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I Point (i + point)
Selected AbstractsThe Secret Life of Things: Rethinking Social OntologyJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 3 2003Iordanis Marcoulatos Despite a recent resurgence of interest in social ontology, the standard conceptualization of social/cultural objects reiterates dichotomies such as nature and culture, subjectivity and objectivity: the objective components of a social/cultural environment are usually divided into their (symbolically vacuous) material substratum, natural or manufactured, and their imposed or assigned social import. Inert materiality and subjectively or intersubjectively assigned meanings and functions remain distinct as constitutive aspects of a reality that is intuitively experienced as a whole. In contrast,by means of examining a broad range of natural/cultural entities,I propose an experiential or visceral ontology of the social, which addresses the comprehensive nature of our experience of cultural objects, as well as their perpetual transmutability within the space between nature and culture, objectivity and subjectivity. This perspective allows for a cathexis of meaning in the material constitution of cultural entities,in contrast to a mere imposition of detachable layers of meaning,and suggests a reconsideration of our unexamined perception of social/political action as editorial supervision and correction. Moreover, I point out the centrality of the concept of practice for recovering the lived sense of social things, since practice, by virtue of its inalienable informality, constitutes the field of Protean renewal of this sense. I understand my approach as complementary to the body-turn in contemporary social theory, since I extend the postulation of meaningfulness in the objective aspect of subjective existence (i.e. the body) towards its lived surroundings, which are here perceived as engaged in a process of meaningful practiced reciprocations with corporeal subjectivities. [source] Application of molecular clocks in ornithology revisitedJOURNAL OF AVIAN BIOLOGY, Issue 6 2006A. Townsend Peterson Molecular clocks have seen many applications in ornithology, but many applications are uncritical. In this commentary, I point out logical inconsistencies in many uses of clocks in avian molecular systematics. I call for greater rigor in application of molecular clocks , clocks should only be used when clocklike behavior has been tested and confirmed, and when appropriate calibrations are available. Authors and reviewers should insist on such rigor to assure that systematics is indeed scientific, and not just storytelling. [source] Changing Definitions of Risk and Responsibility in French Political ScandalsJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2002Violaine Roussel In the 1990s in France, a large number of political scandals developed and many political actors were prosecuted. This process of making politicians responsible related, in particular, to the rise of ,new risks' regarding public health and security. In this paper, I analyse the diffusion and the crystallization of discourses linking public risk and political responsibility. First, I point to some of the social and cognitive bases in which the recent uses of the notions of risk and responsibility are rooted. Second, I focus on the mechanisms through which the notions were mobilized and invested with new definitions in the course of the scandal hearings. Third, I explore some of the effects of the changes which occurred during the 1990s: new perception frames in terms of risk and responsibility are consolidated and are progressively appropriated by social actors located in various professional spheres. [source] The Picture of the Linguistic Brain: How Sharp Can It Be?LINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 8 2010Reply to Fedorenko & Kanwisher What is the best way to learn how the brain analyzes linguistic input? Two popular methods have attempted to segregate and localize linguistic processes: analyses of language deficits subsequent to (mostly focal) brain disease and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in health. A recent Compass article by Fedorenko and Kanwisher (FK, 2009) observes that these methods group together data from many individuals through methods that rely on variable anatomical landmarks and that results in a murky picture of how language is represented in the brain. To get around the variability problem, FK propose to import into neurolinguistics a method that has been successfully used in vision research , one that locates functional Regions Of Interest (fROIs) in each individual brain. In this note, I propose an alternative perspective. I first take issue with FK's reading of the literature. I point out that, when the neurolinguistic landscape is examined with the right linguistic spectacles, the emerging picture , while intriguingly complex , is not murky, but rather, stable and clear, parsing the linguistic brain into functionally and anatomically coherent pieces. I then examine the potential value of the method that FK propose, in light of important micro-anatomical differences between language and high-level vision areas and conclude that as things stand the method they propose is not very likely to bear much fruit in neurolinguistic research. [source] CONCILIAR, NOT CONCILIATORY: HANS URS VON BALTHASAR'S ECCLESIOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS OF VATICAN IIMODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 1 2008STEFFEN LÖSEL In this essay, I analyze von Balthasar's ecclesiology against the backdrop of Vatican II and identify its ecumenical challenges. I demonstrate how von Balthasar's ecclesiology reflects the last council particularly in terms of its integration of ecclesiology and mariology, its gendered conceptualization of the church and its hierarchy, and its reaffirmation of papal primacy. From a Protestant perspective, I have, however, a number of critical questions. First, I question von Balthasar's sacred sociology, which ultimately privileges the magisterium as the decisive source of divine revelation. Second, I point out the peculiarities of von Balthasar's typological interpretation of scripture and its consequences for his ecclesiological vision. Finally, I take issue with his outdated binary gender anthropology. [source] Does population ecology have general laws?OIKOS, Issue 1 2001Peter Turchin There is a widespread opinion among ecologists that ecology lacks general laws. In this paper I argue that this opinion is mistaken. Taking the case of population dynamics, I point out that there are several very general law-like propositions that provide the theoretical basis for most population dynamics models that were developed to address specific issues. Some of these foundational principles, like the law of exponential growth, are logically very similar to certain laws of physics (Newton's law of inertia, for example, is almost a direct analogue of exponential growth). I discuss two other principles (population self-limitation and resource-consumer oscillations), as well as the more elementary postulates that underlie them. None of the "laws" that I propose for population ecology are new. Collectively ecologists have been using these general principles in guiding development of their models and experiments since the days of Lotka, Volterra, and Gause. [source] Utopianism Parodied in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 5 2010An Intertextual Reading of the, Goldstein Treatise' The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, attributed to Big Brother's arch-enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, is the book-in-book in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Along with the appendix, it provides the reader with a theoretical and philosophical framework that complements the narrative. First I point out the importance of Goldstein's tract on an intratextual level; then my focus shifts towards its intertextuality with influential works of European intellectual history, such as Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Marx's and Engels's Communist Manifesto (1848), Spengler's Decline of the West (1918) and Burnham's Managerial Revolution (1941). Bringing into focus the myriad of perspectives that result from the intra-, inter- and extratextual layers in the text, the article shows that the treatise is the ultimate example of Orwell's distinctive fusion of realism and satire. [source] The Death of the Collective Subject in Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über JakobORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 6 2003David Kenosian In previous interpretations of Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob, critics have focused primarily on Johnson's relationship to socialism on the complex narrative structure of the novel. In this essay, I explore a topic that has received comparatively little attention: Johnson's notion of subjectivity. I show that Johnson's attempt to challenge Marxist concepts of the collective subject is inseparably linked to his views on representing history. Johnson's first move is to eliminate the omniscient Socialist Realist narrator who is supposed to have a greater understanding of societal forces than do the characters in the fictional world. But in Mutmassungen über Jakob, it is the protagonist (Jakob) who has a greater understanding of politics than the former Socialist Realist narrator (Rohlfs). Their relationship undermines the political hierarchy constituted by workers and party. In addition, history in the novel is not narrated from a privileged epistemological position. Rather, it is reconstructed in a negotiation among various subjects (characters) at the porous border between history and memory. This self-reflexive model of historiography is, as implied by Uwe Johnson, democratic, in contradistinction to Socialist Realism. Finally, I point out that this model of writing history in Mutmassungen über Jakob anticipates the polyphonic representation of the past in Johnson's Jahrestage (1970,83). In Johnson's final work, German history is consequently written in dialogues with Germans, immigrants from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors, and textual sources from various countries. [source] Friendship, Identity, and Solidarity.RATIO JURIS, Issue 3 2003An Approach to Rights in Plant Closing Cases My focus is on the problem of plant closings, which have become increasingly common as the deindustrialization of America has proceeded since the early 1980s. In a well-known article, Joseph William Singer proposed that workers who sued to keep a plant open in the face of a planned closure might appropriately be regarded as possessing a reliance-based interest in the plant that merited some protection. I seek to extend this sort of argument in two ways. In the first half of the paper, I point to the way in which "tacit obligation" emerges in friendship between persons in the absence of explicit commitments. Employers and employees are of course not as such friends. But I argue that the development of tacit obligations binding friends provides a useful analogy for understanding the growth of similar tacit obligations binding plant owners to workers and local communities. In the second half, I draw on Margaret Radin's work on property and identity to ground a related argument. I suggest that the potential contribution of plants,and the traditions and networks of relationships they help to create and sustain,to the identities of workers and communities provides reason for at least some legal protection of employee and community interests. [source] Fusion of Descriptive and Normative Propositions.RATIO JURIS, Issue 3 2000Descriptive Proposition', Normative Proposition' as Concepts of Degree, The Concepts of I introduce the concept of ,fused descriptive and normative proposition.' I demonstrate that and how this concept has a basis in reality in lawyers' propositions de lege lata, and I point out that and why we do not find fused modality in language qua language, morals and the relationship between parents and children. The concept of ,fused descriptive and normative proposition' is of interest in a number of contexts, inter alia in relation to law, cf. the debate about the status of lawyers' propositions de lege lata ("exactly what kind of propositions are lawyers' propositions about what is the law?"), and in relation to philosophy, cf. the debate about the relationship between ,the is, and ,the ought.' As a consequence of the reality basis and interest of this concept, I see the concepts of ,descriptive proposition' and ,normative proposition' as the extreme points on a graduated dimension, from the purely descriptive to the purely normative. [source] The second modern condition?THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2010Compressed modernity as internalized reflexive cosmopolitization Abstract Compressed modernity is a civilizational condition in which economic, political, social and/or cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner in respect to both time and space, and in which the dynamic coexistence of mutually disparate historical and social elements leads to the construction and reconstruction of a highly complex and fluid social system. During what Beck considers the second modern stage of humanity, every society reflexively internalizes cosmopolitanized risks. Societies (or their civilizational conditions) are thereby being internalized into each other, making compressed modernity a universal feature of contemporary societies. This paper theoretically discusses compressed modernity as nationally ramified from reflexive cosmopolitization, and, then, comparatively illustrates varying instances of compressed modernity in advanced capitalist societies, un(der)developed capitalist societies, and system transition societies. In lieu of a conclusion, I point out the declining status of national societies as the dominant unit of (compressed) modernity and the interactive acceleration of compressed modernity among different levels of human life ranging from individuals to the global community. [source] | ||||||||||||||||