The Human Condition.
TL;DR: In some religious traditions, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness.
Abstract: Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:
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27 Mar 2015
TL;DR: In this article, a series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human are presented, with a focus on the life of lines.
Abstract: To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from Tim Ingold's groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, it offers a wholly original series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human.
In the first part, Ingold argues that a world of life is woven from knots, and not built from blocks as commonly thought. He shows how the principle of knotting underwrites both the way things join with one another, in walls, buildings and bodies, and the composition of the ground and the knowledge we find there.
In the second part, Ingold argues that to study living lines, we must also study the weather. To complement a linealogy that asks what is common to walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling and writing, he develops a meteorology that seeks the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This denominator is the atmosphere.
In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social.
This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world refreshingly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges widely over an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture.
410 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the fact that gender equality and women empowerment have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice.
Abstract: The language of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ was mobilised by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of getting women’s rights onto the international development agenda. Their efforts can be declared a resounding success. The international development industry has fully embraced these terms. From international NGOs to donor governments to multilateral agencies the language of gender equality and women’s empowerment is a pervasive presence and takes pride of place among their major development priorities. And yet, this article argues, the fact that these terms have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice. Critically examining the trajectories of these terms in development, the article suggests that if the promise of the post-2015 agenda is to deliver on gender justice, new frames are needed, which can connect with and contribute to a broader movement for global justice.
271 citations
TL;DR: A network simulation model used to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions.
Abstract: The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media
223 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...The disappearance of media intermediation seems not to have, as was believed, fostered a space for direct meetings in a sort of online Habermasian public sphere, but rather to have implied that the “world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them” [6] (p....
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...But despite early optimism about this ostensibly decentralized and democratic meetingplace, the online world seems less and less like a common “table” that “gathers us together” [6] (p....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a mediation model to explain the relationship between CEO humility and firm performance and found that when a more humble CEO leads a firm, its top management team is more likely to collaborate, share information, jointly make decisions, and possess a shared vision.
215 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...Drawing on the communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958), we propose that humble CEOs do not stress power over other TMT members but, instead, have power to pursue goals for collective interest with the TMTs....
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...In this sense, humble CEOs exercise power in a way that diverts from an interpersonal power perspective (Sturm & Antonakis, 2015) and complies with a communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958)....
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TL;DR: The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies.
Abstract: Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrialscale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today.
204 citations
References
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21 Mar 2018
TL;DR: Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic as discussed by the authors introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
Abstract: Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
In Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare shows Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire. Why did Rome degenerate into an autocracy? Alternating between ruthless competition, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and self-indulgent fantasies, Rome as Shakespeare sees it is inevitably bound for civil war. Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic considers Shakespeare’s place in the history of concepts of selfhood and reflects on his sympathy for Christianity, in light of his reception of medieval Biblical drama, as well as his allusions to the New Testament. Shakespeare’s critique of Romanitas anticipates concerns about secularization, individualism, and liberalism shared by philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Patrick Deneen.
47 citations
01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: In the preface of the Philosophy of Right, this paper, the author argues that private property is a rational necessity for human freedom and that the state must conscientiously choose to allow broad discretion for the acquisition, use, and alienation of property.
Abstract: right are fully socialized by their family, civil society, and the state in order to prepare them for property ownership. When the state secures the property right through the establishment of institutions which codify the rights, define it, and punish those who violate it, it is bound by a certain logic: only private property creates free individuals, and persons are free to the extent they can exchange property in accord with rational desire. These free individuals in turn perpetuate the institution of private property by owning and exchanging property on the terms established by abstract right, which promotes the development of persons by permitting them to freely exercise their will upon the internal and external world. Because of the importance of property for personhood, the state must conscientiously choose to allow broad discretion for the acquisition, use, and alienation of property. Reading Philosophy of Right In the preface of Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes that “each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts.” As Jeremy Waldron notes, Hegel’s theory of private property the result of its status as an institution in his era, and he sought to discover what was rational about the institution and whether it contributed to human freedom. “[I]f we are led to agree with Hegel that private property is a rational necessity, then we will be inclined to give a positive evaluation of some features of society...([such as] those that represent a progressive tendency towards private ownership) and a negative evaluation...of others.” By seeking “standards of rationality within existing systems of thought and forms of life”, Hegel engages in a critique of private property as the apotheosis of freedom in the 1800s. To that extent, Joachim Ritter writes that it is important to understand that Hegel, despite
46 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a polemic that questions individualist approaches to the good society and individualist assumptions about the social, especially in the analytic-individualist traditions and in postphenomenology, is presented.
46 citations
TL;DR: The actor-centered theoretical and measurement approach in this study identifies caveats to the theory that changing citizenship norms are leading to civic and political renewal, and discusses the implications of these findings for measuring different aspects of democratic (dis)engagement and participatory (in)equality.
Abstract: Scholars have recognized that a recent increase in the ways citizens participate beyond the electoral arena may be a promising avenue of renewal for citizen participation. In this article we test the theory that different kinds of citizenship norms motivate some citizens to specialize in electoral-oriented activities (e.g. voting), while others specialize in non-institutionalized activities (e.g. protest). The latent class analysis of data from the U.S. Citizen, Involvement and Democracy Survey (2005) in the current study assesses how actors combine a variety of acts in their “political tool kits” of participation, and facilitates a comparison to prior findings that analyze single political behaviors. Results indicate a participatory type that specializes in non-institutionalized acts, but the group’s high probability of voting does not align with the expectations in the literature. An electoral-oriented specialist type is not identified; instead, the findings show that a majority of the population is best characterized as disengaged, while a small group of all-around activists embrace all possible opportunities for political action. The actor-centered theoretical and measurement approach in this study identifies caveats to the theory that changing citizenship norms are leading to civic and political renewal. We discuss the implications of these findings for measuring different aspects of democratic (dis)engagement and participatory (in)equality.
45 citations
Book•
05 Sep 2016
TL;DR: The theory of "egalitarian rights recognition" as discussed by the authors is based on a combination of aspects of the work of Thomas Hill Green and Hannah Arendt, and it is argued that human rights must be grounded in social recognition, rather than in the innate qualities of the human.
Abstract: This thesis sets out the theory of ‘egalitarian rights recognition’, which is based on a novel combination of aspects of the work of Thomas Hill Green and Hannah Arendt. In doing so, it makes three key arguments. First, human rights must be grounded in social recognition, rather than in the innate qualities of the human. Second, rights recognition requires a serious commitment to equality - conversely egalitarian rights recognition provides a critical lens through which the problems of rights recognised in situations of inequality can be more clearly seen. Third, human rights, if grounded by egalitarian social recognition, are important for human freedom and flourishing. The thesis concludes by applying the theory of egalitarian rights recognition to the international level, arguing that rights recognition can provide a more plausible basis for cosmopolitanism than natural rights, and thus for human rights, rather than rights within a certain state.
45 citations