bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Taxas de retrogradação e balanço sedimentar em praias sob risco muito alto de erosão no município de Ubatuba (Litoral Norte de São Paulo)
Authors: Souza Celia Regina De Gouveia , Luna Graciele Da Costa
Published: September 2014

Cerca de 22% das praias arenosas do município de Ubatuba (Litoral Norte de São Paulo) encontram-se em risco muito alto de erosão. As causas do fenômeno são diversas, incluindo fatores naturais, como a elevação atual do nível do mar e mudanças na dinâmica costeira, e fatores antrópicos associados a diversas intervenções ao longo da linha de costa e nas planícies costeiras. Um dos onze indicadores de erosão costeira monitorados nas praias paulistas é a retrogradação da linha de costa nas últimas décadas. Este trabalho apresenta os resultados dos estudos realizados em quatro praias de Ubatuba que estão sob risco muito alto de erosão costeira - Maranduba, Praia Grande, Barra Seca e Ubatumirim/Estaleiro, visando ao cálculo das taxas de retogradação das mesmas em fotografias aéreas de 1962, 1973 e 2001. Para o mapeamento dos polígonos praiais foram adotados os limites: superior – linha de vegetação permanente na planície costeira ou estruturas construídas pelo homem, e inferior – linha de água mais alta. Os cálculos das taxas de variação da linha de costa e do déficit sedimentar foram efetuados através dos métodos End Point Rate (EPR) e médias dos EPRs (AEPRs). Como esperado, os resultados mostraram que as praias analisadas apresentaram tendências erosivas nas últimas quatro décadas. A maior erosão foi observada na Praia Grande, que teve um recuo de 1,9 m/ano, seguida pelas praias de Barra Seca, com 0,78 m/ano, Estaleiro, 0,36 m/ano, Ubatumirim, 0,25 m/ano, e Maranduba, 0,17 m/ano.
Distribuição espacial das litofácies de fundo da Baía de Todos os Santos
Authors: Lessa Guilherme , Dias Kalina
Published: September 2014

Os estudos das fácies sedimentares superficiais da Baía de Todos os Santos (BTS) foram iniciados há mais de 30 anos, tendo sempre privilegiado as características texturais dos sedimentos. O mapeamento das fácies foi elaborado para diferentes setores, e as classificações texturais não são padronizadas. Este trabalho tem o objetivo de reavaliar a distribuição, padronizar a classificação e gerar um mapa único das fácies texturais na BTS. Além da digitalização e georreferenciamento dos mapas anteriores, o trabalho alia ainda registros de sonar de varredura lateral e amostras adicionais de sedimentos de fundo coletadas para a classificação de fácies sísmicas e melhor delineamento dos limites texturais. O mapeamento final indica a existência de onze fácies texturais, refina espacialmente o mapeamento em áreas com baixa densidade de amostras (resultando, por exemplo, na inclusão de uma fácies recifal) e indica a progradação, de aproximadamente 3 km, da fácies lamosa responsável pela colmatação atual da BTS.
Geologia e hipsometria de bacias de drenagem do centro-norte catarinense (Brasil): implicações para a zona costeira
Authors: Asp Nils Edvin , Siegle Eduardo , Schettini Carlos Augusto França , Losso Arthur Pires , Klein Antonio Henrique Da Fontoura
Published: September 2014

A região centro-norte do Estado de Santa Catarina/Brasil é composta basicamente pelas bacias hidrográficas dos rios Itajaí-Açu, Itapocu e Tijucas, drenando diretamente para o Atlântico Sul. O objetivo do presente trabalho é analisar e correlacionar a hipsometria dessas bacias para melhor entender a evolução holocênica e a dinâmica dos estuários e planícies costeiras associadas àqueles rios. Foram compilados dados gerais da cobertura geológico-sedimentar, topografia, dimensões e clima de cada bacia hidrográfica. Esses dados foram analisados e interpretados no contexto geomorfológico. Dados de hidrodinâmica e sedimentologia dos estuários e estratigrafia das planícies costeiras foram também considerados. Os resultados apontam diferenças importantes na geologia, topografia, perfis de talvegue e hipsometria das bacias estudadas. Foram também identificadas diferenças significativas na morfologia, dinâmica e estratigrafia das respectivas regiões estuarinas e planícies costeiras, que foram diretamente correlacionadas com as características das bacias de drenagem.
Vulnerability to sea level rise of an estuarine island in southern Brazil
Authors: Tagliani Carlos Roney , Calliari Lauro Júlio , Tagliani Paulo Roberto , De Antiqueira José Antonio
Published: September 2014

Este trabalho apresenta um mapa de vulnerabilidade à elevação do nível do mar para a Ilha dos Marinheiros-RS, Brasil, elaborado por meio de rotinas de apoio à decisão em um Sistema de Informações Geográficas. Um diagnóstico ambiental prévio permitiu o reconhecimento de cinco fatores principais de vulnerabilidade, incluindo variáveis dos meios físico, biótico e socioeconômico. Cada um dos fatores foi padronizado para uma escala contínua de valores usando a lógica fuzzy e depois, analisado conjuntamente pelo módulo de avaliação multicritério do software para produzir o mapa final. As áreas mais vulneráveis estão localizadas na margem nordeste da ilha como resultado da coincidência de vários dos fatores considerados. Nas demais regiões, os valores de vulnerabilidade decrescem progressivamente das margens para o centro da ilha. Embora o resultado final tenda a ser subjetivo, uma vez que é o tomador de decisão que determina os critérios, os fatores, os pesos relativos e as regras de decisão, exercícios de projeção como o realizado nesse trabalho são úteis para explorar certas alternativas e inserir a variável “nível do mar” no planejamento municipal
Padrões e tendências a médio prazo da contaminação por resíduos sólidos na praia de Boa Viagem, Nordeste do Brasil
Authors: Silva-Cavalcanti Jacqueline Santos , Araujo Maria Christina Barbosa , Costa Monica Ferreira
Published: September 2014

A quantidade, diversidade e composição do lixo encontrado ao longo de uma praia arenosa do nordeste do Brasil (praia de Boa Viagem) foram descritos neste trabalho. Variações temporais e espaciais da contaminação por lixo marinho depositados na linha do deixa num período de três anos foram examinadas. As amostras foram coletadas durante as estações seca (janeiro, fevereiro, março) e chuvosa (junho, julho, agosto) de 2005 a 2007. A praia foi amostrada uma vez por mês para contagem e classificação de todos os itens visíveis dentro de um transecto com 1m de largura centrado na linha do deixa. Foram encontradas diferenças significativas na diversidade e quantidade de lixo marinho encontrado ao longo das duas estações do ano. Um total de 165.882 itens foram depositados na praia de Boa Viagem. A categoria plástico representou 74,3% dos resíduos sólidos encontrados na praia de Boa Viagem. A quantidade de plástico foi significativamente maior (p <0,05) do que a matéria orgânica e madeira. Diferenças significativas (p <0,05) foram observadas na diversidade de lixo durante eventos de El Niño. Estas análises destacam os problemas que devem ser abordados na gestão futura de áreas de praia.
Vivisection, Virtue Ethics, and the Law in 19th-Century Britain
Authors: Bates A. W. H.
Published: September 2014

This historical study of early 19th-century opposition to vivisection suggests that the moral persona of the vivisector was an important theme. Vivisectors claimed they deliberately suppressed their feelings to perform scientifically necessary experiments: Where there was reason, there could be no cruelty. Their critics argued they were callous and indifferent to suffering, which was problematic for medical practitioners, who were expected to be merciful and compassionate. This anthropocentric debate can be located within the virtue ethics tradition: Compassion for animals signified a humane character. The 1876 Vivisection Act facilitated experimentation by separating the practice of vivisection from that of medicine.
New Perspectives on Animal Ethics
Authors: Naconecy Carlos
Published: September 2014

In this article, I review a recent book edited by Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker that presents novel frameworks and refreshing perspectives on the issue of the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals.
Moral Animals?
Authors: Hooley Dan
Published: September 2014

In this article, I review Can Animals Be Moral? by Mark Rowlands. I outline the central arguments made by Rowlands in defense of his thesis that other animals can be moral subjects, and I compare this claim to others who have held that animals can act morally. I finish by raising a few worries about Rowlands’s arguments and note some areas for further inquiry and work.
Introduction
Authors: Pyle Forest
Published: September 2014

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s main themes. The book focuses on radical aestheticism, a term that describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of the British Romantic literary tradition. A radical aestheticism offers the best way to consider what takes place at certain moments in texts by P. B. Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, D. G. Rossetti, and Wilde when aestheticized representations reach their radicalization.
Future Directions for Environmental Aesthetics
Authors: Saito Yuriko
Published: September 2014

Yuriko Saito argues for the broadening of environmental aesthetics’ scope from natural environments to mixed environments such as gardens, agricultural landscapes, urban environments, and its further expansion to include what Saito has called ‘everyday aesthetics’, i.e., all those ingredients that constitute our spatial environments, namely artefacts, human activities, and social relationships. The environment understood in this widest sense shapes the state of the world and the quality of life. Aesthetics plays a crucial, although often unrecognized, role in this ongoing world-making project, for better or worse. Environmental aesthetics can help cultivate aesthetic literacy so that we become aware of the power wielded by aesthetics, but it can also help to find ways of guiding aesthetically motivated decisions and actions toward better world-making.
On Universalism and Cultural Historicism in Environmental Aesthetics
Authors: Maskit Jonathan
Published: September 2014

Jonathan Maskit challenges the ‘standard view’ that the most important division in contemporary aesthetics is that between cognitivists (those who believe that concepts, usually scientific concepts, are essential for the aesthetic appreciation of nature) and non-cognitivists (those who do not so believe). Both camps tend to agree that our goal ought to be to figure out the one correct way to appreciate an environment appropriately. Such a characterization of the field suggests an Anglo-American bias. If we confront New World with Old World perspectives an alternative distinction come to the fore, that between universalists, who are analytic in their methods, and cultural historicists, who use hermeneutic methods. Universalists generally hold that culture and history are unimportant when trying to figure out what nature is or how people should appreciate it aesthetically. Cultural historicists, by contrast, believe that one’s culture or the history of the observer or the place are crucial to working out one’s environmental aesthetic. Crucially, from the cultural historicist standpoint, the very idea of there being one correct or appropriate way to appreciate nature aesthetically makes no sense.
The Cultural Aesthetics of Environment
Authors: Berleant Arnold
Published: September 2014

Arnold Berleant, who is known for his “aesthetics of engagement”, attempts to reconcile the need for cooperative environmental action in the face of environmental degradation and destruction with the existence of cultural and historic differences. The first part of this essay is conceptual and proposes a common understanding of ‘environment,’ ‘ecology,’ and ‘aesthetics.’ The second part develops the aesthetic side of the matter by identifying some representative cultural patterns of sensibility. It considers whether and how these patterns may be reconciled in order to enhance the effectiveness of our responses to environmental issues.
Environmental Art and Ecological Citizenship
Authors: Simus Jason B.
Published: September 2014

Jason B. Simus discusses and dismisses the criticism put forward by Allen Carlson that some, if not most, environmental artworks constitute an aesthetic affront to nature. Carlson claims that whether an environmental artwork constitutes an affront depends only on aesthetic qualities apart from any relationship to its social, moral, and ecological qualities. Simus rejects this claim, and argues that the aesthetic qualities of a work should not be divorced from these other qualities; instead we should aim at a comprehensive evaluation that takes all the work’s qualities into consideration when the question is whether or not an environmental artwork is an affront. Simus also criticizes Carlson’s idea that real nature is pristine, untouched by humans, as based on an outdated ecological theory. If humans are not seen as part of nature but apart from nature, environmental artworks are almost by definition an affront to nature. Simus’ central thesis is that environmental artworks have the same democratic potential as restoration projects if participation in their creation, appreciation, and criticism encourage deliberation about aesthetic, social, moral, ecological and all other community-regarding values.
Thinking Like a Mall
Authors: Vogel Steven
Published: September 2014

Steven Vogel examines the history of the City Center Mall in Columbus, Ohio, asking whether the same sorts of consideration that led Aldo Leopold to call for humans to “think like a mountain” might suggest that we should also learn to think like a mall. The moral considerability of natural entities such as mountains is often claimed to derive from their autonomy or independence from human beings. But, Vogel claims, malls too exhibit autonomy, as do all humanly built structures. The commercial failure of City Center itself shows this, revealing it to have been subject to an ecology of commerce that escaped human understanding and prediction. Human artifacts, Vogel concludes, are as marked by “otherness” from humans as so-called natural objects are; we cannot “identify” with our artifacts, we do not “see ourselves reflected” in them, they do not exist on the other side of an ontological divide from natural entities. We live in one world, not two; if we are to let mountains be, we should let malls be as well.
Refinement
Authors: Longenecker Steve
Published: September 2014

Refinement—that is, the evaluation of manners, dress, speech, possessions, bearing, pastimes, and homes for style, beauty, and improvement—was integral to Gettysburg religion. The Lutheran Theological Seminary and Pennsylvania College contributed polished Lutheran men to the surrounding region. Methodists experienced a decline in revivals, camp meetings, emotional conversion, classes, discipline, and nonconformity—all of which seemed unrefined—while Sunday schools, catechisms, nurture, and dignity increased, all markers of middle-class respectability. Meanwhile, Dunkers, an Anabaptist fellowship, went the other direction, redoubling efforts to resist refinement at home, in their garb, and in the meetinghouse, paradoxically bearing witness to the ability of refinement to define the mainstream. In sum, the Lutheran Seminary, Pennsylvania College, Methodists, and Dunkers illustrate the power of refinement in Gettysburg religion and in American thought.
Diversity
Authors: Longenecker Steve
Published: September 2014

This chapter draws attention to two particularly strong contributions to diversity in antebellum Gettysburg religion: ethnicity and doctrine. Germans, the largest ethnic group, pondered how much English to accept, and evangelicalism provoked passionate debate, notably within mainline fellowships. Distinctive doctrines also thrived. Dunkers and Catholics were so far from the Protestant center that they occupied outer orbits of Gettysburg religion, although they moved in different, nearly opposite directions. Thus, diversity remained a daily occurrence in the antebellum Border North, and Gettysburg religion, more complicated than the rest of America, foretold of an ethnically and doctrinally complex nation that as a rule, with some big exceptions, was tolerant.
Diversity
Authors: Longenecker Steve
Published: September 2014

The racial climate of the Border North was mixed. Blacks were borderline social outcasts, frozen out of the mainstream by poverty and racism. But white progressives offered support, including assistance with the Underground Railroad and support for abolition, and interracial worship was gracefully accepted, if not widely practiced. Also, unlike very nearby Maryland, blacks controlled their own religious life. Problems continually threatened black religion; black congregants were poor, undereducated, and burdened by racism. But African Americans in Gettysburg controlled their little African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregation with minimal assistance and no oversight from whites, and the fellowship survived, no small victory. Black religion, independent but barely, was especially characteristic of the Border North and would soon be the national pattern on race for a long time.
War
Authors: Longenecker Steve
Published: September 2014

This chapter describes the impact of the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg on religion. Gettysburg, a typical wartime community, save for its battle experience, is a logical place to find evidence of a remade America, yet change in local religion was measured. During the war, the religious community settled into a pattern, much like before the war, in which matters of faith remained fixed on the mundane, especially refinement. Eventually the war came directly to Gettysburg and the famous battle briefly shredded order, but recognizable religion, not a new version, reconstructed stability. Aside from temporary chaos caused by the battle, the biggest change was civil religion, which became much stronger, a broad national trend. Religion, then, felt change, but modestly rather than fundamentally.
Variants and Facets of the Literary Erection
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

This chapter discusses the generation of Armenian writers gathered in Constantinople around the journal Mehyan in 1914. It shows how the national idea is reflected in the pages of the journal, emphasizing the connection between art and religion made in the launching Manifesto. Attending to the interpretation given after the facts by some of its proponents with regard to the strivings of that generation, the chapter describes how they imagined the project of “nationalizing the nation” as an operation of active reception and sublation of the popular productions, i.e. through their aestheticization. Finally, the antisemitic views expressed in the journal are referred to the logic of mythological religion invented by nineteenth-century philology.
The Mourning of Religion I
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

Through the analysis of Daniel Varuzhan's earliest “pagan” poem, which presents itself first as the description of a sacrifice to the god Vahagn, and then more essentially as a repetition of that same sacrifice within the sphere of art, in a time when (mythological) religion has come to an end, this chapter tries to understand once again how Varuzhan understood “art” both as the origin of religion and the “mourning” for religion. When everything has been destroyed, what remains is the capacity for mourning in the form of art. The question that haunts this chapter is therefore: What mourning after the Catastrophe?
The Mourning of Religion II
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

The opening question of this final chapter on Daniel Varuzhan's poetry is: What is the name of the “enemy” that destroyed the world of the ancient gods and condemned us to live under the spell of their disaster? The answer is, strangely enough, Christianity. The chapter offers a parallel with Hölderlin's late elegies and his dealing with the categoric (and catastrophic) “turning away” of the gods. The final question is: How to think the disaster without aesthetics, how to think mourning outside the essential relation to the “end of religion“? The chapter then delineates the necessity of working against the aesthetic matrix in order to receive the Catastrophe into the language of thought. The concluding section examines the 19th century debate on the “peoples without religion,” which begins with Schelling and goes all the way down to Max Müller, Ignaz Goldziher (the author of a book on Hebrew mythology), and the representatives of an evolutionist theory of religion.
Nietzsche in Armenian Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Nichanian Marc , Goshgarian G. M. , Fort Jeff
Published: September 2014

The epilogue describes the reception of Nietzsche among the Armenian writers before 1915, within the distorting influence of the aesthetic principle functioning as “national-aestheticism,” i.e. the fiction of a people as a work of art. The term is borrowed from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's reflections on Heidegger in La Fiction du politique (though it does not appear in the English translation). The emphasis here is on the racialist thought inherited from the philology of the 19th century, and its overtly antisemitic brand in the writings of Constant Zarian.
Goodbye, Idealist Consensus; Hello, New Realism!
Authors: Tunstall Dwayne
Published: September 2014

In this chapter, Dwayne Tunstall contends that the idealist consensus in philosophy, as represented by Josiah Royce, that existed at the dawn of the twentieth century in the United States was never adequately refuted by the New Realists. Rather, the New Realists seemed to have persuaded enough professional philosophers that realism was a more fruitful approach for conducting philosophical inquiries than post-Kantian idealism. Accordingly, Tunstall characterizes the Royce–New Realist debate not as an overthrowing of an obsolescent philosophical view with a better one, but as a series of profound disagreements over the nature and purpose of philosophy.
On Four Originators of Transatlantic Phenomenology
Authors: Bell Jason
Published: September 2014

The forthcoming publication of the 1914 dissertation of Winthrop Bell on the relevance of Josiah Royce's theory of knowledge to Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, a thesis directed by Husserl, calls our attention to a surprising network of historical relations that connect not only Royce and Husserl, but which further connect the golden ages of American philosophy at Harvard and of German phenomenology at Göttingen. The present chapter examines four principal ?gures in this transatlantic exchange of ideas, listed here in their order of arrival as scholars at Göttingen: Josiah Royce (1855-1916), Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), William Hocking (1873-1966), and Winthrop Bell (1884-1965).
(Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe
Authors: Ferguson Gary
Published: September 2014

This essay will examine stories of alleged marriages contracted between men in sixteenth-century Rome and explore a number of interrelated social, political, and sexual questions set within a European context. For example, did these marriages set out to reproduce the conditions of a heterosexual union? Or might it have resembled the sworn or ‘wedded’ friendship/brotherhood practised throughout the Middle Ages? Besides, some of the men executed in Rome for marrying among themselves were not Italians but foreigners – Spaniards and Portuguese. To what extent was the execution linked to the recent conquest and annexation of Portugal by Spain, as well as to the obeisance that both nations pay to the Pope. A whole series of sexual and political imbrications is thus suggested.
Straight Migrants Queering European Man
Authors: Guénif Nacira
Published: September 2014

This chapter analyses France’s reluctance to accept encounters with morphing identities that confound a binary logic. Sexualizing religion, “religionizing” sexuality, gendering and racializing minority languages, whitening majority national language, sexualizing race, racializing sexuality: this unexpected range of combinations outlines a queer Europe. Yet, these queer forms often go unnoticed because their visibility is not discernible within the more recognizable modes of identity politics through which migrant, national, and colonial issues are publicly staged. Such queer assemblages expose the fiction of European universalism. The chapter argues that return of the European Man is a compensation for the threat of queer migrant bodies that confront Europe’s inability to imagine itself outside a white male/female binary.
Queer/Euro Visions
Authors: Stychin Carl F.
Published: September 2014

This chapter provides a critical and interdisciplinary interrogation of the cultural phenomenon of the Eurovision Song Contest. The cultural spectacle of Eurovision has been interpreted both by academics and in popular culture as heavily inflected by a lesbian and gay sensibility characterised by artifice, excess, parody, glamour, irony and the problematisation of the binary of high (European)/low (Eurotrash) culture. But Eurovision also can be seen as a microcosm of the tensions which surround the widening and deepening of the European Union legal order. It is therefore an opportune moment for us to engage in a close reading of the policies and spectacles of the Eurovision Song Contest through a queer lens.
Echo of the Otherwise and the Lure of Theolatry
Authors: Wolfson Elliot R.
Published: September 2014

This chapter explores the intricacies of Levinas's reflections on transcendence in the various stages of his intellectual biography, particularly as they relate to the tropes of the infinite and illeity that are essential to his conception of alterity. Deviating from Husserl's reflections on the intentional structure of consciousness, Levinas argues that infinity and transcendence, the wholly other, are to be excluded from the domain of phenomenology and the criterion of truth as the showing of what comes to light. The determination of the transcendence of the subject from the standpoint of the practical intentionality of affective life set Levinas on a course of thinking from which he never diverged, culminating in his more advanced articulations of ethics as first philosophy and the emphasis he placed on the radical transcendence necessary to establish the ground for genuine alterity. The phenomenological fascination with the nonphenomenalizable can be pinpointed as the essential thought that informed Levinas's critique of ontological realism—the narcissistic reduction of the other to the same—throughout his life, the philosophical venture toward a transcendence that is not to be relocated absolutely in the domain of immanence. The rhetoric of his texts indicate, however, that he could not avoid characterizing transcendence in personal terms that efface the clear distinction between human and divine and thus jeopardize the concept of an irreducible alterity of the transcendent that is truly other.
Undoing (K)not of Apophaticism: A Heideggerian Afterthought
Authors: Wolfson Elliot R.
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition of Western neoplatonism together with Derridean deconstruction in order to construct a viable postmodern negative theology. It is reasonable to argue that we must marshal the best metaphors in an effort to imagine what technically cannot be imagined, but such efforts ensnare the human mind in representing the unrepresentable and imaging the imageless by the production of images that, literally speaking, are false, and in so doing, the very allure to the alleged transcendence is severely compromised.
Rather than expanding the analogical imagination in envisioning transcendence, the epochal duty is the need to overcome it, to rid monotheism not only of the psychological tug to personify the impersonal but also of what Corbin called the “pious illusion of negative theology” and the pitfall of “metaphysical idolatry.” If we were to apply the unrestrained smashing of all idols without political prejudice or psychological need, then the more fruitful use of the apophatic rhetoric in our moment would be to get beyond the anthropocentric bias to undo both the masculine and the feminine imaginaries that have informed our depictions of the deity. On hermeneutical grounds a genuine unknowing, unencumbered by a theopolitical agenda, should yield a twofold agnosis that would it make it difficult, if well-neigh impossible, to speak of any doxa about matters divine. The more radical negation presumes neither a presence that is absent nor an absence that is present; there is simply nothing of which not to speak, and hence it should occasion the end of God-talk, even of an apophatic nature, a mode of speech predicated on the seemingly absurd proposition that what is said is never what one is saying. The exigency of the moment—to subjugate the theistic anthropomorphization of God and the corresponding egoistic theomorphization of self—demands a sweeping and uncompromising purification of the idea of infinity from all predication, including the ecological tendency to deify the cosmos in incarnational language as the embodiment of a gift of transcendence. Structurally, givenness requires giving and the given, but not everything given is a gift. To portray the latter in postmodern terms as a bestowal on the part of divinity liberated from the straightjacket of ontotheology does not mitigate the problem of presuming that what is given is a gift, which in turn rests on the even more laden assumption that the giving is expressive of some form of generosity or grace on the part of the giver.
The Fourth Age of Security
Authors: Gros Frédéric
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Gros is intended to familiarize the reader with the idea that security has functioned in four different ways in the West, from the “spiritual” security of Hellenism to the “imperial” security in the medieval social imaginary, from the early modern “state” security to our current “biopolitical” or “human” form of security. Foucault, according to Gros, thinks a new form of security that works through networks of communication flows and where security is brought by the generalized function of policing the circulation of communication, commodities, and persons which are in turn essential to capitalist relations of exchange and production.
The Risks of Security: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Fear
Authors: Lemke Thomas
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Lemke shows how Foucault’s idea of a “technology of security” can provide the link between liberal government and biopolitics. On this reading, liberalism is a form of government which, unlike previous forms, does not “run” on obedience but on freedom. The technology of security is productive of individual freedom by regulating doses of security with doses of fear into the “population” in what Lemke designates as a veritable “economy of power” that lies beneath and makes possible the “power of the economy” in neoliberal regimes.
A Genealogy of Biopolitics: The Notion of Life in Canguilhem and Foucault
Authors: Muhle Maria
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Muhle offers an in-depth and original treatment of Foucault’s debt to Canguilhem’s conception of biological normativity for his reconstruction of neoliberal biopolitics. On Muhle’s reconstruction, Foucault understood neoliberal biopolitics as the attempt by power to “imitate” the polarity characteristic of life that moves between self-preservation and self-transgression. The goal of such imitation of life in neoliberal governmentality is to achieve a “regulation” of conduct that would appear as “normal” as possible, where normality is now understood to include the occasional transgression of established patterns, the acknowledgement of the subject’s “authenticity” and “creativity.”
Power over Life, Politics of Death: Forms of Resistance to Biopower in Foucault
Authors: Adorno Francesco Paolo
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Adorno discusses the implications of the parallel formation of economics and biology in the eighteenth century that account for the continuous transference of medical metaphors to the economy and of economical considerations into medical well-being that is characteristic of the neoliberal normative order. Adorno takes up Foucault’s formula according to which biopower is a power which has “the right to make live” in opposition to the sovereign right to “put to death.” Adorno advances the paradoxical hypothesis that, if thanatopolitics is the product of the power to “make live,” then perhaps an affirmative biopolitics ought to be found on the side of a practice of “learning how to die” which, since Socrates through Montaigne to Heidegger, has characterized the philosophical form of life.
Foucault and Rawls: Government and Public Reason
Authors: Patton Paul
Published: September 2014

The chapter by Patton discusses the stage in the development of liberal governmentality from reason of state to the public use of reason, that is, from Hobbes to Kant. Patton is interested in the function of liberal governmentality as a normative order for a certain way of distributing property, and in this context he situates the interest of Foucault’s interpretation of neoliberalism by comparing and contrasting the neoliberal conception of equal distribution with that of Rawls, who advocates a normative order of “property-owning democracy” informed by a Kantian conception of public reason.
Making Space for Domesticity
Authors: Maddalena Tirabassi
Published: September 2014

Early-twentieth-century Italian immigrants to the United States experienced a shift from the preindustrial culture of subsistence to one of mass consumption. The home was one of the key places where this change was most visible and tangible. The essay is an attempt to deconstruct American culture from the bottom up by analyzing through immigrants’ adjustment to U.S. consumer society the interplay of Old World culture with a modern environment and showing how transnational relationships with Italy brought to the development of “glocal” identities still at work. In so doing, the chapter follows the recent transnational research, carried on both in Italy and in the United States, by exploring the beginnings of Italian American consumerism in the domestic realm. Leaving behind them a world of scarcity with few available objects, Italian immigrant women developed a distinctive domesticity in urban America. By transforming their material culture into an Italian American lifestyle, immigrants created a unique, coherent identity.
Consuming La Bella Figura
Authors: Padurano Dominique
Published: September 2014

The biography of pioneering body-builder Charles Atlas (né Angelo Siciliano) illuminates the paths of the commodification of the Italian American male body against the backdrop of the consumer culture of the 1920s and 1930s, its insistence on body presentation, and the graphic power in the “representation of the other” of mail-order catalogues and photo magazines. Since the 1930s, photographs of and words about Atlas’s body attempted to convey its power, the new sine qua non for American “he-men.” But despite his own public embrace of hegemonic notions of one-hundred-percent
Americanism in his popular bodybuilding course Dynamic Tension and advertisements from the 1930s onward, Atlas continued to engage in private acts of consumption that reflected his Italian origins. Dynamic Tension inadvertently continued to teach other men how to “consume Italian” in order to become like its corporate icon. In the process, Charles Atlas helped to alter dominant conceptions of what it meant to be an American man, ensuring that he would be a little more Italian for decades to come.
Italian Americans, the New Deal State, and the Making of Citizen Consumers
Authors: Luconi Stefano
Published: September 2014

Italian immigrants are conspicuously absent from all major historical accounts of working-class consumer activism. The chapter argues that this impression is to a certain extent a consequence of the fact that although Italian Americans were a critical electoral component of the New Deal coalition, very little has been written about their participation in support of the Roosevelt administration’s programs of national welfare. The recognition of the “consumer interest” was a central feature of the New Deal’s political economy. Italian Americans vocally reclaimed an “American standard of living” for working-class consumers and especially participated in and benefited from the New Deal’s social policies on housing (a crossroads which, giving the virtual racial segregation that these policies would eventually entail, dramatically accelerated the Italian American endorsement of a “white” identity along with an “Italian” one.) This essay focuses on the response of Italian Americans to New Deal’s economic policies as well as on the impact of the consequent legislation on their lives and identity. In addition, it highlights how campaigns for social equity playing on the language of the citizen consumer became a means to claim a voice in politics on the part of such a theretofore marginalized minority as Italian Americans.
Sideline Shtick
Authors: Gennari John
Published: September 2014

The chapter discusses the Italian American presence in a popular, widely televised sport—NCAA college basketball—noting that that (differently from baseball and boxing) has been much more conspicuous among coaches than players. Italian American basketball coaches of the 1980s and later appear as the most credible interpreters and mediators of an inherently black culture—the best basketball playing—for the wider interracial markets of fans. What black and white spectators alike really “buy” with Italian basketball coaching is authenticity, an heritage of racially and class-inflected identities, and the entire universe of memory and cultural references that has been built in consumer culture around the urban experience of Italian Americans. As an economic and cultural phenomenon, NCAA owes overwhelmingly to the labor and artistry of African American athletes. Yet, as big-time college basketball has become blacker, it also has become more Italian, even as Italian Americans have been among the white ethnic groups whose on-court athletic presence has radically diminished.
The Immigrant Enclave as Theme Park
Authors: Kosta Ervin
Published: September 2014

The chapter compares two New York’s Little Italies—the
“Little Italy” on Lower Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, and the “Real Little Italy” of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. The historical trajectories of the neighborhoods—from immigrant enclaves to popular ethnic theme parks for international tourists—is framed within postindustrial urban change and the turn of cultural production into most profitable investment for financial capital. Confronted with the loss of their residents of Italian origin, both neighborhoods owe their continued significance as “Italian” spaces to the construction of commodified versions of their ethnic pasts for consumption by a variegated clientele. However, their commercial ethnicities have emerged in particular ways that reflect the geographic, economic, demographic, and ethnic and racial conditions of their local histories.
Speak If You Are a Man, or the Transcendental Exclusion
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter considers the question of how the ethical enters into language. The answer given from Aristotle's time up to the present would seem to be: with the requirement of meaning or sense. It is argued that since the originary scene set up in the Gamma book of Aristotle's Metaphysics as a war machine against the ancient Sophists, the same structure—sense, consensus, exclusion—appears to have been repeating itself over and over again. The repetition continues right through the philosophies of consensus, ethics of communication, and pragmatics of conversation developed by Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty, whose diminishing demands for language entail the same type of undesirable others to be excluded, to be forced to exclude themselves from humanity. Thus, meaning, understood as a transcendental necessity, that is, as a condition of possibility of human language, is supported by, and only by, an exclusion no less transcendental than the necessity itself.
From Organism to Picnic
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines, from the standpoint of ancient Greece, the notion of consensus—a notion that is increasingly central to the space of our current political and philosophical imagination, to the point where it may seem constitutive of maturity or modernity in politics. The analysis is grounded on three distinct philosophical corpora that are, either implicitly or explicitly, in a relationship of dialogue, contradiction, or polemical engagement with each other: the corpus of sophistics, that of Plato and that of Aristotle. The discussions cover rhetorical consensus: continually creating the city through logos; ethico-political consensus: agreeing to the fixist hierarchy of differences; and specificity of the political mixture: optimizing deficiencies.
Greeks and Romans
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter compares the relationship of both Arendt and Heidegger with the past using the contrast between political thought and professional thought or thought about thought. Arendt and Heidegger refer to different pasts. Arendt makes a double reference—to the Greeks and to the Romans; for Heidegger, there is only one reference point: the Greeks—and again the Greeks. Heidegger believes that the dignity of politics consists in not being itself—while the philosopher runs the risk of Syracuse. For Arendt, the dignity of politics consists in being nothing but itself—and the “philosopher” must think only of the conditions under which politics, in its specific form, is possible.
The Performative Without Condition
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter considers the thoughts of Jacques Derrida and argues for a university without condition—a university without appeal [sans appel]. Without appeal covers without ethics, without responsibility, but also without the dilemma between an autonomy desirable for every corporation and a heteronomy necessary to bring the university out of itself. Just as the performative utterance—the university thought of in the form of an enlarged perlocutory—has been able to get the university out of an autonomy reduced to Selbstbehauptung, so it will serve as a provisional arm for subtracting us from an autonomy confused with the performance of a manager.
Genres and Genders. Woman/Philosopher
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines the concept of “woman-philosopher.” It argues that the identity of woman-philosopher is primarily a strategic one designed for a particular purpose and as a means of resistance, an identity that has much in common with “affirmative action,” which is tied to a particular situation, to a set of circumstances specific to a given time and place. It considers to the relationship between the impossibility of being a woman and the impossibility of philosophy.
Google and Cultural Democracy
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: September 2014

The democratic pretention of Google has two dimensions, according to Google itself: democracy upstream and democracy downstream. Upstream, each one of “us,” in equal measure or weighted aristocratically, constitutes a portion of the information that appears on the Web: “you are the web,” its content. Downstream, everyone has (or will or would have) free and equal access to the Web in terms of the sharing of knowledge. However, in relation to the idea of cultural democracy, more modesty is needed, both with democracy and with culture. This chapter argues that Google is a champion of a cultural democracy with neither culture nor democracy because it is a master neither of culture (information is not paideia) nor of politics (the democracy of clicks is not a democracy).
The Personal Value and Social Usefulness of Philosophy
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Blending personal and intellectual biography, Lachs reflects on his own development as a thinker. He argues that philosopher's should be attentive to the personal value and social usefulness of their discipline. He provides an overview of philosophy's significance in his own life, highlighting his unique contributions which include a theory of mediation, choice-inclusive facts, and an appreciation for the wide range of human natures.
On Selling Organs
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs argues that liberty is a relevant idea in addressing technological advances concerning organ transplant. Arguing that the poor have a right to make use of their bodies in securing wealth, he contends that the government has no right to interfere with the sale of skills and bodies, so long as this activity does not harm others.
Leaving Others Alone
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs argues that we should leave others alone, especially those with natures and hence goods different from our own. This means leaving them enough “operational space” to exercise their choices and enjoy their goods. Leaving others alone does not amount to indifference, since its flip side is helping them when they need it and when doing so is consistent with the integrity of their (not our own) needs. Since individuals have different natures and so different satisfactions, Lachs advocates a positive pluralism that both tolerates and encourages diversity, generating a society more conducive to human flourishing.
Relativism and Its Benefits
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs argues that belief in the uniformity of human nature underlies dogmatism about absolute values. He rejects this view since he finds that the natures of individuals vary. Values are relative not to individuals’ thoughts and feelings but to their natures. This form of relativism does not lead to anarchy, however, since natures are similar and compatible enough to make social organizations possible, even if their overlaps do not constitute or consist in a uniform essence. Relativism has the chief advantage of promoting human liberty so that individuals can pursue their unique forms of perfection.
Good Enough
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs distinguishes what is good enough, whose mark is experienced satisfaction, from the compromise implicit in the idea of that with which we can “make do.” What is good enough has an integrity of its own that indicates that it does not need to be better; it is satisfactory on its own terms. We may deem it unsatisfactory, but that is relative to another experience or situation. Consequently, embracing the good enough does not warrant indifference or settling for less than what is possible, though it does enable us to enjoy satisfactions and counteract the impossible drive to have and do everything.
Physician Assisted Suicide
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Writing in response to his mother's death at the age of 103, Lachs argues in favor of physician assisted suicide. He is critical of bioethical discussions that are couched in abstractions and focuses on a concrete detailed case of someone seeking relief from existence. The article includes an analysis of arguments against suicide from Kant and Mill. Lachs offers an analysis of a meaningful death in relation to our current social practices.
The Translation of a System in Deconstruction
Authors: Miller Steven
Published: September 2014

This chapter considers Derrida’s thoughts on translation. It argues that the work of Derrida represents perhaps the only attempt to put into practice and to elaborate a theory of translation that reframes the very problem of the task of the translator. It further argues that for Derrida, war takes place in language, on language, and by language. The act of war takes the form of writing or the mark; it might be nonverbal but it is not external to the symbolic field.