Cet article porte un regard sur les temporalités et les territorialités nocturnes des pratiques et des usages quotidiens à l’île de la Réunion. Peu d’études en sciences sociales ont jusqu’alors réussi à s’extraire des grandes métropoles du Nord pour décentrer leur regard et s’intéresser aux nuits des espaces urbains tropicaux. Dans cette perspective, l’une des tâches de fond consiste à étudier la place de l’obscurité dans le vécu et l’imaginaire des populations réunionnaises, gageant qu’une meilleure connaissance et compréhension des territorialités (...) nocturnes pourrait aider à consolider les démarches de protection de l’environnement nocturne dans le quotidien de l’aménagement des territoires. L’île a vu depuis plusieurs décennies ses campagnes se transformer profondément, pour certaines très marquées par l’exode, pour d’autres avalées dans un processus d’urbanisation non maîtrisé. C’est dans ce contexte que notre équipe a commencé à installer, en partenariat avec le Parc national de... (shrink)

The artistic work of photographer Gudio Baselgia focuses on landscapes formed by nature s forces and, more recently, on the sky with the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from earth. Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures, the Babylonians and ancient Egyptians as well as the Greek and Celts, the Maya, or the ancient Indians and Chinese. Until the present day we look at the sky and keep being amazed, and try to read (...) what it tells us. Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the spectacle we observe above us day and night. The modern term astrodynamics describes all movements of celestial bodies, in particular the solar system including the moon and other satellites, asteroids and comets, but also movements of stars within a stellar system or galaxy, or of galaxies towards each other. They are well understood today and depicted in coordinate systems and elaborate visualizations. Guido Baselgia s artistic project on astrodynamics and celestial phenomena has no scientific or didactic ambition. His analogue camera is used as a recorder inscribing the movement of stars on the light-sensitive surface of photographic paper. Thus Baselgia s images make traceable the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and show us astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Baselgia has been captivated in particular also by the phenomenon of the umbra, planet earth s shadow thrown into space. It becomes visible occasionally on a clear evening at sunset when a slight mist lies at the horizon: looking in opposite direction to the sun, a dark and sharply marked band of shadow can be seen rising while sun sets behind the observer. But also by recording sunrise and sunset at the polar circle or the tropic, Baselgia visualizes the geometry of celestial mechanics and the concurrence of forces, as well as the miracle of light as such that leaves us awestruck today as much as it did our ancestors. The new book "Guido Baselgia Light Fall" presents 80 outstanding black-and-white images from the artist s Light Fall project taken in Norway, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the Swiss Alps. The brilliant tritone plates are complemented with essays by the German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss photography critic Nadine Olonetzky. ". (shrink)

Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in “tropical” regions and are under‐researched, under‐funded, and under‐treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives “tropical” and “neglected,” I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term “neglected tropical disease” derives its meaning. First, I argue that the term “tropical” conjures the notion of “tropicality,” a form of Othering which erroneously explains the disease‐prevalence of “tropical” regions by reference to environmental (...) determinism, rather than colonialism and neocolonialism. Second, I examine the way in which this Othering enables the abjection of tropical regions and their peoples, leading to neglect. I recommend that the term “neglected tropical diseases” be more carefully contextualised within health scholarship, education, and policy. (shrink)

From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers ...

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value , which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question.Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a (...) yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive , it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value, which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question. Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a (...) yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive, it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value (value for their own sake), which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question.Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano‐inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention (...) is given to a yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars (so‐called tropes) rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive ((fone entertains the existence of tropes), it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

Saturday Night Live (SNL) has become a staple of each political season. In this chapter, the authors show how late night comedy programs such as SNL have joined traditional TV news programs as authorities of delimination for defining the boundaries of political truth in historical epoch. SNL is different from other comedy programs such as the The Daily Show because of its focus on parody. SNL featured many sketches focused on the election, which also contributed to the production (...) of the truth. As an authority of delimination for political truth, SNL emphasized the sexist double standard to which Hillary Clinton was held. In short, SNL will continue to play a role in the production of political truth and knowledge. Michel Foucault famously argued that truth and knowledge are neither static nor objective. Foucault shows that different historical epochs and different geographical locations have different frameworks of verification for something to be considered true. (shrink)

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied (...) are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which (...) extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which (...) extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Study of philosophy and aesthetics in music.

This essay offers a new reading of Marx's chapter on ‘the working day’ in Capital Volume One by exploring the textual theme of night-time work. Even as Marx emphasises how the lengthening workday enables the super-exploitation of producers’ wage labour, his depictions of nocturnal experiences highlight more forcefully the destruction of workers’ reproductive resources, capacities and relationships. Night comes to represent the contracted time, condensed space, petrified relational bonds and thwarted desires for human reproduction in a free, fulsome (...) sense that includes reinvigorating oneself, caring for others and enjoying experiences apart from work or care. Night's role as a privileged signifier and catalyst of these changes comes through in key passages about women, children and vampires, and in theoretically meaningful variances between Marx's German paraphrasing of English sources and those original texts, which replace Marx's phrases in English translations of Capital. Contemplating Marx's ambivalent reflections on legal-political action to limit workday hours, I argue for making struggles over social reproduction in a capacious sense central to working-class politics today. I demonstrate the power of this Marxian analytic by considering the compression of social-reproductive time among today's microworkers, who fuel the digital economy by performing platform-based ‘tasks’ at all hours for very low wages. (shrink)

"Night Animals" is part of a larger investigation into the relationship between humans and animals. Traditionally humans have distinguished themselves from other animals and from their own animality; the question of the animal, however repressed or uncanny, nonetheless encroaches upon our symbolic spheres and our very psyches. We might ask about the possibilities for human-animal interrelation, and what these possibilities indicate about the future: what promise is held there? This poem forwards the possibility of a companion animal that might (...) be followed, or mounted and ridden--perhaps in a dream--and with which one could communicate in some fashion, perhaps even telepathically. As with all dreams, one wonders whether there is a point of no return, and what going beyond might mean. (shrink)

Upon its release in 1968, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was attacked by many critics as an exploitative low budget film of questionable moral value. I argue in this paper that Night of the Living Dead is indeed nihilistic, but in a deeper philosophical sense than the critics had in mind.

Supernatural fans often associate Season 3's popular “Jus in Bello” episode with the world's quintessential zombie movie, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Romero's zombie films, beginning with Night, fill the survival space with multiple, diverse survivalists who are forced to work through personal differences stemming from jealousy and petty annoyance to racism and bigotry, issues of morality, theology, and other social and cultural differences. Indeed, the setting is the first link to Romero's Night, whose cramped (...) Pennsylvanian farmhouse is little different than the poorly fortified police station holding Sam and Dean. The demons congregate listlessly around the jail. This is an obvious visual homage to the isolated Pennsylvanian farmhouse in Night. The work of the demons in “Jus in Bello” like the zombies in Night and Dawn, is ceaseless and instinctual. (shrink)

To enter the many experiential chambers of Night--space, silence, cruelty, secrecy--and thereby confront a vision of the end of worlds.

Engages the myriad dimensions of Night in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark."--Provided by publisher.

Saturday Night Live (SNL) has no obligation to avoid political bias, but it provides a valuable service when it reaches beyond its core audience, as arguably it has when effectively lampooning Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. There is no obligation for comedians to pass the Ideological Turing Test, but it is possible. “The Bubble” passes the Ideological Turing Test. Everyone thinks political bubbles are bad, but no one thinks they are in one. In fact, there is nothing wrong with (...) SNL exhibiting a political bias. Joe Piscopo has supported Donald Trump and voiced displeasure with Trump's portrayal on SNL, but Piscopo remains a Democrat. If SNL attempted to integrate conservative cast members and writers, the result might have more integrity but find fewer viewers. If SNL put out the word that they were looking for conservatives, there would probably be no shortage of applications and audition tapes. (shrink)

From Emily Litella to Grumpy Old Man, from Joe Blow to Drunk Uncle, Saturday Night Live has long employed guest characters as “citizen journalists” on its famous Weekend Update segment. These characters have provided a comic take on everyday issues impacting the life of citizens in the public sphere. Two of the first philosophers who take up the modern problems of participatory democracy in the public sphere are John Dewey (1859–1952) and Walter Lippmann (1889–1974). “Weekend Update” provides us with (...) a foundation to understand what Dewey and Lippmann argued about news, democracy, and the formation of public opinion. Dewey's creative response to the problems of the public in democracy was not to rely on experts, but to rely on the arts and artists to help communicate important issues in the public sphere and foster more public participation. (shrink)

In Rabinowicz & Rønnow-Rasmussen, we defended the following claims: Not only states of affairs, or facts, but also concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value ; The final value of a concrete object need not be intrinsic, i.e., it need not be exclusively based on the internal properties of its bearer; The final value of a concrete object is not reducible to the value of some states of affairs that involve the object in question. Our arguments (...) for – have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive, it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting research. Combative and clear, Starry Nights provides an important critique of mainstream anthropology as represented by Geertz and the postmodern legacy, and envisions a mode of anthropological research that addresses social, cultural and biological questions (...) with techniques that are theoretically rigorous and practically useful. (shrink)

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

Abstract:This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four ethnographic scenes: Orthodox Christian activists in austerity Beirut refuse to abandon the corrupted world; a Syrian Islamic scholar in Jordan insists on the patient work of rehabilitation; Orthodox ascetics in a monastic community outside Tripoli turn to the hidden alienation borne in the world; and a Muslim calligrapher in Canada relinquishes the guarantee of ethical relation. Taken together, these scenes form a tableau of estrangement in the shared (...) vocabulary of Eastern Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah–in its articulations of soul, community, and world always already shadowed by their undoing–we then situate these four scenes along spatio-temporal axes of destruction and production, city and desert, paradise and hellfire: a purgatorial topology which modulates what Agamben calls the contemporary destruction of experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a noted empirical link between regret and insomnia. Drawing on Brian O’Shaughnessy analysis of wakeful consciousness, I sketch three candidate ways of excavating a conceptual connection. Regret involves a certain kind of temporal orientation that, for O’Shaughnessy, only the state of wakefulness makes possible. Regret involves mental activity – it is productive of and precipitates patterns of counterfactual thought and imagining. Further, picking up a cue from Bernard Williams’ celebrated conception of agent-regret in ‘Moral Luck’, (...) sometimes the mental activity that occurs in regret is affective and expressive – as I argue, it is expressive of the wish that things were otherwise were satisfied now. Finally, I take up the puzzle as to why occurrent regret is not merely incompatible with sleep – insofar as it necessitates wakefulness - but may preclude falling asleep and I offer a tentative solution, focusing on the self-conscious character of occurrent regret. (shrink)

Research into television's ethical value has mostly focused on scandal genres, such as Big Brother, Jersey Shore, and Jerry Springer. Only recently have researchers started to explore television's moral content with a broader focus. In this study we explore and describe the types of morality and moral content of a night of Dutch prime time television with an open and inductive approach through a qualitative content analysis. Our results revealed 13 types of morality and a basic differentiation between morals (...) that react on violations and transgressions, focusing on restricting behavior, and morals that are focused on ideals and values and stimulate social behavior. Lastly, we differentiated three moral meta-themes that permeate all genres, as well as six moral themes that arose only in specific genre-clusters. (shrink)

Saturday night. 11pm. “Bingo,” he mumbles tiredly. The webpage glows blue in the nursery gloom. “Is it green like pesto or yellow like mustard?” he asks. “Erm, kind of a mixture,” she replies. “Normal!” he announces, triumphant. Then smiles. “Shall I close down Baby Poo: A Photo Gallery?” “We used to go clubbing,” she..

The 18 contributions to this volume deal with a variety of 'tropes', such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole. Using various approaches or paradigms the authors aim to find answers to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

. Night driving is one of the major factors which affects traffic safety. Although detecting oncoming vehicles at night time is a challenging task, it may improve traffic safety. If the oncoming vehicle is recognised in good time, this will motivate drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to detect vehicles at night based on the employment of a single onboard camera. This system is based on (...) detecting vehicle headlights by recognising their shapes via an SVM classifier which was trained for this purpose. A pairing algorithm was designed to pair vehicle headlights to ensure that the two headlights belong to the same vehicle. A multi-object tracking algorithm was invoked to track the vehicle throughout the time the vehicle is in the scene. The system was trained with 503 single objects and tested using 144 587 single objects which were extracted from 1410 frames collected from 15 videos and 27 moving vehicles. It was found that the accuracy of recognition was 97.9% and the vehicle recognition rate was 96.3% which indicates clearly the high robustness attained by this system. (shrink)

This hilarious cast of star philosophers will make you laugh while you think as they explore the moral conundrums, ridiculous paradoxes, and wild implications of Saturday Night Live Comedian-philosophers from Socrates to Sartre have always prodded and provoked us, critiquing our most sacred institutions and urging us to examine ourselves in the process. In Saturday Night Live and Philosophy, a star-studded cast of philosophers takes a close look at the “deep thoughts” beneath the surface of NBC’s award-winning late- (...) class='Hi'>night variety show and its hosts’ zany antics. In this book, philosophy and comedy join forces, just like the Ambiguously Gay Duo, to explore the meaning of life itself through the riffs and beats of the subversive parody that gives the show its razor-sharp wit and undeniable cultural and political significance. Our guest hosts raise some eyebrows with questions like: Is Weekend Update Fake News? Does SNL upset dominant paradigms or trap us in political bubbles? When it comes to SNL, how can we tell the difference between satire, smart-assery, and seriousness? Is the Ladies Man too stupid for moral responsibility? What is the benefit of jokes that cause outrage? The Church Lady has a bad case of moral superiority. How about you? What can Wayne and Garth teach us about living a happy life? (shrink)

I examine the kindred phenomena of shadows and night in order to reveal their significance for better understanding our lifeworld and the elemental environment. I first describe how light is primary to ecological perception and how it conditions our conceptions of space, truth, and beauty. Light and darkness are involved in a dialectical relationship rather than conceived as polar opposites. Borne of the interplay of both realms, shadows have been disparaged historically and deserve to be reconsidered for their aesthetic (...) appearance and their relevance to an ecology and anthropology of perception. Night, in turn, is often marked by a negative ontology that points toward the possibility of a kind of elemental a priori, but it is important to characterize darkness in terms of its subtle shades and filtering by way of the creative matrix of the human imagination. Seeing the night in novel and unexpected ways, especially via the insights and descriptions of phenomenologists, poets, and artists, enables us to grasp the depth and atmosphere of the surrounding world and to light up our geographical perspectives, our philosophical visions, and our environmental awareness. (shrink)