Using a longitudinal case study design, we have tracked the recovery of motor function following severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) through a multimodal neuroimaging approach. In 2006, Canadian Soldier Captain (retired) Trevor Greene (TG) was attacked with an axe to the head while on tour in Afghanistan. TG continues intensive daily rehabilitation, which recently included the integration of physical therapy (PT) with neuromodulation using translingual neurostimulation (TLNS) to facilitate neuroplasticity. Recent findings with PT+TLNS demonstrated that recovery of motor function occurred (...) beyond conventional time limits, currently extending past 14-years post-injury. To investigate whether PT+TLNS similarly resulted in associated cognitive function improvements, we examined event-related potentials (ERPs) with the brain vital signs framework. In parallel with motor function improvements, brain vital signs detected significant increases in basic attention (as measured by P300 response amplitude) and cognitive processing (as measured by contextual N400 response amplitude). These objective cognitive improvements corresponded with TG’s self-reported improvements, including a noteworthy and consistent reduction in ongoing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The findings provide valuable insight into the potential importance of non-invasive neuromodulation in cognitive rehabilitation, in addition to initial indications for physical rehabilitation. (shrink)

Why is consent revocable? In other words, why must we respect someone's present dissent at the expense of her past consent? This essay argues against act-based explanations and in favor of a rule-based explanation. A rule prioritizing present consent will serve our interests the best, in light of our interests in having flexibility over our consent and in minimizing the possibility of error in people's judgments about whether we consent.

In the trolley problem, a well-known moral dilemma, the intuitive process is believed to increase deontological judgments, while deliberative reasoning is thought to promote utilitarian decisions. Therefore, based on the dual-process model, there seems to be an attempt to save several lives at the expense of a few others in a deliberative manner. This study examines the validity of this argument. To this end, we manipulate decision-making time in the standard trolley dilemma to compare differences among 119 Japanese female undergraduates (...) under three conditions: intuitive judgment, deliberative judgment, and judgment after a group discussion. The current results demonstrate that utilitarian judgments decreased from 52.9% in the intuition condition to 43.7% in the deliberation condition and 37.0% after the discussion. Additional analysis suggests that the decrease in utilitarian judgments may be related to psychological unwillingness to assume responsibility for the lives of others rather than to an increase in deontological judgments. Finally, these results are discussed from an adaptationist perspective. (shrink)

In this paper, I motivate a puzzle about epistemic rationality. On the one hand, there seems to be something problematic about frequently changing your mind. On the other hand, changing your mind once is often permissible. Why do one-off changes of mind seem rationally permissible, even admirable, while constant changes seem quintessentially irrational? The puzzle of fickleness is to explain this asymmetry. To solve the puzzle, I propose and defend the Ratifiable Reasoning Account. According to this solution, as agents (...) redeliberate, they gain two types of evidence. First, they gain inductive evidence that they will not stably settle their belief. Second, this inductive evidence affords higher-order evidence that they are unreliable at assessing the matter at hand. The fact that fickle agents gain this higher-order evidence explains why fickleness can be epistemically—not just practically—irrational. In addition to solving the puzzle, my account captures a wide range of contextual factors that are relevant for our judgments. (shrink)

Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of posthumanist literature and potential research avenues.

My dissertation defends the importance of epistemic norms on what I call ‘inquiring further.’ Inquiring further is a familiar practice we engage in when we redeliberate, gather more evidence, or double-check our beliefs. Nonetheless, many philosophers have argued that norms governing further inquiry are at most practical or moral norms. Against this, I argue that norms on inquiring further are central to our understanding of responsible epistemic agency. I do this by appealing to both the roles of epistemic evaluations and (...) our practices of holding agents epistemically accountable. My dissertation thereby expands and deepens our understanding of epistemic evaluations and normativity. Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on a different practice of inquiring further. The first, “A Puzzle About Fickleness,” motivates a puzzle about changes of mind resulting from redeliberation. The puzzle is to explain the asymmetry between one-off changes of mind, which often seem permissible, and multiple changes of mind—or fickleness—which often seem problematic. After motivating an epistemic solution to the puzzle, I propose and defend the Ratifiable Reasoning Account. On this solution, as agents redeliberate, they gain two types of evidence. First, they gain inductive evidence that they will not stably settle their belief. Second, this inductive evidence affords higher-order evidence that they are unreliable at assessing the matter at hand. The fact that fickle agents gain this higher-order evidence explains why fickleness can be epistemically—not just practically—irrational. The second chapter turns to our practices of evidence-gathering. In “Epistemic Norms on Evidence-Gathering,” I and my co-author, Carolina Flores, argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Though this view is intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has; justified or rational beliefs are those based on appropriate responses to that evidence. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. The third chapter, “Why Double-Check?”, explores the relationship between double-checking and knowledge. I argue that agents can simultaneously know that p and rationally double-check that p. Call this view the Synchronic Compatibility Thesis. Although intuitive, this thesis faces two challenges. First, some have argued that agents who double-check ought to suspend judgment while inquiring; they thus lose knowledge while double-checking, if only temporarily. Second, some have argued that if it is rational to double-check that p, then one does not know that p. This claim is motivated by strong conceptions of belief or pragmatic encroachment. I argue that these competing views fail to accommodate the many reasons why agents might double-check, ranging from seeking certainty to making one’s beliefs more resilient. Moreover, the alternative views rely on overly strong assumptions about what inquiry, knowledge, or belief requires. By exploring fickleness, evidence-gathering, and double-checking—three phenomena that traditional epistemology has neglected—this dissertation enriches epistemology by making it more relevant to real-world agents. (shrink)

Integrated information theory attempts to account for both the quantitative and the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, and in taking consciousness as fundamental and widespread it bears similarities to panpsychist Russellian monism. In this paper I compare IIT's and RM's response to the conceivability argument, and their metaphysical account of conscious experience. I start by claiming that RM neutralizes the conceivability argument, but that by virtue of its commitment to categoricalism it doesn't exclude fickle qualia scenarios. I argue that IIT's core (...) notion of intrinsic cause-effect power makes it incompatible with categoricalist versions of RM and, to the contrary, is best understood as entailing pandispositionalism, the view for which all properties are powers. I show that, thus construed, IIT can cope with both the conceivability and with the fickle qualia arguments, offers a promising way to account for the content of experience, and hence is preferable to categoricalist RM. (shrink)

A rise of academic capitalism over the past four decades has been well documented within many research-intensive universities. Largely missing, however, are in-depth studies of how particularly situated academic groups manage the uncertainties that come with intermittent and fickle commercial funding streams in their daily research practice and problem choice. To capture the strategies scientists adopt under these conditions, this article provides an ethnographically detailed (and true) story about how a single project in Artificial Intelligence grew over several years from (...) a peripheral idea to the very center of an academic lab’s commercial portfolio. The analysis theorizes an epistemic form—nimble knowledge production—and documents three of its lab-level features: 1) rapid prototyping to keep sunk costs low, 2) shared search for “real world problems” rather than “theoretical” ones, and 3) nimble commitment to research problem choice. While similar forms of academic knowledge transfer have been lauded as “mode 2,” “innovative,” or “hybrid” for initiating cross-institutional collaboration and pushing science beyond disciplinary silos, this case suggests it can rely on fleeting attention to problems resistant to a quick fix. (shrink)

Physicians and other medical practitioners make untold numbers of judgments about patient care on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These judgments fall along a number of spectrums, from the mundane to the tragic, from the obvious to the challenging. Under the rubric of evidence-based medicine, these judgments will be informed by the robust conclusions of medical research. In the ideal circumstance, medical research makes the best decision obvious to the trained professional. Even when practice approximates this ideal, it does (...) so unevenly. Judgments in medical practice are always accompanied by uncertainty, and this uncertainty is a fickle companion—constant in its presence but inconstant in its expression. This feature of medical judgments gives rise to the moral responsibility of medical practitioners to be epistemically humble. This requires the recognition and communication of the uncertainty that accompanies their judgment as well as a commitment to avoiding intuitive innovations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of “The Clever Politician”Harold J. CookAs the institutional authority of the learned physicians of Augustan London waned, new threats to the classical foundations of medical practice appeared. 1 Patients had more freedom to chose from a variety of practitioners and practices, giving both consumer demand and the advertising skills of suppliers an even more powerful hand in medical affairs. While the burgeoning medical marketplace (...) developed mostly because of the profound socio-economic and political changes of the late Stuart period, intellectual transformations were at play, too. The new science appeared to encourage empiricism and the development of new remedies based on experimentation, devaluing university education in medical classics, but conversely the new science could strengthen physicians’ claims to superiority over mere patients and practitioners. Medical materialists, for instance, could turn the classical advisor/client relationship into that of an expert contolling a passive recipient (patient) for his or her own good.One contemporary debate that shows the implications of materialism for medical relationships is the theory of the passions. The passions linked mind and body. According to most classical accounts, one could (or should) control the passions by applying reason, resulting in both a virtuous and a healthy life. But according to a strong version of materialism, the mind could not hope to control the passions. A doctor therefore could no longer appeal to patients’ reason; rather, he had to manipulate the patient’s passions for his or her own good. Hence for a materialist, the doctor was not an adviser to the patient but an expert therapist, not a teacher of health and virtue but a “clever politician” who ordered bodily passions. Some versions of the new science, then, favored [End Page 101] the expertise of physicians while undermining older views about learned authority. Such an outlook is clear in the work of Dr. Bernard Mandeville, whose famous Fable of the Bees shows how the “clever politician” played on passions to make the body politic run smoothly. Mandeville held coherent views on politics, economics, moral philosophy, and medicine. Like many doctors of his time, he fought to establish his expertise in the new science. His views are expressed most clearly in the theory of the passions. By examining his discussion of the passions in both his social commentary and his medical dialogues, we can note similarities among his various writings and glimpse one of his fundamental positions on medicine and humanity.The Fable and its CriticsTo many English minds of the early eighteenth century, no one exemplified materialism’s threat better than Dr. Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville’s famous slogan, the subtitle of his Fable of the Bees—“private vices, public benefits”—seemed to epitomize materialism’s inherent immorality. The book seemed to argue that what most people recognized as human vices were the main engines of the collective good. Mandeville’s famous book pictured human nature as animalistic, in which the passions held sway over reason. In Mandeville’s world, it appeared, reason became little more than the ability to rationalize, the instrument of hypocrisy, merely letting people cover their true motives (grounded as they were in the passions) with empty words pretending to more exalted ends.His Fable had begun as a little, anonymous, satirical poem in 1705, titled “The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest.” It began by speaking of “A Spacious Hive well stockt with Bees, / That liv’d in Luxury and Ease.” Many of the bees were knaves, with no calling free of deceit, but while “every Part was full of Vice, / Yet [was] the whole Mass a Paradise; /... Such were the Blessings of that State; / Their Crimes conspir’d to make them Great.” Avarice, prodigality, luxury, pride, envy, vanity, folly, fickleness, and inconstancy employed millions, encouraging ingenuity and industry and creating pleasures and comforts “To such a Height, the very Poor / Liv’d better than the Rich before.” But many of the thriving bees complained, shouting for honesty and virtue. When Jove “rid / The bawling Hive of Fraud,” economic collapse followed, with the consequent end of arts and sciences as well; population declined; the hive’s territory decreased; and the remaining bees toiled long and... (shrink)

The difficulty with democracy is always how to define the demos—the people. Can we think of democracy in a different way? My starting point is to ask what it would mean to take kratos (power) rather than demos as the starting point of the thinking of democracy. I will argue that this is consistent with Solon’s first democratic constitution and that it leads to a thinking of democracy in terms of agonism. Maybe such a conception of agonistic democracy will allow (...) us to conceptualize as well as actualize a political space not predetermined by the “fickle multitude” that can be manipulated and is pray to the forces of populism. (shrink)

Nothing about Xenophon's Hellenica is more outrageous than his treatment of the relations of Persia and the Greeks. It was orthodoxy in the circle of Agesilaus that Theban medizing, barbarismos, had sabotaged the plans for a glorious anabasis and recalled him to the defence of his city . Not until the Thebans woo and win the fickle favour of the King , does anything like detail emerge. In the regrettable interlude, the less said the better. If the third speech of (...) Andocides had not survived, there would have been some tangled theorizing about a note in Didymus , especially as regards ‘the ambassadors who in Sparta consented’, but sober historical judgement would never have transgressed so far from the text of Xenophon as to postulate a Peace Congress in Sparta as well as in Sardis in 392. Likewise, the merest chance of epigraphic survival assures us that the oaths, which the ‘Athenians and the Spartans and the other Greeks’ swore in 387/6, ‘the King swore’ — and so on. If we did not have the reflection of Ephorus in Diodorus, albeit a mirror cracked and blemished, we would be sadly astray in 375 and 371. When, however, the despicable Thebans become the King's favoured power, disgraceful scenes unfold. ‘Pelopidas very much had things his own way with the Persian; he could say that the Thebans alone of the Greeks had fought on the King's side at Plataea, that they had never afterwards campaigned against him, that the Spartans were at war with them because they would not join Agesilaus…etc.’ . A Persian is found at Thebes reading out the contents of a Royal Rescript, after displaying the Royal seal ; at Sparta twenty years before, such details had been left to the imagination. The cause of Xenophon's method in this matter is not for the moment under discussion, but rather the consequence, viz. our uncertainty about what precisely the King's Peace said. There was a document, inscribed on stone pillars and displayed in the national shrines . If ever a copy turns up, what can we expect to find? The measure of our uncertainty was provided by Wilcken, who produced a curious hypothesis which found little sympathy; that he could do so shows the state of the evidence. Some effort of the imagination is needed, and those who gravely disapprove of conjectures of what might have been the case need read no further. At the end one can be sure of very little. Conjectures, however, have been uttered, en passant, elsewhere. What may prove to be a chorus of disdain has begun. A formal confession may be welcome. (shrink)

We've pursued and achieved the modern dream of defining ourselves-but at what cost? The New York Post op-ed editor makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning. As a young father and a self-proclaimed "radically assimilated immigrant," opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari realized that when it comes to shaping his young son's moral fiber, today's America comes up short. For millennia, the world's great ethical and religious traditions taught that true happiness lies in (...) pursuing virtue and accepting limits. But now, unbound from these stubborn traditions, we are free to choose whichever way of life we think is most optimal-or, more often than not, merely the easiest. All that remains are the fickle desires that a wealthy, technologically advanced society is equipped to fulfill. The result is a society riven by deep conflict and individual lives that, for all their apparent freedom, are marked by alienation and stark unhappiness. In response to this crisis, Ahmari offers twelve questions for us to grapple with-twelve timeless, fundamental queries that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the life and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Andrea Dworkin, Ahmari invites us to examine the hidden assumptions that drive our behavior and, in so doing, recapture a more humane way of living in a world that has lost its way. (shrink)

Computer simulations may allow us to understand the earth’s fickle climate and how it is affected by detours of the great ocean currents. These detours cause abrupt coolings -- the average global temperature can drop dramatically in just a few years, with droughts that set up El-Niño-like forest fires even in the tropics. While volcanic eruptions and Antarctic ice shelf collapses can also abruptly cool things, what we’re talking about here is a flip-flop: a few centuries later, there’s an equally (...) abrupt rewarming. This cycle has repeated every few thousand years (though it has been 12,000 years since the most recent one). (shrink)

On the stupidity of oysters -- Divining creaturely love -- Horsing around: the marriage blanc of Nietzsche, Andreas-Salomø, and Røe -- Groping for an opening: Rilke between animal and angel -- Electric caresses:Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou -- Between perfection and temptation: Musil, Claudine, and Veronica -- The biological travesty -- "The creature whom we love": Proust and jealousy -- The love tone: capture and captivation -- "The soft word that comes deceiving": Fournival's bestiary of love -- The cuckold and the (...) cockatrice: Fourier and Hazlitt -- The animal bride and horny toads -- Unsettled being: Ovid's metamorphoses -- Fickle metaphysics -- Nymphomania and faunication -- Senseless arabesques: Wendy and Lucy -- The goat in the machine (a reprise) -- On cetaceous maidens -- Animal magnetism and alternative currents (or Tesla and the white dove). (shrink)

In this article, I take off from some central issues in Paul Katsafanas’ recent book Agency and the Foundations of Ethics. I argue that Katsafanas’ alleged aims of action fail to do the work he requires them to do. First, his approach to activity or control is deeply problematic in the light of counterexamples. More importantly, the view of activity or control he needs to get his argument going is most likely false, as it requires our values to do work (...) that they are too fickle to do. Second, I take issue with the Nietzschean drive psychology underlying the second agential aim, viz. power. I argue that ordinary desires better describe a number of phenomena that Katsafanas uses drives to explain, and that some actions can aim in the opposite direction. As only drive-motivated actions aim at power, action does not, therefore, constitutively aim at power. Finally, I sketch a Humean approach to constitutivism, and argue that it both explains the desiderata that Katsafanas posits as well as solves the problems for his view. The Humean view is preferable, and should be developed further. (shrink)

In the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, participants have commonly been instructed to report their conscious content. This, it was claimed, risks confounding the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) with their preconditions, i.e., allocation of attention, and consequences, i.e., metacognitive reflection. Recently, the field has therefore been shifting towards no-report paradigms. No-report paradigms draw their validity from a direct comparison with no-report conditions. We analyze several examples of such comparisons and identify alternative interpretations of their results and/or methodological issues in all (...) cases. These go beyond the previous criticism that just removing the report is insufficient, because it does not prevent metacognitive reflection. The conscious mind is fickle. Without having much to do, it will turn inward and switch, or timeshare, between the stimuli on display and daydreaming or mind-wandering. Thus, rather than the NCC, no-report paradigms might be addressing the neural correlates of conscious disengagement. This observation reaffirms the conclusion that no-report paradigms are no less problematic than report paradigms. (shrink)

The Crito dramatizes the impossibility, and the indispensability, of persuasion sby locating it between two extremes, Socrates and the Laws, the truths of philosophy and the force of politics. The question is whether those two limits are themselves inside or outside rhetoric. Can philosophy persuade, ormust it always be an alternative sto persuasion? Socrates insists on ignoring the opinion, and the power, of the many, and so the Laws have to show themselves as different from the opinion of the many (...) in order for him to obey. If Socrates and the Laws cannot talk to each other, it is because philosophy and politics are incommensurable. If there is common ground, it is because persuasion can make the two, philosophy and politics, commensurable to each other. Socrates exhibits the philosopher’s task as transforming himself from a universal thinker into a particular agent, while the Laws face the opposite challenge, aspiring to a generality that makes them rational and normative, and so open to discourse and persuasion. The many whom Socrates constantly denigrates have the particularity of being fickle and changeable, while the Laws look rigid. Socrates, as he says in the Apology, is always the same. Both sides look to the flexibility and adaptability to circumstances central to rhetoric. (shrink)

The Crito dramatizes the impossibility, and the indispensability, of persuasion sby locating it between two extremes, Socrates and the Laws, the truths of philosophy and the force of politics. The question is whether those two limits are themselves inside or outside rhetoric. Can philosophy persuade, ormust it always be an alternative sto persuasion? Socrates insists on ignoring the opinion, and the power, of the many, and so the Laws have to show themselves as different from the opinion of the many (...) in order for him to obey. If Socrates and the Laws cannot talk to each other, it is because philosophy and politics are incommensurable. If there is common ground, it is because persuasion can make the two, philosophy and politics, commensurable to each other. Socrates exhibits the philosopher’s task as transforming himself from a universal thinker into a particular agent, while the Laws face the opposite challenge, aspiring to a generality that makes them rational and normative, and so open to discourse and persuasion. The many whom Socrates constantly denigrates have the particularity of being fickle and changeable, while the Laws look rigid. Socrates, as he says in the Apology, is always the same. Both sides look to the flexibility and adaptability to circumstances central to rhetoric. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to sketch out the conceptual possibility of what is given the name remuant existence. That is to say, a changeable, restless and fickle existence. The word remuant, no longer in common use in the English language, is an adjective. Its meaning offered here is used to designate what will be considered the qualifying attribute of existence, which is to make the point that existence is remuant existence. Existence is a common noun and thereby grammatically a (...) universal but if it cannot exist without being remuant its nominal universality is of no significance. The universality of existence does not mean anything; only remuant existence has meaning. The articulation of this concept, and those which are concomitant with it, is primarily an untangling of the remuant from the critique of presence and of the subject offered by Jacques Derrida, whose influence remains visitant throughout. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Elisabeth Blair 173 How it feels is a series of questions Are you home now, or in the body of a bird? Do you drown, or do you sit calm in the watery air? And the fire—did you light it yourself, or did someone you know, or someone you have yet to meet? Can you sit quiet by it or is (...) it bridging the wet and dry with its feet, consuming your shoes first, then your eyes, skipping the topography in between in fickle pecking like chicken for grain? Is the shower water or is it fire? What if you want to feel something? Are you tired of time, to be so locked into now in this way, in the shower, and later in the circle, where they’ll say, We saw your scars, we know you were abused— it’s OK—we were too— —? But you had only scratched your back in the shower (accidentally) that day. Elisabeth Blair 174 Elisabeth Blair What is the fire that is the fire of drowning and what is the urgency that is the command of fog, saying you’d better sit down? You’d better stand up. Wood. Upholstery. Snow. Mud. These are real, while you are sinister, not believed. There were welts on your back; now they’ve gone. You try to explain: You had a belly once. You had a body. This place stores you in the leg of a bird, and not an invested one but a chicken, pecking, running lines in the ground. Most of the time is gone. You’re a stream down which a foundling comes. You’re a paramecium—all the hints and holds of life are here in you, but you are just a little one. You’re a mouth. You use yourself to laugh, to clutch your chin with one hand, rest the other on your knee. You use yourself to say no, I do not have scars—to clarify. You use yourself like the chicken in the yard uses itself to get by. Elisabeth Blair 175 Listen. I haven’t hit you. I’ve only used your body to demonstrate the richness of your feeling and the piracy inherent in your unwillingness to brave the feeling. I’ve only pulled you up. I’ve only sheltered you with a slap. I’ve dipped into your orange blood with my finger and felt relief—I know how to help. You listen to me— your blood will redden, then your face. You’ll get better. 176 Elisabeth Blair The English boy dwells in any of many neurodivergent states, no doubt undiagnosed. You only speak when spoken to by the staff, but he will and does speak—and laugh. He pulls his pants down and shits in the mess tent. You look at the grain in the rough wooden bench. He kicks as they tackle him to the ground, and all the while—as they swear and shout and he fights—comes that laughter, making ripples on your eyes. They put him in a sleeping bag, wrap a tarp around it, tie it with rope, then leave him on the ground for days, on display, in March, in the mountains, in many feet of snow. They call it a burrito. Let him laugh, they say, let him wiggle and roll.  [we were not killed]  [I am not ungrateful  I am not ungrateful] Elisabeth Blair 177 Age 16 A few years before, your horns newly removed, there had come a drought. Once you felt it, and felt yourself not just alone but marked— once on the forehead and once on either side where you had been but now were not— you developed doubts. You had intended to be reasonable, to talk. But the melting ice: there was no container. The evaporating water: there was no shade. No room to meet in. No family to group. No wits to gather or weave, nothing to save. Your hands became a precipice attached to a belief. The belief was mismanaged, had a bad day. Stuff clattered onto you. You lay there in the stuff and knew you had broken hearts. People... (shrink)

RESUMO Esboça-se neste artigo uma possível via de interpretação ao problema ético-estético, ou ainda ético-poiêtico da criação de si, a partir de uma reavaliação da noção de hipocrisia, enquanto arte do engano e arte do ator, reaproximando-a da hypókrisis [ὑπόκρισις] grega. Para tanto, procura-se estabelecer um diálogo, ou mesmo um contraponto, com aqueles pensadores que, nas preleções de Foucault, conformaram na antiguidade clássica e helenística os elementos para se pensar, por meio do discurso parrêsiástico e da prática da áskêsis, a (...) criação de si enquanto estética da existência. O lastro para essa compreensão vem de uma reavaliação das formas de inteligência estocástica e astuciosa que comandam a lida com a inconstância, a multiplicidade e os acasos - formas às quais os gregos atribuíram o nome da deusa Mêtis [Μήτις]. Mais afeitas a estas inconstâncias, práticas tais como: a simulação, a dissimulação e a ênfase - próprias da arte do engano - ganham sob essa ótica uma feição de virtuosidade que o pensamento filosófico hegemônico, afeito à retidão e ao enfrentamento heroico diante do real, dificilmente se disporia a reconhecer. ABSTRACT This paper outlines a possible way of interpreting the ethical-aesthetic or ethical-poiêthical problem of the creation of self, from a re-evaluation of the concept of hypocrisy, while art of deception and the art of the actor, reconnecting it with the greek hypókrisis [ὑπόκρισις]. For it aims to establish a dialogue, or even a counterpoint, with those thinkers who, in Foucault's lectures, conformed in classical and Hellenistic antiquity elements to think, through the parhêsiástic discourse and the practice of áskêsis, the creation of self while an aesthetics of existence. The ballast for this understanding comes from a re-evaluation of forms of stochastic and astute intelligence who command the dealings with the fickleness, the multiplicity and the accidents - which forms the Greeks attributed the name of the goddess Mêtis [Μήτις]. More related to these uncertainties, practices such as: the simulation, dissimulation and the emphasis - related to some art of deception - win under this optics a feature of virtuosity that the hegemonic philosophical thought, wont to the righteousness and the heroic confrontation facing the real, would hardly accept. (shrink)

Interpreting VTA dopamine activity as a facilitator of affective engagement fits Depue & Collins's agency dimension of extraverted personality and also Watson's and Tellegen's (1985) engagement dimension of state mood. Serotonin, by turning down the gain on dopaminergic affective engagement, would permit already prepotent responses or habits to prevail against the behavior-switching incentive-simulation-driven temptations of the moment facilitated by fickle VTA DA. Intelligent switching between openly responsive affective engagement and constraint by long-term plans, goals, or values presumably involves environment-sensitive balancing (...) of these neuromodulators, such as socially dominant primates may show. (shrink)

There is growing agreement among scholars and citizens that our planet and its peoples are presently living through an era of great political uncertainty. Global pestilence, species destruction, shrinking US power and the birth of a new Chinese global empire are among the forces said to be responsible for the rising tides of uncertainty. Some observers even speak of a great leap backwards, a regression towards catastrophe, a rebirth of the disquiet and fear that marked the world of the 1920s (...) and 1930s. They are sure that the future will bring only threats, rather than new opportunities to live well. This essay notes the seriousness of things, but it raises doubts about these pessimistic claims of a new age of uncertainty. Historical comparisons are needed. So is greater clarity about the role played by communicative abundance in inflating our collective sense of doom. And a paradox is noted: calamities do more than stir up questions about how best to classify and measure the experience of uncertainty. Definitions of uncertainty also become uncertain. This should be unsurprising. Only institutions and everyday experiences unaffected by the flow of time could be defined and lived with any certainty. The insight not only has rich implications for the way we think about politics and democracy and its vulnerability to morbid backlashes and yearnings for demagogues. Doubt can generate fresh ideas and positive practical breakthroughs. Disquiet and incertitude are fickle characters, but they are also challengers of all forms of human arrogance, including the dogmatic conviction that our world is now headed for hell. (shrink)

Montaigne ha trasformato radicalmente l’idea di scetticismo tramandatagli dal­l’antichità. Egli ritiene infatti che la meta del pensiero non debba con­sistere nella quiete dello spirito, come so­stenevano gli scettici antichi, ben­sì che ci manteniamo fedeli alla condizione umana se riconosciamo la nostra fondamentale mutevolezza e arrischiamo prospettive differenti, senza tut­­tavia identificarci in esse al punto da non essere disposti a rivederle o ab­bandonarle.Montaigne had completely transformed the skepticism’s idea handed down to him from the past. While the ancient skeptics believed that (...) the thought’s aim had to be the stillness of spirit, Montaigne maintained that we stick to our human condition since we truly recognize our fundamental fickleness. Following this path, it’s possible to look at the world from many different perspectives. However, one doesn't look for a point of view with which one might identify, but rather to remain open to reassessment and change. (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)

The problem of how to handle interesting but ignored thinkers of the past is discussed through an analysis of the case of Ludwik Fleck. Fleck was totally ignored in the ?30s and declared an important thinker in the 70s and ?80s. In the first case fashion ignored him and in the second it praised him. The praise has been as poor as the silence was unjust. We may do such thinkers more justice if we recognize that intellectual society is fickle, (...) that we cannot make amends in many cases, but that we can do such thinkers justice by treating them critically ? even if this means explaining away any impact they might have had. If we wish to be autonomous and independent of fashion, we must abandon efforts to use the making of amends the occasion for making intellectual society seem fairer than it is. (shrink)

Whether the word ‘passion’, as indicating the suffering or affection from without of a soul, is by now no more than a dead metaphor, surviving from an antique conception of the mind; whether, indeed, there is any way open to us of determining the passivity or otherwise of our inner life, apart, that is, from how it strikes us, from how we are prompted to describe it, are not questions that I can take up this evening. It is enough for (...) my purpose that for much of the time our feelings, our emotions, our inclinations are as fluctuating or as imperious as if they were not totally under our control. We are elated: we are dejected: we get angry, and then our anger gives place to a feeling of absurdity: we remain in love with someone who is lost to us but whom we cannot renounce: we are interested in something, and suddenly we are bored, or frightened that we will be bored: we see a stranger, someone who is nothing to us, who is poor or crippled, and we feel guilt: someone does something wrong or foolish, and we are unaccountably transported by laughter, by ‘sudden glory’ as Hobbes called it, knowing what it was about, and then, as unaccountably, we are thrown down. Man is, in Montaigne's famous phrase, une chose ondoyante, a creature of inner change and fickleness. (shrink)

Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive (...) theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics. (shrink)

Naturalism does not necessarily imply an exclusive emphasis on the notoriously fickle empathic emotions. Contemporary neurobiological emotion research strongly suggests that the search for moral meaning, like any other everyday truth-seeking activity, is motivated not only by altruistic instincts or social conditioning, but also and more importantly it is motivated by a basic exploratory drive that makes us want to know what the truth is, independently of whether we happen to feel altruistic or nurturing in a particular instance. This innate (...) biological drive is not socially learned or developed through reinforcement, yet it motivates us to try to find out what we really ought to do. That the love of truth is innate has survival value, yet does not lead to the naturalistic fallacy, as do the more frequently cited “moral” emotions such as sympathy and fellow-feeling. The endogenous love of truth, qua natural emotion, does not lead to the vacuous conclusion that “We ought to act morally because we naturally feel altruistic in a given situation.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic ThemesCatherine E. MorrisonHuman Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic Themes by Paul Schollmeier Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 302. $80.00, cloth.This is a book about spirits—human, godly, ghostly, and alcoholic. Paul Schollmeier's Human Goodness: Pragmatic Variations on Platonic Themes explores how humble humans act morally in an absurd world. Schollmeier contends that the Socratic spirit, or daimon, of self-knowledge and (...) hypothesis testing provides the foundation for a deeply human moral philosophy. It is, in Schollmeier's elegant phrasing, daimonic rather than eudaimonic, joining Aristotle and Plato with William James, as well as contributions from the ghosts of David Hume and Immanuel Kant and a few rounds of whiskey. Spirits abound! Mixing Socratic skepticism with Jamesian empiricism, Schollmeier argues that we act best when we apply general principles held as opinion (not as certain knowledge), and tested through experience, to our particular situation. When these opinions yield fruit, we find ourselves less at the whim of our capricious surroundings; when they do not, we are obliged to recognize the provisional nature of our opinions and change them. The ends of these day-to-day activities reflect a far grander cosmological order, one we ignore to our mortal (and moral) peril. It is by engaging in this intellectual activity that we are made happy, and it is in measured pursuit of this happiness that we are virtuous. Our actions are neither absolutely true nor perfect. They are instead the best that we can do. And for a reviewer attempting to encapsulate a finely nuanced book in a small space, this is comforting advice indeed. [End Page 190]The book begins with a puzzle: The curious twin claims in Plato's Apology that, true to the Delphic oracle's proclamation, Socrates is both wise and knows nothing. The key to this apparent paradox, Schollmeier contends, is the difference between divine knowledge, "ultimate, nonhypothetical knowledge of final causes" (6), and human knowledge, which is hypothetical only. Schollmeier marshals William James to argue that as humans, we encounter objects of knowledge perceptually; even our concepts are fashioned from this meager material. Without access to divine knowledge, humans must test hypotheses and assume that they are true only provisionally.James's (and Hume's) emphasis on the passions as the foundation for action, however, gives Schollmeier pause. In order to construct a moral philosophy that avoids absolutism but remains objective, Schollmeier argues for a harmony between the intellectual and the passional that is ultimately rational, our Socratic daimon. We are neither gods nor animals. Should we surrender rationality to desire, Schollmeier warns in concert with Socrates, our already fragile perceptual knowledge will be further distorted by fickle emotion. It is precisely because our grasp on the world is so tenuous that we must pay heed to cool intellect rather than hot passion.Such skepticism of our claim to know might make one hesitant to engage in the enigmatic world—but we have no choice! In order to find our hybrid daimon, both Socratic and pragmatic, Schollmeier suggests rhetoric as the methodology best suited to serving practical knowledge because it eschews certainty in favor of probability and acknowledges that the hypotheses on which we act are tentative and revisable. To this end, Schollmeier highlights the enthymeme and argument by example as the two techniques that best suit the nature of our hypothetical knowledge, and he urges a return to philodoxy, the love of opinion.Giving up our claim to certainty need not be a dismal proposition. Having established his methodology, Schollmeier begins building a moral philosophy that embraces an ontology of change and contends that our happiness provides us with stability in the form of a rational teleology. The objects of our human happiness are fleeting and changeable, so happiness cannot be static but is, rather, an activity that is its own end, "an activity that is an intellectual inquiry" (78). Our happiness is contingent on our ability to hypothetically determine, in our particular setting, our function and then fulfill this role to the best of our abilities. Depending on the setting, it may be dancing, parenting, or simply a lively... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse ed. by Sandra Becker, Megen de Bruin-Molé, and Sara PolakLars SchmeinkSandra Becker, Megen de Bruin-Molé, and Sara Polak, editors. Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse. Bangor, Wales: The University of Wales Press, 2021. PB, p. 288, ISBN 978-1-78683-690-8, GBP 45,-There is a trend in current humanities writing to point out its relation (...) to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, curious on the one hand as we normally do not address the day-to-day of our contemporary moment in time quite as immediately, reasonably needing a few years to position our thinking against the fickleness of the Zeitgeist. But, on the other hand, the pandemic has had such a profound impact on all the work we have been doing that it seems impossible not to mention—from projects cancelled or changed due to travel restrictions and lockdowns or to issues becoming so much more (or sometime less) important as our academic as well as social priorities shift. Embodying Contagion, a volume of collected essays, was already in the process of editorial work when the pandemic struck; in fact, it was already in the final round of edits (xiii). But how would you edit a collection on contagion narratives and not address the big one unfolding right then and there? So, in a way this volume is made even more timely because of its peculiar moment of publication, as the ongoing health crisis of COVID-19 is entering its next stage, and somehow the essays needed to position themselves against this historical backdrop—this, the experience of living through a contagion narrative, is then interwoven into the volume like a thread. [End Page 515]In terms of its original premise, the volume has not lost its pertinence; if anything, it is heightened. In a nutshell, the volume takes up the mantle from Priscilla Wald, who had coined the term "outbreak narrative" and expands it to the idea of "contagion" (1–2), discussing the "viropolitics of horror and desire" (2) linked to these contagions as metaphors and images to cope with social realities. As the editors attest, the fascination with contagion in our culture is omnipresent—more so after COVID-19—and can be read to determine our bodies as posthuman, existing "as shifting and sharing ecosystems rather than isolated and inviolate objects, contemporary culture unveils a seemingly endless series of new ways to be, to behave and to belong alongside other bodies" (3). Contagion narratives reveal our relational existence—through them, "we negotiate the boundaries between bodies that are welcome, bodies that must be confined or silenced, and bodies that must be eradicated" (4). It is this negotiation that is framed as key cultural work in the volume and that the ten essays interrogate—why do we use contagion to explore our relational selves, to each other and to our surroundings?In terms of structure, the essays are divided into two main parts with five essays each, framed by a preface from the inspirational Priscilla Wald, an introduction laying out the idea of the volume, and a centrally important epilogue that addresses the current pandemic and its impacts as a contagion narrative specifically. In her preface, Wald is adamant in sounding the alarm, or better yet sounding out a profound "I told you so" as she discusses how "woefully underprepared" (xvii) we were for the pandemic and how ignored contagions are politically—making clear in the process that the cultural work of these narratives is more pressing to recognize: "As these stories titillate us, they shape experience: who, what and where a culture locates its threats, its definitions of 'us' and 'them,' its response to other cultures and to the planet" (xvii).The first part of the volume, then, addresses "the role of epidemic fantasies in theory and reality" (4), meaning that news reporting, policy measures, or social media take up metaphors and imagery of contagion, generating meaning around these narratives. Consequently, in terms of its interdisciplinary approach, the chapters in this part of the volume are closely related to sociology and communication studies, as... (shrink)

Drawing on phenomenological literature author presents understanding of the aesthetic experience of the musical work pointing to several things: 1. the deep grounding of the experience in myth and Orphic tradition, 2. to the metaphor of building worlds and 3. to being in the moment as one of the most important description of the experience of musical work. Further on author underlines the dynamic as well as fickle character of the experience of musical work, suspended between the sensual audio experience (...) and the conscious mental one. Phenomenological descriptions capture the aesthetic experience of musical work as processual, subjective, emotional, quality based and unfinished, in which they realize perfectly the complexity of the experience, claims the author. (shrink)

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst disasters in United States history. Failures within New Orleans’ engineered hurricane protection system (levees and floodwalls) contributed to the severity of the event and have drawn considerable public attention. In the time since Katrina, forensic investigations have uncovered a range of issues and problems related to the engineering work. In this article, my goal is to distill from these investigations, and the related literature that has accumulated, some overarching macro-ethical issues that are relevant (...) for all engineers. I attempt to frame these issues, using illustrative examples taken from Katrina, in a way that might be of pedagogical use and benefit for engineering educators interested in engaging their students in discussions of engineering ethics, societal impact of engineered systems, engineering design, or related topics. Some of the issues discussed are problems of unanticipated failure modes, faulty assumptions, lack or misuse of information, the importance of resiliency, the effects of time, balancing competing interests, attending to the details of interfaces, the fickleness of risk perception, and how the past constrains the present. (shrink)

In his pioneering study of Grande Dame Guignol (also referred to as hag horror or psycho-biddy), a female-centric 1960s subgenre of horror film, Peter Shelley explains that the grande dame, a stock character in this form of cinematic expression, “may pine for a lost youth and glory, or she may be trapped by idealized memories of childhood, with a trauma that haunts her past” (8). Indeed, a typical Grande Dame Guignol female protagonist/antagonist (as these two roles often merge) usually deals (...) with various kinds of traumatic experiences: loss of a child, domestic violence, childhood abuse, family conflicts or sudden end of career in the fickle artistic industry, etc. Unable to cope with her problems, but also incapable of facing the inevitable process of aging and dying, she gradually yields to mental and physical illnesses that further strengthen the trauma and lead to her social exclusion, making her life even more unbearable. Unsurprisingly, scholars such as Charles Derry choose to name psycho-biddies horrors of personality, drawing attention to the insightful psychological portrayal of their characters. Thus, it would be relevant and illuminating to discuss films such as Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) as narratives of trauma. This will be the main concern of my article. (shrink)

Whether the word ‘passion’, as indicating the suffering or affection from without of a soul, is by now no more than a dead metaphor, surviving from an antique conception of the mind; whether, indeed, there is any way open to us of determining the passivity or otherwise of our inner life, apart, that is, from how it strikes us, from how we are prompted to describe it, are not questions that I can take up this evening. It is enough for (...) my purpose that for much of the time our feelings, our emotions, our inclinations are as fluctuating or as imperious as if they were not totally under our control. We are elated: we are dejected: we get angry, and then our anger gives place to a feeling of absurdity: we remain in love with someone who is lost to us but whom we cannot renounce: we are interested in something, and suddenly we are bored, or frightened that we will be bored: we see a stranger, someone who is nothing to us, who is poor or crippled, and we feel guilt: someone does something wrong or foolish, and we are unaccountably transported by laughter, by ‘sudden glory’ as Hobbes called it, knowing what it was about, and then, as unaccountably, we are thrown down. Man is, in Montaigne's famous phrase, une chose ondoyante, a creature of inner change and fickleness. (shrink)

This paper wants to draw out a common argument in three great philosophers and littérateurs in modern French thought: Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. The argument makes metaphysical and theological scepticism the first premise for a universalistic political ethics, as per Voltaire's: “it is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error.” The argument, it seems to me, presents an interestingly overlooked, deeply important (...) and powerful contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity. On one hand, theological and post-structuralist critics of “humanism” usually take the latter to depend either on an essentialist philosophical anthropology, or a progressive philosophy of history. The former, it is argued, is philosophically contestable and ethically contentious. The latter, for better or worse, is a continuation of theological eschatology by another name. So both, if not “modernity” per se, should somehow be rejected. But an ethical universalism – like that we find in Montaigne, Bayle, Voltaire, or Camus – which does not claim familiarity with metaphysical or eschatological truths, but humbly confesses our epistemic finitude, seeing in this the basis for ethical solidarity, eludes these charges. On the other hand, philosophical scepticism plays a large role in the post-structuralist criticisms of modern institutions and ideas in ways which have been widely taken to license forms of ethics which problematically identify responsibility, with taking a stand unjustifiable by recourse to universalizable reasons. But, in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus, our ignorance concerning the highest or final truths does not close off, but rather opens up, a new descriptive sensitivity to the foibles and complexities of human experience: a sensitivity reflected amply, and often hilariously, in their literary productions. As such, a critical agnosticism concerning claims about things “in the heavens and beneath the earth” does not, for such a “sceptical humanism,” necessitate decisionism or nihilism. Instead, it demands a redoubled ethical sensitivity to the complexities and plurality of political life which sees the dignity of “really-existing” others, whatever their metaphysical creeds, as an inalienable first datum of ethical conduct and reflection. After tracking these arguments in Montaigne, Voltaire, and Camus, the essay closes by reflecting on, and contesting, one more powerful theological argument against modern agnosticism's allegedly deleterious effects on ethical culture: that acknowledging ignorance concerning the highest things robs us of the basis for awe or wonder, the wellspring of human beings’ highest ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual achievements. (shrink)

In this noblest of Epistles Horace has been warning Quinctius to trust his own judgement about his happiness—is he sapiens bonusque? . The plaudits of the people are fickle and can be withdrawn overnight. Only a man who is flawed and in need of treatment is delighted by false honour or upset by untrue defamation: the philosophic man is impervious to both. Horace, prompted by the words ‘pone, meum est’, illustrates the idea of defamation by reference to a very ancient (...) and traditional form of Italian popular justice—flagitatio ordefamatory dunning.The three charges made in the Horatian passage—thieving, homosexuality, and unfilial behaviour—also appear in the classic Plautine catalogue of flagitatio at Pseud. 360 ff., where the pimp Ballio is abused: ‘fur’ , ‘impudice’ , ‘parricida’. (shrink)

This article explores aspects of the textual relationship between women and early modern London by examining three verbal ‘snapshots’ of the city in works either written by women or focusing on women in their urban environment. The first text, Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573), addresses London from a rural perspective, treating the city as a fickle male to whom she wants to hand back all his treasures. The poem constructs a vivid and ironic social topography, giving a glimpse of (...) the roles of men and women in the Tudor city. The second text is by Mary Carleton, the roguish Restoration figure who defended her apparently ‘counterfeit’ life in the prose of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663). Carleton's London is a place of unwanted seduction and sexual intimidation, highlighting a gendered moral geography even while the memoir itself titillates the reader with the account of her bizarre experiences. Finally, in a coda to the discussions of Whitney and Carleton, early eighteenth-century London is viewed through Jonathan Swift's satirical mock-pastorals of squalid urban life, in which female identity, like the city itself, is a site of violence, disgust and deception. Together, these textual representations of women and early modern London indicate the complex interactions of gender, literature and the early modern city. The analysis of the texts also suggests the significance of the ironic voice as a quintessentially urban literary mode, the prevalence of the idea of woman as a commodified topographical site, and the function of metaphors of courtship or marriage as indicators of the paradoxical attractions of the city. (shrink)

Impositiion of selection and opportunity for censorship meust be regarded as aberrations of a communication system for science. Future historians might wonder why these faults evinced so little concern. Because editorial decisiions pre-empt scientific debate, editors and their advisers assume a heavy responsibility for nurturing fresh conjectures and for maintaining unbiased speedy communication. Evidently this responsibility has not always been honoured.Available evidence of inappropriate rejection confirms the expectable, if not adequately anticipated, tendency for reviewers to oppose innovation; so that although (...) the statistics of rejection might seem acceptable, there is an unfortunate selectivity working against new ideas. It follows that the perceptive and inventive must work harder to be heard. This is quite the wrong bias: the ingenious should be encouraged, not opposed.The strategy of ‘peer review’ is attractive to publishers and disbursers of funds because it is cheap and practical; but there are fundamental weaknesses in the notion of peer review: peer status is illusory, preception is fickle, and impartiality is unnatural. Peer opinion is not, ipso facto, scientific argument.Unchecked whimsical censorship, which is most likely to affect the more perceptive and innovative offerings, disregards the fundamental uncertainty of scientific knowledge and denies the value of general debate. ‘Peer’ review should not usurp that debate, but should rather act as a strictly preliminary filter atuned to acceptance of fresh ideas.The psychology of anonymous ‘peer’ review is inimical to science. Authority automatically accorded to reviewers' comment and defence of ‘reputation’ are antitheses of scientific method. Proper functioning of review as a preliminary filter depends entirely on the good sense and integrity of the few people involved. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that criticism will be rational, relevant and refutable. The accidental authoeity of the uncertain review process encourages obstruction and fraud.In order to safeguard communication, the burden of proof in refereeing should be on the criticisers. Disagreement is no reason for suppression. Reviewers' objections, which should be factual and specific, should always be tested. Failure to ebserve these elementary principles of scientific assessment, by admitting anonymous unsupported opinion as valid criticism, has caused and is causing constraint on communication and on exposure of new ideas. (shrink)