Compared to other animals, humans appear to have a special motivation to share experiences and mental states with others (Clark, 2006;Grice, 1975), which enables them to enter a condition of ‘we’ or shared intentionality (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005). Shared intentionality has been suggested to be an evolutionary response to unique problems faced in complex joint action coordination (Levinson, 2006;Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005) and to be unique to humans (Tomasello, 2014). The theoretical and empirical bases for this claim, (...) however, present several issues and inconsistencies. Here, we suggest that shared intentionality can be approached as an interactional achievement, and that by studying how our closest relatives, the great apes, coordinate joint action with conspecifics, we might demonstrate some correlate abilities of shared intentionality, such as the appreciation of joint commitment. We provide seven examples from bonobo joint activities to illustrate our framework. (shrink)

Just as contemporary metaphysics, in general, is marked by an interest in ground, contemporary social metaphysics, in particular, is marked by an interest in social construction. It’s no surprise, then, that some contemporary metaphysicians have come to understand social construction in terms of ground. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. In particular, I argue that any otherwise plausible account of construction as ground is objectionably revisionary. First, I discuss an argument for the view that construction is (...) ground that is endorsed by its proponents, and identify its weaknesses. I then consider, and dispense with, different versions of the view that construction is ground, and argue that these either overgeneralize, undergeneralize, or both. After responding to the objection that my arguments presuppose monism with respect to construction, I conclude that though ground is relevant to construction, extant ground-theoretic accounts of its relevance fail to capture it. (shrink)

Brian Epstein has argued (in The Ant Trap and ‘Anchoring versus grounding’) that social kinds ‘export’ across worlds. Although the conditions for war criminality are not ‘fixed’ in the Empire, for instance, Darth Vader is a war criminal there. And, according to Epstein, an account of social construction should imply that he is. Ultimately, he argues that ‘grounding-only’ accounts of social construction – like those proposed by Jonathan Schaffer and Aaron Griffith – imply that social kinds do not export across (...) worlds. As a result, he argues that we need more than grounding; in particular, we need both grounding and what he calls ‘anchoring’ to account for it. In this paper, I argue that, once we draw a distinction between what I call ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ social kinds, Epstein’s argument is either invalid or irrelevant. (shrink)

In this contribution we will approach language and images in different modalities: speech and face, anticipated and imagined movements, illusions on the sound by the image. It will be the opportunity for us to revisit the Gestalt concepts which were considered obsolete since structuralism in Humanities. As instantiated by Gilbert Durand in The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (1999, French 1st ed. 1960), we shall recall that Gestalt is not—even implicitly—an exclusively static approach to cognition. On the contrary we will (...) emphasize that forms can emerge from movements and stabilize in memory, thence morphology. And for speech, we will consider phonology as the stabilized outcome from audible and visible gestures of the mouth—caught in the time-course of a flow of some four in six syllables by second—via the perception of motor coordinations: which is necessary to master the most common expression of language between humans. We will adopt here also for the perceptual flows of spoken language, Multimodal Scene Analysis, the ongoing legacy of Gestalt Theory, including one of our main research topics: the gestural expression of the face and the hand for Deaf people, who practise as an augment French LPC (Langue française Parlée Complétée), adapted in 1967 from Cued Speech by its originator Dr Richard Cornett. (shrink)

Many students have experienced the death of a loved one, which increases their risk of grief and mental health problems. Formal and social support can contribute to better coping skills and personal growth in bereaved students. The purpose of this study was to examine the support that students received or wanted to receive and its relation to students’ mental health. We also looked at students’ needs when receiving support and barriers in seeking formal and social support. Participants completed an online (...) survey consisting of questions about their sociodemographic characteristics, the support they received or wanted to receive, and support needs and barriers in seeking support. The survey also included three scales assessing grief, mental health distress, and personal growth. First, we analyzed the data descriptively. Next, we used MANCOVA to examine whether students who did or did not receive or wanted more support differed in terms of their grief, mental health distress, or personal growth. About 30% of students needed more support and experienced more grief and mental health distress than students who had their support needs met. Students who received support experienced more personal growth and grief than students who did not receive support. Students indicated a need for feeling acknowledged and safe. Feeling like a burden to others and perceiving their problems as not serious enough to warrant support were common barriers to seeking support. Our results indicate that support should be provided actively to students after the death of a loved one, and support being available on an ongoing basis. (shrink)

Si les animaux d’élevage comme les animaux d’expérimentation intéressent depuis une trentaine d’années de plus en plus de personnes – de chercheurs, de militants –, les animaux dit de compagnie, en revanche, semblent toujours pâtir du préjugé selon lequel, parce qu’ils relèveraient d’une relation privée, ils seraient sans intérêt scientifique ou philosophique. Donna Haraway propose une façon tout à fait singulière de court-circuiter cet arrêt de la pensée afin de pouvoir re-problématiser cette relation à nouveau frais. Ce qui change immédiatement, (...) c’est le caractère non plus privé mais politique de cette co-relation : l’histoire biologique et politique qui nous unit à ces animaux dit de compagnie apparus massivement dans les années 1970 est toute aussi complexe que celle que nous partageons par ailleurs avec nos autres espèces compagnes. Comment raconter cette histoire et hériter des conséquences de cette co-évolution? Comment prendre au sérieux, moralement, politiquement nos relations inter-espèces? (shrink)

It is in the obscure terrain between the life-world of Greek science and technology and the language of its metaphysics that one sees the attempts of early navigators and map-makers to conceptualize what lies beyond the oikoumene. This interest later effects astronomy in terms of what is “beyond the heavens [ezo tes ouranos]” and then in metaphysics as a “Beyond Being [epekeina tes ousias],” an ideal Beyond proposed by Plato in Republic and one that is to eventually become a mainstay (...) of NeoPlatonism. Thus, the “fundamental act” that Romm describes in the above quote was not only taken up with geographical interest, but is one that can be seen as a preparatory gesture in a culture readying itself for the advent of metaphysics, a gesture that continued to make itself felt up until the last days of the Ancient Academy in the fifth century AD. The threads of the intellectual history of a Beyond Being find technological roots in the increasingly sophisticated acts of representation that one finds in early cartography, astronomy, and cosmology, one of which will be to mark boundaries around the heavens themselves and to call that Being. (shrink)

Dans un régime comme celui de la République populaire de Chine, où prévaut la suprématie d’un Parti-État unique, la politique et le politique constituent, a fortiori plus qu’ailleurs, la chasse gardée de l’élite dirigeante du pays, à savoir les cadres du Parti communiste. Cet article tente de saisir qui sont les élites politiques aux commandes de la Chine d’aujourd’hui à travers l’analyse du modus operandi de l’École des cadres du Parti de Shanghai. L’étude de cette institution, qui participe à la (...) régulation de la circulation des élites et constitue l’un des lieux privilégiés de la transmission et de l’exercice du pouvoir, permet, par-delà son propre fonctionnement, d’éclairer la nature et le devenir même du régime. S’il apparaît que les forces modernisatrices, en assimilant davantage l’École du Parti à un institut d’administration publique, œuvrent à la professionnalisation du métier de cadre, c’est également et avant tout afin de mieux perpétuer l’hégémonie du Parti-État unique.In a regime where the one Party-State rule still prevails, as is the case in the People’s Republic of China, the polity and politics constitute – here more than anywhere else – the private ground of the country’s ruling elite, i.e. the cadres of the Communist Party. This article attempts to grasp who the political elites in control of contemporary China are, by analyzing the modus operandi of the Shanghai Party School for Cadres. The study of an institution that takes part in the circulation of the elites and hence constitutes one of the privileged playing fields for the transmission and the exercise of power, allows, beyond the understanding of its own working, to shed light on the very nature and evolution of the regime. If the modernizing forces appear to work towards the professionalization of the cadres’ craft by equating the Party School to an institute of public administration, they ultimately do so in order to better perpetuate the supremacy ofthe one-Party system. (shrink)

Cet article propose un tour d’horizon de différents types de biais que l’on peut rencontrer dans les études basées sur l’annotation de corpus vidéo de langue des signes. En tâchant de situer objectivement les choix effectués et les biais potentiels à chaque étape, nous décrivons les méthodologies que nous avons mises en place dans trois études, portant respectivement sur la synchronisation des composantes corporelles, le mouvement des sourcils et les clignements des yeux, puis la coarticulation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetoric of Romantic ProphecySara GuyerThe Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Ian BalfourStanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. 368. $70.00, cloth; $29.95, paperback.Not insignificantly, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot are the first two names to appear in Ian Balfour's excellent study The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Benjamin and Blanchot are authors of two of the most influential essays on romanticism, essays that, it just so happens, Ian Balfour is (...) responsible for introducing to an English-reading audience. 1 Thus, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is not only a long awaited, prize-winning book by a major theorist of romanticism, it is also a book written by the first English translator of Benjamin's and Blanchot's essays. Both Blanchot's "The Athenaeum" and Benjamin's "On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" expose the incompletion of the romantic project and unsettle the relation between the past and the present. They also provide a context for understanding the kind of book that Ian Balfour has written. Like its eminent predecessors, this book focuses on local phenomena, yet its force far exceeds the field that it so thoughtfully treats. In it, Balfour shows how a turn to the past (to a set of historical texts) has the effect of unsettling the present, and he argues that an apparent turn to the future (prophecy) has as its issue the present.The book's introduction, entitled "The Call of Prophecy and the Future (After Benjamin)," alerts us to the fact that Benjamin and Blanchot, who have written extensively on language, also have written compellingly on the prophetic. While the prophetic today most often seems to signify religion's naive or violent claims on the future (and by implication on the present), in Benjamin's and Blanchot's work—and in Balfour's work—"the prophetic" (by which Balfour means not a genre, but a "mode") poses problems of referentiality and interpretation. Benjamin's treatment of messianism and allegory in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" offers Balfour a clear framework for undertaking this examination. And, in style and approach, Benjamin is the thinker with whom Balfour has the closest kinship. Like Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Balfour's The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is a historical study that is not historicist, that is, it does not aim to account for a historical phenomenon, but is a philosophical and rhetorical investigation into language.However, it is Blanchot's brief essay "Prophetic Speech"—a review of André Neher's L'essence du prophétisme—that informs Balfour's thinking about the prophetic. Indeed, Balfour's book can be read as a meditation on the rhetorical implications of Blanchot's suggestion that: [End Page 257]Prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence. 2With this passage, Blanchot not only recasts the conventional account of prophecy (and, implicitly, the symbolic reading upon which prophecy relies), but also shows that if prophecy turns the future into a referent—and hence becomes history—the present is lost. Balfour's transfer of Blanchot's account of the prophetic to romanticism is broadly explained by the debates within romanticism (and contemporary criticism of romanticism) about referentiality and the primacy of symbol over allegory, debates that today are most well-known to non-romanticists through Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality."Balfour offers a lucid account of his project—and its relation to history and historicist criticism—when he explains:If there is a historical force to the analysis here, it lies not in the attempt to show how representative these texts were of some larger, pervasive phenomenon—although they sometimes are—but rather to mark what was possible to be thought and done at a given moment. More than that, the analysis implicitly and sometimes explicitly confronts... (shrink)

Precarious times have material consequences. Yet, feminist new materialist approaches demonstrate that the concepts of the “ma-terial” and of “matter” are radically different than what is com-monly held in the Western tradition. This article argues that femi-nist new materialism provides practical, essential, and ethical tools for political action in dynamic and entangled worlds. In such worlds (e.g., the Anthropocene), it is critically needed to establish an ethics of responsiveness, a culture of ethical living and dying with others. Yet, this ethic (...) must respond to and acknowledge our relational, entangled, dynamic, and agentic ontology. In response to this, this article proposes the “pluri-person,” a political figure that mobilizes contributions of feminist new materialism to produce an ethical, ontology-making, everyday practice/response to “Precari-ous Times.”. (shrink)

Soul is the self-moving, self-constituting entity linking the transcendent with the immanent. Proclus distinguishes many types of souls. This chapter concentrates on the World Soul and the rational human soul. The World Soul infuses the sensible, temporal, divided, and material cosmos with unity and Forms ultimately deriving from the One and Intelligible Being, in a manner reminiscent of human phantasia. The mathematical psychology of the Timaeus is explained as referring to the Soul’s activity, rather than its essence. Concerning the human (...) soul, with its eternal essence and temporal activity, the authors concentrate on the function and nature of the many ‘vehicles’, assisting the soul’s descent and, in a different manner, its ascent. (shrink)

Prior to August Weismann’s 1889 germ-plasm theory, social reformers believed that humans could inherit the effects of a salubrious environment and, by passing environmentally-induced modifications to their offspring, achieve continuous progress. Weismann’s theory disrupted this logic and caused many to fear that they had little control over human development. As numerous historians have observed, this contributed to the birth of the eugenics movement. However, through an examination of the work of social scientists Lester Frank Ward, Richard T. Ely, Amos Griswold (...) Warner, James Mark Baldwin, Simon Nelson Patten, Alfred Kroeber, Walter Robinson Smith, and Luther Lee Bernard, I demonstrate that Weismann’s ideas also prompted scholars to create of theories of human progress in which the social environment had a central role and biological heredity had a diminished one. Furthermore, in creating a new theory of social progress based on a concept called “social heredity,” the thinkers surveyed in this article separated biological and social thought and asserted the independence of the American social sciences. I argue that this represents an important moment in the maturation of the human sciences, and I suggest that the germ-plasm theory of heredity deserves a larger place in histories of the development of the American social scientific disciplines. (shrink)

Dall-E2 and Stable Diffusion promote their text-to-image models based on their level of (photo)realism. The use of photographic language is not superficial or accidental but indicative of a broader tendency in computer science and data practice. To nuance the general application of photorealism, I position the term alongside photographic realism and computational photorealism. To contextualize important nuances between these three terms, contemporary examples from astrophotography are analysed and reconstructed using text-to-image models. From the comparative analysis, computational photorealism emerges as a (...) modified term that recognizes the relationship between photography and text-to-image models without conflating their ontological and epistemological differences. (shrink)

Chora – le «cratère à mélanger» maternel, vannant et secouant de Platon – remplit «l’écart explicatif» entre les paradigmes formels «intelligibles et toujours existants» (48E5) et un monde encosmique «généré et visible». Proclus traite la gamme polysémique des termes utilisés par Platon pour chôra : hypodochê (réceptacle), kratêr (cratère à mélanger), etc., comme désignant des forces actives dans un univers où la sympathie cosmique règne, à partir des plus élevées, jusqu’aux plus basses manifestations de l’ «Un» transcendant. L’univers proclusien est (...) un «hénothéisme», dans lequel une «unité» dominante surgit sur la totalité de l’Être et du Devenir. Chôra permet à la fois au monde immatériel et au monde matériel de recevoir, de manière appropriée à chacun, les mêmes dons transcendants que leurs homologues intellectifs‑intelligibles superieurs. Aucun niveau de la réalité n’est dépourvu de cette donation. La réceptivité (hypodochê), indéterminée, mais toujours active, est présente à tous les niveaux. L’âme reçoit l’Intellect, la temporalité reçoit le temps monadique, la matière reçoit la structure géométrique polyédrique, etc. Chôra n’est pas l’equivalent de la matière, mais permet à la matière d’être imprimée par des paradigmes formels. Dans son rôle de «cratère à mélanger», elle protège la matière de sa potentielle itérabilité et dissolution infinie. Dans l’univers proclusien, le Bien atteint la dernière et la plus extrême de ses limites, il est espace et lieu, recevant à la fois l’expansivité et une capacité à donner place à la forme pour qu’elle puisse s’imposer à la matière. Après tout, les dons lui sont accordés depuis la plus haute hypostase, celle de la Limite et de l’Illimité, premier niveau après l’Un lui‑même. Vitale pour la création, la Chôra est alors la «mère» de tout. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que, comme nous le dit Proclus, la chôra soit, en fait, la déesse Rhéa. En hommage à la littérature révélatrice antique, comme les Oracles chaldaïques, Homère et Hésiode, Proclus fournit une élucidation non seulement philosophique, mais aussi théologique, de la chôra. À la différence de Platon, il théologise la Physique. (shrink)

Strategies based on performance measurement and feedback are commonly used to support quality improvement among nurses. These strategies require practice change, which, for nurses, rely to a large extent on their capacity to coordinate with each other effectively. However, the levers for coordinated action are difficult to mobilize. This discussion paper offers a theoretical reflection on the challenges related to coordinating nurses' actions in the context of practice changes initiated by performance measurement and feedback strategies. We explore how Jürgen Habermas' (...) theory of Communicative Action may shed light on the issues underlying nurses' collective actions and self‐determination in practice change and the implications for the design of strategies based on performance measurement and feedback. Based on this theory, we propose differences between communicative and functional coordination according to the nature of the actions and the purposes involved. The domains of action underlying these coordination processes, which Habermas referred to as the lifeworld and the system, are then used to draw a parallel with aspects of nursing practice. Further exploration of these concepts allows us to consider the tensions between the demands of the system and the self‐determination of nurses within their practice. (shrink)

There are an increasing number of cell therapy approaches being studied and employed world‐wide. An emerging area in this field is the use of human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) products for the treatment of injuries/diseases that cannot be effectively managed through current approaches. However, as with any cell therapy, vast numbers of functional and safe cells are required. Bioreactors provide an attractive avenue to generate clinically relevant cell numbers with decreased labour and decreased batch to batch variation. Yet, current methods (...) of performing quality control are not readily scalable to the cell densities produced during bioreactor scale‐up. One potential solution is the application of inducible/controllable suicide genes that can trigger cell death in unwanted cell types. These types of approaches have been demonstrated to increase the quality and safety of the resultant cell products. In this review, we will provide background on these approaches and how they could be used together with bioreactor technology to create effective bioprocesses for the generation of high quality and safe hPSCs for use in regenerative medicine approaches. (shrink)

Le présent article établit deux résultats distincts mais complémentaires : il montre d’abord que Jan Patočka découvre, dans les années soixante-dix, le primat épistémologique de la donation, à partir duquel la question du monde dans son rapport au problème du donné se pose et se résout – le monde comme donné en totalité, le donné comme avance du monde ; il montre ensuite que cette découverte permet au philosophe tchèque de poser à nouveaux frais la question du sujet et de (...) faire émerger une nouvelle figure du sujet, dont les principales caractéristiques anticipent sur celles de l’adonné – le sujet comme adonné-au-monde. Cet article aboutit ainsi à montrer que les concepts fondamentaux de la phénoménologie de la donation (donné, adonné, contre-expérience, témoin, appel-réponse, etc.), quand ils sont appliqués à la phénoménologie de Patočka, ne fonctionnent pas comme des catégories anachroniques, mais au contraire comme des clés herméneutiques qui révèlent à la fois l’originalité et l’actualité de cette phénoménologie. (shrink)

La capacité des êtres humains à obéir aux ordres, même si ceux-ci sont jugés atroces, n’a plus à être prouvée. Comme l’a souligné Howard Zinn, « D’un point de vue historique, les évènements les plus terribles – tels que la guerre, les génocides et l’esclavage – ont résulté non pas de la désobéissance, mais de l’obéissance» (Zinn, 1997). Mais la question de savoir « comment» les individus peuvent commettre des atrocités lorsqu’ils suivent des ordres reste ouverte. Les études de Milgram (...) sont célèbres pour avoir montré une forte soumission aux ordres de l’expérimentateur. Mais ces études n’ont révélé que les facteurs situationnels et sociaux favorisant l’obéissance. Elles n’ont pas permis de comprendre comment tant de personnes ont accepté d’envoyer des chocs douloureux et potentiellement mortels à une autre personne. Dans cet article, j’opposerai les entretiens qualitatifs réalisés avec d’anciens génocidaires au Rwanda et la recherche expérimentale en neurosciences pour tenter de faire émerger un élément de réponse à cette question critique. Je soutiendrai que le dépassement des frontières entre différentes disciplines scientifiques est la clé d’une meilleure compréhension de la façon dont l’obéissance modifie la prosocialité. Je défendrai également l’idée provocatrice que les chercheurs devraient saisir l’opportunité de quitter leur laboratoire pour étudier la question de l’obéissance. (shrink)

These hominins used their ability to choose freely to distance themselves from God at some point in history. These stories follow the Augustinian heritage. Some like contend that neither paleoanthropological nor genetic data lend credence to the existence of a superhuman society. This analysis shed light on the variety of religious and scientific writings. A detailed summary would be outside the purview of the study. Because the terms "science" and "religion" are so broad, the literature has split into many areas (...) of "science-engaged theology," where a particular scientific claim or subfield is examined in light of a particular theological argument. Asking whether Christian eschatology is consistent with scientific claims about cultural evolution or the cosmic fate of the cosmos would be a more pertinent question than whether Christianity is consistent with Science. The range of subjects that Science and religion can address grows as their respective fields become more global and expansive. All the religious philosophies say that this world will end one day, and there will be a day of judgment after it. Same in the Case of Science, nowadays metaphysics proves that this universe will end a day after some time. If there will be an end of the world, there will also be a day of judgment. So, aspects of the end of the world and the Day of Judgment have also been proved by scientific studies and religious philosophies. (shrink)

This paper draws on an in-depth phenomenological analysis of some interviews taken from volunteers, inviting them to reflect on their lived experiences of meaningfulness in the context of volunteering and citizenship. It is found that while some testimonies reinforce the standard conceptions of meaningfulness, other testimonies vary from it. The main challenge of this contribution consists in phenomenologically describing this alternative picture of meaningfulness, depicted as the event of witnessing. In a final part, the authors consider how volunteering is at (...) times especially prone to further experiences of witnessing. (shrink)

Adaptive phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to cope with environmental variability, and yet, despite its adaptive significance, phenotypic plasticity is neither ubiquitous nor infinite. In this review, we merge developmental and population genetic perspectives to explore costs and limits on the evolution of plasticity. Specifically, we focus on the role of modularity in developmental genetic networks as a mechanism underlying phenotypic plasticity, and apply to it lessons learned from population genetic theory on the interplay between relaxed selection and mutation accumulation. We (...) argue that the environmental specificity of gene expression and the associated reduction in pleiotropic constraints drive a fundamental tradeoff between the range of plasticity that can be accommodated and mutation accumulation in alternative developmental networks. This tradeoff has broad implications for understanding the origin and maintenance of plasticity and may contribute to a better understanding of the role of plasticity in the origin, diversification, and loss of phenotypic diversity. (shrink)

To develop effective public health management strategies, it is necessary to account for the viewpoints of all stakeholders. Thus, anthropological approaches can potentially inform strategies for preventing and managing zoonotic diseases. Here, we use Q fever as a starting point for exploring how small ruminant farmers perceive the reality of microbes by disentangling the farmers’ often subtle relationships with their livestock, disease, and the world in general. We found that livestock farmers feel like they exist in the borderlands between two (...) worlds: the non-naturalistic World A, characterised by long timespans and complex relationships with non-humans, and the naturalistic World B, characterised by short timespans and the control of non-humans. The occurrence of diseases leads to tension and shifts between the worlds, depending on how much farmers entrust World B with health risk management and relations with non-humans. Significant or complete delegation of these responsibilities may result in a sense of unease and dispossession, particularly when World B fails to provide productive solutions. Whether farmers view Q fever as mysterious and threatening is also highly dependent on the degree of health risk delegation. Overall, the agent that causes Q fever is perceived in one of two ways: as a fearsome pathogen or a normal denizen in the farm’s ecosystem. These results have implications beyond Q fever and clearly illustrate the concept of the “microbial turn”, which emphasizes the plurality and ambivalence of the relationships between humans and microbes. (shrink)

In recent years, humans’ ability to selectively modify genes has increased dramatically as a result of the development of new, more efficient, and easier genetic modification technology. In this paper, we argue in favor of using this technology to improve the welfare of agricultural animals. We first argue that using animals genetically modified for improved welfare is preferable to the current status quo. Nevertheless, the strongest argument against pursuing gene editing for welfare is that there are alternative approaches to addressing (...) some of the challenges of modern agriculture that may offer ethical advantages over genetic modification; namely, a dramatic shift towards plant-based diets or the development of in vitro meat. Nevertheless, we provide reasons for thinking that despite these possible comparative disadvantages there are important reasons for continuing the pursuit of welfare improvements via genetic modification. (shrink)

Translation for this volume by Lydia Patton of Chapter 9 (pages 179-200) of Émilie du Châtelet's Institutions de Physique (Foundations of Physics). Original publication date 1750. Paris: Chez Prault Fils.

This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of ‘transformative illegality’, we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we (...) show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms’ legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms ‘became legal’ when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts. (shrink)