Batteries containing cobalt will play a central role in the global transition to cleaner energy. Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, the negative human rights image of the minerals sector in the DRC, and the emergence of an inaccurate and exploitative “blood cobalt” narrative risks harming small-scale, ‘artisanal’ producers who rely on this industry for their livelihood. The DRC government, civil society and small-scale producers already have a roadmap for ending child labour and improving working conditions. Countries and companies whose economies and business interests rely on these precious natural resources should engage with this roadmap rather than disengaging from the country’s mining sector altogether.

With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more as a product of data and algorithms. Thus, we conceive ourselves “in the image of our machines,” and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, the present book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses the new technologies only as means instead of submitting to them. The book offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism in various areas of science and society. As an alternative, it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. This general concept is applied to issues such as artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday life. The book thus applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to current scientific, technological, and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society’s development in the twenty-first century.

Emily Carroll and Parker Crutchfield propose a new inconsistency argument against abortion restrictivism. In response, I raised several objections to their argument. Recently Carroll and Crutchfield have replied and seem to be under the impression that I’m a restrictivist. This is puzzling, since my criticism of their view included a very thinly veiled, but purposely more charitable, anti-restrictivist inconsistency argument. In this response, I explain how Carroll and Crutchfield mischaracterize my position and that of the restrictivist.

Many philosophical accounts of manipulation are blind to the extent to which actual people fall short of the rational ideal, while prominent accounts in political science are under-inclusive. We offer necessary and sufficient conditions – Suitable Reason and Testimonial Honesty – distinguishing manipulative from non-manipulative influence; develop a ‘hypothetical disclosure test’ to measure the degree of manipulation; and provide further criteria to assess and compare the morality of manipulation across cases. We discuss multiple examples drawn from politics and from public policy with particular attention to recent debates about the ethics and politics of nudge.

This article explores the characterological metadiscourses through which characters, or figures of personhood, become modeled, evaluated, and enacted during a multi-ethnic, community-inclusive theater project that aims to make the group's ‘joint voice’ heard on stage and in society. Based on ethnographic data and discourse-analytical methods, the article examines two modes of characterological metadiscourse that contribute to the construction of an ‘alternative’ discursive space that allows the group to reflect on and to experiment with everyday social interactions. First, the article analyzes writing and conversation tasks that deal with experiences of ethnicization and inequality. Second, the article analyzes exercises in acting techniques, in which the focus turns to universal characterological dimensions, enabling each participant to participate in the joint voice as an equal performer. The analyses illuminate a local strategy of managing multi-ethnic relations and committing to ideals of solidarity and egalitarianism with the purpose of collective social action. (Voice, entextualization, interdiscursivity, ethnicity, raciolinguistics, theater)*

Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending is a perennial favourite in the British classical music radio station Classic FM's ‘Hall of Fame’ poll. In spite of its apparent popularity, however, the work sits uncomfortably with the way revisionist critics and scholars have wanted to portray the composer. As an escapist piece of English musical pastoralism, The Lark undermines their preferred view of Vaughan Williams as a progressive or even ‘modernist’ participant in his artistic milieu. To combat this image, some critics and musicologists have argued for complex, harder-edged interpretations of the work that have little to no basis in the music's primary source materials or the composer's stated priorities in his own writings. Such emphases reflect a problem in recent revisionist literature, wherein traditionalist, nationalist, or Romantic aspects of Vaughan Williams's music are excessively downplayed (or re-situated) in favour of arguments that better support elite sensibilities. As a work consisting of accessible, melody-centric music, and following from a poem excerpt suggesting an idyllic scene, The Lark serves as a bulwark against revisionist overreach and a check against over-emphasis on trendy priorities.

‘I couldn't tell who was colored and who was white’, admitted the African American trumpet player Roy Eldridge after being submitted to a so-called blindfold test by the white critic Leonard Feather in 1951. Feather was happy that the blindfold test duped a prominent Black musician, because it proved his point about the fundamental colourblindness of music and listening. Through close reading of the source material, this article provides the full context for this infamous case and shows how the blindfold test was a product of transnational discourses of colourblindness, primitivism, ‘reverse racism’, and technological mediation. Building on current research in racialized practices of listening in musicology and sound studies, and mobilizing interventions from critical race studies, the article contends that acousmatic techniques of listening often promote a colourblind ideology invested in whiteness, which remains hegemonic in music culture.

English comparative modals are combinations of the adverbs rather, sooner and better with an auxiliary. There is recent consensus that the comparative modals rather and sooner have over time developed a different syntax and semantics than better. However, potential differences in the syntax of rather and sooner with respect to patterns of complementation haven’t been explored. This article reports the results of a corpus study of these two modals and finds that rather patterns like object-raising verbs, allowing a range of complements that are unavailable for sooner. Our analysis of these patterns draws on recent work in the Construction Grammar framework, with forays into its formal implementation, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and we propose that rather differs from sooner in that it constitutes a micro-construction whose features are licensed by both the Modal Construction and the Object-Raising Construction, the latter a subtype of the Transitive Construction.

This essay deals with the criteria for the employment of POWs in Italy during the Great War. It is a contribution to the current research demonstrating the close connection between civilian and military spheres during the war, including in the area of internment. This intertwining is particularly evident when one studies the wartime economic system. Although the article shows that the contribution of POWs was marginal, their work was diverse and particularly visible in certain sectors. Therefore, it is important to clarify the rules that governed their employment, and the outcomes of their work.