Deleuze's concepts - such as assemblage, the fold, difference and repetition, cinema and desire - are key to understanding his philosophical approach: they work to unsettle particular bodies of knowledge, to open them up and link them to other concepts within and outside that body of knowledge. The short and accessible chapters in this book each focus on a single concept, offering a definition and showing what the concept does. The contributors also consider how the concepts are engaged, intersect, and (...) link, and how they may deviate from other areas of postmodern thought. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts is aimed at a readership new to Deleuze both from within philosophy and outside the discipline. Contributors include Christa Albrecht-Crane, Ronald Bogue, Felicity J. Colman, Tom Conley, Gregory Flaxman, Eugene W. Holland, Karen Houle, Gregg Lambert, Melissa McMahon, Judith L. Poxon, Gregory Seigworth, Jennifer Daryl Slack, Daniel W. Smith, Patty Sotirin, Charles J. Stivale, Kenneth Surin, James Williams, and J. Macgregor Wise. (shrink)
Beyond impressionistic observations, little is known about the role and influence of scientific societies on research conduct. Acknowledging that the influence of scientific societies is not easily disentangled from other factors that shape norms and practices, this article addresses how best to study the promotion of research integrity generally as well as the role and impact of scientific societies as part of that process. In setting forth the parameters of a research agenda, the article addresses four issues: (1) how to (...) conceptualize research on scientific societies and research integrity; (2) challenges and complexities in undertaking basic research; (3) strategies for undertaking basic research that is attentive to individual, situational, organizational, and environmental levels of analysis; and (4) the need for evaluation research as integral to programmatic change and to assessment of the impact of activities by scientific societies. (shrink)
An ideal introduction for students, Film, Theory and Philosophy brings together leading scholars to provide a clear, detailed overview of the key thinkers who have shaped the field of film philosophy. From continental philosophers to analytical philosophers, film-makers, film reviewers, sociologists, and cultural theorists, the essays reveal how philosophy can be applied to film analysis and how film can be used to illustrate philosophical problems. But most importantly, the essays explore how cinema has shaped contemporary philosophy and how philosophy has (...) led to a reappraisal of film. This collection will prove an invaluable reference and guide to readers interested in a deeper understanding of the issues and insights presented by the philosophy of film. (shrink)
Modal logics support philosophy, providing means to organise information, and to think and act in response to abstract concepts and to real conditions. In its organisation, the modal is generative of the ethics of any given system. Feminist new materialist practices require us to consider ethics when generated by technological rather than theological modalities.
“Feminicity” is the term for a predicate register that enables feminist work be accounted for as relational “active-points” that collectively can be seen through what they have achieved. But going further, it marks where those active-points contribute to the dynamic field of feminist epistemologies and where change occurs. This article contributes to my larger project’s discussion of this concept. Broadly, feminicity argues that the active-points of feminist practices need to be understood within their situated fields as materialist informatics. In the (...) digital era, examples of the affects of digital feminicity are as identified in works such as those by Wajcman ; Haraway, Hayles, VNSMatrix, Adam, Plant. Collectively, such authors and artists opened a creative, and sometimes radical discourse of the digital field as multidirectional, multidimensional, multitemporal platform of “gender actions”. Taken as a predicated field sense of the term “predicate”), this work contributes to the feminist materialist reappraisal of feminist epistemology, and larger radical feminist deconstructive projects. Thus conceived, the genealogy of digital feminicity problematizes the monopolitical terms of feminism in its collation of actions, enabling a re-situation of feminist practices as positive material interventions and expressions of the ontological constitution of the political sphere. Feminicity does not propose a chronological account of the active-points, but processually and systemically addresses the terms of generational epistemological political change. This article describes the ways in which a materialist constructed register – “feminicity”– can be used to think about encounters between the domains of gender, politics and technology, as manifested by materialist informatics. For reasons of brevity, this article focuses on just two aspects of feminicity: the terms of predication of the female as gendered, and the issue of the image, as digital informatics, comprised of activitypoints of feminist practice. Consequently, these are measurable and offer practical resources for the general problem of gendering politics that operate in governance, resource distribution and a non-equal opportunity social/cultural power structure, under which minorities are disadvantaged. Feminist practice here refers to forms produced through feminist activities, ie, forms generated through relations with the matter of life through specific modalities of needs-based practices. (shrink)
Film Theory addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers, including the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, Miriam Hansen, bell hooks, Siegfried Kracauer, Raul Ruiz, P. Adams Sitney, Bernard Stiegler, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This volume takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar; and like all grammars, it forms part of the system of rules that govern a language, (...) and is thus applicable to wider range of media forms. In their creation of authorial trends, identification of the technology of cinema as a creative force, and production of films as aesthetic markers, film theories contribute an epistemological resource that connects the technologies of filmmaking and film composition. This book explores these connections through film theorisations of processes of the diagrammatisation of cinematic matters of the filmic world. (shrink)
The question of affect emerges in the daily realm of routine, and survival; of your physical and existential existence. No matter what the situation or condition in life, as observed, different systems are reactive and generative, corruptible and powerful, colonisable and subversive; that is to say, all systems are subject to affects as much as they are affective, and generative of positive and negative affects within and of a system. This proposition can be tested against whatever the degree of sentience (...) or sensitivity that a system’s responsive domains or bodies may hold. This Spinozist principle of understanding – that every body has the capacity to be affected in positive and or negative ways – provides one of the core axioms for any affect ecology. But if affect is to be taken as more than an indicator of change – a barometer of the change of conditions for a system – then how do we describe affect itself? How can the changes that the notions of affect seek to express be registered or measured? How can affect be situated by and generative of a system simultaneously? This question has long been the subject of Marie-Luise Angerer’s extensive research into and analysis of the conception of affect. (shrink)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)
Thomas Hobbes’s concept of magnanimity, a descendant of Aristotle’s “greatness of soul,” plays a key role in Hobbes’s theory with respect to felicity and the virtue of justice. In his Critique du ‘De Mundo’, Hobbes implies that only genuinely magnanimous people can achieve the greatest felicity in their lives. A life of felicity is a life of pleasure, where the only pleasure that counts is the well grounded glory experienced by those who are magnanimous. Hobbes suggests that (...)felicity involves the successful pursuit of desires, a pursuit at which the magnanimous are particularly adept. Additionally, Hobbes implies that those who possess the virtue of justice must also possess magnanimity; it is the just person’s “Nobleness or Gallantnesse of courage, (rarely found).” Leo Strauss and Dorothea Krook suggest that this cannot be Hobbes’s “final word” on justice, because, they say, Hobbes considers magnanimity a type of pride, which he derogates and cannot consistently associate with virtue. I argue that magnanimity, associated with well-grounded glory, is not a type of pride; only vain glory is. (shrink)
_ Source: _Volume 29, Issue 2, pp 129 - 147 Thomas Hobbes’s concept of felicity is a re-imagining of the Hellenistic concept of _eudaimonia_, which is based on the doctrine that people by nature are happy with little. His concept is based instead on an alternative view, that people by nature are never satisfied and it directly challenges the Aristotelian and Hellenistic concepts of _eudaimonia_. I also will suggest that Hobbes developed it from ideas he found in Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ (...) as well as in Francis Bacon’s critique of ancient moral philosophy in _The Advancement of Learning_. (shrink)
How often does an interest or pleasure in your life become something that has to be managed, given a hierarchical position amongst other tasks, and thus becomes a chore alongside other chores? When content and possibility are stripped by scheduling and the demands of capitalist required labour mean that free play or time required for speculative and/or creative thought is removed in the interests of deadlines, what happens to the compassionate, generous and intimate functioning of thought and life? This paper (...) considers how Guattari argues that subjectivities are produced and organised by what he describes as machinic assemblages. Machinic assemblages are those aspects of life that operate to regulate the affective powers of life. Guattari's work on activities such as art making, game play, music and performance provides ways to consider the labour of subjectivity outside of work. I ask the reader to consider what the notion and motivation for play signal. Arguing that a singular life at play is the collective event of play, I describe play as a mediatising form for the production of subjectivity. The play field situates and directs the machinic assemblage of subjectivation through its own forms of mediatisation. (shrink)
Regarding marriage, John Wyclif defends the following position: strictly speaking, no words or any kind of sensory signs would be needed, since the consensus of the spouses together with God's approbation would suffice for the accomplishment of marriage. But if words do have to be pronounced, then the appropriate formula should not be in the present, but in the future. In the following, I shall discuss Wyclif's arguments by comparing them with some other medieval positions, as well as with some (...) elements of contemporary theories of speech acts. It will appear that in his analysis of the only sacrament which is a “social act“ in the literal sense of the expression, Wyclif (i) clearly acknowledges the central role of individual intentions behind (linguistic) conventions, and (ii) carefully distinguishes between the different, chronologically disparate acts involved in marriage and their respective (semantic, psychological and factual) felicity conditions. (shrink)
This paper presents a novel account of focal stress and pitch contour in English dialogue. We argue that one should analyse and treat focus and pitch contour jointly, since (i) some pragmatic interpretations vary with contour (e.g., whether an utterance accepts or rejects; or whether it implicates a positive or negative answer); and (ii) there are utterances with identical prosodic focus that in the same context are infelicitous with one contour, but felicitous with another. We offer an account of two (...) distinct pitch contours that predicts the correct felicity judgements and implicatures, outclassing other models in empirical coverage or formality. Prosodic focus triggers a presupposition, where what is presupposed and how the presupposition is resolved depends on prosodic contour. If resolving the presupposition entails the proffered content, then the proffered content is uninteresting and hence the utterance is in-felicitous. Otherwise, resolving the presupposition may lead to an implicature. We regiment this account in SDRT. (shrink)
Perfectivity is often assumed to entail the completion of the event described by event-denoting stems and their arguments. Although some scholars have noted that perfective markers do not always entail completion, their formal definitions contradict their informal descriptions. We show that these traditional models of perfective aspect cannot account for the aspectual system of Thai. In Thai, perfective markers do not entail that the event was completed: the resulting state of sentences that are in appareance telic in their ‘inner aspect’ (...) need not have been reached. We call these non-completive perfective markers semi-perfectives. We propose a formal model of semi-perfectivity within Discourse Representation Theory that relies on the inclusion of an imperfective operator in the lexical meaning of Thai accomplishment verbs as well as the notion of maximal event relative to an event description. We show that this letter notion is strictly weaker than the traditional notion of felicity, thus demonstrating that (a)telicity is not the sole property of event descriptions relevant to the semantics of grammatical aspect. (shrink)
I am addressing you this evening in a somewhat unfamiliar theme: that of “logical values” or “values in speaking.” I do so since the points I want to raise come up very constantly in contemporary discussion, and yet are seldom made the object of explicit reflection. There are, it is plain, a large number of qualities which appeal to us in our utterances, whether in the setting forth of our notions in words, or in the weaving of such words into (...) sentences. And they may be said to appeal to us in a peculiar manner, and to satisfy a special set of interests in us, which we may group together as the “logical side” of our nature. Thus most people would say that clarity, relevance, coherence, solid significance and simplicity were merits in speaking, and that so also was truthful conformity to the facts of experience, whether in their general outline or their concrete detail. And everyone would admit readily that such excellences “belonged together,” that they were somehow akin, and that they differed profoundly from such virtues in speaking as poetic felicity, practical helpfulness, or moral and religious inspiration. And most people would also be willing to say, with a great deal of obscurity and most puzzling conviction, that the appeal of such qualities wasn't “merely momentary and personal,” but had something “solid” and “universal” about it, that a man would be foolish not to value such qualities, and that he couldn't help valuing them if he only thought of them sufficiently. And we should recommend such qualities to the approval of others with an air of earnestness and authority, setting them on a level, in this respect, with those other excellences that are called “ethical” and “aesthetic.” But while we could back our recommendation in the last two types of case with a great deal of systematic doctrine, built up in centuries of reflection, we should have little to bring forward in the former case, since the excellences that I want to call “logical,” though often acknowledged, have seldom been made the objects of systematic reflection. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the “true” has generally been ranged alongside of the “good” and the “beautiful” as a species of “ultimate value.”. (shrink)
American auteur Jeffrey Jacob "J. J." Abrams's genius for creating densely plotted scripts has won him broad commercial and critical success in TV shows such as Felicity, Emmy-nominated Alias, Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Lost, and the critically acclaimed Fringe. In addition, his direction in films such as Cloverfield, Super 8, and the new Mission Impossible and Star Trek films has left fans eagerly awaiting his revival of the Star Wars franchise. As a writer, director, producer, and composer, Abrams seamlessly (...) combines geek appeal with blockbuster intuition, leaving a distinctive stamp on all of his work and establishing him as one of Tinsel Town's most influential visionaries. In The Philosophy of J.J. Abrams, editors Patricia L. Brace and Robert Arp assemble the first collection of essays to highlight the philosophical insights of the Hollywood giant's successful career. The filmmaker addresses a diverse range of themes in his onscreen pursuits, including such issues as personal identity in an increasingly impersonal digitized world, the morality of terrorism, bioethics, friendship, family obligation, and free will. Utilizing Abrams's scope of work as a touchstone, this comprehensive volume is a guide for fans as well as students of film, media, and culture. The Philosophy of J.J. Abrams is a significant contribution to popular culture scholarship, drawing attention to the mind behind some of the most provocative television and movie plots of our day. (shrink)