_Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism_ fundamentally rethinks the nature of the transgressive theories and practices of the Buddhist Tantric traditions, challenging the notion that the Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situating them instead--both ideologically and institutionally--within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture. Critically surveying prior scholarship, Wedemeyer exposes the fallacies of attributing Tantric transgression to either the passions of lusty monks, primitive tribal rites, or slavish imitation of Saiva traditions. Through comparative analysis of modern historical narratives--that depict (...) Tantrism as a degenerate form of Buddhism, a primal religious undercurrent, or medieval ritualism--he likewise demonstrates these to be stock patterns in the European historical imagination. Through close analysis of primary sources, Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative, semiological readings of the influential _Guhyasamaja Tantra_ underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight--issues shared by all Indic religions--and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights into Tantric scripture and ritual clarify the continuities between South Asian Tantrism and broader currents in Indian religion, illustrating how thoroughly these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism. (shrink)

_Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism_ fundamentally rethinks the nature of the transgressive theories and practices of the Buddhist Tantric traditions, challenging the notion that the Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situating them instead -- both ideologically and institutionally -- within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture. Critically surveying prior scholarship, Wedemeyer exposes the fallacies of attributing Tantric transgression to either the passions of lusty monks, primitive tribal rites, or slavish imitation of Saiva traditions. Through comparative analysis of (...) modern historical narratives -- that depict Tantrism as a degenerate form of Buddhism, a primal religious undercurrent, or medieval ritualism -- he likewise demonstrates these to be stock patterns in the European historical imagination. Through close analysis of primary sources, Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative, semiological readings of the influential _Guhyasamaja Tantra_ underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight -- issues shared by all Indic religions -- and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights into Tantric scripture and ritual clarify the continuities between South Asian Tantrism and broader currents in Indian religion, illustrating how thoroughly these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism. (shrink)

How to integrate artificial intelligence technologies in the functioning and structures of our society has become a concern of contemporary politics and public debates. In this paper, we investigate national AI strategies as a peculiar form of co-shaping this development, a hybrid of policy and discourse that offers imaginaries, allocates resources, and sets rules. Conceptually, the paper is informed by sociotechnical imaginaries, the sociology of expectations, myths, and the sublime. Empirically we analyze AI policy documents of four key players in (...) the field, namely China, the United States, France, and Germany. The results show that the narrative construction of AI strategies is strikingly similar: they all establish AI as an inevitable and massively disrupting technological development by building on rhetorical devices such as a grand legacy and international competition. Having established this inevitable, yet uncertain, AI future, national leaders proclaim leadership intervention and articulate opportunities and distinct national pathways. While this narrative construction is quite uniform, the respective AI imaginaries are remarkably different, reflecting the vast cultural, political, and economic differences of the countries under study. As governments endow these imaginary pathways with massive resources and investments, they contribute to coproducing the installment of these futures and, thus, yield a performative lock-in function. (shrink)

The new series of Ideen&Argumente subscribes to the ideal of a pluralist and open culture of argument and debate and presents well-produced volumes on topics and questions which make substantive or methodologically important contributions to contemporary philosophy. The publications are designed to effect a productive synergy between the Anglo-Saxon and Continental European philosophical traditions. Ideen&Argumente provides a platform for outstanding systematically oriented original editions and German first editions from all areas of Theoretical and Practical Philosophy. A welcome is extended to (...) programmatic monographs from whatever philosophical direction. The aim is to highlight anew the thematic and methodological richness of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Across various fields it is argued that the self in part consists of an autobiographical self-narrative and that the self-narrative has an impact on agential behavior. Similarly, within action theory, it is claimed that the intentional structure of coherent long-term action is divided into a hierarchy of distal, proximal, and motor intentions. However, the concrete mechanisms for how narratives and distal intentions are generated and impact action is rarely fleshed out concretely. We here demonstrate how narratives and distal (...) intentions can be generated within cognitive agents and how they can impact agential behavior over long time scales. We integrate narratives and distal intentions into the LIDA model,and demonstrate how they can guide agential action in a manner that is consistent with the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. This paper serves both as an addition to the LIDA cognitive architecture and an elucidation of how narratives and distal intention emerge and play their role in cognition and action. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay describes the emergence and stabilization in French and English experimental accounts, in second half of the seventeenth century, of the narrative sequence: X did (some process in the laboratory) and X saw (something happen), where X stands for a pronoun, I or we in English,je, nousoronin French. Focussing on the French case, it shows how the use of the collective pronounonin the experimental accounts registered in the files of the Académie des Sciences is directly related to (...) the will of this newly created institution to assert a collective authority on the production and legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact produced in the laboratory. It is argued, through the case of the discovery of the blind spot in the eye by Mariotte, that this new narrative form imbeds a construal of the experiment as a public spectacle, and of the proof as a witnessing event, which eludes the Academy's attempts to monopolize the process of fact validation and favors the diffusion and display of experiments in front of larger audiences. The question of whether a privileged witness such as the King of France who patronized the Academy could not have constituted by himself a suitable audience to ensure a full legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact while remaning within the bounds of academic practices is addressed. It is answered in the negative by providing evidence for the lack of interest of the absolute monarch in experiments. On the other hand, the outdoor practices of observation and measurement are shown to interfere in a constructive manner with the absolutist power and to capture the attention of the absolutist monarch, where laboratory experiments had failed. It is proposed that natural philosophers in the early modern period bear the burden of proof in buying credibility for the phenomena they try, by paying a tribute to the standing of the patrician elites that witness their experiments. This makes sense in a straightforward manner of the lack of interest of the King of France in a practice which exalts the power of the very group he is trying hard to control through the absolutist structure of power. (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the (...) vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

In recent years, the post-truth phenomenon has dominated public and political discourse. This article offers a functional analysis of its mechanisms based on the category of narrative. After providing a brief definition of post-truth as a conceptual foundation, I trace the meaning of the term ‘narrative’ in the works of Jean-François Lyotard, focusing on the elusive category of small narrative. Utilizing terms and concepts of contemporary narrative theory, I propose a general definition of cultural narrative (...) and reconceptualize Lyotard’s petit récit as a particular case of this superordinate category. Drawing on Lyotard’s phrase linguistics as set out in The Differend, I develop the category of epistemic sphere to analyze Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as an example of post-truth politics, the rise of populism and the epistemic fragmentation of society. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump claims in her book "Wandering in Darkness" that the problem of evil can be solved best by the help of narratives. This - so Stump - is due to the fact that narratives allow one to get a general view about relevant parts of the discussion of suffering. In this context she distinguishes the more detailed view of the discussion from a more general one by two different modes of cognition: the mode of gathering "knowledge that" and that (...) one of gathering "knowledge how". Knowledge by narratives is a subcategory of the last-mentioned one. In the paper I argue for the thesis that this distinction is not really crucial for Stump's argumentation and that in fact only "knowledge that" is relevant for her proposed solution. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and humanities disciplines in Argentina, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Where most narratives of a scholarly past are presented as a succession of ‘ideas,’ research results and theories, this collection highlights the structural shifts in the systems of higher education, as well as institutions of research and innovation within which these disciplines have developed. This institutional perspective will facilitate systematic comparisons between (...) developments in various disciplines and countries. Across eight country studies the book reveals remarkably different dynamics of disciplinary growth between countries, as well as important interdisciplinary differences within countries. In addition, instances of institutional contractions and downturns and veritable breaks of continuity under authoritarian political regimes can be observed, which are almost totally absent from narratives of individual disciplinary histories. This important work will provide a valuable resource to scholars of disciplinary history, the history of ideas, the sociology of education and of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This paper is about non-fictional objects in fictions and their role as narrators. Two central claims are advanced. In part 1 it is argued that non-fictional objects such as you and me can be part of fictions. This commonsensical idea is elaborated and defended against objections. Building on it, it is argued in part 2 that non-fictional objects can be characters and narrators in fictional narratives. As a consequence, three fundamental and popular claims concerning narrators are rejected. In particular, it (...) is shown that some fictional narratives have non-fictional internal narrators, some have no internal fictional narrator, and, most controversially, that the author of a fictional narrative can be identical to its internal narrator. (shrink)

For theologians, to conceive of God in terms of light has some undeniable advantages, allowing a middle-of-the road position between the two extremes of thinking about God in terms of a purely disembodied, unfathomable, unsensible being, and of crediting Him with a body, possibly even a human body. This paper first reviews the reasons why God, in early medieval Islam, was never fully theorized in terms of light. It then proceeds to discuss light-related narratives in two major, late-medieval compilations of (...) hadiths about the afterlife, by al-Suyuti and al-Majlisi, suggesting that eschatology was the area in which God’s light continued to shine in Islam, and the backdoor through which a theology of light, in the thought of al-Suhrawardi and his followers, made a triumphant re-entry into Islamic thought. (shrink)

Within the last fifty years as philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science have moved towards increasingly more embodied theoretical frameworks, there has been growing interest in Dance Movement Therapy. DMT has been shown to be effective in mitigating negative symptoms in several psychopathologies including PTSD, autism, and schizophrenia. Further, DMT generally helps participants gain a stronger sense of agency and connection with their body. However, it has been argued that it is not always clear what constitutes these changes in DMT participants. (...) I argue that we can better understand the empirical and phenomenological results of DMT across psychopathologies if we adapt an enactive embodied approach to cognition. I use the framework of embodied enactive cognition and narrative theories of the self to develop an account of DMT as a form of narrative change. I claim that through the acquisition of new bodily skill and bodily awareness, DMT can cause changes to the participant’s narrative self-understanding. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzscheforschung Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 306-313.

The prediction defended in this paper is that over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of “universal history”; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods. Until the end of the nineteenth century, universal history of some kind seems to have been present in most historiographical traditions. Then it vanished as historians became disillusioned with the search for grand (...) historical narratives and began to focus instead on getting the details right through document-based research. Today, however, there are many signs of a return to universal history. This has been made possible, at least in part, by the detailed empirical research undertaken in the last century in many different fields, and also by the creation of new methods of absolute dating that do not rely on the presence of written documents. The last part of the paper explores some of the possible consequences for historical scholarship of a return to a new, scientific form of universal history. These may include a closer integration of historical scholarship with the more historically oriented of the sciences, including cosmology, geology, and biology. Finally, the paper raises the possibility that universal history may eventually be taught in high schools, where it will provide a powerful new way of integrating knowledge from the humanities and the sciences. (shrink)

Technologies of “artificial intelligence” and machine learning are increasingly presented as solutions to key problems of our societies. Companies are developing, investing in, and deploying machine learning applications at scale in order to filter and organize content, mediate transactions, and make sense of massive sets of data. At the same time, social and legal expectations are ambiguous, and the technical challenges are substantial. This is the introductory article to a special theme that addresses this turn to AI as a technical, (...) discursive and political phenomena. The opening article contextualizes this theme by unfolding this multi-layered nature of the turn to AI. It argues that, whereas public and economic discourses position the widespread deployment of AI and automation in the governance of digital communication as a technical turn with a narrative of revolutionary breakthrough-moments and of technological progress, this development is at least similarly dependent on a parallel discursive and political turn to AI. The article positions the current turn to AI in the longstanding motif of the “technological fix” in the relationship between technology and society, and identifies a discursive turn to responsibility in platform governance as a key driver for AI and automation. In addition, a political turn to more demanding liability rules for platforms further incentivizes platforms to automatically screen their content for possibly infringing or violating content, and position AI as a solution to complex social problems. (shrink)

Ce livre traite du 11 septembre ; du triomphe de la télé réalité, des formes nouvelles de domination symbolique, du capitalisme culturel, mais il gravite autour d'un seul et même foyer : nous vivons une crise mondiale de narration, dont le symptôme le plus visible est une inflation narrative, la substitution de l'anecdote au récit. Qu'il emprunte la forme de l'essai ou du récit, ce livre décrit la situation d'un homme sans recours narratif face à l'expérience, qui ne sait (...) plus faire la distinction entre fait et fiction, et entre vrai et faux. Un homme qui représentait pour Hannah Arendt, "le sujet idéal du règne totalitaire". Un homme, en somme, sans récit. Face à l'empire, c'est le manque et l'impossibilité d'une contre-narration que Christian Salmon explore - et déplore - ici. i. (shrink)

Prevalent narratives of agricultural innovation predict that we are once again on the cusp of a global agricultural revolution. According to these narratives, this so-called fourth agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is set to transform current agricultural practices around the world at a quick pace, making use of new sophisticated precision technologies. Often used as a rhetorical device, this narrative has a material effect on the trajectories of an inherently political and normative agricultural transition; with funding, other policy instruments, (...) and research attention focusing on the design and development of new precision technologies. A growing critical social science literature interrogates the promises of revolution. Engagement with new technology is likely to be uneven, with benefits potentially favouring the already powerful and the costs falling hardest on the least powerful. If grand narratives of change remain unchallenged, we risk pursuing innovation trajectories that are exclusionary, failing to achieve responsible innovation. This study utilises a range of methodologies to explore everyday encounters between farmers and technology, with the aim of inspiring further work to compile the microhistories that can help to challenge robust grand narratives of change. We explore how farmers are engaging with technology in practice and show how these interactions problematise a simple, linear notion of innovation adoption and use. In doing so, we reflect upon the contribution that the study of everyday encounters can make in setting more inclusionary, responsible pathways towards sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

This study represents a comparison between two radical gestures of literary self-reflexivity: romantic irony and postmodernist metafiction. It examines the impact of early German romantic theory and its central concept of irony on German and English romantic narrative fiction and relates the same to postmodernist self-reflexive novels, including its British and American variants. A primary objective of this comparison is to account for the radical skepticism that postmodernist metafiction voices with respect to the paramount philosophical question of truth and (...) reality. The immanent tension between an absolute idealistic and a radically skeptic position which romantic irony articulates and enacts is conceived of as an important and instructive link to the understanding of postmodernism. (shrink)

Social media platforms offer convenient, instantaneous social sharing on a mass scale with tremendous impact on public perceptions, opinions, and behavior. There is a need to understand why information spreads including the human motivations, cognitive processes, and neural dynamics of large-scale sharing. This study introduces a novel approach for investigating the effect social media messaging and in-person discussion has on the inter-brain dynamics within small groups of participants. The psychophysiological impact of information campaigns and narrative messaging within a closed (...) social media environment was assessed using 24-channel wireless EEG. Data were acquired from three- or four-person groups while subjects debated contemporary social issues framed by four scenarios of varying controversy: investing in ethical vs. unethical corporations, selecting travel destination based on social awareness, determining verdict in a murder trial and the punishment of life in prison or death penalty, and decision to vaccinate. Pre-/post-scenario questionnaires assess the effects of the social media information. Inter-brain coherence between subject pairs on each social issue discussed by subjects was analyzed by concordance, agreement vs. disagreement, and by group unanimity, unanimous vs. not unanimous. Subject pairs that agreed on the social issues raised in the scenarios had significantly greater inter-brain coherence in gamma frequency range than disagreeing pairs over cortical regions known to be involved in social interactions. These effects were magnified when comparing groups where subject pairs were unanimous in their stance on the social issues for some but not all scenarios. While there was considerable overlap between scenarios in what EEG channels were significant, there was enough variability to indicate the possibility of scenario-specific effects on inter-brain coherence. (shrink)

Traditionell wird Einfühlung anthropozentrisch und figurenbezogen behandelt. Demgegenüber arbeitet dieser Text, anknüpfend an die ästhetische Einfühlungstheorie von Theodor Lipps und neuere Bild- und Filmtheorien, eine ästhetische Form dingbezogener Einfühlung heraus. Mit Bezug auf die dramaturgische Funktionsweise sogenannter McGuffins, wie Alfred Hitchcock sie für den Film eingeführt hat, rückt ein ganzes Genre filmischer Dinge exemplarisch ins Zentrum, die die Aufgabe übernehmen, eigenständig filmische Spannung und damit Immersion zu erzeugen. McGuffins treten meist in Form von konkreten Gegenständen wie Koffern oder Behältern auf, (...) die physischen Ortswechseln unterzogen werden und Faszination auf sich ziehen, ohne dafür auf psychologische und personenbezogene Register Bezug nehmen zu müssen. Die Spannung und Zeit antreibende Kraft von McGuffins, welche sich stets als bedeutungsleere Motive am Ende einer Geschichte erweisen, ist eine Funktion ihrer geradezu kontaktmagischen und kausalen Übertragungsmöglichkeiten. McGuffins organisieren narrative Bewegungen diesseits von Sinn und Bedeutung. Der Bezug auf dingbezogene Einfühlung weist in philosophischer Hinsicht auf die Notwendigkeit hin, nicht-semiotische und materielle Formen dramaturgischer Bewegung in ästhetischen und narrativen Theorien begrifflich stärker zu berücksichtigen. Empathy is traditionally treated anthropocentrically and figure-related. In contrast, this text, based on Theodor Lipp’s aesthetic theory of empathy and more recent image and film theories, works out an aesthetic form of thing-related empathy. With reference to the dramaturgical functioning of so-called McGuffins, as Alfred Hitchcock introduced them for film, an entire genre of cinematic things, which take on the task of independently creating cinematic suspense and thus immersion, takes centre stage. McGuffins usually appear in the form of concrete objects such as suitcases or containers which undergo physical changes of location and attract fascination without having to refer to psychological and personal registers. The suspense-and time-driving force of McGuffins, which always prove to be meaningless motifs at the end of a story, is a function of their almost contact-magic and causal transmission possibilities. McGuffins organize narrative movements instead of meaning and significance. In philosophical terms, the reference to material empathy points to the need to take greater account of non-semiotic and material forms of dramaturgical movement in aesthetic and narrative theories. (shrink)

Il s’agit dans cet article d’analyser le travail de désingularisation relative de l’événement que Ricœur opère par couplage avec le récit dans Temps et récit au début des années 1980, puis la reprise de la question de la singularité et de l’unicité de l’événement dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli dans le cadre théorique recomposé de la représentation historienne mise à l’épreuve de “l’événement aux limites” qu’est la Shoah. Dans Temps et récit Ricœur entend dépasser, par l’entrecroisement entre histoire et fiction (...) appliqué à des événements fondateurs d’identité collective comme la Shoah, l’aporie épistémologique de la dichotomie entre une histoire qui dissout l’événement dans l’explication et une attitude purement émotionnelle face aux événements à intensité éthique considérable. Cette narrativisation de l’événement se heurte cependant à la puissance traumatique de l’extra-textuel radical de l’événement-Shoah qui constitue ainsi un défi pour la représentation historienne du passé. C’est cette question que Ricœur reprend dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, mais cette fois-ci cet examen a été largement reconfiguré par la dialectique de la mémoire et de l’histoire contribuant à la représentation du passé. Tout en distinguant l’incomparabilité absolue au plan moral de la Shoah et l’incomparabilité relative sur le plan historiographique, Ricœur maintient que l’enchevêtrement entre jugement historiographique et jugement moral est inévitable, ouvrant ainsi sur la grande question de la responsabilité sociale, politique et éthique de l’historien. (shrink)

The encounter between a patient and her surgeon is unique for several reasons. The surgeon inflicts pain upon a patient for the patient’s own good. An operative intervention is irreducibly personal, such that the decisions about and performance of operations are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of the individual surgeon. Furthermore, there is a chasm of knowledge between the patient and surgeon that is difficult to cross. Hence, training in the discipline of surgery includes the inculcation of certain virtues and practices (...) to safeguard against abuses of this relationship and to make sure that the best interests of the patient are prioritized. The stories in this issue are evidence that in contemporary practice this is not quite enough, as surgeons reflect on instances they felt were ethically challenging. Common themes include the difficulty in communicating surgical uncertainty, patient–surgeon relationships, ethical issues in surgical training, and the impact of the technological imperative on caring for dying patients. (shrink)

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

The interaction between the concepts of character attachment, agency, and choice in a video game narrative was investigated using BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Posts on a BioWare forum discussing the depiction of their player characters in the ending sequences of Mass Effect 3, the final game in the trilogy, were downloaded and analyzed using thematic analysis. Players demonstrated emotional attachment for the characters and narrative and expected to see the consequences of their choices play out, as in the (...) previous games. Furthermore, players conflated winning the game with achieving a narratively satisfactory ending for the game world and its characters indicating emotional consequences for players that developers should consider when designing games with a high degree of player choice and agency. However, for some players character attachment is incongruous as they described Shepard as “acting out of character,” which needs further research. (shrink)

In his new book, Lambert Zuidervaart argues that the concept of propositional truth remains one-dimensional and needs to be extended by and embedded in several versions of what the author calls “existential truth,” which he discusses in relation to phenomenology and critical theory. Zuidervaart focuses on key figures of twentieth-century German philosophy, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. According to the author, his book “does not intend to be a historical narrative” ; (...) nor does it intend to present “a few nuggets of insights from continental writings”. Instead, Zuidervaart tries to reconstruct the primary material and immanently criticizes the... (shrink)

The 200-Year Continuum is the producer, recorder and exhibitor in Christian Kerrigan's advancing anthology of narratives. Central to Kerrigan's practice is storytelling and myth-making as a means of engaging his audience. Kerrigan uses drawing as his primary mode of research into these narratives which are consequently offered in the form of live Internet feed installations acting as ecological sites, collaborative scientific experiments introducing new organic technologies and digital images of worlds unseen. Each addition acts as a middle story within (...) The 200-Year Continuum. In his narrative, The Amber Clock, a ship is grown in the yew forest, Kingley Vale, over 200 years. As such, he explores the possibilities of time in relationship to technology and the natural world. In his narrative, artificial and wild systems are choreographed, and the natural production of resin is harvested from the yew trees as a way of measuring time. Biological imperatives are harnessed in a second collaborative architectural project entitled Living Architecture: The Protocell. This project seeks to investigate the design potential of using the drivers of biology, the technological issues and the implications of intervention. (shrink)

Marcantonio Raimondis so-called Caryatid Façade has received scant attention, yet it occupies an important place in the printmakers oeuvre and was widely admired and imitated in the sixteenth century. The image, which features an architectural façade adorned with Caryatid and Persian porticoes and an oversized female capital, does not fit easily with the usual narrative about Raimondis career in Rome, summed up in Vasaris account that he collaborated with Raphael to publicise the masters storie. Rather than being an illustration (...) of a religious or mythological subject, it brings together architectural fantasia, archaeology and Vitruvian studies, reflecting on the origins of the orders and the nature of architectural ornament. Arguably, it is also an indirect trace of Raphaels unfinished projects to reconstruct Rome and to collaborate with humanist Fabio Calvo and others on a new, illustrated edition of Vitruvius. (shrink)

The central question of this conference is whether the media can contribute to high quality social dialogue. The prospects for resolving that question positively in the “sound and fury” depend on recovering the idea of truth. At present the news media are lurching along from one crisis to another with an empty centre. We need to articulate a believable concept of truth as communication's master principle. As the norm of healing is to medicine, justice to politics, critical thinking to education, (...) craftsmanship to engineering, and stewardship to business, so truth-telling is the news profession's occupational norm. Truth-telling is the ethical framework that fundamentally reorders the media's professional culture and enables them to enrich social dialogue rather than undermine it.Historically the mainstream press has defined itself in terms of an objectivist worldview. Centred on human rationality and armed with the scientific method, the facts in news have been said to mirror reality. The aim has been true and incontrovertible accounts of a domain separate from human consciousness. In Bertrand Russell's formula, “truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact” . In the received view, truth is defined in elementary epistemological terms as accurate representation. News corresponds to context-free neutral algorithms, and ethics is equated with impartiality.The attacks on this misguided view of human knowledge had already originated in Giambattista Vico's fantasia and Wilhelm Dilthey's verstehen in the counter-Enlightenment of the 18th century. They have continued with hermeneutics, critical theory in the Frankfurt School, American pragmatism, Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, Gramsci, and in their own way, Lyotard's denial of master narratives and Derrida's sliding signifiers; until the anti-foundationalism of our own day indicates a crisis in correspondence views of truth. Institutional structures remain Enlightenment-driven, but in principle the tide has turned currently toward restricting objectivism to the territory of mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences. In reporting, objectivity has become increasingly controversial as the working press' professional standard, though it will remain entrenched in our ordinary practices of news production and dissemination until an alternative mission for the press is convincingly formulated.The demise of correspondence views of truth has created a predicament for the notion of truth altogether. However, instead of appealing to coherence versions or abandoning the concept, truth needs to be relocated in the moral sphere. Truth is a problem of axiology rather than epistemology. With the dominant scheme no longer tenable, truth should become the province of ethicists who can reconstruct it as the news media's contribution to social dialogue.When truth is articulated in terms of a moral framework, we can mold its richly textured meaning around the Hebrew emeth , the Greek aletheia . In Serbo-Croatian the true is justified as with plumbline in carpentry. In the powerful wheel imagery of the Buddhist tradition, truth is the immovable axle. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa presumes that sufferings from apartheid can be healed through truthful testimony. In Ghandhi's “satyagrapha,” the power of truth through the human spirit eventually wins over force . Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics contends correctly that a truthful account lays hold of the context, motives, and presuppositions involved .Telling the truth depends on the quality of discernment so that penultimates do not gain ultimacy. Truth means, in other words, to strike gold, to get at “the core, the essence, the nub, the heart of the matter” . For Henry David Thoreau – though addressing a different issue – when we are truthful, we attempt to “drive life into a corner and¼if it proves to be mean, why then to get the genuine meanness out of it and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by personal experience and be able to give a true account of the encounter” . For the former secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, “the most dangerous of all moral dilemmas is when we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth be victorious” . In the Talmud, the liar's punishment is that no one believes him.Augustine , professor of rhetoric at Milan and later Bishop of Hippo, illustrates a non-correspondence view of truth. His rhetorical theory is a major contribution to the philosophy of communication, contradicting the highly secular and linear view of the ancient Greeks. As with Aristotle, rhetoric entails reasoned judgement for Augustine; however, he “break[s] away from Graeco-Roman rhetoric, moving instead toward ¼rhetoric as aletheiac act” . Rhetoric for him is not knowledge-producing or opinion-producing but truth-producing . The Epistolae Doctrina Christiana scourges the value-neutral, technical language of “word merchants” without wisdom.Truth is not fundamentally a prescriptive statement. The aletheiac act in Augustine “tends to be more relational than propositional, a dialogically interpersonal, sacramentally charitable act rather than a statement¼taking into account and being motivated by [the cardinal virtues] faith, hope, and charity” . The truth for him does not merely make things clear, but motivates us to belief and action. In truthful communication for Augustine, “it is not enough to seek to move men's minds, merely for the sake of power; instead, the power to move is to be used to lead men to truth”. (shrink)

Algorithms are used across a wide range of societal sectors such as banking, administration, and healthcare to make predictions that impact on our lives. While the predictions can be incredibly accurate about our present and future behavior, there is an important question about how these algorithms in fact represent human identity. In this paper, we explore this question and argue that machine learning algorithms represent human identity in terms of what we shall call the statistical individual. This statisticalized representation of (...) individuals, we shall argue, differs significantly from our ordinary conception of human identity, which is tightly intertwined with considerations about biological, psychological, and narrative continuity—as witnessed by our most well-established philosophical views on personal identity. Indeed, algorithmic representations of individuals give no special attention to biological, psychological, and narrative continuity and instead rely on predictive properties that significantly exceed and diverge from those that we would ordinarily take to be relevant for questions about how we are. (shrink)

Digital literature is playing an increasingly important role in children's everyday lives and opening up new paths for family literacy and early childhood education. However, despite positive effects of electronic books and picture-book apps on vocabulary learning, early writing, or phonological awareness, research findings on early narrative skills are ambiguous. Particularly, there still is a research gap regarding how app materiality affects children's story understanding. Thus, based on the ViSAR model for picture-book app analysis and data stemming from 12 (...) digital reading dyads containing German monolingual 2- to 3-year-olds and their caregivers this study assessed the narrative potential of a commercial picture-book app and how this is used in interaction. Results of the media analysis showed that the app provides a high number of narrative animations. These animations could be used interactively to engage the child in the story. However, results of the interaction analysis showed that adult readers do not exploit this potential due to their strong concentration on operative prompts and instructions. Furthermore, an explorative analysis of the relation between adults' utterances and children's story comprehension provided preliminary indicators regarding how the length of reading duration and the number of utterances might relate to children's understanding of the story. Findings and methodological limitations of the study are discussed and combined didactically with practical recommendations on how to use narrative animations in interaction effectively. (shrink)

In this landmark volume of contemporary communication theory, Ronald C. Arnett applies the metaphor of dialogic confession—which enables historical moments to be addressed from a confessed standpoint and through a communicative lens—to the works of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pointed to an era of postmodern difference with his notion of "a world come of age." Arnett’s interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s life and scholarship in contention with Nazi dominance offer implications for a dialogic confession that engages the complexity of postmodern (...) class='Hi'>narrative contention. Rooted in classical theory, the field of communication ethics is abstract and arguably outmoded. In _Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility, _Arnett locates cross-cultural and comparative anchors that not only bring legitimacy and relevance to the field but also develop a conceptual framework that will advance and inspire future scholarship. (shrink)

Epidemiological studies of the last decade have shown a low prevalence of hypomania and bipolar I disorder in Western societies while pointing to a prevalence of unipolar mania in non-Western societies. This work seeks to investigate the explanatory role of the Stimmung concept to understand these differences, as much as the increase in the number of cases of mania in the West in the last two decades. It attempts to explore the relationship between the phenomenology of hypomania and its adaptation (...) to the atmosphere of its environment. Our hypothesis is that the experience of hypomania would be in harmony with the narrative of Western societies and with Stimmung (in the sense of the term used by Spitzer and Heidegger) of these societies. Finally, we will present a clinical case and analyzes of business leadership manuals that will illustrate the phenomenological relationship of Stimmung and mania, as well as its transformation in the sphere of work. (shrink)

This paper seeks to situate the idea and intellectual narrative of “world revolution” in its modern historical context, tracing it back to the age of democratic revolution in the late eighteenth century, and then developed by great revolutionary thinkers like Marx and Engels. It examines the possible limitations of Marx and Engels’s vision of world revolution with respect to the Third World as a result of their European intellectual formation in the tradition of the Enlightenment, and examines the charge (...) of “Eurocentrism” advanced by post-colonialist theorists among others against classical Marxism. It then explores the inspiration of the Russian Revolution for those fighting racism and imperialism, and how black radicals brought their revolutionary narratives of black liberation into communist narratives for the first time in its aftermath. The essay then discusses C.L.R. James’s pioneering 1937 history of the Comintern, World Revolution, among other things a theoretical intervention into the debates raging among socialist black radicals during the 1930s, and critically examines the charge of “Eurocentrism” often levelled at World Revolution. (shrink)