The article examines whether state officials may shoot down a hijacked airplane which carries uninvolved passengers, if it is known that the plane will be used against the lives of other human beings. In its first sections, it explains the German Federal Constitutional Court’s verdict against such a permission, and it scrutinizes the crucial arguments in this ruling. The author then extends the discussion beyond the path taken by the court. She examines the defensive claims of passengers aboard the (...) plane and the protective claims of potential victims who are present at the hijackers’ target zone. In contrast to the German Federal Constitutional Court, she concludes that state officials must take the claims of both groups of potential victims equally serious, and that such conditions allow applying a consequentialist calculus because it is the only way out of a genuine dilemma. (shrink)

This paper is a historical, legal and philosophical analysis of the concept of human dignity in German and Kenyan constitutional law. We base our analysis on decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, in particular its take on life imprisonment and its 2006 decision concerning the shooting of hijacked airplanes, and on a close reading of the Constitution of Kenya. We also present a dialogue between us in which we offer some critical remarks on the concept of (...) human dignity in the two constitutions, each one of us from his own philosophical perspective. (shrink)

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ethic on behalf of the One Percent. However, workers and their advocates have long used the (...) work ethic on behalf of ordinary people. By exposing the ideological roots of contemporary neoliberalism as a perversion of the seventeenth-century Protestant work ethic, Elizabeth Anderson shows how we can reclaim the original goals of the work ethic, and uplift ourselves again. Hijacked persuasively and powerfully demonstrates how ideas inspired by the work ethic informed debates among leading political economists of the past, and how these ideas can help us today. (shrink)

A hijacking is a violent takeover, a misappropriation of something for a purpose other than its intended one, by parties other than those for whom the thing was meant. This issue explores the aesthetic practices and consequences of unauthorized repurposing.

This paper introduces the concept of linguistic hijacking, the phenomenon wherein politically significant terminology is co-opted by dominant groups in ways that further their dominance over marginalized groups. Here I focus on hijackings of the words “racist” and “racism.” The model of linguistic hijacking developed here, called the semantic corruption model, is inspired by Burge’s social externalism, in which deference plays a key role in determining the semantic properties of expressions. The model describes networks of deference relations, which support competing (...) meanings of, for example, “racist,” and postulates the existence of deference magnets that influence those networks over time. Linguistic hijacking functions to shift the semantic properties of crucial political terminology by causing changes in deference networks, spreading semantics that serve the interests of dominant groups, and weakening the influence of resistant deference networks. I consider an objection alleging the semantic corruption model gets the semantic data wrong because it entails those who hijack terms like “racist” speak truly, whereas it’s natural to see such hijacking misuses as false speech about racism. I then respond to this objection by invoking the framework of metalinguistic negotiation proposed by Plunkett and Sundell. (shrink)

Neuroscientists and clinicians often speak of addictive drugs ‘hijacking’ the brain. Earp et al. want to do to the notion of addiction what drugs allegedly do to the brains of addicts; hijack it and put it to other purposes. There are, as they point out, clear commonalities between addiction and being in love. But there are also very important differences. These differences are significant enough to entail that it is at best highly misleading to describe love as an addiction. Hijacking (...) addiction in this way is a move we should resist, both to better understand addiction and love, and to promote better responses to each.If anything justifies the hijacking metaphor with regard to... (shrink)

Invalid journals are recent challenges in the academic world and many researchers are unacquainted with the phenomenon. The number of victims appears to be accelerating. Researchers might be suspicious of predatory journals because they have unfamiliar names, but hijacked journals are imitations of well-known, reputable journals whose websites have been hijacked. Hijacked journals issue calls for papers via generally laudatory emails that delude researchers into paying exorbitant page charges for publication in a nonexistent journal. This paper presents (...) a method for detecting hijacked journals by using a classification algorithm. The number of published articles exposing hijacked journals is limited and most of them use simple techniques that are limited to specific journals. Hence we needed to amass Internet addresses and pertinent data for analyzing this type of attack. We inspected the websites of 104 scientific journals by using a classification algorithm that used criteria common to reputable journals. We then prepared a decision tree that we used to test five journals we knew were authentic and five we knew were hijacked. (shrink)

Invalid journals are recent challenges in the academic world and many researchers are unacquainted with the phenomenon. The number of victims appears to be accelerating. Researchers might be suspicious of predatory journals because they have unfamiliar names, but hijacked journals are imitations of well-known, reputable journals whose websites have been hijacked. Hijacked journals issue calls for papers via generally laudatory emails that delude researchers into paying exorbitant page charges for publication in a nonexistent journal. This paper presents (...) a method for detecting hijacked journals by using a classification algorithm. The number of published articles exposing hijacked journals is limited and most of them use simple techniques that are limited to specific journals. Hence we needed to amass Internet addresses and pertinent data for analyzing this type of attack. We inspected the websites of 104 scientific journals by using a classification algorithm that used criteria common to reputable journals. We then prepared a decision tree that we used to test five journals we knew were authentic and five we knew were hijacked. (shrink)

“Hijack” has etymological connotations of force. It is intended here as a purposeful turn away from expert authority and from singular authorship, towards a more expanded sphere of multiple experience in art aesthetics. If there is a hijacking force in art, it is the dynamic desire to reclaim the impossible and the unexpected. These qualities are evident in telepathy as a system of transmitted aesthetic information. Isabelle Stengers, who has investigated the role of the charlatan, might urge us to follow (...) such a turn away from regulated forms of sensory information and repurpose telepathy as a propagated extra-sensory activity. Like the charlatan or other maligned characters of ill repute, the art writer who responds to the essence of the artwork through participation rather than judgment becomes the outsider and, in this case, the telepath. This paper addresses the work of Australian artist Jacquelene Drinkall as an aggregate of telepathic transmissions, ripe for hijacking. I argue that a telepathic hijack, as an unexpected reclamation and as a method of aesthetic experimentation, can be enacted as a speculative form of art writing. Telepathy in art and of art allows a writing with the artwork. By this I mean that a super-sensory and speculative mode of writing can exist beside the artwork, rather than in judgment of it. This is a divergence from an overt critique of art through established constructs of history, origin or relations alone. In this paper I will explore the concept of telepathy as a quality of speculative aesthetics, which is distinguished by contingent change, variable outcomes and meandering. I will focus on: telepathic art transmissions as a hijack of conventional aesthetics; Jacquelene Drinkall’s telepathic artwork as an interrupted experience; and Isabelle Stengers’ figure of the charlatan. (shrink)

The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance, a process that also concerned the issues related to agro-food sustainability, such as food quality, environmental impact, social justice, and farm animal welfare. Scholars believe that social media are a new site that reconfigures relations between various actors involved in the governance of these problems. However, empirical research on this matter remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by examining the case of Februdairy, a Twitter hashtag campaign (...) to promote the British dairy industry, hijacked by animal protection activists. For this case, I employ the relational perspective on technology affordances—as operationalised by Faraj and Azad, Materiality and organizing. Social interaction in a technological world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)—to highlight two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities by the opposing groups: hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency. The analysis reveals also that a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that actually strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms. (shrink)

A hijacking is a violent takeover, a misappropriation of something for a purpose other than its intended one, by parties other than those for whom the thing was meant. This issue explores the aesthetic practices and consequences of unauthorized repurposing.

This article examines emergency ambulance calls made by lay callers for patients found to be in cardiac arrest when the paramedics arrived. Using conversation analysis, we explored the trajectories of calls in which the caller, before being asked by the call-taker, said why they were calling, that is, calls in which callers pre-empted a reason-for-the-call. Caller pre-emption can be disruptive when call-takers first need to obtain an address and telephone number. Pre-emptions have further implications when call-takers reach the stage when (...) they are required to deliver the scripted turn ‘tell me exactly what happened’. When there has been a pre-emption earlier on, callers tend to treat the scripted turn as a request for more information and may not repeat their reason-for-the-call. This can occasion delays and important information can be lost. We identified an effective alternative strategy used by some call-takers, pre-emption repeat, which callers treat as a request for confirmation. (shrink)

This article uses decolonial to critique the discourse of ‘subaltern whiteness’ by questioning some Afrikaner scholars’ morality of regarding ‘white Afrikaners as subaltern’. Subaltern designates submerged, subordinated, exploited or suppressed – those whose voices have been historically muted, their humanity stripped by those with sociopolitical and economic power. Within South Africa, this raises the question: to what extent can white Afrikaners be regarded as subaltern? The article proposes indivisibility of epistemic vulnerability and regenerative theological praxis both emerging within Afrikaner theological (...) discussion as viable response to broken bodies of those who still bear the marks or scars of apartheid and rather not to seek to hijack their voice. (shrink)

The aim of this project to expose the reasons behind the pandemic of misinformation (henceforth, PofM) by examining the enabling conditions of epistemic agency and the emerging technologies that threaten it. I plan to research the emotional origin of epistemic agency, i.e. on the origin of our capacity to acquire justification for belief, as well as on the significance this emotional origin has for our lives as epistemic agents in our so-called Misinformation Age. This project has three objectives. First, I (...) plan to expose the degree to which epistemic agency is made possible by an under-researched species of emotion called epistemic feelings. Perhaps, the most epistemically significant is the feeling of confidence. In particular, epistemic feelings make epistemic agency possible by making errors in reasoning salient or the potential lack thereof. -/- Second, in order to diagnose the reasons for PofM, I will analyze the emotional basis of epistemic agency in the context of emerging technologies. Epistemic feelings ought to be construed as motivators of epistemic acts, specifically acts following exposure to misinformation spread by social media. For example, a recent study found that subjects on YouTube have a 6.3% probability in five clicks to go from watching innocuous videos to misogynistic videos. Accordingly, one prominent view holds that social media algorithms lead subjects down the proverbial rabbit hole, producing content that elicits strong emotional reactions. -/- But under-researched is the degree to which these emotions are intertwined with epistemic feelings, so that subjects are likely to misjudge the information as correct due to being primed to do so by processing the AI's suggested media. Thus, when this technology is used in epistemic practices, the result is invariably epistemically bad behavior because of how this manner of producing content motivates epistemic acts through the production of erroneous feelings of confidence, which result from the perceived ease of cognitive processing: the content is easy to process and so, the subject confidently misjudges, it is true. As of yet, an account of this cognitive and emotional decision-making process has not been used to analyze how emerging technologies are threatening epistemic agency, and thus our wellbeing as knowers. -/- Finally, I plan to develop therapeutics for PofM by outlining how to reform our collective epistemic practices. Thus, this project complements existing research in virtue epistemology, specifically by articulating the challenges to cultivating epistemic virtues and warding off the vices of the mind. In summation, the project aims to account for how emerging technologies are committing a form of epistemic injustice through the exploitation of cognitive biases and the production of erroneous epistemic feelings, with the overarching goal being a framework for convalescing from the pandemic of misinformation plaguing our age. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper investigates from a phenomenological perspective the origins of self-illness ambiguity. Drawing on phenomenological theories of affectivity and selfhood, I argue that, as a phenomenon which concerns primarily the ‘personal self’, self-illness ambiguity is dependent on distinct alterations of affective background orientations. I start by illustrating how personhood is anchored in the experience of a specific set of non-intentional affects – i.e. moods or existential feelings – alterations of which are often present in mental ill-health. Also through the (...) exploration of the phenomenology of acute and long-term anxiety, I suggest that self-illness ambiguity originates in the presence of moods or existential feelings that are in tension with the ones that structure the person’s experience prior to the onset of the illness or when its symptoms are not experienced. More specifically, I claim that due to their ability to ‘block’ or ‘suspend’ some of the person’s affective and cognitive responses, such affective orientations may unsettle one’s self-defining evaluative perspective, leading to uncertainty and doubting about one’s personal self. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Contributors -- Series Editor's Foreword -- Preface: A 'Science' of Psychology: The Enduring Aspiration -- Introduction: Science, Scientism, and Psychology -- 1 Epistemology and the Boundaries Between Phenomena and Conventions -- 2 Hayek and Hempel on the Nature, Role, and Limitations of Science -- 3 On Scientism in Psychology: Some Observations of Historical Relevance -- 4 Why Science Needs Intuition -- 5 Scientism and Saturation: Evolutionary Psychology, Human Experience, and the (...) Phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion -- 6 Psychotherapy and Scientism -- 7 Science and Society: Effects, Reactions, and a Call for Reformation -- 8 Beyond Scientism: Reaches in Psychology Toward a Science of Consciousness -- Index. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how different discourses on frugal innovation are articulated, and how the dynamics between these different discourses have led to a certain dominant understanding of frugal innovation today. We analyse the dynamic interactions between three discourses on frugal innovation: innovations for the poor, grassroots innovations by the poor, and more recently co-creating frugal innovations with the poor. We argue that this latter discourse is articulated as a hegemonic project as it is designed to accommodate demands from (...) both business and poor communities. We draw on Laclau and Mouffe’s concepts of ‘chain of difference’, ‘empty signifier’ and ‘floating signifier’ to explain the advent of the hegemonic discourse on co-creating innovations with the poor. We show how a floating signifier with radical potential, frugal innovation, has been hijacked and co-opted in a hegemonic project that has leveraged powerful ambiguous signifiers, with co-creation acting as an empty signifier. To clarify what is problematic in this hegemonic intervention, we expose how contemporary frugal innovation discourse contributes to a project of governing and exploiting rather than helping the poor, in ways that benefit formal economic actors while further worsening global inequalities. (shrink)

Defining sustainability is a tricky endeavor. While Adrian Parr’s Hijacking Sustainability does not contribute a clear definition of the term, it does provide a series of interesting and useful examples to illustrate some of the difficulties and inconsistencies of applying so-called sustainable ideals to a capitalist infrastructure. While the concept behind Parr’s work is intriguing, the book itself, which focuses on the nature, construction, and impact of sustainability culture, is verbose, convoluted, and difficult.

The aim of the present paper was to introduce some online-based approaches to evaluate scientific journals and publishers and to differentiate them from the hijacked ones, regardless of their disciplines. With the advent of open-access journals, many hijacked journals and publishers have deceitfully assumed the mantle of authenticity in order to take advantage of researchers and students. Although these hijacked journals and publishers can be identified through checking their advertisement techniques and their websites, these ways do not (...) always result in their identification. There exist certain online-based approaches, such as using Master Journal List provided by Thomson Reuters, and Scopus database, and using the DOI of a paper, to certify the realness of a journal or publisher. It is indispensable that inexperienced students and researchers know these methods so as to identify hijacked journals and publishers with a higher level of probability. (shrink)

This paper questions and criticizes the employment of critical realism in the field of ‘science and religion’. Referring to the texts of four main actors in this field, I demonstrate how the choice of critical realism is justified by a (disguised) apologetic interest in defending the epistemic privilege of the theological enterprise against that of the natural sciences. I argue that this is possible thanks to the reactivation of ‘theological potential’ latent in some under-examined assumptions and conceptual structures still at (...) work within philosophy of science and scientific epistemology. (shrink)

A review of Louis Charland's paper, "Cynthia's Dilemma: Consenting to Heroin Prescription," American Journal of Bioethics 2(2), 2002: 37-47.

Why has fiction been so successful over time? We make the case that fiction may have properties that enhance both individual and group-level fitness by (a) allowing risk-free simulation of important scenarios, (b) effectively transmitting solutions to common problems, and (c) enhancing group cohesion through shared consumption of fictive worlds.

Volume 34, Issue 2, April-June 2019, Page 128-129.

This Collision uses an encounter with Cathy Choi’s B1206 , coupled with theories of aesthetic empathy, to articulate how hijacking as an aesthetic concept might work. The aesthetic faculty of empathy conceives of the aesthetic experience as “feeling into” a given work. This concept furnishes a useful framework for thinking about aesthetic hijacking, as “feeling into” something implies the displacement of the work or its viewer. Hijacking, then, could foreground that displacement by emphasizing spatial uncertainty. Furthermore, hijacking could be an (...) inversion of the process of “feeling into” a given work, indicating a process whereby the work forces its way into the viewer and the space s/he inhabits. (shrink)

The human and mouse genomes are complex from a genomic standpoint. Each cell has the same genomic sequence, yet a wide array of cell types exists due to the presence of a plethora of regulatory elements in the non‐coding genome. Recent advances in epigenomic profiling have uncovered non‐coding gene proximal promoters and distal enhancers of transcription genome‐wide. Extension of promoter‐associated H3K4me3 histone mark across the gene body, known as a broad H3K4me3 domain (H3K4me3‐BD), is a signature of constitutive expression of (...) cell‐type‐specific regulation and of tumour suppressor genes in healthy cells. Recently, it has been discovered that the presence of H3K4me3‐BDs over oncogenes is a cancer‐specific feature associated with their dysregulated gene expression and tumourigenesis. Moreover, it has been shown that the hijacking of clusters of enhancers, known as super‐enhancers (SE), by proto‐oncogenes results in the presence of H3K4me3‐BDs over the gene body. Therefore, H3K4me3‐BDs and SE crosstalk in healthy and cancer cells therefore represents an important mechanism to identify future treatments for patients with SE driven cancers. (shrink)

From the mid 1990s, the OECD started the planning of the Program for International Student Assessment, now well known as PISA. 1 The first PISA testing took place early in 2000, and the results were published in December 2001. Since then, PISA results have gradually become a kind of global “gold standard” for educational quality, and educational policy has been globalized, lifted out of the domestic policy, as proudly stated by the PISA director, Andreas Schleicher in the TED-talk quoted below. (...) The presentation is transcribed in 29 languages and has been seen by some 758 thousand viewers. (shrink)

Rawls intended the difference principle to be a liberal egalitarian principle of justice. By that I mean he intended it to provide a moral justification for a moderate amount of redistribution of income from the most advantaged members of society to the least. But since the difference principle was introduced, economic inequality has increased dramatically, reaching levels now not seen since just before the Great Depression, levels that Rawls surely would have thought perverse. Many blame this increase on the rise (...) of supply-side economics and the dramatic cuts in marginal tax rates enacted by the supply-siders for corporations and those already at the top of the income distribution. But I contend that the difference principle, or at least the ethos that the difference principle embodies and represents, is also partially to blame. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to explain how the difference principle, the ideas and arguments of the supply-siders, and this dramatic rise in inequality are connected, to identify where the difference principle went wrong, and to discuss what those who remain committed to the liberal egalitarian ideals that the difference principle was thought to represent might do about it. (shrink)

The host actin nucleation machinery is subverted by many bacterial pathogens to facilitate their entry, motility, replication, and survival. The majority of research conducted in the past primarily focused on exploitation of a host actin nucleator, the Arp2/3 complex, by bacterial pathogens. Recently, new studies have begun to explore the role of formins, another family of host actin nucleators, in bacterial pathogenesis. This review provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the exploitation of the Arp2/3 complex and (...) formins by bacterial pathogens. Secreted bacterial effector proteins seem to manipulate the regulation of these actin nucleators or functionally mimic them to drive bacterial entry, motility and survival within host cells. An enhanced understanding of how formins are exploited will provide us with greater insight into how a fundamental eurkaryotic cellular process is utilized by bacteria and will also advance our knowledge of host‐pathogen interactions. (shrink)

This paper argues that Henry Sidgwick’s account of the relationship between the right and the good, as well as his theory of the good are still undervalued in many respects. An applied section illustrates the practical significance of this finding. In cases in which shooting down a passenger plane can save a greater number of people on the ground, and no other relevant considerations apply, the passengers should desire their own destruction—not only to promote the general good, but also in (...) order to reach the only good they can still secure for themselves: giving their inevitable deaths a positive meaning. This utilitarian position regarding some one-versus-the-many cases has been overlooked in the German Supreme Court ruling on the destruction of 9/11 airplanes in 2006. (shrink)

The paper suggests that there are two different ways in which a legal system restricts an individual’s rights. It can either grant a power that revokes the legal protection of the right or it can acknowledge the infringement of a legal right and yet justify such an infringement by means of a criminal law justification. The distinction proposed by the paper has both expressive and practical implications and is useful in solving dilemmas arising in emergencies when constitutional constraints make it (...) impossible to grant the power to revoke legal protection of a basic right. In some of these situations a criminal law justification might support infringement of such a right. This claim is demonstrated by analyzing the ruling of the German Constitutional Court concerning the shooting down of a hijacked airplane in circumstances similar to those of September 11. (shrink)