Vol. XLIV (August 2007), 401–409 401 © 2007, American Marketing Association ISSN: 0022-2437 (print), 1547-7193 (electronic) *Manoj Thomas is Assistant Professor of Marketing, S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University (e-mail: mkt27@ cornell.edu). Geeta Menon is Professor of Marketing and Harold MacDowell Faculty Fellow, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York Universi...

In this paper, I argue that the recent work on mirror neurons illuminates the character of our capacities for a politics of resonant receptivity in ways that both help us to comprehend the damages of our contemporary order and suggest indispensable alternative ethical strategic registers and possible directions for organising a powerful movement towards radical democracy. In doing so, neuroscie...

Resources for an authentic response to the ‘post-ecologist condition’ as described by Ingolfur Blühdorn can be found in a cultural modernism which emphasises the contradictory nature of the human condition and whose master trope is irony. The concept of irony can help us both diagnose and respond to the crisis in public meaning which helps sustain unsustainable behaviour. Forms of dispositional...

Litotes, often confused with meiosis and understatement, has long suffered neglect. By comparing synonymous key words in previous definitions, this essay defines litotes as “a trope in which an affirmative is expressed by the negation of its opposite,” and for the first time classifies litotes into three subtypes based upon Aristotle’s study of opposition: contradictory, contrary and relative. ...

Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003) suggests that construal level—or the degree of abstractness of mental representations—increases with temporal, spatial, or sensory distance. Three experiments show that the mere presence of a set of target brands at the time a choice is made encourages consumers to represent the brands in memory in terms of concrete lower-level construals. Consequ...

This paper introduces ‘The Self Aware Image’, a creative research project that is part of the Virtual Laboratory for Envisioning Connections (vLEC) consortium. The paper will outline the rationale of the project and locate it within wider debates about the relationship between art, consciousness and technology. The notion of the ‘self-aware image’ is touched on as an art historical trope, and t...

Properties and facts play a central role within metaphysics, yet there is no widely accepted account of what constitutes a property or a fact. Traditional conceptions of these metaphysical notions raise serious philosophical puzzles, making the existence of each seem dubious. Drawing on the minimalist theory of truth, I argue in favor of a minimalist conception of properties and facts. A minima...