Intellectual Clarity Research Articles

Danielle Allen's Design for Democracy: A Review Essay

Abstract In Justice by Means of Democracy, author Danielle Allen argues that justice in the fullest sense requires a robust set of democratic institutions and practices. Focused on the United States, the author challenges the idea that justice can be achieved by first maximizing economic output and then redistributing funds and benefits to enhance the welfare of poor and less-well-off people. In the book, Allen suggests a wide range of policy proposals and institutional reforms intended to lead toward participatory constitutional democracy; social practices that enable people to make connections across divides of race, class, and the like; a more inclusive approach to immigration and integration of immigrants into American society; and an economy that empowers ordinary people and strengthens democracy. However, the author's arguments for these proposals suffer from lack of intellectual clarity about principles, institutions, and democratic practices. The argument is also weakened by its avoidance of the hard issues that arise when scholars and others turn from lofty principles to attempts to implement them. Consequently, the book falls far short of achieving its bold ambitions.

Политическият екзистенциализъм на Карл Шмит

This paper aims to examine the existentialist elements in Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy. Such an analytical perspective is necessary so that we can fully understand the ideas of the German thinker. This article concentrates on three of Schmitt’s most serious areas of research: decisionism as a fundamental part of the political, constitutional theory and the concept of the political as a fundamental distinction between friends and enemies. Each of these three moments is deeply existential. Thus, it is that which enables Schmitt to develop an authentic counter-argument to 20th century’s main political ideas. This existential perspective illuminates the essence of Carl Schmitt’s philosophy and provides it with intellectual clarity.

LIMITASI DOMAIN KOGNISI DAN PERILAKU DALAM PEMBENTUKAN KARAKTER

This article aims to analyze the character through the domain of cognition and behavior. That the domain of cognition and behavior consists of three domains of intelligence; Cognitive, affective and psychomotor play an important role in shaping personality. However, it should be realized that each domain has a specific function in stimulating the pattern of autonomous psychological traits. The method used is qualitative analysis based on critical analysis approach. The results of the study show that there are various patterns of individual character in thinking, acting and acting. Observing the existence of function limitations, it is necessary to balance the internal domains, harmonize and synergize them with other domains. This is intended so that the internalization of positive values ​​instilled in each domain for the formation of good character can be carried out in a directed, simultaneous and optimal manner. Full awareness (conscious awareness) thinking activities that are connected through the work function of the brain can basically build connectedness and influence each other between domains in shaping behavior. Its optimization requires harmonization between body and spirit, mind and heart, knowledge and charity. With it, the intellectual clarity that a person has is not only in the normative-idealistic but empirical-applicative aspects. Ihsan, who has a core of moral values, is able to move conscious awareness while still standing on his strong individuality to also bring benefits among others, including relationships with his natural environment.

Russian Theatre in Practice: The Director's Guide by Skinner Amy (review)

REVIEWS 167 dominate with its single, monologic voice and those dissenters who pursue alternative forms of thought and discourse. There is an intriguing logic to this book, and how Reich juggles close readings, literary genealogies, medical reports and theory, among other things, speaks to her abilities as a skilled analyst of these varied materials. What makes Snezhnevskii, leader of the so-called Moscow School of psychiatry, especially powerful as a villain for Reich’s account is not so much what he himself accomplished during his reign as Soviet Russia’s premier psychologist. Rather, it is what he represents: the corruption of psychiatric science that pushed authors to experience a need to prove their sanity before a state that seemed itself to have lost sense. At times zooming in to the level of parts of speech in a poem, at others expanding outward to the broad historical factors at work in the post-Stalin era, Reich offers a thorough and engrossing story of this battle of wills fought in examination rooms and in samizdat publications. Department of Modern Languages and Literatures José Vergara Swarthmore College Skinner, Amy (ed.). Russian Theatre in Practice: The Director’s Guide. Methuen Drama, London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi and Sydney, 2019. xv + 278 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £24.00 (paperback). Twelve brief essays covering a period from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, written by six male and six female contributors advocating the theoretical and practical importance of eight male and four female theatre directors, form the content of this ambitious student handbook. The names of the subjects are both well-known and less familiar, as are their formal means and methods, including puppetry and children’s theatre. The book’s format is very attractive, consisting of bite-sized sections prefaced by bold, indicative headings interspersed with areas of highlighted text containing advice on ways to match acting theory with directorial practice. As far as the choice of practitioners is concerned, the pre-1945 group are virtually self-selecting — Stanislavskii, Vakhtangov, Meierkhol´d, Tairov and Mikhail Chekhov. Less well-known are Aleksandra Remizova (pedagogue and director), Natalia Sats (children’s theatre specialist) and Nina SimionovichEfimova (puppeteer). The post-war selection, once again, includes the more and the less familiar: Oleg Efremov and Anatolii Efros among the former, with Mar Sulimov (pedagogue and director) and Genrietta Ianovskaia (Theatre for Youth) among the latter. The editor is alert to criticism of what might be SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 168 considered controversial choices for inclusion, plus the absence of other key figures, descriptions of whose work the reader is advised to consult elsewhere. It is extremely difficult to do justice to the lifetime’s work and theories of an important director in the space of a few pages but, in the case of major luminaries such as Stanislavskii and Meierkhol´d, the contributors can point to a mass of external reportage, including detailed accounts of productions and elucidations of theory. The problem with the lesser-known figures is that their champions need to justify their inclusion by explaining the precise nature of the subject’s importance which, in the absence of easily accessible external referencing, poses problems that not every essayist manages to solve effectively. Indeed, in some cases, descriptive and exegetical powers are less than adequate. There are exceptions, such as the contribution on Mikhail (Michael) Chekhov, which ought to be of genuine assistance to any aspiring student director. The remainder read either like synopses of more substantial published work and therefore suffer from the effects of compression or, where English may not be the writer’s first language, exhibit a degree of expressive deficiency and/ or stylistic bathos requiring radical, even ruthless editorial intervention, quite apart from improved proof reading. Other drawbacks include a lack of intellectual clarity when it comes to substantive analysis of ways in which the selected directors put theory into practice, and the frequent resort to mere biography. In the case of the post-war grouping, the citation of critical responses to their work would have enhanced a reader’s appreciation of its value, especially where productions have been seen both at home and abroad. It...

Policy Diffusion and Telecommunications Regulation Wavre, Veronique Cham, Palgrave Macmillan (2019), 202 p., ISBN 978-3-319-70744-0

Policy Diffusion and Telecommunications Regulation Wavre, Veronique Cham, Palgrave Macmillan (2019), 202 p., ISBN 978-3-319-70744-0

An Imaginary Paradise of Individuals

An Imaginary Paradise of Individuals Annette Federico Introducing Elizabeth Langland's "A Perspective of One's Own: Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead," first published in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 12, No. 1, spring 1980, pp. 12-28. In The Art of the Novel (1986), Czech writer Milan Kundera claims that it is only when we lose the certainty of truth, when we can no longer depend on the unanimous agreement of others, that we become individuals. In a wonderful phrase, Kundera calls the novel "an imaginary paradise of individuals." Because the novel possesses its own wisdom, even beyond the intentions of the novelist, it is incapable of ideological servitude. The novel occupies that crucial territory "where no one possesses the truth…but where everyone has the right to be understood" (159). In "A Perspective of One's Own: Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead," Elizabeth Langland conscientiously works through a set of formal problems in Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895)—inconsistencies in focalization, narratorial interjections, uneven character development—in order to respect one fictional character's right to be understood. Langland's article is not a landmark in 1980s criticism or a pioneering work of theory. Her methodology does not gesture toward a bold new direction for studying the nineteenth-century novel. But to me, the motive toward understanding and Langland's articulation of why this matters for criticism speaks to my own ruminations about how we write about and teach the novel today. Her essay models a nuanced ethical intelligence, great literary sensitivity, directness, and intellectual clarity. Many critics have described Sue Bridehead, one of the most decidedly "modern" women in Victorian fiction, as inconsistent, elusive, or just problematic in an especially frustrating way. Sue is a character who has been "understood" primarily within a familiar set of critical matrixes: she functions [End Page 51] schematically as one half of Hardy's thematic focus (spirit/flesh, reason/feeling), or she is presented as a sociological type (the New Woman, the Girl of the Period), or as a psychological case study (masochistic, frigid, hysterical). These readings are convincing and illuminating, and they have had a long critical life. And yet, there is something pat and diminishing about them, too. Sue refuses to be read as merely a device. And, at least for a few critics, when it comes to private intuitions about Sue apart from the "grinder of analysis," she may not seem maddeningly erratic at all. She may instead seem to be "utterly charming and vibrant" (Irving Howe), someone "rather wonderful" (A. Alvarez). "The critical need to construct a coherent and logical character out of Sue," writes Langland, supervises a more generous reflex toward an autonomous and dynamic individual (25). Just as we have to make an effort to see Sue from a perspective not enmeshed with Jude's limited point of view, we may have to work to slip through the nets of our own critical mindsets. For responses to Hardy's heroine expose a puzzling inconsistency in the way we approach literary interpretation—the contradiction between the judgment of the critic and the feelings of the reader. Langland does not write about Sue naively, as though she were a real person—and yet, in a way, she does. She argues for the character's integrity, her autonomy and cohesiveness as a personality, her desire for "an identity of her own" (23). Indeed, Langland's title, "A Perspective of One's Own," directs us back not only to Virginia Woolf, but to Elaine Showalter's groundbreaking A Literature of Their Own, from 1978. Langland's article was written at the start of a decade that would see an explosion of feminist criticism. Many of those books and articles would challenge all kinds of assumptions about critical practice in the academy—starting with assumptions about voice and identity, and about whose perspective is privileged and whose is marginalized, unstable, or out of step. Langland does not explicitly frame her argument in the terms of feminist critique—indeed, she never pointedly identifies her theoretical orientation or her politics at all. Her reading is almost New Critical in its tight focus on Hardy's narration and...

Defining a relationship between transitional justice and jus post bellum: A call and an opportunity for post-conflict justice

While there is an acknowledged overlap of transitional justice and jus post bellum, there has been no real attention to delineating a clear relationship between the two or addressing the significant differences regarding aims, scope and audience. These differences must be acknowledged and a clear relationship between the two fields needs to be demarcated for both intellectual clarity and practical reasons. It seems right to question not only where these fields of inquiry fall in relation to each other but how the two can co-exist and inform each other in a meaningful way that works to the benefit of victims of conflict and mass atrocity. Done correctly, this overlap can be ushered into a coherent research agenda where the two perspectives can be brought together in a careful and concise manner. This article aims to start to address this gap.

The African struggle to abandon westernity: African philosophy at Eshuean crossroads

This essay deals with the ideas of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye on the individual-community relationship. I begin with a provocative statement: most African intellectuals struggle with abandoning Westernity and consequently remain at the Eshuean crossroads seeking to please both sides of the abyss. It is my argument that both Menkiti and Gyekye understood that teasing out our philosophical problems might lead us to an intellectual clarity about the concepts of community and individual in African cultures. I am making no attempt to solve this problem of Eshuean crossroads in this essay; I simply want to establish the grounds upon which the combatants of philosophical ideas like Menkiti and Gyekye are fighting.Keywords: Westernity, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, Eshuean Crossroads, Africa

The quest for environmental sustainability in educational institutions

Over the last four decades “Sustainable Development” has emerged as a catchphrase while defining development. Many reforms have taken up in the past to solve ever-increasing snags related to untenable development at local as well as global level. However, the review of literature pertaining to sustainable development shows that it lacks in proper interpretation and consistency in the definition across the globe. Further, it’s the environmental sustainability aspect that has been compromised again and again to give way to economic development. In practice, environmental sustainability is not considered as equally significant in comparison to the other two aspects of sustainability. The issues of sustainability in educational institutions have historical pedigree starting from Stockholm Declaration, Tbilisi Declarations and subsequently a lot of evolution has taken place in this field. Still, most of the educational institutions lack their roadmap to attain sustainable development. Some of the universities have tried to implement their own sustainability plan apart from signing any major declaration. This review paper suggests that environmental sustainability is the need of the hour and this concept need more workable, elaborated and practical solution which need to be free from political bias and possess intellectual clarity and objectivity.

On the meaning and usefulness of History of Medicine (1895-1970)

The knowledge of the history of Medicine does not seem to add "utility" to the activities of a physician. Nevertheless, for a doctor eager to get good intellectual information -or the spiritual perfection called "culture"- the autor gives some reasons on why being acquainted with the history of medicine has some "utility" through the following items: Intellectual dignity: by deliberately and gratefully assuming the best of those who introduced technical devices or methods, as auscultation, or intellectual elaborations, like the etiologic model of Galen. Moral clarity: to perform as if they were his own, great deeds of the personages whose discoveries built the concepts and procedures used nowadays. Intellectual clarity: assuming the reason for being and the sense of what is being done. Intellectual liberty: knowing history in a comprehensive way, frees a doctor from the temptation of considering scientific notions as unmistakably true and definite. A possible option to originality: stimulated by a will of emulation, to search for less insecure or more rewarding knowledge, tending to "complete" what is at present accepted.

Developing a Multidisciplinary Syndromic Surveillance Academic Research Program in the United Kingdom: Benefits for Public Health Surveillance.

Syndromic surveillance is growing in stature internationally as a recognised and innovative approach to public health surveillance. Syndromic surveillance research uses data captured by syndromic surveillance systems to investigate specific hypotheses or questions. However, this research is often undertaken either within established public health organisations or the academic setting, but often not together. Public health organisations can provide access to health-related data and expertise in infectious and non-infectious disease epidemiology and clinical interpretation of data. Academic institutions can optimise methodological rigour, intellectual clarity and establish routes for applying to external research funding bodies to attract money to fund projects. Together, these competencies can complement each other to enhance the public health benefits of syndromic surveillance research. This paper describes the development of a multidisciplinary syndromic surveillance academic research programme in England, United Kingdom, its aims, goals and benefits to public health.

A Discussion of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a “realistic” conception of democracy cannot be centered on the idea of a “rational voter,” and that the ills of contemporary democracies, and especially democracy in the U.S., must be sought in the dynamics that link voters, political parties and public policy in ways that reproduce inequality. “We believe,” write the authors, “that abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas.”

A Discussion of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels' Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a “realistic” conception of democracy cannot be centered on the idea of a “rational voter,” and that the ills of contemporary democracies, and especially democracy in the U.S., must be sought in the dynamics that link voters, political parties and public policy in ways that reproduce inequality. “We believe,” write the authors, “that abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas.”

A Discussion of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels'Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a “realistic” conception of democracy cannot be centered on the idea of a “rational voter,” and that the ills of contemporary democracies, and especially democracy in the U.S., must be sought in the dynamics that link voters, political parties and public policy in ways that reproduce inequality. “We believe,” write the authors, “that abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas.”

A Discussion of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels' Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a “realistic” conception of democracy cannot be centered on the idea of a “rational voter,” and that the ills of contemporary democracies, and especially democracy in the U.S., must be sought in the dynamics that link voters, political parties and public policy in ways that reproduce inequality. “We believe,” write the authors, “that abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas.”

A Discussion of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels' Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a “realistic” conception of democracy cannot be centered on the idea of a “rational voter,” and that the ills of contemporary democracies, and especially democracy in the U.S., must be sought in the dynamics that link voters, political parties and public policy in ways that reproduce inequality. “We believe,” write the authors, “that abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas.”

Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows ed. by Mark Fleishman, and: Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space ed. by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger, and: The Magnet Theatre 'Migration' Plays by Jenny Reznek et al.

Reviewed by: Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows ed. by Mark Fleishman, and: Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space ed. by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger, and: The Magnet Theatre 'Migration' Plays by Jenny Reznek et al. Loren Kruger PERFORMING MIGRANCY AND MOBILITY IN AFRICA: CAPE OF FLOWS. Edited by Mark Fleishman. Studies in International Performance series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; pp. 236. MAGNET THEATRE: THREE DECADES OF MAKING SPACE. Edited by Megan Lewis and Anton Krueger. Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd, 2016; pp. 300. THE MAGNET THEATRE 'MIGRATION' PLAYS. Compiled by Jenny Reznek et al. Cape Town, SA: Junkets, 2012; pp. 184. Migrants from Africa attempting to land in Europe have captured the attention of global media, but as Loren Landau and others at the African Center for Migration and Society (ACMS) remind us, most migrants in Africa are on the move to destinations within Africa. Since the end of apartheid more than two decades ago, many have sought a better life in South Africa. Although Johannesburg absorbs more migrants than any other South African city, Cape Town has a longer history of documented settlement—by Khoisan herders, by European colonists hailing from the Low Countries, France, and later Britain, and by slaves from India, as well as Indonesia, from 1660 to 1805—and a distinctive creole culture combining Indonesian, Muslim, Christian, European, and even American elements. In the twenty-first century the Western Cape has housed informal migrants from Senegal, Somalia, Congo, and Zimbabwe, as well as formal emigrants from both the affluent northwestern and the troubled southeastern parts of Europe. In addition to this history of migration to the Cape of Good Hope, the peninsula that marks the confluence of flows from Europe and Asia at the tip of Africa, there is the lesser known phenomenon of internal migration by Xhosa and related groups from the impoverished Eastern Cape to wealthy Cape Town [End Page 122] and back. Inspired by these journeys, Magnet Theatre has created vivid and thoughtful performances that animate the stories of people on the move. All three books under review here, despite the general title of the first one, focus on Magnet's work since the 1990s and are most compelling when they draw on the experience of past and present members of the company, supplemented with articles by people who have worked with or closely observed the company and, especially in the Lewis and Krueger collection, with a rich collection of color and black-and-white images. Magnet Theatre 'Migration' Plays, published by Junkets, a small though vigorous Cape Town press that has built an impressive backlist of new drama, showcases not only four plays, but also Magnet's collective mode of production and distinctive performance method. This method combines company-founder Jenny Reznek's training with the Jacques Le Coq school in thinking, as well as acting, with the body using minimal though carefully chosen props with the research and practice in workshop format developed at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, where cofounder Mark Fleishman worked in the 1980s, while also deploying the stories and skills of more recent Magnet Theatre members. The collection of "migration" plays was compiled by Reznek and Fleishman, collaborating with long-time member Faniswa Yisa and former member Frances Marek, who co-wrote Die Vreemdeling (The Stranger [2010]), and also includes Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking, Magnet's best-known play. Every Year has traveled across Africa and Europe, as well as to Argentina and India. Developed in English and French (with some Xhosa) to speak to its initial audience at a festival in Cameroon in 2006, it is a fine example of Magnet's signature fusion of precise body movement, telling objects, and intellectual clarity. In addition to the central characters—a mother and daughter who flee slaughter in an unnamed central African country and, after several detention centers, land up in Cape Town—Reznek and Yisa played multiple roles as they moved around a metal table that first represented their burnt-up house and later a displacement camp, using props that included shoes that indexed the small feet of a child lost in the fire and the threatening...

Democracy for realists: Holding up a mirror to the electorate

Conventional accounts of how democracy works are flawed on a fundamental level, argue Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels. By accounting for the ways social identities shape voting behaviour, they present a new model that not only offers greater intellectual clarity but could make genuine political change possible.

Legislation's Culture

American statutes can seem like labyrinthine mazes when compared to some countries’ legislation. French codes are admired for their intellectual elegance and clarity. Novelists and poets (Stendhal, Valery) have considered the Code civil to be literature. Swedish legislation might be based on empirical research into problems the legislation is intended to remedy, and the drafting style, though modern today, is descended from an oral tradition of poetic narrative.Comparing these legislative cultures with our own reveals that the main problem with American legislation is not too many words. It is too many ideas — a high ratio of concepts per legislative goal. When American, French, and Swedish legislatures address similar problems, the French and Swedes draft using far fewer concepts than Americans do. In both countries, simple solutions are preferred over convoluted ones. The drafters of the Code civil thought the highest intellectual and legislative accomplishment to be simplicity. The Swedes got to approximately the same place through a cultural value that law be understandable to the public. Where the American legislative process can seem chaotic, there has been some respect for Cartesian rationality in France and for empirical evidence in Sweden.Even if American statutes were to be translated into ordinary English, they would still be labyrinths because our legislatures insist on addressing every conceivable detail that legislators can imagine. The result is excessively conceptualized legislation, imposing large numbers of duties. Statutory concepts cost money. They create issues, which must be decided by publicly funded courts and agencies with additional costs to the parties involved. Every unnecessary statutory concept wastes social and economic resources. And to the extent law seems incomprehensible to the public, it loses moral authority.

NUDGING, SHOVING, AND BUDGING: BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMIC‐INFORMED POLICY

In recent years, behavioural economics has gained considerable traction in the policy discourse, with a particular conceptual framework called libertarian paternalism, which informs nudge policy, dominating. Libertarian paternalism requires policies to protect individual liberty, to be focused specifically upon improving the welfare of those towards whom the intervention is targeted, and to be informed by the findings of behavioural economics. In practice, however, many of the interventions that are being advocated as nudges do not meet all of these criteria. Moreover, libertarian paternalism is not the only framework in which behavioural economics can inform policy. Coercive paternalism and behavioural regulation, frameworks that respectively underpin shove and budge policies, both use behavioural economics to inform public policy, and both face their own set of limitations. This article attempts to bring a degree of intellectual clarity to the potentially important contribution that behavioural economics can make to public policy.