The exchange of goods and services between individuals is often formalised by a contract in which the parties establish norms to define what is expected of each one. Norms use deontic statements of obligation, prohibition, and permission, which may be in conflict. The task of manually detecting norm conflicts can be time–consuming and error-prone since contracts can be vast and complex. To automate such tasks, we develop an approach to identify potential conflicts between norms. We show the effectiveness of our (...) approach and its individual components empirically using two publicly available corpora, and contribute with a new annotated test corpus for norm conflict identification. (shrink)

This article intends to follow the path of building the notion of object in relation to the démarche Lacanian, as well as locate elements of rapprochement with Winnicott's transitional object. For accomplish our purpose, we begin with the object definition as proposed by Freud - (1) as the correlate of drive; (2) as the correlate of love and (3) in relation to the subject - and indicates the Lacanian option of emphasize the dimension of language in a reading that focuses (...) on Freud's theory and technique as a whole. In this context, Winnicott arises as an author that, proposing the concept of transitional object, allows Lacan's presentation of the distinction between the symbolic and imaginary records in relation to concepts of desire, demand and need while enabling the construction of a proper concept of object. One can consider that, in his formulations, Lacan does criticize the post-freudians for producing a deviation of the technique and doctrine of Freud in disregarding the subject's speech, favoring a practice of interpreting resistance. Winnicott is then greeted as a distinguished author, a post-Freudian psychoanalyst post that doesn't deviates from freudian's precepts and takes the clinic as its main support. The theoretical relations of approximation and distanciation between Lacan and Winnicott, allow us, in the body of this article, to problematize the bound between the concepts of object a and transitional object. (shrink)

How do calculative trust and relational trust influence the emergence of institutional-based trust in farmers’ markets? We fill a gap in the literature by studying how diverse forms of trust influence the way frequent consumers evaluate the institutions of a farmers’ market. We analyze a data set of 687 frequent shoppers from the U.S. state of Missouri, assessing the institutional-based trust in farmers’ markets in comparison with the level of institutional-based trust in conventional food systems. The results suggest that calculative (...) trust plays an important role in the consolidation of institutional-based trust in local food systems. More specifically, consumers who shop frequently and live closer to a farmers’ market tend to trust more in local food systems than in conventional food systems. Likewise, affinity towards conventional food systems—i.e., convenience-oriented lifestyle preferences—seems to influence the level of institutional-based trust in local food systems. Consumers who eat out more often tend to trust less in local food systems, possibly due to the lack of repeated experiences with sellers. Following the literature, we also show that consumers search for a broader set of attributes when shopping at a farmers’ market. Even though relational trust is correlated with higher levels of institutional-based trust in alternative food systems, strong ties do not increase the trust in the information found in a farmers’ market. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In the 18th century, Kant evaluated that his historical period was not a time of enlightenment, but rather minority, because of man’s inability to use his own understanding. Adorno updated this problem, interpreting the minority in our presente in terms of loss of experience. Men are no longer apt to experience, because the technical and economic apparatus prevents the clarification and awareness of reality. From this diagnosis, The aim of this article is to investigate Adorno’s educational thought in its (...) possibilities of emancipation. In our point of view, the role of education, in the thoughts of the Frankfurtian, is to recover the critical autonomy of individuals, through dialectical thinking, to rebuild the damaged experience. (shrink)

A characteristics of Contemporary Occidental Cultural machinery is making Ethics a central point concerning to the several spheres of human activity, including the action of mass media, crossing public health problems and economic questions, and coming to political activity, new technologies development and ecology. However, if this positively points us to a possible enhancement of human being before the viral pluralism in which we now live by showing how ethical requirements are more extensive each moment everywhere, on the other side (...) this apparent consensus can not prevent us to take the question concerning what it is deeply mobilizing all that Cultural machinery around that subject. This paper presents the main axes of Alasdair MacIntyre´s virtue ethics by showing how tradition, rationality and human good are articulated in order to offer an alternative to the difficulties of granting a moral rationality inside the Contemporary Occidental Cultural machinery, before the cultural force of Emotivism and also of relativism. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that by confronting the ethical alternatives proposed by Nietzsche and MacIntyre as resulting of their critical analyses of the modern moral condition respectively done in Genealogy of the Morals and After Virtue , we can find shared theoretical presumptions that point to those alternatives as convergent in many cases and not simply as excluding each other, even in a opposed direction to the MacIntyre’s point of view concerning that issue.

O artigo discute a relação entre verdade e moralidade na ética das virtudes de Alasdair MacIntyre, apontando para a tensão entre o realismo metafísico-teológico pressuposto em sua virada tomista a partir de Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, e a matriz, a nosso ver, claramente hermenêutico-pragmática de seu modelo da racionalidade das tradições morais de pesquisa racional, explicitado anteriormente em Depois da Virtude e em Justiça de Quem? Qual Racionalidade?.

The paper presents different clustering approaches in legal judgments from the Special Civil Court located at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. The subject is Consumer Law, specifically cases in which consumers claim moral and material compensation from airlines for service failures. To identify patterns from the dataset, we apply four types of clustering algorithms: Hierarchical and Lingo, K-means and Affinity Propagation. We evaluate the results based on the following criteria: entropy and purity; algorithm's ability in providing labels; legal expert’s (...) evaluation; and experimental complexity. The results demonstrate that the most advantageous approach is Hierarchical Clustering, since it has the best entropy and purity numbers, as well as the least difficulty for the expert to analyze the clusters, and the least experimental complexity. The main contribution of the paper is to show the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, especially to identify labels in unstructured and non-indexed legal texts. (shrink)

We aimed to characterize the age of onset of training, age at menarche, menstrual periodicity, and performance perception during the menstrual cycle and examined the impact of these reproductive variables on body composition, morphology, and body weight satisfaction in Brazilian elite futsal players. The study consisted of 115 female Brazilian elite futsal players from the top national teams. Data were collected during the twentieth Women’s Brazil Futsal Cup. Players were interviewed and self-reported their age of onset of training, age at (...) menarche, menstrual periodicity, and the menstrual period, where they performed best. We also asked for what they considered to be their ideal body weight as well as information related to their training. Subsequently, anthropometric measurements were performed to estimate the body composition and determine morphological characteristics. Fifty-nine players were postmenarche-trained and 52 were premenarche-trained. Eighteen, 65, and 28 were classified as early, normal, and late menarche, respectively. Only 11 and 1 had irregular menstrual cycles and were amenorrheic, respectively. Seventy-three, 23, and 9 reported that their game performance was the best at the follicular phase, menses, and luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, respectively. No associations between the four reproductive-related variables were found. Postmenarche-trained players had significant lower age at menarche and higher percentage body fat. The somatotype profile registered lower ectomorphy rate for the postmenarche-trained participants after controlling for covariates. Early menarche group presented higher sum of six skinfold thickness and endomorphy rate compared to normal and late menarche groups. No differences were found when menstrual periodicity groups and best performance groups were compared, except for higher femur width in the regular menstrual cycle group compared to the irregular one. The association between body weight satisfaction and the four reproductive-related variables were not observed. Premenarche-trained Brazilian elite futsal players had the menarche later than the postmenarche-trained athletes. Most of the participants had menarche age classified as “normal,” presented “regular” menstrual cycles and perceived to perform better during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle. (shrink)

It appears to be a feature of our ordinary understanding of morality that we ought not to act in certain ways at all. We ought not to kill, torture, deceive, break our promises (say)—exceptional circumstances apart. Many moral duties are thought of in this way. Killing another person would be wrong even if it achieved a great good, and even if it led to preventing the deaths of several others. This feature of moral thinking is at the core of deontological (...) ethics. But while it is also part and parcel of ordinary moral thought, it seems puzzling, because it requires an agent to act (or to abstain from acting) in certain ways, even if by violating the duty she could achieve a better outcome in terms of the very restriction that she is required to heed. If the explanation of the duty not to kill were that it preserves human life it would be hard to understand why killing is not morally permitted when it leads to preserving a greater number of lives. Moreover, why should we not violate a restriction if doing so leads to fewer violations of that very restriction? There are two questions here. (1) Why not violate a restriction whose point it is to preserve lives, if doing so leads to preserving a greater number of lives? (2) Why not violate a restriction if doing so minimizes the violation of that very restriction? The latter question concerns what is sometimes called ‘the paradox of deontology’ or the problem of ‘minimizing violations’. The former may concern the so-called trolley cases, for instance. After all, a trolley hurtling towards a number of innocent people is not about to violate the moral restriction on killing innocent people, as it is not the kind of thing that can be subject to such a restriction. In this paper I am concerned only with (2): the paradox of deontology. To put it in Nozick’s terms: ‘How can a concern for the nonviolation of C [i.e. some deontological constraint] lead to refusal to violate C even when this would prevent other more extensive violations of C? -/- Samuel Scheffler, puzzled by the same idea, put it in terms of ‘agent-centred restrictions’ (ACR), because the restriction requires an agent (not) to act in certain ways, contrasting thereby with a requirement that certain actions not be done. The restriction is thus an agent-relative rather than an agent-neutral one. Scheffler ended up rejecting the idea of agent-centred restrictions, as even on close investigation the puzzle would not dissolve. Scheffler maintains that ACRs have ‘an air of paradox’ to them, as they violate what he calls maximizing rationality. ACRs appear to clash with the idea of maximizing rationality, because they require an agent to choose the option that worse achieves her goal of not harming people. I call this, following common parlance, the paradox of deontology, even though it is not strictly speaking a paradox. Exploring whether there is really a problem here, and how it might be solved, is the main objective of this paper. I begin by explaining the puzzlement about agent-centred restrictions in more detail. I then discuss promising as an example of a kind of action which is thought to be subject to agent-centred restrictions. It turns out that they are surprisingly easy to explain. The difficult case is killing—and that should put us on guard. I argue that the problem is not with the very idea of deontological restrictions, but with puzzling aspects of the ethics of killing. (shrink)

French theorist Luce Irigaray has become one of the twentieth century's most influential feminist thinkers. Among her many writings are three books (with a projected fourth) in which she challenges the Western tradition's construals of human beings' relations to the four elements--earth, air, fire, and water--and to nature. In answer to Heidegger's undoing of Western metaphysics as a "forgetting of Being," Irigaray seeks in this work to begin to think out the Being of sexedness and the sexedness of Being. This (...) volume is the first English translation of L'oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger (1983). In this complex, lyrical, meditative engagement with the later work of the eminent German philosopher, Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air. With the other volumes (Elemental Passions and Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche) in Irigaray's "elemental" series, The Forgetting of Air offers a fundamental rereading of basic tenets in Western metaphysics. And with its emphasis on dwelling and human habitation, it will be important reading not only in the humanities but also in architecture and the environmental sciences. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

(1) In Plato’s Phaedrus divine inspiration comes literally to mean “environmental inspiration.” Intimated thereby is the insufficiency of all reflection on the divine and the natural which would fail to interrogate these categories precisely in their convergence, indeed, in their being (at) one. (2) The theme of inspiration, in its divine or elemental character, necessarily raises further questions concerning the status of inspired utterance—that is, in this case, of philosophical discourse itself. (3) These themes finally point to the problem of (...) the provenance of speaking and writing, if not from a purely active and free subject. (shrink)

Although environmental issues have attracted public attention, there are still many people unwilling to make behavioral changes to solve the problem, which makes promoting pro-environmental behavior become an interesting research topic. This study discusses the influence of air quality on the pro-environmental behavior of Chinese residents from the perspective of spatial distance, providing a theoretical basis and practical application for improving pro-environmental behavior. Through three experiments, this study reveals that air pollution within the local spatial distance could make residents more (...) willing to conduct pro-environmental behavior. In addition, we also find that air pollution within local spatial distance would stimulate residents’ environmental affection and promote them to conduct pro-environmental behavior. That is, environmental affection plays a mediating role in the interactive effect of air quality and spatial distance on pro-environmental behavior. (shrink)

In Plato’s Phaedrus divine inspiration comes literally to mean “environmental inspiration.” Intimated thereby is the insufficiency of all reflection on the divine and the natural which would fail to interrogate these categories precisely in their convergence, indeed, in their being one. The theme of inspiration, in its divine or elemental character, necessarily raises further questions concerning the status of inspired utterance—that is, in this case, of philosophical discourse itself. These themes finally point to the problem of the provenance of speaking (...) and writing, if not from a purely active and free subject. (shrink)

Can we deploy creative practices to critically address the fatal interlocking of global surveillance technologies, neo-colonial expansionism, environmental degradation and the lethal threat of drone warfare? Throughout the following conversation, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey examine these and other questions in relation to the recent publication of Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2022). Edited by Downey, the book includes discussion and documentation of two major bodies of work by Illingworth, including Topologies of Air (2021) and Lesions (...) in the Landscape (2015), alongside an extended series of essays that analyse the psychological and environmental impact of military, industrial and corporate transformations of airspace and outer space. Employing interdisciplinary research and collaborative processes, Illingworth’s practice, as detailed in the discussion below, uses creative methodologies to visualize and interrogate this proliferating exploitation of airspace. The conversation between Illingworth and Downey also outlines the work of the Airspace Tribunal, an ongoing series of public hearings that brings together diverse disciplines, methodologies, knowledge and lived experiences to propose a new human right that will counter the colonization of the sky and, in time, protect individuals, communities and ecologies from ever-increasing threats from above. (shrink)

Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers her first-person perspective of entanglements of light and air during the 2020–21 pandemic from her position in academia and Florida.

Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world’s biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human–environment (...) relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air – but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air’s contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis. (shrink)

The dissertation is composed of two parts. Part II is the first English translation of philosopher Luce Irigaray's 1983 book L'oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger, a lyrical meditation on the later work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Part I is a general introduction to Part II and to the work of Luce Irigaray.

The right inferior frontal gyrus has most strongly, although not exclusively, been associated with response inhibition, not least based on covariations of behavioral performance measures and local gray matter characteristics. However, the white matter microstructure of the rIFG as well as its connectivity has been less in focus, especially when it comes to the consideration of potential subdivisions within this area. The present study reconstructed the structural connections of the three main subregions of the rIFG using diffusion tensor imaging, and (...) further assessed their associations with behavioral measures of inhibitory control. The results revealed a marked heterogeneity of the three subregions with respect to the pattern and extent of their connections, with the pars orbitalis showing the most widespread inter-regional connectivity, while the pars opercularis showed the lowest number of interconnected regions. When relating behavioral performance measures of a stop signal task to brain structure, the data indicated an association between the dorsal opercular connectivity and the go reaction time and the stopping accuracy. (shrink)

I present experimental and computational research, inspired by the perspective of Embodied Embedded Cognition, concerning various aspects of language as supporting Everett’s interactionist view of language. Based on earlier and ongo- ing work, I briefly illustrate the contribution of the environment to the syste- maticity displayed in linguistic performance, the importance of joint attention for the development of a shared vocabulary, the role of (limited) traveling for language diversification, the function of perspective taking in social communica- tion, and the bodily (...) nature of understanding of meaning. (shrink)

I present experimental and computational research, inspired by the perspective of Embodied Embedded Cognition, concerning various aspects of language as supporting Everett's interactionist view of language. Based on earlier and ongoing work, I briefly illustrate the contribution of the environment to the systematicity displayed in linguistic performance, the importance of joint attention for the development of a shared vocabulary, the role of (limited) traveling for language diversification, the function of perspective taking in social communication, and the bodily nature of understanding (...) of meaning. (shrink)

I present experimental and computational research, inspired by the perspective of Embodied Embedded Cognition, concerning various aspects of language as supporting Everett’s interactionist view of language. Based on earlier and ongoing work, I briefly illustrate the contribution of the environment to the systematicity displayed in linguistic performance, the importance of joint attention for the development of a shared vocabulary, the role of traveling for language diversification, the function of perspective taking in social communication, and the bodily nature of understanding of (...) meaning. (shrink)

The general topic of my philosophical dissertation is phenomenological ontology of breathing. I do not investigate the phenomenon of breathing as a natural scientific problem, but as a philosophical question. Within our tradition, breathing has been normally understood as a mechanistic-materialistic physiological life-sustaining process of gas exchange and cellular respiration which does not really seem to have any essential connection to human being’s spiritual, mental or philosophical capacities. On the contrary to this natural scientific view, I argue that breathing can (...) be understood as a philosophical question that has phenomenological, experiential, ontological, spiritual, bodily, mental, poetic, elemental, ethical, voluntary and mystical dimensions. My investigation conceptualizes breathing in the first place as a question of phenomenological ontology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologico-ontological method of interrogation of the lived body’s experiential openness to the world and Being provides the most fundamental point of departure in this dissertation. Merleau-Ponty emphasized in his investigations the lived body’s perceptual openness to the world and Being. He argued famously for the primacy of perception. His thesis of the primacy of perception means that perception as the perceptual openness to the world and Being is the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other levels of our existence and being-in-the-world. In this dissertation, I challenge this idea of the primacy of perception with Merleau-Ponty’s own remarks about breathing. I argue that in his own remarks about breathing, he implicitly points toward a level which is even more fundamental than the primacy of perception. In this dissertation, this level of our being-in-the-world I call the primacy of breathing. Breathing as the lived body’s respiratory openness to the world and Being is now understood as the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other dimensions of our being-in-the-world. These dimensions are, for example, our theoretical, practical, social and perceptual ways of relating with the world. If the idea of the primacy of breathing is taken seriously, it means that all the questions of philosophy could be rethought, reexamined and re-experienced within the fundamental atmosphere of respiratory openness to the world and Being. In this dissertation, I initially try to rethink philosophy as a new philosophy of breathing. This new philosophy of breathing would be phenomenological ontology of breathing. The bases of this new phenomenological ontology of breathing are Merleau-Ponty’s remarks about breathing. My task is to explicate and interpret them with the help of Merleau- Ponty’s own phenomenological ontology. In my task of beginning philosophy anew as philosophy of breathing or as respiratory philosophy, I will also use the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, Luce Irigaray, Edmund Husserl and David Kleinberg-Levin. My dissertation is divided into two main sections. In Section One, I construct within the framework of phenomenological ontology a new notion of breathing as the primacy of breathing. In Section Two, I develop a phenomenological method that I call the method of ontologico-respiratory reduction. This method will lead us back to the primacy of breathing. (shrink)

This commentary raises three points in response to the target article. First, what appear to be victimless behaviors in highly individualistic, post-industrial societies might have a direct impact on group members in small-scale societies. Second, many societies show marked tolerance or ambivalence toward intemperate behavior. Third, undisciplined behavior is not antithetical to cooperation but can be used to cooperative ends.

In this article the key aspects of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity on the market of air transport services have been defined, the structure of the airline’s innovation system, logistics approach to managing the innovation activity of an airline enterprise have been considered and the main objectives of logistical activity in the context of innovation activity support of airlines have been clarified. The importance and peculiarities of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity as an innovation flow control (...) system have been studied. The algorithm of formation of the logistical support mechanism for the airline’s innovation activity has been elaborated and specified. The objectives tree for improving the efficiency of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity has been created. (shrink)

In the struggle for breathable air amid pollution and climate change, both resistance and inspiration can be found in ‘atmospheric care practices’ (Vine 2019). In this article, I embed these practices in a more than human political approach (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). More than human atmospheric care practices work to undo toxic harm both on a material and social level while intimately involving human beings with more than human worlds. In so doing, they are demonstrative of different kinds of (...) agency and political activity that open up alternative ways of relating and responding to climate change. (shrink)

The remarkable growth in the application of information and communications technologies indicates a great shift toward a globally integrated society. The urban metropolises are turning into intersections of transit and migration of goods, capital, services, cultures, knowledge and especially people. Moreover the flow of bodies, information and money is changing the rules of what defines national territory, space and identity. Social realities with specific qualities are appearing, implying a new spatial correlation between the local and the global. International airports and (...) within emerging extraterritorial zones have become an important threshold controlling the flow of people in a free market economy. The airport border mutates into an abstract space permeating the physical territory of the airport and beyond. This abstract border space, within which mobile bodies operate, is created by a bureaucratic system of inclusion and exclusion particular to transition states. Transit zones at airports emerge because of a complex set of factors: border crossing as well as increasingly stringent security and safety regulations. The innumerable thresholds within these transit zones are points of congestion governed and increasingly supported by technological systems of identification. Within the transnation state, the movement of bodies is the constant subject of streaming and proceduralization. Increasingly, the conventional system of control based on face-to-face interaction between the controlling and the controlled is being replaced by the algorithmic precision of database logic. The paradigm of pattern matching ensures precise verification of the uniqueness of the body, in turn offering new potentials for permeability and flux. These different orders of legal and economic categorization create manifold sub-territories accessible to select groups of travellers. Nowadays, the airport is a transnation state spatialized through a new order of architecture, a manifestation of technology of abstract procedures of transition, inclusion and exclusion, adopting emergent patterns of socio-spatial mobility in a globalized network. (shrink)

Although sexual difference is widely regarded as the concept that lies at the center of Luce Irigaray's thought, its meaning and significance is highly contested. This dissensus, however, attests to more than merely the existence of a recalcitrant conceptual ambiguity. That is, Irigaray's discussion of sexual difference remains fraught not because she leaves this concept undefined but because the centrality of sexual difference in fact marks a complex and unstable nexus of phenomena that shift throughout her work. Consequently, if Irigaray (...) is indeed the preeminent thinker of sexual difference, this is not in virtue of her recurrent appeal to a monolithic, readily digestible concept but rather somehow despite the absence of precisely this gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference in Irigaray's work by identifying her persistent, though largely unexamined, commitment to transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, I attempt to show that the complex of phenomena of sexual difference emerges in L'oubli de l'air and The Way of Love as a modulation of Heidegger's own revision of transcendental phenomenology. In this sense, the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference does not mark the centrality of a concept but Irigaray's amplification of this Heideggerian gesture. (shrink)