Notion Of Universality Research Articles

The concept of “justice” in the legislation of Russia and France, implementation features

The relevance of the study is determined by the prevailing variety of approaches to understanding the essence of the concept of “justice”, which is characteristic of both Russia and France. Such variability leads to a persistent distortion of this concept in practice of law enforcement, which, in turn, affects the effectiveness of administration of justice. The aim of the authors is to study scientific theoretical views and practical issues associated with the implementation of the principle of justice in two states. In the work we used following methods: dialectics, analysis, synthesis, deduction, as well as the formal legal and comparative legal method.Based on the analysis of the doctrine, legislation and judicial practice of two states, Russia and France, the following conclusions are drawn. At present, “justice” is understood as a universal notion, which is not limited only by coverage of regulatory norms of the law, but is actively applied by judicial practice. The use of this concept allows the court to make fair decisions depending on specific circumstances of the case, thereby achieving a balance of interests of participants in the process by interpreting and clarifying the law, and in some cases by creating a new rule of law that allows the courts to ensure the effective implementation of the principle of justice. However, in order to avoid variability in understanding this notion, it is proposed to fix the concept of “justice” in the civil procedure code, this will reduce the percentage of judicial conflicts and will contribute to formation of a uniform judicial practice.

Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris by Emine Fişek

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris by Emine Fişek Janice Gross AESTHETIC CITIZENSHIP: IMMIGRATION AND THEATER IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PARIS. By Emine Fişek. Performance Works series. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017; pp. 240. As part of its commitment to l’exception française, France has long supported the ideals of republican universalism through policies that use the arts to integrate its citizens and foster cultural competency. Given the postcolonial nation’s relentless struggle “to integrate a multicultural polity” (5) with its robust animation culturelle outreach, Aesthetic Citizenship rightly identifies France as an “exemplary site” to study the social and aesthetic practice of immigrant theatre. Emine Fişek’s meticulously documented overview of the conflicted politics of French immigration offers an essential backdrop to the book’s ethnographic accounts of localized performance projects that developed in social centers, aid organizations, and neighborhood associations in 2008. Each project enacts performance as both a staged event and “a structuring logic of social life” (29), demonstrating Fişek’s argument “that national participation, belonging, and citizenship are spheres of experience that require rehearsal, and that theater is a particularly apt space through which to understand the complicated relationship between ideal and enactment” (5). Focused largely on the Sarkozy era (2002–12), the book situates the immigration crises of this period within France’s larger historical struggle toward national self-definition (including examinations of the 2004 law and the headscarf controversy, and 2005 urban violence in the banlieue neighborhoods). The book’s emphasis on embodied social practices interweaves performance studies research with discourses of alterity and communal belonging from French cultural theorists (Étienne Balibar, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière). Fişek’s expertise in cultural and linguistic translation serves the book’s extensive consideration of France’s distinctive relationship to processes of social integration and its articulation in the French language. Most importantly, the book’s argument rests on the tension between universality and particularity contained in two fraught terms: intégration as the abstract notion of French republican universality and autonomous personhood, and the danger of communautarisme as particular identification (local, ethnic, or religious) with the resultant categorization of the immigrant as Other. Fişek distinguishes Anglo-American notions of “community-based performance,” “intercultural theater,” and “multi-culturalism” from French critical terms often lacking handy English equivalents (communautarisme, laïcité, banlieue, animation culturelle, citoyen, and immigré). These concepts unique to the French lexicon are well-presented and prove critical to assessing theatre’s capacity for civic and artistic engagement consistent with France’s “ideal” of “social enmeshment and moral autonomy” (180) performed as an “enactment” of individual national belonging and self-affirmation. Interweaving archival, theoretical, and socio-political sources, Fişek’s ethnographic, dialogic, and self-reflective approach calls to mind Dwight Conquergood’s ideal ethnography of the “ears and heart” as a co-performative witnessing. Extensive interviews and exchanges with theatre practitioners, social and humanitarian aid workers, and civic actors and activists offer “fieldwork vignettes” that bring localized immigrant experience to bear on the development of an “emergent immigrant theater” and the staging of the “immigrant body.” Noteworthy is Fişek’s nuanced discussion of immigrant women’s relationship to embodiment and the complexities of ethno-cultural particularity. Her account of the contradictory stances regarding the headscarf controversy is particularly incisive and theoretically enmeshed in feminist scholarship (by scholars including Judith Butler, Jane Freedman, Joan Scott, and Saba Mahmood). [End Page 121] Focused on empowerment through immigrant corporeality, the book tracks “two dueling ideologies” of emancipatory work: “public recognition for those who lacked visibility,” and “arts practices as habit-generating phenomena that participat[e] in the creation of cultured citizens” (17). Each chapter narrates site-specific case studies where “ethical and aesthetic sensibilities” intersect and evolve. Chapter 1, “On the Paris Stage,” outlines the early effects of 1970s decentralization policies in their outreach to the “non-public” in underserved areas (la banlieue) through state-sponsored animation culturelle. The French-Arab troupes Al Assifa and La Kahina, as precursors to immigrant theatre activism, illustrate theatrical engagement as “both a force for cultivation and a space for aesthetic militantism” (23). The...

On the Issues of the Structural Methodology of Sustainable Development

The whole world, including Russia, is on the verge of a third, after the agrarian and industrial, the digital technological revolution, no less, and perhaps more fundamental, than the two previous ones. A sustainable development strategy cannot be created on the basis of traditional universal human notions and values, stereotypes of thinking. It requires the development of new scientific and ideological approaches that correspond not only to modern realities, but also to the expected development prospects in the 3rd millennium. The transition to sustainable development involves the gradual restoration of natural ecosystems to a level that ensures the sustainability of the environment, and in which there is a real possibility for future generations of people to live up to their vital needs and interests. The formulation of a new development strategy means a structural changes during gradual integration into a single self-organizing system of economic, environmental and social spheres of activity. In this sense, sustainable development implies, at a minimum, structural efficiency and compatibility of the biosphere and the new digital world, social justice with a general decrease in anthropogenic pressure on the biosphere. However, the transition to sustainable development is the only alternative to the development of mankind, since the economics of technologically advanced countries are already forming the foundations of new structural changes that radically change the place of nature-intensive industries in meeting human needs.

Wendy Wasserstein by Jill Dolan

Reviewed by: Wendy Wasserstein by Jill Dolan Carol Martin WENDY WASSERSTEIN. By Jill Dolan. Modern Dramatists series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; pp. 206. The second wave of feminism helped usher in new voices, groundbreaking dramatic structures, and little-known subject matter. Among the many playwrights—not to mention performance artists and companies—to emerge during that time were Ntozake Shange, María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Megan Terry, Marsha Norman, Emily Mann, Beth Henley, and Wendy Wasserstein. Wasserstein, Jill Dolan writes, wanted to “see people like herself onstage,” but was met with male resistance in the form of comments like “I can’t get into this—it’s about girls” (9). Assertions of the universality of male subjectivity demoralized generations of women. How were women supposed to tell their stories, let alone write them, if men assume that they are the universal subject? How can we understand women’s experiences apart from a disenabling notion of universality? (To be sure, Wasserstein was mostly writing about educated, heterosexual, white, and Jewish women living upper-middle-class lives.) Wasserstein was a mainstream playwright who achieved her aspirations for success with Broadway and regional theatre productions, and a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, both for The Heidi Chronicles. Popular profiles of Wasserstein and her work, however, often ambivalently noted her appearance (disheveled), body (overweight), voice (too high), and manner (somewhat timid). No matter her achievements, the subject was her personal self: her body, her appearance, her manner. Meanwhile, the feminist strategy at the time for reading the second-wave feminist playwrights included careful attention to how race, gender, and economic realities determine the construction of characters and their experiences. Dolan’s Wendy Wasserstein is a play-by-play consideration of the playwright’s oeuvre that demonstrates the kind of analysis that was integral to the second wave of feminism and beyond. Dolan considers several questions: “What do Wasserstein’s plays and career suggest about the last forty years of U.S. feminism? How does her journey through the most powerful echelons of American theater provide a role model—or, on the other hand, a cautionary tale—for artists who might follow? What can we glean from reading her most significant plays with an eye toward the venues in which they were produced, the directors who mounted them, and the designers who helped bring them to life? What’s revealed by studying the critical response to Wasserstein, as her plays remained for so long among the few titles by women admitted into the canon of American comedy and drama?” (3). In other words, Dolan’s feminist focus is as much about what informs the gender inequities in all areas of American theatre, including higher education—although Dolan wrote this book before the Me Too movement—as it is about Wasserstein’s career and plays. Wasserstein’s oeuvre reads like a cultural history of American progressive feminism: The uncertainties of a career path after graduating college (Uncommon Women, 1977), making romantic decisions that determine the rest of one’s life (Isn’t It Romantic, 1981), navigating career and family ambitions (The Heidi Chronicles, 1989), balancing self-interest and social activism (Sisters Rosensweig, 1993), achieving political power and social status in institutions designed to exclude women (An American Daughter, 1997), and, finally, the fault line between entrenched beliefs and political transformation (Third, 2005) that runs through her work. For those who have read Dolan’s earlier work, the style of the writing will seem familiar. At the same time, she rethinks her previous ideas with regard to Wasserstein’s work as a whole, and lets her readers in on her rethinking. She admits she once thought The Heidi Chronicles was a sellout to dominant [End Page 128] culture (59). Now, Dolan writes, she sees the play as important for themes that echo throughout Wasserstein’s work: “men speaking for women, foretelling their futures, as Scoop does (so presciently) when he first meets Heidi; women striving to ‘have it all,’ to find husbands, bear children, and exceed these traditional achievements with the even more ambitious careers to which women of a certain class, by 1989, could at least presume to aspire; and...

Rickless and Passive Obedience

Samuel Rickless has recently defended an act utilitarian interpretation of Berkeley’s Passive Obedience. Part of his argument is a criticism of my natural law reading of Berkeley, particularly my contention that natural lawyers are committed to a distributive notion of universality, while utilitarians are committed to a collective sense of universality. This essay is, in part, a reply to Rickless’s criticisms. I argue that if we assume that Berkeley was either a natural lawyer or a utilitarian, and if we can find grounds for distinguishing natural law theories from utilitarian theories, then a natural law theory provides a more philosophically defensible fit with the texts than does a utilitarian theory.

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Between the Global and the Local: Human Rights Discourse and Engagement in Two New York City High Schools

While there has been a rise in human rights education at the global level, little attention has been paid to how it is integrated into schools in the United States. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected in two diverse high schools across an academic year, S. Garnett Russell investigates the extent to which human rights education influences students' knowledge and attitudes about human rights and how students engage with and translate global human rights into the local context. Although the majority of students in the study showed a superficial understanding or sense of distance around global human rights issues, Russell finds that students were better able to “vernacularize” universal notions of rights into their own local context, particularly around issues linked to police brutality and racial discrimination. Findings from the study point to the importance of human rights education, particularly for marginalized students.

Metaethics: Aquinas, Hume and Moore

This article concerns Aquinas’ practical doctrine on two philosophical difficulties underlying much contemporary ethical debate. One is Hume’s Is-ought thesis and the other is its radical con-sequence, Moore’s Open-question argument. These ethical paradoxes appear to have their roots in epistemological scepticism and in a deficient anthropology. Possible response to them can be found in that Aquinas’ human intellect (essentially theoretical and practical at the same time) naturally performs three main operations: 1º) To apprehend the intellecta and universal notions ens, verum and bonum. 2º) To formulate the first theoretical and practical principles. 3º) To order that the intellectum and universal good be done and the opposite avoided. Thomistic philosophical response to both predicaments will not be exclusively ethical, but will harmonically embrace ontology, anthropology and epistemology.

A cross-cultural study of autistic traits across India, Japan and the UK

BackgroundThere is a global need for brief screening instruments that can identify key indicators for autism to support frontline professionals in their referral decision-making. Although a universal set of conditions, there may be subtle differences in expression, identification and reporting of autistic traits across cultures. In order to assess the potential for any measure for cross-cultural screening use, it is important to understand the relative performance of such measures in different cultures. Our study aimed to identify the items on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ)-Child that are most predictive of an autism diagnosis among children aged 4–9 years across samples from India, Japan and the UK.MethodsWe analysed parent-reported AQ-Child data from India (73 children with an autism diagnosis and 81 neurotypical children), Japan (116 children with autism and 190 neurotypical children) and the UK (488 children with autism and 532 neurotypical children). None of the children had a reported existing diagnosis of intellectual disability. Discrimination indices (DI) and positive predictive values (PPV) were used to identify the most predictive items in each country.ResultsSixteen items in the Indian sample, 15 items in the Japanese sample and 28 items in the UK sample demonstrated excellent discriminatory power (DI ≥ 0.5 and PPV ≥ 0.7), suggesting these items represent the strongest indicators for predicting an autism diagnosis within these countries. Across cultures, good performing items were largely overlapping, with five key indicator items appearing across all three countries (can easily keep track of several different people’s conversations, enjoys social chit-chat, knows how to tell if someone listening to him/her is getting bored, good at social chit-chat, finds it difficult to work out people’s intentions). Four items indicated potential cultural differences. One item was highly discriminative in Japan but poorly discriminative (DI < 0.3) in the UK and India, and a further item had excellent discrimination properties in the UK but poorly discriminated in the Indian and Japanese samples. Two additional items were highly discriminative in two cultures but poor in the third.ConclusionsCross-cultural overlap in the items most predictive of an autism diagnosis supports the general notion of universality in autistic traits whilst also highlighting that there can be cultural differences associated with certain autistic traits. These findings have the potential to inform the development of a brief global screening tool for autism. Further development and evaluation work is needed.

Affectedness, empowerment and norm contestation – children and young people as social agents in international politics

ABSTRACTIn my contribution to this collection, I aim to expose how the growing transnationalisation of groups of affected persons – in this case children and young people – has brought to the fore normative contradictions and tensions built into the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. More specifically, I will show how the universal notion of children’s rights and a strong global consensus on the ‘scourge’ of child labour has been challenged through the empowerment of affected persons – in this case child workers. Building on critical constructivist thinking on norms, my core argument is that the increasing access of affected persons’ organisations (APOs) to international organisations and high-level events brings with it an increase in norm contestation. Rather than creating new normative contestations, I will show in my analysis, the inclusion of the most affected brings to light normative inconsistencies and ambiguities that have been potentially ingrained in international treaties but hitherto successfully suppressed by powerful norm advocates. The articulation of subversive perspectives on child labour by working children and young people, I will conclude, results in normative tensions and collisions and a reconsideration of seemingly universal values previously taken for granted.

Water, Infrastructure and Power: Contention and Resistance in Post‐colonial Cities of the South

Water, Infrastructure and Power: Contention and Resistance in Post‐colonial Cities of the South

5D rotating black holes and the nAdS2/nCFT1 correspondence

We study rotating black holes in five dimensions using the nAdS2/nCFT1 correspondence. A consistent truncation of pure Einstein gravity (with a cosmological constant) in five dimensions to two dimensions gives a generalization of the Jackiw-Teitelboim theory that has two scalar fields: a dilaton and a squashing parameter that breaks spherical symmetry. The interplay between these two scalar fields is non trivial and leads to interesting new features. We study the holographic description of this theory and apply the results to the thermodynamics of the rotating black hole from a two dimensional point of view. This setup challenges notions of universality that have been advanced based on simpler models: we find that the mass gap of Kerr-AdS5 corresponds to an undetermined effective coupling in the nAdS2/nCFT1 theory which depends on ultraviolet data.

Does Universal Controllability of Physical Systems Prohibit Thermodynamic Cycles?

Here we study the thermodynamic cost of computation and control using ‘physically universal’ cellular automata (CAs) or Hamiltonians. The latter were previously defined as systems that admit the implementation of any desired transformation on a finite target region by first initializing the state of the surrounding and then letting the system evolve according to its autonomous dynamics. This way, one obtains a model of control where each region can play both roles, the controller or the system to be controlled. In physically universal systems every degree of freedom is indirectly accessible by operating on the remaining degrees of freedom. In a nutshell, the thermodynamic cost of an operation is then given by the size of the region around the target region that needs to be initialized. In the meantime, physically universal CAs have been constructed by Schaeffer (in two dimensions) and Salo &amp; Törmä (in one dimension). Here we show that in Schaeffer’s CA the cost for implementing n operations grows linearly in n, while operating in a thermodynamic cycle requires sublinear growth to ensure zero cost per operation in the limit n → ∞. Although this particular result need not hold for general physically universal CAs, this strong notion of universality does imply a certain kind of instability of information, which could result in lower bounds on the cost of protecting information from its noisy environment. The technical results of the paper are sparse and quite simple. The contribution of the paper is mainly conceptual and consists in illustrating the type of thermodynamic questions raised by models of control that rely on the concept of physical universality.

Four Principles Regarding an Effective Treatment of Aging.

The question whether aging is a disease or not, has been asked by many professionals who are involved in the study of age-related degeneration. However, not only an agreement on this remains elusive, but also effective clinical treatments against human aging have not been forthcoming. In this Opinion paper I suggest that the complexity involved in aging is such that we need to remodel our thinking to involve a much more ‘systems-oriented’ approach. I explore four main principles which should be employed by those who are working on finding treatments against age-related de-generation. First, I discuss the problems encountered in translating laboratory research into effective therapies for humans. Second, I propose that a ‘systems-thinking’ method needs to be more exten-sively employed, instead of relying exclusively on the current reductionist one. Third, it is submitted that we must learn from the history of life-extension research, and not blindly follow contemporary paradigms, which may lead us into yet more ‘dead ends’ with regards to therapies. Finally, I suggest that, we may need to employ certain universal notions and use these in order to gain insights into the mechanics of a possible therapy against age-related degeneration. Examples may be the principle of hormesis, those of degeneracy, exaptation, and others from cybernetic or systems science domains. By using this four-pronged approach we liberate our thinking from the shackles of existing common mistakes and fallacies, and we open the way for a fresh approach that may lead us towards entirely new paradigms for providing clinically effective therapies against age-related degeneration

A new pathway to universalism? Explaining the spread of ‘social’ pensions in the global South, 1967–2011

The assumption of social responsibility for all citizens is a hallmark of the welfare state, reflecting a notion of universalism. But in developing countries, old-age pensions only cover small sections of the population, mainly through contributory social insurance. However, over the last 25 years, old-age pension coverage across the global South has expanded unexpectedly, mostly accounted for by the adoption and reform of non-contributory, or ‘social’, pensions. In this way, developing countries have come closer to universal coverage, but not through social insurance as in Western and Northern Europe. The rise of social pensions was an unlikely event, since well into the 1990s the idea of ‘just giving money to the poor’ had been rejected by all major actors in the development community. The standard explanatory model of Northern welfare state research would not have predicted the rise either. Using event history analysis (1967–2011), we find that key variables from the Northern standard explanatory model also operate in development contexts, but that three drivers peculiar to developing countries have to be added. The paper draws on a new data base, constructed by the authors, which covers all social pensions in all low- and middle-income countries.

Posible respuesta tomista a la ley de Hume y a la pregunta abierta de Moore

Este artículo se refiere a la doctrina práctica de Aquino sobre dos dificultades filosóficas que subyacen en gran parte del debate ético contemporáneo. Una es la Is-ought thesis de Hume y la otra es su consecuencia radical la Open-question argument de Moore. Estas paradojas éticas parecen tener sus raíces en un scepticismo epistemológico y en una antropología deficiente. La posible respuesta a ellas se puede encontrar en que: a) Tomás de Aquino defiende la esencial racionalidad y unidad del ser humano; b) La ley natural tomista es una consecuencia natural del ser racional; c) La razón humana es esencialmente teórica y práctica al mismotiempo. El intelecto humano de Aquino naturalmente realiza tres operaciones principales: 1º) Aprehender las nociones inteligidas y universales ens, verum y bonum. 2º) Formular los primeros principios teóricos y prácticos. 3º) Ordenar que se haga el bien inteligido y universal y se evite lo contrario. Por estas razones,la respuesta filosófica de Aquino a ambas dificultades no es exclusivamente ética, sino que abarca armónicamente la ontología, antropología y epistemología. La ética de Tomás de Aquino es fundamentalmente diferente de las éticas que califican las acciones como buenas o por mero consenso social (contractualismo) o simplemente calculando sus consecuencias (consecuencialismo).

(Re)Imagining Ireland Through India in the Mid-nineteenth Century: History, Empire, and Nationality in the Early Work of Thomas Davis

This essay explores a hitherto neglected text on the history of India by leading nineteenth-century Irish nationalist Thomas Davis. India Her Own – And Another’s marks an outright rejection of imperial fantasies of a civilizing mission motivating British involvement in India through an innovative reading of imperial texts. In India Her Own, Davis posits the “spirit of conquest” in direct opposition to the “spirit of nationality,” which in turn is identified as kindred to freedom. It will be seen that Davis set up a dichotomy between conquest/empire and nationality/freedom which allows him to oppose imperial expansion without succumbing to notions of universalism or philanthropy. He sees in India’s pre-imperial past a potential model for Ireland’s future – one that could overcome ethnic tensions within the harmony of an ancient yet emergent nation. This marks an important contribution to how we understand the ambivalent discursive structures underpinning nascent anti-imperial ideological formations in the nineteenth century.

Containing Sotomayor: Rhetorics of personal restraint, judicial prudence, and diabetes management

ABSTRACTThis essay explores how rhetorics of diabetes management informed Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial persona during her ascent to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were clouded famously by institutional racism and sexism. She was accused repeatedly by congressional Republicans of being intemperate, emotional, and illogical in a judicial sphere that prizes circumspection, deliberateness, and collegiality. As part of a larger strategy to counter such claims, the Obama administration forwarded her lifetime of managing type-one diabetes as proof of personal control, and by extension judicial prudence. This strategic invocation of intersectionality, using a disability to rhetorically “contain” race and gender, helped to successfully resituate universal notions of wisdom and secure Sotomayor a seat on the nation’s highest court.

Simultaneous universality

In this paper, the notion of simultaneous universality is introduced, concerning operators having orbits that simultaneously approximate any given vector. This notion is related to the well known concepts of universality and disjoint universality. Several criteria are provided, and several applications to specific operators or sequences of operators are performed, mainly in the setting of sequence spaces or spaces of holomorphic functions.

From Shakespearean singularity to singular Shakespeares: finding new names for will-in-the-world

This article reflects on the ways in which much of the terminology that is used to discuss Shakespearean manifestations around the world still operates, implicitly or explicitly, within the constraints of the discourse of universality. If scholars and theatre-makers seek to decolonise Shakespeare, ‘we need new names’ – or perhaps to find new meanings in the language that has previously been employed in the field of Shakespeare studies. The author thus explores the concept of singularity: both the historical relationship between Shakespearean singularity and universality, and the alternative paradigms that are made possible by focusing on ‘singular Shakespeares’ (with a particular emphasis on performance). If Shakespearean singularity pertains to an historical figure, or a body of literature, or a symbol, then singular Shakespeares describe Shakespeare as an experience, a phenomenon or a meaning constituted in the moment of interaction between actor(s) and each audience member. The notion of singular Shakespeares resists the biographical impetus that is ultimately behind the notion of universality; ‘Shakespeare’ is the means and not the end. The article concludes by applying its argument to Coriolanus in a South African context. Decolonising