Invoking Hope: Reading Theory and Utopia in Dark Times argues for the undiminished importance of the practices of theory, utopia, and deep, close, and even critical reading in our current situation of what Brecht refers to as finsteren Zeiten, dark times. Written during 2016, an extraordinarily consequential year, Wegner reflects on the question: what does any particular theory allow us to do, what is the value of so doing, and, most importantly, who benefits?

This essay offers an immanent reading of Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future in terms of his theorization of a four-fold allegorical hermeneutic. On the literal level, the book explores science fictions; on the allegorical, Utopian representations; on the moral, or individual psychological, it serves as a “partial summing up” of a number of sequences in Jameson’s ongoing project; and on the anagogical, it contributes to a reinvention of Marxism for an era of globalization. Jameson’s recent writings also share an (...) interest in modernism, challenging late modernist ideology and recovering more radical forms. The essay concludes by exploring how Jameson’s discussion of Utopia serves as a figure for the problems of radical politics in the present. (shrink)

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions represents not only a significant contribution in utopian studies; it is also a major intervention in contemporary literary studies and global cultural studies more generally. Each of the book’s chapters is structured around a specific set of formal and generic questions, exploring in great detail and with a tremendous amount of insight recent feminist revisionings of older genres, including the bildungsroman, the novel of art, nonlinear histories, American historical novels, and finally, in an (...) extraordinary turn, the works of contemporary Arab feminist writers, which, Wagner-Lawlor shows, “directly address the nature of the work left to do, as.. (shrink)

Affective theory of mind (aToM) impairments associated with the youth antisocial phenotype callous-unemotional (CU) traits predict antisocial behaviour above CU traits alone. Importantly, CU traits associate with decrements in complex but not basic aToM. aToM is modulated by cognitive control and CU traits associate with cognitive control impairments; thus, cognitive control is a plausible mechanism underlying aToM impairments in CU traits. Because cognitive control is dependent on the availability of cognitive resources, youth with CU traits may have difficulty with allocating (...) cognitive resources under greater demands that impact complex aToM. To test this, 81 participants (ages 12–14, Female = 51.8%, Male = 48.2%) were recruited to complete a behavioural paradigm that involved an initial aToM task with complex and basic emotions followed by placing additional demands on cognitive control and a final repeat of the same aToM task. Results indicate adolescents higher in CU traits had intact basic aToM but less accuracy in complex aToM that worsened after taxing cognitive control; and this load only required a short duration to account for ToM decrements (200 ms [range 150–1600 ms]). These results demonstrate CU traits association with cognitive control limitations that impact complex aToM. This may partially explain antisocial behaviour associated with CU traits. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with the definition of religion. This definition is developed within a context which recognizes the impossibility of value-neutrality in the definition of words. The definition proposed is applied to three complex borderline cases: Spinozism, Marxism,and economism or free-market ideology.

This paper considers pick-the-winners contests as a simple method for harnessing the wisdom of crowds to produce probability forecasts. Pick-the-winners contests are those in which players pick the outcomes of selected future binary events with a prize going to the player with the most correct picks. In contrast to soliciting probability forecasts from experts, this paper shows that competition among players is to be encouraged because it improves the accuracy of the resulting crowd probability forecasts. This improvement comes because the (...) competition not only discourages the overbetting of favorites that occurs if prizes are awarded based on absolute performance, but also helps mitigate the public knowledge bias that occurs if everyone reports truthfully. In addition to the theoretical arguments, the paper analyzes picks from 6 years of pick-the-winners contests involving hundreds of players and 1037 college lacrosse games to find that the crowd proportions outperformed two benchmark sets of probabilities. (shrink)

The problem of philosophical introductions - or, rather, introductions to the works of philosophers - is notorious. Generally, they fall into three categories. The first type are those which are no introduction at all in any but the most attenuated sense … Hegel’s introduction to The Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to his Phenomenology of Perception, Husserl’s introduction to his Logical Investigations, or even Ideas, which is subtitled “Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.” Introductions of this sort have often attained the status of philosophic (...) texts in their own right as is the case with the now often discussed first introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. (shrink)