Life,reason and history: reading Georges Canguilhem today

This paper outline some of the central feature of the approach to historical epistemology developed by Georges Canguilhem and argues for their contemporary significance in relation to recent changes in the life sciences. It develops this in relation to three lines of enquiry.The first concerns the specific characteristics of scientific reason.The second conerns the relations betweeen knowledge of life and life itself.The third concerns the role that historical work on scientific reason can play within contemporary critical thought.In each area it proposes some developments of Canguilhem's approach, and illustrates this with examples from biology,medicine and psychology.     

Evaluating Democratic Governance: A Bottom-up Approach to European Union Enlargement

To be admitted to the European Union (EU), an applicant country is expected to meet five conditions for democratic governance set out in the EU's Copenhagen criteria. The first section compares the EU's criteria with alternative criteria of democracy and of governance. Secondly, the article uses New Europe Barometer sample surveys to demonstrate how the bottom-up evaluation of governance by a country's citizens can complement top-down evaluations by external institutions. Evaluations by citizens of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Ukraine are compared with those of citizens in eight post-communist countries admitted to the EU in 2004. Factor analysis demonstrates that, unlike democracy indexes, democratic governance is a multi-dimensional concept. Citizens characterize their system of democratic governance as acceptable on some criteria but not on others. Taken singly, each Copenhagen criterion can be a tool for diagnosing an area of weakness in democratic governance. However, political pressures lead policymakers to lower demands for improving governance as a deadline approach for deciding whether or not to admit an applicant country to the European Union.     

Responsible Party Government in a World of Interdependence

This article opens up the closed model of the responsibility of a national government to its national electorate by adding constraints on its capacity to enact effective economic, national security and political policies. These constraints come from policy interdependence. The European Union exerts a denationalising influence through the Council, a multinational effect through the European Parliament, and the eurozone is designed as a transnational technocracy. Intergovernmental institutions spanning continents add further constraints. The result is a growing gap between the efforts of a national government to deliver outputs that match the preferences of voters and a reduction in the capacity of national electorates to hold accountable institutions outside their country that have a major impact on national outcomes. The conclusion considers three prospective possibilities: a growing frustration with a policy-irrelevant rotation of parties in office; institutional reform at the supranational level; and a learning process in which a recognition of the constraints of interdependence leads to a change in expectations.     

An examination of current psychometric assessments of child molesters' offense-supportive beliefs using Ward's implicit theories

Are current questionnaire methods fit for the task of assessing offense-related schemas? Six published and unpublished questionnaire measures that assess child molesters' offense-related beliefs are evaluated and examined for evidence of the five implicit schemas proposed by Ward: children as sexual beings, nature of harm, uncontrollability, entitlement, and dangerous world. Current treatment approaches assume that child molesters hold some, if not all, of these implicit schemas-an assumption demonstrated through the use of appropriately modified schema-based treatment techniques. Coding the six questionnaires revealed that nonsexual offense-specific implicit theories are underrepresented on existing measures (i.e., uncontrollability, entitlement, and dangerous world) and that many questionnaire items could not be classified as tapping any implicit theories. Suggestions are made for the future design and revision of questionnaire assessments .     

Beyond Peirce: The New Science of Semiotics and the Semiotics of Law

This paper shows how Peirce's semeiotic could be turned into a powerful science. The New Science of Semiotics provides not only a new paradigm and an empirical justification for all these applications, but also a rational and systematic procedure for carrying them out as well. Thus the New Science of Semiotics transforms the philosophy of law into the science of legal scholarship, the discipline that I call jurisology.