In this article I argue that Levinas can be read as a critic, not just of Heideggerian being, but also of being-with. After pointing out that the publication of the Black Notebooks only makes this criticism more interesting to revisit, I first of all discuss passages from both earlier and later writings in which Levinas explicitly takes issue with Heidegger’s claim that there is no self outside of a specific socio-historical community. I then explain how these criticisms are reflected (...) in Levinas’s own account, arguing that Levinasian subjectivity and alterity are precisely defined by their not belonging to a larger unity; to the extent that they partake in a multi-personal collectivity, this does not take the form of a traditional community. In the final section, I look into a different and seemingly opposing argument Levinas makes against Heidegger: on the basis of the latter’s reflections on death, he argues that Dasein is anti-social rather than overly immersed in the socio-historical. Arguing that this rests on a misreading of Being and Time, I use this opportunity to raise questions about Levinas’s interpretation of Heidegger and his “otherwise than being-with” more generally, for Levinas’s account runs into several problems as well. Yet as I will conclude, this in fact offers a valuable insight, not just for the present-day reception of Heidegger, but also for thinking community today. It indicates that a radical break with human situatedness does not automatically fare better than a firmly enrooted account of existence. (shrink)

I apologize for not being William Connolly. You can get me any year, and I feel badly that Connolly had to cancel. I considered giving one of my Hegel and Whitehead talks, which would have been a poor substitute for the world of becoming that Connolly would have discussed. But nearly everyone who goes to AJTP gatherings has already heard me on things Hegelian and Whiteheadian, and I have a new book that means much more to me than those things. (...) So this is a page from my current work on the black social gospel. The social gospel movement of the Progressive Era is justly renowned. It established and legitimized liberal theology in American Protestantism. It created the ecumenical movement and the... (shrink)

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

Chantal Mouffe is one of the most influential political theorists at work today. Her work has influenced political parties across Europe and continues to inform the direction of left politics. In this work, Mouffe argues that liberal democracy misunderstands the problems of ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts because of its inadequate conception of politics.

Frederick Douglass (1817?–1875) is a monumental American figure. As a runaway slave and leading black thinker, speaker, and writer in the abolitionist movement and during Reconstruction and its tragic collapse, his legacy in American history is singular. His ideals and scorching criticisms have marked American political thought about democracy, religion, race, racism, liberty, and equality. American political parties claim him, especially the Republican Party, with which he has an early connection and which has used his figure as cover for (...) their less than egalitarian projects, as do different ideological camps. One can find accounts of Douglass as an existentialist, revolutionary, proto-libertarian, liberal, civic republican thinker. His North Star continues to guide those who welcome its light, although it may lead them down different political-ideological paths.In all of this, one can imagine that those not familiar with the details of Douglass’s narratives and deeds might, in the context of all of that national hagiography, lose track of the fact that he was a black man. Frederick Douglass was a black man born into slavery, survived that brutal regime for twenty-one years, and then escaped and became a principal leader of the American abolition movement and leading black political thinker. Shortly after escaping slavery, he wrote his first famous autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and subsequently two more, in addition to volumes of speeches, articles, and a novel. It is as if his monumentality, like marble, alabaster, or bronze—the stuff of civic memorials—would obscure that irreducible fact in its grand monotones.Nick Brommell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass reminds readers that that irreducible fact is a nontrivial, essential element of Douglass’s life and work. Bromell argues that this includes the political theory, a product of Douglass’s black political philosophy that runs through it all. He contends that Douglass argued for an inclusive conception of personhood and active citizenship, which America’s founding public philosophy, distorted by white supremacy, purposefully did not. Its elements include a defense of the moral personhood of blacks and their full and equal citizenship and a view of political community enlivened by group solidarities and active citizenship in defense of justice.In the course of his analysis, Bromell, a literary theorist, draws on an assortment of contemporary philosophical, rhetorical, and political theories, all of which have a critical theoretical bent, to explicate Douglass’s ideas. This method bears fruit in an instructive analysis of the rhetorical structure of Douglass’ his arguments. Brommell’s analysis of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom usefully explains how it stands out, not only in terms of updated autobiographical details, but also style and analytical and argumentative intent. This is a reading that other scholars have pioneered, but his rhetorical analysis fleshes out, for example, the role of moral sentiments, care, and intimate and social relations in Douglass’s narrative.A central feature of Bromell’s analysis is that Douglass employs what he and others call a “fugitive rhetoric” that comprises an emphasis on the perspective of his and other black Americans’ standpoints, the holding of opposite ideas in tension, and the use of the rhetorical technique “chiasmus,” where a statement is repeated in reverse order in successive phrases or clauses. It is an illuminating analysis, but Bromell goes further by claiming that Douglass was committed to the tenets of contemporary standpoint epistemology. Douglass certainly referenced and employed his experience and viewpoint as a black man and former slave in his work, just as he directly addressed the viewpoints and interests of black Americans. However, whether this means that Douglass was committed to the set of ideas that we now call standpoint epistemology is another matter. This concern applies to Bromell’s reading of Douglass’s method of holding seemingly contrasting ideas in tension and his use of chiasmus. Contemporary philosophical theories of chiasmus carry particular metaphysical and epistemological implications, and those theories might shed light on Douglass’s political projects. However, their incidental utility does not mean they definitively describe Douglass’s intent or public philosophy. This is a specifically important point because those theories lead to subjective conceptions of truth, especially relating to ethics and politics, while Douglass, as Bromell recognizes, repeatedly and emphatically endorsed what he took to be universal normative truths.In the same vein, Bromell makes several additional claims regarding the conceptual distinctiveness of Douglass’s view of power, dignity, rights, and citizenship. Douglass employed conceptions of each and other important ideas specific to his style, approach, and ends. As other black political thinkers did before him, he used these concepts to condemn slavery, racism, and the hypocrisy of American Republicanism and Christianity to assert the equal moral personhood and dignity of blacks and demand equal rights and citizenship. Bromell rightly emphasizes the role of “power,“ as an individual capability, in Douglass’s view of natural rights, moral dignity, and citizenship. It is an emphasis that is in keeping with both Douglass’s personal narrative and his national political projects. Douglass did not think that Americans—that Black Americans or abolitionists—should passively wait for deliverance from either God or national political leadership. Likewise, Bromell is correct to push back on reductions of Douglass’s views to Lockean, Rousseauian, or Kantian interpretations. Douglass is more than an incarnation of standard deontological, liberal, or civic republican philosophy. As a nineteenth-century black radical thinker, he stood in relation and contributed to those moral and political philosophical traditions. However, Bromell’s claim that Douglass’s conceptions of power, natural rights, and citizenship are conceptually distinct from the large host of major philosophical, theological, and political theoretical accounts that preceded him and influenced those ideas in his time is suggestive but not decisive.Like other writers and theorists before him, Bromell offers us another Douglass—as a black critical political theorist. This is a testament to the fecundity of Douglass’s black political-philosophical legacy. It is a legacy that leads to competing interpretations of him; all the same and for all their differences, his scorching prophetic vision of liberty, equality, citizenship, and progress unites them all. (shrink)

In ‘Treating Adolescents Differently’, Skelton, Black, and Forsberg develop their wellbeing-based justification of the asymmetrical treatment of adolescent consent and refusal in the context of health care to justify the differential and paternalistic treatment of adolescents more generally. The core of the Skelton, Black, and Forsberg’s view is a variabilist theory of what is fundamentally and non-instrumentally prudentially good for adolescents, which includes the prudential value of what they call shielding—or the value of being insulated from full responsibility (...) for their choices. This theory of wellbeing, they argue, explains why adolescents may be treated differential and paternalistically in numerous domains. It is good for them to be shielded because it allows for a variety of freedom from making certain kinds of decisions in the absence of a safety net provided by others in supportive and caring relationships. Skelton, Black, and Forsberg argue that their account of the justification of differential and paternalistic treatment of adolescents has attractive implications for a range of cases and holds up well in the face of philosophical criticism. (shrink)

This essay places Paulo Freire in dialogue with a Black Radical Tradition (BRT) in three distinct yet interrelated ways. First, the paper situates the significance of Cedric’s Robinson’s articulation of a BRT while exploring how contemporary scholars are troubling his disputatious relationship with Marxist social thought. Second, the paper foregrounds Freire’s modest contributions to a BRT in his anticolonial literacy campaigns in Guinea Bissau, Africa. Extending the principles of ‘dialogical cultural action’ in the context of African struggle that Freire (...) documented in the letters compiled in Pedagogy in Process, a robust theorization of solidarity comes into sharper view. Third, the paper calls for further reinvention of Freire pointing to the ways his cogent analysis can be augmented by other racialized groups and radical traditions in solidarity with Black struggle to more explicitly confront the inherent racism and anti-Blackness fundamental to global capitalism. (shrink)

Motivated by the known mathematical and physical problems arising from the current mathematical formalization of the physical spatio-temporal continuum, as a substantial technical clarification of our earlier attempt (Etesi in Found Sci 25:327–340, 2020), the aim in this paper is twofold. Firstly, by interpreting Chaitin’s variant of Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem as an inherent uncertainty or fuzziness present in the set of real numbers, a set-theoretic entropy is assigned to it using the Kullback–Leibler relative entropy of a pair of Riemannian (...) manifolds. Then exploiting the non-negativity of this relative entropy an abstract Hawking-like area theorem is derived. Secondly, by analyzing Noether’s theorem on symmetries and conserved quantities, we argue that whenever the four dimensional space-time continuum containing a single, stationary, asymptotically flat black hole is modeled by the set of real numbers in the mathematical formulation of general relativity, the hidden set-theoretic entropy of this latter structure reveals itself as the entropy of the black hole (proportional to the area of its “instantaneous” event horizon), indicating that this apparently physical quantity might have a pure set-theoretic origin, too. (shrink)

Brain death has been accepted worldwide medically and legally as the biological state of death of the organism. Nevertheless, the literature has described persistent problems with this acceptance ever since brain death was described. Many of these problems are not widely known or properly understood by much of the medical community. Here we aim to clarify these issues, based on the two intractable problems in the brain death debates. First, the metaphysical problem: there is no reason that withstands critical scrutiny (...) to believe that BD is the state of biological death of the human organism. Second, the epistemic problem: there is no way currently to diagnose the state of BD, the irreversible loss of all brain functions, using clinical tests and ancillary tests, given potential confounders to testing. We discuss these problems and their main objections and conclude that these problems are intractable in that there has been no acceptable solution offered other than bare assertions of an ‘operational definition’ of death. We present possible ways to move forward that accept both the metaphysical problem - that BD is not biological death of the human organism - and the epistemic problem - that as currently diagnosed, BD is a devastating neurological state where recovery of sentience is very unlikely, but not a confirmed state of irreversible loss of all [critical] brain functions. We argue that the best solution is to abandon the dead donor rule, thus allowing vital organ donation from patients currently diagnosed as BD, assuming appropriate changes are made to the consent process and to laws about killing. (shrink)

"An illustrated directory of experimental, Dada and, in particular, Surrealist photography from 1918-1948, containing over 200 photographic images by some 50 revolutionary artists."--P. [4] of cover.

Liquor stores have been repeatedly shown to be disproportionately prevalent in Black neighborhoods and therefore constitute a disproportionate health risk. This paper examines the ways in which liquor stores jeopardize Black lives through social and material conditions that are broader than health risk. Embodying and perpetuating dysfunctional markets, liquor stores relegate Black consumers to an overabundance of inexpensive and potent alcoholic beverages sold from heavily securitized storefronts and provoke conflicted and oppositional relationships. Liquor stores exist in a (...) state of antibiosis with Black communities, an antagonistic relationship in which liquor stores gain but communities are adversely affected. (shrink)

A recent commentary defends 1) the concept of 'brain arrest' to explain what brain death is, and 2) the concept that death occurs at 2–5 minutes after absent circulation. I suggest that both these claims are flawed. Brain arrest is said to threaten life, and lead to death by causing a secondary respiratory then cardiac arrest. It is further claimed that ventilation only interrupts this way that brain arrest leads to death. These statements imply that brain arrest is not death (...) itself. Brain death is a devastating state that leads to death when intensive care, which replaces some of the brain's vital functions such as breathing, is withdrawn and circulation stops resulting in irreversible loss of integration of the organism. Circulatory death is said to occur at 2–5 minutes after absent circulation because, in the context of DCD, the intent is to not attempt reversal of the absent circulation. No defense of this weak construal of irreversible loss of circulation is given. This means that paents in identical physiologic states are dead (in the DCD context) or alive (in the resuscitation context); the current state of death (at 2–5 minutes) is contingent on a future event (whether there will be resuscitation) suggesting backward causation; and the commonly used meaning of irreversible as 'not capable of being reversed' is abandoned. The literature supporting the claim that autoresuscitation does not occur in the context of no cardiopulmonary resuscitation is shown to be very limited. Several cases of autoresuscitation are summarized, suggesting that the claim that these cases are not applicable to the current debate may be premature. I suggest that brain dead and DCD donors are not dead; whether organs can be harvested before death from these patients whose prognosis is death should be debated urgently. (shrink)

: Medical research is widely thought to have a fundamentally therapeutic orientation, in spite of the fact that clinical research is thought to be ethically distinct from medical care. We need an entirely new conception of clinical research ethics—one that looks to science instead of the doctor-patient relationship.

In addition to the traditional attacks from competing legal theories (from natural law to postmodern approach), modern legal positivism seems to be placed at a point of no return when looking at the effects of globalization upon the legal phenomenon. The reality offers to legal positivists countless examples of soft-law, i. e. law which is not law but is perceived and applied by the vast majority of the legal actors as law. Faced with this radically changed reality, most contemporary legal (...) positivists appear to be caught in a dilemma. The modern legal positivism, on one hand, is in front of a reality of legal globalization and increasing legal pluralism in many areas of law, that is a reality (e. g. soft-law) challenging some of the fundamental paradigms endorsed by this legal movement (e. g. the pedigree thesis). On the other hand, modern legal positivists have taken a quite passive attitude toward this challenge, either by abandoning the legal positivism as a whole to its destiny or by simply continuing to focus upon traditional (i. e. pre-globalization) issues as the fundamental ones to be tackled. The goal of this work is to suggest a shift of attention among legal positivists towards questions which have always been present in their program (though often in secondary terms), as also their solutions (often already present in the legal positivist works). This shift would possibly help the legal positivism movement to circumvent the black hole represented by legal globalization (and its legal pluralism), a black hole where the distinction between law and non-law (i. e. the major tenant of legal positivism) seems to vanish, putting the very existence and legitimacy of the legal phenomenon under question. (shrink)

Drawing upon Leigh Schmidt’s work on the “spiritual left,” this article presents a genealogy of the Black Spiritual Left featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Howard Thurman, and Black Lives Matter activists Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. Black Spiritual Leftists are defined as Black figures who separated from or were not part of Black churches and yet took on a spiritual orientation important to their progressive activism. Their faith is Spiritual, but not (...) necessarily religious. In its most recent manifestation, the Black Spiritual Left argues—in opposition to some Black Church pastors—that defense of Black lives requires respect for marginalized Black women, LGBTQ, and criminalized Black men and boys. (shrink)

Brain death is accepted in most countries as death. The rationales to explain why brain death is death are surprisingly problematic. The standard rationale that in brain death there has been loss of integrative unity of the organism has been shown to be false, and a better rationale has not been clearly articulated. Recent expert defences of the brain death concept are examined in this paper, and are suggested to be inadequate. I argue that, ironically, these defences demonstrate the lack (...) of a defensible rationale for why brain death should be accepted as death itself. If brain death is death, a conceptual rationale for brain death being equivalent to death should be clarified, and this should be done urgently. (shrink)

Since September 11th, we frequently hear that political differences should be put aside: the real struggle is between good and evil. What does this mean for political and social life? Is there a 'Third Way' beyond left and right, and if so, should we fear or welcome it? This thought-provoking book by Chantal Mouffe, a globally recognized political author, presents a timely account of the current state of democracy, affording readers the most relevant and up-to-date information. Arguing that liberal (...) 'third way thinking' ignores fundamental, conflicting aspects of human nature, Mouffe states that, far from expanding democracy, globalization is undermining the combative and radical heart of democratic life. Going back first to Aristotle, she identifies the historical origins of the political and reflects on the Enlightenment, and the social contract, arguing that in spite of its good intentions, it levelled the radical core of political life. Contemporary examples, including the Iraq war, racism and the rise of the far right, are used to illustrate and support her theory that far from combating extremism, the quest for consensus politics undermines the ability to challenge it. These case studies are also highly effective points of reference for student revision. _On the Political _is a stimulating argument about the future of politics and addresses the most fundamental aspects of democracy that will aid further study. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 42-44.

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) is read through a Guattarian theoretical prism to emphasise four chief points: (1) the role of the unconscious, (2) the role of affect (affectus in the Spinozian sense; contrary to feeling (...) which immobilises, affect moves us), (3) the apparent becoming cyborg of the human race and (4) the desire to desire repression. The author contends that while qualitative multiplicities play a central role for MLT, it is neither inconsistent nor contradictory to consider the role of the machinic in greater detail. It is argued that more research must be directed into the cartographic, ethological and noological mechanisms at work in plastic universes of reference (new technologies and the arts) which transform the virtual and transfigure the dynamic of affect. (shrink)

Revisiting the generally accepted notion of psycho-physical parallelism in Spinoza, Chantal Jaquet offers a new analysis of the relation between body and mind. Looking at a range of Spinoza's texts, and using an original methodology, she analyses their unity in action through affects, actions and passions.

Through research that was conducted with mountain bike trail builders, this article explores the processes by which socio-natures or ‘emergent ecologies’ are formed through the assemblage of trail building, mountain bike riding and matter. In moving conversations about ‘Nature’ beyond essentialist readings and dualistic thinking, we consider how ecological sensibilities are reflected in the complex, lived realities of the trail building community. Specifically, we draw on Morton’s (2017) notion of the ‘symbiotic real’ to examine how participants connect with a range (...) of objects and non-humans, revealing a ‘spectral’ existence in which they take pleasure in building material features that are only partially of their creation. Such ‘tuning’ to the symbiotic real was manifest in the ongoing battle that the trail builders maintained with water. This battle not only emphasized the fragility of their trail construction but also the temporal significance of the environments that these creations were rendered in/with. In conclusion, we argue that these findings present an ecological awareness that views nature as neither static, inert or fixed, but instead, as a temporal ‘nowness’, formed from the ambiguity of being in and with nature. Ecologically, this provides a unique form of orientation that re-establishes the ambiguity between humans and nature, without privileging the former. It is set against this ecological (un)awareness that we believe a re-orientation can be made to our understandings of leisure, the Anthropocene and the nature-culture dyad. (shrink)

Drawing on reflections from a collaborative autoethnography, this article argues that ultramarathon running is defied by a 'dark' ecological sensibility (Morton 2007, 2010, 2016), characterised by moments of pain, disgust, and the macabre. In contrast to existing accounts, we problematise the notion that runners 'use' nature for escape and/or competition, while questioning the aesthetic-causal relationships often evinced within these accounts. With specific reference to the discursive, embodied, spatial and temporal aspects of the sport, we explore the way in which participants (...) begin to appreciate the immense power of nature, while being humbled by the fragile and unstable foundations of human experience. Accordingly this article contributes novel insights into the human-nature complex that seek to move beyond Romantic analyses towards a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between (nature) sport, people and place. (shrink)

I explored the relationship between the “Black Axe” Confraternity and cybercrime, with a particular emphasis on the structural dynamics of the Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes. I investigated whether a conventional hierarchical system governs the membership and remuneration for BEC roles as perpetrators by interviewing an accused “leader” of the “Black Axe” affiliated cybercriminal incarcerated in a prominent Western nation. I supplemented the analysis of interview data with insights from tapped phone records monitored by a law enforcement entity. (...) I merged Actor-network theory and Social Network theory as analytical frameworks and thematically analyzed data to produce six overarching themes: (1) The fluidity of Structure and Adaptive Roles in BEC, (2) Challenges in Visualizing Criminal Networks, (3) Globalization and Transnational Dimensions, (4) Social and Cultural Influences, (5) Internal Cybersecurity Threats and Money Laundering, and (6) Remuneration and Influences of Cryptocurrency, casting a brighter light on the topic. Unlike traditional organized crime, BEC scammers have adopted a nonhierarchical model that is flexible and fluid. I found no evidence of a rigid hierarchy dictating positions and remuneration for BEC roles. Instead, I observed that cybercriminals involved in BEC activities functioned horizontally, promoting fluidity, maneuverability, collaboration, and specialization across various facets of their illicit pursuits. I also highlighted the cross-border links BEC offenders have with other criminal actors facilitated by Black Axe organizational machinery. My research adds value to the existing body of knowledge, utilizing a unique dataset comprising direct testimonies of a high-profile BEC offender affiliated with the ‘hard–to–access,’ Black Axe gang. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Martin Heidegger’s own interpretation of Being and Time in the Black Notebooks. The opening part addresses Heidegger’s singular notions of “thinking” and “questioning” which suggest a critically reflective stance, but involve an initiatory call to surrender to the hidden powers of Beyng. The second part addresses Heidegger’s lament in the Black Notebooks that Being and Time has not produced a “great enemy”, and his critique of the initial existentialist or “anthropological” receptions of his magnum opus. (...) The third part looks at how Heidegger’s thought moves beyond Being and Time, in light of the central role the thinker assigns to the German people in repeating the first “inception” of preSocratic thought, in order to overcome the legacies of Roman universalism, and what Heidegger as early as 1932 was calling “Jewish Christianity”. The final part addresses Heidegger’s conception of “the history of Beyng” as it is developed in the Black Notebooks of the early 1940s, from out of the account of “temporality” in Being and Time: a “history” in which Heidegger’s postulation of a need for the “annihilation“ ” of the essential enemy of the Volk become the lens through which Heidegger can read the Shoah as the “the peak of self-destruction in history”. (shrink)

My intention is to consider Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’. Open Humanities Press, 2020) and to explore how one might rethink the knowledge-creating potentialities of information itself. This has become all the more apparent in the time of lockdowns, physical distancing during the pandemic but the primary purpose of the paper is to look at the distinction between knowledge/information and the role of the teacher in using technology pharmacologically to safeguard the savoirs and to stem the proletarianization of (...) knowledge or stupidity as such. The point is that the pandemic is bringing home the question of the role of the teacher, the role of the school and the necessity of the co-production and co-creation of knowledge. It seems essential to understand the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ in the time of the pandemic as students are left at home without a journey to voyage upon. As such, there is a lack of futurally-bound collective protentions, an absence of any vision projection into the future. What is there in the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ that demonstrates how to use the Internet in bifurcatory ways, to produce what Stiegler calls negentropic knowledge or new forms of knowledge, or what I want to designate as experiments with truth-telling. What does it mean to produce negentropic knowledge without the teacher to guide, curate and care? With the above in mind, and by writing out of the wound of thinking, it is by rethinking the concept of curation in a different way that it is hoped one can contribute to educational research to produce unheard-of bifurcations of knowledge, to invoke Deleuze’s sense of the incomprehensible and Stiegler’s sense of the impossible, the improbable and the incalculable in educational concerns, to pave a path out of the aporia of the present—a present which is without decision and epoch. (shrink)

Despite general agreement within philosophy that peer review is indispensable, its fairness and reliability is often questioned. This article suggests that such worries can to a large extent be met by adopting the practice that reviews as well as earlier versions of papers are made publicly available when the final version of a paper is published. This suggestion combines the advantages of transparency with the merits of anonymity of reviewers. While there are obstacles to this suggestion, the article argues that (...) it would be worthwhile to implement it because it can help map patterns of conduct and secure confidence in the fairness and reliability of review procedures and journal editing within philosophy. (shrink)

This is Volume V of twenty-two of a collection on 20th Century Philosophy. Originally published in 1964, this collection contains original papers assembled and representative in their styles, methods, and preoccupations. The various problems here discussed where to the author both important and unsolved: if others are stimulated to make further progress in solving them, the main purpose of this collection will have been achieved.

The aim of the present paper is to show the results of one chapter of my Doctorate thesis about Thasian black-figure pottery as archaeologically contextualized documents, being part of the votive objects offered at female sanctuaries, especially the Artemision of Thassos. This paper is centered on Thassos, an island situated in the Northern Aegean, settled by Greeks from Paros. We focus on the Archaic Period, more specifically on the sixth century BC, the peak of local production. Departing from the (...) archaeological contexts through excavation reports, we analyze significant social and religious connections among votive materials associated with the Thasian black-figure pottery. These connections brought us elements that allowed us to interpret the multiculturalism imbricated within the objects, the mimicry and the innovations in the decoration of this black-figure pottery, as well as the particular demand in quantitative terms of a type of vessel called lekane, an object that was loaded with information and religious and apotropaic meaning. In addition, those same elements also showed us traits that reveal votive practices, judging by the way the pottery was exhibited, and its decorative features, which to date are only attested in Thassos. The research revealed intrinsic relationships linked to the diverse facets of Artemis, from a goddess protecting the rites of passage to the protection of women in childbirth, as seen in the black-figure pottery, amulets and other apotropaic objects. Moreover, it demonstrated that the multiple facets of Artemis, as protector of women, act in many spheres, such the civic-religious space in connection with the oíkos and social order, the possibility of a good childbirth and the social position of women in Thassos from the Archaic period. (shrink)

A complement to _Researching Schools_ by the same authors, this book provides readers with a strong theoretical framework for school-based research as well as valuable advice on the ways in which networks of specialist groups can work together to create a broad-ranging approach to educational research. Through a critical examination of existing research and current thinking, the authors draw out implications for the effective policy and practice of school-based research. Illustrated throughout with case studies and including a full and detailed (...) literature review, this book will be a vital resource for all academics pursuing research into education. (shrink)

Survivors of the Black Death confronted a world changed very much for the worse, or so we often say when ignoring nuance. There is no denying that many chroniclers wrote from a situation of real anxiety about an uncertain future. Many locales felt the effects of severe wage inflation and dramatic price fluctuations, some work regimes intensified, social mobility increased, and the utility of traditional safety nets failed to provide against localized food scarcity. Nevertheless, we should view with caution (...) descriptions of plague-induced economic and social dislocation leading to anarchy and decadence, which can become colorful exaggerations, especially when buboes and piled bodies get added to the narrative mix. In recent years many researchers have begun to confront the overload of stereotypes about postplague living to which a human inclination to prurience and some vast historical lacunae have led us. Edwin Hunt, James Murray, and others have found men and women in late-medieval Europe seizing latent economic opportunities in the midst of their difficult circumstances, stimulating producer innovations and encouraging a consumption boom. The medical practitioners studied by Jon Arrizabalaga and John Henderson did not surrender to the defeatism often ascribed to them. And despite the evidence that social stress made room for extremism—flagellant self-abuse, attacks upon Jewish communities, urban riots and rebellions—in government and the world of custom pragmatic flexibility insulated foundational institutions against radical upheaval. Important continuities bridged the pre- and postplague eras. Plague epidemiology has also grown more complex in response to a keener understanding of the morphology of disease agents and the historical shaping of disease categories. (shrink)

In the burgeoning debate about neuroscience’s role in contemporary society, the issue of brain optimization, or the application of neuroscientific knowledge and technologies to augment neurocognitive function, has taken center stage. Previous research has characterized media discourse on brain optimization as individualistic in ethos, pressuring individuals to expend calculated effort in cultivating culturally desirable forms of selves and bodies. However, little research has investigated whether the themes that characterize media dialogue are shared by lay populations. This article considers the relationship (...) between the representations of brain optimization that surfaced in a study of British press coverage between 2000 and 2012 and interviews with forty-eight London residents. Both data sets represented the brain as a resource that could be manipulated by the individual, with optimal brain function contingent on applying self-control in one’s lifestyle choices. However, these ideas emerged more sharply in the media than in the interviews: while most interviewees were aware of brain optimization practices, few were committed to carrying them out. The two data sets diverged in several ways: the media’s intense preoccupation with optimizing children’s brains was not apparent in lay dialogue, while interviewees elaborated beliefs about the underuse of brain tissue that showed no presence in the media. This article considers these continuities and discontinuities in light of their wider cultural significance and their implications for the media–mind relationship in public engagement with neuroscience. (shrink)

This paper examines the affective disorders plaguing many young people and the problem of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in particular. It aims to define the limits of the critique of British educationalist Sir Ken Robinson in terms of his philosophy of ‘creativity’ through a consideration of the ideas of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, especially the notions of ‘industrial temporal objects’ and stupidity. It makes the case for adopting elements of each distinct research paradigm as a prolegomena to forging a social critique (...) of capitalist-dominated, market-led educational institutions. The former, it will be seen, identifies some of the problems facing teachers in terms of the use and application of technology, the false divide between arts and the humanities, but falls short of explaining the root of the structural and psychic malaise in neo-liberal regimes regarding classroom breakdown in general. The latter, despite the apocalyptic tone of some his pronouncements provides an update and radicalization of Deleuze’s societies of control thesis in terms of what Stiegler designates ‘uncontrollable societies’. Stiegler, it will be seen, presents a critique of technology that is all the more pressing in an age in which the loss of expectation in the lives of young people can lead to a corresponding fall off or destruction in ‘deep attention’. I want to test the hyperbole of Stiegler’s assertion that young people today suffer from a ‘colossal’ attention deficit disorder of unprecedented scale and magnitude. (shrink)

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) recently provided two recommendations about predictive genetic testing of children. The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium's Pediatrics Working Group compared these recommendations, focusing on operational and ethical issues specific to decision making for children. Content analysis of the statements addresses two issues: (1) how these recommendations characterize and analyze locus of decision making, as well as the risks and benefits of testing, and (2) whether the guidelines conflict or (...) come to different but compatible conclusions because they consider different testing scenarios. These statements differ in ethically significant ways. AAP/ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using best interests of the child and recommends that, absent ameliorative interventions available during childhood, clinicians should generally decline to order testing. Parents authorize focused tests. ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using the interests of the child and other family members and recommends that sequencing results be examined for additional variants that can lead to ameliorative interventions, regardless of age, which laboratories should report to clinicians who should contextualize the results. Parents must accept additional analysis. The ethical arguments in these statements appear to be in tension with each other. (shrink)