In this paper we discuss two different criticisms of liberal democracy. By analyzing the contemporary Slovenian political thought of Žižek and some of his followers, which recently are revitalizing the “idea of Communism”, we first critically reflect upon the emancipatory potential of this strand of contemporary Slovenian philosophy. The interlude focuses on the uses and logic of violence and pleads for a new politico-ethical culture of nonviolence. In the second part of the paper, by approaching Levinas’ ethical criticism of the (...) liberal democracy and by focusing on his concept of a different temporality within political ethics, we discuss some alternative possibilities for the future progress of democracy. (shrink)

There is increasing interest in how the pupil dynamics of the eye reflect underlying cognitive processes and brain states. Problematic, however, is that pupil changes can be due to non-cognitive factors, for example luminance changes in the environment, accommodation and movement. In this paper we consider how by modeling the response of the pupil in real-world environments we can capture the non-cognitive related changes and remove these to extract a residual signal which is a better index of cognition and performance. (...) Specifically, we utilize sequence measures such as fixation position, duration, saccades, and blink-related information as inputs to a deep recurrent neural network (RNN) model for predicting subsequent pupil diameter. We build and evaluate the model for a task where subjects are watching educational videos and subsequently asked questions based on the content. Compared to commonly-used models for this task, the RNN had the lowest errors rates in predicting subsequent pupil dilation given sequence data. Most importantly was how the model output related to subjects' cognitive performance as assessed by a post-viewing test. Consistent with our hypothesis that the model captures non-cognitive pupil dynamics, we found (1) the model's root-mean square error was less for lower performing subjects than for those having better performance on the post-viewing test, (2) the residuals of the RNN (LSTM) model had the highest correlation with subject post-viewing test scores and (3) the residuals had the highest discriminability (assessed via area under the ROC curve, AUC) for classifying high and low test performers, compared to the true pupil size or the RNN model predictions. This suggests that deep learning sequence models may be good for separating components of pupil responses that are linked to luminance and accommodation from those that are linked to cognition and arousal. (shrink)

When multiple individuals interact in a conversation or as part of a large crowd, emergent structures and dynamics arise that are behavioral properties of the interacting group rather than of any individual member of that group. Recent work using traditional signal processing techniques and machine learning has demonstrated that global acoustic data recorded from a crowd at a basketball game can be used to classify emergent crowd behavior in terms of the crowd's purported emotional state. We propose that the description (...) of crowd behavior from such global acoustic data could benefit from nonlinear analysis methods derived from dynamical systems theory. Such methods have been used in recent research applying nonlinear methods to audio data extracted from music and group musical interactions. In this work, we used nonlinear analyses to extract features that are relevant to the behavioral interactions that underlie acoustic signals produced by a crowd attending a sporting event. We propose that recurrence dynamics measured from these audio signals via recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) reflect information about the behavioral dynamics of the crowd itself. We analyze these dynamics from acoustic signals recorded from crowds attending basketball games, and that were manually labeled according to the crowds' emotional state across six categories: angry noise, applause, cheer, distraction noise, positive chant, and negative chant. We show that RQA measures are useful to differentiate the emergent acoustic behavioral dynamics between these categories, and can provide insight into the recurrence patterns that underlie crowd interactions. (shrink)

The approach used by physics is based on the identification and study of ideal objects, which is also the basis of biophysics, in combination with von Neumann heuristic modeling and functional fractionation according to R.Rosen is discussed as a tool for studying the properties of consciousness. The object of the study is a kind of line of analog systems: the human brain, the vertebrate brain, the invertebrate brain and artificial neural networks capable of reflection, which is a key property (...) characteristic of consciousness. Reflection in the broad sense of the word, understood as an internal representation of the external world, is characteristic of a wide range of animals, and some of them (bumblebees, fish) even demonstrate reflection in the narrow sense of the word, understood as an inner self-representation. This complex behavior is realized by miniature brains of ~1 million neurons. The use of simple recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to obtain answers to general questions is illustrated. For example, it has been shown a small RNS is able to pass delayed matching to sample (DMTS) test, forming an individual dynamic representation of the received stimulus, allowing decoding by a special external neural detector.. It has been demonstrated in the reflexive game “even-odd”, the RNS has a huge advantage over a multi-layered neural network, with the same and a larger number of neurons – reflection defeats regression. It was found that the asymmetry of outcomes in the odd-even game, which was explained by various causes, including psychological ones – “it’s easier to catch up than to run away”, is reproduced in the game of two RNNs. Obviously, there are no psychological causes here and the advantage of the player playing for “even” is explained by the more complex strategy of the “odd” player – he needs to predict the opponent’s move and choose the opposite one. (shrink)

The approach used by physics is based on the identification and study of ideal objects, which is also the basis of biophysics, in combination with von Neumann heuristic modeling and functional fractionation according to R.Rosen is discussed as a tool for studying the properties of consciousness. The object of the study is a kind of line of analog systems: the human brain, the vertebrate brain, the invertebrate brain and artificial neural networks capable of reflection, which is a key property (...) characteristic of consciousness. Reflection in the broad sense of the word, understood as an internal representation of the external world, is characteristic of a wide range of animals, and some of them (bumblebees, fish) even demonstrate reflection in the narrow sense of the word, understood as an inner self-representation. This complex behavior is realized by miniature brains of ~1 million neurons. The use of simple recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to obtain answers to general questions is illustrated. For example, it has been shown a small RNS is able to pass delayed matching to sample (DMTS) test, forming an individual dynamic representation of the received stimulus, allowing decoding by a special external neural detector.. It has been demonstrated in the reflexive game “even-odd”, the RNS has a huge advantage over a multi-layered neural network, with the same and a larger number of neurons – reflection defeats regression. It was found that the asymmetry of outcomes in the odd-even game, which was explained by various causes, including psychological ones – “it’s easier to catch up than to run away”, is reproduced in the game of two RNNs. Obviously, there are no psychological causes here and the advantage of the player playing for “even” is explained by the more complex strategy of the “odd” player – he needs to predict the opponent’s move and choose the opposite one. (shrink)

For over two and a half millennia human beings have attempted to invent strategies to “discover” the truth of time, to determine whether time is infinite, whether eternity is the infinite duration of a continuous present, or whether it too rises and falls with the cycles of universal creation and destruction. _Time-Fetishes_ recounts the history of a tradition that runs counter to the dominant tradition in Western metaphysics, which has sought to purify eternity of its temporal character. From the pre-Socratics (...) to Ovid and Plotinus, and from Shakespeare to Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, _Time-Fetishes_ traces the secret tradition of the idea of eternal recurrence and situates it as the grounding thought of Western philosophy and literature. The thinkers in this counter-history of the eternal return lingered long enough on the question of time to learn how to resist separating eternity from time, and how to reflect on the possible identity of time and eternity as a way of resisting all prior metaphysical determinations. Drawing out the implications of Nietzsche’s reinvention of the doctrine of return, Lukacher ranges across a broad spectrum of ancient and modern thinkers. Shakespeare’s role in this history as the “poet of time” is particularly significant, for not only does Shakespeare reactivate the pre-Christian arguments of eternal return, he regards them, and all arguments and images concerning the essence of time and Being, from an inimitably ironic perspective. As he makes transitions from literature to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Lukacher displays a theoretical imagination and historical vision that bring to the forefront a host of pre- and post-Christian texts in order to decipher in them an encounter with the thought of eternal recurrence that has been too long buried under layers of rigid metaphysical interpretation. (shrink)

What forms of consciousness can the subject have of her body in action? This is a recurrent issue in contemporary research on skilled movement and expertise, and according to a widespread view, the body makes itself inconspicuous in performance in favour of the object or goal that the activity is directed to. However, this attitude to consciousness in bodily performance seems unsatisfying for an understanding of skilled action, and the work of several researchers can be seen as responding to this (...) view: Montero, Legrand, Ravn and others in the philosophy of expertise and of dance have developed various notions of consciousness and cognition to account for the mindful processes at play in performance. Two related questions can be distinguished here: 1. Is there an inherent conflict between skilled action and at least more than marginal awareness of that action, or is it possible – and even desirable – to reflect on our own performance without considerably impeding on it? 2. What forms of consciousness pertaining to the body in action must we distinguish in order to answer the first question? This paper gives an overview of this discussion, focusing on the second issue, although the first will come into play in so far as it is linked with the latter question. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of bodily reflection and on dancers’ descriptions, I show that there is, in phenomenological terms, a bodily level of reflection: a fully conscious and exploratory activity that is led by the skilled body, and that is explicitly aimed at by many performers. (shrink)

The approach used by physics is based on the identification and study of ideal objects, which is also the basis of biophysics, in combination with von Neumann heuristic modeling and functional fractionation according to R.Rosen is discussed as a tool for studying the properties of consciousness. The object of the study is a kind of line of analog systems: the human brain, the vertebrate brain, the invertebrate brain and artificial neural networks capable of reflection, which is a key property (...) characteristic of consciousness. Reflection in the broad sense of the word, understood as an internal representation of the external world, is characteristic of a wide range of animals, and some of them (bumblebees, fish) even demonstrate reflection in the narrow sense of the word, understood as an inner self-representation. This complex behavior is realized by miniature brains of ~1 million neurons. The use of simple recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to obtain answers to general questions is illustrated. For example, it has been shown a small RNS is able to pass delayed matching to sample (DMTS) test, forming an individual dynamic representation of the received stimulus, allowing decoding by a special external neural detector.. It has been demonstrated in the reflexive game “even-odd”, the RNS has a huge advantage over a multi-layered neural network, with the same and a larger number of neurons – reflection defeats regression. It was found that the asymmetry of outcomes in the odd-even game, which was explained by various causes, including psychological ones – “it’s easier to catch up than to run away”, is reproduced in the game of two RNNs. Obviously, there are no psychological causes here and the advantage of the player playing for “even” is explained by the more complex strategy of the “odd” player – he needs to predict the opponent’s move and choose the opposite one. (shrink)

This article presents Theodor W. Adorno's concept of education, the basis of which is critical self-reflection. It argues that a close reading of Adorno's various writings on education yields a theory of critical self-reflection that is not simply introspection but an analysis of the social totality. Beginning with Adorno's assessment of education within capitalism – which is always a critique of capitalism itself – the article moves through his concept of critical self-reflection, and concludes by reassessing his (...) claim that an education for critical self-reflection offers the strongest barrier to the recurrence of Auschwitz. (shrink)

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal interidentities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related (...) notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilise and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency towards an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realise relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending towards a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on How the Theatre TeachesJonathan Levy (bio)PreambleTheatre is, famously, an imitation of an action. It presents the essence, the gist, of human experience, not a narration or recital of that experience. Therefore, any attempt to explain how the theatre works in words will be at best a translation or paraphrase. The real power of the theatre lies in our total experience of it before the mind begins to (...) turn that experience into words. Thus, when we write or speak about the theatrical experience, the best we can hope for is to fall short rather than mislead or, worse, overshadow and obliterate the original. I write what follows with that knowledge always in my mind.The QuestionMuch is said by the friends of theatres about what they might be; and not a few persons indulge the hope that the theatre may yet be made a school of morality. But my business at present is with it as it is, and as it has hitherto been. The reader will be more benefited by existing facts than sanguine anticipations, or visionary predictions.—William A. Alcott, The Young Man's Guide1It is widely assumed that the theatre, particularly theatre for children, can and should teach. It is also widely assumed that the theatre can and does do harm, real harm, especially to children. And it is universally assumed that even if the theatre does not teach, it should do no harm.I believe that these assumptions are true: that the theatre does have the power to teach, and teach profoundly, and that the theatre can and often does do profound harm. However, I do not believe that how it teaches and [End Page 20] the nature of the real harm it does have yet been satisfactorily explained. My purpose in this paper is to reopen the discussion of how theatre teaches and what the real harm it can do is. These two complementary questions seem to me to be the most compelling and elusive questions facing students of theatre for children.The ProblemThere is no shortage of theories about how the theatre teaches. For at least the past two hundred and fifty years, authors of plays for children have felt the need to justify themselves and the odd genre they had chosen to write in. Frequently, these justifications appear in the prefaces and introductions to collections of their plays. Some of these justifications are original with the plays' authors. Others are borrowed from the classical authors, for in much of history classical precedent itself was thought to be powerful argument. Still others were borrowed from defenses of the adult theatre, which arose periodically in reaction to what Jonas Barish has called "the anti-theatrical prejudice."2What all these theories have in common is their insistence that the theatre was, somehow, a tool of instruction. They argued that the theatre taught and often argued that it taught more than one thing, usually a skill and a moral. For example, Louis Jauffret, the author of La Petite Thalie and other didactic plays for children, wrote that his intention in his plays was "to exercise the memory of their students while at the same time forming their hearts to virtue and sensibilité."3But my purpose in this essay is not historical. It is to try to isolate and examine the recurrent rationales and theories about how the theatre teaches. Therefore, for the sake of clarity, I will consider those rationales and theories separately. They sometimes overlap, but again for the sake of clarity, I will describe them separately. And although my purpose is not historical, I will often cite examples from early writers. I do so for three reasons: First, because it is useful for us to know that the discussions we are having today did not begin with us; second, because many of our distinguished predecessors in the field are not known to us, even by name, and deserve to be; and, third, because so much of what our predecessors said still makes such good sense.Eleven RationalesFirst, the theatre teaches by example, which prompts emulation. "The path by precept is long," the argument runs... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life ed. by Daniel CameJames A. MollisonDaniel Came, ed., Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 220 pp. isbn: 978-0-198-72889-4. Hardback, $70.00Daniel Came's most recent edited collection features original essays from leading figures in the field. As most of its chapters are well-written and well-argued, it will interest Nietzsche scholars generally. It's difficult to narrow (...) the volume's intended audience much further than this, however. The source of this difficulty is not merely titular, though one wonders what aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy could not plausibly be yoked under the dual headings of "morality" and "life affirmation." Rather, the difficulty stems from a shortcoming of Nietzsche's. As Came puts the point in his introduction, "Nietzsche is greatly more forthcoming in his diagnosis of the life-denying nature of morality than he is about what should replace morality and in particular the type of life-affirming attitude which might then ensue" (7). The underdeveloped character of Nietzsche's positive [End Page 110] pronouncements about life affirmation leaves many questions unanswered, the most basic of which might be, "What exactly is it to affirm life?" (7). This collection admirably attempts to tackle such questions head-on by foregrounding Nietzsche's "practical-existential concern with the value of existence" (4)—even if, in resisting the temptation to delve ever deeper into the complexities of Nietzsche's critical enterprise, this approach risks leaving some specialist concerns aside.In light of the inchoate nature of Nietzsche's remedy for life denial, a volume taking life affirmation as its starting point can be forgiven if its contributions are somewhat scattered. Four chapters in this collection—authored by Gemes, Hassan, Huddleston, and Janaway—identify distinct obstacles to Nietzsche's project of life affirmation and explain how Nietzsche might overcome them. Three others—written by Came, Stern, and Kanterian—overlap in arguing that Nietzsche's notion of life affirmation is deeply confused at best and fatally flawed at worst. Two remaining chapters, by Reginster and Clark, are functionally close readings of GM. Below, I discuss the standout essays by Gemes, Came, Huddleston, and Stern, which straightforwardly interact with one another. I then comment on the volume's remaining essays.In his chapter, Gemes suggests that Nietzsche's concern with nihilism emerges after HH, whereas his earlier works express a Romantic preoccupation with cultural renewal. While Reginster analyzes nihilism as a cognitive state of disorientation or despair (The Affirmation of Life [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006]) and Pippin analyzes nihilism as a waning of erotic desire (Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010]), Gemes contends that these forms of nihilism are downstream from a more fundamental condition of affective nihilism that becomes fully manifest with the advent of Christian morality. (Kaitlyn Creasy's work on affective nihilism goes unmentioned.) Gemes then rightly observes that nihilism does not merely subtend overt expressions of life denial, as Nietzsche also "characterizes the need to ask reflective questions about the value of existence as a pathological symptom" of nihilism (29, emphasis added; see also GS P:2; TI "Socrates" 2; TI "Morality" 5). This presents a problem for Nietzsche's life-affirming ambitions. For, even if the ancient Greeks and GM's nobles can accomplish "naïve affirmation," which is "more an affective state than a consciously avowed cognitive belief" (28–29), it is unclear whether we late moderns can do the same. Moreover, Nietzsche's [End Page 111] challenge of affirming the eternal recurrence (GS 341) seems to require the sort of reflective, cognitive assessment of life that Nietzsche diagnoses as nihilistic. I would have liked for Gemes to have examined Nietzsche's indictment of judgments about life in more detail, as this seems crucial for delimiting Nietzsche's project of life affirmation. In any case, Gemes concludes by suggesting that Z might strive to incite "deep poetic inspiration […] among those who [can] hear rightly" (35), thereby helping these select few overcome affective nihilism. This might be Nietzsche's best strategy for facilitating life affirmation.Came is less confident... (shrink)

What forms of consciousness can the subject have of her body in action? This is a recurrent issue in contemporary research on skilled movement and expertise, and according to a widespread view, the body makes itself inconspicuous in performance in favour of the object or goal that the activity is directed to. However, this attitude to consciousness in bodily performance seems unsatisfying for an understanding of skilled action, and the work of several researchers can be seen as responding to this (...) view: Montero, Legrand, Ravn and others in the philosophy of expertise and of dance have developed various notions of consciousness and cognition to account for the mindful processes at play in performance.Two related questions can be distinguished here: (1) Is there an inherent conflict between skilled action and at least more than marginal awareness of that action, or is it possible – and even desirable – to reflect on our own performance without considerably impeding on it? (2) What forms of consciousness pertaining to the body in action must we distinguish in order to answer the first question?This paper gives an overview of this discussion, focusing on the second issue, although the first will come into play in so far as it is linked with the latter question. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of bodily reflection and on dancers’ descriptions, I show that there is, in phenomenological terms, a bodily level of reflection: a fully conscious and exploratory activity that is led by the skilled body, and that is explicitly aimed at by many performers. (shrink)

We develop a conceptual framework that connects biological heredity and organization. We refer to heredity as the cross-generation conservation of functional elements, defined as constraints subject to organizational closure. While hereditary objects are functional constituents of biological systems, any other entity that is stable across generations—and possibly involved in the recurrence of phenotypes—belongs to their environment. The central outcome of the organizational perspective consists in extending the scope of heredity beyond the genetic domain without merging it with the broad (...) category of cross-generation stability. After discussing some implications, we conclude with a reflection on the relationship between stability and variation. 1Introduction2From Extended Heredity to Cross-generation Stability 2.1Extending the scope of heredity: A brief state of the art2.2Rethinking heredity: Conceptual challenges3Biological Heredity in Light of Organization 3.1Biological organization within organisms and beyond3.2Extending organization in time3.3What is biological heredity?4Implications and Objections 4.1Heredity as a specific kind of cross-generation stability4.2Heredity at various levels of description4.3Non-functional and dysfunctional objects5Conclusions: From Conservation to Variation. (shrink)

There have been recurrent reports of fragilities in the Brazilian health system, especially in public institutions. In this commentary, I argue that moral distress in nursing in Brazil can still be considered an innovative and important subject of study. I also highlight the relevance of engaging educational institutions in the development of policies about environmental sustainability. It is relevant to continue studying moral distress in nursing and in health care generally in order to contribute to the transformation of reality by (...) confronting the multiple common situations in the work environment that are recognized by many as morally problematic because they infringe upon the rights of people, patients, and health care professionals and are an affront to environmental health. (shrink)

The following essay aims to analyze the problem of repetition in the reflection of Walter Benjamin. Showing first of all how this concept, singularly neglected by critics, is the unexpected centre towards which the philosopher’s entire reflection converges, thus offering a new reading of his entire production. All the vast domains of Benjamin’s speculation are thoroughly rethought starting from this idea, revealing how what is at stake is a more articulated movement of the eternal recurrence of the (...) same, which characterizes mythical temporality. A movement that has to do with the constitution of the human and which indeed exhibits an intimate link between repetition and innovation, repetition and the constructive principle. Another intention of this text is therefore to carry out an in depth analysis of this connection, to question the nature of such a gesture, both repetitive and differential, and its relationship with the recurrence of the ever self-same, therefore with the possible way out of the myth. (shrink)

Presented as a Vorlesung in the German philosophical tradition, this book presents the most detailed account of Nelson's method of argument analysis, celebrated by many luminaries such as Karl Popper. It was written in 1921 in opposition to the relativistic, subjectivistic and nihilistic tendencies of Nelson's time. The book contains an exposition of a method that is a further development of Kant's transcendental dialectics, followed by an application to the critical analysis of arguments by many famous thinkers, including Bentham, Mill, (...) Poincaré, Leibniz, Hegel, Einstein, Bergson, Rickert, Simmel, Brentano, Stammler, Jellinek, Dingler, and Meinong. The book presents a general theory of philosophical argumentation as seen from the viewpoint of the typical fallacies committed by anybody arguing philosophically, whether professional philosophers or philosophical laypeople. Although the nature of philosophy and philosophical argumentation is one of the most recurrent objects of reflection for philosophers, this book represents the first attempt at a general theory of philosophical fallacy. According to Nelson, it is in the shape of false dilemmas that errors in reasoning always emerge, and false dilemmas are always the result of the same mechanism--the unwitting replacement of one concept for another. (shrink)

Zadra, Desjardins, and Marcotte tested several predictions derived from the Threat Simulation Theory of dreaming in a large sample of recurrent dreams. In response to these findings, Valli and Revonsuo presented a commentary outlining alternate conceptualizations and explanations for the results obtained. We argue that many points raised by Valli and Revonsuo do not accurately reflect our main findings and at times present a biased assessment of the data. In this article, we provide necessary clarifications and responses to each one (...) of their main points of discussion. (shrink)

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the (...) universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of “universal,” we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. (shrink)

Roadkill is a recurrent but often unthought feature of modern life. Yet, consideration of the broader significance of the myriad social, ethical, and political issues related to roadkill has largely gone missing from mainstream scholarship and activism. This neglect persists even in fields such as mobility studies and animal studies that would otherwise seem to have a vested interest in the topic. This book aims to bring roadkill to the foreground of current discussions among scholars and activists in these fields (...) in order to demonstrate that roadkill is a uniquely important site from which to understand and contest the machinations of the dominant social order. It argues that a careful examination of roadkill can help both to uncover the hidden violence of contemporary human-centered systems of mobility and to develop alternative modes of mobility for a renewed social life in common with our more-than-human kin. (shrink)

In the last century, professional sport has experienced a process of standardization that has favoured the development of its two most recent characteristics: the quantification and the pursuit of records, as Guttmann exposed in From Ritual to Record (1978). This article reflects on the ramifications that those characteristics have had in the sport consumption of sport in recent times, focusing particularly on the temporal consequences. The work proposes an ‘evolutive time’ perspective to understand the double fundaments of the sporting temporality: (...) its cyclical dimension of recurrences and familiar elements; and its linear dimension of newness and uniqueness. The argument is that sport draws on elements derived from quantification and records such as time serialization and time disruptions in order to produce a globally appealing and intelligible commodity. (shrink)

The technological possibilities for new data sources in media psychology, such as online live recordings, called Live Streaming, are growing continuously. These sources do not only offer plentiful quantitative material but also a fairly new access to ecologically valid and unobtrusive observation of problem-solving and decision-making processes. However, to exploit these potentials, epistemological and methodological reflection should guide research. The availability of Big Data and naturally occurring data sets allows to revise the historical controversies on the eligibility of self-description. (...) Drawing on such reflections, media psychology can contribute to renovate well established research methods, such as think aloud protocols, in order to enhance their empirical claims. Apart from other confident attempts to improve these methods, phenomenology and ethnomethodology offer a fruitful account to develop innovative data sources for self-description. Yet, this approach does not support a recurrence of self-description’s previous application but proposes an epistemological shift towards more subtle observations. In order to convey the potentials of media psychology, the risk of repeating classical mistakes, such as introspectionism, have to be regarded. Beyond these fallacies, however, modern digital technology holds encouraging potentials which have already partly been sighted by video gaming research. Due to the similarity of digital environments to laboratory setups, there remains to be a continuity from offline to online research, from traditional data to Big Data. Nevertheless, a true advance into new possibilities requires understanding the qualitative meaning of such data. (shrink)

In what is advertised as a “controversial coast to coast bestseller,” most men who were asked “How would you feel if something about you were described as feminine or womanly?” said they’d be angry. Consider these voices from The Hite Report on Male Sexuality:Enraged. Insulted. Never mind what women are really like—I know what he’s saying: he’s saying I should be submissive to him.To be called “like a woman” by another man is to be humiliated by him, because most men (...) consider women to be weak, and a man doesn’t want to be considered weak.Chagrined. I may appear soft, but I carry a big stick. So watch out.If I was described as having something “like a woman’s,” I would be outraged. I would defend my masculinity almost automatically. I wouldn’t like being compared to a woman’s anything.1About two seconds of reflection should be enough to convince most of us that what is offered in The Hite Report on Male Sexuality as the representative testimony of contemporary American men is, in fact, representative: our relations with women are problematic, those with ourselves something worse. What Shere Hite does not call attention to is an intriguing recurrence in many of the responses: the question is heard as a charge and it is imagined to be coming from another male. The basic point now seems to me inescapable, though to say “inescapable” is in no way to say that the history of literary theory and criticism has found it so . One way of understanding that history is to read it as a series of ingenious escapes from the basic point which is economic and sexual and which goes something like this: What we know as “femininity” is internally linked to what we know as “masculinity” because both designations are highly motivated cultural constructions of biological difference that do powerful social work at the moment when they are lived, when they constitute the barely conscious and barely reflected upon substance of belief. The political synonym for “belief” is “ideology” in the particular sense of “ideology” as a constructed thing which nevertheless feels natural and is never experienced as a thing bearing interested human intention. The basic ideological point has to do with social engenderment, and it means, among other things, if you’re male, that you must police yourself for traces of femininity. If you’re male it means, among other things, that the great dread is not so much that another man might call you feminine or womanly , but that you might have to call yourself feminine or womanly. The political issue of gender has recently been the special concern of feminist criticism and eventually, after a long look at Wallace Stevens, I’ll address feminism directly, in what may be its institutionally most potent form. 1. Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality , p. 64. Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. This essay is part of a forthcoming book, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. He has also published Criticism and Social Change and After the new Criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Rawls's Originary Theory of JusticeEric Gans (bio)The fundamental thesis of generative anthropology is that the principal concern of human culture is and has been from the outset to defer the potential violence of mimetic desire. To this mode of thought, constructing a model of the good society in any but the general terms of "exchange" and "reciprocity" is unfaithful to the human community, whose operations have been from (...) the beginning beyond the grasp of any individual mind within the society, and in which since the rise of the market system we participate largely unmediated by ritual. Rather than providing a template for the "good society," originary thinking provides a touchstone for ethical progress: act so as to contribute to reciprocal exchange, negatively, by aiding those who need help to participate in the exchange system more fully, and positively, by creating new foci of desire that enrich the system of exchange, the circulation of desire and satisfaction. The result of these acts is to reduce or "defer" resentment, negatively, by removing grievances, and positively, by creating new opportunities for recycling resentment into productive activity.These precepts notwithstanding, the "moral model" of reciprocal exchange, as exemplified in the exchange of signs around the sacred center in the hypothetical originary event, provides the basis for a recurrent temptation to create utopias. The theoretical gesture of measuring a given social order against a moral ideal is an extension of the moral intuition we apply in judging all human actions; whatever our degree of resignation, we cannot help but resent any suggestion—even when it is "objectively" false—that we have been victims of a failure of reciprocity. Both the theory and the personal intuition are direct descendants of the originary exchange of representations, as are the moral "theories" that are explicitly grounded in the sacred. Abstract moral theorizing must ultimately appeal to either transcendence or intuition, and the appeal to the former differs only in its rhetoric from the appeal to the latter.Finally, these "timeless" reflections must be situated in history. Determining the proper relationship between universal morality and historically [End Page 149] particular ethics poses a particularly acute problem in the postmodern era. The question that has remained with us since the end of World War II is how to overcome the paralysis of Auschwitz—how to acknowledge the necessary deferral of reciprocity without condoning genocide. If we hold history's institutions to the touchstone of the moral model, they will always be found wanting, yet this historical experience tells us that if we do not so hold them, anything is possible. The fact that accusations of Nazism (or "fascism") continue to be made today—notably against Israel itself—is a sign that the moral dilemma has not yet been resolved. But unlike metaphysical thought, originary thinking takes the Holocaust as a sign not of the need to construct a social model that will resolve this dilemma, but of the inappropriateness of confronting it directly. Making the world a better place not only does not require but is in fact incompatible with a prior image of the world made good.The most serious attempt by mainstream Anglo-American social thought to grapple with this postmodern quandary is that of the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002), whose A Theory of Justice (1971) remains the era's most important work of moral philosophy. To sum up in my own terms Rawls's basic idea: if we imagine ourselves in an "original position" when society has not yet come into existence, so that our (future) place in it is hidden from us by a "veil of ignorance," then we will be able to agree on the criteria of a good society, since our uncertainty will convince us all equally of the necessity to protect ourselves from unfairness in the event we are assigned one of society's less desirable roles. We may then accept this imaginary agreement, unbiased by the participants' knowledge of their eventual social role, as universal humanity's most just arrangement. Rawls considers that under these conditions any inequality in the overall distribution of social goods can be justified only if it produces a margin of... (shrink)

Medicine's crucial concern with health is perennial, but its reflection, concepts, means change with the advance of science and social life. We present here a fascinating panorama of current medical discussions with their philosophical underpinnings, and queries as they have evolved from the past. The role of Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life is brought forth as the system of philosophical reference.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Writing of Space:On French Critical Theory in 1973 and its AftermathTom Conley (bio)Je rempliz d'un beau nom ce grand espace vide(I fill with a handsome name this great empty space)—Joachim Du Bellay, Les regrets[...] l'unique mot ESPACE, indéfiniment répété, isolé, d'une ligne à l'autre; clos sur lui-même par la recurrence du e (espace), brisé pourtant par l'adjonction interne du s (espace), qui se réfléchit en trompe l'oeil (...) phonétique (espace); avec un centre immuable—espace—, où peut se lire l'amorce de la paix ou du tombeau—mais susceptible de faire cap de tout côté, comme on fait eau. L'espace est « découvert », « brisé » ou « vécu »—à droite, où poussent les épithètes ; l'espace est objet de « découverte », de « promenade » ou d' « odyssée », à gauche où s'alignent les substantifs qui commandent les clichés dont l'espace serait le complément obligé. Génitif d'un côté, ou pour le moin complétif, générateur de l'autre, ou en tout cas substance à qualités variables. Dans l'arbre à syntagmes ainsi érigé, l'espace est inventé par l'écriture qui fait alterner, sans jamais les combiner sur une même ligne, un espace donné comme objet stable d'exploration. [...]([...] the unique word ESPACE can be placed, indefinitely repeated, isolated, from one line to another ; closed upon itself by the recurrence of the e (espace), yet broken by the inner adjunction of the s (espace) reflected in a phonetic trompe-l'œil (espace) ; with an immutable center—espace—, in which can be read the first letters of peace or of tomb—but liable to go everywhere, like water in the sea. Space is « discovered, » « broken, » or « lived »—on the right where epithets come forward; space is the object of « discovery », of a « walk » or an « odyssey », on the left where are aligned the substantives that order the clichés for [End Page 189] which space would be the required object. Genitive on one side, or at least objective, generative of the other, or in every event a substance with variable traits. In the tree of syntagms erected above space is invented by writing that causes to alternate—without ever combining them on the same line—a given space as a stable object of exploration. [...]—Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Écrire l'espaceIn 1974 Henri Lefebvre published La production de l'espace (The Production of Space), a study said to have changed the course of critical reflection on the world around us. In his copious work Lefebvre locates the gaps and rifts between spatial practices or representational spaces and representations of space in order to mark the brute nature of social contradiction. Over history, he shows, those individuals who practice and represent space generally own control over those who do not or cannot. The very history of the reception of Lefebvre's work has been so rich that it cannot be disentangled from debates concerning the nature of the postmodern condition. It has brought forward an element, something akin to Lacan's "real," that cannot be contained or discerned by language, the arena of life itself. The impact of La production de l'espace cannot be underestimated.1 Yet, at the same time, the work remains a legacy or a point of reference for a concurrent labor born at the same moment and of a different texture than Lefebvre's: an activity that I would like to call a writing of space, a labor by which authors of different formation engage and invent alternative or other spaces within the texture of their own reflections on space. Like Lefebvre, they respond to a anxiety about the condition of space in which they live, but unlike him, they embody, in the gist of their own writing, spaces alternative to those in which they live. What follows is thus aimed at discerning why and how space emerged in the field of critical theory when it did and, in turn, at showing how the reflections remain crucial for critical practice here and now.The first of the two epigraphs above is... (shrink)

A recurrent issue in the vast amount of literature on reasoning models in ethics is the role and nature of moral intuitions. In this paper, we start from the view that people who work and live in a certain moral practice usually possess specific moral wisdom. If we manage to incorporate their moral intuitions in ethical reasoning, we can arrive at judgements and (modest) theories that grasp a moral experience that generally cannot be found outside the practice. Reflective equilibrium (RE) (...) provides a framework for balancing moral intuitions, ethical principles and general theories. Nevertheless, persisting problems associated with the use of intuitions need to be addressed. One is the objection that moral intuitions lack the credibility necessary to guide moral reasoning. Ethicists have tried to solve this problem by formulating criteria to separate the “bad” intuitions from the “good” ones at the beginning of the reasoning process. We call this the credible input-justified outcome strategy. An example is the appeal to the common morality by Beauchamp and Childress. We think this approach is unsuccessful. As an alternative, we outline the good reasoning-justified outcome strategy. It connects to a variant of RE in which intuitions from different sources are incorporated. We argue that the elements of RE have different levels of justificatory power at the start of reasoning. In our strategy, each element can gain or lose justificatory power when it is tested in a reasoning process that meets several criteria. (shrink)

Kant's political thinking is predominantly evaluated in contractarian terms, though recent contributions have also emphasized the natural law influence on him. This paper argues that the assimilation of Kant into either tradition is problematic. An analysis of his account of political obligation cannot ignore the distinctiveness of Kant's general philosophical framework. Two recurrent Kantian themes are crucial to a reconstruction of his political argument. The first is the tension between freedom and causality, or nature. The second is the role of (...) reflective judgment in practical reasoning. The paper analyses Kant's property argument, and his related account of political obligation, from the perspective of these Kantian themes. Kant's ‘antinomy of Right’, formulated in the context of his property argument, is interpreted as a conflict between freedom and nature, and in analogy with the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's obscure theorem, the lex permissiva, is central to his ‘solution’ to the antinomy. The theorem is best understood as a reflective practical judgment, through which agents are brought to acknowledge that their obligations of justice towards one another are a direct entailment of their respective claims to property. The connection between property rights and political obligations is thus intrinsic, not extrinsic; the acknowledgement of that connection an act of reflective judgment, not contractual. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guest Editor's Introduction:The Time of Africana PhilosophyOmedi OchiengAfricana philosophy is in the main a philosophy of the present. Many will demur and with good reason. In the first place, in worrying about the definition and animating energies of Africana philosophers, Africana philosophers have looked to the past to furnish answers to the former, and to the future to motivate its orientation to the latter. For Lucius Outlaw, for example, (...) writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Africana philosophy is a third-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept used to bring organizing oversight to various efforts of philosophizing—that is, activities of reflective, critical thinking and articulation and aesthetic expression—engaged in by persons and peoples African and of African descent who were and are indigenous residents of continental Africa and residents of the many African Diasporas worldwide" (2017, first paragraph).If, then, on the one hand, Outlaw's definition points to the past to make intelligible the contours of Africana philosophy—"persons and peoples... of African descent"—it is to the end of mobilizing toward the future. "In all cases," he argues, "the point of much of [Africana] philosophizings has been to confer meaningful orderings on individual and shared living and on natural and social worlds while resolving recurrent, emergent, and radically disruptive challenges to existence so as to survive, endure, and flourish across successive generations." It is striking, for all that, though, that he makes sure to insist on Africana philosophizing, the verb, rather than philosophy, the noun. For Outlaw, "the name [Africana philosophy] does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system, method, or tradition" (2017). Rather, it is primarily a philosophizing, a doing. Where, then, the past and the future are invoked to give Africana philosophy its shape and contours, the doing of Africana philosophy—practices of the moment, of the present—are revealed to be its constitutive marrow.In the history of Africana philosophy few encounters clarify its present stakes as much as the bitter debate that erupted in post-independence African philosophy over whether there could be said to be an African philosophy. For the protagonists and other commentators, those debates seemed overwhelmingly to be fights about the past—specifically, over the [End Page 1] existence of African philosophy in the precolonial past. Those who came to be identified as ethnophilosophers held that worldviews of precolonial African societies constituted coherent systems of thought worthy of the name "philosophy." They were vehemently opposed by those who insisted on a universalist standpoint, led by the redoubtable Beninois Paulin Hountondji. These philosophers argued that those bent on the task of recuperating traditional worldviews were doing anthropology, not philosophy.At first glance, then, it would seem that these debates have little to tell us about the present of African philosophy. Indeed, there is overwhelming weariness among African philosophers regarding the pitched and factionalized disputations that tore through the discipline in the immediate post-independence era. And yet the view that these debates are now passé, relics and distractions from an immature era of a fledgling discipline, cannot account for their stakes; why precisely they were so rancorous, and why, even today, they occasion simmering tensions and embittered eruptions among African philosophers. Ethnophilosophers, after all, were not intent on recuperating the epistemes of traditional African societies out of sheer curiosity. Rather, they were intervening in deeply contested sociopolitical cleavages of their time.Alexis Kagame, for example, is renowned within the field of African philosophy as one of the most prominent ethnophilosophers to have emerged in the mid-twentieth century. His explication of the ontology of the Bantu, as revealed in Bantu languages, ought to be seen as all of a piece with his position as the central court historian and political theorist of the Kingdom of Rwanda. As historian Claudine Vidal (1991) established, Kagame's influential scholarship had as one of its primary goals the justification of a constitutional monarchy. Indeed, half a century after his writings, Rwandese leaders who came to power in the wake of the 1990s genocide would seize on his portrayal of precolonial Rwanda as a pastoral social formation and his testimony to the existence of a Greater Rwanda in justifying their political and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life ed. by Daniel CameJames A. MollisonDaniel Came, ed., Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 220 pp. isbn: 978-0-198-72889-4. Hardback, $70.00Daniel Came's most recent edited collection features original essays from leading figures in the field. As most of its chapters are well-written and well-argued, it will interest Nietzsche scholars generally. It's difficult to narrow (...) the volume's intended audience much further than this, however. The source of this difficulty is not merely titular, though one wonders what aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy could not plausibly be yoked under the dual headings of "morality" and "life affirmation." Rather, the difficulty stems from a shortcoming of Nietzsche's. As Came puts the point in his introduction, "Nietzsche is greatly more forthcoming in his diagnosis of the life-denying nature of morality than he is about what should replace morality and in particular the type of life-affirming attitude which might then ensue" (7). The underdeveloped character of Nietzsche's positive [End Page 110] pronouncements about life affirmation leaves many questions unanswered, the most basic of which might be, "What exactly is it to affirm life?" (7). This collection admirably attempts to tackle such questions head-on by foregrounding Nietzsche's "practical-existential concern with the value of existence" (4)—even if, in resisting the temptation to delve ever deeper into the complexities of Nietzsche's critical enterprise, this approach risks leaving some specialist concerns aside.In light of the inchoate nature of Nietzsche's remedy for life denial, a volume taking life affirmation as its starting point can be forgiven if its contributions are somewhat scattered. Four chapters in this collection—authored by Gemes, Hassan, Huddleston, and Janaway—identify distinct obstacles to Nietzsche's project of life affirmation and explain how Nietzsche might overcome them. Three others—written by Came, Stern, and Kanterian—overlap in arguing that Nietzsche's notion of life affirmation is deeply confused at best and fatally flawed at worst. Two remaining chapters, by Reginster and Clark, are functionally close readings of GM. Below, I discuss the standout essays by Gemes, Came, Huddleston, and Stern, which straightforwardly interact with one another. I then comment on the volume's remaining essays.In his chapter, Gemes suggests that Nietzsche's concern with nihilism emerges after HH, whereas his earlier works express a Romantic preoccupation with cultural renewal. While Reginster analyzes nihilism as a cognitive state of disorientation or despair (The Affirmation of Life [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006]) and Pippin analyzes nihilism as a waning of erotic desire (Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010]), Gemes contends that these forms of nihilism are downstream from a more fundamental condition of affective nihilism that becomes fully manifest with the advent of Christian morality. (Kaitlyn Creasy's work on affective nihilism goes unmentioned.) Gemes then rightly observes that nihilism does not merely subtend overt expressions of life denial, as Nietzsche also "characterizes the need to ask reflective questions about the value of existence as a pathological symptom" of nihilism (29, emphasis added; see also GS P:2; TI "Socrates" 2; TI "Morality" 5). This presents a problem for Nietzsche's life-affirming ambitions. For, even if the ancient Greeks and GM's nobles can accomplish "naïve affirmation," which is "more an affective state than a consciously avowed cognitive belief" (28–29), it is unclear whether we late moderns can do the same. Moreover, Nietzsche's [End Page 111] challenge of affirming the eternal recurrence (GS 341) seems to require the sort of reflective, cognitive assessment of life that Nietzsche diagnoses as nihilistic. I would have liked for Gemes to have examined Nietzsche's indictment of judgments about life in more detail, as this seems crucial for delimiting Nietzsche's project of life affirmation. In any case, Gemes concludes by suggesting that Z might strive to incite "deep poetic inspiration […] among those who [can] hear rightly" (35), thereby helping these select few overcome affective nihilism. This might be Nietzsche's best strategy for facilitating life affirmation.Came is less confident... (shrink)

Nietzsche suggests that even individuals who take themselves to bear an affirmative attitude toward life would be horrified by the thought of eternal recurrence (roughly, the idea that our lives will repeat endlessly in exactly the same fashion). But why? Why is it supposed to be more difficult to affirm recurring lives than to affirm a non-recurring, singular life? I argue that standard interpretations of eternal recurrence are unable to answer this question. I offer a new interpretation of (...) eternal recurrence, which attributes its difficulty to the conditional nature of ordinary affirmation. Affirmation is conditional when it depends on the possibility of excising objectionable elements from the object of affirmation. What Nietzsche means to reveal, with eternal recurrence, is that even the most apparently affirmative individuals often manifest only a conditional affirmation of life, a form of affirmation that conceals a tacit negation. Eternal recurrence brings this hidden negation to light, thereby encouraging us to move toward an unconditionally affirmative stance. I conclude by reflecting on why Nietzsche takes the distinction between conditional and unconditional affirmation to be such an important philosophical idea. I argue that those who devote themselves to challenging, long-term goals will face psychological pressures that tend to deform unconditional affirmation into conditional affirmation. (shrink)

The first decade of event-related potential (ERP) research had established that the most consistent correlates of the onset of visual consciousness are the early visual awareness negativity (VAN), a posterior negative component in the N2 time range, and the late positivity (LP), an anterior positive component in the P3 time range. Two earlier extensive reviews ten years ago had concluded that VAN is the earliest and most reliable correlate of visual phenomenal consciousness, whereas LP probably reflects later processes associated with (...) reflective/access consciousness. This article provides an update to those earlier reviews. ERP and MEG studies that have appeared since 2010 and directly compared ERPs between aware and unaware conditions are reviewed, and important new developments in the field are discussed. The result corroborates VAN as the earliest and most consistent signature of visual phenomenal consciousness, and casts further doubt on LP as an ERP correlate of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

The idea of attention was brought back into mainstream philosophical thinking about ethics by Iris Murdoch, drawing on Simone Weil. While Murdoch’s use of the idea has been reflected on by a number of recent commentators, I think its deepest lessons have largely been missed. Beginning from a recurrent and revealing misreading of Murdoch on attention, a misreading often articulated through reflection on Murdoch’s example of M and D, I want to bring out some of those lessons. It is (...) well-known that Murdoch links attention with just and loving vision. I describe a common, mistaken account of what she means by just and loving vision, and I then turn to other connotations of attention invoked by Murdoch. These other connotations are mentioned in dispatches by some commentators, but not dwelt upon. While Murdoch herself does not explore them extensively either, I argue that they are important for teasing out what matters most in Murdoch’s invocation of attention. As that way of putting suggests, my interest in Murdochian exegesis is eventually superseded by my attempts to elicit what I think to be some of the most fruitful implications of her reflections on attention. (shrink)

The idea of reality as construction maybe one of the most recurrent themes cutting across Modern and Contemporary thinking. Objectivist realism has professed reality to be external and independent of subjectivity and maintained that experience was the capacity of being affected by things through the senses and of reproducing them as representative mental contents. As a reaction, Modernity will establish: a) that consciousness is not merely receptive passivity but a configurant activity; b) that reality is not reflected by consciousness but, (...) rather, is somehow constructed by it. Our time rescues such heritage in a particularly fecund manner in the semiological discourse. Intersubjectively constructed reality is a web of meanings and values which man institutes around himself in the world. Reality sediments in systems of sign vehiculation and becomes fixed m codes. Therefore the question: if reality, as construction, has the limits and scope of code, how does consciousness behave concerning the non-codified, the non-constructed, in the absence of a code? This article deals with some views of this other of consciousness, presented as declensions of metaphor of absence.Talvez o tema mais recorrente do discurso filosófico que atravessa o pensamento moderno e a contemporaneidade seja a idéia da realidade como construção. Como reação ao realismo objetivista, que acreditava ser a realidade exterior e independente da subjetividade e para quem a experiência é a capacidade de ser afetado pelas coisas através dos sentidos e de reproduzi-las em conteúdos mentais representativos, a modernidade vai estabelecer que: a) a consciência não é uma mera passividade receptiva, mas atividade configurante; b) a realidade não é refletida pela consciência, mas por ela, de certa forma, construída. A nossa época recolhe esta herança de maneira fecunda particularmente no discurso semiológico: a realidade construída intersubjetivamente é uma teia de significados e valores que o homem institui ao redor de si no mundo. Ela sedimenta-se em sistemas de veiculação sêmicos e se fixa em códigos. Daí emerge a questão: tendo a realidade, enquanto construção, os limites e alcance do código, como se comporta a consciência e seus registros perante o não-codificado, o não-construído, a sua ausência? Algumas abordagens desse outro da consciência, apresentadas como declinações de metáforas da ausência, é aquilo que esse artigo pretende apresentar. (shrink)

The role of African higher education institutions has been embedded within the socio-economic and historical contexts of the continent. Understanding the nature of African universities, their roles in African societies, and their place in the global knowledge system demands comprehensive reflection of the historical trajectories of the sector itself. In order to re-imagine the future of African higher education, it is important not only to reconstruct the past by uncovering facts but also to deconstruct it by challenging the nature (...) of established truth on which historical evidences are created. This article challenges and deconstructs dominant narratives on the historical trajectories and configurations of progress in African higher education systems. The article provides a thorough analysis of major trends, developments and challenges that the sector has been facing through time with the intention of reimaging and constructing the notion of a new or alternative future that addresses the recurrent challenges of the sector. The notion of creating the new African university carries a fundamental inquiry asking: ‘What it means to be an African university?’ ‘What role do they play in African societies?’ and ‘How do African institutions manage to strike a balance between the individual, social and corporate responsibilities interacting with their stakeholders?’ This article interrogates the intricate pattern of interactions among African societies and higher education institutions, reflecting on historical trends and critical challenges facing the sector that have been negatively impacting the pace of realising the desired future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:History of Philosophy and History of Ideas PAUL OSKAR KRISTELLER THE TF.~MS "history of philosophy" and "history of ideas" are frequently associated in current public and professional discussions, and many statements seem to suggest that the two terms are more or less synonymous, or that the former term, being old-fashioned, might well be replaced with the latter which for many ears appears to have a more fashionable and glamorous (...) ring. Hence there arises the question what each of these terms really means, or what it should mean, and whether and to what extent it is justifiable to identify them with each other, to reduce the history of philosophy to the history of ideas, or to treat the former as a part or subdivision of the latter. I am not convinced that these questions can be answered through an appeal to ordinary usage since this usage is fluid and reflects at best the intellectual formulations and decisions of a remote or recent past. We may have reason to question the very validity of these decisions, and perhaps to suggest or make different decisions, and in case we are successful and obtain a reasonable amount of approval, these different decisions will be reflected in the ordinary usage of tomorrow, though not yet in that of today. The attempt to discuss the meaning and relationship of the history of philosophy and the history of ideas is obviously difficult and hazardous. It involves not only the discussion of such complicated notions as history and philosophy (and idea), but also the shifting balance of the intellectual globe that includes the continents or territories denoted by those terms, and even of the academic globe that purports to be, with varying success, its faithful image. In a short paper, I cannot hope to present an original or adequate discussion of these difficult problems, but merely try to raise a few questions which to my knowledge have not received sufficient attention and may be of interest to philosophers and historians. The history of philosophy has been of recurrent interest to philosophers and other scholars, especially in classical antiquity and again in the Renaissance period. It came to occupy a central place in European thought during the last century, especially in the wake of German idealism. Hegel recognized "history" as a major area of reality and of philosophical concern, as Vico and Herder had done before him, and thus left a living heritage not only to his followers down to Croce and Gentile, but also to Marx and his [1] 2 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY disciples, and to many other thinkers who cannot be called Hegelians. Hegel also did not conceive political history in isolation, but in his phenomenology and philosophy of the spirit came close to a concept of culture or civilization in which political and social institutions, religion and the arts, the sciences and philosophy are interrelated as manifestations of the same spirit and subject to the same "dialectical" laws of historical development. The vast progress which the historical disciplines made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only in the field of political and economic history but in the history of languages and literatures, of the arts and religions, and of civilization in general was not influenced by Hegel's theories, but rather opposed to them. Yet this vast body of knowledge and of learning imposed itself as an epistemological problem to such thinkers as Dilthey, Rickert, and Cassirer. Finally, Hegel considered philosophical thought itself as dialectical, that is, in a certain sense as historical, and thus foreshadowed not only Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, or Croce's claim that philosophy and history are identical, but also Heidegger's conception of historicity as a basic aspect or dimension of human thought and being. Within such a framework, the history of philosophy occupies a significant and even a central position for the philosopher since it elucidates the basic stages through which philosophical thinking passed before it reached its present situation. Any attempt to grasp or answer our present philosophical prob- ]ems thus presupposes at least a general understanding of the historical developments which have prepared or produced these problems. In the English-speaking world, both... (shrink)

This essay aims to demonstrate how attention to black political thought might expand and complicate our understanding of modern politics and the conceptualization of the political in contemporary political theory, and in modern politics more generally. Black political thought can be viewed as the attempt to develop a set of critical tools to help explain the political distinctiveness of black life-worlds and how this distinctiveness is structured by a series of relations between individual and community, self and other, state and (...) society, citizen and non-citizen, and national and multinational (or global) circumstances. Too often, black politics is exclusively considered as a form of minority group politics and phenomena reducible to empirical investigation and observation, rather than a set of practices with underlying conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological premises. If we understand race as a fundamentally relational concept, namely, an assumption of dynamic interaction between two or more putatively distinct groups, and racism as a political phenomena that is conditioned and articulated through politics, then taken together they provide the opportunity for reflection and consideration of how black peoples and subjects have conceptualized, created and engaged in politics, political communities, and their articulation. Race and racism, the modalities of political participation and, conversely, the modalities of political exclusion have been recurrent themes in black political thought. The distinctiveness of black political thought is symptomatic of the distinctive trajectories of black politics, which first emerged from spaces of exclusion in Western polities and colonies. The histories of black political and social movements provide evidence of the ways in which black subordination in Western societies and polities required the reconfiguration of the actual boundaries between the public and private, the political and the social. Race and racism, the distinction between identity and identification, black solidarities, and the relationship between history, context, and politics and the political are themes central to black political thought. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has repeatedly been described as an “essentially contested concept,” which means that its signification is subject to continuous struggle. We argue that the “CSR institution” (CSRI; i.e., the set of standards and rules regulating corporate conduct under the banner of CSR) is legitimized by narratives which “decontest” the underlying concept of CSR in a manner that safeguards the CSRI from calls for alternative institutional arrangements. Examining several such narratives from a structuralist perspective, we find them to (...) be permeated with six recurrent ambiguities that we show to be reflective of three deep-set taboos: the taboo of the noncongruency between corporate profit objectives and societal needs, the taboo of multinational firms’ continued contribution to the emergence of global socioenvironmental issues, and the taboo of the CSRI’s moderate results in solving these problems. We contend that the perpetuation of these taboos contributes to inhibiting substantial change in the way of doing business, and we sketch out possibilities for initiating a “recontestation” of CSR’s meaning. (shrink)

In this fascinating new collection of essays, contemporary historians examine the ways earlier historians have framed, written, and "made" the Jewish past. Probing the ideology and methodology of their professional predecessors, American and Israeli historians offer new perspectives on some of the central figures of twentieth-century Jewish historiography, including Gershom Scholem, S. D. Goitein, Yitzhak Baer, Elias Bickermann, and Cecil Roth, as well as the Israeli "New Historians." Although the lives and work of these scholars differ in many ways, Jewish (...) historians have recurrently confronted the challenges posed by assimilation, antisemitism, and various forms of nationalism. Through their critical examinations of the construction of the Jewish past, the contributors to this volume develop important insights into current attitudes toward the dominant canons and ideals of historical scholarship and the future of historiography. They shine new light on the formation of a historical worldview and the "making" of history. (shrink)

This reflective essay is an attempt to organize trends in feedback I have observed during ten years of coursework, conversations, and correspondence with former students associated with the Medical Humanities Program at Baylor University. Over the years, recurrent themes arise when speaking with alumni about whether and how their medical humanities experience intersects with their current training. I have identified five particular domains in which baccalaureate medical humanities training affects students’ subsequent healthcare professions training and practice: context and complementarity, clinical (...) relevance, reflective practice, professional preparedness and vocational calling. I created an instrument of open-ended questions for each of these categories and posted it to social media with an invitation for alumni to respond. This informal survey was conceived as an exploratory exercise with the intent to help generate a foundation for more formal qualitative research in these five domains. In this essay, I offer my own reflections together with those of former students on the impact of baccalaureate-level medical humanities training in order to illustrate the benefits in each domain for subsequent healthcare training and practice. The need for qualitative research that explores the impact of baccalaureate medical humanities merits collaboration between multiple centers of investigation across many disciplines, and across the divide between premedical and medical educators. (shrink)

BackgroundFidelity of implementation reflects whether an intervention was implemented in clinical practice according to the originally developed manual and is a key aspect in understanding intervention effectiveness. To illustrate this process of developing a fidelity measure, this study uses the Mini-AFTERc, a brief psychological intervention aimed at managing breast cancer patients’ fear of cancer recurrence, as an example.ObjectivesTo illustrate the development of an FOI measure through applying this process to the Mini-AFTERc intervention, by including the design of a scoring (...) system and rating criteria; content validating the FOI measure using thematic framework analysis as a qualitative approach; testing consistency of the FOI measure using interrater reliability.MethodsThe FOI measure was developed, its scoring system modified and the rating criteria defined. Thematic framework analysis was conducted to content validate the FOI measure using nine intervention discussions between four specialist cancer nurses and four breast cancer patients, and one simulated breast cancer patient. Intraclass-correlation was conducted to assess interrater reliability.ResultsThe qualitative findings suggested that the Mini-AFTERc FOI measure has content validity as it was able to measure all five components of the Mini-AFTERc intervention. The interrater reliability suggested a moderate to excellent degree of reliability among three raters, rICC = 0.84, 95% CI [0.51, 0.96].ConclusionThe study has illustrated the steps that an FOI measure can be developed through a systematic approach applied to the Mini-AFTERc intervention. The FOI measure was found to have content validity and was consistently applied, independently, by three researchers familiar with the Mini-AFTERc intervention. Future studies should determine whether similar levels of interrater reliability can be obtained by distributing written and/or video instructions to researchers who are unfamiliar with the FOI measure, using a larger sample. Employing developed and validated FOI measures such as the one presented for the Mini-AFTERc would facilitate implementation of interventions in the FCR field in clinical practice as intended.Clinical Trial Registrationwww.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier: NCT03763825. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jean Wyatt THE CELEBRATION OF EROS: GREEK CONCEPTS OF LOVE AND BEAUTY IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE A voracious reader all her life, Virginia Woolf stored up patterns and images which she naturally wove into the fabric of her novels.1 Integrating literature of the past into her own works was also an affirmation of her belief that "everything comes over again a little differently," as Eleanor says in The Years. (...) Acutely aware of the prevailing fluidity of human life, Virginia Woolf sought a counterbalance in the principle of eternal recurrence. The whole chain of human history forms a "gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible." It becomes perceptible when elemental forces in human life coincide with the forms of individuals, "making them symbolical, making them representative."3 In Mrs. Ramsay, Virginia Woolf combines a personal portrait of her mother with an evocation of eternal life forces in the "symbolical outline" (p. Ill) of Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and marriage, that Mrs. Ramsay irradiates. Events, too, can be "symbolical, and therefore perhaps permanent," in the words of Bernard in The Waves, when they reflect the continuity of human experience. The dinner party in To the Lighthouse contains ritual elements, reminders that it is one in a series of communal feasts. The search for truth in the midst of human pleasures, by means of human love, recalls one such banquet in particular, the Symposium.'' The central concerns of the Symposium are those of To the Lighthouse: striving for knowledge through love; the desire to create that beauty arouses; the paradox of the eternal in the midst of the transitory. The figures and patterns of Greek literature were part of Virginia Woolf's mental formation. She began learning Greek at King's College in 1897, at the age of fifteen.6 For the next few years, Greek was her chief refuge from a stifling Victorian society. From 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. every day she read Greek: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, all of Sophocles, Plato. Twice a week she met for Greek lessons, first 160 Jean WyATT161 with Clara Pater, then with Janet Case. Her letters speak of Greek as "the greatest of comforts to me" (April, 1900), "my daily bread, and a keen delight to me" (June, 1900); it "has so much attraction for me... that I don't want to do anything else" (February, 1905).8 A diary entry from 1924 shows how Greek "worked its way" into her life. Upon meeting a herd of cattle, "I waved my stick and stood at bay; and thought of Homer.... some mimic battle. Grizzle grew more and more insolent and excited and skirmished about yapping. Ajax? That Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me." Seeing Grizzle as Ajax is not different in kind from transforming Mrs. Ramsay into Aphrodite, Mr. Carmichael into Poseidon. Greek was in the forefront of Virginia Woolf's mind in 1924 because she had been reading Greek steadily since 1922 in preparation for the article "On Not Knowing Greek." "The amount of reading... that went into the production of that essay... was remarkable," comments Quentin Bell. She published the essay in 1925, the year she began To the Lighthouse. "On Not Knowing Greek" shows that Virginia Woolf knew the Symposium well: she discusses it for four pages, not with the analytical lens of a literary critic, but with loving familiarity. She first read the Symposium when she was about sixteen, but her intimacy with it suggests that she must have read it more than once. At the center of the Symposium is Diotima's doctrine: man has to work through a series of human loves to arrive at the eternal. Lily pursues a similar quest for knowledge through love. She loves Mrs. Ramsay, but, unable to satisfy her love on a personal level, casts about for a way of reaching "the spirit in her, the essential thing" (p. 76). She finally finds a way of loving that takes her to the essence of things when, ten years after Mrs. Ramsay's death, she sees and loves a Mrs. Ramsay who transcends the individual to become the form of love and beauty. To understand the... (shrink)

This thesis aims to elucidate an apparent paradox about the role of emotion in moral agency. A number of lines of concern suggest emotion may have serious negative impact on moral agency. On the other hand, there are considerations that suggest emotion also plays a crucial role in motivating, informing and even constituting moral agency. Significantly, there is a strong connection between participant reactive attitudes and ascription of moral status as agent or subject. Nonemotional agents could not hold such attitudes. (...) Also, removing participant reactive attitudes imposes a peculiar and incoherent form of solipsism about moral agency. Given this necessary role for emotion, can we give an account of emotion that will also meet the worries? I examine, as crucial examples, three recurrent lines of concern about emotion - that it threatens our capacities for objectivity, rationality, and autonomy - to tease out the descriptive assumptions about emotion, and the normative assumptions about moral agency, that these objections are based on. I then offer three lines of argument towards resolving these worries. The first addresses the worries directly, and the other two shift blame off emotion. First, then, I argue that the normative concerns can largely be met by a descriptive account that views emotion as cognitive. However, “judgementalist” cognitive accounts that assimilate emotion to belief may make emotion metaethically respectable at the cost of making it meta-ethically redundant. Also, such accounts are descriptively less than plausible. A better approach, I argue, is to allow that belief may play a significant role in emotion but to also allow at least a quasicognitive role to the distinctively affective element in emotion: feeling. I also argue for a hrther revision of cognitive accounts to emphasise that emotions reflect features of those who feel them. If we were different, our emotions would be different. So, secondly, I argue that a number of the features that power worries about emotions have their sources in what those who feel them are like, rather than in emotions as such. However, both human nature and emotion are capable of significant plasticity and diversity. We are also capable of a considerable - but not infinite - degree of self-determination both about what we are like and what our emotions are like. Finally, I argue that the normative assumptions that power the objections to emotion are themselves in need of revision - and in some tension with each other. This leads to a McGufin-theory of emotion in moral agency: Problems with emotion’s place in moral agency serve as indicators of unresolved tensions in our thinking about moral agency, rather than just indicators of problems with emotion as such. In view of this, I also argue for caution in any attempts to change emotion to fit particular ideals of moral agency. (shrink)

Language is highly dynamic: It unfolds over time, and we can use it to achieve a wide variety of communicative goals, from telling a story to trying to persuade another person. One aspect of language that has gained increasing popularity among researchers in the last several decades is the individual language style (LS) represented by an individual’s use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles). Previous approaches to LS mostly focus on LS of one individual in isolation, paying less attention to (...) the fact that language emerges from interaction with others. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we integrate LS into a dynamical theoretical framework and present an innovative methodological approach. Second, this paper aims to address how interactive conversation—as an aspect of the communicative setting—changes an individual’s LS. We use recurrence quantification analysis to look at structure in patterns of LS in monologs and conversations of 118 participants. Our results showed that LS significantly differs from monolog to conversation, and post hoc analyses further revealed that the change in LS is greater for conflict than for friendly conversations. The difference between monologs and conversations is reflected more strongly in the dynamics (i.e., structure and complexity) of LS than the proportion of function words used. Theoretical implications and directions for future studies are discussed. (shrink)

Nietzsche's model of eternal return triggers a drama of affirmation, the overcoming of a simple miming of our ancestors in favour of an active participation in the counter-actualisation of hidden potentials in recurrent events. Based on a close study of Zarathustra's struggle to free himself from a suffocating nihilism, the paper focuses on the revelatory caesura that ushers in what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time, a time of ‘doing’ rather than reflection.

This article traces the recurrence of certain “obstacles” in the work of Paul de Man. My analysis centers on de Man’s essays on Romanticism in order to locate what he describes as a “shift” from “historical reflection” to the “problematics of reading.” De Man’s renewed attempts to describe this shift—and to name the obstacle that occasions it—draw on the very same language he uses in his reading of romantic texts. Focusing on de Man’s reading of Baudelaire and Hölderlin, (...) in particular, I examine the obstacles de Man identifies within the work of these authors, as well as the ways these obstacles disappear and resurface in later essays. Although I maintain de Man never succeeds in actually naming this obstacle, his repeated attempts to confront it attest to the importance—perhaps even the necessity—of stumbling as a constitutive feature of his critical project. (shrink)

Music is an abstract art form that uses sound as its means of expression. It has deeply affected our lives. This paper proposes a method for extracting segment features from nonmultiple cluster music files. We divide each piece of music into multiple segments and extract the features of each segment. The specific process includes nonmultiple cluster music file note extraction, main melody extraction, segment division, and segment feature extraction. The segment feature is extracted from a segment of a piece of (...) music, contains the main melody and accompaniment information of the segment, and can reflect the sequence relationship of the notes. This paper proposes a performance style conversion network based on recurrent neural network and convolutional neural network. The bidirectional recurrent neural network based on Gated Recurrent Unit is used to extract different styles of note feature vector sequences, and the extracted note feature vector sequence is used to predict the intensity of a specific style, and the intensity changes of different styles of nonmultiple cluster music are better learned. Through the comparison, the multiclassification strategy of “one-to-the-rest” is selected, and the fuzzy recurrent neural network is applied to the shortcomings of the unrecognizable area. Finally, according to the feature extraction method and the principle of the classifier algorithm studied in this paper, a music style classification system is implemented in the MATLAB environment. Experimental simulation shows that this system can effectively classify music performance styles. (shrink)

The Ethics of War traces how different cultures involved in present conflicts have addressed problems over the centuries. Distinguished authors reflect how the Greco-Roman world, Byzantium, the Christian just war tradition, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and the Geneva Conventions have addressed recurrent ethical issues of war. Cutting edge essays by prominent modern theorists address vital contemporary issues including asymmetric war, preventive war, human rights and humanitarian intervention.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche. His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His PhilosophyAlan D. SchriftWolfgang Müller-Lauter. Nietzsche. His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy. Translated from the German by David J. Parent. Foreword by Richard Schacht. Ghicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 246. Paper, $21.95.Since this work first appeared in 1971, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter has been at the forefront of German Nietzsche scholarship. The long (...) overdue appearance in English translation of this important work is a welcome addition to the Nietzsche literature and, although dated in some respects, it remains an important work that warrants careful attention. As Richard Schacht notes in his foreword, the original publication of this work was a significant event in the history of Nietzsche studies in Germany. Coming ten years after the publication of Heidegger's massive two-volume Nietzsche, Müller-Lauter's book "provided a much-needed counterweight" to Heidegger's idiosyncratic treatment (ix). Aside from proferring a significant rejoinder to the Heideggerian interpretation, Müller-Lauter also responds to a vast array of German Nietzsche scholars, some well-known (K. Löwith, K. Jaspers, E. Fink, K. Schlechta), but many much less familiar. As such, this book is an important piece of historical scholarship, offering the contemporary English-speaking reader an interesting picture of German scholarship on Nietzsche before Heidegger's work took center stage as the dominant (unfortunately, some would say only) German work worth engaging.But Müller-Lauter's book is not just of historical interest; it offers a powerful and profound reading of Nietzsche's corpus focused on the question of contradiction, both the contradictions readers find amidst Nietzsche's various works and Nietzsche's own philosophy of contradiction, namely, that contradictoriness is in some sense constitutive of the world. For Müller-Lauter, contradiction, the unresolvable conflict between essentially antithetical perspectives, grounds Nietzsche's philosophizing in wills to power. Emphasizing the plurality of conflicting wills to power, Müller-Lauter offers in successive chapters interpretations of Nietzsche's views on history as the "concrete occurrences" of these conflicting wills to power; nihilism as the process by which an organized system of forces (physical, social, intellectual, cultural) disintegrates into an antagonistic multiplicity of competing wills; morality as demanding truths that, once discovered, it can neither face nor accept, fleeing instead into a fictitious world of its own creation; Christian truthfulness as a destruction of truth that presents a "multiplicity of mutually opposing untruths" (72). All of these interpretations are shown to rest upon a contradiction at the heart of Nietzsche's own account of will to power, namely, that the strong will to power both affirms the multiplicity of perspectives and yet imposes its perspective as absolute.This is the paradox of the overman, a paradox Müller-Lauter addresses in his final chapter on "the doctrine of eternal recurrence." Not surprisingly, the eternal recurrence reveals itself to be essentially contradictory. But this contradiction is not self-refuting; rather "since the eternal recurrence is only as a thought and a doctrine, its meaning remains insurmountably split into a duality" (121) reflected in two ultimately incompatible types of overman. There is, on the one hand, the "powerful overman" who sees the entirety of what is as necessary for his own existence; to affirm eternal [End Page 453] recurrence is to understand everything that has been as a necessary series of events that ends with himself at its apex. But there is also the "wise overman," who understands the totality of what has been and is as necessary for his having arrived at the present moment in which he transcends himself and becomes other. Where the meaning of the powerful overman's affirmation of eternal recurrence resides in his appearance as the being who is dominant, the meaning of the wise overman's affirmation lies in understanding and accepting what has been as the precondition for both what he presently is and what he can become. Although both types of overman want recurrence, Müller-Lauter concludes they want something different in it and by it: the wise overman "is concerned with dissolving in the stream of... (shrink)

BackgroundDeciphering the amount of work provided by different co-authors of a scientific paper has been a recurrent problem in science. Despite the myriad of metrics available, the scientific community still largely relies on the position in the list of authors to evaluate contributions, a metric that attributes subjective and unfounded credit to co-authors. We propose an easy to apply, universally comparable and fair metric to measure and report co-authors contribution in the scientific literature. MethodsThe proposed Author Contribution Index (ACI) is (...) based on contribution percentages provided by the authors, preferably at the time of submission. Researchers can use ACI to compare the contributions of different authors, describe the contribution profile of a particular researcher or analyse how contribution changes through time. We provide such an analysis based on contribution percentages provided by 97 scientists from the field of ecology who voluntarily responded to an online anonymous survey.ResultsACI is simple to understand and to implement because it is based solely on percentage contributions and the number of co-authors. It provides a continuous score that reflects the contribution of one author as compared to the average contribution of all other authors. For example, ACI(i) = 3, means that author i contributed three times more than what the other authors contributed on average. Our analysis comprised 836 papers published in 2014-2016 and revealed patterns of ACI values that relate to career advancement.ConclusionThere are many examples of author contribution indices that have been proposed but none has really been adopted by scientific journals. Many of the proposed solutions are either too complicated, not accurate enough or not comparable across articles, authors and disciplines. The author contribution index presented here addresses these three major issues and has the potential to contribute to more transparency in the science literature. If adopted by scientific journals, it could provide job seekers, recruiters and evaluating bodies with a tool to gather information that is essential to them and cannot be easily and accurately obtained otherwise. We also suggest that scientists use the index regardless of whether it is implemented by journals or not. (shrink)