The rapidly growing research on hybrid organizations in recent years suggests that these organizations may have particular abilities to facilitate institutional change. This article contributes to our understanding of change and, in particular, sustainable transformation in society by highlighting the importance of organizational forms. Looking more closely at the role of hybrid organizations in processes of path generation, we analyze the conditions under which hybrid organizations may enable path generation. A retrospective exploratory case study of the Swedish hybrid organization The (...) Natural Step confirms how hybrids can take part in- and may facilitate the early phases of path generation: assimilation and coalescence. The conclusion drawn is that hybrids have multivocal abilities that enable them to earn trust and authority to open up “neutral” spaces for orientation and connection between actors in separated sub-paths, and that this in turn may ease tensions and trigger dialogue and exchange, also between former opponents. Yet, as also seen in the case, this enabling position of the hybrid may be both fragile and temporary. (shrink)

Literary historians have been working productively in recent years to reclaim the texture of early-fifteenth-century English poetry in contexts of politics and religion. To the list of major authors we should add John Audelay, chaplain of Knockin , setting him equally beside his contemporaries Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and Margery Kempe. As a vernacular poet with a name, a provenance, and a rich body of work, Audelay warrants serious regard. His oeuvre displays an artistry that is different from, but as (...) innovative and revelatory of his times as, those of his celebrated contemporaries. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary essay looks at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding. Rather historical fiction reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations.

This book reconstructs the impact of Plato's words for the modern reader. In the Republic, Plato presented his schematization of human intellectual development, and called for collaboration between writer and reader. The response presented in this book results in a new theoretical framework for engaging with Plato's dialogues. Susanna Saracco analyzes the epistemic function of Plato's written words and explores Plato's higher order pedagogy, in which students are not mere learners and teachers are not the depositories of the truth.

I’m grateful to Endre Begby, Harmen Ghijsen, and Katia Samoilova for engaging with The Rationality of Perception and for writing such interesting and productive commentaries. Taken together, the three commentaries cover a diverse range of topics.

Those who model doxastic states with a set of probability functions, rather than a single function, face a pressing challenge: can they provide a plausible decision theory compatible with their view? Adam Elga and others claim that they cannot, and that the set of functions model should be rejected for this reason. This paper aims to answer this challenge. The key insight is that the set of functions model can be seen as an instance of the supervaluationist approach to vagueness (...) more generally. We can then generate our decision theory by applying the general supervaluationist semantics to decision-theoretic claims. The result: if an action is permissible according to all functions in the set, it’s determinately permissible; if impermissible according to all, determinately impermissible; and – crucially – if permissible according to some, but not all, it’s indeterminate whether it’s permissible. This proposal handles with ease some difficult cases ) on which alternative decision theories falter. One reason this view has been overlooked in the literature thus far is that all parties to the debate presuppose that an acceptable decision theory must classify each action as either permissible or impermissible. But I will argue that this thought is misguided. Seeing the set of functions model as an instance of supervaluationism provides a compelling motivation for the claim that there can be indeterminacy in the rationality of some actions. (shrink)

Perception grounds demonstrative reference, yields singular thoughts, and fixes the reference of singular terms. Moreover, perception provides us with knowledge of particulars in our environment and justifies singular thoughts about particulars. How does perception play these cognitive and epistemic roles in our lives? I address this question by exploring the fundamental nature of perceptual experience. I argue that perceptual states are constituted by particulars and discuss epistemic, ontological, psychologistic, and semantic approaches to account for perceptual particularity.

Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North (...) America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self. Contributors Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon. (shrink)

Sometimes different partitions of the same space each seem to divide that space into propositions that call for equal epistemic treatment. Famously, equal treatment in the form of equal point-valued credence leads to incoherence. Some have argued that equal treatment in the form of equal interval-valued credence solves the puzzle. This paper shows that, once we rule out intervals with extreme endpoints, this proposal also leads to incoherence.

Im Folgenden möchte ich einige Thesen zu dem berühmten Brief entwikkeln, den Jacobi im Frühjahr 1799 an Fichte schrieb: Zu dem Brief eines Denkers aus der zweiten Reihe an einen der Grossen des Deutschen Idealismus.

This study focuses on troubles-tellings in calls to the Swedish Board for Student Support, where the caller wants to negotiate the repayment contract of a student loan. The study relates to research on the organization of troubles-tellings in institutional interaction, and the overall question of how talk about money is a delicate matter that is shaped by moral concerns. The data consist of 94 calls in which the caller proposes either a reduction or a temporal suspension of repayment. The analysis (...) shows that troubles-tellings are launched to account for past failures to adhere to the contracted payment schedule. These tellings are met with minimal responses, which in turn engender a shift towards solutions that resonate with the institutional agenda. The study explores the resources recruited by the participants to deal with a potentially stigmatic situation by formulating the troubles as merely temporary and projecting a future situation where payments are made on time. (shrink)

Cet article présente la conception hégélienne de la vie naturelle comme limite : la nature est la limite de l’esprit, et le vivant est une limite en soi. Examiné surtout dans l’animal, « vivre » équivaut à tracer les limites du vivant, dont on voit ainsi la plasticité fondamentale. La finitude du vivant se traduit en une imagination purement sensible, qui se réalise dans la création d’un espace-temps singulier ; le sens qui dirige cette activité vise à reproduire une existence, (...) non une forme, ce qui en fait plus un terme qu’un but de la téléologie animale. Or, si la nature vivante est la limite de l’esprit, peut-elle « surprendre » celui-ci ? Si la « surprise » dit l’apparition de l’inouï depuis la création libre, elle ne le peut pas, car la plasticité naturelle ne produit que la contingence de l’existence et de l’entendement. Mais la contingence ne soumet pas pour autant la nature intégralement à l’idée : en ce sens, la nature reste pour Hegel l’ « énigme » qui tient l’esprit en éveil.The article presents Hegel’s conception of natural life as a limit : nature is the limit of spirit, and the living being is a limit as such. Examined above all in the animal, life is the tracing of the limits of the living being, whose fundamental plasticity becomes manifest. The living being’s finitude is conveyed in its purely sensible imagination, which realises itself in the creation of a singular space-time ; the sense directing this activity aims at reproducing an existence, not a form, and such a sense is rather the end than the aim of animal teleology. Now, if living nature is spirit’s limit, can it « surprise » the latter ? It cannot, if « surprise » means the apparition of an unprecedented possibility of a free creation, for natural plasticity can only produce the contingencies of existence and understanding. But neither does the contingency of nature subjugate it integrally to idea : in this sense, nature remains for Hegel the « enigma » that keeps spirit awake. (shrink)

Poster presentation at "Toward a Science of Consciousness, Tucson III", April 27 - May 2 1998, Tucson, Arizona.

This paper defends a principle I call Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of a belief is determined in precisely the same way as the rationality of any other state. For example, if wearing a raincoat is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value, then believing some proposition P is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value. This contrasts with the popular view that the rationality of belief is determined by evidential support. It also contrasts (...) with the common idea that in the case of belief, there are two different incommensurable senses of rationality, one of which is distinctively epistemic. I present considerations that favor Equal Treatment over these two alternatives, reply to objections, and criticize some arguments for Evidentialism. I also show how Equal Treatment opens the door to a distinctive kind of response to skepticism. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the question “What should I believe?” is to be answered in the same way as the question “What should I do?,” a view I call Equal Treatment. After clarifying the relevant sense of “should,” I point out advantages that Equal Treatment has over both simple and subtle evidentialist alternatives, including versions that distinguish what one should believe from what one should get oneself to believe. I then discuss views on which there is a distinctively epistemic sense (...) of should. Next I reply to an objection which alleges that non-evidential considerations cannot serve as reasons for which one believes. I then situate Equal Treatment in a broader theoretical framework, discussing connections to rationality, justification, knowledge, and theoretical vs. practical reasoning. Finally, I show how Equal Treatment has important implications for a wide variety of issues, including the status of religious belief, philosophical skepticism, racial profiling and gender stereotyping, and certain issues in psychology, such as depressive realism and positive illusions. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, cyberfeminism surfaced as an arena for critical analyses of the inter-connections of gender and new technology – especially so in the context of the internet, which was then emerging as something of a “mass-medium”. Scholars, activists and artists interested in media technology and its gendered underpinnings formed networks and groups. Consequently, they attached altering sets of meaning to the term cyberfeminism that ranged in their take on, and identifications with feminism. Cyberfeminist activities began to fade in (...) the early 2000s and the term has since been used by some as synonymous with feminist studies of new media – yet much is also lost in such a conflation. This article investigates the histories of cyberfeminism from two interconnecting perspectives. First, it addresses the meanings of the prefix “cyber” in cyberfeminism. Second, it asks what kinds of critical and analytical positions cyberfeminist networks, events, projects and publications have entailed. Through these two perspectives, the article addresses the appeal and attraction of cyberfeminism and poses some tentative explanations for its appeal fading and for cyberfeminist activities being channelled into other networks and practiced under different names. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that certain type of first-personal causal property, efficacy, is represented in perceptual experience.

Some prominent evidentialists argue that practical considerations cannot be normative reasons for belief because they can’t be motivating reasons for belief. Existing pragmatist responses turn out to depend on the assumption that it’s possible to believe in the absence of evidence. The evidentialist may deny this, at which point the debate ends in an impasse. I propose a new strategy for the pragmatist. This involves conceding that belief in the absence of evidence is impossible. We then argue that evidence can (...) play a role in bringing about belief without being a motivating reason for belief, thereby leaving room for practical considerations to serve as motivating reasons. I present two ways in which this can happen. First, agents can use evidence as a mere means by which to believe, with practical considerations serving as motivating reasons for belief, just as we use tools (e.g. a brake pedal) as mere means by which to do something (e.g. slow down) which we are motivated to do for practical reasons. Second, evidence can make it possible for one to choose whether or not to believe – a choice one can then make for practical reasons. These arguments push the debate between the evidentialist and the pragmatist into new territory. It is no longer enough for an evidentialist to insist that belief is impossible without evidence. Even if this is right, the outcome of the debate remains unsettled. It will hang on the ability of the evidentialist to respond to the new pragmatist strategy presented here. (shrink)

The introduction of social distancing, as part of efforts to try and curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought about drastic disruption to the world of the performing arts. In the UK the majority of professional orchestral musicians are freelance and therefore self-employed. These players, previously engaged in enjoyable, busy, successful, portfolio careers, are currently unable to earn a living carrying out their everyday work of performing music, and their future working lives are surrounded by great uncertainty. The (...) aim of the present study was to examine how established professional musicians are experiencing this period, and to look for similarities and differences between the experiences of musicians in the middle of their performing careers, with those of older players. Single semi-structured interviews were carried out over Zoom with 24 freelance, self-employed orchestral musicians; 12 mid-career musicians aged 35–45, and 12 seasoned musicians aged 53 and over. Thematic analysis identified themes common to both groups: the loss of a much-loved performing career, missing music making and colleagues, and anxiety about the future of the music profession. It also identified differences between the two groups: challenges to their identity as a musician, the extent of their anxiety about finances, the extent of their emotional distress, attitudes toward practicing and engaging in collaborative music making, and confusion over future career plans. Findings are discussed with reference to lifespan models of musicians' career development, the PERMA model of wellbeing, and the concept of resilience. (shrink)

Increasing public knowledge of science is a widely recognized goal, but what that knowledge might consist of is rarely unpacked. Existing measures of science literacy tend to focus on textbook knowledge of science. Yet constructing a meaningful list of facts, even facts in application, is not only difficult but less than satisfying as an indicator of what people actually know—or need to know—as citizens. Revisiting this concept from a more sociological perspective yields a rather different concept that is here termed (...) “critical science literacy.” The implications of this reconsideration for thinking about citizen perspectives, for the work of science journalists and other professional interpreters, and for the design and evaluation of new approaches to science communication are explored. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 434-453, March 2022.

UN peace operations have increasingly focused on the importance of “local ownership.” The logic is simple. For peace operations to succeed in helping war-torn states to create accountable, democratic institutions grounded in the rule of law, peace operations need to internalize democratic principles by making UN missions accountable to different domestic constituencies—crossing ethnic, religious, racial, social, and gender lines—within the war-torn country. As part of a special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay (...) argues that while there is widespread consensus among UN member states and UN bureaucrats that local ownership is necessary, UN peace operations have faced significant obstacles to creating true local ownership. These obstacles include the UN's focus on host-government ownership; the challenge of creating trust with different domestic constituencies that represent diverse perspectives; the supply-driven nature of UN intervention; and the mismatch between the UN's ideal post-conflict state and the preferences of post-conflict societies. To make UN peace operations more responsive to post-conflict societies, UN staff often have to bend or break rules established only to hold them accountable to their member states. (shrink)

In this article we analyse the ideas of outstanding Armenian thinker of X century Gregory of Narek and their connection with ideas of V. Potter. The power of Narek as a remedy for diseases is explained also by the viewpoint of Word Remedy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leibniz’s Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise by Patrick RileySusanna GoodinPatrick Riley. Leibniz’s Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 338. Cloth, $39.95.Leibniz’s political views are often downplayed, if not simply ignored, by philosophers focusing on his metaphysical accounts of substance and force. That Leibniz himself does not view these two areas as distinct is (...) forcefully argued in Patrick Riley’s detailed account of Leibniz’s theory of justice. Under Riley’s presentation, Leibniz’s definition of justice as the “charity of the wise” depends crucially on both his monadology and his theodicy. And his political maneuverings, particularly with France, are dominated by this unique definition of justice.Riley begins his argument by detailing Leibniz’s objections to Descartes’s voluntarism and Hobbes’s mechanistic view of human nature and the emphasis on power as the foundation of moral truths. The central Leibnizian theme to which Riley returns repeatedly is perfection. A perfect God does not act on whim or power but on reason. Monads are created with the freedom to strive toward perfection. Love, or charity, becomes perfect by becoming universal. Justice is not, as Hobbes claimed, that which is determined to be good for the whole by an absolute power, but a love or benevolence for the whole, striving through reason for the best. Wisdom is the heart of justice, not power. And for Leibniz, wisdom is inseparable from charity. God wills to actualize the best of all possible worlds out of love and wisdom, thus, wise charity.But Leibniz’s view of justice as wise charity is not without problems, most significantly the problem of freedom. In his first chapter, “Foundations,” Riley skillfully raises this problem in the context not only of Leibniz’s political stance on justice but also in the context of his metaphysics and theodicy. It is in the second chapter, “Monadology and Justice,” that Riley does the bulk of the work relating the metaphysics with the moral-political: “... on the knowledge of substance, and in consequence of the soul, depends the knowledge of virtue and of justice” (Leibniz, as quoted in Riley, 51). Political philosophy cannot be done correctly without first acquiring an adequate and proper account of substance, something the materialist Hobbes had failed to do. But because Leibniz has so closely linked his politics with his metaphysics, the perhaps insurmountable problem of freedom in his metaphysics hounds his politics. “If there are no autonomous persons with nonillusory ‘wills’, there cannot be ‘general benevolence’—for benevolence is just [End Page 470] ‘good willing’, and Leibniz invariably equates benevolentia with caritas sapientis. Without a certain kind of will, then, wise charity cannot serve as the heart of a justice which is more than sovereign-ordained law” (61). To prevent Hobbes from ruling the day, Leibniz must, as Riley correctly notes, devise a metaphysics which allows for freedom for both God and man.And here arises the one troubling aspect of Riley’s work. He addresses the problem of freedom in Leibniz’s metaphysics, but there is no discussion of the recent work done by such scholars as Robert Adams, whose book Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist makes significant contributions on exactly this topic. Regarding Leibniz’s serpentine defense of freedom, Riley does little more than bring up the problem and comment that Leibniz had a problem which, ultimately, he seemed unable to resolve. In fact, Riley shows little appreciation for the work done by mainstream scholars in the area of Leibniz’s metaphysics. If Riley’s work centered primarily on Leibniz’s political writings this might not matter, but given that the thrust of the first part of the book is to argue that Leibniz’s political theory is not merely compatible with his metaphysics but arises out of it, so that an understanding of Leibniz’s metaphysics is essential to grasping the logic of his political views, the absence of current scholarship on the metaphysics is troubling. References in footnotes confirm that Riley had read Adams’s book, as well as The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, which contains David Blumenfeld’s excellent... (shrink)

Peirce considera a matemática uma ciência informativa realmente capaz de aumentar nosso conhecimento. Isso significa que a matemática não é limitada à análise conceitual, mas possui um objeto real de investigação. O coração da visão peirciana da matemática é que o raciocínio matemático não é desenvolvido somente por meio de conceitos gerais, mas lida com um inevitável elemento de individualidade. A conclusão de uma inferência indutiva pode conter informação que não está absolutamente presente nas suas premissas, podendo vir a ser (...) somente por meio de trabalho concreto por parte do matemático. Peirce descreve esse trabalho como observação e experimentação sobre diagramas individuais. Enquanto a idéia de um elemento individual na matemática já está presente em Kant (e pode também ser traçada até Aristóteles), a sua base está na diferença entre Kant e Peirce acerca da análise categorial. A abordagem semiótica peirciana da matemática implica uma mudança, do plano do objeto denotado para o do próprio signo. Isso vale tanto para as inferências geométricas como para as inferências algébricas, que Peirce pode igualar nesse aspecto. Em ambos os casos, o elemento individual da matemática deve ser encontrado dentro do próprio diagrama, sem referência ao objeto denotado. Enquanto o diagrama é em todo caso um token, isso não pode explicar sua individualidade essencial, para cujo fim a justaposição indicial de suas partes deve ser examinada. (shrink)

This is a review of the book Archiving Sovereignty by Stewart Motha. Typical of critical legal writing, the monograph challenges our conditioned perception about the sovereign State. As such, it provides us with access to an archive of sovereign violence created by the law. It is argued that judicial decisions sustain and recreate sovereign power by way of destruction of facts. The focus here is on states with imperial histories, taking as case studies several islands in the Indian ocean region.

The Strong Content View is re-evaluated in this chapter in light of earlier conclusions. It is found that the previous conclusions defended in the book do not warrant endorsing it.

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces (...) a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

Evidentialists and Pragmatists about reasons for belief have long been in dialectical stalemate. However, recent times have seen a new wave of Evidentialists who claim to provide arguments for their view which should be persuasive even to someone initially inclined toward Pragmatism. This paper reveals a central flaw in this New Evidentialist project: their arguments rely on overly demanding necessary conditions for a consideration to count as a genuine reason. In particular, their conditions rule out the possibility of pragmatic reasons (...) for action. Since the existence of genuine pragmatic reasons for action is common ground between the Evidentialist and the Pragmatist, this problem for the New Evidentialist arguments is fatal. The upshot is that the deadlock between these two positions is restored: neither side can claim to be in possession of an argument that could convince the other. As it happens, I myself favor Pragmatism about reasons for belief, and although I don't claim to be able to convince a committed Evidentialist, I do make a prima facie case for Pragmatism by describing particular scenarios in which it seems to be true. I then go on to develop my own preferred version of the view: Robust Pragmatism, according to which a consideration never constitutes a reason for believing a proposition purely in virtue of being evidence for it. (shrink)