Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary isolation of musical composition from cognitive science, in this conceptual analysis, we approach compositional processes with the analytic tools of blending theory, material anchoring, and enaction. Our case study is Iannis Xenakis’ use of (...) sieves for distributing rhythmic patterns in Psappha. Though disregarded in previous accounts, the timeline and the gearwheel provide crucial conceptual templates for anchoring Xenakis’ idea of time for this score. This case study of conceptual integration templates for temporal representation seeks to gain insight into musical creativity, embodiment, and blending, especially into how virtual interactions with material structures facilitate the construction of complex meanings. (shrink)

The shift from print to screen has bodily effects on how we read. We distinguish two dimensions of embodied reading: the spatio-temporal and the imaginary. The former relates to what the body does during the act of reading and the latter relates to the role of the body in the imagined scenarios we create from what we read. At the level of neurons, these two dimensions are related to how we make sense of the world. From this perspective, we explain (...) how the bodily activity of reading changes from print to screen. Our focus is on the decreased material anchoring of memories. (shrink)

Cytoplasmic dynein is the major minus‐end‐directed motor protein in eukaryotes, and has functions ranging from organelle and vesicle transport to spindle positioning and orientation. The mode of regulation of dynein in the cell remains elusive, but a tantalising possibility is that dynein is maintained in an inhibited, non‐motile state until bound to cargo. In vivo, stable attachment of dynein to the cell membrane via anchor proteins enables dynein to produce force by pulling on microtubules and serves to organise the nuclear (...) material. Anchor proteins of dynein assume diverse structures and functions and differ in their interaction with the membrane. In yeast, the anchor protein has come to the fore as one of the key mediators of dynein activity. In other systems, much is yet to be discovered about the anchors, but future work in this area will prove invaluable in understanding dynein regulation in the cell. (shrink)

Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. To illustrate this (...) process I will take advantage of the analysis of some aspects of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay critical in analyzing the relation between meaningful semiotic internal resources and devices and their dynamical interactions with the externalized semiotic materiality suitably stocked in the environment. Hence, minds are material, “extended” and artificial in themselves. A considerable part of human abductive thinking is occurring through an activity consisting in a kind of reification in the external environment and a subsequent re-projection and reinterpretation through new configurations of neural networks and chemical processes. I also illustrate how this activity takes advantage of hybrid representations and how it can nicely account for various processes of creative and selective abduction, bringing up the question of how multimodal aspects involving a full range of sensory modalities are important in hypothetical reasoning. (shrink)

This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a “good society” realized through technoscientific-oriented policies. Focusing on the 1952 Resources for Freedom report, the authors trace the genealogy of energy security, elucidating how it establishes a morality of efficiency that orients policy action under the guise of security toward the liberalizing of markets in resource states and a robust program of energy research and development (...) in the United States. This evidence challenges the pervasive historical anchoring of the concept in the 1970s and illustrates the importance of the genealogical approach for the emerging literature on energy and sociotechnical imaginaries. Exploring the genealogy of energy security also unpacks key social, political, and economic undercurrents that disrupt the seeming universality of the language of energy, leading the authors to question whether energy security discourse is appropriate for guiding policy action during ongoing global energy transitions. (shrink)

“Eve Sedgwick’s ‘Other Materials’” refers to a graduate seminar that Sedgwick offered at the CUNY Graduate Center entitled “How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials.” As its title suggests, her seminar advanced Sedgwick’s enduring “FASCINATION” with “MAKING UNSPEAKING OBJECTS” of all sorts, which elsewhere included the body’s organic and inorganic waste. Taking a cue from her teaching, I suggest that, while critics have extensively detailed Sedgwick’s contributions to literary interpretation, sexuality, gender, affect, and performativity, we should also appreciate (...) her writings as theorizing queer material relations. This observation is pertinent given her rethinking of psychodynamic object relations theory alongside her creative writings on “THE WASTE PRODUCTS,” or the matter we ceaselessly produce. My argument thus anchors its claims in a close non-Kleinian reading of her poem “Bathroom Song,” which also offers an unforeseen take on paranoid and reparative idioms of psycho-material being. How waste matter facilitates this unanticipated insight is one of my essay’s – and Sedgwick’s – subsidiary concerns. (shrink)

Respondents saw photos and vignettes on the characters in random order (Appendix A), and selected a survey from a set of descriptions of 18 mental capacities or 6 personal judgments (Appendix B). For the survey, images and descriptions of the two characters to be compared appeared with a five-point scale anchored by “Much more this one” below each image, “Slightly more this one” next, and “Both equally” between the images. Respondents also supplied demographic information and made 7-point Likerttype ratings on (...) religious belief (“I consider myself to be strongly religious” and “I believe that God exists”) and afterlife belief (“I believe that people whose bodies are dead continue to live on spiritually”). On survey completion, respondents were shown how their rank ordering of the characters compared with the mean of others who had completed the same survey. Respondents.. (shrink)

The underlying theme of the inquiry is the real and possible relevance of the Enlightenment tradition to contemporary Western society.

Book reviewed in this article: Die Lineatur Der Geschichte, by Kurt Röttgers.

Book reviewed in this article: Konstruktion der Vergangenheit: Eine Einführung in die Geschichts‐theorie By Chris Lorenz. Translated from Dutch by Annegret Böttner with Introduction by Jörn Rüsen.

The objective of this article is to take into account the functioning of representational cognitive tools, and in particular of notations and visualizations in mathematics. In order to explain their functioning, formulas in algebra and logic and diagrams in topology will be presented as case studies and the notion of manipulative imagination as proposed in previous work will be discussed. To better characterize the analysis, the notions of material anchor and representational affordance will be introduced.

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but (...) also shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

Descartes’ Rules for the direction of the mind presents us with a theory of knowledge in which imagination, considered as an “aid” for the intellect, plays a key role. This function of schematization, which strongly resembles key features of Proclus’ philosophy of mathematics, is in full accordance with Descartes’ mathematical practice in later works such as La Géométrie from 1637. Although due to its reliance on a form of geometric intuition, it may sound obsolete, I would like to show that (...) this has strong echoes in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, in particular in the trend of the so called “philosophy of mathematical practice”. Indeed Ken Manders’ study on the Euclidean practice, along with Reviel Netz’s historical studies on ancient Greek Geometry, indicate that mathematical imagination can play a central role in mathematical knowledge as bearing specific forms of inference. Moreover, this role can be formalized into sound logical systems. One question of general epistemology is thus to understand this mysterious role of the imagination in reasoning and to assess its relevance for other mathematical practices. Drawing from Edwin Hutchins’ study of “material anchors” in human reasoning, I would like to show that Descartes’ epistemology of mathematics may prove to be a helpful resource in the analysis of mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

This essay explores the practical significance of Michel Henry’s “material phenomenology.” Commencing with an exposition of his most basic philosophical intuition, i.e., his insight that transcendental affectivity is the primordial mode of revelation of our selfhood, the essay then brings to light how this intuition also establishes our relation to both the world and others. Animated by a radical form of the phenomenological reduction, Henry’s material phenomenology brackets the exterior world in a bid to reach the concrete interior (...) transcendental experience at the base of all exteriority. The essay argues that this “counter reduction,” designed as a practical orientation to the world, suspends all traditional parameters of onto(theo)logical individuation in order to rethink subjectivity in terms of its transcendental corporeality, i.e., in terms of the invisible display of “affective flesh.” The development of this “metaphysics of the individual” anchors his “practical philosophy” as he developed it—under shifting accents—throughout his oeuvre. In particular, the essay brings into focus Henry’s reflections on modernity, the industry of mass culture and their “barbaric” movements. The essay briefly puts these cultural and political areas of Henry’s of thinking into contact with his late “theological turn,” i.e., his Christological account of Life and the (inter)subjective self-realization to which it gives rise. (shrink)

This book investigates the role of inference in argumentation, considering how arguments support standpoints on the basis of different loci. The authors propose and illustrate a model for the analysis of the standpoint-argument connection, called Argumentum Model of Topics. A prominent feature of the AMT is that it distinguishes, within each and every single argumentation, between an inferential-procedural component, on which the reasoning process is based; and a material-contextual component, which anchors the argument in the interlocutors’ cultural and (...) factual common ground. The AMT explains how these components differ and how they are intertwined within each single argument. This model is introduced in Part II of the book, following a careful reconstruction of the enormously rich tradition of studies on inference in argumentation, from the antiquity to contemporary authors, without neglecting medieval and post-medieval contributions. The AMT is a contemporary model grounded in a dialogue with such tradition, whose crucial aspects are illuminated in this book. (shrink)

Recent new materialist and posthumanist research in curriculum and pedagogy studies is focusing more and more on the intertwinement between social justice, fairness, and accountability, and how to put these ideals to use to create inclusive, consciousness-raising canons, curricula, and pedagogies that take the dehumanized and the more-than-human into account. Especially pedagogical responsibility, often rephrased as ‘response-ability’ to accentuate the entanglements that this notion engenders versus forgotten or forcefully eradicated knowledges, and between teacher and student as intra-active learners, is highlighted (...) in this ethico-political turn. In this chapter, a critical pedagogical cartography of response-ability is sketched out to philosophically expand on—and also better anchor—the above turn. This critical cartography is put together at the backdrop of critical new materialist reflections with regards to the COVID-19 crisis; a crisis demanding a pedagogical but also ethico-political reorientation toward the hauntological powers of past-present-future injustices, the thick material present, and a more response-able engagement with the world. (shrink)

The scholarship on meaningful work has approached the topic mostly from the perspective of the subjective experience of the individual worker. This has led the literature to under-theorize, if not outright ignore, the cultural and normative dimension of meaningful work. In particular, it has obscured that a person’s ability to find meaning in her life in general, and her work in particular, is typically anchored and dependent on shared institutions and cultural aspirations. Reflecting on the future of work, particularly on (...) the dangers posed by the threat of technological unemployment, helps us recognize this cultural and normative dimension of meaningful work. I argue that a world with few work opportunities is a world devoid of a core structuring ideal around which our society has organized itself and, as such, will strain our ability to make sense of what it means to find life meaningful. To make this case I show that work operates as a central organizing _telos_ around which our contemporary lives gravitate. Work touches everyone and everything, defining the rhythms of our days and weeks and providing a center of gravity around which our lives are structured. Work constitutes a central dimension of human flourishing. Through work we provide for our material needs, develop our skills and virtues, build community, and contribute to the common good. As such, work constitutes a central organizing ideal in contemporary Western societies, a fact has significant normative force and plays an important role in our finding work meaningful. (shrink)

Professionalisation of Journalism has been a subject under global scrutiny since the nineteenth century. Contemporary studies show how journalism profession grapples with the implementation of standard journalism education and practices across the globe. The author discovered that the development of journalism has remarkable link with the advent of Christianity, however, an apparent decline of ethical values in higher education and professional practices abound thereby revealing the type of quality of education provided and the substandard nature of journalistic Professionalisation. Empirical research (...) conducted in this regard geared towards assessing the socio-ethical relevance of Professionalisation as beneficial to democratic development, and the challenges journalists encounter that hinder the implementation of professional ethics and cultural values as a contribution to human dignity, rights, justice, solidarity and the common good. To critically examine these phenomena, this research study is anchored of scientific materials. It adopted the see-judge-act (A Theological methodology approach used in appraising socio-ethical situations) as well as qualitative and quantitative methods. The researcher conducted thirteen semi-standardised interviews as well as analysed 200 data samples (twenty-three questions) with Mayring model and (SPSS) was used to evaluate the quantitative data. The research results showed the thirteen different interview partners unanimously consented that journalism in Nigeria must be professionalised and there is need to integrate Christian social ethics and culture driven values into the training curriculum if journalists are to regain their credibility and integrity. The tested hypotheses showed statistical significance (p. (shrink)

Atopias is a manifesto for a radical existentialism that restores the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside "atopia": not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an object-oriented ontology might formalize, nor the matter that new materialisms might identify. Atopia is what constitutes the eccentric existence of every being. Etymologically, to exist means "to be (...) outside" and Atopias argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world without ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism no longer privileges human beings, as Sartre and Heidegger did, but considers existence a universal condition of every being. Now, when our denial of any outside is at its most damaging, is the moment for such a radical existentialism. Only an atopian philosophy-a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy-can rechannel our fear of the outside. Breaking the immanence in which we are trapped, Atopias opens new ways to consider human and animal subjectivity, language, politics, and metaphysics. (shrink)

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which (...) objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose. (shrink)

Object perception deploys a suite of perceptual capacities that constrains attention, guides reidentification, subserves recognition, and anchors demonstrative thought. Objects for perception—perceptual objects—are the targets of such capacities. Characterizing perceptual objects for multisensory perception faces two puzzles. First is the diversity of objects across sensory modalities. Second is the unity of multisensory perceptual objects. This paper resolves the puzzles. Objects for perception are structured mereologically complex individuals. Perceptual objects are items that bear perceptible features and have perceptible parts arranged (...) to form a unified whole. This circumscribes the targets of object perception where neutral talk concerning intentional objects and objects of perception cannot. Nonetheless, it is more permissive than identifying perceptual objects with material bodies, which excludes too much and leans too heavily on vision. The account thus is tailored to capture the role of objects in perception beyond vision: tactual, auditory, and olfactory objects are individuals with differing structures. Its flexibility also enables the account to accommodate shared objects for multisensory perception: multisensory perceptual objects are mereologically complex individuals with hybrid structure. For instance, one can bimodally perceive a common whole with parts accessible to one but not both modalities. Each sense provides a partial perspective on a complex whole that is perceptible through the coordinated use of multiple senses. Understanding perceptual objects as structured mereologically complex individuals thus provides a theoretically useful notion of an object for multisensory perception that resolves the puzzles of diversity and of unity. (shrink)

Digital technologies have opened up new perspectives in thinking about the future of food and farming. Not only do these new technologies promise to revolutionise our way of meeting global food demand, they do so by boldly claiming that they can reduce their environmental impacts. However, they also have the potential to transform the organisation of agri-food systems more fundamentally. Drawing on assemblage theory, we propose a conceptual model of digitalisation organised around three facets: digitalisation as a project; “everyday digitalisation”; (...) and reflexive digitalisation. These facets reflect different relations between concrete practices and representations, imaginaries, and narratives, while representing different modes of agency: the collective, the distributed, and the individual, which, we argue, highlight contrasting ways for human and non-human actors to engage with digitalisation. With this model anchored in assemblage theory, we offer a tool for critically and comprehensively engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of digitalisation as a sociotechnical process. We then apply our theoretical framework to two ethnographic studies, one explores the growth of digital technologies in Switzerland as a way to govern and monitor national agriculture, the other focuses on Indonesia, where small digital startups have begun to dot the landscape. By identifying the material and semiotic processes occurring in each case, we notice similar issues being raised in terms of how digitalisation is co-constructed in society. (shrink)

When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has been, it has had a long (...) and tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and background knowledge. I focus on strategies of triangulation and traceability that establish the integrity of these data and their relevance as anchors for evidential reasoning in archaeology. (shrink)

Cartographies contributes to the growing debates on the value of poststructuralist theory. Grounded in a theoretical framework, it combines poststructural semiotics and a philosophy of the body. While interest in poststructuralism is well established, the currently felt need to anchor that interest in a political, material reality is where these readings gain their critical edge. They address the material - social, political and economic - effects of representation, marking anew direction in the debate.

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring (...) at timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4). (shrink)

In the summer of 1977, as I was preparing to teach Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology to a class at the School of Criticism and Theory in Irvine, a card floated out of the text and presented itself for interpretation. It read:WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHORImmediately I was faced with an interpretive problem not only in the ordinary and everyday sense of having to determine the meaning and the intention of the utterance but in the special sense occasioned by the (...) fact that I didn’t know who the author named or, rather, not named by the card was. It might have been Derrida himself whom I had met, but only in passing. Or it might have been Derrida’s translator, Gayatri Spivak whom I had known for some time and who might well have put me on the publisher’s list. Or it might have been the publisher, in this case the Johns Hopkins University Press of whose editorial board I was then a member. In the absence of any explicit identification, I found myself a very emblem of the difficulties or infelicities that attend distanced or etiolated communication: unable to proceed because the words were cut off from their anchoring source in a unique and clearly present intention. That is to say, I seemed, in the very moment of my perplexity, to be proving on my pulse the superiority of face-to-face communication, where one can know intentions directly, to communication mediated by the marks of writing and in this case by a writing that materialized without any clues as to its context of origin. It may not have been a message found in a bottle, but it certainly was a message found in a book. (shrink)

Digital technologies have opened up new perspectives in thinking about the future of food and farming. Not only do these new technologies promise to revolutionise our way of meeting global food demand, they do so by boldly claiming that they can reduce their environmental impacts. However, they also have the potential to transform the organisation of agri-food systems more fundamentally. Drawing on assemblage theory, we propose a conceptual model of digitalisation organised around three facets: digitalisation as a project; “everyday digitalisation”; (...) and reflexive digitalisation. These facets reflect different relations between concrete practices and representations, imaginaries, and narratives, while representing different modes of agency: the collective, the distributed, and the individual, which, we argue, highlight contrasting ways for human and non-human actors to engage with digitalisation. With this model anchored in assemblage theory, we offer a tool for critically and comprehensively engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of digitalisation as a sociotechnical process. We then apply our theoretical framework to two ethnographic studies, one explores the growth of digital technologies in Switzerland as a way to govern and monitor national agriculture, the other focuses on Indonesia, where small digital startups have begun to dot the landscape. By identifying the material and semiotic processes occurring in each case, we notice similar issues being raised in terms of how digitalisation is co-constructed in society. (shrink)

Virtual reality is all too often considered as antithetical to reality, the former being an entity fully separated from the latter. Since there has been historically no consensus among philosophers as to what constitutes reality, this article seeks to contribute to the debate on i crucial issue. It argues that reality should be considered as including non-tangible properties and that, from the first-person point of view, virtual reality is part of the reality of each and every one of us. Furthermore, (...) grey zones between reality and virtual reality, that is to say environments in which reality blends with fantasy and highly personal perception of our surroundings are much more common than often assumed. The article claims that architecture is the most powerful foundation for virtual reality and therefore creator of grey zones. Real spaces (such as cafés or streets, and moreover cities) offer experiences more intense than any typical virtual environment and cause the blurring of awareness in which world we are. Virtual reality is an impoverished reality, and attempts to realize it have led to disastrous outcomes. On the contrary, grey zones, partially anchored on the materiality, actually enrich reality with non-tangible qualities, without threatening its authority in our souls and minds. (shrink)

It is a well-established fact in representationalist cognitive science that concrete concepts influence human perception. In radical, anti-representationalist cognitive science, however, the case is far from clear. One reason for this is that proponents of Radical Enactivism yet have to clarify whether perceptual activity involving concepts is bound to rely on mental content or if it instantiates basic, contentfree cognition. The purpose of this paper is to show that concept-involving perception instantiates REC-style basic cognition. The paper begins by considering ‘cognitive (...) projection’ as the term is introduced by Distributed Cognition research. Although being introduced as a means for exploring concept-based perception in non-representationalist terms, I argue that ‘cognitive projection’ comes with mentalist overtones and unclarities concerning its linguistic basis. With the purpose of overcoming these shortcomings, I unfold a REC-friendly reading of Wittgenstein’s writings on aspect perception, arguing that basic concept-involving perception is an instantiation of basic cognition. Concludingly, with the aim of ensuring compatibility, I make a connection between conceptual aspect perception and the REC notion of attentional anchors. The latter has been introduced to explore the role of material artefacts in the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educational design but has, I submit, the potential for being extended to other practical contexts. (shrink)

This essay offers a critique of environmental ethics and argues that a post-environmental ethics may be unavoidable. It does so by exposing and questioning the ontological assumptions common to otherwise different modalities of environmental ethics. These modalities, it is argued, rest upon an implicit or explicit 'material essentialism'. Such essentialism entails the belief that putatively 'environmental' entities have discrete and relatively enduring properties. These properties 'anchor' ethical claims and permit the objects of ethical considerability to be named. Against this, (...) it is argued that a non-essentialist ontology is preferable. This ontology presumes neither that environmental phenomena are simply environmental nor that their properties can be 'fixed' under some determinate description. Drawing on recent 'hybrid' research in human geography and elsewhere, it is suggested that the motility and mutability of ostensibly environmental entities be recognised. This recognition, I conclude, desta bilises conventional environmental ethics and calls for a more supple mode of ethical reasoning. (shrink)

Existing research demonstrates a positive connection between psychedelics and increased nature relatedness. Enhanced affective ties toward nature are widely framed as being built into the pharmakon itself, and the relevance of experiences remains little understood. This paper turns to neoshamanic ayahuasca ceremonies in Europe, exploring the way specialists and attendants refer to nature in speech and performance. I argue that ritual framings performed during these ceremonies provide fertile ground for affective ties to emerge through substance‐induced experiences. I trace such framings (...) by exploring how medicine and healers are being coded; how specific materialities are rendered meaningful; and how individual experiences are discussed at such retreats. I argue that even while participants prioritize individual healing, personal development, or the satisfaction of psychonautical curiosity, environmentalism appears to be anchored by the proceedings themselves. Thus, this paper opens up for analysis ceremonial substance use as a contact zone where coherence is produced intersubjectively. (shrink)

“Black box argument” is a metaphor for modular components of argumentative discussion that are, within a particular discussion, not open to expansion. In public policy debate such as the controversy over abstinence-only sex education, scientific conclusions enter the discourse as black boxes consisting of a result returned from an external and largely impenetrable process. In one way of looking at black box arguments, there is nothing fundamentally new for the argumentation theorist: A black box argument is very like any other (...) appeal to authority, and what might be said about any particular form of black box will turn out to be a particularized version of what might be said about evaluating arguments based on authority. But in another way of looking at black box arguments, they are a constantly evolving technology for coming to conclusions and making these conclusions broadly acceptable. Black boxes are to argumentation what material inventions are to engineering and related sciences. They are anchored in and constrained by fundamental natural processes, but they are also new things that require theoretical explication and practical assessment. (shrink)

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in (...) a socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment. (shrink)

En contraste con algunas concepciones muy difundidas acerca de la razón, los análisis de Husserl subrayan tanto sus múltiples maneras de darse, es decir, su multidimensionalidad, como su entrelazamiento con la vida, lo que significa que la razón está arraigada en la vida y la vida es racional desde sus raíces. La multidimensionalidad da cuenta de sus diferenciables aspectos teoréticos, prácticos y afectivo-valorativos, mientras que el arraigo se refiere al anclaje de esos aspectos en la experiencia “anónima” que es “previa” (...) al pensamiento. Esto significa que la experiencia es racional en la medida que despliega una estructura constitutiva interna organizada en un sistema de niveles y estratos mediante los cuales se orienta hacia la racionalidad activa. Siguiendo las líneas de una articulación tripartita de la reflexión fenomenológica en los niveles estático, genético y mundovital, este trabajo procura mostrar que tales análisis, junto con este apuntar a una teleología implícita que exige una continuidad entre la vida y la razón, ponen de manifiesto el papel necesario que juega el cuerpo animado en este arraigo. La razón está arraigada en la vida por medio de la experiencia corporal en virtud de la función de “puente” que posee el cuerpo en su condición de cosa material y “órgano” estratificado del sentir y el mover del yo. Así la razón teórica está relacionada con los estratos de la sensibilidad y la cinestesia, la razón práctica se vincula con los estratos cinestésicos y volitivos, y la razón axiológica se asocia con el doble estrato de afección y sentir que subyacen y motivan la valoración. La constitución adopta nuevas formas en el tránsito de la egología a la intersubjetividad y a la experiencia completa mundovital, mientras que el arraigo puede ser ilustrado adicionalmente con el caso de la Tierra como suelo para la experiencia corporal.In contrast with widespread reductionistic conceptions of reason, Husserl’s analyses stress both its multifarious manners of givenness, i.e. its multidimensionality, and its intertwining with life, such that reason is rooted in life and life is rational from its roots. Multidimensionality accounts for distinguishable theoretical, practical and affective-valuing aspects of reason, while rootedness refers to the anchoring of these aspects in ‘anonymous’ experience ‘prior’ to thinking. This means that experience is rational insofar as it displays an inner constitutive structure organized as a system of levels and strata, by means of which it points to active rationality. Following the lines of a threefold articulation of phenomenological reflection in static, genetic and life-wordly levels, this paper aims to show that, together with this pointing to an implicit teleology, which calls for a continuity between life and reason, such analyses also unveil the necessary role played by the Body in this rootedness. Reason is rooted in life by means of Bodily experience, in virtue of the ‘bridging’ function of the Body as a material thing and as the stratified ‘organ’ of the Ego’s sensing and moving. Thus theoretical reason is related to the strata of sensibility and kinaesthesia, practical reason is related to the kinaesthetical and volitional strata, and axiological reason is related to the twofold strata of affection and feeling, which underlie and motivate valuation. This constitution takes on new forms in the transit from egology to intersubjectivity and to the full-fledged life-worldly experience, whereas rootedness can be further illustrated with the case of the Earth as basis-place for Bodily experience. (shrink)

We can understand objectivity, in the broadest sense of the term, as epistemic accountability to the real. Since at least the 1986 publication of Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism, so-called standpoint epistemologists have sought to build an understanding of such objectivity that does not essentially anchor it to a dislocated, ‘view from nowhere’ stance on the part of the judging subject. Instead, these theorists have argued that a proper understanding of objectivity must recognize that different agential standpoints offer (...) different access to objective truths, with some standpoints holding better epistemic potential than others. As Harding puts it, standpoint epistemology calls for “a critical evaluation of which social situations tend to generate the most objective knowledge claims” so as to identify those standpoints that “produce empirically more accurate descriptions and theoretically richer explanations” (1991, 142, 149). Which standpoints enable the most objectivity with respect to a particular inquiry is, for the standpoint theorists, always an empirical at least as much as a conceptual question; it requires attention to the actual, material relationship between knowers, knowledge practices, and objects known. Standpoint epistemology was developed primarily by self-identiªed feminist epistemologists. Virtually all developments of standpoint episte-. (shrink)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: faster, lower-levelcoordination processesof behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale t1; (...) mid-rangecollaborative processeswhich re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; cooperative processesinvolved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and cultural processesand practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales. (shrink)

Kliniske etikkomiteer har vært etablert i norske helseforetak siden 1996, først som et prøveprosjekt, senere som et permanent tiltak med et nasjonalt mandat. I forbindelse med det nasjonale etikkprosjektet «Samarbeid om etisk kompetanseheving» har det også i noen kommuner blitt etablert KEK. Senter for medisinsk etikk ved Universitetet i Oslo er tildelt ansvaret for oppfølging av KEK i helseforetakene og er i tillegg gitt et langsiktig ansvar for etikkarbeid og forskning i den kommunale helse- og omsorgstjenesten. Hensikten med denne studien (...) har vært å fremskaffe kunnskap om hvordan det står til med KEK som er etablert i kommunene. Hva jobber de med, hvilken betydning erfarer de at KEK har og hvilke ressurser har de? Studien har et kvalitativt design. Materialet er basert på telefonintervjuer med ledere for KEK og gjennomgang av komiteenes årsrapporter. Det er gjennomført en kvalitativ innholdsanalyse av datamaterialet. Komiteene arbeider både med enkeltsaker, saker av mer prinsipiell karakter og etikkskolering. Arbeidet vurderes som betydningsfullt og gjennomføres til tross for få ressurser og svak forankring. Kanskje vil en styrket forankring og ressurssituasjon og et nasjonalt mandat bidra positivt til komiteenes arbeid. Nøkkelord: Kliniske etikkomiteer, kommunal helse- og omsorgstjeneste, evaluering English Summary: Are clinical ethics committees in the municipal health and care services sustainable? Clinical ethics committees have been established in Norwegian hospital trusts since 1996, first as a pilot project, later on a permanent basis with a national mandate. As part of the national ethics project "Cooperation on ethical competence" some municipalities have also established a CEC. Centre for Medical Ethics at the University of Oslo is given the responsibility to support CECs in hospital trusts, and is also given a long-term responsibility for ethics support and research in municipal health care services. The purpose of this study was to obtain knowledge about the situation of CECs established in municipalities. What are they working on, what impact do they find that CEC has, and what resources do they have? The study has a qualitative design. The material is based on telephone interviews with CEC chairs, and reviews of the committees' annual reports. We have carried out a qualitative content analysis of the data. The committees work with individual cases, issues of a more principle character, and ethics training. The work is considered to be significant, and is carried out despite limited resources and weak anchoring. Perhaps a stronger anchoring, resource situation and a national mandate could strengthen the committees’ situation. Keywords: Clinical ethics committees, municipal health and care services, evaluation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradox of Education:A ConversationHumberto R. Maturana and Bernhard PoerksenResponsibility of the TeacherPoerksen: Immanuel Kant writes in his essay Über Pädagogik that the wide field of education is governed by a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, we want free and self-determined individuals to leave our schools; on the other, we impose a syllabus on the future individuals, force them to attend schools, punish their failures, and persecute their (...) noncompliance. There is, if we follow Kant, an inescapable relationship of tension between the goals and the means of educational efforts: They contradict each other. Would you agree?Maturana: No. Education, the commentary of an observer, is the process of transformation resulting from the co-existence with adults. We become the adults we have been living with. This means: If freedom and self-determined thinking are the goals of educational activity, then we have to live together in a way that is supported by the mutual respect for the autonomy of the other. In my view, the paradox formulated by Kant does not exist at all. The way of life, the manner of living together, shapes and transforms people. If you want to teach autonomy and reflection, you cannot use force as a method but must create an open space for communal reflection and action. There must be no contradiction between goals and means.Poerksen: Surely, there must also be constraints? It must be laid down when everybody has to be present, what the task is, who the teacher is, who has authority.Maturana: Compulsion will emerge if the teachers do not succeed in presenting their material in a thrilling way and in making school an attractive place of being together. Their failure will lead to force.Poerksen: The teacher is totally responsible for everything that may happen in school. Is this not an exaggerated claim?Maturana: No. If a teacher behaves respectfully, if he does not intimidate his pupils, if he listens, encourages cooperation and reflection, then a special form of interaction will emerge. The way of living practiced by the teacher, including the goals of teaching, will be the source of profitable learning for the pupils. This also implies that three questions and tasks must be sorted out cooperatively in education. First it seems necessary to me to debate the educational ideal to be chosen—what should the future adults be like when leaving the school one day? Should they be democratically minded and responsibly acting citizens? Or are they to be authoritarian and commandeering hierarchs, lords who feel superior to everyone else? It is then necessary to anchor a way of life in the school that permits acting and thinking according to that ideal. Finally, there is the essential task of preparing the teachers for their job in such a [End Page 25] way as to do justice to the desired goals—to enable them to live what they have to achieve.Poerksen: This would mean that teaching has nothing to do with the stepwise elimination of ignorance, as is commonly thought. The transmission of knowledge is secondary. The primary requirement is a way of life that corresponds with one's ideals, a particular form of living together, out of which the material topics will arise in due course.Maturana: Exactly. The children do not learn mathematics in school; they learn how to live together with a mathematics teacher. Perhaps they will one day carry on this enjoyable and exciting kind of being together independently—and become mathematics teachers or mathematicians themselves. Teachers do not simply transmit some content; they acquaint their pupils with a way of living. In the process, the rules of arithmetic, the laws of physics, or the grammar of a language will be acquired. My claim is: Pupils learn teachers.Poerksen: What about children who systematically refuse to cooperate? What is to be done with them? The classical answer is, of course: bad marks, relegation, exclusion from the winning circles.Maturana: The so-called difficult children about whom teachers keep complaining often only struggle to be seen and accepted, while the whole world expects them to behave in a calculable manner and to adapt to strange demands. Asking... (shrink)

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the theoretical (...) presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz presents the idea of monads, as non-communicative, self-actuating system of beings that are windowless, closed, eternal, deterministic and individualistic. For him, the whole universe and its constituents are monads and that includes humans. In fact, any ‘body’, such as the ‘body’ of an animal or man has, according to Leibniz, one dominant monad which controls the others within it. This dominant monad, he often refers to as the soul. If Leibniz’s conception of monads is accepted, it merely (...) establishes human subjectivity, idiosyncrasies, biases, prejudices and individual points of view as the norm. How then do we ensure inter-subjectivity and the kind of social interaction requisite for the achievement of social order, since Leibniz’s system forecloses the possibility of interaction and communication among monads? In this essay, we argue that just as Leibniz’s monads synchronize only through the Supreme Monad (Monas Monadum), humans as social monads should also interact through a matrix of ideals like truth, honesty, sincerity, integrity, altruism, impartiality, compassion and trust. Since social order is actualised only within the context of linked social structures, relations and values, these utopian ideals would form the fulcrum through which humans relate and the very foundation that would anchor a viable social order. Our aim here is to establish a relationship between Leibniz’s metaphysics and the physical domains of life by showing that metaphysical constructs can impinge on human social relations and wellbeing. The study employed the qualitative method of research through critical analysis of texts, library and archival materials. (shrink)