A comparative fMRI study by Peeters et al. (2009) provided evidence that a specific sector of left inferior parietal lobule is devoted to tool use in humans, but not in monkeys. We propose that this area represents the neural substrate of the human capacity to understand tool use by using causal reasoning.

Single-cell studies of monkey posterior parietal cortex (PPC) have revealed the extensive neuronal representations of three-dimensional subject motion and three-dimensional layout of the environment. I propose that navigational planning integrates this PPC information, including gravity signals, with horizontal-plane based information provided by the hippocampal formation, modified in primates by expansion of the ventral stream.

Cohen Kadosh & Walsh (CK&W) discuss the limitations of the behavioral, imaging, and single-cell studies related to number representation in human parietal cortex. The limitations of the imaging studies are grossly underestimated, particularly those using adaptation paradigms, and the problem of establishing a link between single-cell studies and imaging is not even addressed. Monkey functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), however, provides a solution to these problems.

En raison de ses élargissements successifs, l’Union européenne compte désormais près d’un demi-milliard de citoyens, 27 États membres, 3 alphabets et 23 langues officielles dont certaines ont une diffusion mondiale. Mais ce n’est que la partie émergée de l’iceberg : quelques 60 autres langues font également partie de son patrimoine commun, parlées qu’elles sont dans certaines régions ou par des groupes spécifiques. Par ailleurs, les migrants ont apporté un large éventail de langues : on estime qu’au moins 175 nationalités sont (...) présentes sur le territoire de l’Union. Cette diversité est le fondement même de l’identité européenne, qui, à l’heure de la mondialisation, en fait sa force : le multilinguisme est un facteur majeur de compétitivité pour l’économie européenne, et la traduction sous toutes ses formes – notamment littéraire – constitue le support essentiel d’une Europe de la diversité.With its successive enlargements, the European Union now has almost half a billion citizens, 27 Member States, 3 alphabets and 23 official languages, some of which are spoken all over the world. But this is only the visible part of the iceberg: some 60 other languages, spoken in certain regions or by particular groups, are also part of its common heritage. To these are added a wide range of other languages introduced by migrants: it is estimated that at least 175 nationalities are represented within the EU. This diversity is the very foundation of European identity and, in our age of globalisation, also what makes its strength: multilingualism is an important factor of competitiveness for the European economy, and translation of every kind, literary included, is a mainstay of European diversity. (shrink)

This essay examines Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and his cultivation of a new form of authoritarian and hyper-nationalist neoliberalism, which I call ordonationalist. With particular emphasis placed on tracing resurgence of the national state, ordonationalism points to the neoliberal intensifications, but also the ruptures to neoliberalism through post-neoliberal advances, exemplified by the Hungarian state. Ordonationalism combines: (1) a newly empowered nationalist state invested in flexibilizing domestic labour and controlling access to domestic capitalist accumulation; (2) a national state captured by political actors (...) as a means towards controlling access to domestic capital accumulation; (3) a novel regime of social reproduction, linking financialization, flexibilization of labour, steep decline in supporting social reproduction, and supporting consumption as a source of social reproduction. This project is hegemonic. However, the contradictions between radical neoliberalization and radical nationalism generate ever-more instances where an authoritarian state steps in to solve crises generated by its contradictions. (shrink)

This paper offers a politolinguistic analysis of four ‘state of the nation’ speeches delivered by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán between 1999 and 2002. The analysis focuses on the ways in which Orbán’s self-representation, his discourse strategies and the tone of the speeches changed in response to changes in the ideological background over the four years in question. The findings demonstrate that Orbán’s voice was most active in the pre-election speech of 2002, that he had become increasingly interpellative (in (...) the Althusserian sense) over this period and that he increasingly tried to conversationalize the dominant ideology. (shrink)

Populist leaders and their radical policies attract the interest of the media across borders. The aim of the current article is to uncover whether interviews centered on one populist leader, but involving interviewers located in different European countries, lead to the same production of populist equivocation across the EU. In addition, two types of journalistic elements that can explain potential differences are investigated: the broad interactions between the media and politicians in a given country, or the reporters belonging to a (...) specific media segment such as the tabloid press or public broadcasters. The research is based on interviews given by Viktor Orbán during the 2019 EU election campaign. Critical discourse analysis is carried out to investigate the equivocal populist narratives produced. (shrink)

Recent studies have proposed that the executive advantages associated with bilingualism may stem from language-switching frequency rather than from bilingualism per se (see for example, Prior & Gollan, 2011). Barbu, Gillet, Orban and Poncelet (2018) showed that high-frequency language switchers outperformed low-frequency switchers on a mental flexibility task but not on alertness or response inhibition tasks. The aim of the present study was to replicate these results as well as to compare proficient high and low-frequency bilingual language switchers to (...) a control group of monolingual participants. Two groups of proficient bilingual adults (30 high-frequency language switchers and 21 low-frequency language switchers) and a group of 28 monolinguals participated in the study. The results showed superior mental flexibility skills in high-frequency language switchers compared to low-frequency switchers and monolinguals; furthermore, the two latter groups showed no difference in mental flexibility skills. These results provide novel support for the hypothesis that the so-called bilingual advantage is, in fact, a result of language-switching habits. (shrink)

The phenomenon of «оrbanism» as a derivative of the perception of the politician and Prime-Minister of Hungary V.Orban is considered on the basis of the contradictions of the ontological aspects of the internal and external political background of his field of activity. It is noted that in Hungary «оrbanism» is perceived not as an artificially constructed slogan that highlights the activities of the country’s prime minister, but as a manifestation of healthy conservatism and the antithesis of the values of (...) liberal democracy, which are declared to be one of the pillars of building a united Europe. It is proved that in the person of the politician Orbán, «оrbanism» became a product of the national, cultural and historical retrospective of Hungary, which united a fairly significant part of society and Hungarian emigrants who, due to insurmountable circumstances, found themselves abroad. The article proposes to consider the phenomenon of «оrbanism» as a certain synthesis of five steps-strategies, which V.Orban successively implements in the country. They are as follows: step 1) adoption of the new Constitution of the country; step 2) the labor state instead of the market; step 3) regulation of emigration policy; step 4) compliance with the national energy policy; step 5) dialogue with the Hungarian diaspora and restraint in border conflicts. Collectively, these strategic steps are aimed at strengthening the national sovereignty of Hungary in the EU and weakening the «pressure» of the Eurobureaucracy. It is stated that for the national project «sovereign Hungary in the EU», which is aimed at the future, this means the presence of the Hegelian «basis» in the political prerogatives of the FIDES party, which gives this project an expected orbit and predictable result. Its main guidelines are the preservation of statehood within the EU, limiting the power of the Eurobureaucracy, productive cooperation with all partner countries, and distancing from conflicts that could harm the country’s national interests. (shrink)

This study uses an interdisciplinary perspective to shed light on Ukraine’s continuous problems with media independence, which to date have not allowed Ukraine to become a country with a truly free media: since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 its media have consistently remained only “partly free.” The approach proposed in the paper combines theoretical tools of post-communist media studies with advancements in political science research in regime change and state-building to explore the continuities and changes in the institutional environment for the (...) media in post-communist new democracies. The approach is applied to analyze two cases of post-communist media change, both problematic to explain within the framework of media studies alone: the case of incomplete media transformation in a hybrid regime and the incident of backsliding in independent media in an advanced new democracy. The paper is structured as follows: I first present the shortcomings in the way institutions, or more specifically the institutional environment for media freedom, were previously approached in post-communist media studies. I then propose a more advanced approach based on theories and concepts originating from comparative-politics studies of regime change and state and institution-building. I apply this approach to analyze the institutional environment for the media in Ukraine. Next, I explore the case of a radical reconstruction of media-related institutions in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party came to power in 2010. (shrink)

On 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament approved emergency measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, granting prime minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule by decree. The very next day, the government repealed the legal recognition of transgenderism, ruling that assignations of biological sex are binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not coincidental. As I argue in this short essay, Orbán’s move was itself a kind of assignation, (...) an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation. -/- Drawing on Derrida’s motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán’s law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán’s placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida’s. (shrink)

On 28 October 2018 the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential elections in Brazil with 55% of the vote. This result has been viewed by many as yet another instance of the global rise of authoritarian populist leaders, grouping Bolsonaro alongside the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, India’s Narendra Modi, or Donald Trump in the USA – indeed, Bolsonaro has been dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics.” The focus on Bolsonaro himself reflects the strong emphasis (...) on executives in a rapidly expanding literature suggesting the emergence of a new form of would-be autocrat who is democratically elected but who hollows out democratic rule over time. However, this Article argues that, far beyond Bolsonaro, the Brazilian experience is an important case-study as it prompts reflection on three fundamental propositions. First, any analysis of liberal democracy as the perceived object of attack must be highly cognizant of the democratic “starting point” and history of a given state. Second, an excessive focus on executive-led assaults on democratic rule can impede fuller analysis of a broader suite of actors and factors relevant to the (declining) health of the democratic system. Third, authoritarianism is a more appropriate analytical lens than populism for identifying potential democratic threats, especially in the Brazilian context. (shrink)

El despliegue casi generalizado de las democracias iliberales en el centro de Europa es inquietante. La mayoría de esos países (Polonia, Hungría, República Checa, Eslovaquia) están afectados pero, en esos mismos países, abundan los partidos extremistas, además de los que están en el poder. En Eslovaquia, hay varios partidos nacionalistas, algunos de ellos muy radicales. En Hungría, el partido Jobbik deja a Orban por moderado. El fenómeno es amplio y profundo. Como consecuencia, aumentan las disensiones entre la Europa occidental (...) y la Europa central. La incomprensión viene de lejos y no lo habíamos advertido…. (shrink)

This article examines the problematic phenomenon of political naming through conceptual history. It is evident that illiberal is an ambiguous term and determining what it means is challenging, not to mention the political aspects of the name itself. We claim that naming is a political act par excellence and test our hypothesis by examining Viktor Orbán’s Băile Tuşnad speeches between 2014 and 2019 and the annual State of the Nation speeches between 2015 and 2020. We claim that even Orbán has (...) difficulties in naming his political system. Moreover, we link naming to discussions concerning democracy. In Hungary, this “illiberal” position enables a ruling party to act in accordance with a purely majoritarian form of democracy, that is, to implement legislation with very little regard to the opposition, and by concentrating power to the party and especially to its leader. (shrink)

Famous for his declaration on the end of history after free-market liberaleconomy triumphed over communism at the end of the Cold War, FrancisFukuyama is back to elucidate on the recent rise of identity politics inthe second decade of the twenty-first century. Starting with the vote bythe British electorate to leave the European Union, we have seen therise of more populist leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, andGeert Wilders using the rhetoric of identity to rile up voters. While thereis (...) a growing body of literature on the subject, what Fukuyama does bestis explaining a complex phenomenon in a simple yet elegant prose tomake his arguments digestible to a wider audience and thus, helpinghim make a case on the danger of ignoring identity politics and its roots. (shrink)