Answering back to policy? Headteachers’ stress and the logic of the sympathetic interview

Headteacher workloads are often in the news. Long hours, punitive audit regimes and excessive amounts of paperwork take their toll on many, including John Illingworth, former National Union of Teachers (UK) President, and ex primary headteacher. In this paper, I investigate a UK BBC Radio 4 human interest interview conducted with Illingworth by the usually acerbic John Humphrys. Mobilising Bourdieu’s notion of field, I examine the interview and argue that the analysis suggests that the media game of market share and the doxa of the fourth estate might work to delimit the capacity of such interviews to speak truth to policy power.

The role of the libero in volleyball as a paradoxical influence on the game: logical debate and the proposal for a rule change

The purpose of this paper is to bring into focus philosophical and logical concerns relating to specific rules that govern the role of the libero in volleyball. The authors contest that the introduction of the position of the libero in volleyball may have actually undermined the continuing logic of the rules of the game. In addressing these questions the authors offer theoretically based rule-change proposals for the sport of volleyball that could be used to inform future training methods or development programmes at both the participatory and elite levels. Discussion may also inform the development of new tools of analysis (e.g. computer software) or the creation of a new breadth of match simulation resources to enhance athlete performance. These tools and devices could then be presented to volleyball coaches in an effort to resolve the issues that have come to light and further inform the philosophical and logical debates about the role of the libero in volleyball.

Logic and The Open Society : revising the place of Tarski’s theory of truth within Popper’s political philosophy

This chapter retraces the way in which the Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Popper came to accept a Correspondence Theory of Truth from the work of the Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski. It is argued that Popper’s use of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth reveals crucial insights into the fundamental characteristics of Popper’s social philosophy.  Quite deceptively, arguments based upon Tarski’s theory of truth appear implicitly throughout the text of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). It is then demonstrated how Popper integrated a correspondence theory of truth into a theory of the functions of communicative language that he received from Karl Bühler.

Deleuze's neo-leibnizianism, events and the logic of sense's 'static ontological genesis'

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze effectively argues that two types of relation between events govern their ‘evental’ or ‘ideal play’, and ultimately underlie determined substances, that is, worldly individuals and persons. Leibniz calls these relations ‘compossibility’ and ‘incompossibility’. Deleuze calls them ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’. This paper explores how Deleuze appropriates and extends a number of Leibnizian concepts in order to ground the idea that events have ontological priority over substances ‘all the way down’.

The age of ‘depoliticisation’ and ‘dejuridification’ and its ‘logic of assembling’: an essay against the instrumentalist use of comparative law’s geopolitics

While comparative law has become a key discipline, its instrumentalist use has turned out to be a powerful weapon: it is the ‘pen’ by which the identity of and differences in law’s geopolitics are continually written and rewritten. Given its attractive functionalist essence, comparative law is gaining increasing international credit as a way of developing newer theories of sovereignty and governance in a framework in which law is conceived of less as a set of rules and more as a symbolic vestimentum of global soft power. The present contribution critically investigates the relationship between distortive views of comparative law’s geopolitics and the intimate essence of the doctrine aimed at creating the ‘aspatial’, unbounded, illimitable (and hence intangible) liberal global order whose governance appears to transcend the idea and form(s) of law through which the ‘politicization’ and ‘juridification’ of modernity have been achieved in the last century. In doing so, it also addresses why such an alliance has made it easier to ‘discover’ and ‘sell’ the smooth and rectilinear land of the figuratively unspoken and unwritten as the terra incognita that lies over what is created by the constructivist political intervention(s) of the modern nation-state

Next steps in the logic of consumer-led self-management : translating chronic condition self-management programmes (CCSM) into lifestyle management programmes for young people

The techniques applied in chronic condition self-management programmes (CCSM) to support patients with chronic conditions are basic counselling and communication strategies that would benefit people at all stages of life and wellness. The question being explored here is why, as a society, we wait until people develop essentially preventable chronic conditions before helping them to develop the life skills they need to manage their lives and their human interactions better rather than working to avoid or prevent many chronic conditions that develop as a result of people lacking such skills? If we were to teach coping and managing skills to everyone in a supportive and structured way, using the peer-led teaching and learning strategies and basic counselling and education processes that have been shown to be successful for other older groups with chronic illness, the overall population impact would be more significant. Therefore why wait until people have chronic conditions before empowering them with basic life management techniques? Do people need to be sick before they can be motivated to live more effective lives? Is sickness the main stimulus for triggering health-related behaviour change or can other factors in people’s lives serve to inform and motivate lifestyle change?

The untameable logic of sacrifice

Paolo Diego Bubbio's Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition offers a valuable and insightful discussion of the place of sacrifice plays in nineteenth century European philosophy, setting the stage for its emergence as a central theme in subsequent continental thought. Bubbio offers a strong case for the claim that the foundational move of the post-Kantian tradition is a fundamentally kenotic one. Bubbio is also critical of certain excesses in the way sacrifice is discussed in more recent work. However, the case of Kierkegaard in particular suggests kenosis is not so easily kept within the comfortable boundaries Bubbio prescribes for it: its excesses may be an integral part, rather than a hyperbolic distortion, of the logic of sacrifice.

Reconsidering the scope of the equitable mortgage arising from deposit of title documents

This article examines the underlying fairness of applying equitable security presumptions to the deposit of title documents belonging to third parties. It argues that within such transactions, the focus of the equitable jurisdiction must be upon the intention of the owner of the title documents rather than presumptions arising from the fact of the deposit. It suggests that there is no logic in applying equitable presumptions, founded on the principles of part performance, to infer a security intention in transactions involving third party title documents. The fact that the parties to a loan advance may have intended to create a mortgage between themselves does not mean that the third party owner of the title documents also intended to create a mortgage. In third party transactions, the objectives of the equity jurisdiction are best achieved through a comprehensive assessment of the intention of all parties and the abolition of presumptions based upon the bare fact of title deposit.