Empirical studies indicate that business compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act is disappointing, but they struggle to make sense of this phenomenon. This article offers a novel framework to understand how business organizations construct the meaning of compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act. Our analysis builds on the endogeneity of law theory developed by Edelman. Empirically, our study is based on the analysis of the modern slavery statements of 10 FTSE 100 (Financial (...) Times Stock Exchange 100 Index) companies in the food and tobacco sector, backed by interviews with business, civil society, and public officers. We offer a dynamic model that draws attention to the role of compliance professionals in framing ambiguous rules and devising a variety of organizational responses to modern slavery law. Contrary to extant research that tends to praise organizations for going “beyond compliance”, our study underlines the risks of managerialization of modern slavery law, whereby merely symbolic structures come to be associated with legal compliance, even when they are ineffective at tackling modern slavery. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to problematise a particular social transparency and disclosure regulation in the UK, that transcend national boundaries in order to control slavery in supply chains operating in the developing world. Drawing on notions from the regulatory and sociology literature, i.e. transparency and normativity, and by interviewing anti-slavery activists and experts, this study explores the limitations of the disclosure and transparency requirements of the UK Modern Slavery Act and, more specifically, how anti- (...) class='Hi'>slavery activists experience and interpret the new regulations and the regulators’ implementation of the regulation. This research found limited confidence among anti-slavery activists regarding the Act’s call for transparency in relation to the elimination of slavery from global supply chains. The research also found that the limits of the transparency provisions within the Act appear to hinder the attainment of normativity. This study provides new and unique insights into the critical role that social activists play in exposing the lack of corporate transparency and failures of responsibility to protect workers within global supply chains. (shrink)

There is a growing understanding that modern slavery is a phenomenon ‘hidden in plain sight’ in the home countries of multinational firms. Yet, business scholarship on modern slavery has so far focussed on product supply chains. To address this, we direct attention to the various institutional pressures on the UK construction industry, and managers of firms within it, around modern slavery risk for on-site labour. Based on a unique data set of 30 in-depth interviews (...) with construction firm managers and directors, we identify two institutional logics as being integral to explaining how these companies have responded to the Modern Slavery Act: a market logic and a state logic. While the institutional logics literature largely assumes that institutional complexity will lead to a conciliation of multiple logics, we find both complementarity and continued conflict in the logics in our study. Though we identify conciliation between aspects of the market logic and the state logic, conflict remains as engagement with actions which could potentially address modern slavery is limited by the trade-offs between the two logics. (shrink)

The Law Society recently published a practice note titled 'Prosecutions of victims of trafficking'. This practice note comes many years after many lawyers had highlighted the problem and after the government machinery had chuntered into action and passed the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 with explanatory notes and non-statutory guidelines for corporations. Since 2012 there had been issued warnings about the way defence lawyers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK police were dealing with trafficking and the (...) Criminal Cases Review Commission as far back as 2012 had note the severe failings by defence solicitors, prosecution and police, leading to many appeals and potential miscarriages of justice. Even in 2012 there were 946 known human trafficking victims, including 234 children. There was an attempt at a Human Trafficking Bill in 2010 which came to a halt and several reports including one by the Prison Reform Trust and Cambridge University Press, notwithstanding many books by notable academics for many years before today. This article examines the inadequacies of the Law Society practice note on defending victims and the jumble of high-ideals but short-sighted and impractical parts of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. (shrink)

The UK has been slack in fulfilling its international obligations regarding human trafficking. The UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 has apparently nothing to say about the demand for women trafficked into prostitution, although it addresses the demand for other forms of trfficking though the supply chain provisins in the Act. The UK has disappointed many in condoning prostitution, as Lady Butler-Sloss describes as 'one of the longest standing industries'. However it is one of the longest-standing forms of (...) exploitation. The Act instead, has given much importance to modern -day slavery. An effective way of tackling demand for prostitution and the attendant exploitation would be to make it an offence to purchase someone for sex. Yet perhaps the point is that to curb modern-day slavery is to curb prostitution and pornography, through curbing the supply side. However the UK hasragged its feet over many years, especially when one considers that Internet pornography brings in over £4 billion annually to the UK Gross Domestic Product. (shrink)

This article analyzes the use of crowdsourcing to promote corporate sustainability by assessing compliance with supply chain disclosure laws. It draws on a case study of WikiRate.org as a novel example of crowdsourcing compliance with respect to the UK Modern Slavery Act and U.S. conflict minerals legislation (section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act). WikiRate is an open research platform whose mission is to crowdsource better companies by motivating corporations to be transparent about their environmental, social, and (...) governance performance. In particular, WikiRate’s projects on modern slavery and conflict minerals harness the power of citizens to evaluate the quality of corporate disclosures produced in accordance with these laws. Following an analysis of its projects on modern slavery and conflict minerals, I evaluate the challenges of using crowdsourcing to assess legal compliance, including the potential manipulation of data and the difficulty of relying on non-expert citizens to assess complex information in corporate disclosures. I argue that one must identify the appropriate “crowd” that would be most capable of assessing compliance with a given law. While crowdsourcing platforms such as WikiRate invite a broad range of stakeholders to assess compliance, the reality is that only a limited set of individuals may be able to meaningfully participate given the complexity of supply chain disclosures. Thus, “expertsourcing” may be a more appropriate tool for assessing compliance with certain laws as it limits participation to citizens with specialized expertise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Biblical Economic Ethics: Sacred Scripture’s Teachings on Economic Life by Albino BarreraRaymond Kemp AndersonBiblical Economic Ethics: Sacred Scripture’s Teachings on Economic Life By Albino Barrera LANHAM, MD: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2013. 353 PP. $89.65; KINDLE, $54.49You will not find much direct application of biblical theology to pressing economic issues in this book. Albino Barrera, a Dominican monk who teaches economics and theology at Providence College, gave us that in (...) well-received earlier works on market complicity, political economy, and the evils of scarcity. Keeping to this book’s title, he now gives us a remarkable collation of recent studies on the social and theological contexts of the Bible itself. He seems quite confident that given a comprehensive review, we will intuit modern implications for ourselves and be drawn closer together by our common heritage.Written for a wide audience, Barrera’s clear and readable book compiles fascinating snapshots of the diverse cultural situations and beliefs that unfold across the millennium-spanning canon. Even biblical scholars will enjoy this lively, up-to-date tour of their field.As a monastic, Barrera is careful to show that those New Testament texts that seem to call for divestment of property describe a situation-related special calling and do not make poverty an end in itself. Yet he stresses how the “preferential status of the poor” and the “devaluation of wealth” are prime norms that recur throughout both the Old Testament and New Testament and that he sees backed by both revelation and natural experience.One may find the book limited by the procrustean selectivity that seems inevitable when pre-formed notions (e.g., what is proper to our modern discipline of ethics or to the field of economics) shape our apperceptions of ancient [End Page 205] peoples’ concerns. From Barrera’s viewpoint, ethics has to do primarily with the promulgation and refinement of set norms. So his main goal is to uncover abstract principles and norms for behavior that recur insistently across scripture’s enormous diversity. This, he does beautifully. But in the process, he lets the recurrent trump the emergent.For example, Barrera seems to not fully appreciate the revolutionary impact where Jesus finally declares it impossible for people to bolster their personal stature by pursuing such norms (see, e.g., Mk 10:27). Little attention is given the apostles’ insistence (with Ps 14 and Ps 53) upon this same ethical impasse. For when they find the normative redefined by Christ’s excruciatingly holistic love command, they not only discover their own incapacity but also find themselves catapulted into the totally grace-dependent motivational dynamic described by Paul’s Christian freedom (Rom 3:12, 5, passim, 11:32; Gal 3:22; Jas 2:10).Evidently preoccupied by his quest for the normative, Barrera bypasses the historical priority of Paul and virtually ignores how his grace-responsive freedom pervades the later Gospels and Acts. (He relegates the Paul material to the tail end and accords it but a fraction of the space.)Freedom for Barrera is a social norm—freedom from oppression, slavery, poverty, hunger, and so forth (and he forcefully shows how this is a recurrent theme). But was not Paul, like Jesus before him, hounded and persecuted for his notorious freedom in the use of norms—even those of Mosaic law? Did not the Gospel reduce the normative to a minimum in favor of life-shaping, person-responsive love as the free gift or “fruit of the Spirit”? All of us—the rich and powerful, along with the poor and oppressed—discover our corporate brokenness exposed before God’s grace. Yet in our concomitant response to that same grace, we find our actions newly motivated and gradually reshaped—bonded into covenant community through his judgment of healing re-creation.Again, Barrera does well to stress Sabbath law’s normative force, as mandating times of rest. But one could wish to hear more on how the apostles parleyed this priestly provision into something new, in joyful direct response to a gracious Lord—a freely sabbatic, playfully creative ethic. [End Page 206]Raymond Kemp AndersonWilson CollegeCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This article shows how the ethical framing of the contemporary issue of modern slavery has evolved in UK construction, a sector in which there is a high risk of labor exploitation. It also examines how these framing dynamics have inhibited the emergence of a common framework of action to deal with the issue. We draw on both framing theory and the literature on the discursive construction of moral legitimacy. Our longitudinal analysis reveals that actors seeking to shape the (...) debate bring their own moral schemes to justify and construct the legitimacy of their frames. Actors cluster their views around five evolving frames: human rights issue (later shifting to hidden crime), moral issue, management issue (later shifting to human moral obligation), social justice issue, and decent work issue—which promote particular normative evaluations of what the issue is, who is responsible, and recommendations for action. Our study contributes to a dynamic and political understanding of the meaning making of modern slavery. We identify the antecedents and conditions that have forestalled the emergence of new patterns of action to tackle modern slavery in the UK construction sector thereby evidencing the effects of the interplay of morally competing frames on field-level change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hyper-Abjects:Finitude, “Sustainability,” and the Maternal Body in the AnthropoceneBethany DoaneThe concept of the Anthropocene prioritizes a new paradigmatic scale that seems to outweigh that of “the political”: imagining deep time or the death of the human species as a result of climate change tends to negate the (relatively speaking) smaller-scale concerns of race, class, gender, or capitalism. While feminist critique is often circumscribed by this political scale, and thus (...) may seem to be dwarfed or rendered obsolete by the geological, deep-time scale of the Anthropocene, examining issues of feminist concern from this geological perspective has profound implications for thinking not only of gender politics but also of how to construct something like the political at all in this new era. Suggesting a new and normative global politics is, of course, beyond the scope of this article, but perhaps we might begin to conceive of a political schema that would function more appropriately in light of this grander scale. At the very least we may begin to think the borders or limits of the species as it has existed in the modern era in a way that neither environmentalism nor posthumanism has yet been able to sufficiently tackle.The Anthropocene marks the epoch in which human activities have caused global environmental changes that will leave their mark in the geological strata of the earth itself.1 While the specific moments of its onset are contested, its beginnings are generally associated with the industrial age; Crutzen and Stoermer mark its onset at roughly 1800 with the beginnings [End Page 251] of the industrial revolution. (Timothy Morton pinpoints it more specifically with the invention of the steam engine in 1794.) The changes made in this era of geological, technological, and climate convergence have accelerated in the last seventy years or so in what scientists call the Great Acceleration, which began around 1940 and quickened anthropogenic impact with events like the testing/dropping of atomic bombs, the homogenization of biodiversity, mass extinctions as a result of human activity, and various types of drilling and mining.2 In the era broadly conceived as modernity, the steady march of “progress” that has so shaped the paradigm of the period has been made possible only through its own abjections: those phenomena that mark the era as limited, limiting, and unsustainable. In other words, the “birth of the modern world” was made possible only through devastating acts of violence: institutionalized inequalities like slavery, oppression, colonization, and war. These acts of violence translate as cannibalization at the global scale: the exploitation of most members of the species and the consumption of their resources for the benefit and luxury of the few. While these forms of violence have been criticized and confronted by political and theoretical movements since at least the middle of the twentieth century, thinking of them in terms of the Anthropocene and deep time allows us to consider their consequences in a new light. Our present awareness of the Anthropocene makes visible phenomena like climate, global warming, earth, and the “anthropos” that present us with the very real eventuality of species finitude. Species finitude calls into question not just the practices of modernity that have brought about the Anthropocene (the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few), but the entire paradigm of global thinking that is invested in progress, growth, and even in any environmentalism that calls for stewardship of the earth. The notion of care for an entity like “nature” or “the environment” only reinforces the separation between the human and its milieu, a separation that is impossible to maintain in light of the absolute inextricability that the Anthropocene brings to light.At the heart of this essay are two theoretical concepts: Julia Kristeva’s abjection, and Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, both of which stand for a sort of insufficiency or impossibility of discourse (politics, the Symbolic, etc.) in managing some Real object or phenomenon. Kristeva’s abject is generally thought of as functioning at two levels or scales: the personal, in which an individual must cast off the abject of the maternal body in order to become a proper subject; and the social or... (shrink)

The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market (...) category disappeared, even though considerable quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethics of the Australian business community’s responses to the phenomenon of modern slavery. Engaging a critical discourse approach, we draw upon a data set of submissions by businesses and business representatives to the Australian government’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade ‘Parliamentary Inquiry into Establishing a Modern Slavery Act in Australia’—which preceded the signing into law of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018—to examine the business community’s discursive construction (...) in their submissions of the ethical–political concept of freedom. The paper shows how the concept of freedom was employed by Australian business in a manner that privileged their own subject status and advocated for legislation with minimal burden. Relating this contemporary case to a longer historical context, we show how Australian business responses towards modern slavery map onto liberal and neoliberal ethics in which the freedom of the propertied takes precedent over that of the property-less. Further, we show discursive similarities in the arguments presented by modern Australian businesses and certain historical efforts by members of the business community to privilege commercial freedoms in responses to 18th and 19th Century abolitionist movements. Overall, our research makes two important contributions: first, it highlights the value of a critical discourse lens in business ethics research to show how business and other stakeholders in the field construct and shape their own and other’s ethically-laden understanding of reality; and second, it presents a case for considerable scepticism about the motivation of business to employ the freedoms made available to it under neo/liberal discourse to confront a key human rights challenge. (shrink)

Transparency lies at the heart of most modern slavery reporting legislation, but while publication of statements is mandatory, conformance with content guidance is voluntary, such that overall, corporate responses have been poor. Existing studies, concentrated in business to consumer rather than inter-organisational contexts, have not undertaken the fine-grained assessments of statements needed to identify which aspects of reporting performance are particularly poor and the underlying reasons that need to be addressed by policy makers. In a novel design, this (...) study utilises the ethical trade initiative assessment framework to evaluate the content of 95 UK government suppliers’ modern slavery statements. The findings suggest that in a modern slavery context, discovery challenges are more important than firms’ attitudes to disclosure. We contribute to the transparency literature through a model contrasting discovery costs and disclosure risks and by identifying the disclosure of unknowns as an additional relevant dimension of disclosure. We then discuss the model in relation to normativity theory to consider options through which the currently low legitimacy of the reporting governance regime can be enhanced and the intended norms established. (shrink)

This essay argues that through a new and radical relationship with digital technologies that are oriented towards networking and automaticity, humans have become estranged from what philosopher Arnold Gehlen termed the ‘circle of action’ that expressed our ancient adaptation to tool use and constituted the basis for our capacity for reflective consciousness. The objectification of the material and analogue relationship that enabled humans to ‘act’ upon the world and to construct the basis for our collective endeavours, this paper shows, is (...) beginning to redirect the social orientation that tool use enabled, back to a form of individualism I term a ‘post-modern vanity’. Computer-driven automation on a networked and global scale is engendering a new illusion regarding our relationship with technology. Greek philosophy, later religion, and then the Enlightenment all saw our relation to technology as evidence of either our ‘specialness’ or our inherent ‘mastery over nature’. These perspectives resulted in our acquiring a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ wherein for the individual life had meaning and was ontologically tolerable—we thought ourselves to be of a realm beyond raw nature. Automation, however, to an unprecedented degree, objectifies and exteriorizes the processes of technology use, alienating the individual from the ‘circle of action’. This process is throwing us back to another form of what this essay terms a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ where we increasingly believe that we no longer need each other so much. The cult of computer efficiency and the virtual sphere of the network that it has spawned, I argue, is a largely barren sphere of radical individualism, a post-modern vanity, where we exist at a borderland closer to nature and to the animals than we have been for thousands of years. (shrink)

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to attempt to investigate how Information and Communications Technology researchers in UK computing departments address ethics in their research. Whilst research and innovation in ICT has blossomed in the last two decades, the ethical, social and legal challenges they present have also increased. However, the increasing attention the technical development receives has not been replicated in the area of developing effective guidelines that can address the moral issues inherent in ICT research.Design/methodology/approach– This research (...) is qualitative and made use of interviews. The data analysis was done with dialectical hermeneutics. Through a dialectical hermeneutic process, this research unpacks different understandings of relevance attached to ethics reviews of ICT research in UK computing departments.Findings– The findings include that ethics reviews are relevant because; it is a moral duty, it improves trust for researchers, it is part of risk assessment, it is in compliance with the law and it is a sustainable act.Practical implications– These various understandings illustrate an important dialectic process on the current state of the art in ICT research.Social implications– It asks to what degree the currently dominant model of ethics review based on biomedical ethics is optimal to ICT.Originality/value– It proposes a framework that can effectively help researchers and administrators to ensure responsible research and innovation in ICT. Finally, it identifies that ICT researchers would benefit from the developing repertoire of responsible research innovation. (shrink)

In the article, the organic principle of the Euroasian philosophy is studied. The organic principle acts as a basis of special style of thinking and a certain methodology of scientific knowledge here. The Euroasian methodology of studying of development of society allows establishing of the nature of communications between social processes and the phenomena of wildlife. In the article, the most important components of the Euroasian organic principle of thinking are shown: special terminology and possibilities of its application for the (...) description and forecasting of the social phenomena. Prerequisites of change of the style of thinking dominating in modern science are also noted. The author considers advantages of the organic principle of the Euroasian methodology in solution of national political, social-economic and cultural problems and in possible prospects of its use for formation of scientific methodology. The organic principle of thinking creates complex idea of reality, which can appear before us new, party unknown earlier. Lack of division of sensual experience and ‘pure reason‘, irrational and rational in organic thinking is unconditional advantage of organic approach. Organic principle presented by the Euroasian philosophical organization of the beginning of the twentieth century and continued by Lev Gumilev in the theory of ethnogenesis acts as alternative developed in the west of one-dimensional, mechanistic methodology. It can be told with confidence that owning all of variety of intellectual traditions is necessary for the modern humankind to become capable to realize global ecological threats and negative consequences of influence of culture in which ethics of individualism prevails. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 121-123, March 2022.

Signs and States, programme financé par l'ERG (European Research Council), a pour but d'explorer la sémiologie de l'Etat du XIIIe siècle au milieu du XVIIe siècle. Textes, performances, images, liturgies, sons et musiques, architectures, structures spatiales, tout ce qui contribue à la communication des sociétés politiques, tout ce qu'exprime l'idéel des individus et leur imaginaire, est ici passé au crible dans trois séries de rencontres dont les actes ont été rassemblés dans une collection, Le pouvoir symbolique en Occident (1300-1640). Ces (...) volumes, adoptant une perspective pluridisciplinaire et comparative dans une visée de long terme, combinent études de cas, analyses conceptuelles et réflexions plus théoriques. Et les réponses à ce questionnaire, issu d'une réflexion sur une histoire culturelle poursuivie sur plus de cinq siècles, remettent en cause une histoire de l'Occident latin où l'on opposerait Eglise et Etat : la mutation culturelle engendrée par la réforme grégorienne qui, tout en assurant d'abord le triomphe de la papauté, a donné à l'Etat moderne les moyens d'assurer sa propre légitimité en créant les conditions d'une révolution du système de communication. Elle engendre un partage du pouvoir symbolique et des processus de légitimation avec l'Etat : la capacité de ce dernier à se légitimer par le consentement de la société politique en dehors de la contingence religieuse est une spécificité de l'Occident latin, clé de l'essor des Etats modernes européens. (shrink)

Nigeria is a developing country with youths that have great potentials. They embrace new innovations easily. In Anambra State of Nigeria alone, there are eight (8) higher institutions. It was observed that in the rural areas recently, youths indulge in drug taking and other anti-social acts. Many of them are dropout from schools. The rural libraries could play big roles by reverting them to skillful living again that is by equipping the libraries with information resources that would interest the youths (...) and attract them back to complete their education. A questionnaire titled “Using the rural library for youth development” was constructed and distributed among the youths and librarians in five (5) villages that have rural libraries. 300 copies of questionnaire was made and distributed. 235 respondents were gotten. The response rate became 78%. Findings were made. It was suggested that the government should build and equip the rural libraries to modern standard, provide current materials and also employ more librarians to work there. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a recent (2015) Bioethics editorial, Udo Schuklenk argues against allowing Canadian doctors to conscientiously object to any new euthanasia procedures approved by Parliament. In this he follows Julian Savulescu's 2006 BMJ paper which argued for the removal of the conscientious objection clause in the 1967 UK Abortion Act. Both authors advance powerful arguments based on the need for uniformity of service and on analogies with reprehensible kinds of personal exemption. In this article I want to defend the (...) practice of conscientious objection in publicly‐funded healthcare systems (such as those of Canada and the UK), at least in the area of abortion and end‐of‐life care, without entering either of the substantive moral debates about the permissibility of either. My main claim is that Schuklenk and Savulescu have misunderstood the special nature of medicine, and have misunderstood the motivations of the conscientious objectors. However, I acknowledge Schuklenk's point about differential access to lawful services in remote rural areas, and I argue that the health service should expend more to protect conscientious objection while ensuring universal access. (shrink)

Political and social commentators regularly bemoan the decline of morality in the modern world. They claim that the norms and values that held society together in the past are rapidly eroding, to be replaced by permissiveness and empty hedonism. But as Edward Rubin demonstrates in this powerful account of moral transformations, these prophets of doom are missing the point. Morality is not diminishing; instead, a new morality, centered on an ethos of human self-fulfillment, is arising to replace the old (...) one. As Rubin explains, changes in morality have gone hand in hand with changes in the prevailing mode of governance throughout the course of Western history. During the Early Middle Ages, a moral system based on honor gradually developed. In a dangerous world where state power was declining, people relied on bonds of personal loyalty that were secured by generosity to their followers and violence against their enemies. That moral order, exemplified in the early feudal system and in sagas like The Song of Roland, The Song of the Cid, and the Arthurian legends has faded, but its remnants exist today in criminal organizations like the Mafia and in the rap music of the urban ghettos. When state power began to revive in the High Middle Ages through the efforts of the European monarchies, and Christianity became more institutionally effective and more spiritually intense, a new morality emerged. Described by Rubin as the morality of higher purposes, it demanded that people devote their personal efforts to achieving salvation and their social efforts to serving the emerging nation-states. It insisted on social hierarchy, confined women to subordinate roles, restricted sex to procreation, centered child-rearing on moral inculcation, and countenanced slavery and the marriage of pre-teenage girls to older men. Our modern era, which began in the late 18th century, has seen the gradual erosion of this morality of higher purposes and the rise of a new morality of self-fulfillment, one that encourages individuals to pursue the most meaningful and rewarding life-path. Far from being permissive or a moral abdication, it demands that people respect each other's choices, that sex be mutually enjoyable, that public positions be allocated according to merit, and that society provide all its members with their minimum needs so that they have the opportunity to fulfill themselves. Where people once served the state, the state now functions to serve the people. The clash between this ascending morality and the declining morality of higher purposes is the primary driver of contemporary political and cultural conflict. A sweeping, big-idea book in the vein of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, Charles Taylor's The Secular Age, and Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, Edward Rubin's new volume promises to reshape our understanding of morality, its relationship to government, and its role in shaping the emerging world of High Modernity. (shrink)

People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. (...) Smith demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, Smith delves into philosophy's part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being. (shrink)

The notion of human dignity stands at the core of contemporary debates on rights, politics, and ethics. Many scholars consider the Renaissance discourse on dignity as one of its main contributions to the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. This article examines the role of human dignity in the philosophies of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In their works human dignity relates both to freedom and to a Neo-Platonic ontology, which raises the question of how they reconcile (...) these two possibly contradictory elements. I show that starting from the insight that human beings are “naturally” free and able to make right choices, Ficino and Pico argue that human dignity consists in the ability of humans to understand what is good and to act accordingly. I thus defend the thesis that their conception of human dignity is not modern because it liberates human beings from the “history of being” but rather because it paves the way for their liberation to become rational beings. (shrink)

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of (...) memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history. (shrink)

Judicial independence is generally understood as requiring that judges must be insulated from political life. The central claim of this work is that far from standing apart from the political realm, judicial independence is a product of it. It is defined and protected through interactions between judges and politicians. In short, judicial independence is a political achievement. This is the main conclusion of a three-year research project on the major changes introduced by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, and the consequences (...) for judicial independence and accountability. The authors interviewed over 150 judges, politicians, civil servants and practitioners to understand the day-to-day processes of negotiation and interaction between politicians and judges. They conclude that the greatest threat to judicial independence in future may lie not from politicians actively seeking to undermine the courts, but rather from their increasing disengagement from the justice system and the judiciary. (shrink)

At present, the debate on global justice, a debate which is at the core of global ethics, is largely being conducted by European and American scholars from different disciplines without taking into account views and concepts from other regions of the world, particularly, from the Global South. The lack of a truly intercultural, interreligious, and international exchange of ideas provokes doubts whether the concepts of global justice introduced so far are able to transcend regional and cultural horizons. The article introduces (...) concepts of justice from African scholars, whose voices have remained marginal until now, like the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka, the Ethiopian philosopher Teodros Kiros, and the debate on ubuntu, one of the most controversial concepts in southern Africa today. These concepts focus on issues that are seldom considered in the debate on global justice, such as the importance of bodily needs as a prerequisite for human beings to act as moral beings and the importance of human rel.. (shrink)

In the past decades, computers have become more and more involved in society by the rise of ubiquitous systems, increasing the number of interactions between humans and IT systems. At the same time, the technology itself is getting more complex, enabling devices to act in a way that previously only humans could, based on developments in the fields of both robotics and artificial intelligence. This results in a situation in which many autonomous, intelligent and context-aware systems are involved in decisions (...) that affect their environment. These relations between people, machines, and decisions can take many different forms, but thus far, a systematic account of machine-assisted moral decisions is lacking. This paper investigates the concept of machine-assisted moral decisions from the perspective of technological mediation. It is argued that modern machines do not only have morality in the sense of mediating the actions of humans, but that, by making their own decisions within their relations with humans, mediate morality itself. A classification is proposed to differentiate between four different types of moral relations. The moral aspects within the decisions these systems make are combined into three dimensions that describe the distinct characteristics of different types of moral mediation by machines. Based on this classification, specific guidelines for moral behavior can be provided for these systems. (shrink)

The idea of "spirit" has manifold meanings and plays a crucial role in Early Modern medicine, psychology, religion, natural philosophy, and cosmology. This book contains twenty papers, written by international experts; it explores how those disciplines conceived of the spirits and shows that knowledge of the spirits is an essential prerequisite for the understanding of Renaissance literature and music. The volume focuses on the way in which the spirits act upon the soul's perception, imagination, and cognition, and on the (...) cultural practices which aim to use, purge, or ban the spirits. (shrink)

At Danish universities, the governance structure is regulated by law. This structure was radically changed in 2003, abolishing the republican rule of the senate consisting of academics, students, and staff in favour of an authoritarian system assigning all executive power to the vice-chancellor, or as we say in Denmark, the rector. To introduce the current situation at Danish universities, in the first two sections of this article, I will compare them with more well-known counterparts in other countries. This situation is (...) reflected in exemplary cases, and in the third section, I focus on the most dramatic controversy ever encountered at a Danish university, the Koldau case, which reached national newspaper headlines and broadcasting in two rounds in 2011 and 2012. In the fourth section, I will interpret the case as an educational controversy in light of two conflicting ideas of the modern university, which may be attributed to two leading Enlightenment figures, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Denis Diderot. The conclusion is that to some extent, the failure to resist the neo-liberal university reforms in Denmark and the UK, and the drama of the Koldau case, may be explained with reference to the conflicting ideologies of those involved in these controversies. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 2, pp 196 - 219 In his 1978 On Human Nature, Edward Wilson defined the evolutionary epic as the scientific story of all life, a linear narrative beginning with the big bang and ending with the story of human history. Since that time several popular science writers have attempted to write that story of life producing such titles as The Universe Story and The Epic of Evolution. Historians have also gotten into the act under the (...) guise of “Big History,” which has resulted in a series of monographs and is taught at several universities and high schools throughout the world. While the evolutionary epic is often presented as a novel way of bringing the historical insights of modern science into a narrative form that transcends the humanities–natural science divide, the genre itself originates in the nineteenth century, just as new geological and cosmic timescales were being established and new sciences such as biology and anthropology were being formalized. Several German Naturphilosophen and Victorian naturalists imagined the history of life as one, as a “Cosmos,” and produced evolutionary epics that bare significant similarities with their more modern counterparts. By considering the various recurrences of the evolutionary epic, from its origins in early German Romanticism and Victorian naturalism to the degeneration narratives of the fin de siècle and on to the Wilsonian and Big History versions of the late twentieth century and beyond, this essay seeks to map out a shared intellectual genealogy while examining the genre’s conceptual commonalities. What is perhaps most compelling about the history of the genre is the striking persistence of non-Darwinian forms of evolution that are utilized to situate the emergence of humanity in these epic narratives of life. (shrink)

IntroductionExtended decision -making through the use of proxy decision -makers has been enshrined in a range of International Codes, Professional Guidance and Statute,For example, the UK Mental Capacity Act section 9.1; The General Medical Council ; the US National Guardianship Association ; Nuffield Council on Bioethics ; CIOMS-WHO section 6. Court cases such as Re Quinlan in the US have also contributed to establishing the groundings for the legal status of the proxy, albeit in terms of who might be suitable (...) as a proxy in cases where there was no clear appointment of them by a still competent individual. and is now widely seen as a useful means through which we can exercise control over decisions that affect our lives when we have lost capacity to make these decisions for ourselves.I will here limit myself to discussion of proxy consent for adults appointed prior to the loss of competence by the person they are acting as proxy for. The issue of p. (shrink)

Academic skepticism is usually interpreted as a type of discourse without an assertion (a dialectical interpretation). I argue against this interpretation. One can interpret Carneades’ notion of approval as our notion of weak assertion and thereby ascribe to him his own views (a non-dialectical interpretation). In Academica Cicero reports the debate about the status of approval as a kind of assent among Carneades’ followers, especially the views of Clitomachus and Philo of Larissa. According to Clitomachus, approving impressions implies acting on (...) them without taking them as true, while according to Philo of Larissa, approval is taking something as true without certainty. In more modern terms, we can say that Philo refers to the notion of weak assertion, and Clitomachus to non-assertion. Thus Clitomachus’ reading correlates with a dialectical reading, and Philo’s reading correlates with a non-dialectical reading. Philo’s reading leads to the interpretation of Carneades as a quasi-fallibilist. It is difficult to establish the precise position of the historical Carneades because he was hesitant in his oral teaching. Still, there is some basis in Carneades’ theory for interpreting approval as weak assertion (comprising three degrees of persuasiveness involving rational consideration of what seems to be truth). My aim in this essay is thus to argue that a quasi-fallibilist and non-dialectical reading is applicable to the historical Carneades. (shrink)

At Alcibiades I, 133b-c, the reader expects, but does not according to the MSS find, the return of the mirror-motif that had supposedly explained the true meaning of the Delphic injunction. Hence it remains unclear why anything viewed within the soul should act in any way that resembles a mirror. I argue that the substitution of a single letter in one word, about which the manuscripts and modern scholars in any case disagree, can restore the necessary reference to a (...) reflective surface, though not specifically to a mirror, since the term for a mirror could only be applied to sight. A failure to understand the underlying intertextual allusion to Cratylus 408c had resulted in a safe but unsatisfactory substitution by Late Antiquity, and other modifications followed thereafter in an effort to give meaning to the text. (shrink)

This symposium contribution offers a reconsideration of a range of “vice crime” legislation from late nineteenth and early twentieth century American law, criminalizing matters such as prostitution, the use of opiates, illegal gambling, and polygamy. According to the standard account, the original justification for these offenses was purely moralistic and paternalistic ; and it was only later, in the late twentieth century, that those who supported such legislative initiatives sought to justify them in terms of their ability to prevent harms. (...) This piece argues that the rationale for these vice crimes laws was much more complicated than has traditionally been thought, encompassing not just moralistic justifications but also a wide range of harm-based rationales—similar to those that underlie modern, technocratic, “preventive justice” legislation involving matters such as anti-social behavior orders, sex offender registration, stop-and-frisk policing, and the fight against terrorism. (shrink)

This article views the Hippocratic Oath from a new perspective and draws consequences for modern health care. The Oath consists of two parts, a family-like alliance where the teacher of the “art” is equal to a father and a set of maxims how the “art” is to be practiced. Self-commitments stated before the gods tie the parts together and give the alliance trustworthiness. One might call this a proto-profession. Modern physicians form a similar alliance. Specific knowledge and skills (...) and specific action guiding rules are elements of a profession but its trustworthiness rests on a combination of professional autonomy and public control. In order to be granted autonomy the profession must show some effort in enforcing its specific rules and in order to do so its members need to be convinced of the intrinsic value of their profession. Whereas in antiquity physicians acted as single individuals the modern alliance is shaped by division of labour. Physicians use each other and other professions by mutual consent and the health care system as means in the diagnostic-therapeutic process. As any actor is reponsible for the means he uses physicians are co-responsible accordingly. Thus, professional conduct now entails care for the organisation of the alliance as detailed in the “Charter on Medical Professionalism”. The effort the profession gives to this task will confirm its trustworthiness. (shrink)

Thanking, as other speech acts such as apologizing or requesting, can be performed in numerous contexts and, for their analysis, many crucial variables must be taken into consideration, which often are difficult to control. Besides these variables, speech acts are carried out in different situations, taking into account the culture in which they are performed. For example, thanking might be performed after alighting a bus in the UK, the USA or Australia, but this might not necessarily happen in Spain. The (...) aim of the study on which this paper is based, in to explore thanking contrastively in British English and in Peninsular Spanish from a pragmatic viewpoint, by looking at specific independent variables: the context and situation in which this speech act is performed, the relationship between the interlocutors who perform it, which includes social power and distance, and the reason for expressing gratitude. For the purpose of this investigation, a corpus of 128 textbooks for the learning and teaching of Spanish and English as foreign languages was used. It is important to note that, although these corpora are built on prefabricated dialogues and these can be regarded as abstractions of reality, the communicative situations found in the textbooks are aimed at depicting exchanges and linguistic patterns representing what naturally occurs in real conversations in both cultures. (shrink)

This article seeks to enrich the social-theoretical and sociological approach to climate change by arguing in favour of a weak naturalistic ontology beyond the usually presupposed methodological sociologism or culturalism. Accordingly, attention is drawn to the elementary social forms that mediate between nature and the sociocultural form of life and thus figure as the central object of a critical sociological explanation of impediments retarding or preventing a transition to a sustainable global society. The argument is illustrated by a comparison of (...) the current situation of climate change to a similar situation some 10,000 years ago which conditioned the transition from hunting-gathering to farming. The crucial factor in the prehistoric transition had been the newly acquired cognitive fluidity, which not only became the defining feature of the modern human mind, but is also foundational of the corresponding social form of life. The cognitively fluid mind made possible new generative practices and the imagination of counterfactuals possessing an incursive force that is capable of transforming existing practices and social structures. The ultimate question, then, is twofold: whether there is enough potential left in the cognitively fluid mind for its societal significance to be activated to the benefit of a transformation of the current recalcitrant social formation; and whether we today are able and willing to recognize such potential and corresponding realizable possibilities upon which to act. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held 2013 in Darmstadt.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Love and Providence: Recognition in the Ancient Novel by Silvia MontiglioTim WhitmarshSilvia Montiglio. Love and Providence: Recognition in the Ancient Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ix + 255 pp. Cloth, $74.Terence Cave’s Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) opened up the subject of recognition scenes to a new readership, with sparkling discussions not just of the medieval and renaissance literature of his own (...) specialism, but also of its Classical antecedents. Without offering (and without claiming to offer) a systematic study of the ancient sources, Cave demonstrated the power and capaciousness of the motif, in particular through a wonderfully dexterous reading of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. For Cave, recognition is a dangerous force at both the social and the literary levels: it threatens to expose the fictionality of identity as a construct of human relations (for recognition is an act of collective assent, not an acknowledgement of any kind of deep truth), and indeed the fictionality of fiction itself.Silvia Montiglio’s new book treats not the entirety of Classical literature but an impressive range of novelistic texts, covering not just the canonical Greek and Latin works but also Jewish and Christian material such as Joseph and Aseneth, the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (unavoidable, perhaps!), and Apollonius, King of Tyre. Montiglio avoids Cave’s grand, theoretical claims about what recognition is and focuses instead on what it does within the texts. Her procedure is to stick closely to the contours of the text, tracing the progress of themes through the narrative. In contrast to Cave, Montiglio sees recognition as primarily running along the dominant ideological grains of the individual novels: in the Greek and Judaeo-Christian texts at any rate it exists in order to affirm the idealising thrust, be it matrimonial or religious. Recognition’s primary role, for Montiglio, is to affirm identity, to validate the relationships to which texts normatively commit.The book proceeds via a series of close, immersive encounters with the texts. Although prodigiously widely read in the modern literature on the novels, Montiglio has little interest in wider social frameworks, and is virtually immune to the theoretical and cultural-historical bugs doing the rounds: intertextuality (though she is certainly alive to the power of literary precedent), narratology, cognitive theory, gender, sexuality, identity, cultural transfer, and so forth. Her story, rather, concerns the fluctuations of literary form across a range of periods and texts, and comparisons between different handlings of this central (but rather [End Page 166] neglected) topos. Although rather more detailed, sophisticated, and wide-ranging in its subject-matter, it harks back in a way to some of the motif-based, formalist novel scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s: Consuelo Ruiz Montero’s La estructura de la novela griega: análisis funcional (Salamanca 1988), Bryan Reardon’s The Form of Greek Romance (Princeton 1991), Françoise Létoublon’s Les lieux communs du roman: stéréotypes grecs d’aventure et d’amour (Leiden 1993).Five substantial chapters deal with Chariton and Xenophon (chap. 1), Achilles and Longus (chap. 2), Heliodorus (chap. 3), Petronius and Apuleius (chap. 4), and the Jewish and Christian “novels” (chap. 5). This cumulative approach allows her to ease a story out of her material by progressively comparing later to earlier treatments of similar themes. To restate it simply, her argument is that Chariton and Xenophon handle recognition relatively “straight,” presenting it as an opportunity for the lovers to reunite triumphantly and to reassert their love (although there are multiple other recognitions that interact with the lovers’ own). In Chariton there is an interesting emphasis on the power of the voice to impel recognition. Achilles, characteristically, turns the topos inside out: in this novel preoccupied with self-presentation, display, and disguise, Clitophon repeatedly fails to recognise Leucippe. In Longus, the central recognition is the New Comedy–style acknowledgement of the lovers by their parents, which not only validates their identities as urban aristos but also legitimises their love for each other. Heliodorus has the most elaborate recognition scene of all, with the extended revelation of Charicleia’s identity offsetting and finally banishing all the perceptual misdirection of the earlier parts of the... (shrink)

La transcription, la traduction et l’étude du libelle d’un petit procès daté de 1435 extrait d’un registre judiciaire (liber maleficiorum) de Bologne permet de comparer les abus sexuels perpétrés par des hommes à l’encontre des filles et des garçons. Pour exprimer une agression sexuelle sur une petite fille, on emploie les mêmes mots que ceux qui servent à désigner le viol d’une femme. Pour décrire la violence commise sur un garçon, on use du vocabulaire de la sodomie. Ce constat permet (...) de montrer qu’à la fin du Moyen Âge, c’est bien la pénétration qui crée l’acte sexuel et que ce que les textes désignent par “vice sodomite” peut souvent avoir le sens moderne de “pédophilie” vis-à-vis des garçons. (shrink)

Magna Carta Libertatum is one of the few documents that continuously imply thorough discussions about fundamental principles of the law. In 2011, Lord McNelly, Justice Minister of UK at the time, has emphasized the core and everlasting principles that derived from this document: ᠅ that the power of the state is not absolute ᠅ that whoever governs the state must obey the law ᠅ and that whoever governs the state must take account of the views of those who are governed. (...) These are the fundamental principles of any government that strives to be distinguished as democratic, these are the self-evident truths that have been developed in the theory of social contract that established the modern day democracies. It is very common that article 39 of Magna Carta that provides for the right to due process, as well as article 40 that provides for the right to access to justice and justice itself, to be usually analyzed from the point of view of the rights of the person accused of a crime. However, it must be taken into consideration, that failure to guarantee these two very important human rights makes the accused person a victim of abuse of power. This article aims to analyze the relevance of Magna Carta in the rise of the concept of rights of victims of abuse of power. Although it is a concept developed later in history, the clauses of Magna Carta that remain in power can be directly linked to this category of victims. The thirteenth century provides a very important perspective on the position of the victim of crime and can be analyzed in a comparative aspect regarding the Common Law and the Civil Law historical development. The article will briefly explain the evolution of the concept of victims’ rights throughout these eight centuries to the modern times when these rights have become a crucial part of the national legislations of Western Balkan countries. (shrink)

Natural resources, especially minerals from the earth, are to be protected by humanity. The church, which acts as leaven in the world is called to rise and address the unfriendly mining activities called mining-induced displacement and resettlement. The general theory of interpretation of creation account calls for human stewardship in the world. Humans must view themselves as partners with God in preserving and sustaining the cosmos. The communities had suffered negative socio-economic imbalances. The ekklesia in this cosmic chaos is called (...) upon to fulfil four major functions, namely identity, integration, policy, and management as a way of intervention in communities that are victims of these mining activities. This response, ecclesiology in context, is the combination of theological and social-scientific approaches to the development of practical models and strategies for the church’s interaction with modern society and its challenges. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of hybrid war. Based on the fact that the military actions can be represented as the particular process, it is proposed to analyze the phenomenon on the technological approach. In addition, the study of the phenomenon does not occur within the traditional "democratic paradigm", and based on the assertion that in modern Ukraine the model of social and political order with an oligarchs in the center was formed. All state institutions and segments (...) of civil society are in a tough financial and economic dependence from the social group of oligarchs. The goals, objectives, principles, directions, forms, methods and techniques of conducting hybrid warfare are discussed. The general and the particular to the phenomena of the conventional war and the hybrid war is determined. Focuses on the complex nature of the phenomenon, its layered structure. In this connection, emphasizes the fact that the main actors of the war at different levels perform different roles, which is fixed by experts who analyze the situation. In particular, Ukraine can be considered as the subject of a hybrid war at the regional level, but it also becomes the purpose and the object as to the subjects of higher geopolitical level. In general, the phenomenon of hybrid war characterized by a lack of principles in building of the technological process. In the specific case of Ukraine, the lack of clear principles in the organization of the process dictated by economic interests of oligarchic clans that joined the struggle for the redistribution model in securing ownership of tools and means of production. Other elements of the process of the hybrid war are serve the implementation of the corporate interests of the oligarchs. In addition, the Ukrainian oligarchic structures are the link, the conductor for the interests of oligarchic structures of higher global level. The main tool in this struggle is the information - the main resource of the era, on which the oligarchs try to win a monopoly. Thus, we can talk about the oligarchic discourse of the hybrid war in Ukraine, as invariably present oligarchic component in all its elements. (shrink)

For the first time in Ukrainian historiography the Battle of Legnano 29 May1176 inthe context of European origin and formation of the professional army has been analyzed in this study. In this battle the first European professional military formation, equipped and trained by the city and commune of Milan, defeated the mighty army, formed with well-armed and prepared German knights. This army was headed by the Emperor Frederick I Barbaros, who was an experienced commander. Particular attention is paid to the (...) reasons of emergence of the first professional formations and infantry evolution, which allowed to resist armored knightly cavalry. The lack of necessary resources and the inability to advance sufficient number of mighty men forced the Italian cities-communes, among which Milan was one of the largest centers of arms crafts at the end of the twelfth century, to form the army, which could be manned with the free segments of the population of not noble origin and resist knightly cavalry. In practice, this led to formation of the armored infantry, which returned to modernized ancient hoplites tactics. Readiness of such infantry which demonstrated its feasibility in the Battle of Legnano required resources and professionalism. The problems of maintaining and training of professional formations led to the search for reduction of their strength due to the efficiency of technical innovations, one of which was the use of chariots bound round with metal and manned with crew armed with fighting scythes - hizarmams. But this experiment did not justify itself or may have been devised by the later Milan chronicler Galvani Fiamma. The battle of Legnano initiated hired professional contingent of condottieres, which were widely used in Italian cities-states in the XIII-XV centuries. (shrink)

The provocative French intellectual promotes a radical body politics that shows us how we must think and act to live well.

It is supposed to be common knowledge about the history of ideas that one of the few medieval philosophical contributions preserved in modern philosophical thought is the idea that mental phenomena are distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality, their directedness toward some object. As is usually the case with such commonplaces about the history of ideas, this claim is not quite true. Medieval philosophers routinely described ordinary physical phenomena, such as reflections in mirrors or sounds in the air, (...) as exhibiting intentionality, while they described what modern philosophers would take to be typically mental phenomena, such as sensation and imagination, as ordinary physical processes. Still, it is true that medieval philosophers would regard all acts of cognition as characterized by intentionality, on account of which all these acts are some sort of representations of their intended objects. This course is going to provide a broad survey of the conceptual relationships between intentionality, cognition and mental representation as conceived by some of the greatest medieval philosophers, including Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and Buridan, and some of their lesser known contemporaries. The clarification of these conceptual connections sheds some light not only on the intriguing historical relationships between medieval and modern thought on these issues, but also on some fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind as it is conceived today. (shrink)