It is important to talk about corporations as a class, about trade agreements, and about government policy; but without examining specific examples of how real corporations actually shape the world to suit their purposes, we stand little chance of understanding the determinative forces behind government policy and trade agreements, and even less chance of affecting them. This article uses the metaphor of “genetics” (inherent character) to examine two major transnational corporations operating at the extremes of restructuring life.

The actions of perceiving and grouping are the two that the human being carries out when thinking in entities different from himself. In this article “The Mirror Problem” and “The Peer Problem”, which correspond respectively to self-perception and the perception of others, are studied. By solving these two problems, the thinker arrives to the following conclusions: “I exist” and “I am”.

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services have recently launched themselves as the UN-sanctioned instrument for conserving nature. They seek to establish themselves as the authority in this field alongside the well-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in climate science. Quickly following or even before recent publication of their conceptual framework in two biology journals, they were already underway building upon it. This headlong push, we believe, is ill advised. We show how the framework is unsound as a foundation (...) for further work—in a number of ways and perhaps even by its authors’ own lights. It is therefore urgent that the IPBES thoroughly and thoughtfully reconsider their framework before too much effort is wasted. (shrink)

This essay explores the phenomenological features of the passional response to evil that Aquinas calls ‘hatred of sin’ in Summa Thelogiae II-II Q34 A3 and I-II Q23 A1, among other places. Social justice concerns and philosophical objections, however, challenge the notion that one can feel hatred toward an agent’s vice or sin without it being the agent who is hated. I argue that a careful, contextual reading of these texts shows that Aquinas cannot be read as commending ‘hate’ in any (...) form. The texts under consideration offer no comfort to those who appeal to hatred of sin or vice to legitimate sentiments or actions that can be reasonably taken to express hatred of persons. (shrink)

"Text, it is Jean-Luc Godard’s “ennemi royal, principal." Text, it is on the side of death, “les images c’est la vie et les textes, c’est la mort”. Twenty years later and the war is not over: “Une image est paisible. Une image de la Vierge avec son petit enfant sur son âne n'amène pas la guerre, c'est son interprétation par un texte qui amènera la guerre et qui fera que les soldats de Luther iront déchirer les toiles de Raphaël.” Godard’s (...) story is not just of the history of cinema, it is one in which text has won out to the extent that TV and the computer too make of the image something subservient to text. “Since Gutenberg” the text has triumphed in this way. “There was a long struggle, marriage or liaison between painting and text. Then the text carried the day. Film is the last art in the pictorial tradition... Take away the text and you’ll see what’s left. In TV nothing is left.” It is obvious from these lines of demarcation, lines which divide the art of the image from what would declare war on its most sacred icons and defeat its technologies, a conflict in which there is just the one aggressor, a division which makes of the relation between image and text nothing less than a matter of life and death, that for Godard text is indeed the enemy...". (shrink)