to displace both humanist and postmodern conceptions of the subject. An examination of feminism's use of rights discourse suggests that feminist practice questions the humanist conception of the subject as a self-identity. Likewise, feminist theory undermines the postmodern emphasis on the constitutive instability and indeterminacy of the subject.

This paper discusses the individuation of characters for the use asunits by geneticists at the beginning of the 20th century. Thediscussion involves the Presence and Absence Hypothesis as a case study. It issuggested that the gap between conceptual consideration and etiological factorsof individuating of characters is being handled by way of mutual adjustment.Confrontation of a suggested morphological unit character with experimentresults molded the final boundaries of it.

Science requires postformal capabilities to compare competing explanations and conceptualize how to coordinate or integrate them. With conflicts thus reconciled, science advances. The Model of Hierarchical Complexity facilitates the coordination of current arguments about intelligence. A cross-species measurement theory of comparative cognition is proposed. It has potential to overcome the lack of a general measurement theory for the science of comparative cognition, and the lack of domain-general mechanisms for evolutionary psychologists. The hierarchical complexity of concepts and debates as well as (...) the new theory are scored, and demonstrate the postformal hierarchical complexity of the proposed theory. (shrink)

Biography of Madhva, 13th cent. Hindu religious leader and founder of Mādhva sect.

This paper explores the trajectories of food and how culinary practices evolve over time in relation to a migrant’s experience. Our focus is on international mothers adjusting to life in London. We identify a connection between eating practices and evolving identities. In line with a stream of research in cultural psychology, we consider food as a symbolic resource mobilized by migrants to provide some material support to their processes of adaptation to a new country. In this respect, we introduce the (...) notion of malleable symbolic resource in order to highlight the ductility of food in relation to an individual’s evolving personal culture. On this basis, we propose to describe ductile trajectories of food in relation to three important steps: where food and eating practices come from; with whom food is consumed and for what goal it is chosen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Athenian Democratic Ideology and Herodotus' HistoriesSara ForsdykeIt is an oft-repeated refrain in studies of Athenian politics that we have no ancient treatises that systematically describe Athenian beliefs about the value of democracy.1 Although we can reconstruct some democratic values from the institutions and practices of the Athenian state, scholars have had to rely on elite writers such as Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, or on the more allusive references in (...) Athenian drama in order to get at the positive tenets of democratic political theory. Recently, oratory has been shown to be a valuable source for democratic political values. Great progress has been made in elucidating Athenian political thought and ideology from all these sources.2In this article, I wish to point to a rather neglected source for Athenian democratic ideology, namely Herodotus' Histories. While parts of the Histories (especially the constitutional debate) have been studied for Greek political thought, less has been made of the Histories as a source for Athenian democratic political beliefs.3 I argue that democratic [End Page 329] political values form the background against which several of Herodotus' narratives resonate and that thus these narratives may provide fruitful ground from which to extract some central themes, symbols, and ideas of Athenian democratic ideology.Herodotus' narratives dealing with Athens are the obvious place to look for signs of Athenian political values, since they ultimately derive from Athenian sources. Yet full utilization of these narratives as a source for democratic beliefs has been hampered by the view, argued by Jacoby and accepted by many current historians, that Herodotus relied primarily on the aristocratic family traditions of the Alcmeonidae for his Athenian narratives and hence that his narratives do not reflect the beliefs of the Athenians as a whole but only those of a particular aristocratic family.4 [End Page 330]This view has been challenged, most recently by Rosalind Thomas in her pathbreaking study of the nature of oral traditions in archaic and classical Greece. Thomas argues that Herodotus' Histories, and in particular his account of the liberation of Athens from the Peisistratid tyranny, reflects a wide variety of traditions, including popular or polis traditions as well as family ones. Certain elements of Herodotus' account, she argues, are decidedly unflattering to the family of the Alcmeonidae and can only be explained by Herodotus' utilization of non Alcmeonid and, in particular, wider polis traditions.5Thomas's revisions of the dominant view of Herodotus' versions of Athenian history open the way for a new evaluation of Herodotus' narratives as a source for polis traditions, or widespread Athenian beliefs about their history and the origins and nature of their political system.6 Furthermore, since these polis traditions were orally transmitted, and oral traditions are shaped by the values of the group that transmits them, they should reveal the values of the fifth-century Athenians from whom Herodotus heard them.7 Herodotus' narratives about early Athenian history, therefore, can be used as a source for widespread, fifth-century Athenian political beliefs and values, as well as partisan family traditions.8In the first part of this article, I argue that comparison of Herodotus' use of the verb in his Athenian narratives with the occurrence of this word in Athenian dramatic and historical texts reveals that this was a key term in the Athenians' understanding of the value of democracy. Specifically, I argue that the word was used by the Athenians to describe the forceful subjection of a people by a tyrant and was associated with Athenian ideas about the weakness of societies ruled by [End Page 331] a tyrant in contrast to the strength of free societies with a democratic political system. In the second half of this article, I argue that the theme of tyranny/civic weakness versus democracy/civic strength underlies Herodotus' presentation of some non-Athenian narratives. In particular, I argue that structural and thematic parallels between the conversation between Xerxes and Demaratus in the Histories and the conversation between Atossa and her messenger in Aeschylus' Persians reveal that the contrast between tyranny and freedom in the Demaratus episode is derived from Athenian democratic ideology.Athenian Democratic Ideology in Herodotus' Athenian NarrativesHerodotus' first... (shrink)

El mal no es. El significado del mal es revisado, desde la perspectiva spinozista, para teorizar al mal como carencia. El espacio que genera el uso inadecuado de las palabras es ocupado por una realidad que se concibe a sí misma por comparación. Las categorías bueno y malo dejan de tener sentido en el momento en el que el conocimiento prescinde de la imaginación para entender. Lo malo lo es para mí, pero el mal no es más que una negación (...) de lo particular, luego como tal no existe. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the goals, structure, and results of an annual, week-long, summer philosophy institute for high school students. Inspired by other similar programs, the Summer Philosophy Institute of Colorado (SPI-CO) was designed for a culturally diverse group of students, aiming to expose college-track high school students to philosophy, to encourage students in lower-track classifications to pursue college, to offer advising to students on how to make college a reality, to expose both groups of students to critical (...) thinking skills, and to promote cultural diversity in philosophy as a discipline. After explaining why philosophy encourages students in education and why high school students are so well-primed to study it, the authors give a detailed overview of the structure of the institute, including schedule, lesson plan, texts and themes studied, funding, and student demography. The authors conclude by discussing an outreach program that grew out of the SPI-CO and a summary of the initial results of the program. (shrink)

In Arnauld’s view, a fruitful clarification of the nature of knowledge is possible if only one pays close attention to “ce qui se passe en nous,” in such a fashion “de n’y rien mêler dont nous ne soyons certains.” In support of his position, he cites not only Descartes’ testimony but also that of St. Augustine. Consequently, he treats—first of all—of the things that any one can know about his own soul upon consulting with himself with a little attention, and (...) by so doing Arnauld shows once again his faithfulness to the spirit of Cartesianism. Yet he does more, for he is among the first thinkers fully to appreciate the value of a truly descriptive method in philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a case for the value of argumentation as an instrument of rational persuasion in doctor-patient (and general health professional–patient) communication. By doing so, I also emphasize the value of argumentation theory—as a body of knowledge devoted to the study of argumentation—both to enrich the study of doctor-patient communication and to enhance its quality by contributing to dedicated training courses for health professionals and patient education interventions. Argumentation is used in health professional–patient interactions, (...) and its significance in this context has been acknowledged in recent literature (see the collection of articles in Rubinelli and .. (shrink)

This book places under sustained scrutiny some of our most basic modern assumptions about inheritance, genealogy, blood relations, and racial categories. It has at its core a deceptively simple question, one too often taken for granted: what constitutes "good" bonds among humans, and what compels us to determine them so across generations as both a physical and a metaphysical attribute? Answering this question is complex and involves a foray into a seemingly disparate array of early modern sources: from adages, common (...) law, and literature about bloodlines and bastardy to philosophical, political, and scientific discourses that both confirm and confound the "common sense" of familial, communal, national, and racial identity.  . (shrink)

Skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis are relatively prevalent health concerns in children, adolescents and young adults. Experiences of these dermatology diagnoses in adolescence have hitherto not been the focus of research, perhaps owing to assumptions that these diagnoses are not particularly impactful or intricate processes, events or labels. We draw on a thematic secondary analysis of in-depth interviews with 42 adolescents and young people living in the United Kingdom and, influenced by the sociologies of diagnosis and time, highlight (...) the psychological, emotional, social and temporal complexities involved in their diagnosis experiences. Firstly, we describe how participants remembered, re- and co-constructed their diagnosis experiences during the interview. Secondly, we explore the pace and rhythm of diagnosis, including mis-diagnoses, highlighting the jarring potential for adolescents on being diagnosed, even for conditions typically deemed minor. Thirdly, we consider the ways in which these diagnoses have the capacity to reformulate notions of past, present and future, including projecting into imagined futures and reinterpreting past bodily sensations. Finally, we examine how memories about and the meaning of diagnosis are revisited, revised and potentially replaced as a child or adolescent grows older, and increases their management of their condition and encounters with healthcare professionals. In unsettling an assumption that diagnosis experiences for adolescents of common skin conditions is unproblematic or straightforward, our qualitative analysis critically engages with and contribute to tenets of health research that are of interest to quantitative and qualitative researchers, clinicians and patients. (shrink)