At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation through the lens of Simone (...) de Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism: a form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today – well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance. (shrink)

American undergraduates rated masculinity, femininity, and likability of two men from a videotaped interaction. Participants were informed that both men were cat persons, dog persons, heterosexual, adopted, or gay, or were unlabeled. Participants rated the men less masculine when cat persons than when dog persons or unlabeled, and less masculine and more feminine when gay than when anything else or unlabeled. The more masculine man received lower feminine ratings when a dog person than when a heterosexual, and higher masculine (...) ratings when a dog person than when unlabeled. Labels did not affect likability. Overall, the gay label consistently promoted cross-gender attributions, the dog person label encouraged somewhat heightened gender-appropriate attributions, and the cat person label allowed for normative attributions. (shrink)

This article consists of an original translation of Ernst Bloch’s 1923 review of Lukács History and Class Consciousness, preceded by a translator’s introduction contextualising Bloch’s review and interpreting what it tells us about the intellectual and personal relationship between Bloch and Lukács. I argue that Bloch’s review highlights some of the key differences and points of intersection between their thinking. Written when their personal relationship had already soured for both political and intellectual reasons, Bloch’s review makes clear his ongoing commitment (...) to a form of utopianism Lukács had long abandoned. Unlike Lukács, who in History and Class Consciousness argued that the dialectical method could only be applied to the social realm, Bloch followed Engels in developing a dialectics of nature. However, even if Bloch was less willing to become involved in party politics than his erstwhile friend, as the review reveals, both men ultimately emphasised the present moment as the privileged locus of urgent political action. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the Spanish War, the Catalan philosopher Eugeni d'Ors and the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset offered a reading of Einstein’s theory of relativity in which discussions of unity and plurality connected their respective synthetic philosophies and nationalist projects of political and cultural analysis and reform. Besides their philosophical views, references to Einstein tracked their territorial concerns and personal circumstances in the relations between Catalonia, Spain and Europe. Einstein’s theory symbolized the saving connection between the classical (...) and the modern, Europe and the Mediterranean, and science and philosophy. In this paper I focus on the case of Ors in relation to Catalan nationalism and the project he called Noucentismeand the case of Ortega in relation to Spanish nationalism and his political philosophy in España Invertebrada. (shrink)

This research was conducted to reveal the views of the parents and prospective parents in our country on the oncept of childhood, the methods of education they applied and their opinions about the effects of the internet. In this context; under the 40; 26 male 32 female, between 40-60; 7 male, 9 female, over the 60; 2 male, 2 female total78 people were interviewed. The findings were assessed regarding gender-generation and gender-repeat/expression. The results of this research show that the participants (...) are aware of the fact that every single child has a unique personality. According to the study, while the younger participants use more diverse and modern education techniques, the older ones still use traditional educational methods. In further detail, the participants are fully aware of the adverse effects of the internet, and they take control over their children's use of the internet. (shrink)

Background:Nurses are in a key position for reproduction health service delivery. Therefore, it is thought that it would be important to inspect opinions of student nurses, who will be health employees in the future, about self-induced abortion to develop women health and public health.Objectives:The goal of this study is to inspect opinions of nursing students with different sociocultural specialties, about self-induced abortions.Research design:It is qualitative type and planned with ethnographic research pattern.Participants and research context:The study was conducted with 20 last-term (...) students of Kırşehir Ahi Evran University, Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Nursing, who were chosen by maximum diversity sampling technique. Interviews were made with semi-structured interview form and voice records during the study; data were analyzed with content analyzing method.Ethical considerations:Permission from the organization, university ethics committee, and personal approvals were taken from participants to conduct the research.Findings:Based on the analysis, two major themes on self-induced abortion in Turkish nursing students were found: dilemma of traditional perspective and professional identity and occupational awareness.Discussion and conclusion:It is seen that there is a dilemma between traditional point of view and professional identities about self-induced abortion for nursing students, but they had occupational awareness. It should be recommended to give information about national and international licit legislations for reproductive health, self-induced abortion, and setting up ethical discussion environments for nursing students. (shrink)

Animal shelters face diverse challenges, which often necessitate making life-or-death decisions for animals in their care. One strategy used to determine whether admitting, adoption, or euthanasia is appropriate is to assess an animal’s in-shelter or pre-admission behavior to infer its “personality.” Shelters do this because potential adopters are often interested in knowing an animal’s personality as it provides information about whether the animal will fit in their home. However, shelter behavior assessments are a broad topic. To narrow focus, I explore (...) a relatively novel development: feline behavior assessments. These assessments suggest that shelter workers can make a valid inference from in-shelter behavior to long-term, consistent personality. I argue that assessments do not, and might not be able to, validly infer personality in shelters; I utilize recent philosophical work by Kaiser & Müller on personality to do so. I build on their work by showing how shelter assessments do not meet their criteria and fall victim to epistemic bias in privileging some behaviors. Because feline assessments fail to meet philosophically robust definitions of animal personality and have methodological biases, these assessments do not provide valid insight into a shelter animal’s personality and should not be used. (shrink)

Karl Barth's review of Franz Overbeck's posthumously edited volume, “Christentum und Kultur”, was part of a larger and ongoing episode of theological name-calling in the early 1920s, one that involved numerous other personal relationships, events, letter-correspondence, and intellectual resources. The full story remains untold, however, and assessments of Overbeck's influence on the Swiss theologian have been inconclusive. In this article, I contextualize Barth's review and argue that the primary impetus for his interaction was the identification of important counter-criticisms to the (...) charges and accusations he was receiving from various reviewers of the first Romans commentary, Adolf von Harnack in particular. Following an introduction to Overbeck's life and thought, I provide an exposition of Barth's review. This occasional work operated on multiple levels: as a summary, polemical, and constructive piece. While Overbeck generally corroborated Barth's emerging two-world eschatology, reinvigorated the time-eternity and God-man diastases, and encouraged his thinking about Urgeschichte, these themes were important secondarily as the basis for a more general attack against theological accommodationism and bourgeois religion. Whatever Barth finally understood or misunderstood about Overbeck's critical thought and interpretation of early Christianity, it was the attack itself by Overbeck and especially the criticisms he produced against shared “liberal” opponents that were the initial objects of Barth's curiosity. (shrink)

Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic here presents an unorthodox, imaginative take on the transition from Communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Three characters—a dog, an underdog, and a cat—offer the reader narratives that reflect on life under Communism and what has followed in its wake. The first, “An Interview with the Oldest Dog in Bucharest,” is about a dog named Charlie, whose mother, Mimi, together with thousands of other pets, was thrown out into the street during the Ceausescu regime. (...) In this interview, Charlie describes how not only people but animals, too, became victims during the destruction of downtown neighborhoods in Bucharest in order to build a pyramid-like “Palace of the People.” In “A Guided Tour of the Museum of Communism,” a 60-year-old souvenir vendor-cum-cleaning woman in Prague reflects upon the meaning of such a museum and concludes wryly that she herself is possibly the Museum’s best exhibit. Finally, “A Cat-keeper in Warsaw” describes an encounter with a person “of feline origin” who claims to be in possession of the cat-keeper called “General”—who declared martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981. The three stories are unified by powerful, but troubling questions: Are democracy and capitalism really a change for the better? Is the idea of social justice lost forever? Is there is such a thing as collective responsibility? And how do we remember and understand our past? (shrink)

Borderline Personality disorder is a severe personality dysfunction characterized by behavioural features such as impulsivity, identity disturbance, suicidal behaviour, emptiness, and intense and unstable relationships. Approximately 2% of the population are thought to meet the criteria for BPD. The authors of this volume - Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy - have developed a psychoanalytically oriented treatment to BPD known as mentalization treatment. With randomised controlled trials having shown this method to be effective, this book presents the first account of mentalization (...) treatment for BPD. The first section gives an overview of BPD, including discussion of nosology, epidemiology, natural history, and psychosocial aetiology. It additionally summarises the present state of our research knowledge about effective psychotherapeutic treatments and use of medication. The second section outlines the authors' theoretical approach and contrasts it with other well known methods, including DBT, CAT, and CBT. In the extensive final section, the authors outline their clinical approach starting with how treatment is organised. A detailed account of the transferable features of the model is provided along with the main strategies and techniques of treatment. Numerous clinical examples are given to illustrate the core techniques and detailed information provided about how to apply aspects of the mentalization based treatment approach in everyday practice. Aimed at mental health professionals, along with counsellors, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts, the book will be a valuable tool, providing an effective means of treating those suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder. (shrink)

This essay introduces a tension between the public Wittgenstein’s optimism about knowledge of other minds and the private Wittgenstein’s pessimism about understanding others. There are three related reasons which render the tension unproblematic. First, the barriers he sought to destroy were metaphysical ones, whereas those he struggled to overcome were psychological. Second, Wittgenstein’s official view is chiefly about knowledge while the unofficial one is about understanding. Last, Wittgenstein’s official remarks on understanding themselves fall into two distinct categories that don’t match (...) the focus of his unofficial ones. One is comprised of those remarks in the Investigations that challenge the thought that understanding is an inner mental process. The other consists primarily of those passages in PPF and On Certainty concerned with the difficulty of understanding others without immersing oneself into their form of life. In its unofficial counterpart, Wittgenstein focuses on individuals, rather than collectives. The official and the unofficial sets of remarks are united in assuming a distinction between understanding a person and understanding the meaning of their words. If to understand a language is to understand a form of life, then to understand a person is to understand a whole life. (shrink)

As schizotypal personality disorder increasingly prevails in the general population, a rapid and comprehensive measurement instrument is imperative to screen individuals at risk for SPD. To address this issue, we aimed to develop a computerized adaptive testing for SPD using a non-clinical Chinese sample, consisting of a calibration sample and a validation sample. The item pool of SPD was constructed from several widely used SPD scales and statistical analyses based on the item response theory via a calibration sample using a (...) graded response model. Finally, 90 items, which measured at least one symptom of diagnostic criteria of SPD in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and had local independence, good item fit, high slope, and no differential item functioning, composed the final item pool for the CAT-SPD. In addition, a simulated CAT was conducted in an independent validation sample to assess the performance of the CAT-SPD. Results showed that the CAT-SPD not only had acceptable reliability, validity, and predictive utility but also had shorter but efficient assessment of SPD which can save significant time and reduce the test burden of individuals with less information loss. (shrink)

Research on mental health of non-professional caregivers has focused on caregivers of people with specific diseases, especially dementia. Less is known about caregivers of people with other diseases. The aims of this study were (a) to determine the caregivers’ emotional state in a random sample of caregivers of people in situations of dependency, (b) to analyze the association between each disease of the care-recipient (a variety of 23 diseases included in the International Classification of Diseases) and the emotional state of (...) the caregiver, and (c) based on the theoretical model, to analyze the relationship of the different study variables in the appearance of the emotional distress of the caregiver. A sample of 491 non-professional caregivers was selected randomly (89.0% women, average age 55.3 years). Trained psychologists collected sociodemographic and care-related characteristics and evaluated the global emotional distress, somatic symptoms, anxiety-insomnia, social dysfunction, depression, probable mental disorder case, self-esteem and social support. It was found that (a) the caregivers showed moderate emotional distress, and 33.8% presented a probable mental disorder. (b) Caring for a care-recipient with cat's cry syndrome or epilepsy was related to suffering from social dysfunction, and caring for a care-recipient with autism was related to having a probable mental health case. (c) Social support mediated the relationship between social class, daily hours of care, monthly family income, self-esteem and global emotional distress. There is an important impact on the emotional state of the caregivers. This impact was similar in caregivers of care-recipients with different diseases, except in caregivers caring for a care-recipient with cat's cry syndrome or epilepsy (related to social dysfunction), and in caregivers caring for a care-recipient with autism (related to having a probable mental health case). (shrink)

Should offenders with psychopathy or those exhibiting extreme forms of antisocial behav- iour be considered criminally responsible? The current debate seems to have reached a stalemate. Several scholars have argued that neuropsychologi- cal data on individuals with psychopathy might be relevant for determining their criminal responsibil- ity. However, relying on such data has not produced a consensus among legal scholars and philosophers on whether individuals with psychopathy should be excused from responsibility. We offer a diagnosis about why this debate has (...) reached a standoff. We argue that part of the problem is that psychopathy, being a syndrome-based category, is too heterogeneous and thus offers low prospects for being integrated with neuropsychological data that might support significant conclusions about the criminal responsibility of individuals with psychopathy. Moreover, the construct of psychopathy was not originally devised to discriminate criminally accountable from unac- countable antisocial individuals. To overcome these difficulties and advance the debate, we extend a currently less discussed theoretical framework for bridging biopsychology and the law that focuses on neuropsychological constructs, domains, and processes that directly measure capacities of offenders that are relevant for criminal responsibility, without necessarily relying on mediating syndrome-based constructs. The novelty of our contribution is that the biopsy- chological bases of exculpation can be further devel- oped and used for determining more fine-grained cat- egorisations of antisocial personality types. We show how this framework provides guidelines for inter- disciplinary research that can significantly advance our understanding of the preconditions for criminal responsibility and help the legal practice of ascribing or withholding it. (shrink)

I argue that humans have moral relationships with dogs and cats that they could adopt, but do not. The obligations of those of us who refrain from incurring particular relationships with dogs and cats are correlative with the power of persons with what Jean Harvey calls “interactive power,” the power to take the initiative in and direct the course of a relationship. I connect Harvey’s points about interactive power to my application of Eva Kittay’s “dependency critique,” to show that those (...) of us who refrain from incurring particular relationships of dependency rely on caregivers in our communities and regions to fulfill the moral and social demands that an abundance of unowned companionable animals makes on the community. (shrink)

Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. The paper addresses two questions: Q1. What are these similarities (and differences)? Q2. How does one tell that one is recalling (and so not perceiving or imagining)?

“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human (...) beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.” In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters. In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism. One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. (shrink)

A fascinating survey of the forces that shape who we are and how we act-from the author of The Calculus Diaries Following her previous tours through the worlds of physics (Black Bodies and Quantum Cats) and calculus (The Calculus Diaries), acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ouellette now turns her attention to the mysteries of human identity and behavior with Me, Myself, and Why. She draws on genetics, neuroscience, and psychology-enlivened as always with her signature sense of humor and pop-culture references-to explore (...) how we become who we are. Ouellette lets readers in on her own surprising journey of self-discover, as she has her genome sequenced, her brain mapped, her personality typed, and even samples a popular hallucinogen. Bringing together everything from Mendel's famous pea plant experiments and mutations in The X-Men to our taste in food and our relationship with avatars and our online selves, Ouellette delivers another fun and enlightening work of popular science that's sure to be enjoyed by her many fans. (shrink)

Solomon, the legend goes, had a magic ring which enabled him to speak to the animals in their own language. Konrad Lorenz was gifted with a similar power of understanding the animal world. He was that rare beast, a brilliant scientist who could write beautifully. He did more than any other person to establish and popularize the study of how animals behave, receiving a Nobel Prize for his work. King Solomon's Ring , the book which brought him worldwide recognition, (...) is a delightful treasury of observations and insights into the lives of all sorts of creatures, from jackdaws and water-shrews to dogs, cats and even wolves. Charmingly illustrated by Lorenz himself, this book is a wonderfully written introduction to the world of our furred and feathered friends, a world which often provides an uncanny resemblance to our own. A must for any animal-lover! (shrink)

What is so special about science? Taking up the old epistemological challenge, this article seeks to rephrase the question of scientific autonomy beyond conventional essentialist criteria of demarcation between science and society. The specificity of science is primarily sought in its studied `lack of haste', its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and from `faster' cultures such a politics and business. This `unhastened' quality defines science's peculiar delaying tactics, which systematically slow down and objectify ordinary conversations, (...) actions, and conflicts, attracting `slow' personalities who read and write more and talk less than the `fast cats' who are attracted to more decisionist, stress-driven and hasty cultures. Such a description, rather than claiming performative innocence, simultaneously expresses the ambition to strengthen what it characterizes, i.e. to liberate science from the stress and haste which are increasingly imposed upon it by the `external' pressures and performance criteria of enterprise culture and political correctness, and by the growing impact of media publicity and the academic celebrity system. In this fashion, the article simultaneously advances a new factual description of the specificity of scientific practice and a new normative/political project to enhance scientific and intellectual autonomy. (shrink)

In the region where some cat sits, there are many very cat-like items that are proper parts of the cat (or otherwise mereologically overlap the cat) , but which we are inclined to think are not themselves cats, e.g. all of Tibbles minus the tail. The question is, how can something be so cat-like without itself being a cat. Some have tried to answer this “Problem of the Many” (a problem that arises for many different kinds of things we regularly (...) encounter, including desks, persons, rocks, and clouds) by relying on a mereological maximality principle, according to which, something cannot be a member of a kind K if it is a large proper part of, or otherwise greatly mereologically overlaps, a K. It has been shown, however, that a maximality constraint of this type, i.e. one that restricts mereological overlap, is open to strong objections. Inspired by the insights of, especially, Sutton and Madden, I develop a type of functional-maximality principle that avoids these objections (and has other merits), and thereby provides a better answer to the Problem of the Many. (shrink)

Many people face a problem about potentiality: their moral beliefs appear to dictate inconsistent views about the significance of the potentiality to become a healthy adult. Briefly, the problem arises as follows. Consider the following two claims. First, both human babies and cats have moral status, but harms to babies matter more, morally, than similar harms to cats. Second, early human embryos lack moral status. It appears that the first claim can only be true if human babies have more moral (...) status than cats. Among the properties that determine moral status, human babies have no properties other than their potentiality that could explain their having more moral status than cats. So human babies’ potentiality to become adult persons must explain their having more moral status than cats. But then potentiality must raise moral status generally. So early human embryos must have some moral status. It appears that the view that must underlie the first claim implies that the second claim is false. (shrink)

Following the success of Sony Corporation’s “AIBO”, robot cats and dogs are multiplying rapidly. “Robot pets” employing sophisticated artificial intelligence and animatronic technologies are now being marketed as toys and companions by a number of large consumer electronics corporations. -/- It is often suggested in popular writing about these devices that they could play a worthwhile role in serving the needs of an increasingly aging and socially isolated population. Robot companions, shaped like familiar household pets, could comfort and entertain lonely (...) older persons. This goal is misguided and unethical. While there are a number of apparent benefits that might be thought to accrue from ownership of a robot pet, the majority and the most important of these are predicated on mistaking, at a conscious or unconscious level, the robot for a real animal. For an individual to benefit significantly from ownership of a robot pet they must systematically delude themselves regarding the real nature of their relation with the animal. It requires sentimentality of a morally deplorable sort. Indulging in such sentimentality violates a (weak) duty that we have to ourselves to apprehend the world accurately. The design and manufacture of these robots is unethical in so far as it presupposes or encourages this delusion. -/- The invention of robot pets heralds the arrival of what might be called “ersatz companions” more generally. That is, of devices that are designed to engage in and replicate significant social and emotional relationships. The advent of robot dogs offers a valuable opportunity to think about the worth of such companions, the proper place of robots in society and the value we should place on our relationships with them. (shrink)

Roughly speaking, perdurantism is the view that ordinary objects persist through time by having temporal parts, whilst endurantism is the view that they persist by being wholly present at different times. (Speaking less roughly will be important later.) It is often thought that perdurantists have an advantage over endurantists when dealing with objects which appear to coincide temporarily: lumps, statues, cats, tail-complements, bisected brains, repaired ships, and the like. Some cases – personal fission, for example – seem to involve temporary (...) coincidence between objects of the same kind. Other cases – a cat and its flesh, a statue and its lump – seem to involve objects of different kinds. (shrink)

The Archive is a central but paradoxical image in the work of the con temporary French artist Christian Boltanski (born 1944). Because Boltanski is obsessively concerned with the death-like rupture and loss by which experience is continuously reduced to fragmentary and inac curate memories of the past, especially regarding the adult's perception of childhood, archives represent for him a potential means of regaining access to what has been lost and is being mourned. However, Boltan ski's installation and performance works that (...) investigate the powers of archives set out ironically the absurdly limited and misleading processes of an archive. Photography in particular is shown to be unreliable, more icon than document, challenging rather than asserting notions of cat egory and coherence. The notion of the icon, moreover, underlines the spiritual dimension that accompanies this absurdist relationship with the past. Our faulty but much-desired awareness of a past gives complex value to our present, often in a touching, pathetic way, however arbitrary the means involved. The trail of the archive leads to an uncertainty that is nonetheless precious. The many subjects that Boltanski treats in this light vary disarmingly and controversially from the trivia and detritus of everyday living to the supreme seriousness of the Holocaust. He also transforms himself and his family into a labyrinthine and playful archive. Here a curious relationship emerges with the reputation and books of his brother, the sociologist Luc Boltanski. Christian borrows with no explicit acknowledgement the archive resources of Luc's sociological research as a sub-text in his visual works. Even more surprisingly, Luc Boltanski published in 1993 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4 © 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199811)11:4;121-140; 006612]Poème, a collection of highly emotive and personal poetry about the past and the Holocaust. The problems raised by Christian Boltanski and by Luc conflate the personal and historical dimensions of the Archive. (shrink)

Chapters One through Three present the following view: I explain moral status as follows: something has moral status just in case we have, reasons not to cause harms to it simply in virtue of the badness of the harms for it. Moral status is not a matter of degree. A living thing has moral status just in case it is ever conscious. If something has moral status, then the strength of a moral reason not to harm it is proportional to (...) the severity of the harm. ;In this view, all humans and animals that are ever conscious have moral status. Future consciousness is sufficient for present moral status. An embryo of any species that will actually be conscious in the future, presently has moral status. Living humans who were conscious but are not and never will be again do have moral status. Any being that dies before it is ever conscious lacks moral status, regardless of its potential. Mere potentiality to be a person is not sufficient for moral status. However, a being's potential future affects the severity of certain harms. There are stronger reasons to avoid causing the deaths of humans than to avoid causing the deaths of cats, because humans lose more in death than cats do. ;Chapters One through Three present the above view. I argue that this view can resolve certain apparent tensions within two different attractive combinations of views, and on this basis I argue that the above view should be adopted. ;Chapter Four, "Can We Harm and Benefit in Creating?" proposes a solution to the puzzle of actions that appear to be wrong in virtue of harming a particular individual, but where the individual would not have existed if the action had not been performed, so the individual is not made worse off by the action. ;Chapter Five, "Ethics Without Ethical Theory," defends part of the methodology of Chapters One through Four by defending the view that we can justifiably reach important substantive ethical conclusions without commitment to a particular ethical theory, or to a particular meta-ethical view. (shrink)

Late in their architectural career, Alison and Peter Smithson designed an eighty-square-foot, indoor-outdoor space for a man and his cat. The Smithsons described this modest space in methodological and phenomenal terms, noting that the addition to Axel Bruchhäuser’s Hexenhaus could be read “as an exemplar of a method by which a small physical change—a layering-over of air adhered to an existing fabric—can bring about a delicate tuning of persons with place.” The Hexenhaus’ tuning elements—second skin, tree screen, and double-acting mesh—create (...) a “treillage’d space” that supplants mediation, reframes attunement, and elicits an active weaving of person, place, and phenomena. This paper seeks to understand what the architects meant by “tuning” and in the process to outline operations for spatial weaving. (shrink)

The paper argues, that a direct formalization of the way common sense thinks about the numerical identity of enduring entities, requires that traditional predicate logic is developed. If everyday language mirrors the world, then persons, organisms, organs, cells, and ordinary material things can lose some parts but nonetheless remain numerically exactly the same entity. In order to formalize this view, two new logical operators are introduced; and they bring with them some non-standard syntax. One of the operators is called ‘the (...) instantiation operator’; it is needed because the existential quantifier and its traditional relatives cannot do the job required. The other operator is called ‘the form-on-matter operator’, and it allows an individual (an instance of a form) to stay the same even though some of its parts (its constituting matter) is taken away from it. Also, a certain kind of predicates, called ‘nature terms’, is needed in order to represent what gives a particular its kind of identity. Both the operators and the nature terms introduced can be used in constructions of formal languages and formal systems, but no such constructions are made in the paper. The paper is structured as a comment on the philosophical problem called ‘the problem of the cats Tibbles and Tib’. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with a recent, clever, and novel argument for the need for genuine collectives in our ontology of agents to accommodate the kinds of normative judgments we make about them. The argument appears in a new paper by David Copp, "On the Agency of Certain Collective Entities: An Argument from 'Normative Autonomy'" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility, XXX, 2006, pp. 194-221; henceforth ‘ACE’), and is developed in Copp’s paper for this special journal issue, (...) “The Collective Moral Autonomy Thesis” (henceforth ‘CAT’). The argument goes as follows. -/- (1) We correctly assign blame (or obligations) to collectives in circumstances in which it would be a mistake to assign any (relevantly related) blame (or obligations) to their members. (2) If (1), then collectives are genuine agents over and above their members. (3) Therefore, collectives are genuine agents over and above their members. -/- Following Copp, I call (1) the Collective Moral Autonomy Thesis (CMA). Copp argues for CMA primarily by appeal to cases, but also offers two general arguments for it. In the cases that Copp describes, we are to judge that a collective act is blameworthy, though each member of the group that acts is blameless because he is merely following procedures appropriate for his participation, or because there are excusing factors, or because of overriding personal duties. -/- I argue that the case for CMA has not been made. In particular, I argue that, in each case in which we feel inclined to hold a group responsible for something but not its members, it is because -/- 1. we have accepted a false dilemma, that when no one agent is fully responsible for the action of a group of which he is a member, the only entity that could be responsible is the group as such, or 2. we have directed our attention to the wrong individual or individuals, or 3. we have become confused about the commitments of the individuals, or 4. we have mistaken ameliorating for excusing factors, or 5. we have mistaken moral blameworthiness and all-in rational blameworthiness, or 6. a combination of these things. (shrink)

Alastair Hannay wrote that there is a campaign against the mental image and a look at the philosophical literature on that topic bears him out. But there is also a campaign against dreams. Given the first campaign this is not surprising. What is surprising is that they are separate campaigns. Intuitively mental images and dreams seem to be as alike as kittens and cats, the one being merely the developed form of the other, made possible by the fading of consciousness (...) of the real world. One would think that an attack on the one is also an attack on the other, at least in the sense that an analysis of the one will, with modest modifications, also be an analysis of the other.But this seems not to be so. To say that a man who pictured his nursery was not a spectator of a resemblance of his nursery, but rather resembled a. spectator of his nursery, may have some initial plausibility because some people behave in curious ways at such times. But to say this of a person who dreamt of his nursery is simply nonsense. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A New Graduate Nurse’s StoryJill MountI was taking pre–med courses on the west coast when my mother was diagnosed with acute leukemia. I immediately finished out my classes, packed up my bags and cat and moved back to the town on the east coast where my parents lived. While my mother was fighting the leukemia, I spent many hours in her hospital room and I learned more about the (...) roles of doctors and nurses. Unlike what I had seen on television, where the doctors were always nearby and available to their patients, my mother’s doctors were seldom present. It was the nurses who spent the most time with my mother in the hospital. I wanted to care and be present for my patients like her nurses. So I decided to become a nurse. I didn’t realize that not all cancer units were like my mother’s where the nurses had time to really care for their patients.My mother’s attending doctor would visit her bedside once a day. The doctor would generally stand a few feet away from the foot of my mother’s bed and describe my mother’s latest blood counts. The doctor always seemed to keep her distance at the foot of the bed. As my mother’s series of chemotherapy treatments failed to put her in remission, the doctor would describe the next chemotherapy protocol that my mother would endure. My mother wanted desperately to live and she would keep copies of the blood counts her doctor provided her and would insist on trying the next round of chemotherapy, despite the list of grim side effects each seemed to come with. The doctor generally stayed an average of five minutes during these visits.My mother’s nurses, however, were a constant presence. I had not realized at the time that people are hospitalized primarily for nursing care. My mother was assigned several great nurses, who not only took her vital signs and administered her medications, but who seemed to care about her as a person as well. The nurses seemed to understand how difficult it was for my mother, a very independent person, not to have control over her health. To help her regain control, they provided her with guided visualizations. This was during the mid–eighties so they had her visualize her immune system as Pac–man eating all the cancer cells. My mother liked this because when she did the Pac– man visualizations, she felt she had some control directing her immune system to fight the disease.The nurses also provided my mother with emotional support. We were not a very physically affectionate family and the nurses encouraged us to give my mother hugs when she was not at risk for infections. They also gave her lots of back rubs. One of the nurses gave my mother a relaxation audiotape, which she listened to for hours, others provided her with poetry books. I believe it was partly the nurses’ physical and emotional care that enabled my mother to live as long and to fight the cancer for as long as she did. During the course of my mother’s illness, she received five rounds of chemotherapy over a period of ten months. Unfortunately her efforts to combat the cancer were unsuccessful and she died of complications of the disease and from the cumulative toxic side effects of the chemotherapy.After observing all the ways the nurses cared for my mother, I decided this was what I wanted to do and I decided to go to nursing school instead of medical school. I was able to apply my pre–med prerequisite courses to an accelerated nursing program [End Page E16] and I graduated with my bachelors in nursing after 18 months of nursing school.My nursing program emphasized the importance of viewing the patient as a whole person and not merely viewing them in terms of a particular disease or condition. Nursing school also reinforced how important nurse caring was for patients. I remember one of our exam questions focused on caring. The question was about a nurse walking into a patient’s room and finding the patient... (shrink)

The recognition and incorporation of evidence-based neuroscientific concepts into creative arts therapeutic knowledge and practice seem valuable and advantageous for the purpose of integration and professional development. Moreover, exhilarating insights from the field of neuroscience coincide with the nature, conceptualization, goals, and methods of Creative Arts Therapies, enabling comprehensive understandings of the clinical landscape, from a translational perspective. This paper contextualizes and discusses dynamic brain functions that have been suggested to lie at the heart of intra- and inter-personal processes. Touching (...) upon fundamental aspects of the self and self-other interaction, the state-of-the-art neuroscientific-informed views will shed light on mechanisms of the embodied, predictive and relational brain. The conceptual analysis introduces and interweaves the following contemporary perspectives of brain function: firstly, the grounding of mental activity in the lived, bodily experience will be delineated; secondly, the enactive account of internal models, or generative predictive representations, shaped by experience, will be defined and extensively deliberated; and thirdly, the interpersonal simulation and synchronization mechanisms that support empathy and mentalization will be thoroughly considered. Throughout the paper, the cross-talks between the brain and the body, within the brain through functionally connected neural networks and in the context of agent-environment dynamics, will be addressed. These communicative patterns will be elaborated on to unfold psychophysiological linkage, as well as psychopathological shifts, concluding with the neuroplastic change associated with the formulation of CATs. The manuscript suggests an integrative view of the brain-body-mind in contexts relevant to the therapeutic potential of the expressive creative arts and the main avenues by which neuroscience may ground, enlighten and enrich the clinical psychotherapeutic practice. (shrink)

The book deals with expounding the nature of Reality as it is understood in contemporary times in Quantum Physics. It also explains the classical Indian theory of Śūnya in its diverse facets. Thereafter it undertakes comparison between the two which is an area of great topical interest. It is a cross-disciplinary study by erudite Indian and western scholars between traditional Indian knowledge system and contemporary researches in Physical sciences. It points out how the theory of ‘Śūnyatā has many seminal ideas (...) and theories in common with contemporary Quantum Physics. The learned authors have tried to dissolve the “mysteries” of Quantum Physics and resolved its “weird paradoxes” with the help of theory of Śūnyatā. The issue of non-separability or entanglement has been approached with the help of the Buddhist theory of Pratītyasamutpāda. The paradoxical situation of “wave-particle duality” has been explained with the help of Upaniṣadic theory of complementarity of the two opposites. The measurement problem represented by “Schrodinger’s cat” has been dealt with by resorting to two forms of the calculation of probabilities. Some writers have argued for Śūnyatā-like non-essentialist position to understand quantum reality. To make sense of quantum theory some papers provide a happy symbiosis of technical understanding and personal meditative experience by drawing multifarious parallels. This book will be of interest to philosophically inclined physicists and philosophers with interest in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 189-192 [Access article in PDF] The Responsibility of the Psychopathic Offender:Commentary on Ciocchetti Piers Benn Christopher Ciocchetti has valuable things to say in his article. He takes as his starting point some common ground between his views and my own, especially about the importance of Strawsonian participant reactive attitudes to our understanding of psychopathy. But he proceeds to claim that the distinguishing feature (...) of psychopaths is not their lack of such attitudes but their inability to understand how relationships are affected by their behavior—and indeed their inability, in some sense, to understand interpersonal relationships at all. He also takes me to task for claiming that the participant reactive attitudes (PRAs)—presumably he includes things like resentment, indignation, gratitude, and so on—are essentially communicative. For him, this is too strong a claim, because we can imagine cases when such attitudes are expressed, but without any communicative purpose.On the latter point, I concede that people often do express PRAs even though they know such expression will have no effect on those whose behavior or attitudes gave rise to them. Different things can explain this lack of effect. For example, imagine a normally responsive person who obstinately fails to see that a certain judgment applies to him or her in a particular case. Take a woman who repeatedly expresses frustration and anger toward her husband for failing to do any domestic chores, but without having the slightest effect on him. Eventually her expressions of anger serve more as an emotional release than as an attempt to get him to change. As in Ciocchetti's example of Mary's reaction to her calls not being returned, she gives up in the end, expressing anger but without any hope of getting through to the other person.But there is another possible explanation for her anger: suppose the husband's failure to contribute to the housework does not arise from his inability to respond to moral claims upon him, but because he thinks he is already doing his duty by being the sole wage earner, and is quite intransigent about this. In that case, the woman might still see him, in general, as a proper object of her PRAs. She sees his fault as local rather than general; a failure, or perhaps even an inability, to think properly about this particular issue rather than about moral demands in general. She might regard her angry outbursts as justified, not because they will have any effect on him now, [End Page 189] but because they are a proper participant response to some earlier failure, which he was then able to do something about—maybe he neglected to think properly about fairness when forming his moral outlook.Compare this case, though, with someone who just does not understand the nature of relationships and the obligations they impose. This is the sort of case Ciocchetti has in mind. Anger is, on his account, understandable, not because it is meant to communicate anything, but because it is "an expression with no further aim at all" (2003, p. 178). On this point, I agree that people sometimes do express anger (or other emotions) without trying to induce a response in someone. At the same time, there is a significant difference between times when we do hope to elicit an appropriate participant response like shame, and times when we do not. When we express such attitudes without any hope of a participant response, we miss something that is, if not essential to, at least typical of such expressions. Getting angry with the neighbor's aggressive dog or scrounging cat is understandable, but it is simply not the same kind of thing as getting angry with a normal, rational adult. The typical case, maybe the necessarily typical case, is when we experience or express such emotions toward, or at least concerning, beings capable of PRAs—and, again typically if not always, such beings are capable of understanding when and why the PRAs of others are directed toward them.But the thrust of Ciocchetti's paper lies not... (shrink)

It’s common to think that animals think. The cat thinks it is time to be fed, the monkey thinks the dominant is a threat. In order to make sense of what the other animals around us do, we ascribe mental states to them. The cat meows at the door because she wants to be let in. The monkey the monkey fails the test because he doesn’t remember the answer. -/- We explain animal actions in terms of their mental states, just (...) as we do with humans. One of us has argued that our science of animal minds requires that animal behavior be explained in such terms, and this doesn’t lead to a problematic use of folk psychology or anthropomorphism (Andrews 2016, 2020). By “anthropomorphism” we mean the attribution of human psychological, social, or normative properties to non-human animals “usually with the implication it is done without sound justification” (Shettleworth 2010, 477). And by “folk psychology” we mean the commonsense practice of seeing action as caused or accompanied by mental states like belief and desire, emotions, and seeing people in terms of their moods or personality traits, as well as categorizing complex behaviors as examples of grieving, communicating, or teaching (Andrews 2012). Psychologists routinely describe human behaviors in folk psychological terms, so it’s not that the categories are unscientific. The issue with using folk psychology to describe animal behavior is whether observable similarities between human and nonhuman behavior warrants thinking they involve the same psychological kind. The use of folk psychology when talking about animals need not be problematically anthropomorphic, though we need some evidentiary basis for filing animal behavior under some folk psychological category. -/- Despite it being commonplace for humans to attribute thoughts to animals, and there being arguments in favor of doing so in science, the nature of these mental states so many are happy to see in other animals remains unclear. To help bring some focus into the discussion, we will examine the attitude of belief. In this chapter we will examine the various possible statuses of animal beliefs, and the implications of those various views for our folk practice as well as our scientific investigations. (shrink)

This paper applies an approach that the author calls Subjective Personal Introspection to the self-reflective examination, inward-looking understanding, and impressionistic evocation of his own consumption experiences as the keeper of a kitten named Rocky Raccoon. Three-dimensional photographs in the form of stereo pairs provide corroborative evidence for the interpretations suggested. In this reflexive, anecdotal, narrative account, Rocky the Cat emerges as a focal point in the author's experiential consumption.

The purpose of this study is to extend and replicate previously published results from a random probability sample of university faculty. The sample assessed reasons given for companion-animal guardianship and for belief in the beneficial health effects of owning pets. In this replication and extension design, these two non-random samples responded to the same questionnaire items as those addressed to university faculty. Results indicated that avoidance of loneliness was the most frequent reason for owning pets among both students and middle-aged (...) community members. This result is consistent with the view that animals provide social support and companionship to humans at various stages of the life cycle. Suggesting an emergent feature of the human-nonhuman animal bond, both groups selected, “the pet helps keep me active” as the second-most common reason. Older women reported a greater belief in the health-giving benefits of pet ownership than did younger persons or men. This belief may contribute to human benefits of pet ownership and requires further research. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

Alice encounters at least three distinct problems in her struggles to understand and navigate Wonderland. The first arises when she attempts to predict what will happen in Wonderland based on what she has experienced outside of Wonderland. In many cases, this proves difficult -- she fails to predict that babies might turn into pigs, that a grin could survive without a cat or that playing cards could hold criminal trials. Alice's second problem involves her efforts to figure out the basic (...) nature of Wonderland. So, for example, there is nothing Alice could observe that would allow her to prove whether Wonderland is simply a dream. The final problem is manifested by Alice's attempts to understand what the various residents of Wonderland mean when they speak to her. In Wonderland, "mock turtles" are real creatures and people go places with a "porpoise" (and not a purpose). All three of these problems concern Alice's attempts to infer information about unobserved events or objects from those she has observed. In philosophical terms, they all involve *induction*. -/- In this essay, I will show how Alice's experiences can be used to clarify the relation between three more general problems related to induction. The first problem, which concerns our justification for beliefs about the future, is an instance of David Hume's classic *problem of induction*. Most of us believe that rabbits will not start talking tomorrow -- the problem of induction challenges us to justify this belief. Even if we manage to solve Hume's puzzle, however, we are left with what W.V.O. Quine calls the problems of *underdetermination *and *indeterminacy.* The former problem asks us to explain how we can determine *what the world is really like *based on *everything that could be observed about the world. *So, for example, it seems plausible that nothing that Alice could observe would allow her to determine whether eating mushrooms causes her to grow or the rest of the world to shrink. The latter problem, which might remain even if resolve the first two, casts doubt on our capacity to determine *what a certain person means *based on *which words that person uses.* This problem is epitomized in the Queen's interpretation of the Knave's letter. The obstacles that Alice faces in getting around Wonderland are thus, in an important sense, the same types of obstacles we face in our own attempts to understand the world. Her successes and failures should therefore be of real interest. (shrink)

A nationwide survey that included personal interviews in 1,021 households studied the incidence, species, and numbers of nonhuman animals kept in Costa Rican households. A total of 71% of households keep animals.The proportion of households keeping dogs is 3.6 higher than the proportion of households keeping cats . In addition to the usual domestic or companion animals kept in 66% of the households, 24% of households keep wild species as pets. Although parrots are the bulk of wild species kept as (...) pets, there is vast species diversity, including other birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, fishes, and invertebrates - typically caught in their natural habitat to satisfy the pet market. The extraction from the wild and the keeping of such animals is by-and-large illegal and often involves endangered species. Costa Ricans, in a conservative estimate, keep about 151,288 parrots as pets. More than half the respondents have kept a psittacid at some point in their lives. Pet keeping is a common practice in Costa Rican society, and its incidence is high by international standards. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contemporary media technologies push individuals into collective action on an industrial scale, without them necessarily being aware of it. Yet what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same affective networks and moments, but rather dispersed into countless different networks and moments? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the (...) same moment? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video, and, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity In this short and provocative book Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls ‘asynchronous hypermodulation’, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. By focusing on ‘we, the mediated’, this radical intervention challenges the narratives that portray the new media environment as a monolithic media apparatus, rendering us all into the same libidinal grey glue, subsequently channelled at will through the pleasure palace of the internet. The unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distractions that accompany it. (shrink)

Some philosophers (such as Kant and Rawls) think it is only wrong to be cruel to cats because it will make one behave cruelly to humans. This explanation is unsatisfactory. Why? Because being cruel to your cat is a direct wrong to your cat regardless of the effects it has on other humans. Ascribing the wrongness of cruelty to the fact it will make one callous to other humans is to assess the character of the cruel person not the (...) act they are performing. Cruelty to your cat is wrong because it wrongs your cat directly. (shrink)

I knew I was in for trouble, that the going would be rough, when I removed the wrapper from the “Race,” Writing, and Difference issue of Critical Inquiry and observed the word “race” in quotation marks. Something deep was clearly brewing. And any doubts were quickly removed when I turned to the opening remarks of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Who,” he asked me, “has seen a black or a red person, a white yellow, or brown?” . There was a (...) question that spelled trouble, a glove in the face if I ever saw one. Here I was, crude, unregenerate, lacking the hypersensitivity that prevents someone like Gates from making such infra dig distinctions; here I was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy. Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently quiet or of perpetuating ruthless violence—of denying the individuality of all of God’s creation—not only by referring to knives, cats, my brother, or Indians, but simply by referring at all. But why, I wondered, was only the word “race” in quotation marks? Why not every single word in the entire issue of Critical Inquiry? For to refer, it seems, is to colonize, to take things over for one’s own brutal use, to turn everything else into a mere Other. There was Gates engaging in the academic’s favorite pastime, épater les bourgeois, and here was I, a hopeless bourgeois, just asking for a put-down. Harold Fromm is an independent scholar who has taught for many years in university English departments. He has published articles on Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as on literary theory, politics, and professionalism. His most recent work concerns the Brontës. (shrink)

This study was designed to compare the natural free form communication that takes place when a person interacts with robotic entities versus live animals. One hundred and eleven participants interacted with one of four entities: an AIBO robotic dog, Legobot, Dog or Cat. It was found that participants tended to rate the Dog as more capable than the other entities, and often spoke to it more than the robotic entities. However, participants were not positively biased toward live entities, as (...) the Cat often was thought of and spoken to similarly to the AIBO robot. Results are consistent with a model in which both appearance and interactivity lead to the development of beliefs about a live or robotic entity in an interaction. Keywords: Human-robot interaction; human-animal interaction; AIBO; free form communication; attributions; human-entity interaction. (shrink)

This study was designed to compare the natural free form communication that takes place when a person interacts with robotic entities versus live animals. One hundred and eleven participants interacted with one of four entities: an AIBO robotic dog, Legobot, Dog or Cat. It was found that participants tended to rate the Dog as more capable than the other entities, and often spoke to it more than the robotic entities. However, participants were not positively biased toward live entities, as (...) the Cat often was thought of and spoken to similarly to the AIBO robot. Results are consistent with a model in which both appearance and interactivity lead to the development of beliefs about a live or robotic entity in an interaction. Keywords: Human-robot interaction; human-animal interaction; AIBO; free form communication; attributions; human-entity interaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dogs and MonstersObservations on the Evacuation of Afghanistan and the Intersection of Human Rights and the AnthropoceneK. M. Ferebee (bio)On August 28, 2021, former Royal Marine and charity worker Pen Farthing was evacuated from Afghanistan with almost two hundred dogs and cats that his Kabul animal charity, Nowzad Dogs, had rescued. The role of the British government in this evacuation remains hotly contested: At the time, the British Ministry (...) of Defence tweeted (Fig. 1) that Farthing's escape had been assisted by the British military, but Farthing later disputed this claim and argued that his rescue was not the result of high-level intervention in the British government. In January 2022 controversy erupted around the emergence of documents suggesting that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had lied to Parliament about the personal role that he played in just such an intervention. Notably, Nowzad's Afghan staff members were not evacuated alongside Farthing and the animals, though they would eventually escape to Pakistan. Following Farthing's escape, the British government failed to evacuate hundreds of British citizens and residents (Merriman and Ghouri), as well as many more Afghans who had worked on behalf of British forces. The Nowzad Dogs evacuation became a site of symbolic struggle over Britain's respect (or lack thereof) for human rights. "What a story to tell the world: Britain values dogs more than Afghan people," the headline of an opinion piece in the Guardian (Hinsliff) read.The story of Nowzad Dogs is interesting to me not only as a tale of human-nonhuman relations, but also because I was, at the time it occurred, volunteering within the Afghan aid community to assist relatives of a friend, British Afghans who had been visiting Kabul when the government [End Page 52] collapsed. The family repeatedly asked for assistance from the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office—assistance that never appeared. Ultimately, due to the generosity of donors and the coordination of a volunteer team, the family was able to flee to Pakistan, where they boarded a commercial flight to London. This case was a particularly stark and powerful illustration of the negotiations of rights and value that took place during and following the evacuation. It seemed nonsensical, in August 2021, to suppose that British citizens, including British children (the family I worked with included a six- and an eleven-year-old who were British citizens), would be abandoned while Afghan dogs had their rights prioritized. As I hope to demonstrate here, however, such an incident becomes comprehensible and even logical when it is understood as part of a specifically Anthropocene manifestation of subjectivity.Upendra Baxi suggests that 1948's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) marks a broad shift from the era of "modern" (42) human rights (which began with the American and French Revolutions) to the era of "contemporary" (42) human rights. His periodization links these eras in human rights to shifts in the ideology of capitalism and empire. The "modern" era of human rights, he writes, "signals a whole variety of ideological 'justifications' for colonization and world domination" and "provides a register of major development in industrial capitalism" (42), while the "contemporary" era of human rights "is based on the premise of radical self-determination" (46). Such a periodization also brings human rights into close alignment with the Anthropocene, which is rooted in the capitalist-colonial Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, yet often dated most concretely to the circa-1950 shift that some (such as J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke) label the "Great Acceleration." Indeed, one could reasonably appropriate Baxi's terms and speak of "modern" and "contemporary" Anthropocenes mapped identically onto the global timeline.I propose to use the 2021 Afghan evacuation as a site from which to explore how human rights and the Anthropocene have together coproduced certain forms of subjectivity that are essential for the continued smooth functioning of world-ecological capitalism. These new forms of subjectivity are necessary to sustain the important fiction of individual [End Page 53] agency and value and conceal the ways in which the Anthropocene moment renders this fiction meaningless. Ultimately, I paint a picture of an Anthropocene without any human agency at all. I want... (shrink)

Late in their architectural career, Alison and Peter Smithson designed an eighty-square-foot, indoor-outdoor space for a man and his cat. The Smithsons described this modest space in methodological and phenomenal terms, noting that the addition to Axel Bruchhäuser’s Hexenhaus could be read “as an exemplar of a method by which a small physical change—a layering-over of air adhered to an existing fabric—can bring about a delicate tuning of persons with place.” The Hexenhaus’ tuning elements—second skin, tree screen, and double-acting mesh—create (...) a “treillage’d space” that supplants mediation, reframes attunement, and elicits an active weaving of person, place, and phenomena. This paper seeks to understand what the architects meant by “tuning” and in the process to outline operations for spatial weaving. (shrink)