The Snowden Archive-in-a-Box is an offline wireless network and web server providing private access to a replica of the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive. The online version is hosted by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. A work-in-development since April 2015, the Archive-in-a-Box is both a research tool and a tool for public education on data surveillance. The original version is powered with battery packs and housed in a 1960s spy style briefcase. When it is turned on, anybody in the vicinity can (...) access the archive by connecting their wireless device to the Snowden Archive WiFi network and browsing to a website. Open the briefcase up and one finds a wood panel with a flatscreen inset, playing back the IP traffic of the archive's current users. Thus, while an audience such as a class of students or workshop group can access the Snowden documents and learn about mass surveillance from primary materials, they are also shown what data surveillance ‘looks like’. This Commentary explores my experiences during the first year of the Snowden Archive-in-a-Box. I examine my experiences as an international traveller carrying a suspicious briefcase of Top Secret materials and this project's reception by certain audiences. The project is still a prototype, yet it is quickly gathering a following and a number of permanent installations around the world. What could this mean for the future of surveillance education and leaks-enabled research? (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a (...) foreclosed home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

Meta-induction, in its various forms, is an imitative prediction method, where the prediction methods and the predictions of other agents are imitated to the extent that those methods or agents have proven successful in the past. In past work, Schurz demonstrated the optimality of meta-induction as a method for predicting unknown events and quantities. However, much recent discussion, along with formal and empirical work, on the Wisdom of Crowds has extolled the virtue of diverse and independent judgment as (...) essential to maintenance of 'wise crowds'. This suggests that meta-inductive prediction methods could undermine the wisdom of the crowd inasmuch these methods recommend that agents imitate the predictions of other agents. In this article, we evaluate meta-inductive methods with a focus on the impact on a group's performance that may result from including meta-inductivists among its members. In addition to considering cases of global accessibility (i.e., cases where the judgments of all members of the group are available to all of the group's members), we consider cases where agents only have access to the judgments of other agents within their own local neighborhoods. (shrink)

Pietraszewski misrepresents both the nature of behaviour in conflict and the ability of psychology to theorise the relational properties of group designation. At the behavioural level, he focusses exclusively on “attack,” when consolation/care in conflict is equally present and important. At the theoretical level, he ignores existing psychological work on how group perception is shaped by the meta-contrast principle.

Ludwig Wittgenstein has often been called a quietist. His work has inspired a rich and varied array of theories in moral philosophy. Some prominent meta-ethicists have also been called quietists, or ‘relaxed’ as opposed to ‘robust’ realists, sometimes with explicit reference to Wittgenstein in attempts to clarify their views. In this chapter, I compare and contrast these groups of theories and draw out their importance for contemporary meta-ethical debate. They represent countercultures to contemporary meta-ethics. That is, they (...) reject in different ways one or more of the common assumptions that, whilst not universally shared, shape how to understand and engage in contemporary meta-ethical debate. Despite striking similarities, I argue that the ‘quietist’ label has obscured the views it is used to describe, the crucial differences between them, and the challenge that they offer to the predominant culture of meta-ethical enquiry. That challenge is this: there are plausible different ways of understanding and doing meta-ethics to those of the meta-ethical orthodoxy. We ignore such heterodoxy at our own peril. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition is the only CD-ROM to give you instant facsimile and text access to the 20,000 pages of the philosopher's Nachlass as catalogued by Professor von Wright in his 1982 publication The Wittgenstein Papers. -/- The result of 10 years of academic research and editorial work by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen this electronic edition is the first scholarly resource to apply a uniform, well-documented, consistent set of editorial principles to the writings. (...) The CD-ROM is a joint publication between Oxford University Press and the Wittgenstein Archives and is published in Text & Facsimile and Text Only formats. (shrink)

BackgroundThe advent of learning healthcare systems (LHSs) raises an important implementation challenge concerning how to request and manage consent to support secondary use of data in learning cycles, particularly research activities. Current consent models in Quebec were not established with the context of LHSs in mind and do not support the agility and transparency required to obtain consent from all involved, especially the citizens. Therefore, a new approach to consent is needed. Previous work identified the meta-consent model as a (...) promising alternative to fulfill the requirements of LHSs, particularly large-scale deployments. We elicited the public’s attitude toward the meta-consent model to evaluate if the model could be understood by the citizens and would be deemed acceptable to prepare for its possible implementation in Quebec.MethodsEight focus groups, with a total of 63 members of the general public from various backgrounds were conducted in Quebec, Canada, in 2019. Explicit attention was given to literacy levels, language spoken at home and rural vs urban settings. We assessed attitudes, concerns and facilitators regarding key components of the meta-consent model: predefined categories to personalized consent requests, a dynamic web-based infrastructure to record meta-consent, and default settings. To analyse the discussions, a thematic content analysis was performed using a qualitative software.ResultsOur findings showed that participants were supportive of this new approach of consent as it promotes transparency and offers autonomy for the management of their health data. Key facilitators were identified to be considered in the implementation of a meta-consent model in the Quebec LHSs: information and transparency, awareness campaigns, development of educational tools, collaboration of front-line healthcare professionals, default settings deemed acceptable by the society as well as close partnerships with recognized and trusted institutions.ConclusionsThis qualitative study reveals the openness of a sample of the Quebec population regarding the meta-consent model for secondary use of health data for research. This first exploratory study conducted with the public is an important step in guiding decision-makers in the next phases of implementing the various strategies to support access and use of health data in Quebec. (shrink)

Hājjī Bayrām Walī’s religious guidance activities that he took over from Somuncu Baba (Ḥamīd al-Dīn Aqsarāyī) were not limited with Ankara and nearby it. These activities continued by expanding with Bayrāmī tekke lodges and zāwiyas which were established by khalīfas trained by him. As a result of this expanding, Shaykh Luṭfullah, one of the khalīfas, led to establishment of waqf and works related to it such as mosque, madrasah and zāwiya in Balıkesir and nearby it. There has not been any (...) detailed study about life of Shaykh Luṭfullah and his services. In this article, the waqf established by Shaykh is analyzed in terms of its trustees, sources of income, in charges, repairs and inspection of zāwiya. Documents analyzed for this article present that Shaykh Luṭfullah contributed to taking shape of religious and cultural structure of Balıkesir and nearby it in the 15th century. His services were not only on spritual bases under the roof of the mosque but he also had an effect on the economic, social and educational life of the region. Thus, Shaykh Luṭfullah and his zāwiya set an important example of the active and dynamic aspect of Anatolian wisdom (irfān) involved in life.Summary: Hājjī Bayrām Walī’s religious guidance activities that he took over from Somuncu Baba (Ḥamīd al-Dīn Aqsarāyī) were not limited with Ankara and nearby it. These activities continued by expanding with Bayrāmī tekke lodges and zāwiyas which were established by khalīfas trained by him. Hājjī Bayrām Walīwas one of the leading sufis who contributed to the formation of sufistic educational tradition. He played a role as an important attraction center in the middle of Anatolia and provided guidance for significant individuals such as Aq Shams al-Dīn (d. 863/1459), Yazıcızāde Muḥammad Bīcān (d. 855/1451) and Eşrefoghlu Rūmī (d. 874/1469-70?). One of such individuals, who completed his spiritual journey under the guidance of Hājjī Bayrām Walīwas Shaykh Luṭfullah from Balıkesir. He became khalīfa at the end of his duty with Hājjī Bayrām Walī. Luṭfullah Efendi descended from Isfendiyarids ancestry. He had left his job, in which he held a high position, and attended to the sect and settled in Balıkesir city. There is limited information about him, but it is known that he went to Ankara in order to help to establish Turkish bath upon the request of some significant figures of the time and there he met his mentor Hājjī Bayrām Walī. As a result of their conversations, the two became close to each other.Shaykh Luṭfullahinvited Hājjī Bayrām Walīto Balıkesir where their relation continued and increased. Luṭfullah Efendi established a beautiful house for his Shaykh Hājjī Bayrām Walīwho stayed in Balıkesir for a while. When he left for Ankara, the Shaykh charged Luṭfullah Efendi with the duty of spreading Bayrāmiyyateachings in Balıkesir and its neighborhood by entitling him as ‘Khalīfa’. Besides the fact that the exact date of his death is not known, it is recorded that Luṭfullah Efendi died at the beginning of the period of Meḥmed II’s (1451-1481) reign. His tomb is located in ahazire(an Ottoman word used for burial area reserved for special people especially in mosques or sufi lodges) in the Mosque called with his name after his death. It is known that Shaykh Luṭfullah had a son named Bahā’ al-Dīn (d. 895/1489-90)and a grandson named Shaykh Muḥyīal-dīn Meḥmed (d. 952/1545-46). Shaykh Luṭfullah carried out significant services in the mosque and zāwiya, which he built with his own budget and he contributed to various important and permanent services that continued throughout centuries. However, as much as we could determine, there is no study about the waqfor service fields of his buildings. In this article, the goal is to analyze some of the tangible surviving heritages of Shaykh Luṭfullah. The analysis is based on the documents in the related archives. In this context, mosque/waqfestablished by Shaykh Luṭfullah Efendi is analyzed under the subtitles of “administrator, resources of income/real properties, his servicemen, renovations-expenses of the mosque and inspection of the zāwiya”. Based on the relevant archive documents, it is understood that after the death of Shaykh, in order to be able to continue the services of the mosque and zāwiya, the authority of ruling his waqfpassed to his son, MawlānāBahā’ al-Dīn. It is known that Bahā’ al-Dīnwas very careful about the distribution of his father’s waqfincomes among the ones in need. He also established a sūfī-hāne building in Balıkesir. After Bahā’ al-Dīn, his son Muḥyīal-dīn Meḥmed (the grandson of Shaykh Luṭfullah) took the charge of the waqf. After his period, this duty continued to be spread among his ancestry until the beginning of the last century. The waqfcontinued to the services through the income obtained from the real estates. Based on the analyzed documents, it is determined that income-expense calculations of the waqfwas inspected from time to time, and the services of zāwiya was controlled occasionally in order to see if they continue to do so. Shaykh Luṭfullah Mosque, one of the most important historical artifacts in Balıkesir, has served Muslims for almost five hundred years and it went through various kinds of repairs. It is deemed suitable to analyze reparations, expansions and renovations in two different groups: Before Balıkesir earthquake in 29 January 1898 and after the earthquake. It is important to know that almost fifty percent of houses and buildings in Balıkesir city center was completely destroyed, many people died or seriously injured in the earthquake. Shaykh LuṭfullahMosque was completely demolished as well. It should be mentioned that the mosque had already been in bad condition before the earthquake. According to a document written one week before the earthquake, the mosque was very old and it could not meet the demands of the community any more as it was so small. After the devastating earthquake, ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd II ordered its renovation. Upon this order, the mosque was rebuilt and expanded. The name of ‘Umar ‘ᾹlīBey, Mutasarrıf(governor of an Ottoman province) of Qarasīis mentioned in the documents about the renovation of various buildings including Shaykh Luṭfullah Mosque after the 1898 Balıkesir earthquake. It is seen that various services in different positions were provided in Shaykh Luṭfullah Mosque where the mosque workers were the ones who mainly carried out these services. These duties were: “Imamate, oratory, muezzin-tutor, ministry and nāsih, children’s teacher, ferrāş, tabbākh and supervision”. These duties show that besides religious services, Shaykh Luṭfullah waqfused to provide educational services as well. On the other hand, based on the analyzed documents, we can assume that the needy could eat in this center, which used to serve like a social aid and solidarity waqf. In this article, specific detailed information is presented about some workers served in the waqf. Information about the name, date and salary of these workers is also included. When the waqfand services of Shaykh Luṭfullah are analyzed, it can be seen that he was a significant figure, carried out important missions just like his mentor Hājjī Bayrām Walī. It should be noted that Luṭfullah Efendi used to conduct sufistic conservations in the mosque he established but did not make religious ceremonies in his zāwiya in Mihaliç (Karacabey); he preferred to transform it into a center in which the needy can be fed and provided for their needs. In this respect, the Zāwiya of ShaykhLuṭfullah sets a significant example, which duly presents the active and dynamic aspect of Anatolian wisdom. (shrink)

Teaching students to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to engage in reasoned argumentation, problem-solving, and learning. This study involved 35 groups of grade 6 children from 18 classrooms in three conditions (cognitive questioning condition, community of inquiry condition, and the comparison condition) who were videotaped as they worked on specific inquiry-based science tasks. The study also involved the teachers in these classrooms who were audio-taped as they interacted with the children during these tasks. The results (...) show that while there were no significant differences in the children's explanatory behaviour across the two time periods, there were significant differences in the total verbal interactions between the children in the cognitive questioning condition and their peers in the community of inquiry and comparison conditions. Furthermore, the children in the cognitive questioning condition obtained higher reasoning and problem-solving scores than peers in the other conditions. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences between the teachers’ basic and extended mediating behaviours in the three conditions at Times 1 and 2, there was a significant difference in extended mediation behaviours with the teachers demonstrating nearly three times more extended mediation to promote students’ learning at Time 2 than they did at Time 1. Teacher intervention in providing guidance in how to interact during cooperative, inquiry-based science appears to be critical to helping students engage in higher-level thinking and learning. (shrink)

Formal and empirical work on the Wisdom of Crowds has extolled the virtue of diverse and independent judgment as essential to the maintenance of ‘wise crowds’. In other words, com-munication and imitation among members of a group may have the negative effect of decreasing the aggregate wisdom of the group. In contrast, it is demonstrable that certain meta-inductive methods provide optimal means for predicting unknown events. Such meta-inductive methods are essentially imitative, where the predictions of other (...) agents are imitated to the extent that those agents have proven successful in the past. Despite the (self-serving) optimality of meta-inductive methods, their imitative nature may undermine the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, since these methods recommend that agents imitate the predictions of other agents. In this paper, I present a replication of selected results of Thorn and Schurz, illustrating the effect on a group’s performance that may result from having members of a group adopt meta-inductive methods. I then expand on the work of Thorn and Schurz by considering three simple measures by which meta-inductive prediction methods may improve their own performance, while simultaneously mitigating their negative impact on group performance. The effects of adopting these maneuvers are investigated using computer simulations. (shrink)

Commentators on empirical research in business ethics have recommended that use should be made of meta-analysis – the quantitative analysis of a group of research studies. This paper elaborates upon those recommendations by conducting, as a "case study" for further reflection, a meta-analysis of studies of accountants' organizational-professional conflict (OPC) previously published in accounting and psychology journals. Of five variables capable of analysis, only the population correlation coefficient between OPC and organizational tenure is identified. It was not (...) possible to find the population correlation coefficient of the other four variables, for which several possible reasons are suggested. The paper then shows how meta-analysis can make a valuable contribution, even when the substantive findings are limited, by providing guidance for future research and a safeguard against the drawing of unjustified conclusions, to which the more usual narrative reviews of literature are prone. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that our understanding of the issue of institutional group minds might be broadened if we consider alternative meta-metaphysical frameworks to those which are presently presupposed in the field. I argue that the two major camps in the contemporary philosophical debate about group beliefs, namely strong realism and eliminative reductionism, share a commitment to some form of meta-philosophical realism. Two alternative metaontological frameworks for the discussion of the issue of (...) group belief are outlined: fictionalism and deflationism. Fictionalism about group minds, although unpopular in the philosophical debate, is still a much-discussed option in legal theory and the theory of the firm in economics. I argue that, once formulated properly, the fictionalist position deserves serious consideration. The other alternative option is deflationism: I develop a sketch of the deflationary approach to group beliefs that is based on Thomasson’s approach to the existence of groups. The final parts of the paper are devoted to a discussion of the resulting four-element classification of the possible views on the reality of group minds: realism, eliminative reductionism, fictionalism, and deflationism. I offer some proposals with regard to the criteria that might be used to choose between these theories. (shrink)

This essay interrogates the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers on whom they crucially depended but more typically ignored or effaced. Comparing archival fragments from elite works of natural history across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, (...) and British America, this essay sketches the contours of a disparate group of people I term ‘earth workers’: laborers of very low social rank, such as quarrymen, shepherds, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers, whose daily labor in and on the earth enabled the discovery of subterranean specimens. At the same time, archival traces of laboring lives ultimately reveal more about the naturalists who created them than they do about the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. Cultural norms of elite masculinity and scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Compared to other kinds of invisible labor that historians of science have brought into view, the social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diagnostic Criteria, Psychological Tests, and Ratings Scales: Extending the HistoryPeter Zachar, PhD (bio)Le moigne narrates a history of the development of psychiatric ratings scales as hybrids between psychological tests and diagnostic categories. In his telling, psychological tests seek to quantify population-based traits on which every person has a position and which tend to be conceptualized as being stable. Personality traits are often conceptualized as dispositions. Diagnostic categories represent not (...) trait-like properties of populations but episodic states consisting of clusters of symptoms experienced by individuals with disorders. Ratings, scales, he notes, are hybrids between the two. They are used to quantify psychiatric symptom clusters so that change over time can be measured. Le Moigne argues that these distinctions were initially suggested during the development of measures that could assess outcomes in psychopharmacological treatment studies.With respect to depression, Le Moigne writes that in the 1970s and 1980s something akin to depressive personality was reconceptualized as a temperament. A key move, somewhat reflective of Kraepelin’s notion of a depressive temperament, was to view a dysthymic temperament as both a predisposing factor and an attenuated form of depression. Thus, an episodic state commandeered the predisposing–dispositional role that was assigned to stable personality traits.This conceptual shift allowed test-like ratings scales to be seen as useful for quantifying not just stable traits, but salient features of episodic states that are potentially subject to change in response to interventions. To put it another way, in the development of a psychological test, one goal is to have high test-retest reliability (i.e., stability of measurement). With rating scales used to measure change, one wants the scores to not be as stable; ideally the scores on the later assessments will be lower. According to Le Moigne, when dysthymia was subsequently placed on axis I of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-III (as a syndrome) and segregated from personality disorders which were placed on axis II, personality traits were evicted from the conceptualization of depressive disorders.One perennial feature of psychiatry and psychology is that even if an older idea is superseded [End Page 253] in the view of some thinkers, it can still attract adherents. Indeed, interest in understanding a relationship between personality and attenuated states did not fully disappear. For example, based on research in genetics, the schizophrenia spectrum concept included not only schizophrenia, but also milder conditions such that were conceptualized as personality disorders; that is, schizotypal personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder (Kety, Rosenthal, Wender, & Schulsinger, 1971).During the development of the DSM-IV, some people wanted to add depressive personality disorder to the manual (Phillips, Hirschfeld, Shea, & Gunderson, 1995). It seems to have become a territorial dispute between mood disorder specialists and personality disorder specialists The mood disorders specialists challenged the personality disorder specialists to differentiate depressive personality disorder from early onset, chronic dysthymia. They were able to do so by using criteria such as critical, blaming, and derogatory toward self. After the mood disorders work group proposed incorporating some of those criteria into a revised criteria set for dysthymia, the two sets overlapped. The result was the old criteria for dysthymia were printed in DSM-IV and criteria for depressive personality disorder and the revised criteria for dysthymia were both placed in the appendix.In the DSM-5, Axis II was eliminated and personality disorders were placed alongside all the syndromic symptom clusters at the same level. Even so, interest in attenuated presentations as personality-related lingered still. During the development of the DSM-5 there was some thought to using diagnostic spectra as a meta-structure for organizing the manual (Andrews et al., 2009). One idea was to move some personality disorders into a best fitting spectrum, akin to attenuated forms. This did occur with schizotypal personality disorder which is both in the DSM-5 chapter on schizophrenia and in the chapter on personality disorder. In the schizophrenia chapter it is positioned as the earliest emerging disorder on the spectrum. There was also some interest in grouping avoidant personality disorder with the anxiety disorders, but the evidence supporting such a change was not available.These issues may... (shrink)

The relevance of the research is due to the fact that the musical and folklore heritage of V. F. Odoevsky is of great value for modern musicology, since it contains many unique recordings of Russian folk songs and songs of 26 other ethnic groups. V. F. Odoevsky is the first folklorist who recorded song folklore in a scientific way. His recordings are the first reliable examples of folklore in the history of Russian musicology. At the same time, the archives of (...) V. F. Odoevsky are practically not studied. The article examines the publications of B. B. Granovsky, since this scientist has been deciphering materials from the archive of V. F. Odoevsky for many years and introducing them into scientific circulation. The article considers that these publications reveal the style of the scientific method of V. F. Odoevsky, which is of great value in the study of the history and development of Russian ethnomusicology. Thanks to the works of B. B. Granovsky, rare songs of the peoples of Russia, which were recorded by V. F. Odoevsky, have been studied. In addition, the article shows that B. B. Granovsky not only deciphered many archival recordings of V. F. Odoevsky, but also published them in a musical collection of Russian folk songs. (shrink)

Histories of psychoanalysis largely respect the boundaries drawn by the psychoanalytic profession, suggesting that the development of psychoanalytic theories and techniques has been the exclusive remit of professionally trained analysts. In this article, I offer an historical example that poses a challenge to this orthodoxy. Based on extensive archival material, I show how British psychiatric social workers, a little-studied group of specialist mental hygiene workers, advanced key organisational, observational, and theoretical insights that shaped mid-century British psychoanalysis. In their (...) daily work compiling patient histories, conducting home visits, and interviewing the parents of ‘maladjusted’ children, psychiatric social workers were uniquely positioned to expose the importance of family relationships in the development of childhood neuroses. As this article details, their analytic attention to these dynamics not only influenced, but fundamentally constituted the innovative research on maternal-child relationships and family therapy pioneered by eminent psychoanalyst John Bowlby. In addition, psychiatric social workers produced and published independent psychoanalytic research, and fiercely debated the limitations of analytic concepts such as transference. In presenting the relationship between British psychiatric social work and psychoanalysis, this article suggests a new way of telling the history of both. (shrink)

This article argues that philosophers and laypeople commonly conceptualize moral truths or justified moral beliefs as discoverable through intuition, argument, or some other purely cognitive or affective process. It then contends that three empirically well-supported theories all predict that this ‘Discovery Model’ of morality plays a substantial role in causing social polarization. The same three theories are then used to argue that an alternative ‘Negotiation Model’ of morality—according to which moral truths are not discovered but instead created by actively negotiating (...) compromises—promises to reduce polarization by fostering a progressive willingness to ‘work across the aisle’ to settle moral issues cooperatively. This article then examines potential methods for normatively evaluating polarization, arguing there are prima facie reasons to favor the Negotiation Model over the Discovery Model based on their hypothesized effects on polarization. Finally, I outline avenues for further empirical and philosophical research. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): Paisley Livingston, ‘Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy’, Philosophy Compass 3/4 (2008): 509–603, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2008.00158.x Author’s Introduction The idea that films can be philosophical, or in some sense ‘do’ philosophy, has recently found a number of prominent proponents. What is at stake here is generally more than the tepid claim that some documentaries about philosophy and related topics convey philosophically relevant content. Instead, the contention is that cinematic fictions, including popular movies such as The (...) Matrix, make significant contributions to philosophy. Various more specific claims are linked to this basic idea. One, relatively weak, but pedagogically important observation is that some films can be used to provide philosophy students with vivid and thought‐provoking illustrations of philosophical issues. Film screenings stimulate discussion and may motivate renewed engagement with difficult philosophical texts. A stronger contention, however, seeks to link innovative and philosophically valuable thinking to ‘the film itself’ or to the ‘specificity of the cinematic medium’. Such claims raise interesting questions, including questions about the status of the increasingly prevalent philosophically motivated interpretations of particular movies. Who is actually doing the philosophizing in such cases? Is it the audio‐visual display, the film‐maker, or the philosopher who devises an interpretation of the work? What is the role of specifically cinematic devices in the philosophical points made in such interpretations? Is there any tension between the goal of appreciating a film as a work of art and the goal of arguing that a film has significant implications for a position on a problem in philosophy? A course in the general area of cinema as philosophy can focus on issues related to the locus and status of cinematic philosophizing. It can also delve into specific films and film‐makers and philosophically oriented interpretations of specific philosophical topics, such as personal identity. Issues pertaining to interpretation, meaning, and authorship can be usefully investigated in this connection, as can topics in meta‐philosophy related to the very nature of philosophical insight or knowledge. Author Recommends Carroll, Noël and Jinhee Choi, eds. 2008. The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, Part VIII: Film and Knowledge. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 381–405. Inclues a brief introduction by Carroll followed by papers by Bruce Russell, Karen Hanson, and Lester H. Hunt. Kania, Andrew, ed. 2009. Memento. London: Routledge. A number of philosophers elucidate philosophical themes in Memento and discuss more general issues pertaining to cinema’s philosophical significance. Livingston, Paisley. 2009. Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Part 1 surveys arguments surrounding the cinema as philosophy theme, providing detailed criticisms of some of the bold theses in this area. Part 2 discusses issues related to cinematic authorship and the status of philosophically motivated interpretations of works of fiction, arguing for a partial intentionalist account of a work’s meanings. Part 3 illustrates the intentionalist principles in a discussion of Ingmar Bergman’s philosophical sources, providing insight into themes of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and self‐knowledge in some of Bergman’s works. Livingston, Paisley and Carl Plantinga, eds. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Part IV: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. 547–659. Offers a succinct survey by Wartenberg as well as entries on Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, and Andrei Tarkovsky, discussions of film and specific philosophical topics (morality, skepticism, personal identity, and practical wisdom), and examples of philosophically motivated interpretations of three specific films: The Five Obstructions, Gattaca, and Memento. Smith, Murray and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds. 2006. Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. A collection of papers that combines essays devoted to general positions on the cinema as philosophy topic as well as specific interpretations of works in different genres. Turvey, Malcolm. 2008. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A probing critical investigation into the assumptions underlying influential philosophical claims about the epistemic value of cinema. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2008. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. Ably surveys and responds to arguments against the idea that films can ‘do philosophy’. It defends a conditionalist form of intentionalism in response to the ‘imposition objection’ according to which it is only the commentator who reads philosophical themes ‘into’ the movie; illustrates the favored account of film as philosophy with interpretations of specific cinematic fictions. Online Materials Film‐Philosophy Founded in 1996, this peer‐reviewed online journal is dedicated to philosophically oriented interpretations of films and cinema studies more generally. The e‐mail salon encourages discussion of related topics. Includes essays, festival reports, calls for papers, conference and job information, and book reviews. The archive includes contributions from 1997 to the present. Wartenberg, Thomas E. ‘Philosophy of Film.’The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; A brief survey of a range of issues in the philosophy of cinema including a few paragraphs on the film as philosophy topic. Philosophical Films A briefly annotated list of philosophical films grouped in rubrics such as ‘The Meaning of Life’ and ‘Environmental Ethics’. Sample Syllabus What follows is a 4‐week ‘start‐up module’ followed by samples of optional units that focus on particular topics and cinematic examples. Introductory Module Week I: Introduction & Overview Livingston, Paisley. ‘Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy.’Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): 1–14, 20 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2008.00158.x). Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2009. ‘Film as Philosophy.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 549–59. Russell, Bruce. 2008. ‘The Philosophical Limits of Film.’The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 387–390. Week II: The Bold Thesis on Film as Philosophy Reading: Livingston, Paisley, ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.’Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, Chapter One. 11–38. Screening: October (dir. Sergei Eisenstein 1928). Week III: Debating the Bold Thesis: The Case of October Carroll, Noël. 1998. ‘For God and Country.’Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 80–91. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. ‘Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67:4: 409–20. Week IV: Cinema as Philosophy: Objections and Replies Livingston, Paisley. 2009. ‘Arguing over Cinema as Philosophy.’Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, Chapter Two. 39–59. Additional Optional Units Depending on the instructor’s areas of interest and expertise, any of the following units could be added (and in some cases, easily expanded into longer segments). The Case of Ingmar Bergman Livingston, Paisley. 2009. ‘Ingmar Bergman.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 560–568. Screening(s): Wild Strawberries (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1957), or The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1957), or Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1966). Skepticism Fumerton, Richard. 2009. ‘Skepticism.’ In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 601–10. Screening: The Matrix (dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski 1999) or Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven 1990). Ethics Kupfer, Joseph. 1999. Visions of Virtue in Popular Film. Boulder, CO: Westview. 35–60. Falzon, Chris. 2009. ‘Why be Moral?’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 591–599. Screening: Groundhog Day (dir. Harold Ramis 1993), or Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen 1989), or Hollow Man (dir. Paul Verhoeven 2000). Personal Identity Knight, Deborah. 2009. ‘Personal Identity.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 611–619. Hanley, Richard. 2009. ‘Memento and Personal Identity: Are We Getting it Backwards?’Memento. Ed. Andrew Kania. London: Routledge. 107–126. Martin, Raymond. 2009. ‘The Value of Memory: Reflections on Memento.’Memento. Ed. Andrew Kania. London: Routledge. 87–106. Screening: Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan 2000). Freedom and (Genetic) Determinism Sesardic, Neven. 2009. ‘Gattaca.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 641–649. Screening: Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol 1997). Focus Questions • Is there anything special about the experience of fiction films that is especially well suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflection? • Have any novel and philosophically significant ideas found their first expression in a cinematic work? • Under what circumstances can the film medium be used as an expression of a cinematic author’s views? • What sort of background knowledge has to be in place for a film to be interpreted as articulating reasonably precise philosophical theses and arguments? • Does the goal of spelling out a film’s philosophical meaning sometimes conflict with the goal of appreciating its value as a work of art? (shrink)

FREE to download my New Book . https://www.academia.edu/31495642/_Meta-Philosophy_Meta-Cognition_and_Critique_of_Doing_Philosophizi ng am in the top 0.5% of Academic Publications on Academia.Edu and belong to a group of Academic giving our work for FREE as Commercial Publishers change too much for books. My new book is HERE for download: https://www.academia.edu/31495642/_Meta-Philosophy_Meta-Cognition_and_Critique_of_Doing_Philosophizi ng Abstract So far in my books and articles I have dealt with the following‭ (‬I hope I do not commit self-plagiarism by referring to my previous work and ideas expressed therein‭! ‬Lol‭)‬: -/- My (...) own discussions or‭ ‘‬philosophizing‭’ ‬follow right at the end after the numerous and very lengthy quotes from philosophers.‭ ‬The nature of the subject-matter of philosophy,‭ ‬the methodology,‭ ‬methods,‭ ‬techniques and tools of doing philosophy or philosophizing,‭ ‬the nature of the different steps or stages of the process/es of theorizing,‭ ‬the fact that doing philosophy are some of the stages of theorizing,‭ ‬the fact that philosophers lack meta-cognition and/or meta-reflection of these things.‭ ‬If they had awareness of what and how they are doing philosophy they might not become involved in quibbling over concepts and the differentiations of these concepts.‭ ‬It is as if philosophers are blind to what they are doing and have been doing for thousands of years,‭ ‬with the result that they continue repeating the same thing‭ – ‬arguing with words over the use of words and in the process creating more and more‭ –‬isms.‭ ‬They are seemingly unable to escape from such‭ –‬isms and their implications.‭ ‬Instead of getting or going anywhere they way they conceive‭ (‬of‭) ‬problems and express their questions they end up with conceiving of notions that cannot be solved or dissolved.‭ ‬They enclose themselves in an insular world or bubble of their own making,‭ ‬compared to sciences investigating humans and the different features and systems of the human body who find irrelevant the problems that philosophers have with things such as the brain,‭ ‬cognition,‭ ‬mind,‭ ‬consciousness,‭ ‬perception,‭ ‬thinking,‭ ‬etc.‭ ‬Sciences deal with these things on many levels and multi-dimensional while philosophers try to restrict them to a single level in one dimension by their words and the way they use those words.‭ ‬Consequently they lose sight of their objects and are unable to question them or express questions about them in a meaningful manner. -/- In my articles and books on the subject-matter I dealt with the traditional branches of philosophy and that with the differentiation of other disciplines and discourses the discourse of philosophy lost subject-matter.‭ ‬I mentioned newer areas of‭ ‘‬philosophy‭’‬,‭ ‬such as X-Phi,‭ ‬Philosophy’s interdisciplinary involvement in for example cognitive sciences,‭ ‬that there exists a philosophy of every discipline possible‭ (‬eg philosophy of science,‭ ‬art,‭ ‬music,‭ ‬sport,‭ ‬social sciences,‭ ‬etc‭)‬,‭ ‬that discourses such as Logic,‭ ‬Critical Thinking,‭ ‬Argumentation and argument maps,‭ ‬Reasoning,‭ ‬etc are relevant to and employed by many if not all disciplines and many discourses and are not uniquely subject-matter of the discourse of philosophy and does not have to form part of or be taught as subject-matter of philosophy. -/- I identified and discussed the methodology,‭ ‬methods,‭ ‬techniques and tools of doing philosophy and some underlying or implicit transcendentals such as pre-suppositions,‭ ‬suppositions and assumptions.‭ ‬I explore the nature of the different features,‭ ‬aspects,‭ ‬characteristics,‭ ‬steps and stages of the processes of theorizing.‭ ‬I showed that doing philosophy or philosophizing employ and/or consist of some of these features,‭ ‬steps and stages of theorizing. -/- As I involuntary have‭ (‬am‭)‬,‭ ‬seemingly endless‭ (‬a stream of consciousness like‭) ‬philosophically-‭ (‬question or problem and insight‭) ‬related‭ ‘‬intuitions‭’‬,‭ ‬it is difficult,‭ ‬painful and frustrating to me for that to be interrupted by social interaction,‭ ‬talking to people,‭ ‬phones,‭ ‬executing all sorts of‭ ‬mundane activities,‭ ‬etc.‭ ‬To understand or cope with this‭ ‘‬mental state‭’ ‬is one of the reasons why I need to explore meta-cognition or thinking about thinking,‭ ‬especially one’s own thinking and related‭ ‘‬activities‭’‬. (shrink)

Malm and colleagues (2008) consider (and reject) five arguments putatively justifying the idea that healthcare workers (HCWs) have a duty to treat (DTT) during a pandemic. We do not have sufficient...

We study \(\kappa \) -maximal cofinitary groups for \(\kappa \) regular uncountable, \(\kappa = \kappa ^{. Revisiting earlier work of Kastermans and building upon a recently obtained higher analogue of Bell’s theorem, we show that: Any \(\kappa \) -maximal cofinitary group has \({ many orbits under the natural group action of \(S(\kappa )\) on \(\kappa \). If \(\mathfrak {p}(\kappa ) = 2^\kappa \) then any partition of \(\kappa \) into less than \(\kappa \) many sets can be realized (...) as the orbits of a \(\kappa \) -maximal cofinitary group. For any regular \(\lambda > \kappa \) it is consistent that there is a \(\kappa \) -maximal cofinitary group which is universal for groups of size \({. If we only require the group to be universal for groups of size \(\kappa \) then this follows from \(\mathfrak {p}(\kappa ) = 2^\kappa \). (shrink)

This article examines the visual archive of the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia. Better known as the Bandung Conference or simply Bandung, this diplomatic meeting hosted 29 delegations from countries in Africa and Asia to address questions of sovereignty and development facing the emergent postcolonial world. A number of well-known leaders attended, including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Sukarno of the host country, Indonesia. Given its importance, the meeting was (...) documented extensively by photojournalists. The argument of this article is that the visual archive that resulted has contributed to the enduring symbolism and mythology of Bandung as a moment of Third World solidarity. More specifically, the street photography style of many images - with leaders walking down the streets of Bandung surrounded by adoring crowds - depicted an informality and intimacy that conveyed an accessible, anti-hierarchical view of the leaders who were present. These qualities of conviviality and optimism can also be seen in images of conference dinners, airport arrivals, delegate speeches, and working groups. Drawing upon the critical work of scholars of southern Africa and Southeast Asia, this article summarily positions the concept of the 'decolonising camera' to describe both the act of documenting political decolonisation as well as the ways in which visual archives produced during decolonisation can contribute to new iconographies of the political, which are both factual and mythic at once. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to offer a view of the current status of women in medical physics and biomedical engineering, while focusing on solutions towards gender balance and providing examples of current activities carried out at national and international levels. The International Union of Physical and Engineering Scientists in Medicine is committed to advancing women in science and health and has several initiatives overseen by the Women in Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering Task Group. Some of the (...) main strategies proposed by the Task Group to attain gender balance are: (a) identify and promote female role models that achieve successful work-life balance, (b) establish programs to develop female leaders, (c) create opportunities for females to increase the international visibility within the scientific community, and (d) establish archives and databases of women in STEM. (shrink)

This article provides practitioners’ perspectives on preservation of the Irish web space by the National Library of Ireland. The context of this work is outlined including the history of Ireland’s national library, its role, resources and place in library, archive, cultural and digital preservation networks. The development of the NLI Web Archive is discussed within the wider context of the Library’s mission and digital collecting and preservation policies, as well as international approaches to preserving the web. The article looks at (...) how the NLI has developed its selective web archive over the past decade, and has grown the content and access to it as a way to mitigate against the absence of at-scale solutions. The unusual legal context in Ireland regarding legislative barriers to archiving the Irish web space at scale and the NLI’s work for over a decade to change this situation are discussed as are the significant implications of the current legal situation for data loss and long-term access to Ireland’s contemporary record. Distinctive Irish aspects of digital cultural heritage preserved in the NLI Web Archive collections are highlighted. The opportunities and challenges in developing outreach and access for the Web Archive are considered together with its relationship with the collecting activities of the Library’s Born Digital Pilot Projects. This article will also discuss types of usage and user groups in relation to archived Irish web data. Potential for creative and imaginative uses of Irish web archive collections and data are also considered in relation to the Library’s broader public learning and outreach programmes. (shrink)

Archival art has been discussed so far in spatial terms, as archival installation, emphasizing stability of content and narrativity. Performative archiving is introduced here as intervention practice producing empowered public spheres in the context of a generalized network archival culture. These archiving practices do not produce content, but dispositives that enable the recension of archival data in distributed processes, not unlike oral forms and rituals of transmission of knowledge. Synchronicity of performance, in distant or person-to-person encounters, (...) creates the possibility of contesting co-utterances. Such works experiment on new forms of participation and collective writing, determining the roles and responsibility of subjects during the development of archival time, regulating different levels of interaction among persons, social groups, institutions, practices, thematic areas, media, physical and virtual spaces. They are centrifugal processes that resist the thematization of the archive and its confinement within the discourse of art. Their intervention aims at a different mode of instituting in the world of art, which problematizes the local conditions of social spaces and cultural institutions. They shift our interest away from archival accumulation and preservation, away from the ‘ideology of the trace’, and towards the moment of speech and act that bears the ‘capacity to aspire’. While they are triggered by an intention to actively institute, to organize tactics of action, they insist on the political performance of ‘act and speech’ at the moment when they occur. (shrink)

Social justice needs a home, a place where it can be found, especially for young people growing up in fragmented and increasingly inequitable societies. Community youth arts organizations have secured a certain prominence in this context over the past three decades and are now part of the urban infrastructures that shape connected learning networks in highly industrialized nations. In this capacity, youth arts organizations regularly engage a language and aesthetics of authenticity and trust as part of how they call out, (...) represent and make a home for children and youth. This paper examines how authenticity in youth culture and youth cultural expression is negotiated by arts organizations and how organizations locate their own trustworthiness as allies of young people through the curation of online media archives. The analysis draws on the internet media archives of two youth arts organizations in Canada’s largest English-speaking cities. The Oasis Skateboard Factory in Toronto, ON is an extension program of the Toronto District School Board that enables participants to create their own brands and learn to run a skateboard or professional design business. ReelYouth started in Vancouver in 2005 as a community media empowerment project, and now delivers programs across Canada and internationally.The claims to youth authenticity articulated in each media archive reveal how authenticity and trust are negotiated ideologically by each organization and how organizations mark their ontological status, as a home from which young people can think and respond to an unjust world. I examine how youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how discourses of youth identity, connection and trust are deployed across each archive. Whilst showcasing how authenticity is negotiated by each group, I show how the production of authenticity discourses by OSF and ReelYouth simultaneously convey a deeper reality: the way youth arts groups operate as care structures that offer ontological security, and places of increasing “awareness of previously unnoticed interconnections” for youth. In this way, they operate as sites of border work, places of routing from which the work of social justice can be borne. (shrink)

Based on Buber’s dialogic philosophy, ideas from the ethics of dialogue and politeness theory, we analyze letters written by members of an Israeli organization named Besod Siach – who come from both the left and right wings, are both religious and secular, who decided to broaden and deepen the dialogue between different groups in Israeli society against the backdrop of the polarization, alienation and violence threatening the state’s integrity and democratic foundations.

Philosophy typically ignores biographical, historical, and cultural aspects of theorists' lives in an attempt to take a supposedly abstract and objective view of their work. This book makes some new conclusions about Arendt’s theory by emphasizing how her experience of the world as displayed in her archival materials impacted her thought. Some aspects of Arendt’s life have been examined in detail before, including the fact she was stateless as well as her affair with Heidegger. Instead, this work explores different (...) topics including the biographical and narrative moments of Arendt's own work, the role of archiving in her thought, pivotal events that have not been archived, her understanding of her own identities, and how it affected the role of identity politics in her work. Typically, group action is underemphasized in Arendt scholarship in comparison to individual action and often identity politics questions are considered to lie within the realm of the private. Although Arendt’s theory is problematic when discussing issues concerning identity politics, she did think identity politics could be public and political and that effective political actions may occur within groups. What makes this project unique are the innovative conclusions made by moving the archival and biographical evidence to the center in order to understand her theory more accurately and within its historical and cultural context. (shrink)

A twenty‐person working group convened to discuss the ethical and policy considerations of the controversial intervention called “growth attenuation,” and if possible to develop practical guidance for health professionals. A consensus proved elusive, but most of the members did reach a compromise.

The Socratic method has a long history in teaching philosophy and mathematics, marked by such names as Karl Weierstra, Leonard Nelson and Gustav Heckmann. Its basic idea is to encourage the participants of a learning group (of pupils, students, or practitioners) to work on a conceptual, ethical or psychological problem by their own collective intellectual effort, without a textual basis and without substantial help from the teacher whose part it is mainly to enforce the rigid procedural rules designed to (...) ensure a fruitful, diversified, open and consensus-oriented thought process. Several features of the Socratic procedure, especially in the canonical form given to it by Heckmann, are highly attractive for the teaching of medical ethics in small groups: the strategy of starting from relevant singular individual experiences, interpreting and cautiously generalizing them in a process of inter-subjective confrontation and confirmation, the duty of non-directivity on the part of the teacher in regard to the contents of the discussion, the necessity, on the part of the participants, to make explicit both their own thinking and the way they understand the thought of others, the strict separation of content level and meta level discussion and, not least, the wise use made of the emotional and motivational resources developing in the group process. Experience shows, however, that the canonical form of the Socratic group suffers from a number of drawbacks which may be overcome by loosening the rigidity of some of the rules. These concern mainly the injunction against substantial interventions on the part of the teacher and the insistence on consensus formation rooted in Leonard Nelson's Neo-Kantian Apriorism. (shrink)

Arthur Norman Prior (1914 – 1969) and Georg Henrik von Wright (1916 – 2003) both attended a conference in England sometime in the spring of 1956, after which they corresponded on Anselm’s ontological argument. Prior had at the conference presented a formal treatment of the ontological argument. Based upon notes from the Prior archive at the Bodleian Library, and correspondence with von Wright, we here presents Prior’s and von Wrights’ discussion of Anselm’s argument in light of Prior’s published, as well (...) as unpublished writings on the ontological argument. Three versions of the ontological argument from Prior’s unpublished as well as published papers is presented: a non-modal, an argument from possible existence and finally a modal version. While Prior dismissed the first on the basis of a meta-theorem for proof in argumentation, the second on the basis of a fallacious commutation of operators, he argued that a valid version of the ontological argument can be proven from the distinctive S5 thesis of Lewis modal logic. While Prior gave reasons for a rejection of those distinct S5 thesis, in favour of Lewis S4 system, he also provided a novel argument in favour of accepting the S5 thesis for necessity and possibility. Finally we relate Prior’s work to Plantinga (1974) and consider objections raised by Oppy (2012) and Gale (2007) toward the modal versions of the ontological argument. (shrink)

The ease with which genotyping technologies generate tremendous amounts of data on research participants has been well chronicled, a feat that continues to become both faster and cheaper to perform. In parallel to these advances come additional ethical considerations and debates, one of which centers on providing individual research results and incidental findings back to research participants taking part in genetic research efforts. In 2006 the Industry Pharmacogenomics Working Group offered some ‘Points-to-Consider’ on this topic within the context (...) of the drug development process from those who are affiliated to pharmaceutical companies. Today many of these points remain applicable to the discussion but will be expanded upon in this updated viewpoint from the I-PWG. The exploratory nature of pharmacogenomic work in the pharmaceutical industry is discussed to provide context for why these results typically are not best suited for return. Operational challenges unique to this industry which cause barriers to returning this information are also explained. (shrink)

We concur with Baum and colleagues (2009) on the importance of pandemic planners taking explicit steps to employ public engagement methodologies. Thus far, as Baum and colleagues note, there have b...

Arid Waters is a photographic response to the growing crisis of water scarcity, which exists because our culture thinks of water as a commodity, or an abstract legal right, rather than the most basic physical source of life. The Water in the West Project began as a collaborative effort designed to present an artistic response to water as a social issue. Photography historian Ellen Manchester and the photographers - Mark Klett, Terry Evans, Laurie Brown, Peter Goin, Robert Dawson, Martin Stupich, (...) Gregory Conniff, and Wanda Hammerbeck - address the question: How can photography contribute to the urgent public debate over water use and allocation? Project members prepared an exhibition of their work, defining it as a laboratory and emphasizing the process of working through ideas. Contact prints and numerous work prints were displayed on the walls of the Sheppard Fine Art Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, and simultaneously the Nevada Humanities Committee sponsored a conference entitled "Water in the Arid West." Participants included historians, writers, ranchers, politicians, lawyers, students, and community members. Arid Waters documents the evolution of the Water in the West Project from its inception as a group collaboration to the foundation of an archive. Ellen Manchester, codirector of the Water in the West Project, has written an informative introduction that provides a historical perspective for the collaboration. Including 59 photographs from the eight photographers, Arid Waters is a testimony to the role photography has played in western history. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

This paper assesses an argument against the representationalist tradition in anthropology: the tradition of reporting how a cultural group represents the world. According to the argument, anthropologists working within this tradition cannot take the concepts of those they study seriously. I defend the representationalist tradition against this argument.

With Euripides’s Bacchae Honig, in A Feminist Theory of Refusal (2021), chooses a story that easily can be read as an “errant path”: the story of a group of “honey-mad” women who, driven by a Dionysian force, slaughter their own kin and are eventually put back into place by fatherly reprimand. Against that, Honig retells the story of the women of Cithaeron as what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “splendid failure” - “a possibility first nurtured outside the city is (...) extinguished, but memory remains” (p. 5). In the three moments that I look at in the following, we find an affirmative politics and a politics of celebration that Honig herself follows in her writing: she lays new foundations upon which future democratic struggle can build. The narrative of “failure,” even in the “splendid form” that Honig employs, however, misses an important aspect of the story: namely the violence and forms of domination that held back the city. Honig reproaches Arendt for not being attuned to the archive’s logic of closure that prevents the seeds of the women’s struggle to flourish in the city. But is Honig? Recognizing the conditions that have led to the bacchant’s failure might push us to think about the work of reformation, or rather transformation, as part of a revolutionary feminist struggle. (shrink)

The politics of interpretation should not be confused with interpretive practices such as political theory, political commentary, or histories of political institutions, parties, and conflicts that have politics itself as a specific object of interest. In these other interpretive practices, the politics that informs or motivates them—“politics” in the sense of political values or ideology—is relatively easily perceived and no particular meta-interpretive analysis is required. The politics of interpretation, on the other hand, arises in those interpretive practices which are (...) ostensibly most remote from overtly political concerns, practices which are carried out under the aegis of a purely disinterested search for the truth or inquiry into the natures of things which appear to have no political relevance at all. This “politics” has to do with the kind of authority the interpreter claims vis-à-vis the established political authorities of his society, on the one side, and vis-à-vis other interpreters in his own field of study or investigation, on the other, as the basis of whatever rights he conceives himself to possess and whatever duties he feels obligated to discharge as a professional seeker of truth. This politics which presides over interpretive conflicts is difficult to identity because traditionally, in our culture at least, interpretation is thought to operate properly only as long as the interpreter does not have recourse to the one instrument which the politician per vocationem utilizes as a matter of course in his practice—the appeal to force as a means of resolving disputes and conflicts.11. I have followed the lead of Max Weber in defining the phrase “politics of interpretation.” In “Politics as Vocation,” Weber wrote that “ ‘politics’ means for us striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state” . Rather than discuss the age-old problem of the professional interpreter’s political responsibilities, I will consider that politics which is endemic to the pursuit of truth—the striving to share power amongst interpreters themselves. The activity of interpreting becomes political at the point where a given interpreter claims authority over rival interpreters. As long as this claim is not reinforced by appeal to the power of the state to compel conformity of belief or conviction, it is “political” only in a metaphorical sense. Of course, interpretation becomes political when a given point of view or finding is taken as orthodoxy of belief by those holding political power, as in the Soviet Union, Germany under Hitler, or any number of religiously puritanical regimes. But these are the easy cases. It is much more difficult to determine the political nature of interpretive practices which, as in literary criticism or antiquarian scholarship, appear to have no bearing upon political policies or practices.Hayden White is a professor and director of the program in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is coeditor of Representing Kenneth Burke and is currently working on a book on the rhetoric of realism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" and "The Narrativization of Real Events". (shrink)

Recently, novel lines of research have developed to study the influence of identity processes in sport-related behaviours. Yet, whereas emotions in sport are the result of a complex psychosocial process, little attention has been paid to examining the mechanisms that underlie how group membership influences athletes’ emotional experiences. The present narrative review aims at complementing the comprehensive review produced by Rees et al. (2015) on social identity in sport by reporting specific work on identity-based emotions in sport. To that (...) end, we firstly overview the different terminology currently used in the field of emotions in groups to clarify the distinct nature of emotions that result from an individual’s social identity. Secondly, we discuss key concepts of social identity to better understand the mechanisms underlying identity-based emotions. Thirdly, we address existing knowledge on identity-based emotions in sport. We close the present narrative review by suggesting future research perspectives based on existing meta-theories of social identity. Evidence from the social psychology literature is discussed alongside existing works from the sport literature to propose a crucial theoretical approach to better understand emotions in sport. (shrink)

Review of "The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner", Volume I, III, and VI. Excerpt from the Conclusions: Many of Wigner’s papers on mathematical physics are great classics. Most famous is his work on group representations which is of lasting value for a proper mathematical foundation of quantum theory. The modern development of quantum theory (which is not reflected in Wigner’s work) is in an essential way a representation theory (e.g. representations of kinematical groups, or representations of C*-algebras). This (...) view owes very much to Wigner’s seminal papers on the unitary representations of compact and noncompact groups. Wigner showed much courage in relating the then unresolved questions of the measurement problem to the much deeper problem of consciousness. In view of this very unorthodox proposal it is astonishing that Wigner was very reactionary with respect of the dogmas of orthodox quantum mechanics. In contrast to von Neumann himself, he took the old von-Neumann codification of quantum mechanics as authoritative and not to be questioned. Much of the efforts to interpret the meaning of this codification and to prove no-go theorems, such as the insolubility of the measurement problem or the impossibility of a quantum theory of individual objects, are physically irrelevant since they are based on a codification of quantum mechanics that is valid only for strictly closed systems with finitely many degrees of freedom. However, in nature there are no such systems. Every material system is coupled to the gravitational and to the electromagnetic field – systems which require in a Hamiltonian description infinitely many degrees of freedom. A deeper insight into the conceptual problems of quantum theory is possible only if the modern development of a quantum theory of infinite systems is taken into account. (shrink)