Contemporary Complex Cinema. Complex conditions: the resurgence of narrative complexity ; Complex cinema as brain-candy for the empowered viewer ; Narrative taxonomies: simple, complex, puzzle plots -- Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema. Why an (embodied-)cognitive approach? ; Various forms of complexity and their effects on sense making ; Problematizing narrative linearity ; Complicating narrative structures and ontologies ; Under-stimulation and cognitive overload ; Contradictions and unreliabilities ; A cognitive approach to classifying complexity ; Deceptive unreliability and the twist film (...) ; Disorienting but solvable puzzle films ; Impossible puzzle films -- Narrative Complexity and Dissonant Cognitions. The concept of cognitive dissonance ; Cognitions in dissonance: from social psychology to narrative engagement ; Types of dissonance in narrative comprehension ; Narrative incongruities ; Narrative impossibilities ; Cognitive access to impossible storyworlds: immersed and reflected operations ; 'Impossibilities' and embodied cognition ; Disrupting viewers' reliance on image schemas by perceptual impossibility ; Disrupting viewers' reliance on image schemas by formal impossibility -- Taming Dissonance: Cognitive Operations and Interpretive Strategies. Cognitive dissonance versus narrative coherence ; Reducing dissonance: interpretation and naturalization ; Foregrounding ; Narrating agency and authorship ; Artefact emotions and metareflexive appreciation ; Interpretation as dissonance reduction ; Coping with dissonance: frame-switches and poetic and aesthetic readings ; Frame-switching as hermeneutic play in impossible puzzle films ; Switching between narrative and symbolical readings: Enemy and Mulholland Drive ; Cognitive hesitation and the fantastic -- Impossible Puzzle Films: Between Art-Cinema and (Post-) Classical Narration. From art-cinema to puzzle films ; Art-cinema as a narrative mode ; Dissonance in modernist art-cinema ; Art-cinema as a cognitive reception frame ; Narrative complexity and meaning-making in art-cinema ; Impossible puzzle films and (post-)classical narration ; High degree of tellability ; Identification with goal-oriented characters ; Strong reliance on classical genre elements ; Adherence to classical narrative cohesion devices ; Inclusion of quasi-rational frames of naturalization -- Wallowing in Dissonance: The Attractiveness of Impossible Puzzles. Hermeneutic play and interpretive multiplicity ; Orientation, navigation, mapping ; Game logic and the fascination in failure ; Effort justification ; Diegetization of decoupling ; Fascination in infinity ; Destabilized ontological certainty ; Eudaimonic motivations and intrinsic needs. (shrink)

After decades of marginalization in the secularized twentieth-century academy, moral education has enjoyed a recent resurgence in American higher education, with the establishment of more than 100 ethics centers and programs on campuses across the country. Yet the idea that the university has a civic responsibility to teach its undergraduate students ethics and morality has been met with skepticism, suspicion, and even outright rejection from both inside and outside the academy. In this collection, renowned scholars of philosophy, politics, and religion (...) debate the role of ethics in the university, investigating whether universities should proactively cultivate morality and ethics, what teaching ethics entails, and what moral education should accomplish. The essays quickly open up to broader questions regarding the very purpose of a university education in modern society. Editors Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben survey the history of ethics in higher education, then engage with provocative recent writings by Stanley Fish in which he argues that universities should not be involved in moral education. Stanley Hauerwas responds, offering a theological perspective on the university’s purpose. Contributors look at the place of politics in moral education; suggest that increasingly diverse, multicultural student bodies are resources for the teaching of ethics; and show how the debate over civic education in public grade-schools provides valuable lessons for higher education. Others reflect on the virtues and character traits that a moral education should foster in students—such as honesty, tolerance, and integrity—and the ways that ethical training formally and informally happens on campuses today, from the classroom to the basketball court. _Debating Moral Education_ is a critical contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role and evolution of ethics education in the modern liberal arts university. _Contributors_. Lawrence Blum, Romand Coles, J. Peter Euben, Stanley Fish, Michael Allen Gillespie, Ruth W. Grant, Stanley Hauerwas, David A. Hoekema, Elizabeth Kiss, Patchen Markell, Susan Jane McWilliams, Wilson Carey McWilliams, J. Donald Moon, James Bernard Murphy, Noah Pickus, Julie A. Reuben, George Shulman, Elizabeth V. Spelman. (shrink)

In this commentary I argue that the notion of incommensurability can be extended to the child's developing theories of mind. I use Carey's concept of Quinian bootstrapping and show that this learning process can account for the acquisition of the semantics of mental terms. I suggest a distinction among three stages of acquisition and adopt the theory–theory of conceptual development.

The authors of the article are trying to identify the signs of a crisis of our time as a consequence of the refusal from the philosophical justification of the goals and objectives of scientific pedagogy, which as a chain reaction entail ignoring the results of sciences related to pedagogy: neurobiology and psychology. The reproductive approach in education selectively takes into account the results of the empirical sciences, as they serve to justify it. The result is a shift in emphasis: being (...) driven by the hypothetical imperatives of competitiveness in the labor market, teachers and other adults feel the need for the achievements of the pupils, for their effectiveness. As a consequence, the child's psyche does not develop properly which manifests itself in the inability to see the subjects of interaction in the vis-a-vis, in an effort to objectify what is not subject to objectification - a person. The authors of the article see the solution to the problem in the appeal in the philosophical and pedagogical system of I. Kant, that may be reconstructed from his works. The authors of the article conclude that I. Kant may rightfully be considered the founder of a productive approach to education. (shrink)

Nietzsche's vision of modern democracy includes an aspect which many tend to neglect given the historical experience with totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. Precisely on account of its triumphant progress, 'irresistible' democracy, according to Nietzsche, tends to instrumentalize the activities of its enemies. This is a claim made by a philosopher whose work Alfred Baeumler and Georg Lukács considered an extreme political archaism. For a long time no serious objection was raised against this absurd verdict. The present article attempts (...) to show how Nietzsche's universalistic approach assigns a definite place to democratic systems and specifies why these systems are of special relevance for the universal-emancipatory development of humankind It argues that by stating the prophylactic character of the democratic system Nietzsche reaches the very core of his philosophy whereby he differs markedly and positively from other political philosophers. The difference lies precisely in the fact that for Nietzsche a given political system is not an ultimate value or objective, but simply an occasion to realize universal human ambitions. Nietzsche's political philosophy, therefore, establishes a distinction between various political systems evaluating them in terms of their prophylactic potential for the purposes of universal-emancipatory development. /// A visão nietzschiana da democracia moderna inclui um aspecto que muitos intérpretes tendem a esquecer devido à experiência histórica do século XX com sistemas totalitários. Para Nietzsche, é devido ao seu triunfante progresso que a democracia 'irresístivel' tende a instrumentalizar as actividades dos seus próprios inimigos. Curiosamente, esta é a pretensão de um filósofo cuja obra Alfred Baeumler e Georg Lukács consideravam como sendo uma forma extrema de arcaísmo politico, veredicto este contra o qual durante muito tempo nenhuma objecção se levantou. Objectivo dopresente artigo, porém, é precisamente mostrar até que ponto a abordagem universalista de Nietzsche atribui aos sistemas democráticos um lugar determinado e ao mesmo tempo especifica a razão pela qual estes sistemas ocupam um lugar privilegiado no que se refere ao desenvolvimento universal-emancipatório da humanidade. A tese do autor, com efeito, é a de que é precisamente ao afirmar o carácter profíláctico do sistema democrático que Nietzsche alcança o verdadeiro núcleo central da sua filosofia, facto esse mediante o qual ele claramente se distingue de outros pensadores polítcos. A diferença está precisamente no facto de para Nietzsche um determinado sistema político nunca constituir em si um valor último ou objectivo, antes encontra o seu valor na ocasião que porporciona para a realização de ambições humanas universais. A filosofia politica de Nietzsche, portanto, estabelece uma distinção entre uma diversidade de sistemas políticos propondo uma avaliação dos mesmos de acordo com o seu potential profiláctico no que se refere aos objectivos de um desenvolvimento universal e emancipatório. (shrink)

Nietzsche's fundamental vision of modern democracy includes an essential aspect which many tend to neglect given the indelible historical experience with totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. "Irresistible" democracy, precisely on account of its triumphant progress, also sets the course for, or, to use another contemporary expression, instrumentalizes the activities of its very enemies. It is, to say the least, quite striking to read such a claim made by a philosopher whose work Alfred Baeumler and Georg Lukäcs have labelled as (...) extreme political archaism, while for a long time no serious objection was raised against this absurd verdict. We can see that Nietzsche's universalistic approach assigns a definite place to democratic systems and also specifies why these systems are of special relevance for the universal-emancipatory development of humankind. By stating the prophylactic character of the democratic system in such a decisive fashion, Nietzsche reaches the very core of his philosophy. By doing so he differs markedly and positively from several other political philosophers. The difference lies in the fact that for Nietzsche a given political system is not an ultimate value or objective, but, as already mentioned, an opportunity to realize universal human ambitions. This is why his political philosophy establishes a principled distinction between various political systems while also evaluating them according to their prophylactic potential to be utilized for the purposes of universal-emancipatory development. (shrink)

Nietzsche's fundamental vision of modern democracy includes an essential aspect which many tend to neglect given the indelible historical experience with totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. "Irresistible" democracy, precisely on account of its triumphant progress, also sets the course for, or, to use another contemporary expression, instrumentalizes the activities of its very enemies. It is, to say the least, quite striking to read such a claim made by a philosopher whose work Alfred Baeumler and Georg Lukäcs have labelled as (...) extreme political archaism, while for a long time no serious objection was raised against this absurd verdict. We can see that Nietzsche's universalistic approach assigns a definite place to democratic systems and also specifies why these systems are of special relevance for the universal-emancipatory development of humankind. By stating the prophylactic character of the democratic system in such a decisive fashion, Nietzsche reaches the very core of his philosophy. By doing so he differs markedly and positively from several other political philosophers. The difference lies in the fact that for Nietzsche a given political system is not an ultimate value or objective, but, as already mentioned, an opportunity to realize universal human ambitions. This is why his political philosophy establishes a principled distinction between various political systems while also evaluating them according to their prophylactic potential to be utilized for the purposes of universal-emancipatory development. (shrink)

Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy avoids the problem of literary objectiveness altogether. His approach witnesses the general fact that an indifference towards literary objectiveness in particular, leads to a peculiar neglect of par excellence literariness as such. It seems obvious, however, that the constitutive aspects of the crisis of literary objectiveness cannot be shown to contain the underlying intention of bringing about this situation. At this point, one can identify what could probably be the most important element in a definition of literary (...) objectiveness. In contrast to ‘natural’ objectiveness and objectiveness based on various societal conventions, the legitimacy of a literary work is solely guaranteed by its elements being organized in accordance with the rules of literary objectiveness. Thus when the crisis of literary objectiveness intensifies, literariness will also find itself in a crisis. This crisis detaches new, quasi-literary formations from various definitions of literariness. When literary objectiveness ceases, however, to be understood as a system constituted by various objective formations aiming to correspond in one way or another to the ‘world’, scientific analysis of literary objectiveness will be rendered impossible. The crisis of literary objectiveness thus brings about the crisis of the theory of literature and the philosophy of art. Gadamer explicitly argues that the scientific approach proves to be inadequate in the analysis of artistic experience. This attitude results in the categorical rejection of a scientific orientation, but he seems to overemphasize an otherwise correct thesis on the non-reflexive character of artistic experience. It is the anti-mimetic and Platonic character of Gadamer’s aesthetic hermeneutics that determines the status of literary objectiveness in his system of thought. What is of crucial importance, however, is to point out that this aesthetics entails a fundamental reduction of the significance of literary objectiveness. As soon as the essence of aesthetic object-constitution is taken to be re-cognition, the absolutely natural interest in the original object represented by a work of art.Undoubtedly, Gadamer’s conception answers a number of questions that tend to be ignored by other theories. It is just as obvious, however, that Gadamer completes here the aesthetic devaluation of the objective domain. It is not the characteristics of the ‘original’ that constitute the image, but in effect the image turns the original into an original. Paraphrasing this claim one arrives at a near paradox: not objectiveness makes a work of art possible, but a work of art lends objects their objectiveness. (shrink)

There is an increasing number of voices—both in the relatively new academic field of film scholarship and outside it—claiming that film could be or even should be studied within science as opposed to the humanities. Among them, one finds some of the most distinguished film scholars teaching in film, literature, art history, or visual arts departments; their core argument is that their specific field needs to become more scientific. A craving for disciplinary rigor in the humanities is as old as (...) Plato’s attack on rhetoric and poetics. In the era of constant academic assessment exercises, however, this craving for measurable results seems like a simple survival instinct. Still, what Plato had not dreamt of (and... (shrink)

The actual originality and radicalism of Canetti's mass psychology provides a comprehensive picture of humanity and society which could also accommodate a naturalized political domain. Proceeding according to a deliberate plan, Canetti discusses four “purely” political complexes on the basis of his mass‐psychological conception. These four complexes are completed, architecturally as it were, by the Schreber Case, the keystone, which legitimately unites and synthesizes the political and psychological domains in terms of power. His strategy does not involve the projection of (...) already available psychological explanatory patterns onto the political subject‐matter. He chooses rather a political subject‐matter in the analysis of which the already elaborated mass‐psychological insights can resurface. The way leads, therefore, not from mass psychology to politics, but from politics to politics seen in a different way—via innovative mass‐psychological insights. The four case‐studies selected by Canetti display remarkable coherence in their conceptual structure. At the same time, they are also astonishingly diverse and variable. The Versaille Case describes a unique act involving the suppression of collective identity, while the Inflation Case captures the possibility of the shocking devaluation of individual and collective identity, a possibility which can in principle always become reality. The approach is yet again different in the Parliamentarianism Case: politics is shown to be wise enough to restrain political struggle by means of a taboo. Finally, for the case of socialism Canetti provides an original concretization and interpretation of a widely shared view, which is nevertheless seldom articulated with the required precision, namely that socialism and human nature run, at least latently, counter to one another, making their incompatibility predetermined. (shrink)

This article compares Hendrik de Man's neo-Marxist approach with that of the Hungarian poet Attila József. It suggests that de Man's “refinement” of Marxism amounts to foregrounding psychological aspects; he tends to replace “hard,” political or economic elements of Marxist and neo-Marxist theories with “soft,” psychological elements. For him Intellectual Socialism stands in opposition to Labor Socialism. This view may have challenged the synthesis-makers, including József, who sees himself as a “proletarian poet”: in his poetry he formulates the optimal relationship (...) between the new intelligentsia and the proletariat, addressing the philosophical dilemmas raised by de Man. Whereas for de Man, Marx and philosophical Marxism are both of the past, demanding a mechanical interpretation, for József, Marxism—approached with no intention at revision—is a valid theory that calls for certain adjustments. His aspiration, even if unintended, is a correction and criticism of de Man's superficial categorization. Whereas de Man finds in Marxism the deterministic logic of eighteenth-century natural science, which analogy justifies its psychological refinement, for József the notion of law is always bound to society and history. (shrink)

Feminist theory in all its diversity begins from the conviction that the social, political, and cultural arrangements that shape women's lives are unjust. Biological sex is a major determinant of people's status, power, and opportunities in all known societies, with women systematically subordinated to men. Feminists aim to understand and end these patterns of subordination. Yet, while the Romans portrayed Justice as a woman, theories of justice have tended either to justify women's subordinate status or to render it invisible. Many (...) accounts of just social arrangements have legitimated men's rule over women by appeal to patriarchal norms. Others have either neglected to mention women entirely, or placed them in a separate domestic sphere lying beyond the scope of considerations of justice. Justice thus represents both a core project for feminism and a tradition of argument which has often been dismissive of, or resistant to, feminist concerns. Small wonder, then, that arguments over justice have raised so many theoretical and practical quandaries and produced some of contemporary feminist philosophy's liveliest debates. (shrink)

Dans le cadre de la thématique liée aux relations entre la philosophie et la pédagogie, Kant offre un trčs riche sujet de réflexion ŕ plusieurs niveaux. La philosophie de Kant est en relation triple avec la philosophie scolaire prise au sens originel. Primo, l’ensemble de la philosophie de Kant est une critique consciente de la métaphysique de Leibniz et Wolff . Secundo, la philosophie de Kant – bien qu’elle ne se laisse pas interpréter comme une philosophie scolaire au sens strict (...) du terme – peut, ŕ cause de sa maničre spécifique d’exposer la réfutation du systčme de Leibniz et Wolff, ętre considérée comme une philosophie scolaire. Tertio, la philosophie de Kant peut, ŕ sa maniere, se comprendre comme une nouvelle alternative positive ŕ la philosophie scolaire, ŕ laquelle elle semble presque ętre destinée grâce ŕ sa maniere d’exposer les problčmes, ŕ ses aspects herméneutiques et didactiques et ŕ la cohérence de son langage. Vu sous cet angle, le rapport de Kant au systčme de Leibniz et Wolff diffčre de celui de Schelling, et męme de celui de Hegel. Hegel analyse, lui aussi, correctement la signification historique multiple de la puissante philosophie scolaire, alors que, sur la męme ligne, Schelling souligne que męme les erreurs de cette école ont été utiles ŕ la philosophie, puisque celle-ci n’aurait pas pu s’épanouir sans elle. Aux yeux de Kant, la philosophie scolaire compréhensive n’est ni de l’histoire, ni un pôle opposé, ni męme un degré inférieur de la haute philosophie, mais un cadre de réflexion qui, d’une part, doit se transformer dans tous ses détails, alors que, d’autre part, la nouvelle haute philosophie doit prendre en considération, en se constituant, le cadre de la philosophie scolaire. Cela est possible parce que la nécessité de la philosophie, bien qu’elle ne soit pas identique ŕ la nécessité de la philosophie scolaire, fait pourtant découvrir cette derničre dans toute son étendue. (shrink)

Whilst considering the problems of the relationship between philosophy and pedagogy, Kant’s philosophy offers one especially rich and layered example for consideration. Kant’s philosophy stands in a triple relationship towards school-philosophy, understood in its real and original context. First, the complete corpus of Kant’s philosophy is valid as a conscious and critical prevalence of Leibniz-Wolff metaphysics . Secondly, Kant’s philosophy – even if one cannot in its real meaning consider it as school-philosophy – in its specific made source, as well (...) as the prevalence of the Leibniz-Wolff system, counts as school-philosophy as well. And thirdly, Kant’s philosophy, in its own way, can understand itself as a new positive school-philosophy alternative, for which it is predestined with its systematically complete execution of problem circles, consequently significant hermeneutic and didactic aspects or its complete linguistic coherence. Thus Kant’s relationship towards the Leibniz-Wolff system differs from Schelling’s or even Hegel’s relationship. Hegel also enters correctly into the manifold historical significance of this strong school-philosophy, while Schelling underlines that the mistakes of this school were of incomparable value to philosophy, because without it there wouldn’t have been an efflorescence of philosophy. For Kant, this scholastic philosophy does not mean history or a contrary pole, nor does it mean a lower degree of higher philosophy – for him, it means a contemplative framework which on the one hand must be transformed in each of its particularities, while on the other hand the new higher philosophy must in its constitution take into consideration its school-philosophical framework. This is possible only because the need for philosophy, if it is not already identical to the need for school-philosophy, unveils school-philosophy in its width. (shrink)

Where is the old Marcuse? Is he too tired to be explicit, to reason, to give a rationale for what he is contending? Why has he written this?--this which is just another protest lost in the shouting and the printing scattered all over stop signs, subway walls, placards, newspapers, magazines, and in books. Perhaps the importance of the book is its perseverance at a time when we are exhausted, worn out by protest's apparent sterility on the one hand and its (...) kiss-of-death fashionability on the other. Many places in this book are obscure because they are poorly written and poorly edited. Marcuse walks the line between being original enough to be provocative and irresponsible enough to be dismissed. The book is a fascinating interplay between sense and nonsense, penetrating insight and polemical overstatement, between creative originality and banal sloganism, between brilliant interpretive social commentary and abject confusion. Marcuse does succeed in letting the reader know that there is something wrong with our society and that many of the values that we have taken for granted must be rethought, but this is not Marcuse at his best, and the net force of the book is to leave the reader bewildered with this, another indication that these are bewildering times.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Actions that do not have instrumental goals can communicate social goals that are not rituals. Many non-instrumental actions such as bowing or kissing communicate a commitment to or roles in dyadic relationships. What is unclear is when people understand such actions in terms of ritual and when they understand them in terms of relationships.

ABSTRACT ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ is not a nostalgic account of a Romantic seducer-figure, and it does not represent the ‘ethical’ rejection of such Romanticism. Instead, it portrays the violence involved just as much in conventional bourgeois marriage as in works of erotic fantasy, and it reveals the necessary failure of both these projects. Although the suffering they may cause is real enough, they never manage to achieve the mastery they seek to impose. At the same time, this radical cultural critique (...) functions as a philosophical allegory of imagination. For, if the main character is a seducer, he is also an artist, and if the material he seeks to shape is a woman, it is also the image produced by imagination as such. Kierkegaard's tale illustrates, and interrogates, the necessary role played by the image in mediating between the ‘real’ and the ‘meaningful.’. (shrink)

The article challenges conventional assumptions regarding the question of incest survival within contemporary discourses. A textual analysis of Kathryn Harrison's autobiographical novel tracing her consensual sexual relationship with her father is used to address the issue of failed or unresolved mourning as a prototypically ‘modern’ cultural phenomenon. Psychoanalytically informed feminist literary criticism is used to explore the parallels between the cultural construction of femininity and failed or postponed mourning in western historical and philosophical traditions. Following the work of Juliana Schiesari (...) and Kathleen Woodward, the article contends that melancholia is a gendered discourse that has historically privileged male theorists and film-makers, such as Barthes and Fassbinder. The article suggests that contemporary women writers, such as Harrison, are engaged in a revisionary approach to the construction of loss within their writing. By situating themselves at the heart of the contemporary family narrative, instead of the ‘melancholic’ margins, they are able to produce a counter-discourse that dispels the conventional dynamics of the traditional family romance. By using the ‘writing cure’ to overcome ideological loss, the desiring daughter is able to challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature. (shrink)

The American rock band KISS is notorious. Its notoriety derives not only from the band’s otherworldly costumes (except for of course during the unmasked period), the fact that they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, their numerous hit records or the amazing stage theatrics and pyrotechnics of their live shows. It’s also related to the band’s constantly changing makeup (and I don’t mean the kind on their faces!). Of the four members, only Paul Stanley and (...) Gene Simmons were fixtures. With so many changes to the band’s composition, has KISS always remained the same band? Some see this head-scratcher as roughly similar to a conundrum in philosophical metaphysics (that’s the area of philosophy addressing problems of existence): the puzzle of Theseus’s ship. (shrink)

In late August 2012, artist Paul Thomas and philosopher Timothy Morton took a stroll up and down King Street in Newtown, Sydney. They took photographs. If you walk too slowly down the street, you find yourself caught in the honey of aesthetic zones emitted by thousands and thousands of beings. If you want to get from A to B, you had better hurry up. Is there any space between anything? Do we not, when we look for such a space, encounter (...) a plenitude of other things —a slice of plaster, an old vinyl record, a flattened piece of aluminum, painted metal surfaces, nameless interstitial powder, the reflection of sky, some letters of the alphabet, roughened concrete. Between what we take to be things there exist other things, as if the universe were jammed with entities like clowns in a crowded Expressionist painting. An abyss of things that emanates from them, not a yawning void that threatens to engulf them, but a sunlit nothingness filled with dust that seems to spray out of them like dry mist sparkling with firefly swarms. In these so-called spaces, we encounter the work of causality. Look: someone painted over this crack, some sunlight rippled in a mirage, a hole appeared. When we look for causes and effects, we don't encounter a basement of efficiently whirring machinery. Rather, we encounter these in-between spaces, where we had not thought to look. What we see are stage hands moving the scenery about—they are doing it in plain sight, the best place to hide, right in front of you, in the place we call the aesthetic dimension . In Tibetan Buddhism these spaces are called bardo , which just means the between. There is no such thing as a moment of your life that is not a between, according to this view. There is the between of living. There is the between of dying. There is the between of the transition between lives. There is the between of dreaming. There is the between of meditation. There is the between of two humans holding cameras walking down a street in Sydney. The between of two buildings, a space bursting with objects as if a billion jack in the boxes had exploded at once. Some of the lids are stuck, sometimes a nose bursts out and the hinge won't open any further; at other times, the jack in the box flies right out and pulps against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Time opens up. Each surface is a poem about the past. A myriad stories begin to proliferate, as if a thing were a crisscrossing of books, a whole library of them, each page whispering parts of paragraphs and broken pieces of word. The stories tell us things—they are quite literal, look, this guy painted part of this wall, then they came and stripped off the panel and touched up the holes. Form is the past. When you look at appearance, you are looking at the past. Where is the present? And essence is the future. The hints of unknown, unseen things, the absolute impossibility of grasping everything about this plastic pipe, the way photons entering the camera lens obey a speed limit and splash onto receptors, going into and out of coherence. At the electronic level, it's quite clear that causality is aesthetic. I can't see an electron without deflecting it. Everything is a refrigerator with a light on—or off—inside. For me, for you, for this arrangement of tiles sandwiched between a door and a slab of marble. To a photon, an electron is a refrigerator with a closed door, and a light that might be on—or off—inside. How can you know whether the light is on inside? Why, you open the door of course. But then you are looking at the past. You never see the light in the refrigerator before you open the door. This future is not a predictable future that is a specific number of now-points away. You will never reach it. You will never be able to sneak up from the side and see through the refrigerator. Nor can a photon see through the refrigerator of an electron. Nor can paint see through the refrigerator of this plastic pipe. You take a photo—click—the past appears, another open refrigerator. But the thing you have just made, the photograph, the graphing of the photons—it is another thing, another story. You can read the words, but the meaning always eludes you. It always lurks just off the edge of the sentence, just at the very edge of this ragged slice of paint, just at the edge of this building, between this one and that one. Thousands of secrets, everywhere. Masks that lie and tell the truth at the same time: this pink paint is not blue paint, that's true. But the thing, the thing in itself, that paint sliding off a brush onto that pipe—it is nowhere to be seen, like a light behind a closed door. When you walk too slowly down the street, you start walking into millions of levels of pastness, levels emitted not just by the humans or the dogs and cats, but also by this garbage can, this mottled pink surface pockmarked with nail holes. You walk surrounded by as many futures as there are things. You walk, or rather you occupy a peculiar shifting ground of nowness, created by the relative motion of the past sliding against the future, not touching. You begin to realize that the present does not exist. A thing is a train station where one train is always arriving and one train is always leaving. Hundreds of train stations everywhere, hundreds of relative motions. The idea of a universal, regular, atomic sequence of instants that contains everything is absolutely ludicrous, the philosophers have known this for thousands of years, and to hide the absurdity, to get from A to B, Houston to Sydney, crossing the International Date Line without too much laughter, you have embedded piezoelectric devices in as many pieces of hardware as possible, devices in which quartz talks to electrons, making train stations where the trains seem to run on time. When you walk too slowly down the street, you begin to realize that Zeno had a point. You can seemingly divide each moment, each step, infinitesimally. So perhaps there are no moments, no steps. Or perhaps time is not a box that everything goes in. Perhaps time is, as Einstein argued after all, a way that things send out ripples. Where one house touches another house, there arise hundreds of things, hundreds of meeting places (Old English thing , meeting place). Hundreds of times. I have a thing for you. Come over here, let's do a thing. Stay in the sunlight and shadow between worlds, in the sunlit canyon between this building and that building. See how paint touches this pipe, caressing then leaving, no one will notice if a surface is left exposed, not quite filled in. See how shadows are reflected in pale cream glass—see the luminous abyss of causality spreading out before your very eyes, right in front of security. All kinds of beautiful crimes are committed right here, and as American cars keep telling you, and you never notice, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. They are here, or rather, here is them, and now is them. Kissing in the shadow. Tim Morton Rice University. (shrink)

The slogan, or the KISS principle has been the basic guideline in agent-based modeling. While the KISS principle or parsimony is vital in modeling attempts, conventional agent-based models remain abstract and are rarely incorporated or validated with empirical data, leaving the links between theoretical models and empirical phenomena rather loose. This article reexamines the KISS principle and discusses the recent modeling attempts that incorporate and validate agent-based models with spatial data, moving beyond the KISS principle. This (...) article also provides a working example of such time and space specified agent-based models that incorporates Schelling's classic model of residential segregation with detailed geo-referenced demographic data on the city of Chicago derived from the US Census 2010. (shrink)

The basis for the analysis is the approach of Christian ethics toward the issue of the human body and sexuality. Based on the views of some present-day Christian, especially Protestant, ethicists, the author points out the effort to establish this area in contemporary Christian theology and ethics, which is, for instance, represented by the theology of sexuality and Christian sexual ethics. Consequently, the author pays attention to the opinions of the significant Slovak Lutheran theologian and ethicist Igor Kišš and his (...) theory of humanized deontology. Within this framework, he studies his opinions on the issue of the human body, sexuality, artificial insemination, genetic engineering, and embryonic stem cell research. The author comes to the conclusion that Kišš has created a highly modern and liberal theory of Protestant ethics based on the principle of humanity (love to one’s neighbor) as a central principle. The principle of humanity, together with the emphasis on the examination of consequences and a potential need for the lesser evil, aims at giving reasons for a possible diversion from rigorous extreme deontology. This creates space for accepting liberal views within Christianity or Protestantism, which, however, must be in accordance with the value of humanity. The author claims that Kišš’s theory of humanized deontology is a theological version of ethics of social consequences (a kind of nonutilitarian consequentialism). (shrink)

Barbey & Sloman's (B&S's) base-rate respect model is anticipated by Reyna's denominator neglect model. There are parallels at three levels: (a) explanations are grounded in a general cognitive theory (rather than in domain-specific ideas); (b) problem structure is treated as a key source of reasoning errors; and most importantly, (c) nested set relations are seen as the cause of base-rate neglect.

A complex, polyvalent phenomenon, the kiss, once embedded in a literary text, is first and foremost a cipher to be decoded. Texts effectively expose its many-sidedness: not merely its potentially seductive power or ostensible expression of affection, but, no less compellingly, its risky demeanors, its capacity to establish dominance, to terrorize, to subdue, to belittle, to ingratiate, even to infuriate. Variously bestowed, retracted, avowed, disavowed, meaningful, meaningless, the kiss can become, as it does in the work so named (...) by Kate Chopin, a multi-layered form of contrivance, the incarnation of tempting, albeit ultimately invidious, non-realities. Though, perhaps, not manifest at first blush, a careful reading reveals that each occasion marked by the “joining of lips” yields an odd sequence of awkward and oft deleterious, consequences: motion is superseded by motive, candor by disingenuousness—all in an unending slew of backward and forward slippages. Thus is engendered the metaphorization of an altered reality—structured all but exclusively upon the relentless deceits it proffers. Jubilation and despair come and go, as though wholly inter-changeable; acceptance and rejection, promulgation and rescission are converted into mere variants of the same gestures of ambivalence, if not of travesty. One might thus conclude that the kiss adopts significance worthy of note only as a metonym for and of factitiousness, vacuity and thinly-veiled distortion. Chopin’s script adeptly explores the multifarious comportments and consequences of the kiss: an act fashioned as a “weapon” of dubious value, as a tactical strategy, as a play-act borne of ulterior objectives and, which, as such, deftly prostitutes itself, willingly, nefariously. In the given context, the kiss-act lays bare the heroine’s ostensible “liberation” to be more imagined than real. Her would-be triumph over gendered subjugation exists, if at all, as but an ill-conceived romantic daydream—destined to slake gradually into a woeful destiny of loneliness and imprisonment. Chopin’s brief narration center-stages betrayal, challenges authenticity and valorizes consummate illegitimacy. -/- . (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to illustrate how Ebrahim Moosa's method of “contrapuntal reading” can be applied fruitfully to the Sunni hadith literature. My case study is the set of penalties (hudud) for illicit sex, which include flogging, stoning, and banishment. I propose a fresh reading of these sacred texts that brings to the fore the ethical dimension of Prophet Muhammad's conduct, especially his strong reluctance to apply these measures. I conclude by identifying four ethical problems that the stoning (...) penalty raises and suggest how the hadith literature can be read to argue against the validity of this specific punishment. (shrink)

In this monograph on Luce Irigay, Kelly Ives explores the French thinker's ideas on the politics of sexual difference.