What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth (...) of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come. (shrink)

This volume aimed to highlight narrative identities of European cities or city neighbourhoods that have been overlooked, such as mid-sized cities. These cities are neither small towns nor metropolises, cities that are now unveiling their appeal or specificity. The present special issue thus covers a range of representations of cities. The articles investigate more systematically how different texts deal with various cities from different experiential and fictional perspectives. The issue covers the geographical scope across Europe, from east to west or (...) vice versa, as well as a range of different works of national literature(s), but with a clear emphasis on mid-sized European cities that have until now been deemed as lesser-known, secondary, peripheral, ‘other’ cities that are in the focus of the research of the COST project Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City, within which this journal issue is being published. (shrink)

In rural Cambodia the rampant allocation of state land to political elites and foreign investors in the form of “Economic Land Concessions (ELCs)”—estimated to cover an area equivalent to more than 50 % of the country’s arable land—has been associated with encroachment on farmland, community forests and indigenous territories and has contributed to a rapid increase of rural landlessness. By contrast, less than 7,000 ha of land have been allotted to land-poor and landless farmers under the pilot project for “Social (...) Land Concessions (SLCs)” supported by various donor agencies. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in two research sites in Kratie Province, this article sheds light on the mechanisms and discourses surrounding the allocation of ELCs and SLCs. Our findings suggest that large-scale and non-transparent land leases in the form of ELCs are discursively justified as land policy measures supporting national development, creating employment opportunities in rural areas, and restoring “degraded” and “non-use” land, while SLCs are presented by the government and its international donors as a complementary policy to reduce landlessness, alleviate rural poverty, and ensure a more equitable land distribution. We argue that the SLC pilot project is a deliberate strategy deployed by the Cambodian ruling elite to instrumentalize international aid agencies in formalizing displacement and distributional injustices, in smoothing the adverse social impacts of their very own land policies and in minimizing resistance by dispossessed rural people. (shrink)

AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in creative fields that were thought to be exclusively human. Thus, it is non-surprising that a negative bias toward AI-generated artwork has been proclaimed. However, results are mixed. Studies that have presented AI-generated and human-created images simultaneously have detected a bias, but most studies in which participants saw either AI-generated or human-created images have not. Therefore, we propose that the bias arises foremost in a competitive situation between AI and humans. In a sample of N (...) = 952 participants, we show that different evaluations emerge only when AI-generated and human-created pieces of art are presented simultaneously. Importantly, we demonstrate that AI art is not devalued, but rather, human art is upvalued, indicating the existence of a positive bias toward humans, rather than a negative bias. Further, we show that attitudes toward AI and empathy partially explain the different valuations of AI and human art in competitive situations. (shrink)

On the basis of a reconstruction of legal theory in the tradition of Marx - a current that has been more or less silenced since the end of the 1970s - Subjectivation and Cohesion develops a critical counter-pole to the theories of law that predominate in social theory today. To this end, the works of Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Evgeny Pashukanis, Oskar Negt, Isaac D. Balbus, the so-called 'State-derivation School', Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas and Michel Foucault are first analysed for (...) their strengths and weaknesses, and then combined to form a new construction: a materialist legal theory that is up to date and can avoid the shortcomings of existing theories - above all their disregard for gender relations and the reductive consequences of functionalist, economic or politicist approaches to law. (shrink)

Comedy and philosophy have too often been thought immiscible, a tradition supported by a solemn reading of philosophers such as Plato. A closer look at Plato – and specifically at what may be his most familiar dialogue – the Republic, suggests just the contrary. Far from immiscible, comedy and philosophy are entwined in ways that are mutually illuminating. I argue that a joke in Book V reveals the self-forgetting involved in founding the city in speech, and so illustrates the vitality (...) of self-knowledge to political ventures. Glaucon criticizes the first city in speech as akin to one “of sows”, prompting a new city altogether, and yet the city that he helps to create not only eradicates distinctions between animals and humans but is founded on principles of animal husbandry and described overwhelmingly in animalistic terms. Justice in this city is defined as a minding of one’s own business, but what exactly “one’s own” is expands to accommodate Glaucon’s pleonexia and accompanying tyrannical allowances. Glaucon has forgotten himself. Without a limit – without a restriction on what one’s own is – the city degenerates into a tyranny. Glaucon’s self-forgetting may be a minor, comical incident, but it has significant philosophical consequences, including a radical undercutting of the city in question as well as the distinction between humans and animals. The comical mode employed here suggests that it may be a comical understanding of the self that best supersedes the forgotten self. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 253 Sonja Thomas The Women’s Wall in Kerala, India, and Brahmanical Patriarchy On January 1, 2019, a human chain of women, between three and five million strong and 385 miles long, gathered to protest the barring of menstruating women from entering Sabarimala Temple in Kerala, India. The so-called Women’s Wall received widespread news coverage; in the United (...) States, NPR, the BBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all had stories on it. Debra Messing, Kerry Washington, and Rose McGowan tweeted about it. As a scholar of caste, gender, and religion in Kerala, India, I watched the news and international attention with a good deal of interest and a bit of unease about how the intersections of casteism and patriarchy (brahmanical patriarchy) were glossed over in the reporting. The issues surrounding the Women’s Wall reveal the ways in which certain groups invest in the protection of brahmanical patriarchal power; a power that is reflected in political tensions between the Kerala state and the Indian central government that may come to a head in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Casteism and religious divides in Kerala are rarely discussed in depth because Kerala is largely seen as a progressive state, with a 94 percent literacy rate. Other development indicators also point to the assumption that Kerala is exceptional: low infant mortality rates, low maternal mortality rates, low fertility rates, and a population where there are more women than men. Kerala is seen as secular because there is a large number of both Christian and Muslim religious minorities. In 1957, 254 News and Views Kerala made history by democratically electing a communist government and initiating a set of far-reaching (although not all-encompassing) land distribution policies. The state is seen as transgender friendly with a transgender beauty pageant and support for trans surgery. The “feminist ” Women’s Wall protest fits in quite neatly within the dominant narrative that Kerala is exceptional, progressive, and thus a model for other Indian states and for countries in the Global South to follow. However, even as “progressive” Kerala is celebrated today, it is not clear that women in the state are necessarily as empowered as commonly believed. The state has some of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation and violence against women is widespread.1 Kerala’s suicide rates are two times the national average, and Kerala leads all other states in India in the number of family murder/suicides.2 Women are vastly underrepresented in politics.3 Although women are educated, the female workforce participation rate is one of the lowest in India.4 There is evidence to suggest that educated, nonworking women are using their education toward securing a better marriage match rather than for employment or empowerment.5 Kerala has a history of extremely repressive caste practices. This area of India once not only practiced untouchability, but what is known as “distance pollution.” A Dalit (the most oppressed caste in the caste hierarchy) was not allowed within sixty feet of a Brahmin (the most privileged caste), and the mere shadow of a Dalit falling upon a dominant-caste person could result in a Dalit’s death.6 Dalit Bahujans were prohibited 1. See Swapna Mukhopadhyay, ed., The Enigma of the Kerala Woman: A Failed Promise of Literacy (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2007). 2. Jocelyn Lim Chua, In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 3. J. Devika and Binitha V. Thampi, New Lamps for Old? Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralisation in Kerala (New Delhi: Zubaan: 2012). 4. Praveena Kodoth and Mridul Eapen, “Looking Beyond Gender Parity: Gender Inequities of Some Dimensions of Well-Being in Kerala,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 30 (2005): 3278. 5. Sonja Thomas, “Education as Empowerment? Gender and the Human Right to Education in Postcolonial India,” in Human Rights in Postcolonial India, ed. Om Prakash Dwivedi and V. G. Julie Rajan (New York: Routledge, 2016), 82; Ritty A. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 104. 6... (shrink)

Sonja Arndt, Michael Peters, Marek Tesar Introspection is a key concept in epistemology, since introspective knowledge is often thought to be particularly secure, maybe even immune to skeptical dou...

This special issue arises from a collaborative symposium in March 2023 between the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) and the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (P...

This article attempts to conceptualise the notion of the foreigner in relation to immigrant early childhood teachers. Sparked by Kristeva’s challenge, to live with and as others without ostracism or levelling, it highlights tensions that arise in a juxtaposition of the Aotearoa/new Zealand early childhood curriculum document, Te Whāriki and other guidelines for cross-cultural practices, with perspectives on the foreigner and foreignness. Situated in the neoliberal sociopolitical and cultural landscape of Aotearoa/new Zealand, the analysis foregrounds and re-frames orientations towards immigrant (...) teachers as they may play out in the early childhood realm. Kristeva’s insights into foreigners’ raw and intimate experiences provide a freeing lens to emphasise influences on and consequences of a foreigner’s otherness. While Kristeva’s challenge may be a never-ending story of a utopian future in education, its use in this analysis is intended to provoke an awareness of complex conceptualisations of foreignness and of tensions that could subvert the aim of working towards this, possibly elusive, ideal. (shrink)

Violence, domination, inégalité, tyrannie et insurrections : la réflexion de Spinoza sur le droit et la politique ne se limite pas au pacte social, ni à la liberté de philosopher. Il ne s'agit pas seulement de dresser la liste des droits respectifs du souverain et des sujets, dans le sillage des théories du droit naturel. Déjà Althusser avait rapproché Spinoza de Marx et Alexandre Matheron avait montré le rôle essentiel des passions dans la Cité et ses transformations. Toute une génération (...) de chercheurs s'est interrogée ensuite sur les notions par lesquelles se pense ce devenir : foule, peuple, nation, mais aussi multitude. C'est ce dernier terme surtout qui concentre le mieux une pensée de l'initiative historique des citoyens et de leur puissance collective. Il restait à en tirer les conséquences sur les rapports entre individu et multitude, sur les relations de la pensée spinoziste avec Machiavel, Grotius et Hobbes, sur l'attitude de Spinoza envers révolution et conservation, résistance, assimilation et intégration, citoyenneté, désobéissance et révolte. Autant de thèmes qui sont développés ici, à travers la lecture renouvelée de L'Ethique, du Traité théologico-politique, et du Traité politique. Le volume s'achève par un entretien avec Toni Negri, qui fut le premier, dans son livre L'Anomalie sauvage, à mettre en lumière l'importance et le rôle de ce concept. Il y fait le bilan de son propre itinéraire et des discussions qu'il a suscitées."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

_The Dutch Legacy_ investigates the political philosophy and philosophy of religion of Franciscus van den Enden, Lodewijk Meyer, the brothers De la Court, and Adriaan Koerbagh in order to assess their contributions to the development of radical movements in the Enlightenment.

The Reshaping of Phytogeographical Knowledge as the “Transition zone” Wallacea: An American Expansion Project in the Philippines, 1902–1928. This paper examines the development of a concept that to this day plays an important role in biogeography: the region Wallacea. Focussing on the work of the American tropical botanist Elmer D. Merrill in the Philippines, I argue that his research on the geographical movement and settlement of Philippine plants reflects a shift in the United States’ scientific and cultural understanding of the (...) Pacific area towards a notion of “American tropics”. While inventorying plants for the American administration from 1901 to 1923, the composition of Philippine flora prompted Merrill to question biogeographical regionalization in Wallace's Malay Archipelago. Not being able to situate the Philippine flora within “Asian” or “Australasian” biota, Merrill described the islands as an area of trans‐regional plant migration. Together with the paleontologist Roy E. Dickerson, he later conceptualized the region Wallacea as biogeographical “transition zone” between the Philippines and Australia. In addition to the scientific conceptualization, Wallacea constitutes a space between two biogeographical subregions, whose flora was considered as being part of both, but could not be unambiguously attributed to either of these regions. In this respect, the plants resembled the inhabitants of the United States’ insular overseas territories, who were legally defined neither as aliens nor as citizens. In this sense, Wallacea embodies epistemic as well as geopolitical boundaries, while its case also illustrates some of the ways in which colonial interests in the usability of plants found expression in botanical research during the early period of American overseas expansion. (shrink)

L'article compare le motif de la contemplation de sa propre image dans une surface réfléchissante chez Plotin avec des motifs semblables que l'on trouvenon seulement dans les récits mythologiques, mais aussi dans les doctrines cosmologiques des systèmes philosophiques, gnostiques surtout, qui sont à la fois proches de Plotin et concurrent, à l'égard de la philosophie plotinienne. En même temps, en analysant deux métaphores mythologiques, dont une se sert du motif de la réflexion dans le miroir (le mythe orphique du démembrement (...) de Dionysos) et l'autre de la réflexion dans l'eau (le mythe de Narcisse), l'article souligne les différences qui séparent la doctrine plotinienne de la descente de l'âme et celle de la chute de l'âme. (shrink)

Die Anforderungen an das ethisch-professionelle Handeln Pflegender und somit auch die Forderungen an die professionelle Ethikkompetenz Pflegender im praktischen Berufsfeld wandeln sich sowohl qualitativ als auch quantitativ. Dies wird auch in den veränderten normativen Rahmungen der Pflegebildung deutlich. Der Lernort Praxis als ein zentraler Ort pflegebezogener (Aus‑)Bildungsprozesse rückt somit nochmals stärker in den Fokus der Ethikkompetenzentwicklung professionell Pflegender. Der Beitrag konturiert zentrale Anforderungen und veränderte Bezüglichkeiten für die Ethikbildung im beruflichen Handlungsfeld professioneller Pflege und formuliert davon ausgehend zentrale Prämissen an (...) organisationsethische Rahmenbedingungen mit dem Ziel, eine ethisch fundierte professionelle pflegerische Handlungspraxis zu unterstützen. (shrink)

Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 experts and stakeholders using the World Café method to identify key governance challenges and explore how public involvement can (...) meet these challenges. This brief report discusses four cross-cutting themes from the study: the need to move beyond individual consent; issues in benefit and data sharing; the challenge of delineating and understanding publics; and the goal of clarifying justifications for public involvement. The report aims to provide a starting point for making sense of the relationship between public involvement and the governance of population-level biomedical research, showing connections, potential solutions and issues arising at their intersection. We suggest that, in population-level biomedical research, there is a pressing need for a shift away from conventional governance frameworks focused on the individual and towards a focus on collectives, as well as to foreground ethical issues around social justice and develop ways to address cultural diversity, value pluralism and competing stakeholder interests. There are many unresolved questions around how this shift could be realised, but these unresolved questions should form the basis for developing justificatory accounts and frameworks for suitable collective models of public involvement in population-level biomedical research governance. (shrink)

Counters the long-standing, solemn interpretation of Plato’s dialogues with one centered on the philosophical and pedagogical significance of Socrates as a comic figure. Plato was described as a boor and it was said that he never laughed out loud. Yet his dialogues abound with puns, jokes, and humor. Sonja Madeleine Tanner argues that in Plato’s dialogues Socrates plays a comical hero who draws heavily from the tradition of comedy in ancient Greece, but also reforms laughter to be applicable to (...) all persons and truly shaming to none. Socrates introduces a form of self-reflective laughter that encourages, rather than stifles, philosophical inquiry. Laughter in the dialogues—both explicit and implied—suggests a view of human nature as incongruous with ourselves, simultaneously falling short of, and superseding, our own capacities. What emerges is a picture of human nature that bears a striking resemblance to Socrates’ own, laughable depiction, one inspired by Dionysus, but one that remains ultimately intractable. The book analyzes specific instances of laughter and the comical from the Apology, Laches, Charmides, Cratylus, Euthydemus, and the Symposium to support this, and to further elucidate the philosophical consequences of recognizing Plato’s laughter. Sonja Madeleine Tanner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and the author of In Praise of Plato’s Poetic Imagination. (shrink)

En este artículo se estudian historias sobre gobernantes y príncipes de tres dinastías - ‛abbāsí, normanda y timurí – y su representación narrativa como conocedores de las ciencias matemáticas, la geografía y la historia. Se argumenta que constituyen un conjunto de formas positivas de aprobar o impugnar el conocimiento en esas sociedades, prescribiendo jerarquías de formas de conocimiento y jerarquías de gentes e instituciones que deciden acerca de la veracidad del conocimiento. Se sugiere que esas historias comparten su origen y (...) significado en un contexto de propaganda legitimadora para varios gobernantes y príncipes. También se afirma que el valor y la posición del conocimientocientífico en esas historias difieren, empezando por lo que en apariencia eran los intereses personales de un gobernante hasta su integración en lo que se consideraba necesario para la educación de un príncipe y la conducta cultivada de un gobernante. Por tanto, esas historias sobre conocimiento y gobernantes presentan imágenes del conocimiento que delinean el status de los sabios en esas tres sociedades, definiendo posibilidades y estableciendo límites para el aprendizaje y los campos de estudio que se podían practicar. (shrink)

This article investigates the contribution of Spinoza and authors of his circle (Antistius Constans, Van den Enden and Koerbagh) on the modern conception of tolerance. In his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza launches the libertas philosophandi-question integrating two kinds of freedom between which there is a tension: freedom of thought and speech and freedom of religious conscience. As freedom means living and acting in society in light of one’s own interests, tolerance becomes a political issue that depends from political perspectives and (...) priorities. This insight leads Spinoza to bringing together the control of political authority on religious affairs and a political regime of religious plurality and toleration. These ideas seem to be reminiscent of texts published in his immediate circle: the anonymus De jure ecclesiasticorum (1665); the political pamphlets Kort verhael (1662) and Vrye Politijke Stellingen (1665) of his teacher Van den Enden; the subversive dictionary Een Bloemhof (1668) and the systematic philosophical Een Ligt (1668) of Koerbagh. In these texts the question of religion and religious authority shifts to the question of the nature and origin of political authority. The authors all criticize the abuse of power in light of the idea that there is no freedom without equality and no equality without freedom. Together with Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus (1677), they thereby form an anomaly within the anomaly of the Calvinist Low Countries that regards specifically this radical democratic view. They are not so much talking about tolerance but about everyone’s active participation in political life which is necessary for the rescue of the republic. (shrink)

The thesis addresses the question of human consciousness in its oscillation between conditioning and transcendence: the impact of cultural worldviews on the individual's lifeworld and their gradual transcendence as a form of spiritual practice. At the centre of attention is a group of individuals and their unfolding life-stories as they move through a journey of transformation, seeking to explore and understand the complexity of their own consciousness. The emphasis is on the embodiment of belief systems and the individuals' inherent existential (...) power to transcend cultural precepts. Methodologically, the study is based in phenomenological anthropology. It thus employs the first-person perspective and includes subjective personal experience as primary data. (shrink)

(1994). Serbia. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 143-148.

In the history of philosophy, voluntarists—that is, philosophers committed to some version of the freedom of indifference—have worried about its metaphysical credentials, but only a few, at least to my knowledge, have attempted to argue for more than its mere existence. Freedom of indifference is the option to choose between opposites in a given situation. In this paper, I present the ambitious attempt of the German pre-Kantian philosopher Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) to argue for the claim that we have freedom (...) of indifference as a matter of hypothetical necessity. The point is that, in his view, there can be no actual world without freedom of indifference. This is not a logical but a metaphysical truth. I argue that a possible (motivational) reason for Crusius’s choice to tread this slippery path is that he attempts to bestow some metaphysical dignity on the freedom of indifference. As a consequence, this metaphysical value of freedom of indifference shapes the relation between the divine and free, rational agents in a way that is completely different from a rationalist’s conception such as Leibniz’s. In this paper, I give a plausible interpretation of a metaphysical argument that has been neglected in the relevant literature. (shrink)

In this essay I wish to discuss the theme of wisdom from within the field of aesthetics and to present the aesthetics of Japanese flower art of ikebana, kadô, as an example. Concepts of nature, beauty and wisdom will be related to each other: we have plenty of knowledge of nature, but we need deep wisdom to understand nature of beauty, and spiritual wisdom to see and enjoy beauty of nature. Through flower art of ikebana I search to discover the (...) essence of beauty of nature, a path to wisdom within the saying “See beauty in nature, cultivate elegance in spirit”. (shrink)

I present a historical solution to the so-called Arbitrariness Objection (AO). The AO has been leveled against contemporary libertarian conceptions of free will and says that freedom of the will, conceived as freedom of indifference, implies that choices can be made for no reason. If successful, the AO would undermine the rationality of libertarian views, which is why a rebuttal of it is of systematic interest. I discuss the attempt of Christian August Crusius (1715–75) in order to explain that Crusius (...) rejects the AO by showing that there is no choice without a reason. (shrink)

This is a collection of sixteen essays by a diverse group of international scholars that offers a wide-ranging and contemporary perspective on the major aspects of Christian Wolff’s ethics. The volume focuses on Wolff’s German Ethics, arguably his most important and influential text on moral philosophy, but many of the chapters also consider the development of the basic tenets of Wolff’s moral theory in his later Latin writings. The contributions cover a range of topics, including the systematic structure of the (...) text itself and the relation between Wolff’s ethics and the preceding natural law tradition. Many chapters pay special attention to the core concepts of Wolff’s moral philosophy, such as obligation, perfection, the highest good, and happiness. Other notable topics include Wolff’s conception of moral judgment and moral education, as well as the role of psychology and anthropology in his ethical thought. The volume also contains discussion of the influence of Wolff’s ethics on subsequent figures such as C.A. Crusius, G.F. Meier, and Kant. As a whole, the volume seeks to establish the importance of Wolff’s German Ethics within the history of ethics as well as inspire others to engage with his thought. (shrink)