Daniel Barenboim, conductor of the Arab/Israeli West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, claims that “everywhere in the world... [Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony] speaks to all people.” But just how universal is Beethoven? Does his music exceed cultural boundaries or is Barenboim’s idea of a “utopian republic,” built, in part, upon Beethoven’s music, just “another Euro-American vision?” In his paper, Mark Whale explores two ways of understanding Beethoven’s music in line with two versions of the “idea of culture” proposed by literary theorist, Terry Eagleton. First, (...) he suggests that our experience of music has to do with its association with the specific cultural “loyalties and allegiances” built into our lives. Second, he argues that there is a mode of musical encounter, one which crosses cultural boundaries, in which we do not simply experience music but actively choose to care about, and to attend to, what we experience. In choosing to attend carefully to Beethoven’s music we discover that it invites and deepens our attention, not only to it, but also to ourselves. (shrink)

Abstract:Increasingly, issues of social justice have become the concern of educators. It is clear, however, that these issues are not concerning for everyone. Awareness of social justice exists in critical relationship to society: it is not synonymous with it. In my paper, I argue that the contemporary relationship society has with social justice is not new. A sense of social justice–of equality–existed in critical tension with eighteenth-century conventions, even if the scope of this tension was far more limited than today. (...) Some say classical music mirrors the values of the society of its production. It follows that classical music may mirror the dialectical relationship between convention and critique–that it may not only present conventional sound patterns but also be critical of them. As self-critical, music (all music) nurtures the ability of its participants to think critically. Ironically, then, I suggest that classical music has contributed to people's capacity to critique classical music. (shrink)

This volume contains "The Wireless Lectures", a series of lectures delivered during April and May, 1936 at Cheshunt College Lodge, Cambridge. The lectures pertain to the age-old problem of evil in Christian doctrine. This volume will appeal to those with an interest in Christian theology, and it would make for a worthy addition to collections of related literature. Contents include: "Four Classic Answers to the Problem", "The Answer of Theism", "The Christian Answer", "Listeners' Questions", and "Books Suggested for Further Reading". (...) Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction. (shrink)

Good epistemic practices are essential to the well-functioning of organizations. Epistemic practices are adopted norms, policies, procedures, and general methodologies that further our epistemic aims or realize our epistemic values. This chapter argues for the importance of organizational good epistemic practices through an analysis of the failures of risk management implicated in JPMorgan’s notorious ‘London Whale’ trading losses, which roiled the financial markets in 2012. A number of these failures of risk management exemplified ways in which we, as fallible reasoners, (...) may be prone to error individually and collectively. Good epistemic practices inter alia anticipate and endeavor to correct for erroneous patterns of reasoning. They help guard against future epistemic failings, and they support good reasoning within and on the part of organizations. In so doing, they constitute some of the key structural elements of organizational epistemic virtues. (shrink)

This paper uses two case studies to explore an interest-relative view of taxonomy and how it complements kind pluralism in biology. First, I consider the ABC island bear, which can be correctly classified into more than one species. I argue that this classificatory pluralism can be explained by reference to the range of alternative explanatory interests in biology. In the second half of the paper, I pursue an interest-relative view of classification more generally. I then apply the resultant view to (...) a second case study: whether whales are fish. I argue that this question is not one about scientific vs folk usage, as has been assumed. I also develop a new view: that Fish should be rejected as a category, both from the point of view of biological science, and from the point of view of folk taxonomy. Along the way, I use the interest-relative view to shed light on the circumstances under which higher taxa should be accepted as legitimate categories for biological science. (shrink)

Whaling is back on the international stage as pro-whaling interests push to reopen commercial whaling by overturning the moratorium imposed in 1986. Proponents of ending the ban are using two strategies: (1) appealing to public sentiment that supports indigenous subsistence whaling by attempting to cloak commercial whaling in the same guise and (2) maintaining that reopening commercial whaling is the “scientific” option. I reject both ploys, and instead shift the focus for global debate to scrutinizing the industrial economic model that (...) Western culture is currently imposing on the rest of the world, a model which ultimately reduces all life forms to mere commodities for the marketplace. (shrink)

"--David Dickson, New York Times Book Review "The Whale and the Reactor is the philosopher's equivalent of superb public history.

Recent history reveals a series of rogue traders, jeopardizing their employers’ assets and reputation. There have been instances of unauthorized acting in concert between traders, their supervisors and/or firms’ decision makers and executives, resulting in collusive rogue trading. We explore organizational misbehaviour theory and explain three major collusive rogue trading events at National Australia Bank, JPMorgan with its London Whale and the interest reference rate manipulation/LIBOR scandal through a descriptive model of organizational/structural, individual and group forces. Our model draws conclusions (...) on how banks can set up behavioural risk management and internal control frameworks to mitigate potential collusive rogue trading. (shrink)

The whale optimization algorithm is a powerful swarm intelligence method which has been widely used in various fields such as parameter identification of solar cells and PV modules. In order to better balance the exploration and exploitation of WOA, we propose a novel modified WOA in which both the mutation strategy based on Levy flight and a local search mechanism of pattern search are introduced. On the one hand, Levy flight can make the algorithm get rid of the local optimum (...) and avoid stagnation; thus, it is able to prevent the algorithm from losing diversity and to increase the global search capability. On the other hand, pattern search, a direct search method, has not only high convergence rate but also good stability, which can boost the local optimization ability of the WOA. Therefore, the combination of these two mechanisms can greatly improve the capability of WOA to obtain the best solution. In addition, MWOA may be employed to estimate parameters in single diode model, double diode model, and PV modules and to identify unknown parameters of two different types of PV modules under diverse light irradiance and temperature conditions. The analytical results demonstrate the validity and the practicality of MWOA for estimating parameters of solar cells and PV modules. (shrink)

Studies of animal culture have not normally included a consideration of cetaceans. However, with several long-term field studies now maturing, this situation should change. Animal culture is generally studied by either investigating transmission mechanisms experimentally, or observing patterns of behavioural variation in wild populations that cannot be explained by either genetic or environmental factors. Taking this second, ethnographic, approach, there is good evidence for cultural transmission in several cetacean species. However, only the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops) has been shown experimentally to (...) possess sophisticated social learning abilities, including vocal and motor imitation; other species have not been studied. There is observational evidence for imitation and teaching in killer whales. For cetaceans and other large, wide-ranging animals, excessive reliance on experimental data for evidence of culture is not productive; we favour the ethnographic approach. The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties. The wide movements of cetaceans, the greater variability of the marine environment over large temporal scales relative to that on land, and the stable matrilineal social groups of some species are potentially important factors in the evolution of cetacean culture. There have been suggestions of gene-culture coevolution in cetaceans, and culture may be implicated in some unusual behavioural and life-history traits of whales and dolphins. We hope to stimulate discussion and research on culture in these animals. (shrink)

The paper develops an account of the value of tradition that completes that of Samuel Scheffler and employs it to discuss whaling and bullfighting. The discussion, however, is applicable to many other practices the paper describes, and its relevance extends also beyond animal ethics. Some of the arguments discussed here for maintaining these traditions appeal to their positive aspects, such as their contribution to social or environmental harmony; other arguments focus on the impermissibility of one group criticizing another group’s practices (...) when its own are vulnerable to comparable criticism. Reflecting on the first kind of argument, the paper responds, building on the work of G. A. Cohen and T. M. Scanlon, that the value of tradition, if any, must be conditional. Reflecting on the second, however, the paper disagrees with Cohen and Scanlon on the impermissibility of casting the first stone. (shrink)

The normative claims underlying international human rights have international law implica­tions in the context of cetaceans. Legal, ethical, philosophical, and scientific elements can be brought together into a synthetic argument to determine appropriate criteria for affording “cetacean rights.” The ethical underpinning of human rights is a neo-Kantian conception of human dignity. Such dignity is ascribed to humans on account of their rationality, attributed according to certain sufficient criteria. The evidence appears sufficient to make it ethically and legally appropriate to consider (...) a novel international instrument or an adaptation of the existing framework to afford cetaceans “whale rights.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spirometer, Whale, Slave:Breathing Emergencies, c. 1850John Durham Peters (bio)Breath dramatically starts with a slap at birth and ceases with death and yet we typically ignore it until it is under duress. Unlike marine mammals such as whales and dolphins who can never fully automate breathing—they sleep one brain hemisphere at a time so as to keep conscious watch, like yogis, over their respiration—we humans are mostly somnambulists with (...) regard to breath. Unlike our briny cousins, we won't drown if we neglect our breath. Our relatively accommodating habitat at the fold of lithosphere and atmosphere enables a Lethe of oblivion, though many elements of our world are hostile to breath: water, fire, earth, extremes of height, heat, or cold. Nothing could be more fundamental for aerobic terrestrial creatures than breathing. So its routine cloaking in impercipience must somehow be functional and require a great deal of nervous expenditure. (It always takes a lot of work to make an infrastructure invisible.)Breathing is a good test case for the notion, common to many variants of critical theory, that nature for humans is always second nature: what would it mean to find culture, history, and politics in something that is so relentlessly universal and given? The intensity of the urge for drink, food, sex, or sleep pales compared to that of taking a breath withheld or expelling a breath too long held. Here, it seems, desire and need converge. Breathing morphs into awareness, art and artifice when threat, absence or curiosity rouse it from its slumber—when we swim, have a coughing fit, sing, or challenge someone to a breath-holding contest. Under the earth in a mine, high in the air on a mountain or airplane, ill with a respiratory disease, or in other extreme situations, we need techniques and technologies to breathe. Like everything supposedly natural, we can't leave breathing in peace. We mold breath in techniques of speech, song, and prayer and in technologies of diving, medicine, and air travel. A full accounting of such would form a full encyclopedia of human ingenuity.1 [End Page 85]With typical flamboyance, Peter Sloterdijk declared that the atmosphere first ceased to be taken for granted, i.e., became technical, a matter of art, on 22 April 1915, with the German deployment of poison gas in World War I. On a world-historical scale, he takes this weaponization of the environment as an "air-quake" that launched modern air-conditioning in its most literal sense of climatization (as French and German has it) and not just interior cooling (Sloterdijk 89-110 passim). We need a history of comparative breathing emergencies! Every era, like every life, has its encounters with the precarity of breathing, even if not as conveniently dated or climate-change prognostic as 22 April 1915. The urban concentration of human population starting a few thousand years ago, for instance, made people co-breathers (con-spirators) in new ways and thus more prone to the contagious respiratory illnesses that have long ravaged our species.I want to look at one such moment—one marked by a deadly global respiratory illness, new instruments for producing data, worries about radical alterations to the atmosphere, comparative interest in nonhuman forms of life, and the politicization of breathing. 1850, like 2020, was a moment when breath awoke from its autonomic quiet. The nineteenth century was the great age of tuberculosis, the tragic and romantic lung disease. It was a time of fog, smoke, and mud, of climate-changing volcanic eruptions and a year without a summer, and of a mysterious, brooding "storm-cloud" that John Ruskin complained of so bitterly. Medical instruments, the whaling industry, and struggles for the abolition of slavery all brought the lungs into the foreground.SpirometerThe nineteenth century was also the great age of instrumentation. Light and sound were only the two most famous dynamic processes to yield to new graphic methods of inscription such as photography and phonography. The spirometer was one of many devices designed to render visual data of physiological functions, such as the myograph, the flame manometer, sphygmomanometer, and the kymograph. Many of them are still in use. The invention... (shrink)

A classic example of the arbitrary relation between the way a word sounds and its meaning is that microorganism is a very long word that refers to a very small entity, whereas whale is a very short word that refers to something very big. This example, originally presented in Hockett's list of language's design features, has been often cited over the years, not only by those discussing the arbitrary nature of language, but also by researchers of sound symbolism. While the (...) two groups disagreed regarding the role of arbitrariness and sound symbolism in language, they both agreed there is a nonsound symbolic relation between word length and entity size in this case. This paper shows that the length of the words whale and microorganism in fact reflects a sound symbolic pattern. An analysis of >600 languages from >100 language families shows that languages use longer words to denote the concept small than they do to denote the concept big. The paper thus shows how explicit judgments might differ from implicit cognitive association and the problem of relying on these in sound symbolism research. (shrink)

This paper investigates the history of a discursive figure that one could call the intelligent whaler. I argue that this figure's success was made possible by the construal and public distribution of whaling intelligence in an important currency of science – facts – in the preparatory phase for the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–1842). The strongest case for the necessity of the enterprise was New England whalers who were said to cruise uncharted parts of the oceans and whose discoveries of (...) uncharted islands were reported in the local press. The document that stood at the core of the lobbying for an expedition was a table that newspaperman and public lecturer Jeremiah Reynolds had compiled after interviewing whaling captains in the country's principal whaling ports. Presenting whalers’ experience in tabular and synoptic form, Reynolds's table helped forge the figure of the ‘intelligent whaler’, a mariner who had better geographical knowledge than other seafarers. By investigating the paper technologies that produced the ‘intelligent whaler’, this paper shows how Reynolds's translation of ‘whaling intelligence’ from news into facts marks the beginning of the intelligent whaler's long career in US-American debates about expansionism, exploration and science. (shrink)

We discuss the 1818 case in which the jury sided with inspector J. Maurice, who had demanded payment for inspecting casks of whale oil. The verdict is arguably incorrect: as several experts argued,...

A bewildering range of games are emerging every other day with newer elements of fun and entertainment to woo youngsters. Games are meant to reduce stress and enhance the cognitive development of children as well as adults. Teenagers are always curious to indulge in newer games; and e-gaming is one such platform providing an easy access and quicker means of entertainment. The particular game challenge which has taken the world by storm is the dangerous “Blue Whale Challenge” often involving vulnerable (...) teenagers. The Blue Whale Challenge is neither an application nor internet based game but the users get a link through social media chat groups to enter this “deadly” challenge game. This probably is the only game where the participant has to end his/her life to complete the game. The innocent teenagers are being targeted based on their depressed psychology and are coercively isolated from their social milieux on the pretext of keeping the challenges confidential. To add to the woes, no option is offered to quit the challenge even if the contender is unable to complete the challenge. Blue Whale Challenge in its sheer form could be seen as an illegal, unethical and inhumane endeavor in our present society. The present communication discusses the severe effects of the game on teenagers, the ethical concerns involved and the preventive measures necessary to curb it. (shrink)

An expanding body of research aims to identify culture in cetaceans, often positing killer whales as an exemplar species. To this end, gene-culture coevolutionary theory provides a conceptual language with which whales are discussed in raciological terms. It renders killer whale ecotypes as discrete cultures that are intrinsically xenophobic and evolutionarily divergent. Such research on whale culture intends to substantiate theories of divergent natural selection between human cultures as well. This effort furthers the essentialism, simultaneously biological and cultural, (...) that has long impelled colonial technoscientific projects of racial typologization. The exchange between the raciologies of humans and killer whales is facilitated by the infrahumanizing frameworks of gene-culture coevolutionary theory that locate whale populations alongside indigenous peoples on a spectrum of cultural simplicity and complexity. At this convergence of the animal and the human, gene-culture coevolutionary theory posits indigenous peoples and killer whales as evidence for social Darwinist theories that dehistoricize and naturalize intercultural conflict and ethnicization. The extension of raciology beyond the human species signals an urgent need to decolonize the biological sciences. (shrink)

This essay examines the cometary theory of Johannes Kepler and his claim that an “ethereal spirit” could lead a comet to appear at a providential place and time. In his account of the comet of 1607, Kepler suggested that a spirit served as a navigational principle that steered the comet on a particular course. I argue that this principle was an extension of Kepler’s celestial physics and part of his larger conception of causes at work in the heavens. I also (...) explore the critical response Kepler received from the theological faculty at the University of Leipzig, where he planned to publish his account. I explain why Kepler turned to natural philosophy to resolve the opposition of his religious authorities and how this was received as a foreign incursion on Sacred Scripture. In my final analysis, I discuss whether Kepler ultimately abandoned spiritual principles in his cometary theory and arrived at a system of celestial physics that was fully free of animistic ideas. (shrink)

We argue that the function of human culture is to clarify what people value. Consequently, nothing in cetacean behavior (or any other animal's behavior) comes remotely close to this aspect of human culture. This does not mean that the traditions observed in cetaceans are uninteresting, but rather, that we need to understand why they are so different from our own.

This article examines some of the difficulties of universalistic science in situations of deep conflict over global nature, using empirical material pertaining to ongoing controversies in the context of Japanese whaling practices. Within global-scale whaling assemblages since the 1970s, science has become a ‘‘post-sovereign’’ authority, unable to impose any stable definition of nature on all actors. Instead, across spaces of deep antagonistic differences, anti- and pro-whalers now ontologically enact a multiplicity of mutually irreconcilable versions of whales. Empirically, the article (...) attempts to map out a ‘‘cosmogram’’ of Japanese pro-whaling enactments of abundant and ‘‘killable’’ whales. Following the political ecology of Bruno Latour, the global-scale situation is conceptualized as one of cosmopolitics, the politics of forging a common world across divergences in nature-cultures. Pointing to tensions inherent in this concept, the article ends by suggesting a move toward ‘‘agonistic cosmopolitics,’’ in clarifying the constructive potentials of a Latourian anti-essentialist political ecology. (shrink)

The aim of this thoroughly unconventional work is to demonstrate that Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations share the same projects and are, in effect, one and the same book.

The discoveries of marine mammal scientists over the last 50 years have made it clear that whales and dolphins demonstrate advanced intellectual and emotional traits once believed to be unique to humans. Sadly, discussions of cetacean captivity are regularly marked by unsophisticated approaches to ethics. Senior scientists regularly fail to demonstrate even the most rudimentary skills of ethical analysis. As a result, most discussions of cetacean captivity in the marine mammal community are intellectually +weak—marked by the combination of formal (...) and informal logical fallacies and a flawed understanding of such key concepts as “consciousness,” “personal identity,” “self-awareness,” “moral standing,” “moral rights,” “personhood,” and “flourishing.” Not surprisingly, similar weaknesses are evident in the arguments offered by representatives of businesses that profit from cetacean captivity. A fundamental problem regarding cetacean captivity, then, is blindness to the ethical significance of scientific facts already known. This essay argues that a proper understanding of the problem of cetacean captivity lies in an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approach that combines both scientific and philosophical methodologies. (shrink)

Whale optimization algorithm, known as a novel nature-inspired swarm optimization algorithm, demonstrates superiority in handling global continuous optimization problems. However, its performance deteriorates when applied to large-scale complex problems due to rapidly increasing execution time required for huge computational tasks. Based on interactions within the population, WOA is naturally amenable to parallelism, prompting an effective approach to mitigate the drawbacks of sequential WOA. In this paper, field programmable gate array is used as an accelerator, of which the high-level synthesis utilizes (...) open computing language as a general programming paradigm for heterogeneous System-on-Chip. With above platform, a novel parallel framework of WOA named PWOA is presented. The proposed framework comprises two feasible parallel models called partial parallel and all-FPGA parallel, respectively. Experiments are conducted by performing WOA on CPU and PWOA on OpenCL-based FPGA heterogeneous platform, to solve ten well-known benchmark functions. Meanwhile, other two classic algorithms including particle swarm optimization and competitive swarm optimizer are adopted for comparison. Numerical results show that the proposed approach achieves a promising computational performance coupled with efficient optimization on relatively large-scale complex problems. (shrink)

Dario Martinelli’s compact and enjoyable treatise on zoömusicology, _Of Birds, Whales and Other Musicians_ introduces musicologists, biologists, social scientists, and philosophers to a new theoretical model for studying how animal behavioral patterns relate to sound communication. Organized by musical trait rather than animal species, and drawing upon the work of such esteemed philosophers as Umberto Eco, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Thomas Sebeok, Martinelli’s analyses redefine the boundaries surrounding music and help readers—scholars and amateurs alike—to appreciate the relationship between animals (...) and musicological exchanges. (shrink)

Ethical discussions have entered into the discourse of the International Whaling Commission. In accordance with the existing approach in international environmental law, countries can legitimately choose not to exploit a resource in the traditional sense. Recognition of this possibility is important because it is commonly suggested that countries must adopt a lethal approach to so-called “sustainable whaling” as there are no other legitimate alternatives. However, the precedent of Antarctica suggests otherwise in international environmental law. Moreover, when the possibilities of the (...) nonlethal utilization of whales via operations such as whale watching are examined, the legitimacy of the nonlethal choices is even stronger. (shrink)

This collision explores ecological aesthetics through two encounters with dead whales: one literary and one osseous . The literary animal is the taxidermied whale that drives the narrative of László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, and the osseous encounter involves a bench made of one jawbone and one rib from a baleen whale. Considered together, the immense totality of the taxidermied whale and the metonymic bones provide unsettling aesthetic insights into ecological matters of interconnectedness – of the (...) relationships between parts and wholes and amongst parts within a whole or wholes. Through analyses of the visual, literary, and haptic aspects of these encounters, this paper raises questions about what it means to perceive and think about ecology through aesthetic encounters with non-human animal bones and taxidermied bodies. (shrink)

Human beings are killing the planet and themselves in the process. Cecile Pineda asks a simple question: Why? An urgent reframing of current ecological thinking, Apology to a Whale addresses what the intersection of relative linguistics and archeology reveals about the present world's power relations, and what the extraordinary communication of plants and animals can teach us. This masterpiece of creative nonfiction is a wild ride on the frontiers of archeo-linguistics in search of the greatest killer on Earth--us.