This paper defends a desire-based understanding of pleasurable and unpleasant experiences. More specifically, the thesis is that what makes an experience pleasant/unpleasant is the subject having a certain kind of desire about that experience. I begin by introducing the ‘Desire Account’ in more detail, and then go on to explain and refute a prominent set of contemporary counter-examples, based on subjects who might have ‘Reflective Blindness’, looking particularly at the example of subjects with depression. I aim to make (...) the Desire Account more persuasive, but also to clear up more widespread misunderstandings about depression in metaethics. For example, mistakes that are made by conflating two of depression’s most prominent symptoms: depressed mood and anhedonia. (shrink)

Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of visual awareness is inattentional blindness (IB), in which a surprisingly salient event right in front of you may go completely unseen when unattended. Does IB reflect a failure of perception, or only of subsequent memory? Previous work has been unable to answer this question, due to a seemingly intractable dilemma: ruling out memory requires immediate perceptual reports, but soliciting such reports fuels an expectation that eliminates IB. Here we introduce a way of evoking (...) repeated IB in the same subjects and the same session: we show that observers fail to report seeing salient events’ not only when they have no expectation, but also when they have the wrong expectations about the events nature. This occurs when observers must immediately report seeing anything unexpected, even mid-event. Repeated IB thus demonstrates that IB is aptly named: it reflects a genuine deficit in moment-by-moment conscious perception, rather than a form of inattentional amnesia. (shrink)

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, (...) that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Blind Spots and Avenues for Transformation within the Utopian Canon: Toward A Terrestrial EcotopianismHeather Alberro (bio)Limitations and Exclusions of the (Western) Utopian CanonUtopianism in all of its manifestations often powerfully (re)surfaces during times of significant socio-ecological upheaval as a response to oppressive and exploitative realities. As such it is a fervent refusal against a given status quo and its purported inevitability. Utopianism and hope are rendered possible by, and (...) draw their transformative potential from, the boundless terrain of potentiality surrounding any given reality.1 Indeed, without such conditions of radical uncertainty, hope and utopianism would not be possible. Often and understandably, the seminal works of Plato, Thomas More, William Morris, H. G. Wells and others come to mind when we think of utopian studies. Hence Kumar’s parochial observation that there is no discernible utopian tradition beyond the West because other cultures lack the foundational myth of the Golden Age—that is, the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and Arcadia—that has been so formative to the development of utopia in the West.2 These traditional or “transcendental” utopian modalities often feature a dichotomous opposition to their present reality, depicting time and historical movement [End Page 528] as linear successions of stages proceeding from an archaic past and toward a future wherein the utopian ideal is seen as occupying a “fixed space outside time and history.”3 Such temporally “transcendent” utopias marked the dawn of the modern phase of utopian thought, originating in the seventeenth century alongside new theories of social evolution that coalesced into modern Enlightenment notions of linear historical progress.4Prioritizing Pluralism: Critical Heterotopias of the “Here and Now”What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.5Tom Moylan’s notion of “critical utopianism,” which emerged during the “historic block” of political opposition of the 1960s and 1970s, marks one important step within the utopian canon toward praxis and the essential “Nowness” of critique and imaginative projection.6 This “critical” strand of utopianism is fueled by a fervent opposition to the exploitation and domination of people and the natural world that is increasingly characteristic of Western-capitalist societies.7 This opposition is coupled with a utopian desire for mutual aid, ecological resilience, liberation, and peaceful living—in effect, a longing for community.8 The “critical” in Moylan’s formulation has a bivalency: first, in the sense of critique through the debunking and deconstruction of the utopian genre itself, which was “colonized” by capitalism toward the 1970s and infused with technocratic dreams of material abundance through boundless economic expansion; and second, in the sense of the critical mass required to effect fundamental societal transformations.9 If the better is the enemy of the good, then perfection serves as “a stick with which to beat the possible.”10 Utopias do not offer rigid blueprints of a fixed or perfect ideal world but rather head toward “the ideal” by offering “a rich blending of creative fantasy, critical thinking, and oppositional activism” predicated on a demand for radically new relations between social and natural systems.11 Ever critically self-reflective, critical utopias continually remind us of the limitations of the utopian impulse, particularly the dangers of pursuing rigid and transcendental visions of “the better.” Nevertheless, these are desperate times that demand some orientation toward a better; utopianism’s [End Page 529] denunciative function is not enough. Thus, in his impassioned recent work Becoming Utopian, Moylan denotes the need for an intersectional, democratically unified leadership structure that can help sustain a political movement for counteracting the “global/neoliberal superpower order while reaching for a utopian horizon.”12 With a focus more on process than a fixed ideal, the critical utopia explores and articulates vibrant post-capitalist futures that are simultaneously open-ended, and far more socio-ecologically resilient than the “now” of late capitalism.Akin in function and style to critical utopias are the grounded and transgressive... (shrink)

In the not-too-distant past, vision was often said to involve three levels of processing: a low level concerned with descriptions of the geometric and photometric properties of the image, a high level concerned with abstract knowledge of the physical and semantic properties of the world, and a middle level concerned with anything not handled by the other two. The negative definition of mid-level vision contained in this description reflected a rather large gap in our understanding of visual processing: How could (...) the here-and-now descriptions of the low levels combine with the enduring knowledge of the high levels to produce our perception of the surrounding world? A number of experimental and theoretical efforts have been made over the past few decades to solve this "mid-level crisis". One of the more recent of these is based on the phenomenon of change blindness—the difficulty in seeing a large change in a scene when the transients accompanying that change no longer convey information about its location (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997; Rensink, 2000a). Phenomenologically, this effect is quite striking: the change typically is not seen for several seconds, after which it suddenly snaps into awareness. During the time the change remains "invisible", there is an apparent disconnection of the low-level descriptions (which respond to the change) from subjective visual experience (which does not). As such, this effect would seem to have the potential to help us understand how mid-level mechanisms might knit low- and high-level processes into a coherent representation of our surroundings. -/- It is argued here that this potential can indeed be realized, and that change blindness can teach us much about the nature of mid-level vision.3 A number of studies are first reviewed showing that the perception of a scene does not involve a steady buildup of detailed representation: rather, it is a dynamic process, with focused attention playing one of the main roles, viz., forming coherent object representations whenever needed. It is then argued that change blindness can also shed considerable light on the nature of focused attention itself, such as its speed, capacity, selectivity, and ability to bind together visual properties into coherent structures. (shrink)

헤겔은 흔히 현존하는 공동체의 규범을 비난하거나 논박하려는욕망을 포기하라고 가르치는 관습주의자로 간주되곤 한다. 이 글에서 나는 이런 통념과 반대로 헤겔의 인륜성 이론이 ‘현존하는 공동체적 규범을 맹목적으로 따르는 태도’가 유발하는 위험에 대한해법을 찾고자 했던 시도였음을 보여줄 것이다. 이를 위해서 먼저소포클레스의 『안티고네』를 후경에 두고 전개된 『정신현상학』의｢정신｣장의 논의를 간략히 조망한다. 여기서 헤겔은 ‘주어진 인륜적 법칙’들을 맹목적으로 따르는 태도가 윤리적 개인의 정체성은물론이고 일반적인 공동체적 규범의 종말을 초래한다는 사실을 명료히 드러내기 때문이다(1). 이어서 나는 이런 인륜적 습관과 관습의 맹목성이 초래하는 위험에 주목한 헤겔연구자들인 크리스토프멘케(Christoph Menke)와 율리아네 레벤티쉬(Juliane (...) Rebentisch) 가 내놓은 해법의 한계를 비판한다. 감각적 충동의 복원을 제안하는 멘케의 미학적 해법은 주체를 인륜적인 것 ‘바깥의’ 고유성으로이탈하도록 만들기 때문에 부적절하다면, 레벤티쉬의 반성적 아이러니의 해법은 인륜적 규범의 참에 대한 회의적 비판을 지속하도록 만듦으로써 분열 상태를 영구화하기 때문에 불충분하다(2). 이로부터 나는 인륜적 관습주의의 타개를 위한 유력한 헤겔주의적해법은 『법철학』의 서론에 등장하는 자유의지론의 요체를 이루는“자아에 대한 순수한 사유”에 있다는 해석적 테제를 방어한다. 자아에 대한 순수한 사유는 ‘나를 포함한 모든 자아를 보편적 자기동일자의 관점에서 동등하게 바라볼 수 있는 역량’을 가리키기 때문에, 공동체적 규범이 편협한 배타적 관습이 되어 버릴 위기를 가로막는 주체적 힘의 요체를 이룬다(3). (shrink)

Images of animals are all around us. Yet the visibility offered by wildlife photography can't help but contribute to an image of the animal as fundamentally separate from the human. But how can we get closer to animals without making them aware of us or changing their relationship to their environment? The Blind might be the answer. Developed for naturalists by the Institute of Critical Zoologists, the Blind is a camouflage cloak that works on the principle that an object vanishes (...) from sight if light rays striking it are not reflected, but are instead forced to flow around as if it were not there. In fifty stunning color photographs, this volumeshows the cloak tested in nature reserves, grasslands, and urban environments. By taking the human out of the picture,The Blind offers an opportunity to explore how we see animals in photography. (shrink)

In this work, we will approach some essential questions about the collective imaginary and their relations with reality and truth. We should face this subject in a conceptual framework, followed by the corresponding factual analysis of demonstrable behavioral realities. We will adopt not only the methodology, but mostly the tenets and propositions of the analytic philosophy, which certainly will be apparent throughout the study, and may be identified by the features described by Perez : -/- Rabossi (1975) defends the idea (...) that analytic philosophy can be identified by considering certain family resemblances. He suggests the following family traits: a positive attitude toward scientific knowledge; a cautious attitude toward metaphysics; a conception of philosophy as a conceptual task, which takes conceptual analysis as a method; a close relationship between language and philosophy; a concern with seeking argumentative answers to philosophical problems; search for conceptual clarity Perez, Diana Ines, "Analytic Philosophy in Latin America”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ). These core concepts involve cultural, social, religious, scientific, philosophic, moral, and political contents, belonging to the individual and collective existence of each one of us. The present work grounds itself on analytical reflection. We will speculate the most comprehensive and profound way we can and express the results of our thoughts. Notwithstanding the multidisciplinary nature of the subject and the methodological openness for accepting contributions from any field of science, this work belongs to the aim of psychology and ontology or, in other terms, social and ontological psychology. The main scope of this paper is to observe how some essential evolutionary attributes of humankind, like creativity, imagination, and association, can become a hazardous sickness, sheltered in the misty shadows of the intelligence. (shrink)

An extensive research program surrounding a phenomenon called inattentional blindness is reported by Mack and Rock in their book of the same name. The general conclusion that is drawn from the work is that no conscious perception can occur without attention. Because the bulk of the evidence surrounding inattentional blindness comes from memorial reports of displays, it is possible that inattentional blindness reflects a problem with memory, rather than a problem with perception. It is argued here that (...) at least some instances of inattentional blindness are better characterized as memorial failures than perceptual failures. The extent to which unattended stimuli fail to engage perceptual processing is an empirical question that the combination of inattentional blindness and online measures of processing can be used to address. (shrink)

In their descriptions of the life dynamics of tendencies as “blind but oriented,” both Scheler and Husserl outline an alternative model of intentionality to Brentano’s conception of mental reference to determinate objects or meanings. In my reading, their phenomenological consideration of tendential structures will reveal tendency as an essential moment of intentionality. A horizon of indeterminacy turns out to be constitutive of every intentional act as a tendency toward or away from something. This paper develops as follows: First, I will (...) present Max Scheler’s nuanced differentiation of tendential life and the systematic horizon of his model of blind but oriented tendency, which seeks to offer an alternative to the mechanism/teleology dichotomy. Second, I will present Jocelyn Benoist’s framing of the same question in the opposition between blind drives and consciousness. Benoist’s radical critique of the interpretation of intentionality as a tendency condenses in his clear assertion that drives cannot be intentional because they are constitutively blind. Benoist accuses Edmund Husserl of nothing less than murdering intentionality through phenomenological vivisection, i.e., by extinguishing in reflection the tension inherent in conative intention and watering down the concept of intentionality to such an extent that it also includes cognitive acts. I will therefore turn my attention to the alleged culprit. I will show that Husserl’s broad concept of intentionality is not only negatively justified by the possibility of transforming tendencies into a consciousness of their implicit object, but rather positively justified by the directed dynamics of both passive and active forms of intentionality. In the conclusion I will show how Husserl’s constitutive analyses move along lines akin to Scheler’s insights and call for a revision of overly static interpretations of the phenomenological concepts of intentionality and teleology. (shrink)

This article proposes the concept of blind visuality as a response to the injunction to look differently at both visual images, and vision itself, posed by Bruce Horak’s exhibition Through a Tired Eye. The brightly colored impressionistic paintings suggest an artist who revels in the domain of the visual, yet he describes his practice as a representation of blindness. This accessible exposition of blind visuality speaks to the broad question of what critical disability arts contribute to discourses about vision, (...) visuality and spectatorship in the arts. I analyze Horak’s paintings as examples of blind epistemology and haptic visuality, showing that this work evokes a way of seeing that blurs the boundaries between vision and embodied feeling. I argue that by expanding understandings of vision and multi-sensory knowledge, deconstructing the separation between vision and haptic perception, and challenging western ocularcentricism, blind visuality poses an alternative economy of looking that reflects disability aesthetics, shifts from individualism to relationality, and challenges understandings of perception/knowledge as a form of mastery. (shrink)

The growing prevalence of misleading information (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people’s susceptibility to falling for it. Here we report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between one’s ability to detect pseudo-profound bullshit, confidence in one’s bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the lowest (highest) bullshit detection performance overestimate (underestimate) their detection abilities and overplace (underplace) those (...) abilities when compared to others. Additionally, people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleading information. Taken together, these results show that both highly bullshit-receptive and highly bullshit-resistant people are largely unaware of the extent to which they can detect bullshit and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may be insufficient to fully account for these effects. (shrink)

Classic theories of religious toleration from the 17th century regularly made exceptions for various categories of people such as Catholics and atheists who need not be tolerated. From a contemporary perspective these may be understood as blind spots because at least some of us would argue that these exceptions were not necessary. This essay explores the toleration theories of John Milton, Benedict de Spinoza, Denis Veiras, John Locke and Pierre Bayle in order to assess whether they actually called for such (...) exceptions and whether those exceptions were justifed or were in fact blind spots. It concludes with some reflections on what our own blind spots may be, and whether we can see around them. (shrink)

Many experiments have demonstrated that people fail to detect seemingly large visual changes in their environment. Despite these failures, most people confidently predict that they would see changes that are actually almost impossible to see. Therefore, in at least some situations visual experience is demonstrably not what people think it is. This paper describes a line of research suggesting that overconfidence about change detection reflects a deeper metacognitive error founded on beliefs about attention and the role of meaning as a (...) support for a coherent perceptual experience. Accordingly, CBB does not occur in all situations , while the scope of the phenomenon remains broad enough to suggest more than a misunderstanding of a small niche of visual experience. I finish by arguing that despite the very small amount of research on visual metacognition, these beliefs are critical to understand. (shrink)

This paper is about the alethic aspect of epistemic rationality. The most common approaches to this aspect are either normative (what a reasoner ought to/may believe?) or evaluative (how rational is a reasoner?), where the evaluative approaches are usually comparative (one reasoner is assessed compared to another). These approaches often present problems with blindspots. For example, ought a reasoner to believe a currently true blindspot? Is she permitted to? Consequently, these approaches often fail in describing a situation of alethic maximality, (...) where a reasoner fulfills all the alethic norms and could be used as a standard of rationality (as they are, in fact, used in some of these approaches). I propose a function α, which accepts a set of beliefs as inputand returns a numeric alethic value. Then I use this function to define a notion of alethic maximality that is satisfiable by finite reasoners (reasoners with cognitive limitations) and does not present problems with blindspots. Function α may also be used in alethic norms and evaluation methods (comparative and non-comparative) that may be applied to finite reasoners and do not present problems with blindspots. A result of this investigation isthat the project of providing purely alethic norms is defective. The use of function α also sheds light on important epistemological issues, such as the lottery and the preface paradoxes, and the principles of clutter avoidance and reflection. (shrink)

Nathaniel Hone’s three portraits of Sir John Fielding establish a public image for the magistrate and a visual language for representing his blindness. Fielding is represented in 1757 as a family man, in 1762 as a sociable member of the Republic of Letters, and finally in 1773 as the embodiment of Justice. The movement across the portraits from empiricism to allegory not only conveys his increasing social status and celebrity, but also the mingling of philosophical and poetic ideas about (...) blindness in Enlightenment thinking. This paper argues that Hone’s construction of Fielding’s vision impairment in the latter two portraits reflects changing attitudes to blindness resulting from Lockean sensationalism and the widespread success of cataract operations. The more academically ambitious final portrait, however, also draws on iconographic tropes of blind justice, casting Fielding in allegorical guise that confers upon him heightened powers of reason and impartiality. For Hone, Fielding’s blindness is a crucial part of his status and identity, but it also provides opportunities to push portraiture beyond its association with the imitation of the visible and into the realm of invention. (shrink)

In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is (...) itself blind; as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing with another. Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. _Memoirs of the Blind_ is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including Diderot's _Lettres sur les aveugles_, the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's _The Painter of Modern _ _Life_, and Merleau-Ponty's _The Visible and the _ _Invisible_. Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, _Memoirs of the Blind_ extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in _Truth and _ _Painting_. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts. (shrink)

Across four studies, we explored how feeling nostalgic about an attitude object impacts the metacognitive characteristics of the attitude toward that object and how those metacognitions predict the evaluation’s underlying strength. In each study, participants reflected on and evaluated a song or television show that either did or did not elicit nostalgia. Across these studies, we found support for the hypotheses that nostalgic attitude objects are viewed more positively, appraised with greater attitudinal importance, and exhibited less objective ambivalence. In Study (...) 4, we observed that nostalgic attitudes are associated with greater behavioural intentions and that this relationship was mediated both by attitudinal importance and objective ambivalence. These studies contribute to our understanding of how nostalgia affects attitude formation processes. (shrink)

While young people today expect gender equity in relationships, inequality persists. In this article, we use interviews with 25 young adults to investigate the link between gender meanings, age meanings, and continued inequality in relationships. Middle-class young adults tell relationship stories in a gender and age context that both reflect and perpetuate ideas about adult masculinity and femininity. While women often tell stories of poor treatment in relationships, they are able to reclaim agency over their experiences and believe that they (...) can solve their relationship problems by understanding their experiences as part of the normative path to adult womanhood. In contrast, men are able to explain their bad relationship behavior by attributing that behavior to youth and immaturity. By telling these stories, both women and men imagine that growing up will fix gender inequalities, obfuscating the persistence of gender inequalities in later adulthood. This work sheds light on the way narratives of age contribute to the persistence of gender inequality in romantic relationships. (shrink)

I suggest that the transformation of an artifact from an introductory-type instrument into a viable, collectively used tool cannot be understood solely in terms of gradual adaptation of the technology and user environment, but also as a qualitatively broader integration process in which an expansion takes place. The case illustrated a constrained shift of an artifact from its first adopter, an individual pioneer user, to a more collective user in institutional medicine. The artifact, a neuromagnetometer instrument for brain research and (...) diagnostics, brings together physicists, neuroscientists, physicians as well as various practitioners from the medical imaging industry. I applied an activity-theoretical framework for analysing the adoption of the neuromagnetometer from the pioneer phase of implementation into the more established use. The case showed that the anticipated transformation of the artifact constituted a major challenge for the user organization and its practitioners. It is suggested that an expansion of the object into a shared object of implementation among the separate practitioner groups is indispensable.This expansion of the object involves for the practitioners to recognize both the different objects and requirements of the pioneer phase of the implementation and the new phase of introduction into medical practice. It is shown that this recognition does not, however, come as given, spontaneously born in the transition. The emerging new object may remain only partially shared if not made visible by deliberate effort among the practitioners. The expansion requires collective visualization of the work and reflective dialogue on it. Employing analytical tools, such as the activity-theoretical concepts used here, is one possible way of facilitating such an effort. (shrink)

This article analyses Camille Henrot’s 2013 film Grosse Fatigue in relation to the histories of hypermedia and modes of interaction with the World Wide Web. It considers the development of non-hierarchical systems for the organisation of information, and uses Grosse Fatigue to draw comparisons between the Web, the natural history museum and the archive. At stake in focusing on the way in which information is organised through hypermedia is the question of subjectivity, and this article argues that such systems are (...) made ‘user-friendly’ by appearing to accommodate intuitive processes of information retrieval, reflecting the subject back to itself as autonomous. This produces an ideology of individualism which belies the forms of heteronomy that in fact shape and structure access to information online in significant ways. At the heart of this argument is an attention to the visual, and the significance of art as an immanent mode of analysis. Through the themes of transparency and opacity, and order and chaos, the article thus proposes a defining dynamic between autonomy and automation as a model for understanding the contemporary subject. (shrink)

In the spirit of James and Dewey, I ask what one might want from a theory of knowledge. Much Anglophone epistemology is centered on questions that were once highly pertinent, but are no longer central to broader human and scientific concerns. The first sense in which epistemology without history is blind lies in the tendency of philosophers to ignore the history of philosophical problems. A second sense consists in the perennial attraction of approaches to knowledge that divorce knowing subjects from (...) their societies and from the tradition of socially assembling a body of transmitted knowledge. When epistemology fails to use the history of inquiry as a laboratory in which methodological claims can be tested, there is a third way in which it becomes blind. Finally, lack of attention to the growth of knowledge in various domains leaves us with puzzles about the character of the knowledge we have. I illustrate this last theme by showing how reflections on the history of mathematics can expand our options for understanding mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

The obvious appeal and growing momentum of clinical ethics in academic medical centers should not blind us to a potential danger: the collapse of critical distance. The very integration into the clinical milieu and the processes of clinical decision making, that clinical ethics claims as its greatest success, carries the seeds of a dilution of ethics' critical stance toward medicine and medical education. The purpose of this paper is to suggest how this might occur, and what potential contributions of ethics (...) to medicine might be sacrificed as a result. Medical sociology will be used for comparison. Sociologists have found that they may function either as students and critics of established medical practices and educational philosophies, or as collaborative participants in them — but rarely both. It may be that professional ethics is most effective when it plays the role of stranger rather than insider, and is continually able to question the most basic assumptions and values of the enterprise with which it is associated. As with medical sociology, ethics and humanities must ask to what extent their desire for acceptance in the clinic requires their acceptance of the clinic: specifically, acceptance of basic assumptions about optimal ways of organizing medical education, socializing physicians-in-training, providing care, and even of defining medical ethics itself. The paper concludes by recommending that ethics reassert its strangeness in the medical milieu even as it assumes a more prominent role within the medical center. (shrink)

Critics currently argue that applied ethics approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) are too principles-oriented and entail a theory–practice gap. Several applied ethical approaches try to prevent such a gap by conceptually translating ethical theory into practice. In this article, we explore how the currently most prominent approaches of AI ethics translate ethics into practice. Therefore, we examine three approaches to applied AI ethics: the embedded ethics approach, the ethically aligned approach, and the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) approach. We analyze each (...) of these three approaches by asking how they understand and conceptualize theory and practice. We outline the conceptual strengths as well as their shortcomings: an embedded ethics approach is context-oriented but risks being biased by it; ethically aligned approaches are principles-oriented but lack justification theories to deal with trade-offs between competing principles; and the interdisciplinary Value Sensitive Design approach is based on stakeholder values but needs linkage to political, legal, or social governance aspects. Against this background, we develop a meta-framework for applied AI ethics conceptions with three dimensions. Based on critical theory, we suggest these dimensions as starting points to critically reflect on the conceptualization of theory and practice. We claim, first, that the inclusion of the dimension of affects and emotions in the ethical decision-making process stimulates reflections on vulnerabilities, experiences of disregard, and marginalization already within the AI development process. Second, we derive from our analysis that considering the dimension of justifying normative background theories provides both standards and criteria as well as guidance for prioritizing or evaluating competing principles in cases of conflict. Third, we argue that reflecting the governance dimension in ethical decision-making is an important factor to reveal power structures as well as to realize ethical AI and its application because this dimension seeks to combine social, legal, technical, and political concerns. This meta-framework can thus serve as a reflective tool for understanding, mapping, and assessing the theory–practice conceptualizations within AI ethics approaches to address and overcome their blind spots. (shrink)

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in René Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book's series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ (...) signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. While unravelling the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,” the analysis highlights a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere, a living Cartesian ghost. This effort at revitalizing and reframing the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces, also involves reflecting on some of the trends in contemporary Cartesian scholarship while putting Descartes in dialogue with a host of twentieth century and contemporary Continental philosophers ranging from Edmund Husserl, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alain Badiou among others. (shrink)

The loss or absence of vision is probably one of the most incapacitating events that can befall a human being. The importance of vision for humans is also reflected in brain anatomy as approximately one third of the human brain is devoted to vision. It is therefore unsurprising that throughout history many attempts have been undertaken to develop devices aiming at substituting for a missing visual capacity. In this review, we present two concepts that have been prevalent over the last (...) two decades. The first concept is sensory substitution, which refers to the use of another sensory modality to perform a task that is normally primarily sub-served by the lost sense. The second concept is cross-modal plasticity, which occurs when loss of input in one sensory modality leads to reorganization in brain representation of other sensory modalities. Both phenomena are training-dependent. We also briefly describe the history of blindness from ancient times to modernity, and then proceed to address themeansthat have been used to help blind individuals, with an emphasis on modern technologies, invasive (various type of surgical implants) and non-invasive devices. With the advent of brain imaging, it has become possible to peer into the neural substrates of sensory substitution and highlight the magnitude of the plastic processes that lead to a rewired brain. Finally, we will address the important question of the value and practicality of the available technologies and future directions. (shrink)

This article—mainly referring to the situation in Germany—consists of three parts. In a first section the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix ‘neuro-’ is ubiquitous today and therefore concepts like ‘neuropedagogy’ or ‘neurodidactics’ seem to be in the mainstream of modern thinking. In the second part of the article the perspective changes from the public discourse to the disciplinary discourse; a (...) brief excursus into developmental psychiatry, neuropsychology and modern psychoanalysis will be made in order to demonstrate how the results of neuroscientific research are integrated in their theoretical frameworks. These three disciplines have no difficulty in integrating neuroscientific findings because each of them possesses a systematic core composed of ‘native concepts’. In contrast to them, educational theory has much more difficulty with such integration, as will be shown in the third part of the essay. On the one hand, neuroscientific thinking seems to be able to dominate education rather easily and without great resistance, especially in the fields of early childhood education, instruction and learning—mainly by simplifying educational processes and by reducing the complexity of the educational task to a mere ‘relationship problem’. On the other hand, this attraction of neuroscience in education might be understood as the reflection of a theoretical deficit in educational theory itself, with the significance of affect and emotion not receiving proper attention. (shrink)

This article examines student peer reporting by extending the findings from the business ethics and higher education literature. In the conceptual model we propose that reflective moral attentiveness, subjective knowledge of the code of ethics, and academic dishonesty beliefs antecede ethical judgment of peer reporting, which impacts intentions to report peers’ unethical behavior. The relationships are tested using structural equation modeling. The findings indicate that moral attentiveness significantly influences ethical judgment, which in turn affects intention. The relationship between beliefs (...) about academic dishonesty and ethical judgment is partially supported. Based on these results, suggestions for higher education institutions are provided. (shrink)

William O. Stephens is to be applauded for the way in which he presents and analyzes some paradigmatic Stoic arguments, and thus defends Stoicism from the misplaced charges of Jim Cheney. Nonetheless, Stephens’ individualist interpretation of what he calls Stoic “logocentrism” obscures key features of the Stoics’ theory of value and their related ethic and metaphysic. Once the Stoics are allowedto speak for themselves, it emerges that they adhered to a holistic axiology, that for them virtue lay in conformity with (...) cosmic nature, and that the standard charges of anthropocentrism and blindness to natural beauty, often wielded by environmental philosophers against them, are misguided. (shrink)

For Kant, ‘reflection’ is a technical term with a range of senses. I focus here on the senses of reflection that come to light in Kant's account of logic, and then bring the results to bear on the distinction between ‘logical’ and ‘transcendental’ reflection that surfaces in the Amphiboly chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. Although recent commentary has followed similar cues, I suggest that it labours under a blind spot, as it neglects Kant's distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ (...) general logic. The foundational text of existing interpretations is a passage in Logik Jäsche that appears to attribute to Kant the view that reflection is a mental operation involved in the generation of concepts from non-conceptual materials. I argue against the received view by attending to Kant's division between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ general logic, identifying senses of reflection proper to each, and showing that none accords well with the received view. Finally, to take account of Kant's notio.. (shrink)

Craig, Barry M The combination of 'the eyes of the blind shall be opened' in Isaiah 35:5 and the psalm's 'the Lord gives sight to the blind' seems to be preparing the way for an account of the restoration of sight in the gospel, but its focus is instead on restoring hearing and speech. In this story, which is shared with Matthew, as with the raising of the young girl told also by Matthew and Luke, Mark alone reports the Lord's (...) command in Aramaic. In this case the Lord's word is transmitted in Greek transliteration as Ephphatha, but correctly it should be Ethphathach. The mispronunciation perhaps points to a particular fascination with the Lord's own words in Mark's Greek-speaking circles, and also to the attribution of magical power to such words that may then be borrowed in magical folk-medicine; think similarly of the conjectured origin of Hocus pocus in Hoc est Corpus from Mass in Latin. However, the Aramaic word is richly connected to the mission of Jesus. In the first reading, the Hebrew has two synonymous verbs in verse 5 for opening, respectively applied to the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf. The first is not common and is always said of eyes, except in Isaiah 42:20, where it is used of ears. The second verb is common and refers to the opening of eyes and ears and mouths, but also to the untying of cords and to setting free. This is clear in the Syriac Peshitta's use of a single verb for both Hebrew verbs in Isaiah and the word Mark reports Jesus using, where it is applicable both to opening the man's ears to hear and to freeing his tongue to speak clearly. The Septuagint's version of Isaiah has 'will hear' instead of the Hebrew's second verb, 'will be opened', while the added translation in Mark matches only the Septuagint's translation of Isaiah's first verb. That Greek verb is fitting only for the ears, not for the tongue, so that the man's becoming able to speak clearly seems to be merely a consequence of the miraculous opening of his ears. Reading both passages via the Syriac, and reading them in parallel as the Lectionary has us do today, reveals the gospel encounter to be more than simply a story of a healing: the episode points to Christ's redeeming mission as being one of liberating, the scene becoming a fulfilment of Isaiah's prophetic passage in a demonstration of Christ's mission in the flesh and in the life of an actual person. Furthermore, Mark's transmission of the Aramaic commands Ethphathach and Kum in 5:41, together sum up Christ's twofold work: to redeem and raise those doomed to die. Both stories show this at work in the here and now of people's lives and not merely as a future hope for the end of time. If our mission as Church is to continue Christ's work, then it is likewise to be carried out among people in our own time. Thus the historical impetus to establish such works as schools, since education sets free from ignorance, and hospitals, since curing the sick frees them from ills or caring for them brings relief in time of suffering. But we should not think only in such institutional modes; not every parish can or should establish a school or hospital or hospice, or other such major works, but the question remains for each: What does this community do to proclaim Christ's saving mission in the lives of real people both near and far? (shrink)

Contrary to hierarchical/procedural (HP) models of autonomous action, according to which reflective self-appraisal is essential to autonomous action, we argue that autonomous action essentially involves the way agents take up and respond to the normative demands of objects of care. To be autonomous, an action must track the genuine needs of some object the agent cares about. Thus, autonomous action is essentially teleological, governed by both an agent’s concerns and the object of care. It is not dependent only on (...) the will, understood as an internal efficient causal force, and is robustly relational in a constitutive sense. (shrink)

Inattentional Blindness occurs when observers engaged in resource-consuming tasks fail to see unexpected stimuli that appear in their visual field. Eye movements were recorded in a dynamic IB task where participants tracked targets amongst distractors. During the task, an unexpected stimulus crossed the screen for several seconds. Individuals who failed to report the unexpected stimulus were deemed to be IB. Being IB was associated with making more fixations and longer gaze times on distractor stimuli, being less likely to fixate (...) the unexpected stimulus, and having lower working memory capacity than those who were not IB. Noticing the unexpected stimulus was not contingent upon fixating it, suggesting that some individuals processed the unexpected stimulus via covert attention. The findings support earlier research on working memory and IB. In addition, IBs were less efficient attentional allocators than those who were not IB, as reflected in their eye tracking of irrelevant distractors. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt has been criticized for her “blindness” to the sociopolitical significance of race and racism in the West, most notably, in her “Reflections on Little Rock.” I consider three prominent explanations for Arendt's wrongheaded conclusions in “Reflections.” First, the “category interpretation” presents Arendt's conclusions as resulting from her rigid application of philosophical categories—the public, the private, and the social—to events in Little Rock. Second, the “racial prejudice interpretation” presents Arendt's conclusions as resulting from her anti-black racism and her (...) dismissal of the political strivings of African Americans. Third, the “cultural interpretation” presents Arendt's conclusions as resulting from her misunderstanding of the sociopolitical significance of race and racism in the United States. Each of these interpretations advances our understanding of Arendt's oversights, but I contend that they do not go far enough. I argue that white ignorance constitutes a fundamental epistemic error in Arendt's work and, as such, strengthens current explanations of Arendt's “blindness” to the history and political strivings of African Americans. If accepted, my analysis—following Charles Mills's work on white ignorance—calls for increased theoretical work on epistemologies of ignorance, their function in Western political philosophy, and the affect of white ignorance on cognizers in American society. (shrink)

Reviewing Zhang Xianliang's novel Half of Man Is Woman,1 I naturally associate it with his Mimosa2 and "Soul and Body."3 When I ponder the content for a moment, even Shen Rong's At Middle Age4 and Xu Chi's Gadbach's Conjecture5 come to mind. I associate them because first, the subject of all these writings is the fate of contemporary Chinese intellectuals, and second, they represent the three types of Chinese intellectual that developed during the three different stages of the New Period (...) literature about Chinese intellectuals. Chen Jingren, who is a "white specialist"6 mathematician devoted to science, represents the literary affirmation of the intellectual who has a simple personality. Lu Wenting, who is an outstanding doctor and responsible wife and mother, represents the complete affirmation of the intellectual who has a complex personality. Xu Lingjun and Zhang Yongling, who are "gifted scholars in dire straits," were created by Zhang to represent the affirmation of intellectual self-transformation. From different perspectives, these stories bring the image of Chinese intellectuals to the peak of character perfection by showing intellectuals' high self-esteem and their rediscovery of their own knowledge and talent, and by contrasting this to the comprehensive negation of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution when they were thrown into the depths of hell. The positive meaning of these images is indubitable. Moreover, all of them have been evaluated quite positively. However, we have to admit that in terms of the intellectuals' understanding of their own identity, their complete negation during the Cultural Revolution and complete affirmation in the New Period show the same tendency: an unconsciousness or blindness—they neither consciously realize their primary destiny as intellectuals in the New Period, nor consciously dig up the deep roots of the tragic fate of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. On the surface, this blindness shows that the influence of the ultraleftist line still exists. On an even deeper level, it shows that the traditional feudal ideology of our country has a deep-rooted potential impact not only on other social groups, but also on intellectuals. Thus, it is really necessary to stand from a macrohistorical perspective and deeply reflect on the images of intellectuals as they appear in the New Period literature by comparing the literature on intellectuals from the New Period, the May Fourth period, and the Classical period. Frankly speaking, such reflection should have started earlier and is unavoidable. It affects not only literature, but also the development in China of modem culture, and even the issue of whether or not Chinese intellectuals, as they push reforms forward, can carry on the May Fourth tradition of bringing forth intellectual enlightenment, transforming the deep-rooted, bad characteristics of our nation, and eliminating traditional feudal ideology. In this sense, although I agree with the idea, proposed by Huang Ziping and others, that the duty of contemporary Chinese literature is to carry forward the May Fourth heritage and change the national character, I have reservations about the general concept of a "twentieth century Chinese literature." This is because evaluations of the antifeudal value of contemporary Chinese literature to date have been insufficient. In reality, although the contemporary works that we have seen show some form of succession and development of the May Fourth new literature, in spirit these works are closer to Chinese Classical writing. This similarity is most visible in the writings about intellectuals. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotional distractors can impair perception of subsequently presented targets, a phenomenon called emotion-induced blindness. Do emotional distractors lose their power to disrupt perception when appearing with increased frequency, perhaps due to desensitisation or enhanced recruitment of proactive control? Non-emotional tasks, such as the Stroop, have revealed that high frequency distractors or conflict lead to reduced interference, and distractor frequency appears to modulate attentional capture by emotional distractors in spatial attention tasks. But emotion-induced blindness is thought to reflect perceptual (...) competition between targets and emotional distractors, and it is unclear whether high frequency emotional stimuli cause less disruption at this relatively early stage of processing. In four experiments, participants searched streams of images for a rotated target image. A negative or neutral distractor appeared before the target, and their relative frequency was manipulated. Across all exper... (shrink)

Inattentional blindness is the failure to perceive salient stimuli presented at unattended locations. Whereas the behavioral manifestation of inattentional blindness has been investigated, the neural basis of this phenomenon has remained elusive. In the current study, event-related fMRI was used to identify the neural substrates associated with inattentional blindness. During central fixation, participants named colored digits presented at a peripheral location. On a subset of trials, an unexpected checkerboard circle was presented at the same eccentricity along with (...) the colored digits . Neural activity during inattentional blindness was observed in the prefrontal cortex. Together with previous findings, these results call into question the widespread view that activity in the prefrontal cortex reflects conscious processing. (shrink)

In a recent commentary, Memmert critiqued claims that attentional misdirection is directly analogous to inattentional blindness and cautioned against assuming too close a similarity between the two phenomena. One important difference highlighted in his analysis is that most lab-based inductions of IB rely on the taxing of attention through a demanding primary task, whereas attentional misdirection typically involves simply the orchestration of spatial attention. The present commentary argues that, rather than reflecting a complete dissociation between IB and attentional misdirection, (...) this difference highlights potential grounds for delineating mechanistically distinct forms of IB: spatial inattentional blindness, which stems from the covert misallocation of spatial attention, and central inattentional blindness, which stems from disruption or preoccupation of perceptual mechanisms that interface with higher-level processes such as working memory. Recognition of such distinctions can help situate theoretical understanding of IB more firmly within the context of the broader attention literature. (shrink)

This volume introduces some of the basic philosophical and conceptual questions underlying the formulation of quantum mechanics, one of the most baffling and far-reaching aspects of modern physics. The book consists of articles by leading thinkers in this field, who have been inspired by the profound work of the late John Bell. Some of the deepest issues concerning the nature of physical reality are debated, including the theory of physical measurements, how to test quantum mechanics, and how classical and quantum (...) physics are related. This book will be of interest to students with a background in quantum physics, who wish to explore in more detail its philosophical aspects, practising scientists who are not content with blindly applying the rules of quantum mechanics, and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the philosophy of physics. (shrink)

The physiological blind spot corresponds to the optic disc where the retina contains no light-detecting photoreceptor cells. Our perception seemingly fills in this gap in input. Here we suggest that rather than an active process, such perceptual filling-in could instead be a consequence of the integration of visual inputs at higher stages of processing discounting the local absence of retinal input. Using functional brain imaging, we resolved the retinotopic representation of the physiological blind spot in early human visual cortex and (...) measured responses while participants perceived filling-in. Responses in early visual areas simply reflected the absence of visual input. In contrast, higher extrastriate regions responded more to stimuli in the eye containing the blind spot than the fellow eye. However, this signature was independent of filling-in. We argue that these findings agree with philosophical accounts that posit that the concept of filling-in of absent retinal input is unnecessary. (shrink)

Should Justice be blind or should she instead be capable of seeing everything, even the human heart? José M. González García examines how the iconography of Justice evolved over the course of history. Providing an overview of depictions of Justice in various ages and places, the book mainly focuses on "The Blindfold Dispute" that began to develop during Renaissance. While at first the blindfold was perceived as unjust, precisely because it denied Justice the ability to see everything, it transformed just (...) a few years later into a positive symbol of the equality of all individuals before the law. And other depictions were added: supplementary eyes, transparent blindfolds, the double face of Janus, the returns of Astraea and the "Eye of the Law". The book also analyses important historic moments in which the crisis of the Law went along with a search for new forms of representing the gaze of Justice, as reflections on the art of Dürer, Klimt and Kafka show as well as recent developments in political philosophy"--Back cover. (shrink)

Stanley, Denis This snippet from the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) captures how blind we can be to the presence of God in our lives. In the Gospels, being healed from physical blindness is also a celebration of coming to faith in Christ and using that new gift to follow him. The gift of having one's eyes opened is our constant prayer, more so than ever during Lent.

Lorenzo Magnani’s Understanding Violence: The Intertwining of Morality, Religion and Violence is a big 23 book. Not big in the sense of page count or prepublication advertisement, but big in the sense of pregnant 24 with potential application. Professor Magnani is explicit in his intentions, “to show how violence is de facto 25 intertwined with morality, and how much violence is hidden, and invisibly or unintentionally performed" 26 (page 273) while confessing a personal motivation, “warning myself (and every reader) that (...) violence is 27 traceable back to my (our) own door.” (page 66) This is not an easy task, given the slippery expanse of his 28 subject, to drag violence out of the shadows, bringing it home to each personal purveyor. But Magnani 29 succeeds, and fruitfully. Understanding Violence deftly exposes violence in its myriad forms from individual 30 aggression to colliding global-historical narratives. It does this by detailing the processes whereby people act 31 from moralities of their own creation, adopting various moral frameworks including those specific to 32 religions, social and political groups, as well as personal constructs, and in terms of which "they engage and 33 disengage both intentionally and unintentionally, in a strict interplay between morality and violence." (page 34 184) Resolving these complex dynamics through simple models and illustrations, Understanding Violence 35 elevates the reader from the forest-for-the-trees perpetual-crisis-blindness symptomatic of the present era, to 36 a position from which personal moral commitments as practical, as necessary, and as the source of hidden 37 violence are clearly visible. Moreover, due to the practicality of Magnani’s demonstrations, it continues in 38 this work long after the text itself is laid back on the shelf. (shrink)

Anders was a preeminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb as he saw this hermeneutico-phenomenologically in the visceral sense of beingand time: the sheer that of its having been used as well as the bland politics of nuclear proliferation functions as programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defense and deterrence. The tactic ofsheerly technological, automatic, mechanical, aggression is carried out in good conscience. The preemptive strike is, as Baudrillard observed, the opponent’s fault: such are the wages (...) of evil. Violence in good conscience characterizes the postwar, cold war era and the present day with its mushrooming effects ofneo-fascism under the titles of national security and anti-terrorism. Karl Krauss’ 1913 bon mot regarding psychoanalysis as the very insanity it claims to cure [Psychoanalyse ist jene Geisteskrankheit, für deren Therapie sie sich halt] has never been more apt for political translation—straight into the heart of what Lacan called the Real which has ‘always been’ the political register. Where Habermas and heirs have tended to disregard Anders , just as most philosophers of technology have ignored the political as well as theethical in their eagerness to avoid suspicion of technophobia, we continue to require both critical theory and a critical philosophy of technology, a conjunction incorporating Ander’s complicated dialectic less of art in Benjamin’s prescient but still innocent age of technological reproduction but and much rather “on the devastation of life in the age of the third industrial revolution.” Thus rather thanreading Anders’ critique of the bomb as limited to a time we call the Atomic Age—as Anders himself varied Samuel Beckett’s 1957 Endgame asEndzeit that is “Endtime,” here invoking the eschatological language of Jacob Taubes as Anders does—this essay connects his reflections on the bomb with his critique of technology and the obsolescence of humanity as of a piece with our dedication to hurling ourselves against our own mortality. This concern with the violence of technology, this hatred of the vulnerability of having been born and having been set on a path unto death inspires Anders’ engagement with the sons of Eichmann—the heirs of those who designed and executed the Nazi death camps and extermination chambers of the Holocaust—and the sons of Claude Eatherly—the heirs ofboth those who designed and those who as pilots deployed the bombings that exploded nothing the stuff of the sun itself against the Empire of the Sun in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We, embroiled as we are in wartime after wartime, suppressing public protest on a scale like never before, in country after country across the globe, cannot dispense with Anders today. (shrink)

This article deals critically with the process of coming to terms with ‘genocide’. It starts from the observation that conventional philosophical and legal approaches to capturing the essence of ‘genocide’ through an improved definition necessarily fail to adapt to the ever-changing nature of political violence. Faced with this challenge, the article suggests that the contemporary debate on genocide (and its denial) should be complemented with a focus on transforming the perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which acts of violence are discussed (...) in the public sphere. The main purpose of this article is to contribute, from the vantage point of political theory, to this debate by offering a novel normative perspective on negative reactions to genocide. Hence I argue that it is productive to speak of ‘genocide blindness’ in cases when the members of the public sphere are simply incapable of seeing an instance of violence as genocidal. To establish this claim, the article introduces Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on ‘aspect-seeing’ so as to underline the importance of changing the way that political violence is perceived and interpreted. In a second step, the article turns to María Pía Lara’s theory of storytelling as a concrete mechanism for triggering and instituting this kind of change. (shrink)

Neither art criticism nor a scholar’s monograph on an artist, Jean-François Lyotard’s Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness: ‘like the paintings of a blind man’ is a reflection that engages both the painter and 43 of his works into a conversation alternating painting and aphoristic writing. Their order follows neither the chronology of the works nor a linear argument in the prose. And yet, the work generates the strongest feeling of there being a continuity in this peculiar dialogue of pictures and (...) poeticism, a continuity not clearly presented by logic, but one concerning what remains unpresented in presentation. The conversation is revelatory of their shared concerns with the energetic force of absence and is fascinating. (shrink)