The term ‘artificial intelligence’ has arguably come to function in political discourse as, what Laclau called, an ‘empty signifier’. This article traces the shifting political discourse on AI within three key institutions of global governance–OHCHR, WHO, and UNESCO–and, in so doing, highlights the role of ‘crisis’ moments in justifying a series of pivotal re-articulations. Most important has been the attachment of AI to the narrative around digital automation in human healthcare. Greatly enabled by the societal context of the pandemic, (...) all three institutions have moved from being critical of the unequal power relations in the economy of AI to, today, reframing themselves primarily as facilitators tasked with helping to ensure the application of AI technologies. The analysis identifies a shift in which human health and healthcare is framed as in a ‘crisis’ to which AI technology is presented as the remedy. The article argues the need to trace these discursive shifts as a means by which to understand, monitor, and where necessary also hold to account these changes in the governance of AI in society. (shrink)

The Treatise on Giving Rise to Faith in the Great Vehicle is one of the most important foundational texts of East Asian Buddhism. This new annotated translation of the Treatise draws on the historical and intellectual contexts of the work's composition and pays close attention to its interpretation in early commentaries.

Baumard et al.'s definition of morality is narrow and their review of empirical work on human cooperation is limited, focusing only on economic games, almost always involving strangers. We suggest that theorizing about mutualisms will benefit from considering extant empirical behavioral research far more broadly and especially from taking relational context into account.

Psychopaths appear to be ‘creatures apart’ – grandiose, shameless, callous and versatile in their violence. I discuss biological underpinnings to their pale affect, their selective inability to discern fear and sadness in others and a predatory orienting towards images that make most startle and look away. However, just because something is biologically underpinned does not mean that it is innate. I show that while there may be some genetic determination of fearlessness and callous-unemotionality, these and other features of the personality (...) may arise from developmental failures in the interpersonal reception of their emotions, needs and their sense of self. One is unlikely to be able to own inner experiences if shamed for having them, or if, having them, one does not know how to regulate and soothe. So psychopaths may learn to attend away and suppress them. Rather than a fully inherited difficulty, they may have become unable to reflect on inner states, so meta-emotions and self-reflective emotions like guilt and shame do not fully arise. They retain enough sensitivity to know their difference, and hide. I suggest that psychopaths are characterised by a nested sense of self, arising from the surprising effect of shame on these seemingly shameless characters. They do not have an integrated sense of self across context or across time or in relation to a generalised social other. With a nested sense of self, diminished intensity and scope of affective experience (in both directly experienced and vicarious forms) they lack textured access to a personal, owned and integrated past. Thus they lack the kind of access to the past required for a motivationally compelling planning of the future. They lack the emotional investment in the future that enables us to overcome the motivation to act opportunistically and myopically. These individuals live strangely in time. They have a fugitive sense of self and live nimbly among many pasts. They present an elegant and coherent mask to the person they are addressing in the moment and generate possible futures without conviction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Strangeness of AlterityJolanta Saldukaitytė (bio)The problem of strangeness can be approached from different angles: aesthetic, sociological, psychological, cultural, etc. Strangeness can be found as well in the strangeness of experience: I as stranger to myself, or the strange place I find myself, or the strange people who surround me. These would enable us to uncover the uncanny (Freud, Heidegger), or discuss sociological notions of alienation (Marx) (...) or the aesthetic method of ostranienie (Shklovsky, Brecht), just to mention a few additional accounts of strangeness. The goal of the present essay, however, is not to show various forms and aspects of strangeness, horizontally, as it were, but to address the very meaning of strangeness, intensively or vertically. Even more specifically, the present essay discusses the strange as at once that which comes from the outside and as that which addresses me.In the first part, I present a general notion of strangeness, mainly concentrating on strangeness as what is peculiar or weird. Some studies by Bernhard Waldenfels will be considered here. In the second part, the problem of strangeness is examined in the context of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, primarily in terms of his notion of personal otherness and the question of the link between strangeness and such [End Page 95] alterity. For the latter point of view, juxtaposing the difference and relatedness of strangeness and Levinasian alterity, we ask the question of if and of how alterity is strange.Relative StrangenessFirst let us clarify what we usually or generally call strange. No doubt different languages uncover slightly different aspects, but in most cases in searching for the strange we bring up similar images: distant, unseen places — something like the lands of Gulliver’s Travels — with their unusual inhabitants and weird customs or distant times, past and future, with their unfamiliar communities and peculiar customs. We may even conjure aliens from undiscovered galaxies or fantastical creatures and monsters — unicorns, nymphs, vampires, dragons — or unusual and peculiar animals — a platypus, albino cave-dwelling fish, elephants. Perhaps unexplained earth phenomena, like Stonehenge, or seemingly paranormal events that are the inspiration for cults and imagination. We may encounter David Lynch’s Elephant Man or Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, or conjure the holy fool, madmen, the third little brother fool Ivan from the European fairytale, or even Prince Myshkin of Dostoyevsky. No doubt all these images do not coincide or cohere. They unveil various different aspects of strangeness: on one hand, we see that strangeness belongs to the realm of the imaginary while, on the other hand, it is part of the world; or, one may say, the latter has existence, or a more stable existence, while the former does not. What gives them a commonality, however, is that in each instance there is some disruption of order, of discourse, a shaking of the established conception of the world and knowledge, going beyond what is familiar, ordinary, and normal. In each case, there is something unusual, weird, peculiar. In each case, there is a putting into question of our aesthetical sensibilities, moral norms or practices, and epistemological knowledge. In other words, using Levinas’s vocabulary, this kind of the strange is a rupture in [End Page 96] the discourse of totality. By “totality” here we understand universalizing order, system, a way of thinking that does not allow otherness, exteriority, anomaly, differences, or, in some sense, strangeness. The univocal discourse of totality, of coherence and consistency without exception, is a discourse of violence because it must suppress even the possibility of ruptures in continuity: the other must be reduced to the same. Totality allows nothing discontinuous: everything must have a place, within, a part, not an exception.The strange as the weird and peculiar, however, opens such a closed universe to discontinuity, variety, and heteronomy. According to Waldenfels, who has developed a phenomenology of the alien/strange with careful precision, strange as weird and peculiar applies to the order of things, to various forms of life and to forms of experience.1 Strangeness understood as difference in kind, as the peculiar, according to Waldenfels, might appear in various forms: (1) everyday strangeness that belongs to or occurs within... (shrink)

The “plant turn” in anthropology, while controversial, has led to a renewed focus on how humans relate to different species of plants. In this article, I aim to contribute to our knowledge of human-plant relationships by analyzing how historical actors used sacred plants in past ritual settings. I study criminal and civil cases involving shamans in late colonial Ecuador, with a focus on plant use. Legal records from 1782, 1793, 1800, and 1802 reveal information about the use of fragrant plants (...) believed to have transformative properties, the use of entheogens for non-visionary purposes, and even the incorporation of the sacred wanduc (Brugmansia sp) into the punishment of one shaman. This plant-focused approach to the reading of ethnohistorical documents provides a history of particular plants as they were used by individual actors in specific geographic and historical contexts, and sheds light on people’s understanding of human-plant-spirit relationships. (shrink)

If you think that semantic minimalism is the only alternative to contextualism but you’d rather do without Cappelen and Lepore’s mysteriously minimal “propositions,” you can. You just have to recognize that being semantically incomplete does not make a sentence context-sensitive. You don’t have to go through the ritual of repeatedly incanting things like this: “John is ready” expresses the proposition that John is ready. Instead, you can opt for Radical Minimalism and suppose that “John is ready” and its ilk (...) fall short of semantically expressing propositions – their semantic contents are propositional “radicals.” Now C&L think they’ve addressed Radical Minimalism and offered objections to it. So they find it strange and bizarre that I think they haven’t. In fact, they persist in confusing semantic incompleteness with context sensitivity. If they appreciated the difference, they might even welcome the opportunity to adopt a form of semantic minimalism that does without the minimal propositions that everyone but them find incredible (pun intended). (shrink)

This essay is a discussion of Aquinas’s argument “from motion” to the existence of God as the argument is found in his Summa Contra Gentiles. The aimof the essay is to suggest an approach to Aquinas’s argument that emphasizes its particular context, where “context” signifies not so much the assumed Aristotelian physics as Aquinas’s larger project of carrying out “the office of a wise man,” namely, “to order things.” Construing the relevant “ordering” as a making sense of things—indeed (...) of “the whole of things”—the argument from motion is thus seen as part of an attempt to make sense of what, following Aristotle, can be called “the whole of life,” that whole within which any one of us must live out his or her particular life. Several ideas found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are introduced in the conviction that they may help at least some of us to see the “strangeness” of the conclusion of Aquinas’s argument, the conclusion, namely, that the first principle of the whole of being is an “unmoved mover”—the strangeness of which conclusion, it is argued, is essential to its significance. (shrink)

This paper looks at the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin had appropriated the ideas of Kant and of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. While Bakhtin was greatly indebted to Kantian philosophy, and is known to have referred to himself as a neo-Kantian, he rejects the main tenets of neo-Kantianism. Instead, Bakhtin offers a substantial re-interpretation of Kantian thought. His frequent borrowings from neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and others) also follow a distinctive pattern of appropriation, whereby blocks of interconnected ideas (...) are removed from their original context, and made to serve Bakhtin’s own—substantially different—philosophical purposes in the context of his own thought. Bakhtin’s thought thus remains original even as he is borrowing ideas from others. (shrink)

Position papers on artificial intelligence (AI) ethics are often framed as attempts to work out technical and regulatory strategies for attaining what is commonly called trustworthy AI. In such papers, the technical and regulatory strategies are frequently analyzed in detail, but the concept of trustworthy AI is not. As a result, it remains unclear. This paper lays out a variety of possible interpretations of the concept and concludes that none of them is appropriate. The central problem is that, by framing (...) the ethics of AI in terms of trustworthiness, we reinforce unjustified anthropocentric assumptions that stand in the way of clear analysis. Furthermore, even if we insist on a purely epistemic interpretation of the concept, according to which trustworthiness just means measurable reliability, it turns out that the analysis will, nevertheless, suffer from a subtle form of anthropocentrism. The paper goes on to develop the concept of strange error, which serves both to sharpen the initial diagnosis of the inadequacy of trustworthy AI and to articulate the novel epistemological situation created by the use of AI. The paper concludes with a discussion of how strange error puts pressure on standard practices of assessing moral culpability, particularly in the context of medicine. (shrink)

Star Trek is a successful popular cultural endeavor because it allows for exactly different kind of imaginative escapism, the possibility of joining in on an alternative narrative. In “The City on the Edge of Forever”, the Enterprise orbits a mysterious planet, where on its surface someone or something is causing temporal and spatial displacement. This chapter uses Romanticism as a philosophical gateway to the sublime experience that is the Guardian of Forever. The Guardian of Forever is the cause of the (...) spatial displacement and ripples in time that shake the Enterprise at the episode's beginning. Friedrich Nietzsche in his writings on Greek history, adopted the Romantic attitude toward the past by suggesting there are certain meaningful archetypes in the Greek past: in the context of “City on the Edge”, James T. Kirk represents the Tragic Hero, Spock the Apollonian figure, and McCoy the Dionysian figure. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Going Deep The Porns of Our Lives Dial M for Missionary For Your Thighs Only A Clear and Present Stranger Enema of the State Good Will Humping Notes.

D. Barton Johnson traces the parallel lives and literary origins of two Russo-American writers: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Saint Peterburg six years apart, they overlapped on the New York Times bestsellers list in the late fifties. While Nabokov's Russian cultural roots have been much explored, Rand's were little realized prior to Chris Matthew Sciabarra's investigation of her Russian philosophical context. Nabokov and Rand represent polar examples of their cultural heritage: for Nabokov, the aesthetically-oriented tradition of the (...) modernist Russian Symbolists; for Rand, the social-utilitarian tradition of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and later, Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. (shrink)

D. BARTON JOHNSON traces the parallel lives and literary origins of two Russo-American writers: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Saint Peterburg six years apart, they overlapped on the New York Times bestsellers list in the late fifties. While Nabokov's Russian cultural roots have been much explored, Rand's were little realized prior to Chris Matthew Sciabarra's investigation of her Russian philosophical context. Nabokov and Rand represent polar examples of their cultural heritage: for Nabokov, the aesthetically-oriented tradition of the (...) modernist Russian Symbolists; for Rand, the social-utilitarian tradition of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and later, Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. (shrink)

ArgumentIn this paper I study the engagement of German ornithologists with the Collared Dove, a bird species of Asian origin that spread massively throughout Central Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Never before had the spread of a single species attracted so much attention from European ornithologists. Ornithologists were not only fascinated by the exotic origin of the bird, but even more so by the unprecedented rapidity of its expansion. As it is argued in the paper, the advent of the (...) bird created an outstanding opportunity for ornithologists to study the process of biogeographic range expansion. The paper traces how knowledge on the dove's expansion took shape in the social, discursive, and material practices of a large-scale observation campaign of German ornithologists. The paper also argues that ornithologists’ observation practices have contributed to the construction of a benevolent cultural image of the Collared Dove. This sets the case of the Collared Dove apart from many recent debates in which newly arriving species have been framed as a threat to biodiversity. The paper contributes both to a historical understanding of scientific fieldwork as well as of the role of scientific knowledge in the shaping of cultural meanings of animals. (shrink)

The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when (...) infants are observed repeatedly in the Strange Situation,the pattern of behavior is said to be highly similar, and this pattern is said to predict the infants' future behavior in a diverse array of contexts. After an exhaustive review of the literature, it is shown that these popular claims are empirically unsupported in their strong form, and that the interpretations in terms of biological adaptationare misguided. There is little reliable evidence about the specific dimensions of parental behavior that affect Strange Situation behavior, although there does appear to be some relationship between these constructs. Temporal stability in security of attachment ishigh only when there is stability in family and caretaking circumstances. Likewise, patterns of Strange Situation behavior only have substantial predictive validity in similarly stable families. Implications for future research and theorizing — particularly as they relate to the use of evolutionary biology in psychological theory — are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Samantha Vice’s prescriptions for living morally as a white person in South Africa today. I allow that her ‘How do I live in this strange place?’ (2010) is convincing when read – probably against intent – as a descriptive account. It fails, though, in its attempt to provide an attractive set of moral prescriptions. I set out an argument against both shame and silence, focussing primarily on shame as I contend that the need (...) to withdraw or keep silent follows from feeling ashamed. I argue that shame is experienced as a diminution of the self, whereas guilt is experienced as a burdening of the self by wrongful behaviour; the diminution of the self in shame experiences is intrinsically harmful, and instead of enabling the self to be moral, actually inhibits the moral instincts of a person by cutting the self off from other selves. In a group context this type of severance has unhealthy moral features, as well as negative consequences for inter-group relations. (shrink)

Non-striving is an important aspect of mindfulness practice, but it has not been sufficiently researched. This study examine whether a strange loop based task — Infinite Water Scooping Task — performed for ten minutes, has an effect on non-striving behaviour and performance in a subsequent word length comparison task. Results showed that performance (number of correct trials) did not differ significantly between the two groups, though the experimental group tended to perform worse. However, participants in the experimental group took (...) a significantly shorter time to respond to the word length comparison task than those in the control group. It is inferred that shorter time taken reflects response without investing much effort to count with care, i.e. non-striving. The present study demonstrates that the brief strange loop task implemented in this study elicited non-striving behaviour compared to the effects of the control task and adds to the understanding of non-striving in the context of mindfulness. The Infinite Water Scooping Task may be useful for illustrating and teaching non-striving within mindfulness practice. (shrink)

In both his life and poetry, The Ruined Cottage marked a decisive breakthrough for Wordsworth, which resulted from his daring adoption and sustained use of a monistic idea. Though hitherto mostly dismissed or construed as a derivative of Platonism, Stoicism, Christian mysticism, and/or other conventional English and European concepts and usually seen as part of his supposedly quietist retreat from radical politics, the philosophy of One Life which Wordsworth promoted was in reality a recognizably unconventional conceptual innovation, which indeed made (...) possible his poetic and political innovations in The Ruined Cottage and beyond. In the larger context of ideas that extends well beyond England and Europe and involves in particular the Chinese cosmological belief in tianren heyi or humanity’s unity with heaven, this essay explores Wordsworth’s innovative use of monism in The Ruined Cottage and argues for a significantly different understanding of Wordsworth and the related rise of English Romanticism. (shrink)

Una Stojnić urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnić’s theories of demon-strations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to meet (...) the demands on any theory of reference. Furthermore, the paper argues that, so far as Stojnić’s theories of these terms go, they are false. This argument appeals to perception-based theories of demonstratives, a part of the tradition that Stojnić strangely overlooks. The paper ends by arguing briefly that though coherence has a place in a theory of understanding, it has no place in a theory of meaning. (shrink)

This paper discusses the explanatory significance of the equilibrium concept in the context of an example of extremely complicated dynamical behavior. In particular, numerical evidence is presented for the existence of chaotic dynamics on a "strange attractor" in the evolutionary game dynamics introduced by Taylor and Jonker [also known as the "replicator dynamics"]. This phenomenon is present already in four strategy evolutionary games where the dynamics takes place in a simplex in three dimensional space-the lowest number of dimensions (...) in which such a strange attractor is possible. From a dynamical point of view, it is the attractor-rather than the equilibrium-that is of prime interest. (shrink)

In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the advocates (...) of the unrepresentability and shows why the often made connection to Kant is flawed. Although his Critique of the Power of Judgment affirms indeed that the prohibition of representation is the “perhaps most sublime passage in the Jewish Law”, turning the prohibition of representation into a supposedly Kantian claim does not hold grounds. The essay reconstructs the political framework of the debate, situates the Kantian passage in its precise philosophical context and then successively assesses the main arguments put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman in their critique of Lanzmann’s categorical imperative. While showing why the rhetoric of the “unrepresentable” bear troubling structural analogies to what they want to fight (i.e. the politics of erasure, which always also include the erasure of the traces of erasure), a certain notion of the “unrepresentable” is rescued nevertheless at the end of the essay. Representation, so it is argued by returning to a Kantian distinction, is not a matter of Kanon, but a matter of Organon, which then puts the debate about the Sublime (which took place between Lyotard and Rancière in the 90’s) into a new perspective. (shrink)

Abstract:In considering the potential of world music in music education, we might imagine ways to think about musics in cultural context or on their own terms. Engaging musics on their own terms involves embracing epistemological diversity; different epistemological frameworks accompany different musics and treating musics ethnocentrically is both an injustice and effectively an epistemological colonization. In considering how to engage musics and their accompanying sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts on their own terms, I put forward Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on dialogism (...) as a theoretical framework to examine the encounter, drawing also upon Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of the “strange encounter” and Megan Boler’s “pedagogy of discomfort” to consider pedagogical possibilities for fostering ethical encounters in music education and critical and mindful engagement in any musical encounter. (shrink)

The essay presents a relational concept of the stranger parting from and at the same time going beyond Alfred Schutz’s famous and controversial conception of “The Stranger.” Not only the subjective viewpoint of the stranger entering an in‑group – as in the Schutzian outline – is relevant for the construction of strangeness, but also the interactional context and the receiving in‑group with its respective patterns of culture. For strangeness is a relational concept, it is only constructed in relationships of (...) individuals and groups; it is an ascription or “label” that is activated in interaction processes. Within in‑ and out‑group constellations, the stranger is objectified by social typification, which may be based on a de‑subjectivation and reification of the respective Other. Relational strangeness refers to the diverse possibilities of the social construction of the stranger, always taking into consideration the individuals involved in in‑ and out‑group relations. (shrink)

We tend to seek theoretical explanations of our own human behavior, to understand everything we do as arising, computationally, from a systematic set of simple laws, principles, or rules. Here, influenced by the later Wittgenstein, I argue that the very possibility of the kind of talk we use in our theorizing arises out of the joint or dialogical activities in which we engage in our practical lives together, and only has its meaning within the context of such activities – (...) thus we cannot turn it around to explain its own genesis. We can, however, achieve a greater reflective awareness of our own structuring of our own activities through the new, nontheoretical methods Wittgenstein introduces into our intellectual practices. Here, I explore some of these methods, and the strange nature of our dialogical activities when seen in their light. (shrink)

In the wake of much previous work on Gilles Deleuze's relations to other thinkers (including Bergson, Spinoza and Leibniz), his relation to Kant is now of great and active interest and a thriving area of research. In the context of the wider debate between 'naturalism' and 'transcendental philosophy', the implicit dispute between Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism' and Kant's 'transcendental idealism' is of prime philosophical concern. -/- Bringing together the work of international experts from both Deleuze scholarship and Kant scholarship, Thinking (...) Between Deleuze and Kant addresses explicitly the varied and various connections between these two great European philosophers, providing key material for understanding the central philosophical problems in the wider 'naturalism/ transcendental philosophy' debate. The book reflects an area of great current interest in Deleuze Studies and initiates an ongoing interest in Deleuze within Kant scholarship. The contributors are Mick Bowles, Levi R. Bryant, Patricia Farrell, Christian Kerslake, Matt Lee, Michael J. Olson, Henry Somers-Hall and Edward Willatt. (shrink)

In recent years, many medical schools around the world have formally established professionalism education as part of their standard curriculum. While the call to prepare future doctors to behave ethically and professionally is not new, what is new is the emphasis on identity formation in the context of the expanding online universe. Nonetheless, role modelling the professional image is challenging in the digital age, especially when cultures and customs across disciplines and generations collide. Against the backdrop of hyper-vigilance about (...) our professional image, this paper explores whether the hidden professionalism curriculum may inadvertently stifle creativity and humanity. It proposes the positive use of social media as relational or pedagogical tools in teaching learners about work-life balance and responsible online behaviours. (shrink)

In this article human-posthuman ruptures and disconnections both in comprehension and in practices, as well as the possibility of epistemological contingency contemporaneously are investigated. This means that an epistemological ruptures and an ontological disconnections of sexuality both differ from one another, and also join together. Since ancient times both sensitive and sensible practices of sexuality were considered the best mode to concern to sexual care of self. It has shown that, in relation to sexuality, a correlation of epistemological discontinuity and (...) continuity is possible. Sexuality, which is actualized with the help of both natural, vital and death, annihilative drives, fits into the context of onticology as a posthuman ontology. Being connected with the thermodynamics of infinitesimal vital parts, anonymous strange strangers, singularities, it turns out to be especially awesome. Such a mode of sexuality is not necessarily reproductive; rather, it unfolds in the fluid space of non-presence and at the same time determines this space. It emphasizes that that the cos mo‑illogical becoming of posthuman leads to negentropy or extropy as vitality. Following this position, the foucaultian conception of the care of self mirrors lacanian graphs of sexuation in a context of object-oriented ontologies in comparison with philosophies of presence. It is recognized that this is the sexuality of the productive disconnection and the pleasure cosmic dissolution. This article concludes by illustrating that the mode of sexuality of Speculative Posthumanism is contingent with the Libidinal Materialism or Vital Posthumanism in a context in which the sexuality of Wide Human Descendants is thought to be oriented to that which is pleasure and is differentiated. (shrink)

James F. Sheridan Allegheny College As we come to the end of the century, an attentive student of con temporary European philosophy will no doubt be startled by a volume titled Husserl in Contemporary Context. Such philosophers are most likely to believe that Hussed has now been declared II classical" rather than a contemporary thinker or, worse, simply old fashioned. Access to Hussed today will most likely come through the allegedly definitive critiques of his work by Heidegger and Derrida (...) and to a lesser extent through the readings of his work by Levinas and Merleau Ponty although Merleau-Ponty himself has been declared old fashioned by some postmodems. Hence, if by II contemporary" one understands the problematic set by the work of the late Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, et. al., Hussed's work seems strange indeed in such a contemporary context, seems better understood as the last gasp of philosophy dominated by metaphysics and thus fit only for inclusion in courses in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a foremost singer of qawwâlî. This Muslim devotional music, which is prominent in South Asia, has been developed since the fourteenth century by the Sufi circles of the Chishti brotherhood in order to preach and communicate the teachings of the saints. Inspired by mystic spirituality, Nusrat's music travelled through the East and the West, absorbing some of the features of the musical cultures with which it came in contact. It also travelled through time, transforming the (...) traditional style of the ancient chanted poetry into new forms of musical expression. Nusrat's life and his artistic vicissitudes show the postmodern destiny of qawwâlî as a religious kind of music that apparently went through a process of desacralization and profanation as a result of multiple interpretations by different audiences. In order to discern the conditions of significance, semiotics reconstructs the relation between text and context of interpretation on the ground of structural pertinences. In this way, semiotics offers an analytical standpoint alternative to the postmodernist approach to postmodern cultural phenomena. By surveying the forms of listening that are structurally provided by the textual discourse, semiotics investigates the destiny of the musical and religious meanings of qawwâlî in relation to the process of intercultural translation. (shrink)

This article reflects on the successes and failures of a new Philosophy and Ethics course in a low socioeconomic context in Perth, Western Australia, with the eventual demise of the subject in the school at the end of 2010. We frame this reflection within Deleuzian notions of geophilosophy to advocate for a Philosophy and Ethics that is informed by nomadic thought, as this offers a critical freedom for students to transform themselves and their society and suggests practical ways both (...) of overcoming the prejudices which led to its demise and of student reluctance to engage in open discussion in class. We consider the demise of the course a ‘missed opportunity’ because it had so much potential to be transformative of student subjectivities in schools. (shrink)

Stoicism is now widely recognised as one of the most important philosophical schools of ancient Greece and Rome. But how did it influence Western thought after Greek and Roman antiquity? The question is a difficult one to answer because the most important Stoic texts have been lost since the end of the classical period, though not before early Christian thinkers had borrowed their ideas and applied them to discussions ranging from dialectic to moral theology. Later philosophers became familiar with Stoic (...) teachings only indirectly, often without knowing that an idea came from the Stoics. The contributors recruited for this volume, first published in 2004, include some of the leading international scholars of Stoicism as well as experts in later periods of philosophy. They trace the impact of Stoicism and Stoic ideas from late antiquity through the medieval and modern periods. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that there are significant ethical problems with nonmedical sex selection, and that prohibitive legislation is justified. The central argument put forward is that nonmedical sex selection is a sexist practice which promotes socially restrictive conceptions of sex, gender and family. Several steps are taken to justify this position: background information on technology and legislation is provided, the neoliberal position that is supportive of nonmedical sex selection is described, and preliminary reasons for rejecting (...) this approach are given. A detailed description of how a harm/benefit based analysis contributes to the argument against nonmedical sex selection, and how it successfully counters most criticism, is provided. The paper concludes by suggesting that virtue ethics further strengthens the moral argument against nonmedical sex selection. (shrink)