One of the most influential figures in the history of Islamic thought is Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210). The identities of mushakkik, which creates problems on many subjects, especially metaphysical and theological ones, the muhaqqiq who tries to solve the problems above the sects, and the jâmî who brings many different views together in the highest concepts, have seriously affected all the thinkers after him. Therefore, in the tradition, all schools had to inherit the philosophical and scientific dynamism that he (...) created and displayed an attitude about the problems he created and the solutions he offered. The real important motive that makes Râzî so indispensable and effective is his problematic identity (mushakkik), which carries the kalām to philosophy and philosophy to kalām, and criticizes philosophy on the basis of the kalām, and the kalām on the basis of philosophy. For this reason, when we look at the works of Râzî, who has been evaluated politically and sociologically within Ash'arism throughout his life, it is clearly seen that he is a thinker who is suitable to be embraced by different schools and to be interpreted in different ways. The fact that many Ahl as-sunnah theologians emphasized the works written by Râzî with a theological-Ash'ari theme, caused his supra-sectarian identity to be overshadowed. On the other hand, it is seen that some thinkers are making an effort to know and recognize Râzî as a philosopher-theologian and muhaqqiq. This effort is clearly seen especially in scientific figures who benefited from Kamaladdin Ibn Yûnus (d. 639/1242) in some way. Afḍal al-Dīn Khūnajī (d. 646/1248), Athir al-Din al-Abharî (d. 663/1265), Najm al-Din al-Qazwinî al-Kâtibî (d. 675/1277) can be given as examples. These personalities, on the one hand, played an active role in the spread of Râzî's scientific heritage and they were effective in bringing Râzî to the fore with his supra-sectarian identity on the other. Sirāj Al-Dīn Al-Urmawî (d. 682/1283), who inherited his scientific legacy, is among the important names who established his identity as a muhaqqiq who mostly solved supra-sectarian problems. Human actions are at the forefront of the issues in which this facility has clearly emerged. Urmawî tries to revise al-Arba'în's expressions, which seem to ignore the power and influence of human beings in terms of human actions as well as criticizing Razi's arguments very seriously. In his work Lübâb, on the one hand, he summarizes al-Erba'în of Razî he seriously criticizes Razi's Ash'ari attitude towards human actions on the other. He does this largely on the axis of the arguments that Râzî himself expressed from his encyclopedic works such as al-Matâlibu'l-'âliyya mina'l-'ilmi'l-ilâhi. It is clear that this is not an ordinary situation. Because human actions are at the forefront of the issues that determine the thinkers' conception of divinity and the relationship between God and man. In this study, Râzî's attitude on this issue and Urmavi's philosophical and theological criticisms will be tried to be determined. Thus, it is clearly seen that he is trying to establish Râzî as a muhaqqiq in the axis of human actions. (shrink)

A commissioned article about philosopher of ecology Levi Bryant, and his theory of urban space.

Ijmā is ranked as the third shariah evidence after the Qur’ān and Sunnah in the science of Uṣūl. Shafi was the first one who made Uṣūl which had been known and used by the Islamic scholars, into a written document and who ascertained that Ijmā was the third of the shariah evidences. Kalām is one of the sciences in which Ijmā evidence is used. The scholars of Kalām used this evidence as far as the science of Uṣūl made it possible. (...) They always used it without changing any basics of religious beliefs and acceptances. That the aqidah of Ahl al-Sunnah has been supported with Ijmā which is regarded as one of naqly evidences, played an important role in eliminating suspicions which were tried to be aroused in momins’ mind. In this article, the function and importance of Ijmā evidence, which is one of the primary sources of the science of Uṣūl, in the science of Kalām and Aqidah of Ahl al-Sunnah has been studied.SummaryWhat the Qur’ān demands from us is to emphasize the spirit of unity among ummah and to keep out the factors that could trigger separation and division. Indeed, Allah emphasizes in the following verses in the Qur’ān on the protection of the unitary structure of the ummah: “And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided” (Āl a-Imrān 3/103) and “And do not be like the ones who became divided and differed after the clear proofs had come to them” (Āl al-Imrān 3/105). Allah has commanded the Ulul ‘Azm Prophets to hold the religion upright and to avoid division. (al-Shūrā 42/13). The command of holding the religion upright and not to be divided in this religion means to certify what needs to be confirmed in the religion of Allah and to obey those that must be obeyed. This is also the proclamation of the principle of religion that all the prophets have consensus over.Ahl al-Sunnah understanding of Islam is identical to the understanding of the Prophet and his companions. For this reason, Ahl al-Sunna is the school that represents the main backbone of Islam. In Ahl al-Sunna, in many subjects, be it usūlî / primary or furū’ī / secondary, there has been ijmā. These ijmās are Sahaba ijmās and deductive ijmās that come from mutakallimūn (theologians) ijtihāds. Therefore, ijmā and ijtihād are closely connected to each other. Ijmā is supported by ijtihād and ijtihād is also the source of ijmā. Thus, the issue is no longer just a pure ijtihād; it turns out to be a degree that gives a solid knowledge after it has risen to some degree just after the nass/texts.Ahl al- Sunnah theologians are talking about two kinds of ijmā. The first is “ijmā taṣdīqī” (approval consensus) which is the consensus based on Sahaba İjmā. These are the ijmās that occur on the principles called ḍaruratal-diniyya (necessities of the religion), and accepted as solid proofs in religion. Issues such as the principles of faith, obligation of prayer and the fasting are the subjects that are determined by the solid/definite ijmā. Such ijmās are valid approvals on existing provisions. These ijmās based on solid nass (verses and hadiths). Such ijmās do not give any new information. The existing information is strengthened by the alliance of Muslims. In these areas, ijtihād cannot be done and Muslims do not need ijtihād on these issues. There is an consensus of Ahl al-Sunnah scholars about the unfaithfulness of the one who denies one or more of the principles which are accepted as the main obligatory principles in Islam. The other is the “deductive ijmā which the ijtihāds have roles over. This kind of ijmās, are formed as a result of mujtahids’ consensus over the same opinion on the issue of theological secondary issues. The issues related to the secondary theological issues which were open to the ijtihāds and the different results obtained on matters are not accepted as the cause of takfīr. However, depending on the subject he/she can be a sinner. Istidlālī/deductive ijmās are not considered as an independent proofs in ‘Ilm al-Kalām, rather a supportive ones and are considered as textual evidences.Since, texts that are accepted as sources give supposed information. In this regard, the Ahl al-Sunnah scholars accepted other members of the sect who have in secondary theological issues opposed the ijmā of the salaf / predecessor as Ahl al-Qibla, but named them as Ahl al-Bid’a (innovator in religion) because of their opposition to Salaf’s İjmās. Moreover, the scholars of the Ahl al-Sunnah did not see them appropriate to participate in the Ijmās, which could occur between the generations that come after Sahābas/companions.Not all disputes have been criticized in Islam. It is a blessing for the ummah to claim different opinions on the issues subject to ijtihād. Since the ummah, in this way, will bring new solutions to emerging issues and as a result, Islam will have a mechanism to produce a dynamic solution. This can only be possible through ijtihād. Dispute is to propose different views on a subject. If this view is not in the actual matters that could harm the unity of the Ummah, rather in the case of ijtihādi issues, this conflict could turn to be mercy.The reason why the methodists evaluate the ijmā within the scope of the authorized evidence is that because they think it is essential that the ijmā be based on a proof. From this point of view, the alliances that occurred in mental matters were not considered as ijmā. The theologians always tried to support their claims with nass/textual proofs. When the ijmā is realized, whether known or not, they have stated that there is certainly a religious proof behind it. Because, the provisions that were reached through ijmā, cannot be against the provisions of the Prophet.Many issues in Islamic Belief and Kalām works are supported by the mental and textual evidences as well as by deductive ijmā. However, many of the claims of Ijmās in these works reflect the inter-sect ijmās of the Ahl al-Sunnah. The sects outside the Ahl al-Sunnah were excluded. This attitude is, above all, the aim of ensuring the integrity within the sect, and trying to protect the Ahl al-Sunnah belief. Since the ijmā evidence has a function that prevents all kinds of arbitrary and divisive thoughts and turns the supposed knowledge into the qat’ī/certain one, it raises the provision to the next level just after the nass, rather than merely being a ijtihādi provision. In the case of the forerunner of the Ahl al-Sunnah, the Māturīdes and Ash‘arites have not differed in in understanding of ijmā in terms of methodology.Although they have different views on the definition and content of the ijmā, they have a common understanding of alliances of Mujtahids on the same view. The mutakallims (theologians) of Māturīdī and Ash’arī schools have used the proof of ijmā as supportive evidence in the cases related to Kalām. al-Ash’arī not only adopted the proof of ijmā but also used it in practice in. He did not make any distinction in proof of ijmā as practical, theological, methodological or sub-divisional; he used it freely in every field. Māturīdī and Ash’arī scholars decided that the ijmā could occur in religious matters and that there would be evidence when it was formed; In the case of mental issues, they have required the knowledge to be based on solid information. In the case of ijmā in purely mental issues, they have disputed over the issue. While some Ahl al-Sunnah scholars stated that since purely mental matters were certain knowledge and therefore don’t need ijmā, they also ruled that because the mujtahids could get this knowledge from religious texts, therefore ijmā could occur in mental matters as well. (shrink)

In recent decades there has been growing concern about the combined undesired consequences of rapid economic growth, based on the free market movement, and developments in science and technology. This concern has placed the sustainable development concept on the world's agenda. The notion of sustainability, which originally referred mostly to the environmental consequences of human activities, along with their economic and social aspects, has been discussed not only at the national and the global levels but also in relation to particular (...) sectors of the economy. One such sector is agriculture, which to be sustainable must be ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially responsible. Unless current trade and agricultural policies are geared to creating such a structure, sustainability will be no more than a myth in the industrialized and globalized world, while considerable numbers of people will be left struggling with hunger and poverty. Ethical, fair trade and ecologic agricultural practices, such as organic farming, have been suggested as alternatives to existing practices. However, with their current and potential size, these alternatives cannot compete with existing production and trade systems. But these alternatives nevertheless highlight the main problems of current day free trade and industrialized agriculture structures and their related solutions.This paper reviews the concepts of sustainable development and sustainable agriculture: it raises the question whether the world-wide free market economy is really free, and it considers the undesired consequences of this economy by focusing on the relationship between sustainable agriculture and agriculture-related trade policies. (shrink)

Both Peter Sloterdijk and Richard David Precht have characteristics of the so-called media intellectuals in their gesture and appearance and also implicitly refer to the protection of human rights. Whereby Sloterdijk seems to be focused on the rights of the individual and his individual interests, a Richard David Precht is more focused on community as well as individual interests. It will be briefly outlined how they can be viewed as representatives of two media tendencies of the media public in the (...) German public - or to establish certain contradictions. (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, (...) which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

Bu makalede 16. yüzyılın sonlarında Osmanlı hareminde güçlü bir konuma gelen Kethüdâ Canfedâ Hatun’un inşa ettirdiği mimari eserler ele alınmıştır. III. Murad döneminde (1574-1595) haremin en etkin kadın banilerinden birisi olan Canfedâ Hatun’un İstanbul ve İzmit’te cami, sıbyan mektebi, hamam, çeşme, köprü, su sarnıcı gibi farklı türden yapılar inşa ya da ihya ettirdiği görülmektedir. Canfeda Hatun’un ihya ettirdiği Mimar Ayas Camii ve inşa ettirdiği Saraçhane Sebili günümüze ulaşamamıştır. Gedikpaşa’daki çeşme ise ikinci bir bani tarafından yeniden inşa edilmiştir. Makalede Canfedâ Hatun’un (...) inşa ettirdiği eserlerin mevcut durumları, mimari ve süsleme özellikleri, zaman içerisindeki değişimleri ve geçirdikleri onarımlar fotoğraflar, çizimler ve arşiv belgeleriyle ortaya konulmaya çalışılmıştır. Yapılar benzer örneklerle karşılaştırılarak mimari ve süsleme unsurları açısından değerlendirilmiştir. Bu amaç doğrultusunda öncelikle Canfedâ Hatun’un hayatına ve Osmanlı Mimarisi’nde kadın bânilere dair bilgiler verilmiştir. (shrink)

Formalizing commonsense knowledge for reasoning about time has long been a central issue in AI. It has been recognized that the existing formalisms do not provide satisfactory solutions to some fundamental problems, viz. the frame problem. Moreover, it has turned out that the inferences drawn do not always coincide with those one had intended when one wrote the axioms. These issues call for a well-defined formalism and useful computational utilities for reasoning about time and change. Yoav Shoham of Stanford University (...) introduced in his 1986 Yale doctoral thesis an appealing temporal nonmonotonic logic and identified a class of theories, causal theories, which have computationally simple model-theoretic properties. This paper is a study towards building upon Shoham's work on causal theories. We concentrate on improving computational aspects of causal theories while preserving their model-theoretic properties. (shrink)

We extend causal theories and study actions in domains involving multiple agents. Causal theories, invented by Yoav Shoham, are based on a temporal nonmonotonic logic and have computationally tractable aspects. Since Shoham's formalism does not provide an adequate mechanism for representing simultaneous actions and specifying their consequences, we introduce the notion of counteractions while preserving the efficiency and model-theoretic properties of causal theories.

Planlama --- bir amaca ulaşmak üzere bir aksiyonlar bütünü tasarlamak --- yapay zekadaki en temel problemlerden biridir. Bu yazıda, robotikte planlama konusuna mantıkçı (logicist) yaklaşım ele alınmaktadır. [Planning --- devising a plan of action to reach a given goal --- is a fundamental problem in AI. This paper reviews the logicist approach to planning in robotics.].

After a review of situation theory and previous attempts at 'computational' situation theory, we present a new programming environment, BABY-SIT, which is based on situation theory. We then demonstrate how problems requiring formal temporal reasoning can be solved in this framework. Specifically, the Yale Shooting Problem, which is commonly regarded as a canonical problem for nonmonotonic temporal reasoning, is implemented in BABY-SIT using Yoav Shoham's causal theories.

Serious thinking about the computational aspects of situation theory is just starting. There have been some recent proposals in this direction (viz. PROSIT and ASTL), with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of the theory. We believe that a programming environment incorporating bona fide situation-theoretic constructs is needed and describe our very recent BABY-SIT implementation. A detailed critical account of PROSIT and ASTL is also offered in order to compare our system with these pioneering and influential frameworks.

Situation theory has been developed over the last decade and various versions of the theory have been applied to a number of linguistic issues. However, not much work has been done in regard to its computational aspects. In this paper, we review the existing approaches towards 'computational situation theory' with considerable emphasis on our own research.

While situation theory and situation semantics provide an appropriate framework for a realistic model-theoretic treatment of natural language, serious thinking on their 'computational' aspects has just started. Existing proposals mainly offer a Prolog- or Lisp-like programming environment with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of situation theory. In this paper, we introduce a computational medium (called BABY-SIT) based on situations. The primary motivation underlying BABY-SIT is to facilitate the development and testing of programs in domains ranging from linguistics to (...) artificial intelligence in a unified framework built upon situation-theoretic constructs. (shrink)

While situation theory and situation semantics provide an appropriate framework for a realistic model-theoretic treatment of natural language, serious thinking on their 'computational' aspects has only recently started. Existing proposals mainly offer a Prolog- or Lisp-like programming environment with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of situation theory. In this paper, we introduce a computational medium (called BABY-SIT) based on situations. The primary motivation underlying BABY-SIT is to facilitate the development and testing of programs in domains ranging from linguistics (...) to artificial intelligence in a unified framework built upon situation-theoretic constructs. (shrink)

Recently, there have been some attempts towards developing programming languages based on situation theory. These languages employ situation-theoretic constructs with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of the theory. In this paper, we review three of these programming languages.

We describe a novel approach to the analysis of pronominal anaphora in Turkish. A computational medium which is based on situation theory is used as our implementation tool. The task of resolving pronominal anaphora is demonstrated in this environment which employs situation-theoretic constructs for processing.

This study aims to investigate the experiences and problems of foreign nationals in Turkey, concerning microaggressions. Thus, it was aimed to find out which types of microaggressions -and at what frequency- are experienced by people who come to Turkey for different reasons like education, pursuit of a better life or escaping from war. The study was conducted in five different cities of Turkey. Students from primary school to university, teachers, parents and doctors took part in the study. The participants were (...) asked the single question “Do you ever experience deliberate or undeliberate insults, whether verbal or behavioral, targeting your ethnic identity and diversity in Turkey?” The results of the study show that microaggression is a very serious problem in Turkey. It can be gathered from the findings that Turkish people are not as tolerant to foreign people as they used to be. Behaviors that make people of foreign origin feel like second-class citizens and alienated take place quite often. Foreigners are usually connected with negative occurrences and they are reminded that they are not welcome in this country. These people are also accused of causing many misfortunes in the country. The study also exhibits that foreign nationals suffer greatly from prejudices about their cultures and they become the target of explicit and direct insults particularly regarding their race. (shrink)

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve (...) as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized). (shrink)

Review of Etienne Balibar's On Universals with an eye towards Balibar's Hegelianism and work on translation.

This paper seeks to show how Kant’s epistemological conception of the transcendental faculties of cognition relates to his ontological conception of the transcendental distinction between mind-dependent, ideal appearances (viz., empirical objects) and mind-independent, transcendentally real things in themselves, as they relate to the self. I engage the metaphysical foundations of Kant’s account of self-consciousness and how this account relates to the self as an empirically perceivable and conceptualizable object of observation. This paper also connects Kant’s work in the Transcendental Deduction (...) on the transcendental unity of apperception with Kant’s work on “clear” and “obscure” representations. (shrink)

According to commentators like Rosalind Krauss, Briony Fer, Caroline Jones, and Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg’s formalist/positivist device of “medium-specificity” debars errant affective aesthetic experiences that are embodied; despite significant differences in how these theorists arrive at this conclusion, one shared point of emphasis is Greenberg’s inheriting Kant’s disinterested conception of pleasure in reflective judgments of beauty. Offering a textualist review of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful, I seek to demonstrate that neither Greenberg, nor Greenberg’s critics, are correct in their account (...) of Kant’s judgments of beauty.1 Specifically, I argue that Greenberg conflates Kant’s conception of judgments of free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) with merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). In formulating a rejoinder to Greenberg and the misplacement of Greenberg as a Kantian, and following Diarmuid Costello, I hope to save a path for a Kantian aesthetics of the present, much in the spirit of other broadly Kantian art historians and philosophers of art/aesthetics (e.g., Thierry de Duve, Paul Guyer, Ido Geiger, etc.). (shrink)

Understanding, for Kant, does not intuit, and intuition—which involves empirical information, i.e., sense-data—does not entail thinking. What is crucial to Kant’s famous claim that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty is the idea that we have no knowledge unless we combine concepts with intuition. Although concepts and intuition are radically separated mental powers, without a way of bringing them together (i.e., synthesis) there is no knowledge for Kant. Thus Kant’s metaphysical-scientific dualism: (scientific) knowledge is limited (...) to the world of phenomena—the world of appearance—while the thing-in-itself is unknowable because there is no intuition that can correspond to the it. This paper sets to cull Béatrice Longuenesse’s recent work on the first-person ‘I’ and put forth a novel Kantian approach to the first-person reference of mental states, working in the tradition of P.F. Strawson, Rudolf Carnap, and Wilfrid Sellars, while offering an empirical study of deafferentation to ground the thesis that the binding of representations is separate from phenomenal consciousness. Accordingly, we stake a kind of self-consciousness vis-à-vis the Fundamental Reference-Rule qua apperception that, while intimately connected to consciousness of one’s own body, apperception is nevertheless distinct from it and is, moreover, the condition for any use of ‘I’. We compliment neuroscientist Oliver Sacks’ research with Ned Block’s recent work on “no-post‐perceptual cognition” and attentional variation to couch Kant’s schema in perceptual psychology. We navigate Kant’s work on intuitions (viz. sensation, perception, and the empirical side of the cognitive faculties) and indirect realism/weak representationism first via Sellars’ naturalization of Kant’s inaccessible thing-in-itself, before challenging Sellars’ functionalist and inferentialist conception of perception and discursive intentionality. We ultimately endeavor to conceptualize the limit-conditions regarding our having reportable knowledge about our access to percepts and concepts. (shrink)

Book review of Anja Jauernig, The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism (2021) by Ekin Erkan.

Review of Charles Ray's recent show, Figure Ground, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly film history scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, André Gaudreault and Benoît Turquety (to name just a few) have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. Considering the heightened attention given to kulturtechnik (Siegert), the database as a dominant symbolic metaphor,1 and the decentered networked tenants of the postmodern global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in increasingly intertextual space. Thus, the term (...) “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that accounts for new media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. It was once presaged in 1992 that “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere.” Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. By locating post-cinema within the semblance of social media, we are allocated a newfound series of theoretical interventions, the most marked of which is that of media archeology vis-à-vis dialectical materialism. This is a lens through which Brian Winston has recently deftly decried Virtual Reality’s “empathy machine” utopic illusionism, bolstered by Chris Milk and a slew of neurohumanities researchers, steadily maintaining that the fundamental myth of “technologies of seeing” is in disguising “their artifice, their cultural formation and their ideological import.” However, this approach, which illuminates the bifurcation between Max Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, neglects what Benjamin identified as occurring to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility—a shift from a technology’s “cult value,” associated with the unique work, to its “exhibition value,” associated with the social act of viewing as part of a mass. Speaking to this divarication, Benjamin Barber, in Strong Democracy, foresaw new media’s two-fold potential—as they are organized and networked, new media and communications technologies possess the possibility to both energize citizen information and political participation but, simultaneously, to supplement the deterioration of public debate. As evinced by Mark Adrejevic’s concept of Infoglut, this two-pronged possibility has only been exacerbated by the interlocking relationship between the advent of a “glut” of information, post-truth politics, the demise of symbolic efficiency, and a renewed focus on the role of affect and emotion as “alternative modalities for thinking about the role of communication in a post-referential era.” Manuel Castells qualifies Barber’s pessimism, noting that the Internet can “be an appropriate platform for informed, interactive politics, stimulating political participation.. […] beyond the closed doors of political institutions,” but that the Internet, like any technology, “is shaped by its uses and users.” Thus, if there exists a positive correlation between exposure to post-cinema media artifacts and political participation, then I seek to explore the revelatory political possibilities of “exhibition value” by way of a particular “post-cinema” case study: the Marxist-Leninist Turkish hacktivist group Redhack’s YouTube-circulated documentary RED! (2013), a project that demanded—by way of the moving-image—to galvanize cyberprotest and democratize a “hacktivist commons. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare Heidegger and Sellars’ respective responses to Kant’s Schematism section of the Transcendental Analytic, taking heed of how both philosophers motivate a criticism of representationalism in their respective renderings while also prodding their Kantian insights towards a holist conception of normativity. We begin with an overview and analysis of Heidegger and Sellars’ holism, comparing both thinkers’ systematic thought. We then turn to how both appraise Kant' Schematism section, first working through Heidegger’s analysis of Kant’s understanding and (...) imagination. We follow this up with Sellars’ naturalized Kantianism, taking particular interest in how Sellars emphasizes the basic foundational units, i.e., ‘this-suches’, grounding Kant’s theory of perception. We appraise both approaches, making the case that they offer a compatible productive misreading. (shrink)

A eulogy on the late Bernard Stiegler, reflecting on Ekin Erkan's friendship with Stiegler and Stiegler's influence on the philosophical study of technology, stoking a comparative review between Stiegler and other thinkers in analytic and continental traditions.

Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” advances the claim that, for the first time in history, the “function” of the work of art is political, as evidenced by cinema. For Benjamin, film is the “first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility” and Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary Benjaminian philosopher, further elucidates this “function,” positing that cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics, not solely with aesthetics, and, (...) consequently, is proximate to philosophy itself. Whereas Deleuze’s Cinema books posed cinema as enacting time in a pure state, Agamben, in his “Notes on Gesture,” breaches from Deleuze’s spatial and cartographic theory of cinema, drawing on Guy Debord’s “détournement via montage,” Simone Weil’s “decreation” and, perhaps most implicitly, from Benjamin. Agamben’s political theory of cinema, motivated by cinema’s “stoppage and repetition of time,” is directly informed by Benjamin’s: “optical unconscious,” appropriation of Brecht’s “social Gestus,” and the relationship between technological reproducibility and aura. Agamben’s “gesture” fastens cinema’s aesthetics not only to ethics and politics, but to the “ontological consistency of human experience,” or to a way of being. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly historical cinema scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, and André Gaudreault have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. With increasing attention on the “database” as a symbolic metaphor for postmodernity and the decentered, networked tenants of the global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in intertextual space. Thus, the term “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that accounts for new (...) media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. As Giorgio Agamben wrote in 1992, “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema…human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere." Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. (shrink)

Review of Gerhard Richter's work on randomness in his recent abstract art paintings, compared with John Cage's work on randomness; the review asks about what randomness in representation qua art amounts to.

This paper seeks to show how Kant’s epistemological conception of the transcendental faculties of cognition relates to his ontological conception of the transcendental distinction between mind-dependent, ideal appearances (viz., empirical objects) and mind-independent, transcendentally real things in themselves, as they relate to the self. I engage the metaphysical foundations of Kant’s account of self-consciousness and how this account relates to the self as an empirically perceivable and conceptualizable object of observation. This paper also connects Kant’s work in the Transcendental Deduction (...) on the transcendental unity of apperception with Kant’s work on “clear” and “obscure” representations. (shrink)