Inadequate Ideas Research Articles

Hiding in Plain Sight? Conceptualizations of Databases in Migration Law and International Tax Law

Databases are increasingly used in international law settings. This requires new strategies for those who want to critique international legal practices and their effects. In this essay, we claim that legal scholarship tends to conceptualize the database in ways that leave older and inadequate ideas of legal method(s) and sovereignty in the context of international law largely unquestioned or even serve to reinforce them. Further, we argue that these tendencies obstruct proper understandings of international legal practices and prevent adequate critique. To illustrate the extent of these tendencies, we provide examples from our own research areas: migration law and international corporate income tax law. We contend that empirical studies of how databases are used in these and other legal settings, can help demystify and rework well-established assumptions through which international law, and the database, are seen.

Marxism and revisionism in the world today

Lenin said, ‘We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life’. Marx himself believed in the principle of ‘ruthless criticism’ of everything existing. Critiquing and revising certain ideas to strengthen an approach to society is a constructive act. But the legitimate act of revision becomes revision-ism, when the fundamental tenets of Marxism are revised in order to attack – negate – its very explanatory or scientific foundation and to justify political reformism. Indeed, since Lenin’s time, scientific socialism has been under attack from not only the ruling class and its ideologues, but also those who associate themselves with Marxism itself, including in academia. The latter are revisionist Marxists. For them, Marxism has some usefulness. But they deny the superiority of Marxism as a way of critically and scientifically interpreting the world and transforming that world in the interest of the exploited and oppressed masses in a revolutionary socialist manner. This denial of Marxism’s superiority takes the form of the denial of Marxism’s central concepts: class and capitalism. The article discusses, and critiques, various forms of revisionist Marxism (e.g. Analytical Marxism, Polanyian Marxism, Post-Modernist Marxism, and Geographical Marxism). Revisionism does respond to some recent developments in the world (e.g. the defeat of class-based movements; the complexity of class structure), but it seeks to explain these not on the basis of Marxist foundations but on the basis of scientifically inadequate ideas and in a manner that is politically reformist.

Reading against the Forces of Boredom: Environmental Literary Culture in ‘the Age of Amazon’

This paper offers an anxious survey of factors inducing boredom or indifference in the readership of environmental writing and criticism. The first is the inertia of limited assumptions in writers and critics about how to engage readers’ attention, with inadequate ideas of what ‘genuine reading’ would be. Secondly and more insidiously, modern readers are usually now immersed in consumerist cultural contexts actively geared to encourage boredom as a market force. Reduced thresholds of attention become effectively a political agent, usually a reactionary one. Next the question is asked: is ‘the reader’ a unified subject? That is, how far are environmental texts and fears unwittingly appealing to unacknowledged fantasies of violence and harm? A final threat to readerly engagement with environmental criticism in particular is that, as the conditions of the ‘Anthropocene’ worsen, just to engage more reading and readers on environmental issues comes to seem less and less adequate, even evasive, an academic theatre only of performing opinions.

Expression as Creativity

Deleuze (1990) reads Part I of the Ethics as articulating an expressionist philosophy, in which to express (exprimere) is the ontological criterion for existence throughout Spinoza’s metaphysical system. However, he argues that inadequate ideas and passions are non‑expressing, such that finite modes express substance only in their adequate ideas. I argue, contra Deleuze, that Spinoza’s account of the workings of the human mind presses us to understand inadequate ideas as genuine expressions of substance which nonetheless are specific to the individuals which form them. On the same textual grounds I propose that the mind’s expression of substance in inadequate ideas, and thus in virtue of its encounters with other modes, is a source of both creativity and potential instability. I put this insight to work in a reading of Spinoza’s political philosophy, arguing that expression generates a dynamic in which social formations enact and reinforce their own forms of expression, while also being subject to the reimaginations and expression of those who live within them.

No Mute Picture

AbstractIn the scholium to proposition 49 of Part 2 of the Ethics, Spinoza addresses a number of prejudices that tend to obscure the essentially judgmental nature of ideas. One warning is issued against those who do not distinguish accurately between ideas and images, and, for this exact reason, fail to see that every idea, insofar as it is an idea, always involves an affirmation that something is the case. This paper shows that in order to properly understand Spinoza's remarks in this passage, we must redirect attention to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, and more particularly to the objections raised against them by Hobbes. Specifically, I argue for the identification of Hobbes and other likeminded “imagists” as Spinoza's main targets, and not, as is often assumed, Descartes himself or Cartesians in general. My identification not only resolves interpretative confusion surrounding this passage, but it also confirms Spinoza's commitment to a key rationalist assumption: the existence of a mind that can grasp or exhibit natures by clear and distinct perceptions. While both adequate and inadequate ideas are necessitated beliefs or judgments in which we assent to something, virtue consists in being propelled by the intellect.

Представления подростков о девиантном поведении

The study reveals peculiarities of perceptions which adolescents from different social groups have about deviant behavior. From the findings obtained in the examination of 80 adolescents using 5 methods, peculiarities were studied of how deviant behavior is viewed. It was revealed that the adolescents from the "normal" group have a more accurate picture of deviant behavior, whereas adolescents who were registered at juvenile affairs departments have an inadequate ideas about it, placing it close to delinquent behavior. External and internal causes were found which have negative impact on adolescents' views. External causes play the key role in the formation of an adolescent's personality and his/her views. Internal causes manifest in indifferent attitude to his/her studies, negative attitude towards the world, lack of trust in adults. In the absence of adolescents' awareness of the authority on the part of adults, obedience isn't a behavioral norm and means mental activity aimed to satisfy their own desires, ambitions and to belong to a group. Due to adolescents' personality specifics such as incomplete personality formation, non-constructive ways of resolving difficult situations, these specifics can be rated among the internal causes of adolescents' views about deviant behavior and of insufficient understanding of the consequences which this behavior leads to.

Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination by Eugene Garver

Reviewed by: Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination by Eugene Garver Kristin Primus Eugene Garver. Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 307. Cloth, $55.00. How the arguments of Spinoza's Ethics work might seem obvious. Even if Spinoza's exposition is not perfect, and some suppressed premises might have to be recovered, it seems clear enough that the demonstrations are supposed to show, in Euclidian fashion, how truths about the basic structure of nature—as well as truths about how to live—follow from axioms and uncontroversial definitions. If readers keep their imagination and emotions from sullying their reasoning, they will see the force of the demonstrations and be convinced. In his engaging, highly original book, Garver argues that the Ethics is not a linear march through timeless truths, but rather a complicated drama that works precisely because its "characters," the human beings described in the Ethics, as well as the people reading the Ethics, have the imaginations they do. We readers may approach this drama with scholarly detachment, but we may also find ourselves provoked by the same difficulties we see the characters encounter, which in turn may transform us in just the ways we see the characters transformed. Understanding the Ethics means following a story of how human beings can go from desiring self-preservation (as all people, by nature, do) to also desiring to live rational, ethical lives. The plot is complex, since, according to Garver, the latter desire cannot arise from the former. For self-preservation, inadequate ideas—various predilections, coping mechanisms, and tendencies to form social attachments—suffice; the desire to have adequate ideas and know things is not a desire following from an inborn striving to persevere in being. Yet human imagination can, with its characteristic deflections, get people to adequate ideas without those people ever aiming to get to them. This is what Garver calls, in a nod to Hegel's cunning of reason, the "cunning of the imagination." Garver's book consists of two parts. In the first part, Garver describes the stage set in Ethics Parts I–III. Spinoza presents what look like incommensurable systems. First, there is a system of God, infinite modes, and adequate ideas—where adequate ideas are, on Garver's view, infinite modes. Second, there is a system of inadequate ideas and finite things striving to persevere in their being. The presence of this deep divide raises hard questions. Given the finitude of our minds, how could we even have adequate ideas (including the adequate idea of God), if adequate ideas are infinite? And why would we even want adequate ideas? Adequate ideas are universal, non-perspectival truths, and there seem to be no schemata to tether those truths to our experiences as particular finite beings who care about particular finite beings. In the second part, Garver explains how these systems can be unified and how beings like us can come to desire adequate ideas. Importantly, the ascent to adequate ideas "can only be affective and must be social" (211). In infancy, we track the sources of pleasures and pains and begin, by imagination and emotion, to construct an objective social world. The [End Page 613] construction of this world opens us up to frustration and heartbreak, but it also prepares the mind to have adequate ideas of a truly objective, mind-independent world. Collaborative sociability also prepares the mind, prefiguring "the relation within a person between reason and passion, in which reason acting on the passions makes them more rather than less powerful as it makes them more rational" (101). As the imagination leads us into new ways of interacting, we think about ourselves and the world in increasingly nuanced ways. As the story goes, we might recognize that despite Ethics I–III, there is concourse between the infinite and finite. In human bondage, the topic of Ethics IV, the finite constrains the infinite. In human freedom, the topic of Ethics V, the infinite acts on the finite and the finite becomes infinite. Adequate ideas may eventually cease to feel like an alien presence in the human mind and instead be seen as one's own...

PROBLEMATICAL DEPOSITS AT TIKAL, GUATEMALA: CONTENT, CONTEXT, AND INTENT

AbstractIn the Mesoamerican archaeological literature, collections of material regarded as somehow anomalous according to the archaeologist's expectations are often referred to as problematical deposits (PDs). Their problematical aspect originates in the researcher's current state of knowledge of the particular site, not in past behavior. PDs are site-specific, provisional classifications, and need further study to determine the function or intent of the activity that created them. A sample of 223 features designated as PDs by the University of Pennsylvania Museum's Tikal Project is examined here in an approach to understand their intent. A typology of the sample, based upon content, date, and variables of recovery context, indicates three principal intents broadly summarized as ritual, political, and site maintenance, and a category of PDs without intent. The study of PDs demands a wide-ranging approach. It provides an opportunity to reevaluate inadequate ideas and gain new insights into past cultural behavior.

Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide ed. by Yitzhak Y. Melamed

Reviewed by: Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide ed. by Yitzhak Y. Melamed Andrea Sangiacomo Yitzhak Y. Melamed, editor. Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 346. Cloth, $99.99. This new Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics offers an extensive, thought-provoking, and up-to-date state of the scholarly conversation that surrounds one of Spinoza’s most studied masterpieces. The first six chapters address topics mostly related to parts one and two of the Ethics. Don Garrett discusses the identity of the attributes. Warren Zev Harvey suggests that Maimonides’s critique of final causes can be considered as an important source for Spinoza’s treatment of the same topic in the appendix to part one. John Morrison argues that Spinoza’s treatment of the nature of the human mind entails a rejection of the indiscernibility of the identicals. Martin Lin contributes a new interpretation of Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism by stressing the numerical identity of mind and body. Alison Peterman focuses on the ‘physical interlude’ that follows proposition 13 of the second part and argues that instead of providing a sketch of Spinoza’s physics, the text actually entails an attribute-neutral account of individuation and identity. Yitzhak Melamed contends that the belief in free will can be rightly considered a false and yet innate idea, according to Spinoza. A second block of four chapters focuses on topics from the third part of the Ethics. John Carriero clarifies Spinoza’s conatus argument from both a historical and systematic point of view. Lia Levy provides a close analysis of Spinoza’s definition of desire and its relationship with consciousness by arguing that consciousness can be attributed only to finite and durational beings. Lisa Shapiro offers an analysis of Spinoza’s doctrine of the association of ideas and how its mechanism can support the mind’s ability to reason. Pina Totaro undertakes a detailed historical reconstruction of the terminology that Spinoza uses to deal with the affects and its historical and philosophical significance. A third block of chapters addresses issues connected with part four. Colin Marshall argues in favor of understanding Spinoza as a moral realist. Samuel Newlands offers a non-axiological and purely metaphysical interpretation of Spinoza’s account of perfection. Beth Lord develops a both systematic and historical interpretation of Spinoza’s remarks about economics and interprets the “free man” as a model to live virtuously in a market society. Finally, two chapters deal with issues from part five. Kristin Primus advances a new interpretation of intuitive science understood as the kind of knowledge that allows the knower to be certain that her true ideas agree with their objects as they exist outside the human mind. Michael LeBuffe argues that a close analysis of proposition 7 of the fifth part [End Page 373] leads to refining the understanding of Spinoza’s intellectualist ethics by granting that, in certain circumstances, it might be best to cultivate not only adequate but also inadequate ideas. As this overview shows, this Critical Guide is a rich exploration of both classical issues in Spinoza scholarship (e.g. the doctrine of the attributes, the mind-body relationship, and the theory of knowledge) and a starting point for further investigating some aspects of Spinoza’s Ethics that are relatively less studied (e.g. the details and consequences of Spinoza’s theory of the affects, explored in Shapiro’s chapter). The collection is written mostly from the standpoint of Anglophone analytical scholarship (with only a few contributors who are not affiliated with Anglophone institutions and little discussion of any scholarship published in languages other than English). This fact has the clear advantage of providing a certain degree of homogeneity and cohesion to the different chapters. It also draws an interesting landscape of the open fronts in the contemporary (Anglophone analytical) conversation on Spinoza. The disadvantage of this relative homogeneity is that the reader risks getting a rather one-sided approach to Spinoza’s work. In this approach, conceptual reconstruction plays a far larger role than a detailed inquiry into historical sources. Moreover, the language of the existing conversation seems to create a barrier to the exchange and discussion...

What are Spinoza’s Inadequate Ideas of?

What are Spinoza’s Inadequate Ideas of?

Ecuador’s experiment in living well: Sumak kawsay, Spinoza and the inadequacy of ideas

In April 2017, Ecuador halted the continental drift to the conservative right in Latin America by electing leftist Lenín Moreno to the Presidency. Attention has turned, therefore, to the legacy of outgoing President Rafael Correa’s decade in power. To that end, this paper examines one of Correa’s signature programmes, ‘Buen Vivir’ (Living Well), a strategic plan for development underscored by the indigenous Kichwa cosmology of ‘sumak kawsay’. Sumak kawsay is a notion that has been co-opted into policy mechanisms in an attempt to both challenge neoliberal modes of governance, and to disrupt the ontological bifurcation of nature and society. Given the emphasis placed on ecological sensibility in sumak kawsay and Buen Vivir, critics have been quick to highlight the contradictory relations between Ecuador’s mode of environmental governance and its extractivist agenda. Such critiques are as staid as they are well rehearsed. Acknowledging the precarious composition of sumak kawsay, the paper questions the extent to which the ethos of experimentalism in politics can be sustained, eliding stymied technocratic forms of the political. It turns, therefore, to Baruch Spinoza’s treatise on adequate and inadequate ideas. In so doing, the paper examines how one can critique an idea without perpetuating a moral economy in judgment. Consequently, the paper considers the way in which Spinoza’s thought can be charged to recuperate imperilled political ideas.

Assessment of access to primary health care among children and adolescents hospitalized due to avoidable conditions.

Hospitalizations for ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (HACSC) are considered an indicator of the effectiveness of primary health care (PHC). High rates of HACSC represent problems in the access or the quality of health care. In Brazil, HACSC rates are high and there are few studies on the factors associated with it. To evaluate the access to PHC offered to children and adolescents hospitalized due to ACSC and analyze the conditioning factors. Cross-sectional study with a quantitative and qualitative approach. Five hundred and one (501) users (guardians/caregivers) and 42 professionals of PHC units were interviewed over one year. Quantitative data were obtained using Primary Care Assessment Tool validated in Brazil (PCATool-Brazil), while qualitative data were collected by semi-structured interview. The independent variables were: age, maternal education, family income, type of diagnosis, and model of care offered, and the dependent variables were access and its components (accessibility and use of services). Sixty-five percent (65.2%) of hospitalizations were ACSC. From the perspective of both users and professionals, access and its components presented low scores. Age, type of diagnosis, and model of care affected the results. The proportion of HACSC was high in this population. Access to services is inappropriate due to: barriers to access, appreciation of the emergency services, and attitude towards health needs. Professional attitudes and opinions reinforce inadequate ideas of users reflecting on the pattern of service use.

Wisdom as a Meditation on Life: Spinoza on Bacon and Civil History

In letter 37 to Johannes Bouwmeester, Spinoza identifies a historiola mentis à la Bacon as an important tool for distinguishing more easily between adequate and inadequate ideas. This paper contends that Spinoza's advice is to take into account Baconian-style ‘Civil History’ as providing instructive material for contemplating the variety, complexity, and persistency of human passionate behaviour. Specifically, it argues that Baconian civil history forms an integral part of Spinoza's reflections on provisional morality. Although for Spinoza, philosophical beatitude ultimately demands understanding affects through their first causes – the intuitive perception of things sub specie aeternitatis – in the realm of everyday Spinoza allows for a different, more pragmatic approach to morality. This paper argues at this stage that a philosophical understanding of the mind and its affections is not needed. Spinoza, following Bacon, holds that conduct of practical affairs is particularly improved when those so engaged acquire historical knowledge of the human condition and apply it. Specifically, both authors place special emphasis on a history of men's characters, actions, and vices as providing the material basis for concrete, directly applicable moral and civil precepts.

On Spinoza's ‘Free Man’

ABSTRACT:In this paper, I examine Spinoza's ‘model of human nature’ in the Ethics, and especially his notion of the ‘free man’. I argue that, contrary to usual interpretations, the free man is not an individual without passions and inadequate ideas but rather an individual who is able consistently to live according to the guidance of reason. Therefore, it is not an impossible and unattainable ideal or incoherent concept, as has often been claimed, but a very realizable goal for the achievement of human well-being.

Nationalism in Western art music: a reassessment

Nationalism in Western art music has long been a source of intense controversy. Scholars have struggled to provide an adequate definition of the phenomenon with varying degrees of success; principally because it has always been assumed that the national in music must include purely musical elements in its definition. This assumption has led to often grossly inadequate ideas about how nationalism in music is created by a composer and perceived by a listener. A brief review and reassessment of traditional attempts to define nationalism in music may shed new light on the aesthetic realties of the national in music.

Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion

This paper introduces the notion of ‘state affects’ to describe the errancies that often characterize everyday statist relations. Where structured conditions and intelligibilities, such as the government of populations, engender state effects that veil the state's non-existence, state affects, I argue, enroll bodies and differentiate masses through what Secor has called ‘unrecognizable conditions.’ Particularly where such conditions are bungled and baffling, they constitute a field of problems that enable the formulation of an affective ‘politics of confusion.’ Several models of affect and emotion provide a glimpse at the possible biological–methodological and epistemological–ontological stakes of such negotiations of affective uncertainty in state errancies. I anchor these to Spinoza's notion of ‘inadequate ideas,’ a mode of embodied not-knowing that has important political consequences for describing the opacity of affect in everyday encounters. Finally, the New York City Police Department's bungled management of protest during the 2004 Republican National Convention offers multiple lenses for reading the spectrum of ways in which deployments of the state's monopoly on violence and the work of its ostensibly dissociated materialities sustain the political tensions between a state's non-existence and its affectiva-emotive power.

Implementación en el aula de una secuencia de enseñanza-aprendizaje para trabajar los conceptos epistemológicos: hipótesis-teoría-ley

This paper analyzes the results obtained from the implementation of a teaching-learning sequence (SEA), Investigating Dragons about some epistemological concepts (hipothesis-law-theory) in a group of students of Secondary Education (ESO). The results were made through the analysis of students’ answers to some questions of the Questionnaire of Opinions of Science, Technology and Society (COCTS) that refer to those concepts, teacher’s diary and semi-structured interviews to some students after the completion of the activity. The results obtained show inadequate ideas about the taught concepts and their persistence in some cases, despite the explicit and reflective teaching thereof.

Psychologie déterministe et projet éthique chez Spinoza

Making use of the opportunity presented by A.R. Damasio's book that makes Spinoza a precursor of neurobiology, the A. re-examines the text of the Ethics. It is true that the philosopher considers man to be the idea of a body and does not attribute free will to him. But in his view the slavery of man (which consists in error and passion) arises from the fact that at the start he possesses only inadequate (that is, partial and mutilated) ideas due to the particular situation of his body among other bodies. Liberation can only come from the acquisition of adequate and intuitive ideas: it has to do therefore with becoming aware and not with action on corporeal conditions (transl. J. Dudley). © 2013 Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Tous droits reserves.

Thomas Mann's Contributions to Current Library Debates on Cataloging and Bibliographic Control

This article examines the writing of Thomas Mann, Reference Librarian at the Library of Congress, regarding the enduring value of traditional methods and tools of research libraries, particularly online public catalogs, professional cataloging, and Library of Congress Subject Headings and pre-coordinated subject strings. One major contention asserted by Mann is that keyword searching on the Internet, while very valuable when used judiciously, should not be used as a substitute for traditional catalogs and cataloging. Also examined are the deprofessionalization of cataloging, inadequate ideas about library users, dangers to serious research, digitization, and the enduring value of books.

The Politics of Spinoza’s Vanishing Dichotomies

Spinoza’s project of showing how the mind can be freed from its passive affects and the State from its divisive factions (E IV.Appendix and V.Preface) ultimately coincides with the aims announced in the subtitle of the Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus (TTP) “to demonstrate that [the] freedom to philosophize does not endanger the piety and obedience required for civic peace.”1 Both projects rest on a set of provisional isomorphic distinctions—between adequate and inadequate ideas, between reason and the imagination, between active and passive affects—that Spinoza proceeds to blur, and indeed to renounce. In using these distinctions while also moving to overcome them, Spinoza is not confused or indecisive. Every philosopher, every wise Sovereign, every free man who attempts to incorporate adequate ideas in inadequately framed, perspectivally limited contexts must use these distinctions and also see how deeply misleading they are. I want to offer a friendly amendment to Hasana Sharpe’s essay “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza” arguing that Spinoza refuses her distinction between the force of an idea and its truth.2