Online data collection with infants raises special opportunities and challenges for developmental research. One of the most prevalent methods in infancy research is eye-tracking, which has been widely applied in laboratory settings to assess cognitive development. Technological advances now allow conducting eye-tracking online with various populations, including infants. However, the accuracy and reliability of online infant eye-tracking remain to be comprehensively evaluated. No research to date has directly compared webcam-based and in-lab eye-tracking data from infants, similarly to data from adults. (...) The present study provides a direct comparison of in-lab and webcam-based eye-tracking data from infants who completed an identical looking time paradigm in two different settings. We assessed 4-6-month-old infants in an eye-tracking task that measured the detection of audio-visual asynchrony. Webcam-based and in-lab eye-tracking data were compared on eye-tracking and video data quality, infants’ viewing behavior, and experimental effects. Results revealed no differences between the in-lab and online setting in the frequency of technical issues and participant attrition rates. Video data quality was comparable between settings in terms of completeness and brightness, despite lower frame rate and resolution online. Eye-tracking data quality was higher in the laboratory than online, except in case of relative sample loss. Gaze data quantity recorded by eye-tracking was significantly lower than by video in both settings. In valid trials, eye-tracking and video data captured infants’ viewing behavior uniformly, irrespective of setting. Despite the common challenges of infant eye-tracking across experimental settings, our results point toward the necessity to further improve the precision of online eye-tracking with infants. Taken together, online eye-tracking is a promising tool to assess infants’ gaze behavior but requires careful data quality control. The demographic composition of both samples differed from the generic population on caregiver education: our samples comprised caregivers with higher-than-average education levels, challenging the notion that online studies will per se reach more diverse populations. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotional response to epistemic risk: the risk of believing in error. The motivation for this account is threefold. First, it makes epistemic anxiety a species of anxiety, thus rendering psychologically respectable a notion that has heretofore been taken seriously only by epistemologists. Second, it illuminates the relationship between anxiety and risk. It is standard in psychology to conceive of anxiety as a response to risk, but psychologists – very (...) reasonably – have little to say about risk itself, as opposed to risk judgement. In this paper, I specify what risk must be like to be the kind of thing to which anxiety can be a response. Third, my account improves on extant accounts of epistemic anxiety in the literature. It is more fleshed out than Jennifer Nagel’s, which is largely agnostic about the nature of epistemic anxiety, focusing instead on what work it does in our epistemic lives. In offering an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotion, my account explains how it is able to do the epistemological work to which Nagel puts it. My account is also more plausible than Juliette Vazard’s, on which epistemic anxiety is an emotional response to potential threat to one’s practical interests. Vazard’s account cannot distinguish epistemic anxiety from anxiety in general, and also fails to capture all instances of what we want to call epistemic anxiety. My account does better on both counts. (shrink)

Doubt is a much-maligned state. We are racked by doubts, tormented by doubts, plagued by them, paralysed. Doubts can be troubling, consuming, agonising. But however ill-regarded is doubt, anxiety is more so. We recognise the significance of doubting in certain contexts, and allow ourselves to be guided by our doubts. For example, the criminal standard of proof operative in the U.K., U.S., as well as in most other anglophone countries, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Israel, requires for conviction to be permissible (...) that the defendant’s guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt; to feel a doubt about a defendant’s guilt, so long as it is reasonable, is reason to refrain from convicting. But our folk understanding of anxiety ascribes no value to that state. Anxiety is inherently unpleasant and irrational; it prevents us from being able to perform well when it is most important to us that we do; it is an emotion that, if we could, we’d eliminate from our emotional toolbox. Yet in this thesis, I offer a vindication of doubt – a defence of doubt in terms of what it does for us – on which it ultimately turns out to be a kind of anxiety. The basic idea is that the concept of doubt serves a function for us that we couldn’t do without: it signals when we should begin inquiry. I will argue that the concept doubt is able to serve this function because the state it picks out, the state of doubt, is a kind of anxiety: epistemic anxiety. I develop a picture of epistemic anxiety as an emotional response to epistemic risk: potential disvalue in the epistemic realm. Because doubt is a kind of anxiety, it has the right kind of representational and motivational profile to track epistemic risk in our environments, and motivate us to reduce or avoid that risk. This makes it hugely valuable for us, as knowledge-seeking creatures, given the incompatibility of knowledge with high levels of epistemic risk. (shrink)

This paper evaluates whether and to what extent modal constraints on knowledge or the semantics of ‘knows’, which make essential reference to what goes on in other possible worlds, can be considered non-epistemic factors with epistemic significance. This is best understood as the question whether modal factors are non-truth-relevant factors that make the difference between true belief and knowledge, or to whether a true belief falls under the extension of ‘knowledge’ in a context, where a factor is truth-relevant with respect (...) to S’s belief that P iff it bears on the probability that P is true. To the extent that these factors are non-epistemic, epistemologies that endorse them—modal epistemologies—stand in conflict with intellectualism. I focus on three modal epistemologies: safety, sensitivity, and David Lewis’s epistemic contextualism. I argue that prima facie, safety and sensitivity allow that non-epistemic changes in a context can shift the closeness ordering on worlds, and in so doing make a difference to whether S knows P, while Lewis’s contextualism allows that non-epistemic changes in a context can shift the relevant domain of not-P possibilities that must be eliminated for ‘S knows P’ to be true in that context. Then to make her theory compatible with intellectualism, the modal epistemologist must say much more about the notion of probability at play in the definition of ‘truth-relevant’. I suggest that either accepting or rejecting that modal epistemologies are intellectualist has significance consequences for debates between pragmatists and purists, which radiate into wider contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

The anthology makes an important contribution to the research topic Literature and Knowledge and picks up on the current narratological discussion on literary characters. The key question addressed in this volume is the function of knowledge in the production and reception of literary texts. Literary studies on works from different national literatures and periods are supplemented by insightful contributions from history, linguistics and philosophy, illuminating the discussion for the first time from a multilayered perspective.".

In a contribution to a symposium on xenophilia, this essay — a study of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations — raises the question of whether all xenophilia is by nature doomed to fail. Set in Ireland in 1833, the drama centers on the tension arising from a young British lieutenant’s falling in love with an Irish-speaker while he is in her country to translate Irish place-names into English for an imperial cartographic survey. While the lieutenant is referred to in the (...) play as a Hibernophile, the essay interprets his love as xenophilic: love for the foreignness rather than the Irishness of what he encounters. The lieutenant’s love of foreign places and their names impedes his effort to systematize Ireland for imperial ends, and his love for an Irish woman brings about his own undoing. Applying Simone de Beauvoir’s view of alterity to the lieutenant’s xenophilia, the essay questions whether the English written over the Irish in this play and the lieutenant’s desire written over the objects of his love obscure enough of the other’s otherness to render his xenophilia no longer viable. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 35-37.

Three philosophical accounts of risk dominate the contemporary literature. On the probabilistic account, risk has to do with the probability of a disvaluable event obtaining; on the modal account, it has to do with the modal closeness of that event obtaining; on the normic account, it has to do with the normalcy of that event obtaining. The debate between these accounts has proceeded via counterexample-trading, with each account having some cases it explains better than others, and some cases that it (...) cannot explain at all. In this article, we attempt to break the impasse between the three accounts of risk through a shift in methodology. We investigate the concept of risk via the method of conceptual reverse-engineering, whereby a theorist reconstructs the need that a concept serves for a group of agents in order to illuminate the shape of the concept: its intension and extension. We suggest that risk functions to meet our need to make decisions that reduce disvalue under conditions of uncertainty. Our project makes plausible that risk is a pluralist concept: meeting this need requires that risk takes different forms in different contexts. But our pluralism is principled: each of these different forms are part of one and the same concept, that has a ‘core-to-periphery’ structure, where the form the concept takes in typical cases (at its ‘core’) explains the form it takes in less typical cases (at its ‘periphery’). We then apply our findings to epistemic risk, to resolve an ambiguity in how ‘epistemic risk’ is standardly understood. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Text ist der Versuch einer Dekonstruktion der herrschenden ideologischen Annahmen des gegenwärtigen Corona-Diskurses. Er ist der Versuch, diese ideologischen Gedankengänge in ihrer Mangelhaftigkeit darzustellen und ihren ideologischen Charakter zu benennen, sohin der Versuch eines Nachvollzugs des herrschenden Nachdenkens über Corona. Dieses herrschende Nachdenken über Corona und dessen Fortgehen von der einen ideologischen Annahme zur nächsten können als Metamorphosen des pandemischen Bewusstseins bezeichnet werden. Seinen Ausgangspunkt nimmt das pandemische Bewusstsein bei der Diagnose des krisenhaften Charakters der gegenwärtigen Gesellschaft, dem (...) es eine „alte Normalität“ entgegenimaginiert. Hier betreibt es eine Rechtfertigung des alten, in dessen Krisencharakter jedoch nicht durchschauten, Zustandes der Gesellschaft. In Sehnsucht nach der Idylle der präpandemischen Gesellschaft entwirft es eine „solidarische“ Gemeinschaft gegen die Bedrohung durch einen äußeren Feind und konstituiert sich also negativ als homogenes Ganzes. Seine Sehnsucht wird zur Harmoniebedürftigkeit im Hier und Jetzt, die es sich durch seinen Glauben an die gute Herrschaft zu stillen weiß, wenn es sich über die Unverhältnismäßigkeit der staatlich verordneten Corona-Maßnahmen echauffiert. Dabei fühlt es sich durch den staatlichen Appell an den gesunden Menschenverstand im täglichen Umgang mit Corona bestätigt und lauscht in aufklärerischem Ethos seiner ewigen Vernunftfähigkeit. In dialektischer Akrobatik veranstaltet es das pandemische Bewusstsein, in der Isolation eine neue Form der Solidarität, das Glück im Unglück zu entdecken, ohne zu erkennen, dass es damit seine Rückkehr zum „Normalzustand“ der bürgerlichen als einer warenproduzierenden Gesellschaft vollzogen hat. Mit gutem Gewissen enthält es sich eines kritischen Urteils über die Corona-Krise und resigniert staatstreu vor der Einsicht in die Wirklichkeit. So lässt es sich gut regieren. (shrink)

A legal critique that ties up to Pashukanis focuses not on the content of law, but on the specific form in which societal relations are conveyed. In analogy to Marx’s theory of value-form, Pashukanis unfolds a theory and critique that captures the specific way in which people relate to each other within the so called civil society. The concept of legal subjectivity becomes the scene of a dialectics of freedom and domination which unfolds in the interplay between obfuscation and reality. (...) Contrary to the assumption of a legal fetishism in the sense of total delusion the practical potential of an immanent social criticism is to be conceptualized. (shrink)

Responding to doubts expressed by contributors to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, this introduction to the seventh and final installment seeks to explain the critics’ methodological concerns in a case study of strong affect in the Babylonian Talmud. Examining the story of Rav Rehumi and his wife in Ketubot 62b, the author inquires whether differences of culture and the passage of time make it impossible for us to determine whether love is the affect involved. The case is especially difficult (...) to resolve, given that, while there may be two lovers in this narrative, there may be three objects of love: the rabbi, his wife, and the Torah. In the story, Rav Rehumi is so ravished by Torah that he forgets his wife. Since the narrative does not predicate that he chose not to visit her but, rather, that he was swept away, the author proposes that “studying Torah is sex, not like sex, but sex itself.” The story describes not sublimation of libido but its desublimation. If so, the story confronts us with an unnamed affect in ancient Jewish culture that “encompasses both the joy of sex and the joy of text.” It is not that, dourly, the Talmudic Rabbis cannot imagine, or that they ignore, corporeal pleasure; it is rather that the erotic experience of Torah is the same pleasure but, at least for them, even stronger. This piece concludes, therefore, that a term like xenophilia, which incorporates the word love, is not universally applicable across cultures and epistemai. The concept of love is too various. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to describe the myth of femme fatale. Starting from popular culture and ending with the representatives of archaic cultures, the author tries to indicate the women who are described in patriarchal narratives as those who bring men to defeat and ruin. An important figure for the whole argument is Lilith, who, according to Jewish legends, was the first wife of Adam. Lilith was erased from the biblical tradition because she opposed her partner (...) and turned away from God. She has become the female archetype of sin, the symbol of sexual vampirism and the rejection of motherhood. All these features make up the femme fatale syndrome. (shrink)

This paper offers a reinterpretation of the divine as embodied by the Semitic goddess Lilith, she who has been represented and misrepresented in a variety of sacred texts. Working with Lilith as both symbol and archetype, I will analyze texts in which she appears, tracing her historical development and metamorphosis from goddess to demon to symbol of independence and open sexuality. As part of this analysis, I will discuss how Lilith's demonization was designed to keep women alienated (...) from their own 'original sources' of power and spiritual authority. The essay concludes with an appreciation of feminist texts, including the first midrash or reinterpretation of the Alphabet of Ben Sira, and more recent work. I also bring in feminist scholars' reclamation of the Sacred Feminine through poetic/liturgical responses to damaging canonical texts. My paper argues that this literature, too, should be regarded as 'sacred text,' since these women-centered writings have become texts of empowerment for contemporary women as well as part of their spiritual practice. (shrink)

The article presents the feminist discourse on Lilith and asks why she has returned to the centre of activity and creation? It begins with Lilith’s Integrative Myth – a description of the classic Lilith myths – whilst trying to define her image’s central characteristics. Following, I offer one integrative myth: a complex essence that contains contrasts, and stems from a variety of sources, each contributing to the formation of Lilith’s story’s numerous aspects. Lilith’s Revival is (...) discussed, surveying the different ways in which Lilith appears in today’s feminist spiritual discourse, while presenting some of the ways in which her story is re-interpreted and used towards contemporary feminist needs. A feminist Jungian outlook on Lilith’s Myths is included, deciphering Lilith as a symbol of the life-death-life cycle, which leads to a summary of the Jungian analysis’ implications. (shrink)

Here we are dealing with the two central figures of the female gender in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Holy Scripture, or at least the texts that apply to the narrative of the first couple. The paper focuses on procreation and its symbolic implications in the Genesis narrative. There is a great difference between Eve and Lilith, the opposite archetypes of the female gender. So examining the forgotten existence of Lilith compared with the creation of Eve is an attempt (...) to understand the schema of reproduction and distinction between the sexes. (shrink)

Musical elements in the structure of G. MacDonald’s Phantastes and Lilith in the context of the theory of intermediality are studied. The following musical elements are analyzed: motif of fairy world’s music, images of music of nature, musical description of characters’ voices, insertions of songs, interpretation of music as an art. These musical elements act as a characterization of topoi, landscape, characters, technique of stylistic imitation and means of rhythmic organization of narration, expression of author’s point of view. The (...) paper concludes that music in G. MacDonald’s fairy romances is represented by means of intermedial imitation and intermedial thematization used for creation of full of sound fairy world and expression of Romantic view on music essence. (shrink)

This essay inquires into the need for and power of role models, and suggests some answers. The example it employs to study the issue is the contemporary Jewish feminist “role model,” Lilith, first wife of Adam. Various and opposite forms of the Lilith-and-Adam myth through the ages are given, including new contributions from a Lilith anthology in preparation by the author and others. Those needs of women and men that the mythical “role model” is constructed to satisfy (...) are suggested. (shrink)

This article examines the critical work of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Dawn, which follows Lilith Ayapo, a black American woman who is rescued by an alien species after a nuclear war destroys nearly all life on Earth. Lilith awakens 250 years later and learns that the aliens have tasked her with reviving other humans and repopulating the planet. In reframing Reagan-era debates about security and survival, Butler captured the spirit of ‘pessimistic futurism’, a unique way of thinking (...) and writing black female sexuality, reproduction and survival. Suturing concepts central to both Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism, pessimistic futurism carefully considers how black female subjectivity and labour create the coming world. By linking human survival to Lilith’s own ability to adapt to the new and dangerous world, Butler offers scholars of black studies a vital interpretive framework for thinking about the points of contact between pessimism and futurism. Specifically, Butler presents a form of futurism brought back to Earth, grounded in the sensibility of the black female experience. (shrink)

This article discusses the politics of sex, gender and knowledge in the development of the Lilith myth in Jewish folklore. More generally, it discusses the contemporary intersection of discourses on Rabbinic Judaism, postmodernism and sexuality, and considers the ironic implications of expectations that post-modernism and its precursors might help to `redeem' Western epistemologies from their logocentric, masculinist biases. The insight - arguably not alien to Rabbinic thought - that knowledge or discourse involves a sexually marked set of practices and (...) performances, is put forward as being `reversible', i.e. as implying that sexual markings (such as binary sex distinctions) might therefore be considered as discursive. The efficacy of contemporary critiques of knowledge production is closely bound up with acknowledgement of this point. (shrink)