This commentary on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History initially frames the work in the context of the ongoing transdisciplinary project of creating synergies or more precisely “consilience” between the sciences and humanities. When this project is engaged in on the premises of the humanities (and the social sciences), we end up with the Earth system and the planetary as the basic lifeblood of human society—what foregrounds existence in common. That this realization is already bringing forth new justificatory principles for governance (...) in a planetary age is then related through a history of ecological justice concerns. (shrink)

According to cognitive averaging theory, preferences for attractive faces result from their similarity to facial prototypes, the categorical central tendencies of a population of faces. Prototypical faces are processed more fluently, resulting in increased positive affect in the viewer.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

As researchers we often find ourselves grappling with social media platforms and data ‘at close quarters’. Although social media platforms were created for purposes other than academic research – which are apparent in their architecture and temporalities – they offer opportunities for researchers to repurpose them for the collection, generation and analysis of rich datasets. At the same time, this repurposing raises an evolving range of practical and methodological challenges at the small and large scale. We draw on our experiences (...) and empirical data from two research projects, one using Facebook Community Pages and the other repurposing Facebook Activity Logs. This article reflects critically on the specific challenges we faced using these platform features, on their common roots, and the tactics we adopted in response. De Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics provides a useful framework for exploring these struggles as located in the practice of doing social research – which often ends up being tactical. This article argues that we have to collectively discuss, demystify and devise tactics to mitigate the strategies and temporalities deeply embedded in platforms, corresponding as far as possible to the temporalities and the aims of our research. Although combat at close quarters is inevitable in social media research, dialogue between researchers is more than ever needed to tip the scales in our favour. (shrink)

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its (...) Other puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Dimitri Lorrain est chercheur en sciences humaines (EHESS), spécialisé dans l'étude de l'art et de la littérature (il a publié des articles sur Michel-Ange, Alberti, ainsi que sur l'art des «?nouveaux commanditaires?»). Installé à Francfort-sur-le-Main, il chronique la vie intellectuelle allemande pour la revue Panorama des idées.

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the (...) other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

O século XX trouxe uma ciência impossível: a ciência da mente. Esta ciência ignora os problemas semiológico, nosológico e sociocultural a ela inerentes e que a inviabilizam. Como resultado, observamos a criação de uma pandemia global de transtornos mentais, majoritariamente administrados através de psicofármacos. Em contraponto, o pensamento filosófico desafia esta logica desde Canguilhem, passando por Michel Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, dentre tantos outros. E da Éticaespinosana dos afetos e afecções, nasceu a Heterogênese Urbana (HU), que tem como objeto original (...) a revitalização criativa das potências humanas através do contato entre subjetividades diversas. Etimologicamente, “criação a partir e com a diversidade”. Com a circulação dos afetos, dos desejos, das ideias nos espaços públicos, a HU promove, fenomenologicamente, a expressão daquilo que, antes permanecia invisível e indizível face o silêncio da vida da cidade. Os campos de afetações intersubjetivo e intercorpóreo entre vidas tão distintas desloca e descola o olhar fundado na psicopatologia clássica para atravessar a vida da cidade pelas potências que cada indivíduo é capaz nas experiências coletivas.A HU denuncia a multicomplexidade do conceito “produção de saúde”, que apenas inicia-se nas práticas biomédicas, compreendendo todos os saberes para a construção do cidadão autônomo e afetivo. (shrink)

The rhetoric of the social model of disability is presented, and its basic claims are critiqued. Proponents of the social model use the distinction between impairment and disability to reduce disabilities to a single social dimension—social oppression. They downplay the role of biological and mental conditions in the lives of disabled people. Consequences of denying biological and mental realities involving disabilities are discussed. People will benefit most by recognizing both the biological and the social dimensions of disabilities.

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Kant regarded ecosphere as having the highest degree of beauty, as opposed to other aesthetical objects such as painting, sculpture, buildings, and we could infer, the built environment. His arguments hinges heavily on his transcendental philosophy, where he stressed that pure beauty could only be achieved through disinterested judgement, without concept, and others. Though his proposition for ecosphere is valid, it could not be used to justify other cases, such as determining the degree of beauty of the built environment. (...) Thus, a modified version of Kant's aesthetics needs to be adopted, as it opens space for the built environment. This research uses Kant's overarching aesthetical arguments to justify the degree of beauty of the built environment. It is found that the built environment could have similar, if not same to, the degree of beauty of ecosphere by way of bioregionalism and ecomimicry, where the totality of the built environment encompases the natural law of local environment, making its degree of beauty as high as ecosphere. Keywords: bioregionalism, ecomimicry, the built environment, ecosphere, degree of beauty ABSTRAK Kant memandang tinggi atas lingkungan alam dan menobatkannya sebagai derajat keindahan tertinggi bila dibandingkan dengan objek estetis lainnya seperti lukisan, patung, gedung, dan kita dapat inferensikan, lingkungan buatan manusia. Argumen dia terjangkar kepada pemikiran transendentalnya, di mana keindahan murni hanya dapat didapatkan melalui penilaian tanpa ketertarikan, tanpa konsep, dan lain-lain. Walaupun proposisinya terhadap lingkungan alam valid, kita tidak dapat menggunakannya untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan manusia. Dengan itu, sebuah modifikasi dari pemikiran Kant diperlukan untuk dapat menilai lingkungan buatan manusia. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori estetika Kant untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan alam. Dipertahankan bahwa lingkungan buatan manusia memiliki derajat keindahan yang sangat mendekati, bahkan sama, dengan lingkungan buatan alam jika, dan hanya jika, lingkungan buatan tersebut mengadopsi konsep bioregionalisme dan ecomimicry, di mana totalitas dari lingkungan buatan manusia mencakupi hukum alam yang terdapat di daerah lokal, meningkatkan derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan tersebut. Keywords: bioregionalisme, ecomimicry, lingkungan buatan manusia, lingkungan alam, derajat keindahan. (shrink)

This paper outlines the background development of “intelligent“ technologies such as speech recognition. Despite significant progress in the development of these technologies, they still fall short in many areas, and rapid advances in areas such as dictation are actually stalled. In this paper we have proposed semi-automatic solutions — smart integration of human and intelligent efforts. One such technique involves improvement to the speech recognition editing interface, thereby reducing the perception of errors to the viewer. Other techniques that are described (...) in the paper are batch enrollment, which allows the user to reduce the amount of time required for enrollment, and content spotting, which can be used for applications that have repeated content flow, such as movies or museum tours. The paper also suggests a general concept of distributive training of speech recognition systems that is based on data collection across a network. (shrink)

We characterize Morita equivalence of theories in the sense of Johnstone in terms of a new syntactic notion of a common definitional extension developed by Barrett and Halvorson for cartesian, regular, coherent, geometric and first-order theories. This provides a purely syntactic characterization of the relation between two theories that have equivalent categories of models naturally in any Grothendieck topos.

Modern, Stevie The appearance of Ayn Rand's 'lost' novel Ideal, 80 years after it was written, gives us cause to examine the life and works of the humanist author, playwright and philosopher.

Modern, Stevie In a dark uniform, she walks swiftly through the tram carriage, her movements machine-like and efficient. Wordlessly, she punches passengers' tickets and passes money from the coin-changer strapped to her hip. The passengers pay small attention, their gazes vaguely forward. They do not see the face of evil, the anonymous official who stands above them returning their ticket stub. The tram clatters on through Berlin's streets.

Modern, Stevie March 15, 2016: A 19 year-old American tourist is arrested in Jerusalem. Police authorities had found him asleep in a prohibited cave area, deep under the Muslim quarter of the Old City. A search finds his backpack loaded with rubble dug with a pickaxe, at a site where myth tells of lost religious treasure. The tourist claims no memory of his actions. Israeli media reports the story as a possible case of 'Jerusalem Syndrome' - a religiously themed psychosis. (...) The syndrome affects nearly 100 people each year out of millions of tourists who visit Jerusalem. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie At its annual general meeting in May this year, the Council of Australian Humanist Societies voted in support of volunteer ethics teachers entering public schools and teaching ethics programs to students as a secular alternative in religious education. The motion was put to the meeting by the NSW Society with the support of the Humanist Society of Victoria. The motion was opposed by the Queensland, Western Australian and South Australian Societies. Here is why the motion is a grave (...) mistake, and why Western Australia moved its own motion against it. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The September 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero opened in May this year, nearly 13 years from the date when 2,983 people were murdered by Islamist hijackers. It is 20 years from Al Qaida's first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.

Modern, Stevie In the movie Exodus set in 1947, Paul Newman plays a Jewish 'people smuggler' Ari Ben Canaan in an amusing early scene where he disguises himself as a British soldier. Ben Canaan fools a commanding officer into signing off on the transport of recent holocaust survivors out of detention in Cyprus, making the officer believe the survivors would be shipped back to Germany.

The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly (...) explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’. (shrink)

We introduce a bimodal epistemic logic intended to capture knowledge as truth in all epistemically alternative states and belief as a generalised ‘majority’ quantifier, interpreted as truth in most of the epistemically alternative states. This doxastic interpretation is of interest in knowledge-representation applications and it also holds an independent philosophical and technical appeal. The logic comprises an epistemic modal operator, a doxastic modal operator of consistent and complete belief and ‘bridge’ axioms which relate knowledge to belief. To capture the notion (...) of a ‘majority’ we use the ‘large sets’ introduced independently by K. Schlechta and V. Jauregui, augmented with a requirement of completeness, which furnishes a ‘weak ultrafilter’ concept. We provide semantics in the form of possible-worlds frames, properly blending relational semantics with a version of general Scott–Montague frames and we obtain soundness and completeness results. We examine the validity of certain epistemic principles discussed in the literature, in particular some of the ‘bridge’ axioms discussed by W. Lenzen and R. Stalnaker, as well as the ‘paradox of the perfect believer’, which is not a theorem of. (shrink)

Through accessible analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s views of linguistic expression and understanding, and by tracing the evolution of these views throughout the course of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language offers a comprehensive picture of his engagement with the philosophy of language.

Through a radical new reading of the Theological Political Treatise, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that the major source of Spinoza’s materialism is the Epicurean tradition that re-emerges in modernity when manuscripts by Epicurus and Lucretius are rediscovered. This reconsideration of Spinoza’s political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism. Central to this new reading of Spinoza are the theory of practical judgment (understood as the calculation of utility) and its implications for a (...) theory of democracy that is resolutely positioned against authority. (shrink)

This paper aims to study the argumentative basis on which the prevention of migration is justified and hatred politics is institutionalised in three Mediterranean settings, namely Greece, Malta, and Italy, that were at the centre of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015–2017. Following the rubric of corpus-assisted Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), we trace (a) the main meaningful patterns, and (b) discursive and argumentation strategies (topoi) in three balanced corpora of mainstream news portals aligned with centre-right and (...) centre-left political views. Among our main findings, the mobilisation of migrant populations is construed as an extremely polarised issue both in national and EU contexts and claims in favour of its prevention are justified on topoi of danger/threat, numbers and burdening/weighing down. (shrink)

I examine a major objection to the mechanistic view of concrete computation, stemming from an apparent tension between the abstract nature of computational explanation and the tenets of the mechanistic framework: while computational explanation is medium-independent, the mechanistic framework insists on the importance of providing some degree of structural detail about the systems target of the explanation. I show that a common reply to the objection, i.e. that mechanistic explanation of computational systems involves only weak structural constraints, is not enough (...) to save the standard mechanistic view of computation—it trivialises the appeal to mechanism, and thus makes the account collapse into a purely functional view. I claim, however, that the objection can be put to rest once the account is appropriately amended: computational individuation is indeed functional, while mechanistic explanation plays a role in accounting for computational implementation. Since individuation and implementation are crucial elements in a satisfying account of computation in physical systems, mechanism keeps its central importance in the theory of concrete computation. Finally, I argue that my version of the mechanistic view helps to provide a convincing reply to a powerful objection against non-semantic theories of concrete computation: the argument from the multiplicity of computations. (shrink)

Throughout his various writings, the Israeli Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz consistently expressed a view, which many considered outrageous or at least odd, regarding the message of the Bible in general and of the Torah in particular.1 Leibowitz, himself a religious person, claimed that the fundamental scriptures of Judaism are not, and are not meant to be, articles of faith expressing metaphysical truths; they are rather the source of mitzvoth, the authorizing and regulating principles of the Jewish community. Moreover, people choosing (...) to obey the commandments should not expect to gain anything in return—in this world or the next—but should simply perform their religious duty for its own... (shrink)

What is luxury? The concept has never received proper attention in social theory. It seemed as if luxury was a highly economic concept that did not need any further investigation. Primary and secondary needs are considered to form the basis of the luxury concept. Luxury has been viewed as useless and superfluous because it belongs to the realm of desires instead of elementary needs. This definition has often been used to stigmatize the use and demonstration of luxury. The needs-wants dichotomy (...) was severely criticized a few decades ago. Luxury touches more than the question of necessity in society. This article attempts to outline the formulation of a definition of luxury. We leave the classic concept of luxury in favor of a more socio-semiotic approach of the concept. The bounds between luxury and some specific product property will be cut through. There is no such thing as a luxury good comparable to categories like ‘cars,’ or ‘clothes.’ Luxury is defined as a specific kind of sign value, produced in specific narratives and used in processes of stratification. As a sign, it becomes apparent that luxury is a relative concept. Every social group can be said to have its own luxury. Every social group has in fact a different kind of luxury, which means that a Cartier is no luxury in some cases where a television is highly exclusive in other cases. (shrink)

The recent economic crisis has brought to the fore another crisis that has been going on for many years, that of economic theory. The latter failed to predict and, after the event, cannot offer an explanation of why it happened. This article sketches out why this is the case and what constitutes the crisis of economics. On this basis, the case is made for the revival of an interdisciplinary political economy as the only way for offering an explanation of the (...) workings of the economy in general and of economic crises in particular. (shrink)

Scholarly discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics tend to focus on his philosophy of painting. By contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to his philosophy of literature. However, he also draws significant conclusions from his work on literary expression. As I will argue, these reflections inform at least two important positions of his later thought. First, Merleau-Ponty’s account of “indirect” literary language led him to develop a hybrid view of phenomenological expression, on which expression is both creative and descriptive. Second, a (...) study of literature furnished him with the resources to develop a novel account of phenomenological “essences”, which holds that essences are revisable explanations of first-order experience. Both results have been overlooked by commentators. They demonstrate the systematic import of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of literature and language, and amount to a qualified extension of a basic Husserlian position. (shrink)