In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Montaigne and the Coherence of EclecticismPierre ForceSince the publication of Pierre Hadot's essays on ancient philosophy by Arnold Davidson in 1995,2 Michel Foucault's late work on "the care of the self"3 has appeared in a new light. We now know that Hadot's work was familiar to Foucault as early as the 1950s.4 It is also clear that Foucault's notion of "techniques of the self" is very close to what (...) Hadot calls "spiritual exercises." At the same time, there are important differences between the views of these two philosophers, and Hadot has often expressed his regret that Foucault's untimely death prevented them from exploring these differences.5 One important point of disagreement was the status of eclecticism. In Foucault's interpretation of ancient philosophy, the "constitution of the self" implied a personal choice among disparate philosophical references: "Writing as a personal exercise done by the self and for the self, is an art of disparate truth."6 In a 1989 article Hadot argued from a historical point of view that, so far as Stoicism and Epicureanism were concerned, [End Page 523] eclecticism had no place in a mature practice of philosophy. Foucault's favorite example, Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, in which Stoic arguments were invoked along with Epicurean arguments, was a work for beginners. In a mature practice of Stoicism, one would stick to the arguments of the Stoic school, choose them for their coherence, and instead of trying to forge a spiritual identity for oneself through writing, one would "liberate oneself from one's individuality in order to raise oneself up to universality."7 Hadot added that "it is only in the New Academy—in the person of Cicero, for instance—that a personal choice is made according to what reason considers as most likely at a given moment."8 This discussion of Foucault may give the impression that Hadot was somewhat dismissive of eclecticism. Yet in a 2001 interview Hadot claimed that he had always admired Cicero's intellectual independence, and he proposed a reappraisal "of an attitude that has always had a bad reputation: eclecticism."9Something very similar is a stake in the work of Alexander Nehamas, as Lanier Anderson and Joshua Landy showed in their study of his Art of Living. In the conception of philosophy as a "way of life" (Hadot) or "care of the self" (Foucault) or "self-fashioning" (Nehamas), a central issue is the relationship between theoretical coherence and the coherence of the person who theorizes. Elaborating on Nehamas's chapter on Montaigne, Anderson and Landy argue that there is a move in Montaigne away from doctrinal coherence and towards a coherence of the self. As they put it, "the harmonious whole Montaigne commends [... ] is not a coherent body of fact or theory; it is the unified self of the theorizer."10 Anderson and Landy show that this brings up all kinds of difficulties: can this unified self be other than a fiction? If that is the case, how can philosophy be a way of life? Nehamas's answer is very much in the spirit of the late Foucault: there is a coherence of the self in Montaigne, and this coherence is the product of writing as a philosophical activity. The self is fashioned through writing.Because Montaigne writes in the ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life, one may recall Hadot's suggestion that Foucault's notion of [End Page 524] "writing the self" is an intriguing but historically inaccurate description of ancient philosophical practice. But perhaps Hadot agrees with Foucault after all, since in his most recent interviews, he speaks favorably of eclecticism, a notion that is central to Foucault's analysis of self-fashioning through writing. The case of Montaigne is particularly interesting for these purposes, not only because the Essays seem to be the prototypical example of "writing the self," but also because eclecticism is both discussed and practiced throughout the Essays. I propose to take a fresh look at this issue by investigating the status of eclecticism in Montaigne's Essays. This must start with an examination of the philosophical tradition most closely associated with... (shrink)

In his 1785-review of the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Kant objects to Herder's conception of nature as being imbued with active forces. This attack is usually evaluated against the background of Kant's critical project and his epistemological concern to caution against the “metaphysical excess” of attributing immanent properties to matter. In this paper I explore a slightly different reading by investigating Kant's pre-critical account of creation and generation. The aim of this is to show that (...) Kant's struggle with the forces of matter has a long history and revolves around one central problem: that of how to distinguish between the non-purposive forces of nature and the intentional powers of the mind. Given this history, the epistemic stricture that Kant's critical project imposes on him no longer appears to be the primary reason for his attack on Herder. It merely aggravates a problem that Kant has been battling with since his earliest writings. (shrink)

Professor Margaret Jo Osler of the University of Calgary, an historian of early modern science and philosophy (and a member of the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Philosophy since 2002) died on September 15, 2010. Born on November 27, 1942, she proudly proclaimed herself to be a "red diaper baby" and particularly delighted in telling her right-wing friends how her middle name was her parents' homage to Stalin. An energetic scholar with a vibrant and positive (...) personality, Maggie, as everyone who worked with her came to call her, never considered retirement and was actively working right up to her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer in early July, 2010.After graduating from Swarthmore College in .. (shrink)

Our examination explicates not only how Leibniz’s emphasis on force or power squares well with (and most probably largely stems from) his endorsement of certain central Aristotelian tenets, but also how the concept of force is incorporated into his mature idealist metaphysics. That metaphysics, in turn, generates some thorny problems with regard to the concept of passivity; and so we shall also ask whether and how Leibniz’s monadology, emphasizing the activity as much as it does, is able to encompass the (...) passivity of created substances. (shrink)

In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant claims that perception of force through touch is fundamental to our knowledge of substance in space. However, he also holds that perception cannot have modal content. Causation is a modal notion, so how can Kant allow perception of causal force? In response to this puzzle, I provide a new reading of Kant’s theory of touch. Touch does not involve perception of the necessity of a cause, but it does involve awareness of the (...) activity of our body in relation to other bodies. Human embodied activity has a hitherto unrecognized central role in Kant’s accounts of empirical cognition of substance in space, the science of such a substance, and the irreducibility of its causal forces. (shrink)

The health of newborns has always been subject to the natural lottery. When in the past a severely disabled baby was born, nature provided the “solution,” and the child did not survive. Medical technology has brought about a change; fetuses who would have died during pregnancy or newborns who once would have had little chance to survive are now kept alive. Although these technological advances do benefit many children, the dark side is that more severely handicapped babies are surviving.When a (...) severely disabled baby is born, all persons concerned are faced with emotional difficulties as well as moral and legal dilemmas. Questions that arise include whether it is acceptable, morally and legally, to allow the severely handicapped newborn to die by forgoing treatment or by direct intervention. (shrink)

Although chemical phenomena are primarily associated with electrons in atoms, ions, and molecules, the masses, charges, spins, and other properties of the nuclei in these species contribute significantly as well. Isotopes, for instance, have proven invaluable in chemistry, in particular the elucidation of reaction mechanisms. Elements with unstable nuclei, for example carbon-14 undergoing beta decay, have enriched chemistry and many other scientific disciplines. The nuclei of all elements have a much more subtle and largely unknown effect on chemical phenomena. All (...) nuclei are innately chiral and, because electrons can penetrate nuclei, all atoms and molecules are likewise chiral. This article describes in considerable detail the discovery of chiral nuclei, how this unusual chirality may influence the chemical behavior of atoms and molecules, and how atomic chirality may have been responsible for the synthesis of optically active molecules in the pre-biotic world. (shrink)

Gassendi holds that matter is intrinsically active - it possesses an innate active force or power. This paper explains what that active power consists in and why Gassendi adopted this view.

It is difficult to evaluate the role of activity - of force or of that which has causal efficacy - in Descartes’ natural philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes claims to include in his natural philosophy only that which can be described geometrically, which amounts to matter (extended substance) in motion (where this motion is described kinematically).’ Yet on the other hand, rigorous adherence to a purely geometrical description of matter in motion would make it difficult to account for the (...) interactions among the particles that constitute Descartes’ universe, since the notions of extension and kinematical motion do not in themselves imply any causal agency. There is, after all, no reason to expect that a particle whose single essence is extension, even if we suppose it to be moving, should impart motion to another particle, while conversely, there is no reason to expect a resting particle to hinder the motion of an impinging one. Descartes' hankering for an austere ontology of matter in motion is in danger of excluding causal agency (force, conceived dynmically) from matter. To the modern reader it may seem obvious that Descartes did not get himself into such a fix, since matter in motion so readily reminds us of kinetic energy or of some more primitive notion of force. Yet by no means is it obvious that Descartes attributed causal efficacy to matter in motion per se. Serious scholars have held opposite positions on this issue. Westfall, Gabbey, and others’ have argued that although on the metaphysical plane Descartes attempted to eliminate force from his mechanical universe, nonetheless ‘force is a real feature’ of his mechanical world. The thrust of this view is that Descartes conceived of force as ‘the capacity of a body in motion to act’, by means of impact, upon other bodies. An opposing interpretation, defended here, is that Descartes did in fact deny causal agency to moving matter per se, restricting agency to immaterial substances such as the human mind, angels, and God. The intention of this interpretation is not to de-emphasize the role of matter in motion in Descartes’ explanation of nature, but rather to stress the fact that Descartes did not conceive of this moving matter dynamically. -/- Reprinted in Descartes, ed. by J. Cottingham, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 281–310. (shrink)

Background: The use of forced treatment and care of home-dwelling persons with dementia is a universally important topic. These patients are completely dependent on care from others to continue living at home. Aim: This study aimed to gain insights into formal decisions related to the forced treatment and care of home-dwelling persons with dementia. Design and sample: This is a cross-sectional study, based on formal decisions of forced treatment and care of home-dwelling persons with dementia in Norway between 1 January (...) 2015 and 31 December 2016. Methods: Descriptive statistical analysis. Statistically significant associations suitable for binary logistic regression were presented as odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals. Ethical considerations: Approved by The Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics, and by the Norwegian Center for Research. Results: We found 108 formal decisions of forced treatment and care of persons with dementia. Decisions of admission represented 57% of the data, other medical and safety decisions 27%, and assistance with activities of daily living 16%. In most cases, physicians were responsible for the decisions (77%), but nurses and family members were often involved. Discussion and conclusion: This study demonstrated a prevalence rate of formally documented decisions of forced treatment and care much lower than findings in previous studies. Poor documentation may constitute a risk for the safety and wellbeing of persons with dementia. Although physicians were usually responsible for the decisions, nurses and family members were often involved in the process. Family participation in forced treatment and care raises ethical dilemmas. More research on the experiences of nurses, persons with dementia and family members with forced treatment and care is needed to aid ethical, legal, and clinically challenging decision-making processes. (shrink)

Continuum physical theories model states as real- or complex-valued fields and dynamics as linear operators on infinite dimensional spaces. Under explanatory realism, an ontic interpretation incurs two semantic commitments: (i) real-valued physical magnitudes must denote relative to the theory’s admissible state interface, and (ii) the theory must be semantically closed under its own evolution and readout rules. Denotation is interface-relative: it requires the existence of a total continuous witness on names. Equivalently, it requires bounded input dependence at each fixed finite (...) precision. Failure of bounded input dependence is captured by forced extensional totalization (FET), in which even coarse output precision cannot be stabilized by any finite prefix of a state name. We give a physics-facing construction of FET for the three dimensional wave equation with Kirchhoff point readout. We construct a countable family of smooth, compactly supported, finite-energy initial states localized on pairwise disjoint shrinking latitude belts on the Huygens sphere, and restrict the admissible domain to states containing at most one localized contingency. Each nonzero belt perturbation is normalized to contribute the same order-one amount to the readout, while the zero state contributes none. Under any non-oracular state interface satisfying a minimal locality-of-access condition, no finite prefix can rule out activation of some sufficiently deep belt. The induced point readout therefore behaves like the existential predicate ``some belt is active'', exhibits FET at the zero state, and fails to denote. Semantic closure fails: the evolution--readout pipeline yields a localized point magnitude that is non-denoting relative to the fixed state interface. The result isolates a semantic obstruction to ontic readings of continuum dynamics. It is independent of computability, predictability, or measurement feasibility, and it holds despite smooth compact support, finite energy, and classical well-posedness. (shrink)

Leibniz believed the ‘true concept of substance’ is found in ‘the concept of forces or powers’. Accordingly, he conceived monadic substances as metaphysically primitive forces whose modifications manifest both as monads’ appetitions and perceptions and as derivative forces in monads’ organic bodies. Relationships between substances, and in particular the ethical relationships that hold between rational substances, are also foregrounded by Leibniz’s concept of substances as forces. In section one, we discuss the derivative forces of bodies. (...) In section two, we consider monads’ perceptions and appetitions. Section three attends to ethical aspects of Leibniz’s account, focusing in particular on souls’ representative natures and the correspondence that obtains between perceptions in one and perceptions in all others. In section four, however, I argue that Leibniz’s commitment to the doctrine of the conservation of force makes it impossible for any one substance to pursue its own advantage by increasing its active force without there being a correlative disadvantageous decrease in the active force of substances elsewhere in the universe. While the reconciliatory proposals offered do not entirely remove the tension between Leibniz’s ethics and his physics, they do soften its severity and allow it to be regarded in a more positive light. (shrink)

This essay proposes a new interpretation of a central, and yet overlooked, argument Leibniz offers against Descartes’s power-free ontology of the corporeal world. Appealing to considerations about the successiveness of motion, Leibniz attempts to show that the reality of motion requires force. It is often assumed that the argument is driven by concerns inspired by Zeno. Against such a reading, this essay contends that Leibniz’s argument is instead best understood against the background of an Aristotelian view of the priority of (...) real being over time. The essay also shows how this alternative interpretation can help to shed new light on the difference between Leibnizian forces and Aristotelian powers, as well as on Leibniz’s famous claim that accounting for force leads us beyond the mechanistic corporeal realm. (shrink)

Manifest Activity presents and critically examines the model of human power, the will, our capacities for purposeful conduct, and the place of our agency in the natural world of one of the most important and traditionally under-appreciated philosophers of the 18th century: Thomas Reid. For Reid, contrary to the view of many of his predecessors, it is simply manifest that we are active with respect to our behaviours; it is manifest, he thinks, that our actions are not merely remote (...) products of forces that lie outside of our control. Reid holds, instead, that actions are all and only those events that spring from active power and he produces insightful and imaginative arguments for the claim that only a creature with a mind is capable of having active power. He believes that only human beings, and creatures 'above us', are capable of directing events towards ends, of endowing them with purpose or direction, the distinctive feature of action. However, he also holds that all events, and not merely human actions, are products of active power, power possessed either by human beings or by God. This collection of theses leads Reid to the view that human behaviour and the progress of nature are both essentially teleological. Patterns in nature are the products of laws of which God is the author; patterns in human conduct are the products of character and the laws that individuals set for themselves. Manifest Activity examines Reid's arguments for this view and the view's implications for the nature of character, motivation and the special kind of causation involved in the production of human behavior. (shrink)

Active Metric Control via Informational State Manipulation: Specification of a Causal-Symmetric Warp Drive develops a warp-drive concept within a causal-symmetric informational framework, in which gravity is treated as the macroscopic effect of an underlying informational medium rather than as a fundamental force sourced only by ordinary matter. The work introduces an additional informational energy density derived from quantum relative entropy between the local physical state and an informational equilibrium reference state. This informational contribution formally plays the role of “exotic (...) matter” in the warp-drive metric, but is reinterpreted as emergent negentropy generated by highly structured non-equilibrium quantum information. -/- Within this framework, the paper specifies a family of warp-drive metrics whose source is entirely informational, using a minimal k-essence–type model that allows controlled violation of the usual null energy condition while maintaining a standard sound speed and avoiding ghost instabilities. It proposes a chronology protection criterion based on a smooth, strictly monotonic profile of an informational conductivity parameter, which yields a sufficient condition for global hyperbolicity and the absence of closed timelike curves. A scaling analysis quantifies the extreme informational energy densities required for realistic bubble sizes and superluminal speeds, showing that they approach near-Planckian levels. The work therefore recasts faster-than-light travel as a problem of quantum informational engineering and links its feasibility to experimentally constrainable informational parameters rather than to unknown forms of exotic matter. (shrink)

The paper attempts to establish a methodological complementarity between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s accounts of the body on the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of active and reactive forces systematically elaborated in Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie. Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s physics of forces opens up two prospective developments of Nietzsche’s legacy: the genealogical critique of the historical body produced by reactive forces on the one hand and the invention of a new unknown body produced by active (...) forces on the other. The paper shows how throughout their careers both Foucault and Deleuze pursue these two divergent yet mutually complementary scenarios respectively. Given the shared background of both thinkers, neither is complete without the other, especially when the question of resistance is at stake. Just as active force is necessarily presupposed by the existence of reactive force in the Nietzschean calculus, Foucault’s reactive body cannot exist without its own inverse, Deleuze’s active ‘body-without-organs’. (shrink)

In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Leibniz and Raymond Ruyer a vitalism of ‘a force that is but does not act’. This is a judicious characterisation of Leibniz's vitalism, but not Ruyer's. In The Fold, Deleuze presents Ruyer as a disciple of Leibniz, but if Leibniz's monads have no doors or windows, Ruyer's are nothing but doors and windows, nothing but liaisons actively forming themselves. For Ruyer, there is only one force, a consciousness-force, matter-form in sustained, non-localisable (...) self-formation. In Deleuze's reading of Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale, Deleuze comes close to presenting a notion of force like that of Ruyer's, in that the vinculum inextricably interfolds monads and bodies, but ultimately the separation of the forces of monads from those of bodies prevails in a fashion incompatible with Ruyer's conception of force. Deleuze and Guattari make use of Ruyer's understanding of consciousness and the brain as the auto-overflight of an absolute surface in their concluding remarks on philosophy and the arts in What Is Philosophy?, but they depart from Ruyer in their characterisation of the relation of force to those two domains, ultimately because they reject Ruyer's advocacy of a universal, goal-directed finalism. (shrink)

The main research work of the article is devoted to the idea of consolidation of national powers of the society in the activity of legal political parties of the Western Ukraine in 1934 – 1939. The author proved that the idea of consolidation was declared as the most important in official documents of Ukrainian parties. But it was not put into practice. Alongside it was mentioned that the activity of consolidation influenced on the experience of cooperation among parties, had a (...) positive impact on raising the level of political consciousness of Ukrainian society. Keywords: consolidation, legal political parties, political consciousness, Ukrainian society, Western Ukraine in 1934–1939. (shrink)

Bioethics is a practically oriented discipline that developed to address pressing ethical issues arising from developments in the life sciences. Given this inherent practical bent, some form of advocacy or activism seems inherent to the nature of bioethics. However, there are potential tensions between being a bioethics activist, and academic ideals. In academic bioethics, scholarship involves reflection, rigour and the embrace of complexity and uncertainty. These values of scholarship seem to be in tension with being an activist, which requires pragmatism, (...) simplicity, certainty and, above all, action. In this paper I explore this apparent dichotomy, using the case example of my own involvement in international efforts to end forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. I conclude that these tensions can be managed and that academic bioethics requires a willingness to be activist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to motivate and defend a conventional approach to assertion and other illocutionary acts. Such an approach takes assertions, questions and orders to be moves within an essentially rule-governed activity similar to a game. The most controversial aspect of a conventional account of assertion is that according to it, for classifying an utterance as an assertion, question or command, “it is irrelevant what intentions the person speaking may have had” (Dummett 1973, p. 302). I understand (...) this to mean that it is irrelevant for the issue of whether an utterance is an assertion whether the utterer has certain communicative intentions, such as the intention to utter something true, the intention to get one’s audience to believe (that one believes) what one has asserted etc. Just as one can commit a foul in football without meaning to do so, one can make an assertion, issue a command or ask a question without meaning to do so. The rules of football specify that a certain form of conduct (tackling an opponent in a certain way), carried out under certain general conditions (being a member of a team engaged in a game of football) counts as committing a foul. Similarly, I claim, the rules of language specify that a certain form of conduct (uttering an assertoric sentence), carried out under certain general conditions (being a member of a speech community engaged in a conversation) counts as making an assertion. (shrink)

Leibniz beschreibt sein philosophisches Anliegen oft als Versuch, bestimmte Formen, die von den modernen Philosophen verbannt waren, wieder herzustellen. Dieser Aufsatz erörtert den historischen Gang dieser Verbannung und Leibniz' Bemühen um eine Rehabilitierung der Begriffe Natur, Form und Kraft, wobei er jedoch okkulte, “barbarische” und überflüssige Zutaten zur Naturphilosophie vermeidet.

Gilles Deleuze once claimed that “modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs.” _The Force of the Virtual_ responds to this need by investigating the consequences of the philosopher’s interest in (and appeal to) “the exact sciences.” In exploring the problematic relationship between the philosophy of Deleuze and science, the original essays gathered here examine how science functions in respect to Deleuze’s concepts of time and space, how science accounts for processes of qualitative change, how science actively (...) participates in the production of subjectivity, and how Deleuze’s thinking engages neuroscience. All of the essays work through Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual—a force of qualitative change that is ontologically primary to the exact, measurable relations that can be found in and among the objects of science. By adopting such a methodology, this collection generates significant new insights, especially regarding the notion of scientific laws, and compels the rethinking of such ideas as reproducibility, the unity of science, and the scientific observer. Contributors: Manola Antonioli, Collège International de Philosophie (Paris); Clark Bailey; Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht U; Manuel DeLanda, U of Pennsylvania; Aden Evens, Dartmouth U; Gregory Flaxman, U of North Carolina; Thomas Kelso; Andrew Murphie, U of New South Wales; Patricia Pisters, U of Amsterdam; Arkady Plotnitsky, Purdue U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Arnaud Villani, Première Supérieure au Lycée Masséna de Nice. (shrink)

In this 1976 volume, Professor Ziman paints a broad picture of science, and of its relations to the world in general. He sets the scene by the historical development of scientific research as a profession, the growth of scientific technologies out of the useful arts, the sources of invention and technical innovation, and the advent of Big Science. He then discusses the economics of research and development, the connections between science and war, the nature of science policy and the moral (...) dilemmas of social responsibility in science. Each topic is introduced by reference to easily understandable particular examples, with a large number of illustrations chosen to bring out the concreteness and reality of science as a human activity. Professor Ziman gives a chapter-by-chapter list of suggested topics for oral and written discussion, intended to provoke critical, sceptical attitudes to simplified solutions to real issues, and comments briefly on relevant books and other sources. (shrink)

Deborah Brown looks at how Hobbes and Descartes used the language of ‘tendency’ in their natural philosophies. She contrasts the problems that arise for Hobbes as he tries to reduce tendencies away with a Descartes, for whom ‘tendency talk is not a mere _façon de parler_’ but rather is ‘real and causally explanatory’, and who strives to incorporate inherent tendencies into his broader mechanistic ontological framework. The resulting interpretation of Descartes sees him as much closer in his conception of natural (...) laws to Nancy Cartwright than to David Lewis. One of the real benefits of this interpretation, claims Brown, is that it ‘might just help to demystify Descartes’s references to active forces’. Having thus establishing that Descartes was a realist about tendencies who nevertheless remained committed to a non-teleological, mechanistic account of nature, Brown contrasts this Cartesian picture with Hobbes’s reductive mechanics that eliminated forces and tendencies by equating them with actual motions, including even the ‘force of a body at rest’. (shrink)

This paper considers Kant’s conception of force and causality in his early pre-Critical writings, arguing that this conception is best understood by way of contrast with his immediate predecessors, such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier, Martin Knutzen, and Christian August Crusius, and in terms of the scientific context of natural philosophy at the time. Accordingly, in the True estimation Kant conceives of force in terms of activity rather than in terms of specific effects, such as motion. Kant’s (...) explicit arguments in the Nova dilucidatio for physical influx are directed primarily against the conception of grounds and existence held by Wolff, Baumgarten, and Meier, and only secondarily against Leibniz. Finally, Kant’s reconciliation of the infinite divisibility of space and the unity of monads in the Physical monadology is designed to respond to objections that could be raised naturally by Wolff and Baumgarten.Author Keywords: Kant; Pre-Critical; Force, Causality; Wolff; Leibniz. (shrink)

When do we judge that someone was forced to do what they did? One relatively well-established finding is that subjects tend to judge that agents were not forced to do actions when those actions violate norms. A surprising discovery of Young & Phillips 2011 is that this effect seems to disappear when we frame the relevant ‘force’-claim in the active rather than passive voice ('X forced Y to φ ' vs. 'Y was forced to φ by X'). Young and (...) Phillips found a similar contrast when the scenario itself shifts attention from Y (the forcee) to X (the forcer). We propose that these effects can be (at least partly) explained by way of the role of attention in the setting of quantifier domains which in turn play a role in the evaluation of ‘force’- claims. We argue for this hypothesis by way of an experiment which shows that sequences of active vs. passive ‘force’-claims display the characteristic “stickiness” of quantifier domain expansion, using a paradigm which we argue provides a useful general paradigm for testing quantifier domain hypotheses. Finally, we sketch a semantics for ‘force’ which we argue is suitable for capturing these effects. (shrink)

Shareholder activism has become a force for good in the extant corporate governance literature. In this article, we present a case study of Nigeria to show how shareholder activism, as a corporate governance mechanism, can constitute a space for unhealthy politics and turbulent politicking, which is a reflection of the country’s brand of politics. As a result, we point out some translational challenges, and suggest more caution, in the diffusion of corporate governance practices across different institutional environments. We contribute to (...) the literature on corporate governance in Africa, whilst creating an understanding of the political embeddedness of shareholder activism in different institutional contexts—i.e. a step closer to a political theorising of shareholder activism. (shrink)

Standard physicalism often renders subjective experience epiphenomenal, while interactionist accounts struggle to reconcile mental causation with energy conservation. We propose the force of experience: a real, physically efficacious force exerted by experience on neural architecture. To address the objection that a fundamental force should act universally, we introduce biological confinement, analogous to the confinement of the strong nuclear interaction. The force of experience acts exclusively on structured biological information—the coherent, meaning-bearing informational patterns sustained within the living brain. Within the brain’s (...) open thermodynamic system, experience supplies the causal influence required to bias activation barriers of neural logic gates, releasing stored metabolic potential in a direction determined by the meaning of the experience and the organism’s prior experiential history. This framework reconceives subjective experience as a confined physical force essential for biological agency and clarifies how meaning-driven interactions can be both constructive and destructive. We situate this proposal within historical perspectives on mental causation, including agential realism, dispositional causation, and nonreductive materialist psychology, while offering a biophysical mechanism absent from prior accounts. (shrink)

Shareholder activism has become a dynamic institutional force, and its associated, rapidly increasing body of scholarly literature affects numerous disciplineswithin the organizational science academy. Despite growing shareholder empowerment, the impact of shareholder activism on corporate outcomes remains equivocal. The heterogeneity of factors in shareholder activism, such as environmental, firm, proponent, and issue characteristics; the variety of activism methods and processes; and varying outcomes provides a plethora of theoretical and methodological challenges for activism researchers. Furthermore, the separation of prior research on (...) financial and social activism has left unanswered questions critical for both the scholarly discourse on shareholder activism and the normative debate on shareholder empowerment. Our multidisciplinary review integrates both the financial and social activism streams and explores shareholder activism controversies, seeking to provide an impetus for more cohesive conceptual and empirical work in the field. (shrink)

Whether active and passive, top-down and bottom-up, or endogenous and exogenous, attention is typically divided into two types. To show the relationship between attention and other functions (sleep, memory, learning), one needs to show whether the type of attention in question is of the active or passive variety. However, the division between active and passive is not sharp in any area of consciousness research. In phenomenology, the experience of voluntariness is taken to indicate activity, but this experience (...) is often confused with others. In psychology, task-dependent behavior is taken to indicate activity, but is often conflated with complex automatic behavior. In neuroscience, top-down processes are taken to exclusively indicate activity despite the fact that both top-down and bottom-up activations are always present in the brain. Moreover, work in attention has shown that the results of so-called passive and active processes are sometimes inseparable. Carrasco, et al. (2004), for example, show that active attention results in the same change in perceptual contrast that is enacted by bottom-up mechanisms. Likewise, Reynolds and Desimone (2003) show that top-down and bottom-up attention effect neural contrast in the same way. Thus, the passive-active distinction does not seem to neatly separate two types of attention. Perhaps a more convincing model of attention combines active and passive processing into a single mechanism of control. One such potential model is what we call the Unitary Saliency Map Model, first suggested by Koch and Ullman (1985) and developed by Treue (2003). In such a model, top-down and bottom-up processes each feed into the same saliency map, from which attention is controlled. We argue that this makes sense of the phenomenological, psychological, and neuroscientific data. Finally, the acceptance of such a model will force us to review some of our previous findings on attention and its relation to consciousness. (shrink)

Descartes holds that when you perceive something with perfect clarity, you are compelled to assent and cannot doubt. (This is a psychological claim.) Many commentators read him as endorsing Psychologism, according to which this compulsion is a matter of brute psychological force. I show that, in Descartes’s view, perfect clarity provides a reason for assent—indeed a perfect reason, which precludes any reason for doubt. (This is a normative claim.) Furthermore, advancing a view I call Rational Force, he holds that the (...) normative claim explains the psychological one: since your will is naturally responsive to reasons, you are compelled to assent because you have a perfect reason to assent. This coheres with his view that will is essentially active, self-determined, and free. The force that clarity exerts on the will is not the brute push of an efficient cause, but the rational pull of a final cause. (shrink)

Building on Nietzsche’s view of power, Foucault developed an original analysis of power by making use of concepts like “disciplinary power,” “bio-power,” “governmentality,” etc.; however, existing studies have not sufficiently examined his reading of Nietzsche’s works on this topic. Therefore, in order to clarify the connection between the two, this article examines Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche in detail. Firstly, this article examines the notion of “force” which Foucault recognized is at the center of Nietzsche’s view of power, and will explicitly (...) shows its conceptual determinations. In doing so, this paper will also clarify related notions such as “event,” “body” and “history,” and thus bring to light the general principle of force. In addition, Foucault focused on the point at which Nietzsche—using these principles—radically reinterpreted a central concept of human intellectual activity, namely knowledge. Therefore, this article secondly examines how knowledge is formed under the principle of force, and explicitly shows the general mechanism of knowledge. Finally, the article explains that Nietzsche’s view of power is understood by Foucault as the duality between force and knowledge; in other words, as an ontology of force. (shrink)

When a person finds herself in peril her right to be rescued is activated and a rescue duty is imposed on those who are in a position to help. In this article, I argue that the activation of the right to be rescued needs to be suitably constrained so that the rescuee is prevented from arbitrarily controlling the normative situation between herself and potential rescuers. Such control would be in conflict with the moral equality of persons. I argue that the (...) activation of the right to be rescued should be conditional on the person having a justification for the action that caused her peril. One implication of my view is that the right to be rescued cannot fulfill the function that Jonathan Quong ascribes to it. The right to be rescued turns out to be an unsuitable ground for the necessity condition which constrains the permissible use of defensive force. (shrink)

This paper analyses the forgotten concept of “sperm-force” proposed by George Newport (1803–1854). Newport is known for his comprehensive microscopic examinations of sperm and egg interaction in amphibian fertilization between 1850 and 1854. My work with archival sources reveals that Newport believed fertilization was caused by sperm-force, which the Royal Society refused to publish. My reconstruction chronologically traces the philosophical and experimental origins of sperm-force to Newport’s 1830s entomological work. Sperm-force is a remnant of Newport’s speculations on the creation of (...) the active individual. I argue that sperm-force was rooted in British interpretations of German _Naturphilosophie_, which demonstrates Continental influences on mid-Victorian embryology, particularly the role of male generative power. This context provides further evidence that British versions of Romantic science fostered sophisticated experimental work. The refusal by Paleyite stalwarts of natural theology to publish Newport’s ideas illustrates the institutional resistance to German pantheistic and vitalistic influences. This reconstruction of sperm-force’s philosophical foundation and its reception offers new understandings of mid-Victorian attitudes toward the inheritance of mind and body. It situates Newport’s work within the nineteenth century’s scientific project to assign stereotypical genders to the gametes. (shrink)

The study has two objectives: to introduce grip force recording as a new technique for studying embodied numerical processing; and to demonstrate how three competing accounts of numerical magnitude representation can be tested by using this new technique: the Mental Number Line, A Theory of Magnitude and Embodied Cognition account. While 26 healthy adults processed visually presented single digits in a go/no-go n-back paradigm, their passive holding forces for two small sensors were recorded in both hands. Spontaneous and unconscious (...) grip force changes related to number magnitude occurred in the left hand already 100–140 ms after stimulus presentation and continued systematically. Our results support a two-step model of number processing where an initial stage is related to the automatic activation of all stimulus properties whereas a later stage consists of deeper conscious processing of the stimulus. This interpretation generalizes previous work with linguistic stimuli and elaborates the timeline of embodied cognition. We hope that the use of grip force recording will advance the field of numerical cognition research. (shrink)

János Kornai, a distinguished Hungarian economist, began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then became a critic of the communist political and economic system. He lost family members in the Holocaust, contributed to the ideological preparation for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and became an influential theorist of the post-Soviet economic transition. He has been a journalist, a researcher prohibited from teaching in his home country, and a tenured professor at Harvard. By Force of Thought traces Kornai's (...) lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research.Disenchanted with communism, Kornai published Overcentralization, the first book written by someone living behind the Iron Curtain to be openly critical of Soviet-style economics. Although it was attacked in Hungary, it was hailed by Western economists. The Kornai-Lipták theory on two-level planning captured the attention of mathematical economists. Kornai went on to publish the controversial Anti-Equilibrium, a critique of the general equilibrium theory underpinning mainstream economic analyses of markets, Economics of Shortage, The Road to a Free Economy, and the summary of his lifetime research, The Socialist System. An intellectual emissary between East and West, Kornai commuted between Harvard and Budapest for many years.Kornai's memoir describes his research--including his present-day evaluation of his past work--as well as the social and political environments in which he did his work. The difficulties faced by a critic of central planning in a communist country are made especially vivid by material from newly opened secret police files and informers' reports on his activities. By Force of Thought will be an essential resource for students of economic thought, socialist systems, and postsocialist transition, and for readers interested in Eastern European intellectual life before, during, and after communism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Impulsive Forces in and Against WordsAlphonso Lingis (bio)In his lecture "Nietzsche, le polythéisme et la parodie" given at the Collège de Philosophie in 1957 and published in 1963 in his Un si funeste désir, Pierre Klossowski explicated certain radical passages from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, a work he had newly translated into French (two prior translations existed). In the philosophical world of France where perception seemed to have (...) found its definitive elucidation in the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience, as Klossowski laid it out, was so radically different from that phenomenology that it could not be assimilated. In his Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, published in 1969, Klossowski worked on texts Nietzsche left unpublished and which date from the years of The Gay Science onward. Philosophers, Nietzsche had written, do not simply coordinate and justify the works and science of society; they break at least in part with the common language by formulating their own aggressivity, tolerance, intimidation, anxieties, need of solitude, or need to forget themselves. And Nietzsche too speaks not of what is common and communicable but of what he experienced inwardly. Now Klossowski presented Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience as an exposition of the experience peculiar to Nietzsche, in the most troubled period of his life. This experience, moreover, Klossowski aimed to show, was wholly premonitory of Nietzsche's final state, in which he could no longer say what he was experiencing nor who he was.The environment is not simply passively impressed upon our sensory surfaces; we have to awaken, move our eyes, and focus on things and circumscribe their contours with our look, and assume a posture that enables us to advance our look. When we are born, and when we awaken each day, that is, are born again to the world, we are needy and vulnerable, to be sure; the organism is porous and needs to replenish fluids and substance lost. But our organisms are material systems that generate excess energies; it is because excess energies have to be discharged that the organism moves into the environment and depletes its substance, and needs develop. Nietzsche calls these excess energies impulses, also multiple wills to power, that is, not conscious drives to acquire power, but positive forces that expand and exist only in expansion. They seek resistances on which to discharge themselves. They push against one another and become multiple.For the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the movements of perception are intentional; they are from the first correlative with objects, or, for Merleau-Ponty, intersensory things, Gestalten agglomerated by an intrinsic intelligible essence or sensory meaning, arising against a background of potential objects or latent things. Yet every glance around us encompasses innumerable unnamed and unnameable shapes, hues, textures, slidings, illuminations. Do not in fact the excess energies of life open upon an environment of swarming sensory patterns, streamings, scintillations, and shadows which quicken life before or without acquiring meaningful identities? [End Page 60]What in classical epistemology were called sensations were the information bits these forces impressed on our sensory surfaces, resulting also in sensory affects of pleasure or pain, according to the passive conception of our sensibility. For Nietzsche the multiple impulses that confront the forces of the environment are active and not reactive; confronting what is not from the first meaningful but resists or empowers, they laugh and weep, bless and curse. And it is these multiple and conflicting impulses, not a conceptual grasp of the essences of things, that know environmental events, know the forces exerted by the multiple hues, textures, glows, savors, reflections, halos, echos, projections, and shadows scattered about us.The impulses do more than know all that; they exalt and consecrate events of the world, they put over each an azure bell of blessing, they give them a space to stand forth and to dance—"they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee—and come back."1 They give themselves form and multiple forms and dance with all things. They are Apollonian and Dionysian.What is called conscious thought is elaborated in words of the common... (shrink)

This article presents a line of thought leading from considerations on how the difference between logical affirmation and negation is linguistically manifest via a critique of the ‘force-content-distinction’ drawn by Frege and reflection on how that distinction is involved in confusions about rule following to a conception of ‘thinking-and-speaking’ as, essentially, an activity of living beings. It thus seeks to motivate a logico-linguistic understanding of ‘form of life’, exhibiting it as already involved in making distinctions as ‘simple’ as that between (...) ‘p’ and ‘not p’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Force and Translation; Or, The Polymorphous Body of LanguageElissa MarderOr un corps verbal ne se laisse pas traduire ou transporter dans une autre langue. Il est cela même que la traduction laisse tomber. Laisser tomber le corps, telle est même l’énergie essentielle de la traduction. Quand elle réinstitue un corps, elle est poésie.—Jacques Derrida, “Freud et la scène de l’écriture”The materiality of a word cannot be translated or carried (...) over into another language. Materiality is precisely that which translation relinquishes. To relinquish materiality: such is the driving force of translation. And when that materiality is reinstated, translation becomes poetry.—Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”Babel Revisited (The Mother Tongue and The Translation Machine)On January 20, 2012, Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard and former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, boldly announced a six-point vision for reforming the U.S. education system in a New York Times Education supplement editorial modestly entitled, “What you (Really) Need to Know.” For the [End Page 1] purposes of this discussion, I will limit myself here to a brief examination of what he says about the study of foreign languages and the merits of machine translation in the item listed as “number 5”:5. The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before. This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism—that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world. It seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be expected of students. I am not so sure.English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.For those of us who still earn our living by teaching literary texts written in foreign languages in foreign language departments in the university, Summers’s breezy assessment that the university of the future need not (indeed ought not) include extensive foreign language study is, sadly, not exactly news. On the contrary, there is nothing particularly innovative or original about the position he advocates here: his vision of a future “global” American university—in which virtually all speculative activities are conducted solely in English—has already begun to be implemented in various colleges and universities around the world. If his remarks are nonetheless noteworthy, it is because of his apparent willingness—even eagerness—to defend a policy that university officials often officially still pretend to abhor. Indeed, Summers’s position goes far beyond the more familiar pragmatic voices that have concluded that the reduction of foreign language instruction is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of the unfortunate economic reality that the American university as we once knew it has become financially untenable and hence unable to accommodate areas of study that can be construed as nonessential. Instead, Summers goes a step farther: he actively advocates against investing precious university resources in foreign language study on ideological, political, quasi-philosophical, or dare I say it, perhaps even theological, grounds. By appealing to the value of what he calls here “cosmopolitanism,” he clearly implies that English’s status as “global language” discharges English speakers in the U.S. university system from any potential obligation to any other language on the globe. [End Page 2]According to Summers, English is optimally positioned to be a vehicle for genuine “cosmopolitanism” because, as a so-called “global language,” it constitutes a receptive, inclusive, and welcoming “common ground” for multicultural exchange that would be otherwise impossible given the sheer volume and overwhelming diversity of all the other languages in the world. In other words, in his opinion, recourse to English actually facilitates and enhances—rather than inhibits—genuine multicultural encounters as it offsets the potentially... (shrink)

The focus of this paper is on the practice of clarifying illocutionary force, the social activity of asking for and providing descriptions that make explicit what kind of act what done in speaking. Two forms of this practice are distinguished, one that takes place as part of the speech encounter that is the target of the practice, and one that takes place subsequent to that speech encounter. It is argued that the function of the practice differs between these forms, and (...) that this yields two very different ways of responding to a clarificatory query. The paper concludes by considering some implications of this difference in function for understanding of the character of illocutionary force itself, with a focus on its repercussions for understanding the possible role of the stance of participant, as opposed to theorist, in determining what was done in speaking. (shrink)

Leibniz explains both activity and sensation in terms of the relative distinctness of perception. This paper argues that the systematic connection between activity and sensation is illuminated by Leibniz’s use of distinctness in analyzing each. Leibnizian sensation involves two levels of activity: on one level, the relative forcefulness of an expression enables certain expressions to stand out against the perceptual field, but in addition to this there is an activity of the mind that enables sensory experience. This connection of mental (...) activity and perceptual distinctness enables us to better appreciate the fundamental role perceptual distinctness plays in Leibniz’s theory of sensation. (shrink)

Current art world statistics demonstrate that the fight for gender and race equality in the art world is far from over: only sixteen percent of this year's Venice Biennale artists were female; only fourteen percent of the work displayed at MoMA in 2016 was by nonwhite artists; only a third of artists represented by U.S. galleries are female, but over two-thirds of students enrolled in art and art-history programs are young women. Arranged in thematic sections focusing on feminism, race, and (...) sexuality, Curatorial Activism examines and illustrates pioneering examples of exhibitions that have broken down boundaries and demonstrated that new approaches are possible, from Linda Nochlin's 'Women Artists' at LACMA in the mid-1970s to Jean-Hubert Martin's 'Carambolages' in 2016 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Including interviews with pioneering curators such as Okwui Enwezor, Linda Nochlin, Jean-Hubert Martin, and Nan Goldin, this volume is both an invaluable source of practical information for those who understand that institutions must be a driving force in this area and a vital source of inspiration for today's expanding new generation of curators. Preface by Lucy R. Lippard. (shrink)

"Michel Foucault's Force of Light" offers a comprehensive, chronological reading of Foucault's published, and many unpublished, writings. James Bernauer claims that Foucault's achievement was to have fashioned a series of inquiries that makes it possible to question the activity of thought itself as an ethical practice. Foucault's ethic historicizes Kant's great questions on knowledge, obligation, and hope. He asks not "What can I know?" but rather "How have my questions been produced? How has the path of my knowing been determined?" (...) Not "What ought I to know?" or "What may I hope for?" by "How have the parameters of my aspirations been defined?". (shrink)