Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended, failed even, in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger's critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger's basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy's attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western (...) rationalism. (shrink)

In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe. This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of female converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary Make Me (...) a Muslim and the Swiss documentary Les Converties d’Allah. We suggest that comparing these two documentaries illuminates certain common narrative threads in media representations of female converts to Islam across different European contexts. In this article, we firstly situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse the two documentaries, focusing on their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. We argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation. (shrink)

Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) is a methodology that is well suited to inquiring into nursing knowledge and its organization. It is a critical analytic approach derived from Foucault's histories of science, madness, medicine, incarceration and sexuality, all of which serve to exteriorize or make visible the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ penetrating bodies and minds. Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) holds the potential to reveal who we are today as nurses and as a profession of nursing by facilitating our ability to identify (...) and trace the effects of the discourses that determine the conditions of possibility for nursing practice that are continuously shaping and (re)shaping the knowledge of nursing and the profession of nursing as we know it. In making visible the chain of knowledge that orders the spaces nurses occupy, no less than their subjectivities, FDA is a powerful methodology for inquiring into nursing knowledge based on its provocation of deep critical reflection on the normalizing power of discourse. (shrink)

We are repeatedly told that AI will help us to solve some of the world's biggest challenges, from treating chronic diseases and reducing fatality rates in traffic accidents to fighting climate change and anticipating cybersecurity threats. However, the article contends that public discourse on AI systematically avoids considering AI’s environmental costs. Artificial Intelligence- Brevini argues- runs on technology, machines, and infrastructures that deplete scarce resources in their production, consumption, and disposal, thus increasing the amounts of energy in their use, and (...) exacerbate problems of waste and pollution. It also relies on data centers, that demands impressive amounts of energy to compute, analyse, categorize. If we want to stand a chance at tackling the Climate Emergency, then we have to stop avoiding addressing the environmental problems generated by AI. (shrink)

This article examines how the authorization of scientific discourses in the US Endangered Species Act of 1973 has influenced the ways people make claims about culturally significant animals. In it, I focus on struggles over the management of two endangered fish species among a federally recognized Native American tribe, state resource managers, and other actors. I discuss how the requirements of the ESA, namely that decisions regarding the protection of endangered species must be made based “solely on the basis of (...) the best scientific…data available,” have pushed people to reframe their cultural claims about the environment as scientific claims in order to gain legal authority. I argue that these animals span the social worlds of indigenous hunters and fishers, regulators, and ecological scientists. As such, they offer the opportunity to interrogate the relationships among ways of knowing the environment. I suggest that strict divisions among “types” of knowledge as well as hard-and-fast bonds between groups and “their” knowledge become problematic. Instead, people assemble eclectic articulations of knowledge to make the most authoritative claim possible in a given context, contradicting the assumption that certain people know the world only, or primarily, in a particular way. (shrink)

Rumour has been part of collective human life for centuries. Communities deal with anxiety and make sense of the unknowable by mixing apprehensions with what is already known to them. With modernity, and in line with studies on a range of social phenomena, there have been efforts to develop a science on rumour. Most of these studies deal with rumour at the propositional level, such that the rumouring or rumour-rebutting subject invariably belongs to one of the two sides of the (...) ‘true–false’ divide. Similar categories are followed in the study of rumour in social media, where the nodes in a rumour chain are, however, less hierarchical, and where images are increasingly used for persuasion. This paper, following a value-oriented approach, argues that the science on rumour has objectivized the problem, and has suggested instrumental solutions like enhancing the digital literacy of social media users. Whereas a value position should ideally attempt to efface the dilemma of the rumouring/rumour-rebutting subject, and locate rumours within the larger socio-political and historical context of a society. (shrink)