The Principle of Autonomy in Kant's Moral Theory: Its Rise and Fall

In this essay, “The Principle of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: Its Rise and Fall,” Pauline Kleingeld notes that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy, which played a central role in both the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, disappeared by the time of the Metaphysics of Morals. She argues that its disappearance is due to significant changes in Kant’s political philosophy. The Principle of Autonomy states that one ought to act as if one were giving universal laws through one’s maxims. The criterion of just legislation that Kant accepted in the mid-1780s does not require any actual consent on the part of the citizens—genuine universality is sufficient for a law to be just. Hence, at that time, Kant could indeed explicate the criterion governing the moral permissibility of one’s maxims by drawing an analogy with the criterion governing the justice of political laws. In the Metaphysics of Morals and in other works in the 1790s, however, he added the further condition that laws must be given with the consent of the citizens. With this further condition, the moral criterion was no longer fully analogous to the criterion for political laws being just. Accordingly, Kleingeld argues, Kant dropped the Principle of Autonomy, which was firmly based on that analogy

The revolution will be tweeted : how the internet can stimulate the public exercise of freedoms

This article discusses how new technologies of communication, especially the Internet and, more specifically, social network services, can interfere in social interactions and in political relations. The main objective is to problematize the concept of public liberty and verify how the new technologies can promote the reoccupation of public spaces and the recovery of public life, in opposition to the tendency to valorize the private sphere, observed in the second half of the twentieth century. The theoretical benchmark adopted for the investigation is Hannah Arendt's theory about the exercise of fundamental political capacities in order to establish a public space of freedom, as presented in “On Revolution”. The “Praia da Estação” (“Station Beach”) case is chosen to test the hypothesis. In 2010 in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, different individuals articulated a movement through blogs, Twitter and facebook, in order to protest against the Mayor’s act that banned the assembling of cultural events in one of the main public places of the city, the “Praça da Estação” (Station Square). By applying Arendt's concepts to the selected case, it is possible to demonstrate that the Internet can assume an important role against governmental arbitrariness and abuse of power, as it can stimulate the public exercise of fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of assembly and manifestation

LIDT-DD: A new self-consistent debris disc model including radiation pressure and coupling collisional and dynamical evolution

In most current debris disc models, the dynamical and the collisional evolutions are studied separately, with N-body and statistical codes, respectively, because of stringent computational constraints. We present here LIDT-DD, the first code able to mix both approaches in a fully self-consistent way. Our aim is for it to be generic enough so as to be applied to any astrophysical cases where we expect dynamics and collisions to be deeply interlocked with one another: planets in discs, violent massive breakups, destabilized planetesimal belts, exozodiacal discs, etc. The code takes its basic architecture from the LIDT3D algorithm developed by Charnoz et al.(2012) for protoplanetary discs, but has been strongly modified and updated in order to handle the very constraining specificities of debris discs physics: high-velocity fragmenting collisions, radiation-pressure affected orbits, absence of gas, etc. In LIDT-DD, grains of a given size at a given location in a disc are grouped into "super-particles", whose orbits are evolved with an N-body code and whose mutual collisions are individually tracked and treated using a particle-in-a-box prescription. To cope with the wide range of possible dynamics, tracers are sorted and regrouped into dynamical families depending on their orbits. The code retrieves the classical features known for debris discs, such as the particle size distributions in unperturbed discs, the outer radial density profiles (slope in -1.5) outside narrow collisionally active rings, and the depletion of small grains in "dynamically cold" discs. The potential of the new code is illustrated with the test case of the violent breakup of a massive planetesimal within a debris disc. The main potential future applications of the code are planet/disc interactions, and more generally any configurations where dynamics and collisions are expected to be intricately connected.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. 20 pages, 17 figures. Abstract shortened for astro-p

Further dimensions: text, typography and play in the metaverse

In this text I wish to delve into the creation of textual content as well as its visualization through typographic design mechanisms inside three dimensional virtual worlds, which are known as the metaverse. I am particularly focused upon the way in which such virtually three dimensional environments may place the usage of text within a context that stands in contradiction to its traditional one by creating an unexpected novel purpose which takes a marked departure from the intrinsic attribute with which text has inherently been associated – namely the attribute of readability. In such environments readability, or indeed even legibility, may often be displaced through the usage of text and typography as a playful device, as artifacts which may manifest in puzzle-like configurations, or as visual structures the contents of which are meant to be understood through means other than straightforward reading; thus bringing about states of heightened engagement, wonder and ‘play’ through their manipulation or indeed simply by being immersed within the spaces which are brought about through their very agency. I also wish to expand upon this subject by talking about my own experiments with this material and will conclude by positing that further virtual dimensions can be instrumental in eliciting exciting alternative usages of text and typography which bring to the fore the allographic properties of text as an artistic/creative expressive media that may well bear further scrutiny and exploration

WALL-E’s world: animating Badiou’s philosophy

This article illustrates the philosophy of Alain Badiou through Pixar’s 2008 animation ‘WALL-E’. The fictional story tells of a toxic planet Earth long abandoned following an ecological disaster. Humanity now exists in a floating brave new world; a spaceship whose passengers’ everyday existence is drowned by a consumptive slumber. That is, until a robot named WALL-E comes aboard and changes things forever. The purpose of making this connection between philosophy and film is not to trivialize Badiou’s work, but rather to open it up, pull it apart, and synchronize it with a movie that is saturated with Badiouian themes. Beneath the complexities of Being and Event’s set-theory and the Logics of Worlds’ algebra, lay a set of ideas that are fizzing with creativity and disruptive potential. WALL-E gives these political and philosophical ideas a lived expression to a wide audience. The central motif of the article is that the finitude of appearance in a world is constantly overrun by the infinitude of being, and this requires a new theorization of site-based geographies. From the miraculous discovery of a plant growing on a dead Earth, to the tumultuous arrival of WALL-E onboard a spaceship that he never belonged to, the stability of a world is always threatened by a ‘point of excess’, called the site. Three interrelated concepts of Badiou’s will be animated in this article: atonic and tensed worlds, sites, and subjects

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGERS’ ROLE IN THE DIGITAL ERA

The file attached to this record is the Publisher's final version.In any one organization, in Business, Service, Industry or State, Human Resource Management (HRM) is perceived as a set of activities that creates value to both the organization itself in terms of bottom line results and to employees, in terms of well – being and employment/ contract terms. Organizations, to a more or lesser extent, have adopted Digital technologies and as a result HR activities are affected, in terms of speed, accuracy, quality, cost innovation, flexibility. The aims of this theoretical study are to highlight HRM in the era of digitalization, emphasize the roles of HR managers in contemporary organizations and discuss the impact of technological changes on HR practices. In order to achieve our aims, we adopt a conceptual approach. Our results summarize the contemporary HRM definitions, discuss the impact of digital technologies in certain HR areas and emphasize the new digital role of human resource manager (d-HRM)

Thoughts for the times on war

For the abstract, please see the PDF fil

Reconfiguring Interactivity, Agency and Pleasure in the Education and Computer Games Debate – using Žižek’s concept of interpassivity to analyse educational play

Digital or computer games have recently attracted the interest of education researchers and policy-makers for two main reasons: their interactivity, which is said to allow greater agency, and their inherent pleasures, which is linked to increased motivation to learn. However, the relationship between pleasure, agency and motivation in educational technologies is under-theorised. This paper aims to situate these concepts within a framework that might identify more precisely how games can be considered to be educational. The framework is based on Zizek’s theory of subjectivity in cyberspace, and in particular his notion of interpassivity, which is defined in relation to interactivity. The usefulness of this concept is explored firstly by examining three approaches to theorizing cyberspace and their respective manifestations in key texts on educational game play. Zizek’s analysis of cyberspace in terms of socio-symbolic relations is then outlined to suggest how games might be considered educational insofar as they provide opportunities to manipulate and experiment with the rules underpinning our sense of reality and identity. This resembles Brecht’s notion of the educational value of theatre. The conclusion emphasizes that the terms on which games are understood to be educational relates to the social interests which education is understood to serve