On the Many Senses of “Self-Determination”

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-35
Author(s):  
Karl Ameriks

This chapter begins by noting a number of basic meanings that “determination” has for Kant: causal, epistemic, formal, and normative, in the sense of defining a “vocation” for the individual and humanity as a whole. These distinctions are employed in a reinterpretation of the difficult transition in Kant’s argument connecting Sections II and III of the Groundwork. In this context, a new reading is given of Kant’s “Formula of Autonomy,” one of the basic meanings of his categorical imperative. It is argued that it is primarily the autonomy of the faculty of reason and its appreciation of an absolutely necessary norm that is Kant’s main concern. It is also argued that Kant’s notion of autonomy should not be understood in a loose, anarchic way, nor in such a way that free action against morality, that is, evil, is not clearly possible.

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ute Osterkamp

This article outlines the essential characteristics of a psychology from the subject standpoint that starts from the principal unity of self-determination and determining the relations that determine one's own actions. The main research object in subject science understood in this way is the many forms of hindrances and obstacles, both in theory and in practice, that prevent us from realizing this unity. In contrast to standard research, where one attempts to grasp the dependency of the individual agency of others on societal structures and their cultural meanings, psychology from a subject standpoint is about relating to the societability of one's own actions, that is, analysing them to grasp their own real preconditions and implications. Consequently, in such a subject science perspective, the aim is less to gain or disseminate knowledge and more to analyse the many ways in which “critical” knowledge urging change is ignored or modified to make it compatible with one's own actual possibilities to act. As the paper details, such subject science research is not possible from an external standpoint but entails subjecting one's own assumptions and methods to a critical analysis.


Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-54
Author(s):  
Oyeh O. Otu

This article examines how female conditioning and sexual repression affect the woman’s sense of self, womanhood, identity and her place in society. It argues that the woman’s body is at the core of the many sites of gender struggles/ politics. Accordingly, the woman’s body must be decolonised for her to attain true emancipation. On the one hand, this study identifies the grave consequences of sexual repression, how it robs women of their freedom to choose whom to love or marry, the freedom to seek legal redress against sexual abuse and terror, and how it hinders their quest for self-determination. On the other hand, it underscores the need to give women sexual freedom that must be respected and enforced by law for the overall good of society.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 366-366
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen

Eddic poetry constitutes one of the most important genres in Old Norse or Scandinavian literature and has been studied since the earliest time of modern-day philology. The progress we have made in that field is impressive, considering the many excellent editions and translations, not to mention the countless critical studies in monographs and articles. Nevertheless, there is always a great need to revisit, to summarize, to review, and to digest the knowledge gained so far. The present handbook intends to address all those goals and does so, to spell it out right away, exceedingly well. But in contrast to traditional concepts, the individual contributions constitute fully developed critical article, each with a specialized topic elucidating it as comprehensively as possible, and concluding with a section of notes. Those are kept very brief, but the volume rounds it all off with an inclusive, comprehensive bibliography. And there is also a very useful index at the end. At the beginning, we find, following the table of contents, a list of the contributors, unfortunately without emails, a list of translations and abbreviations of the titles of Eddic poems in the Codex Regius and then elsewhere, and a very insightful and pleasant introduction by Carolyne Larrington. She briefly introduces the genre and then summarizes the essential points made by the individual authors. The entire volume is based on the Eddic Network established by the three editors in 2012, and on two workshops held at St. John’s College, Oxford in 2013 and 2014.


Author(s):  
Benedetta Zavatta

Based on an analysis of the marginal markings and annotations Nietzsche made to the works of Emerson in his personal library, the book offers a philosophical interpretation of the impact on Nietzsche’s thought of his reading of these works, a reading that began when he was a schoolboy and extended to the final years of his conscious life. The many ideas and sources of inspiration that Nietzsche drew from Emerson can be organized in terms of two main lines of thought. The first line leads in the direction of the development of the individual personality, that is, the achievement of critical thinking, moral autonomy, and original self-expression. The second line of thought is the overcoming of individuality: that is to say, the need to transcend one’s own individual—and thus by definition limited—view of the world by continually confronting and engaging with visions different from one’s own and by putting into question and debating one’s own values and certainties. The image of the strong personality that Nietzsche forms thanks to his reading of Emerson ultimately takes on the appearance of a nomadic subject who is continually passing out of themselves—that is to say, abandoning their own positions and convictions—so as to undergo a constant process of evolution. In other words, the formation of the individual personality takes on the form of a regulative ideal: a goal that can never be said to have been definitively and once and for all attained.


Author(s):  
Elisabeth van Houts

This book contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe c. 900–1300. The focus will be on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage. The book consists of three parts: the first part (Getting Married) is devoted to the process of getting married and wedding celebrations, the second part (Married Life) discusses the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage, while the third part (Alternative Living) explores concubinage and polygyny as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. Four main themes are central to the book. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member’s freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Maxim Pyzh ◽  
Kevin Keiler ◽  
Simeon I. Mistakidis ◽  
Peter Schmelcher

We address the interplay of few lattice trapped bosons interacting with an impurity atom in a box potential. For the ground state, a classification is performed based on the fidelity allowing to quantify the susceptibility of the composite system to structural changes due to the intercomponent coupling. We analyze the overall response at the many-body level and contrast it to the single-particle level. By inspecting different entropy measures we capture the degree of entanglement and intraspecies correlations for a wide range of intra- and intercomponent interactions and lattice depths. We also spatially resolve the imprint of the entanglement on the one- and two-body density distributions showcasing that it accelerates the phase separation process or acts against spatial localization for repulsive and attractive intercomponent interactions, respectively. The many-body effects on the tunneling dynamics of the individual components, resulting from their counterflow, are also discussed. The tunneling period of the impurity is very sensitive to the value of the impurity-medium coupling due to its effective dressing by the few-body medium. Our work provides implications for engineering localized structures in correlated impurity settings using species selective optical potentials.


Author(s):  
Kim P. Roberts ◽  
Katherine R. Wood ◽  
Breanne E. Wylie

AbstractOne of the many sources of information easily available to children is the internet and the millions of websites providing accurate, and sometimes inaccurate, information. In the current investigation, we examined children’s ability to use credibility information about websites when learning about environmental sustainability. In two studies, children studied two different websites and were tested on what they had learned a week later using a multiple-choice test containing both website items and new distracters. Children were given either no information about the websites or were told that one of the websites (the noncredible website) contained errors and they should not use any information from that website to answer the test. In both studies, children aged 7- to 9-years reported information from the noncredible website even when instructed not to, whereas the 10- to 12-year-olds used the credibility warning to ‘edit out’ information that they had learned from the noncredible website. In Study 2, there was an indication that the older children spontaneously assessed the credibility of the website if credibility markers were made explicit. A plausible explanation is that, although children remembered information from the websites, they needed explicit instruction to bind the website content with the relevant source (the individual websites). The results have implications for children’s learning in an open-access, digital age where information comes from many sources, credible and noncredible. Education in credibility evaluation may enable children to be critical consumers of information thereby resisting misinformation provided through public sources.


2007 ◽  
Vol 362 (1486) ◽  
pp. 1841-1845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan Rocheleau ◽  
Steen Rasmussen ◽  
Peter E Nielsen ◽  
Martin N Jacobi ◽  
Hans Ziock

Template-directed replication is known to obey a parabolic growth law due to product inhibition (Sievers & Von Kiedrowski 1994 Nature 369 , 221; Lee et al . 1996 Nature 382 , 525; Varga & Szathmáry 1997 Bull. Math. Biol . 59 , 1145). We investigate a template-directed replication with a coupled template catalysed lipid aggregate production as a model of a minimal protocell and show analytically that the autocatalytic template–container feedback ensures balanced exponential replication kinetics; both the genes and the container grow exponentially with the same exponent. The parabolic gene replication does not limit the protocellular growth, and a detailed stoichiometric control of the individual protocell components is not necessary to ensure a balanced gene–container growth as conjectured by various authors (Gánti 2004 Chemoton theory ). Our analysis also suggests that the exponential growth of most modern biological systems emerges from the inherent spatial quality of the container replication process as we show analytically how the internal gene and metabolic kinetics determine the cell population's generation time and not the growth law (Burdett & Kirkwood 1983 J. Theor. Biol . 103 , 11–20; Novak et al . 1998 Biophys. Chem . 72 , 185–200; Tyson et al . 2003 Curr. Opin. Cell Biol . 15 , 221–231). Previous extensive replication reaction kinetic studies have mainly focused on template replication and have not included a coupling to metabolic container dynamics (Stadler et al . 2000 Bull. Math. Biol . 62 , 1061–1086; Stadler & Stadler 2003 Adv. Comp. Syst . 6 , 47). The reported results extend these investigations. Finally, the coordinated exponential gene–container growth law stemming from catalysis is an encouraging circumstance for the many experimental groups currently engaged in assembling self-replicating minimal artificial cells (Szostak 2001 et al . Nature 409 , 387–390; Pohorille & Deamer 2002 Trends Biotech . 20 123–128; Rasmussen et al . 2004 Science 303 , 963–965; Szathmáry 2005 Nature 433 , 469–470; Luisi et al . 2006 Naturwissenschaften 93 , 1–13). 1


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bencherki ◽  
Alaric Bourgoin

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.


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