What is the nature of time? This new study engages with the philosophy of Henri Bergson on time and proposes a new way of thinking about the effects of future events on the past. According to Bergson, time is an integral feature of real things, just as much as their material or size. When a flower grows, it takes a period of real time for it to flourish, which cannot be quickened or slowed down, nor can it be eliminated from (...) the process of growth. Bergson named this real time 'duration' and argued that everything and everyone exist as duration, and that internal processes flow into one another, with no clear boundaries that separate one phase of duration from another. According to Bergson's philosophy, the past does not disappear but smoothly flows into the present, forming an indivisible dynamic unity. But what if the causal flow of temporal reality is not unidirectional? What if not only past events influence future ones, but future ones in their turn have retrospective effect on past occurrences? The author of this book analyses these key questions, asserts that the changeability of the past follows from Bergson's theory of time and proposes a theory of embodied time that involves the retrospective enrichment of reality. (shrink)

Bergson's views on communication can be deduced from his theory of selfhood, in which he identifies the human self as heterogeneous duration a complex process that can only be adequately understood from within, when we intuit our own inner life. Another person, accessing us from outside, inevitably distorts and misunderstands our nature because duration is incommunicable. Does Bergsonism assert the failure of communication in principle? No, if we develop Bergson's theory further and identify the process of communication as heterogeneous duration. (...) As such, it is intuited from within by its participants who engage with each other in the process of dealing with the same object. They intuit the process of which they are part and thus intuit each other's involvement in it as well. To appreciate the importance of this implicit mutual communicative engagement we only need to imagine an empty airport with just one passenger or a deserted pleasure beach.Bergson does not have a theory of communication per se but his views on communication can be extracted from his ontology and epistemology. These views may account for some apparent failures of communication conflicts, loneliness, hostility and Bergson uses them to suggest a way out towards better and more harmonious intersubjective relations.Bergson claims that we misunderstand reality in general and each other in particular. Instead of trying to grasp human nature directly in intuition we analyse its being and create a distorted view of one another. If we were able to conceive the human self as it is, we would see it as duration and might be able to reach the state of an open society where people's love towards one another is ontologically backed up by their openness towards each other's being.However, the Bergsonian theory of duration and intuition, promising to resolve the difficulties of communication, reasserts these difficulties metaphysically. The idea of duration entails the impossibility of accessing it from outside, as the genuine view of it is only possible from within. This paper, instead of trying to salvage a model of communication where people strive to intuit each other's uniqueness, locates intuition in the very act of communication. Bergson himself finds intuition in artistic creation where the artist and spectators communicate by intuiting a common object without learning any personal details about each other. We find that communication is itself duration and that the communicating participants are heterogeneous elements of that duration. As such they are subservient to the act of communication that displays features of autonomous existence. Our model of communication, although accepting the impenetrability of one's person for a complete cognitive penetration from outside, allows for the partial fusion of minds engaged in the same act of communication and negotiating the same subject matter. (shrink)

Is atheist spirituality an oxymoron and, if so, did Soviet citizens brought up in a definitively atheist environment have no spiritual pursuits? The author asks this question, drawing on Dostoyevsky’s dark prophecy and interrogating Yuri Levada’s model of a Soviet simple person as a distinct anthropological type. Taking on board Riegel’s concept of political religion and testing Marxism–Leninism as a source of wisdom for the Soviet nonbelievers, the author seeks to uncover a version of spirituality compatible with Soviet-style atheism. The (...) discussion also involves the examination of Russian literary tradition and Borodina’s philosophical theory of spirituality, which accords with Sharafutdinova accounting for the phenomenon of inner exile in the late Soviet period and Bekmetov’s reminder that Buddhist world-view had a significant influence on Russian cultural metalanguage. (shrink)

Russians and Westerners access, process and communicate information in different ways. Whilst Westerners favour detailed analysis of subject matter, Russians tend to focus on certain components that are, in their view, significant. This disparity makes it difficult to achieve constructive dialogues between Western and Russian stakeholders contributing to cross-cultural communication problems. The author claims that the difference in the ways Russians and Westerners negotiate information is a significant cultural difference between Russia and West rather than an irritating (and in principle (...) amenable) lack of analytical skills on the Russian partners’ part. Understanding the reasons behind the Russian-specific approaches to dealing with information would be a positive step towards a more effective cross-cultural communication, important in business situations and essential in diplomacy. (shrink)

For Bergson, creating a masterpiece and perceiving it amounts to an act of intuitive communication between the artist and the spectator. Both the artist and the viewer intuit the work of art, which is something other than their own personal history, something that belongs to both of them and at the same time exists independently from them. The Bergsonian concept of heterogeneous duration, which primarily refers to consciousness and living processes, is extended in this instance to artistic communication as a (...) process that unites creation and contemplation. Artistic creation and communication constitute an intimate ontological bonding wherein human beings actualize their ability to intuit and where an artist shares with the audience his or her deep emotions without revealing personal data. This process of creation and perception of art could be named artistic duration or artistic communication. This duration is created by a joint participation of more than one individual and represents duration that escapes the boundaries of one mind because it is created by more than one mind. The artist initiates a continuity of emotion, by expressing it in art and making us feel it when we admire the masterpiece. By perceiving it, we do not return to the artist’s time and re-live his or her artistic creation vicariously, but pick up where the artist left this creation and let it live further on in our soul. (shrink)

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Edited By Tsing Anna Lowenhaupt, Swanson Heather Anne, Gan Elaine, Bubandt Nils.

The relation of our past memories and our communication with others is not simply that of linear causality, whereby our memories smoothly glide into our communicative performance and remain unaffected themselves. Psychologists reveal the opposite process where a current communication has an effect on our memories, not just influencing their selection but also producing false recognition. In this article I will attempt to give a philosophical evaluation of this twofold relationship of memory and communication, paying a special attention to the (...) fabrication of memories, to the significance of this process for the effectiveness of social integration, and to the effects it may have on our authenticity as individuals.An act of communication is not a creation ex nihilo but is a culmination of numberless physical and psychological processes, one of which is remembering, forgetting and recalling. What we say ourselves may be a logical and smooth prolongation of our memories and our past lives, but what we hear from others is not. The information that is communicated to us may contradict our previous beliefs, our previous understanding of the matter in question, and even threaten our established worldview. This is acutely felt by people who have to live through a value-changing period in their society or through a crisis in their personal life.Nevertheless we are required to maintain the communicative process and respond to new demands, and so we have to find ways of adapting ourselves to the new information, even if our past experiences and beliefs cannot serve as a foundation for accepting it. We can, however, construct such a foundation retrospectively, making ourselves believe that we were being prepared for this new situation. For example, the people who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, had to face a complete change of values, and the process of adaptation seemed less traumatic for those who, fabricated or inflated their own supposed disagreement with the system prior to the political changes. (shrink)

The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. By.

The Moving Spotlight: An Essay on Time and Ontology. By Cameron Ross P..

When we communicate with others, we usually know when we are expected to contribute to an evolving dialogue, such as during a debate, or when it is suitable to generate predictable responses, for example, at a marriage ceremony. However, in cross-cultural communication situations, communicating partners may have different assumptions in this respect. In particular, when a western communicator expects a dialogical development, a Russian participant may expect the same communication situation to progress as a sequence of predictable communication acts. This (...) clash of implicit expectations often results in communication failure, without either party realizing that implementing incompatible approaches to information sharing is the reason for this failure. In this article, I introduce the terms ‘dialogical engagement’ and ‘monological sequencing’ whilst exploring cross-cultural communication problems between Russia and the West. I use these terms to describe mechanisms that characterize both cultures’ preferred communication patterns and which, when inadvertently deployed, cause collisions between Russian and western communicating partners. By uncovering these differences, I intend to progress beyond merely acknowledging cross-cultural communication problems between the two worlds. Besides, as in the Russian cultural setting, more communication situations are implicitly expected to develop as monological sequences than similar situations in the West, understanding this particular distinction may prevent practitioners in numerous fields from making the mistake of expecting cross-cultural communication situations to develop in line with their implicit assumptions. (shrink)

The nested continua model is a visual methodological device, consisting in the graphic representation of a series of concentric circles representing successive contexts, within which a particular problem can be examined, ranging from the most specific to the least specific. It is ‘not fundamentally about Peirce’ (p. 3); however, Slater draws on Peirce’s ability to accommodate ‘distinctions of enormous gravity’ (p. 4) required in theology and acknowledges that his own model is analogous to Peirce’s Existential Graphs.

The authors seek to contribute to the existing discussion of the communicative function of political memes by bringing into discussion political memes used by opposition leaders in the 2018 Russian presidential election campaigns as examples of memes being purposefully deployed in targeted political communications. Specifically, they focus on Navalny’s use of the ‘yellow duck’ meme. Drawing on the existing research of memes’ mythological properties, the authors claim that the combination of dialogue and conflict as two main functions entailed in the (...) political meme is a likely key element that increases the popularity of a meme and makes it viral. The discussion of concrete examples is preceded by a discussion that contextualizes the study of a political meme within the field of communication studies as a device that offers clarity in the chaotic flow of information, is constructed by both addresser and the addressee and serves as an effective tool for promoting ideologies. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the Peircean studies by providing an account of the reception of Peirce’s philosophy in Russian academia. Peirce was introduced to Russian scholarship at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Russian scholars’ work on Peirce remains unnoticed for the most part in the international academic world. Presenting an outline of their research fills a certain gap in the Peircean studies demonstrating how Peirce was received in imperial Russia, the USSR and post-Soviet Russian academia. This (...) overview can also serve, to some extent, as a contribution to the studies in cross-cultural communication, because the authors present Russian philosophers’ take on an American philosopher considered in the context of the changing historical and cultural landscape. From being introduced to Peirce via a francophone scholar at the beginning of the twentieth century to criticizing Peirce from the stance of dialectical materialism during the Cold War and exploring Peirce’s original work from various angles in the recent decades, Russophone academics could not avoid being affected by the complexity of cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

This book seeks to fill a void in contemporary aesthetics scholarship by considering the cognitive features that make the aesthetic and artistic worthy of philosophical study. Aesthetic cognition has been largely abandoned by analytical philosophy, which instead tends to focus its attention on the ‘non-exhibited’ properties of artwork or issues concerning semantic and syntactic structure. The Cognitive Basis of Aesthetics innovatively seeks to correct the marginalization of aesthetics in analytical philosophy by reinterpreting aesthetic cognition through an integration of Ernst Cassirer’s (...) philosophy of symbolic forms with Paul Crowther’s theory of imagination and philosophy of art. This integration has three important outcomes: 1) it explains why the aesthetic and artistic constitute a unique form of knowledge; 2) it shows the role this plays in the formation of aesthetics as a discipline; and 3) it describes why aesthetic cognition is so deeply engaging. This book’s unique theoretical approach engages with important works of visual, conceptual, and digital art, as well as literature, music, and theatre. (shrink)

Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach to exploring the limitations of (...) non-ideal theory in its ability to respond to and redress the continuing harms done to Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism, including by outlining non-ideal theory’s relationship to a colonial politics of recognition. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

Adam Ferguson’s imperial thought casts new light on the age-old republican dilemma of the tension between empire and liberty. Generations of republican writers had been haunted by this issue as the decline of Rome proved that imperial expansion would eventually ruin the liberty of a state. Many eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers regarded this as an insoluble conundrum and thus became critics of empire. Ferguson shared their basic views but, paradoxically, was still able to defend the British Empire in the debates over (...) the American Revolution. His argument effectively offered a viable solution to the republican dilemma, which distinguished him from his contemporaries. In light of this, I argue that political representation was the pivotal conception for Ferguson to make empire and liberty compatible. It was on this ground that he could advocate the union with Ireland, which he believed would lead to a lasting balance of power in Europe. -/- ; British Empire; liberty; balance of power; political representation; American Revolution; Anglo-Irish Union. (shrink)

The subject of our article is the identification of cultural codes of Eastern European shtetl towns in the play by Grigory Gorin "Memorial Prayer", the libretto of which was written by the author based on the works of the famous Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. The author of the article describes the history and conditions of localization of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the peculiarities of its transformation, the tragic history of the Jewish theater in the first (...) third of the twentieth century. After the disappearance of the towns and the disuse of the Yiddish language, the preservation of the history of the characteristic everyday and philosophical way of life of the shtetls became the goal of museum figures, historians, writers, playwrights, and artists. In the work, using the example of Tevye the milkman, his family and environment, characteristic images of the inhabitants of small towns, their habitat, types of thinking and actions are revealed. The article uses the methods of historicism in the retrospective of the culture of Shtetl towns, the method of analysis in the identification of Shtetl archetypes, the method of synthesis in the generalization of a set of characteristic cultural codes. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. Eastern European Jewish shtetl towns are small urban-type settlements with a predominantly Jewish population, whose unique culture was determined by the Jewish faith, everyday and religious traditions, the Yiddish language, as well as the localization of residence in a small area. 2. During the period of large-scale social upheavals of the early twentieth century and the subsequent expansion beyond the boundaries of the towns, their unique culture became a mythologeme, the foundation for writers, artists, musicians, and theater figures who emerged from it. One of the milestones in the preservation of this culture was the Jewish theater GOSET, whose existence was tragically cut short in the middle of the twentieth century. 3. The play "Memorial Prayer", written by Grigory Gorin based on the works of Sholem Aleichem and staged at the Lenkom Theater by Mark Zakharov, became the quintessence of the characteristic images of the shtetl, and at the same time the revival of authentic Jewish culture. The author's special contribution is to highlight in the play the images-the archetypes of the Shtetl, which have become cultural markers, or codes of Jewish Yiddish culture. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

The medical drama and its central character, the doctor-hero have been a mainstay of popular television. House M.D. offers a new (and problematic) iteration of the doctor-hero. House eschews the generic conventions of the “television doctor” by being neither the idealized television doctor of the past, nor the more recent competent but often fallible physicians in entertainment texts. Instead, his character is a fragmented text which privileges the biomedical over the personal or emotional with the ultimate goal of scientifically uncovering (...) and resolving instances of disease. This article examines the implicit and explicit messages in House M.D. and critically analyzes both the show and its lead character in relation to the traditional medical drama genre that highlights the “doctor-hero” as the central character. While at first House seems to completely violate narrative and generic norms, ultimately the program provides a new form that reinforces the presence of the doctor-hero, but highlights House’s character as the central figure who is personally and interpersonally problematic but biomedically effective. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

Bare conditionals, I argue, exhibit Conditional Duality in that when they appear in downward entailing environments they differ from bare conditionals elsewhere in having existential rather than universal force. Two recalcitrant phenomena are shown to find a new explanation under this thesis: bare conditionals under only, and bare conditionals in the scope of negative nominal quantifiers, or what has come to be known as Higginbotham’s puzzle. I also consider how bare conditionals behave when embedded under negation, arguing that such conditionals (...) often involve denial negation. One important conclusion that emerges from the discussion is that an account of bare conditionals that validates Conditional Excluded Middle is not warranted. By limiting the scope of the strict analysis Conditional Duality is also a way of maintaining such an account. (shrink)

The paper is about the connection between logic and discrimination, with special focus on Plumwood’s ideas in her groundbreaking article ‘The Politics of Reason. Towards a Feminist Logic’ (1993). Although Plumwood’s paper is not focused on the notion of discrimination, what she writes is useful for illuminating some basic mechanisms of thought that are at the basis of discriminatory practices. After an introductory section about the concepts of logic and discrimination and their possible interconnections, I present Plumwood’s ideas in 1993 (...) with a special focus on their relevance for understanding the nature of discrimination. More specifically, I use examples of discriminatory practices that make the connection between logical operations and oppression envisaged by Plumwood clear. I focus especially on two questions: Can logic produce discrimination? Can logic contribute to the fight against discrimination? If so, how? (shrink)

Das Verstehen legt Wittgenstein einem Ich bei: Einer versteht, indem er Zeichen anwendet. Anwendbare Zeichen sind Symbole: Sie werden bedeutsam, wenn sie in Zusammenhang mit anderen Zeichen gebracht werden und eine Funktion in der kognitiven oder praktischen Aneignung der Welt erfüllen. Symbole gehören zu Symbolsystemen und können als Vorschriften für symbolische, d.h. semiotische und insbesondere logische, Operationen mit Zeichen aufgefasst werden. Die Veränderung der Wittgensteinschen Auffassung des Verstehens besteht vor allem im Anerkennen der Erfahrung der Sozialisation als einer der wichtigsten (...) Voraussetzungen der sinnvollen Anwendung von Zeichen. Diese Veränderung, ihre Quellen und Wirkungen sind das Thema dieses Buches. (shrink)

It has been a long-standing puzzle that Negative Polarity Items appear to split into two subvarieties when their effect on the interpretation of questions is taken into account: while questions with any and ever can be used as unbiased requests of information, questions with so-called `minimizers', i.e. idioms like lift a finger and the faintest idea, are always biased towards a negative answer (cf. Ladusaw 1979). Focusing on yes/no questions, this paper presents a solution to this puzzle. Specifically it is (...) shown that in virtue of containing even (cf. Heim 1984), minimizers, unlike any, trigger a presupposition, which reduces the set of the possible answers to a question to the singleton containing the negative answer. (shrink)