Background: Mental fatigue can impact physical demands and tactical behavior in sport-related contexts. Small-sided games are often used to develop a specific sport-related context. However, the effects of mental fatigue on physical demands and tactical behaviors during soccer SSGs have not been aggregated for systematical assessment.Objective: This systematic review was conducted to compare the effects of mental fatigue vs. control conditions in terms of the total running distance and tactical behavior of soccer players during SSGs.Methods: The data sources (...) utilized were PubMed, PsycINFO, Scielo, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science. The study eligibility criteria were established based on PICOS: Population: healthy youth and young adult men soccer players with regular training practice and belonging to teams with regular competitions; Intervention: exposed to mental fatigue-induced protocols only before SSGs; Comparator: control conditions before SSGs; Outcomes: physical demands and tactical behavior ; Study design: counterbalanced cross-over design; and only full-text and original articles written in English.Results: The database search initially identified 111 titles. From those, six articles were eligible for the systematic review and meta-analysis. Results showed no significant effect of fatigue on total running distance and tactical behavior.Conclusions: A non-significant effect of mental fatigue on total running distance and tactical behaviors performed by soccer players during SSGs was found in this systematic review. (shrink)

Bayesians often appeal to “merging of opinions” to rebut charges of excessive subjectivity. But what happens in the short run is often of greater interest than what happens in the limit. Seidenfeld and coauthors use this observation as motivation for investigating the counterintuitive short run phenomenon of dilation, since, they allege, dilation is “the opposite” of asymptotic merging of opinions. The measure of uncertainty relevant for dilation, however, is not the one relevant for merging of opinions. We explicitly investigate the (...) short run behavior of the metric relevant for merging, and show that dilation is independent of the opposite of merging. (shrink)

It has been proved that total generalized variation can better preserve edges while suppressing staircase effect. In this paper, we propose an effective hybrid regularization model based on second-order TGV and wavelet frame. The proposed model inherits the advantages of TGV regularization and wavelet frame regularization, can eliminate staircase effect while protecting the sharp edge, and simultaneously has good capability of sparsely estimating the piecewise smooth functions. The alternative direction method of multiplier is employed to solve the new (...) model. Numerical results show that our proposed model can preserve more details and get higher image visual quality than some current state-of-the-art methods. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of the ‘continuum of destructiveness’ in relation to organizational corruption. This notion captures the slippery slope of wrongdoing as actors engage in increasingly dubious practices. We identify four kinds of individuals along this continuum in corrupt organizations, who range from complete innocence to total guilt. They are innocent bystanders, innocent participants, active rationalizers and guilty perpetrators. Traditional explanations of how individuals move from bystander status to guilty perpetrators usually focus on socialization and institutional factors. (...) In addition to these factors, we propose that the very distance between an act and its ethical consequences (ethical distance) may also play a determining role – if not always in the same way – in the transition process. Having developed this conceptual argument, we conclude with a discussion of managerial and research implications. (shrink)

Air pollution in China has been drawing considerable attention in recent years. The emergence of new energy vehicles provides hope to reduce air pollutant emission. However, consumers' recognition and acceptance of NEVs remain at the early stage. This research aims to explore how consumers' environmental concern influences their NEV purchase intention. Specifically, this research conducted an online survey and an experiment to address the following issues: how consumers' psychological distance toward air pollution influences their purchase intention for NEVs, and (...) does their risk perception of the consequences of air pollution mediate this influence; whether consumers' perceived price level of NEVs plays a moderating role in the relationship between risk perception and purchase intention; and whether the construal level of stimulus can be manipulated to influence consumers' PD toward air pollution to increase their purchase intention for NEVs. The results of study 1, based on a total of 293 valid samples, show that consumers' PD toward air pollution significantly affects their purchase intention for NEVs, and risk perception of the consequences of air pollution plays a considerable mediating role. Meanwhile, consumers' perceived price level of NEVs has a significant negative moderating effect on the relationship between risk perception and purchase intention. The results of study 2, based on an online experiment, show that the construal level of stimulus can influence consumers' PD toward air pollution, which in turn affects their purchase intention for NEVs. The findings of this research have implications for businesses' promotional strategies and governments' policies. For instance, low-construal-level promotional materials can be developed to arouse consumers' environmental concern, thereby facilitating their eco-friendly consumption behavior. Governmental financial assistance and other policies can also increase consumers' willingness to purchase NEVs. (shrink)

This book examines longstanding problems in the theory of vision. Each section begins by looking at the issues as they were raised and discussed by Berkeley. This work is unique in its blend of philosophical and historical perspectives on contemporary problems of readership.

One of the major adaptations during the evolution of Homo sapiens was an increase in brain size. Here we present evidence that a significant and substantial proportion of variation in brain size may be related to changes in temperature. Based on a sample of 109 fossilized hominid skulls, we found that cranial capacities were highly correlated with paleoclimatic changes in temperature, as indexed by oxygen isotope data and sea-surface temperature. Indeed, as much as 52% of the variance in the (...) cranial capacity of these skulls could be accounted for by temperature variation at 100 ka intervals. As an index of more short-term seasonal fluctuations in temperature, we examined the latitude of the sites from which the crania originated. More than 22% of the variance in cranial capacity of these skulls could be accounted for by variation in equatorial distance. (shrink)

Dealing with phonological variations is important for speech processing. This article addresses whether phonological variations introduced by assimilatory processes are compensated for at the pre-lexical or lexical level, and whether the nature of variation and the phonological context influence this process. To this end, Swedish nasal regressive place assimilation was investigated using the mismatch negativity component. In nasal regressive assimilation, the coronal nasal assimilates to the place of articulation of a following segment, most clearly with a velar or labial (...) place of articulation, as in utan mej “without me” > [ʉːtam mɛjː]. In a passive auditory oddball paradigm, 15 Swedish speakers were presented with Swedish phrases with attested and unattested phonological variations and contexts for nasal assimilation. Attested variations – a coronal-to-labial change as in utan “without” > [ʉːtam] – were contrasted with unattested variations – a labial-to-coronal change as in utom “except” > ∗[ʉːtɔn] – in appropriate and inappropriate contexts created by mej “me” [mɛjː] and dej “you” [dɛjː]. Given that the MMN amplitude depends on the degree of variation between two stimuli, the MMN responses were expected to indicate to what extent the distance between variants was tolerated by the perceptual system. Since the MMN response reflects not only low-level acoustic processing but also higher-level linguistic processes, the results were predicted to indicate whether listeners process assimilation at the pre-lexical and lexical levels. The results indicated no significant interactions across variations, suggesting that variations in phonological forms do not incur any cost in lexical retrieval; hence such variation is compensated for at the lexical level. However, since the MMN response reached significance only for a labial-to-coronal change in a labial context and for a coronal-to-labial change in a coronal context, the compensation might have been influenced by the nature of variation and the phonological context. It is therefore concluded that while assimilation is compensated for at the lexical level, there is also some influence from pre-lexical processing. The present results reveal not only signal-based perception of phonological units, but also higher-level lexical processing, and are thus able to reconcile the bottom-up and top-down models of speech processing. (shrink)

This paper examined the relationship between coaches and youth athletes in China by comparing data collected before and after the lockdown. A total of 221 youth athletes aged 13-19 years in one professional football school completed coach-athlete relationship questionnaires. The rank-sum test was used to verify the differences in the data. The results of the Mann-Whitney U test showed that the mean value of the three dimensions of the coach-athlete relationship (closeness, commitment, and complementarity) increased after the COVID-19 lockdown. (...) The results also showed that athletes of different age categories showed different changes in the coach-athlete relationship after the lockdown, and the changes were not significantly related to the severity of the COVID-19 epidemic. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Objective: To analyse the time variation of topics in bioethical publications as a proxy of the relative importance.Methods: We searched the Medline database for bioethics publications using the words “ethics or bioethics”, and for 360 specific topics publications, associating Medical Subject Heading topic descriptors to those words. We calculated the ratio of bioethics publications to the total publications of Medline, and the ratio of each topic publications to the total bioethics publications, for five-year intervals, from 1970 to (...) 2004. We calculated the time variation of ratios, dividing the difference between the highest and lowest ratio of each topic by its highest ratio. Four topics were described, selected to illustrate different patterns of variation: “Induced Abortion”, “Conflict of Interest”, “Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome”, “Medical Education.”Results: The ratio of bioethics publications to total Medline publications increased from 0.003 to 0.012. The variation of the topic’s ratios was higher than 0.7 for 68% of the topics. The Induced Abortion ratios decreased from 0.12 to 0.02. Conflict of Interest ratios increased from zero to 0.07. The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome ratios were nearly zero in the first three intervals, had a peak of 0.06 during 1985–9, followed by a decrease to 0.01. Medical Education ratios varied few, from 0.04 to 0.03.Conclusions: There was an increase of bioethical publications in the Medline database. The topics in bioethics literature have an important time variation. Some factors were suggested to explain this variation: current legal cases, resolution of the issue, saturation of a discussion and epidemiologic importance. (shrink)

Drone warfare disrupts the generally understood experience of war, and drone operators’ distance from the battlefield has called into question the authenticity of their experiences as participants in conflict. This article examines the autobiographies of three US military drone operators, analysing how the narration is discursively oriented to particular spatial and ideological perspectives. It argues that the linguistic construction of point of view in each text reflects a dynamic and sometimes paradoxical relationship between drone operators and their distance (...) from the battlefield. Observing the position and shifting of deictic centres, the analysis draws parallels between spatial perspective, ideology, and the social identities of drone operators and victims of drone strikes. It concludes by reflecting on the variety of discursive strategies employed across these texts, and considers this variation itself to be an emerging trend in the discourse of drone warfare. (shrink)

A meta-analysis and an experiment show that the degree of compression of the in-depth dimension of visual space relative to the frontal dimension increases quickly as a function of the distance between the stimulus and the observer at first, but the rate of change slows beyond 7 m from the observer, reaching an apparent asymptote of about 50 %. In addition, the compression of visual space is greater for monocular and reduced cue conditions. The pattern of compression of the (...) in-depth dimension as a function of distance is similar to the ratio of in-depth to frontal visual angles of stimuli, but is not as extreme as this ratio would suggest, implying that observers are incapable of fully ignoring size information provided by cues to depth. Size and distance judgments may be described by an Affine transformation of physical space; however, the compression parameter in this model changes as a function of distance from the observer and other experimental conditions. (shrink)

Background Intestinal transplant in infants with severe short bowel syndrome (SBS) is an emerging therapy, yet without sufficient long-term data or established guidelines, resulting in possible variation in practice. Objectives To assess current attitudes and counselling practices among physicians regarding intestinal transplant in infants with SBS, and to determine whether counselling and management vary between subspecialists or centres. Methods A national sample of practicing paediatric surgeons and neonatologists was surveyed via the American Academy of Paediatrics listserves. Results were analysed (...) by physician subspecialty and again by presence or absence of intestinal transplant at respondent's centre. Results The survey was completed by 433 respondents, consisting of 363 neonatologists and 70 paediatric surgeons. Fifty-seven respondents (13.2%) practiced at a centre that performed intestinal transplants in children. The vast majority of respondents (91% for preterm, 95% for term neonates) felt that maintaining a neonate with SBS on total parenteral nutrition for intestinal transplant was ethically optional (neither impermissible nor obligatory), and that parents should be given an informed choice whether to pursue that option. However, only 33% indicated they often/always offer intestinal transplant as a treatment option to families in this situation. Conclusions There is a marked disparity between individual physicians’ beliefs regarding the acceptability of intestinal transplant for severe SBS and their reported practice. Wide variability exists among physicians with respect to their knowledge, beliefs and practice regarding severe SBS, raising concerns about transparency and justice. Survival data prior to transplant, currently unavailable, are essential to rational decision making and informed parental permission. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the exhibition of artworks in museums and galleries. Many have displayed their collection online. In this context, experiencing an online exhibition is essential for visitors to appreciate and understand the artwork. Compared with offline exhibitions, visitors to online exhibitions are often unable to communicate their experiences with other visitors. Therefore, in this study, by facilitating communication via Zoom call, we established a system that allows two people to visit the museum together through the Google (...) Arts and Culture website. To reduce the psychological distance between online visitors and help increase user engagement, we designed and developed a media device based on moiré pattern visualization of electroencephalography signals. The participants were divided into two groups to visit the online museum, communicating remotely through Zoom. The objective of this study was to test whether a real-time EEG signal visualization device could help close the psychological distance between participants and whether it could increase user engagement with the online exhibition. Participants were randomly assigned to either the normal online exhibition experience group or EEG signal visualization device group. Participants in the NOEE group experienced four online exhibitions together. The conditions for participants in the ESVD group remained the same, apart from adding a media device to enable them to visualize EEG signals. A total of 40 university students participated in this study. Independent samples t-tests revealed that participants in the ESVD group perceived a significantly closer psychological distance between themselves and the participants on the opposite side than those in the NOEE group. A one-way ANOVA revealed that participants experienced Task3 with significantly closer psychological distance assessments than Task1, Task2, and Task4. Repeated ANOVAs revealed that participants in the ESVD group had higher overall user engagement than those in the NOEE group, with marginal significance. Thus, this study shows that EEG visualization media devices can reduce the psychological distance between two participants when experiencing an online exhibition. Moreover, it can increase user engagement to some extent. (shrink)

Vision consists of four essays: “Seeing distance,” “Size,” “Perceptual inference,” and “A Gibsonian alternative?” The continuous thread is the Berkeleian treatment of the perception of spatial properties, particularly in connection with what is and is not “immediately perceived.” The first two essays are closely connected with specific Berkeleian arguments and modern responses to them. The second two essays deal more generally with modern discussions by psychologists of whether visual perception is “direct” or “indirect.” The claims on the cover that (...) the book is “unique in its blend of philosophical and historical perspectives on contemporary issues in vision studies” and that it is “clearly written” and suitable “for an interdisciplinary readership in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, cognitive psychology and history of science” are all entirely justified. (shrink)

Weiermann [18] introduces a new method to generate fast growing functions in order to get an elegant and perspicuous proof of a bounding theorem for provably total recursive functions in a formal theory, e.g., in PA. His fast growing function θαn is described as follows. For each ordinal α and natural number n let T α n denote a finitely branching, primitive recursive tree of ordinals, i.e., an ordinal as a label is attached to each node in the tree (...) so that the labelling is compatible with the tree ordering. Then the tree T α n is well founded and hence finite by Konig's lemma. Define θαn=the depth of the tree T α n =the length of the longest branch in T α n . We introduce new fast and slow growing functions in this mode of definitions and show that each of these majorizes provably total recursive functions in PA. (shrink)

This paper investigates the link between the total bivariate risk premium and the sum of partial bivariate risk premia. Whereas in the case of small risks, the non interaction between risks is a sufficient condition to obtain the equality between the total risk premium and the sum of partial risk premia, the paper shows that this condition is not sufficient for large risks. The non interaction between risks occurs in two cases: if risks are independent or if individual's (...) marginal utility of one good is independent of the endowment in the other. Without restriction on the utility function, none of these two conditions is sufficient for large risks. If attention is restricted to preferences that exhibit constant absolute risk aversion, the non variability of the marginal utility of good one with respect to variations in endowment in the other remains a sufficient condition, while the independence between risks does not. (shrink)

Listeners are able to quite accurately distinguish between different dialects of their native language, but little is known about the process of dialect identification and the phonetic cues listeners use to identify someone's regional origin. This study examines how different segments, acoustic between-dialect distance, and the listeners' knowledge about a dialect contribute to this process. Native speakers of Grison and Zurich German were asked to categorize isolated words spoken by eight speakers of Grison and eight speakers of Zurich German. (...) Stimuli contained either none, one, or two segmental cues to regional origin. The presence of one dialect-specific segment was enough to allow for an identification rate well above chance. Sensitivity measures and analysis of reaction time showed that the two dialect groups largely relied on the same segmental cues. Acoustic distance to the other dialect, quantified as Euclidean distance in the F1×F2 vowel space, generally facilitated dialect identification, but interacted with native speakers' general knowledge about the dialects: In segments which listeners explicitly associate with one of the two dialects, acoustic distance facilitated dialect recognition to a larger extent than in segments listeners are not aware of dialectal variation. The results suggest that, depending on the prior knowledge about a dialect, acoustic variation is weighted differently. Further analysis showed that Zurich listeners were more sensitive to the dialect differences, responded faster, and presented a more-marked own-dialect response bias than Grison listeners. These findings are in line with the status of Grison German as a marked and Zurich German as a neutral dialect and suggest that, depending on their own dialect's status, listeners used different decision strategies. (shrink)

Why do people comply with coronavirus disease 2019 public health guidance? This study considers cultural-psychological foundations of variation in beliefs about motivations for such compliance. Specifically, we focused on beliefs about two sources of prosocial motivation: desire to protect others and obligation to society. Across two studies, we observed that the relative emphasis on the desire to protect others as an explanation for compliance was greater in the United States settings associated with cultural ecologies of abstracted independence than in (...) Chinese settings associated with cultural ecologies of embedded interdependence. We observed these patterns for explanations of psychological experience of both others and self, and for compliance with mandates for both social distancing and face masks. Discussion of results considers both practical implications for motivating compliance with public health guidance and theoretical implications for denaturalizing prevailing accounts of prosocial motivation. (shrink)

In our view, the ability to impose moral values which may be, to some extent, either shared or conflictual, influences the strategy adopted when writing argumentative texts. Our hypothesis is that the greater the socio-moral distance between the writers’ representations (the writers in this case being children) and those of the recipients (here the parents), the more likely it is that writing will be successful. Three topics derived from a preliminary experiment and corresponding to significant differences in opinion between (...) children and parents were tested in a population of 11-year-old pupils. The pupils had to write a letter designed to convince their parents about one of these topics. We analyzed the texts in order to identify the different configurations in the frequencies of use of the pronouns (frequencies of Je (I), Tu (You), Il (He), On (One/We)) and adverbs. These frequencies differed depending on the topic that was being written about (the moral context that is mobilized). (shrink)

We comment on the proposition “that lower temperatures and especially greater seasonal variation in temperature call for individuals and societies to adopt … a greater degree of self-control” (Van Lange et al., sect. 3, para. 4) for which we cannot find empirical support in a large data set with data-driven analyses. After providing greater nuance in our theoretical review, we suggest that Van Lange et al. revisit their model with an eye toward the social determinants of self-control.

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

" Pourquoi demandons-nous avec tant d'empressement au cerveau d'expliquer ce qui nous arrive et ce que nous devons faire? On se dit, n'est-ce pas dans ses replis que nous devons désormais chercher notre sort? La philosophie peut-elle rester indifférente à un tel sujet? [...] Mais avons-nous éclairci notre monde et résolu nos questions de vie en les enracinant dans nos cerveaux? A-t-on rendu la conscience moins mystérieuse? Et penser? L'organe de la pensée va-t-il enfin nous en dispenser? " L'auteur s'interroge (...) avec une douce ironie sur les espoirs et les fragilités qui s'expriment dans cette nouvelle quête de fondement que nous avons entreprise. Qu'on ne s'attende pas à trouver ici une théorie du fonctionnement cérébral, mais mille interrogations, mille formulations des questions qui surgissent dès lors qu'on interpose l'idée de cerveau entre nous et le monde. L'ensemble compose une suite de méditations, ramassées en brefs chapitres, pour trouver une place au cerveau et varier notre distance à son égard. (shrink)

In an earlier paper it was suggested that relationships between population density, migration, and the frequency of consanguineous marriage depended on variation in the social class composition of populations. For two valleys in the western Pyrenees, it was found that migration distances are shorter in areas with lower population density and that this could in part be attributed to the effects of social class independently of the occupations of the population. The present paper investigates further the relationships between migration, (...) the frequency of consanguineous marriage and inbreeding in the Roncal valley in Navarre, Spain, for the period 1877–1915. The Roncal valley contains seven villages, each a separate administrative unit. Almost all the total population of 3900 live in these nucleated villages and there are few isolated households. The area of the valley is 420 km2, and the population density 9·28 inhabitants/km2. (shrink)

In a development of the ecosemiotic vivo-scape concept, a ‘safety eco-field’ is proposed as a model of a species response to the safety of its environment. The safety eco-field is based on the ecosemiotic approach which considers environmental safety as a resource sought and chosen by individuals to counter predatory pressure. To test the relative safety of different locations within a landscape, 66 bird feeders (BF) were deployed in a regular 15 × 15 m grid in a rural area, surrounded (...) by shrubs, small trees, hedgerows, and buildings. On each of 48 days in November 2021 and February and March 2022, dried mealworms were placed on each BF and counts of larvae at each BF were made at noon and dusk. The European robin (Erithacus rubecula) and the great tit (Parus major) were the most regular visitors to the BFs. Land cover at each BF was recorded. Bird behaviour at the BFs was noted from direct video recordings of the birds at nine selected BFs, totalling 32 daily sessions in March. The different behaviours of the European robin and the great tit were observable. The safety eco-field changed according to the month and the time of day. The distance of the BF from the woodland edges seemed to be important only in the morning. In the afternoon, BFs that were more distant from the woodland edges received the highest number of visits. Weather conditions were found to influence the number of mealworms removed, but this requires further investigation. A significant relationship between land cover and the number of mealworm larvae removed from the BFs was observed. Within the grid of BF, three regions were distinguishable which were related to land cover in the safety eco-field process. The experimental framework confirms the adequacy, at least for birds that have cryptic predators, to map the landscape as a proxy of safety resource. From the video recordings it was noted that the European robin visits were distributed throughout the day without apparent temporal preferences, while the great tit visits were concentrated in the central part of the day. This result has the limitation of the short period of observation (March) and should be extended to the entire period of the experiment to eventually capture seasonal variation. The experimental evidence obtained confirms that the ecosemiotic-based models of safety eco-field are an efficient approach to explain bird feeding preferences and behaviours. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 60–63 Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. From the forthcoming book Post-History , Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013. It is not necessary to have a keen ear in order to find out that the steps we take towards the future sound hollow. But it is necessary to have concentrated hearing if one wishes to find out which type of vacuity resonates with our progress. There are several types of vacuity, and ours must be compared to others, if the aim (...) is to understand it. The incomparable is incomprehensible. If we affirm that our situation is incomparable, we give up the effort to grasp it. The comparison that imposes itself is to the vacuity of the Baroque. There are innumerable traces in the present that evoke the Baroque. We bear the mark of the same somber rationalism (logics, informatics, cybernetics), and of the same magic and fanatic irrationalism (mass media, phantastic ideologies). But there is a decisive difference. Humanity advanced over a stage during the Baroque. All of its gestures, even the most sincere, were marked by theatricality. The vacuity that resonated under its feet was of the void under the stage. Baroque man represented. 1 For example he represented faith in waging religious wars. Baroque vacuity was the consequence of a medieval loss of faith in dogmas . Our vacuity is different. We do not represent anything. Our world is not a stage. We are not actors, and if we act, it is not to represent a drama, but to divert the audience's attention and our own from the subjects that really matter. We act like criminals that try to hide their tracks. We pretend. Our progress is a farce. The vacuity under our feet is not Baroque. We have not lost our faith in dogmas: we have lost faith in ourselves . We are as counter-reformists as was the Baroque (we want to cover up the recent revolution with warm cloths), but for different reasons. Although comparable with the Baroque, in certain aspects, our situation is in fact incomparable to any other. That is because an incomparable, unheard of, never before seen event happened recently, which emptied the ground we tread. Auschwitz . Other posterior events; Hiroshima, the Gulags, are nothing but variations of the first. Therefore every attempt to grasp the present leads to the following questions: how was Auschwitz possible? How can we live after this? Such questions relate not only to the ones directly or indirectly responsible, and not only to those who were directly or indirectly hit by it: they relate to everyone who takes part in our culture. Because what is so incomparable, unheard of, never before seen and therefore incomprehensible in Auschwitz, is that it was there that Western culture revealed one of its inherent virtualities. Auschwitz is a characteristic realization of our culture. It is neither the product of a particular Western ideology, nor of specific “advanced” industrial techniques. It springs directly from the depths of culture and of its concepts and values. The possibility to realize Auschwitzes is implicit within our culture from the very start: the Western “project” already harbored it, although as a remote possibility. Auschwitz lies within the initial program of the West, which progressively realizes all of its virtualities as history unfolds. That is why the question that Auschwitz poses before us is not: how did it happen? It serves no purpose to “explain” Auschwitz. The fundamental question is: how was it possible? Because what is being questioned is not the extermination camp, but the West. Thus one other question: how to live within a culture henceforth unmasked? Everything that happened afterwards resonates with such a question, with such vacuity. Every economic, social, political, technical, scientific, artistic, philosophic event is corroded by such an undigested question. The distance that separates us from the event does not mitigate the abyss, it erodes it even deeper. Because the distance progressively dissolves the aura of the horror that envelops the event, and it progressively opens up a vision of the scene. It progressively reveals that there all of our categories, all of our “models”, suffered an irreparable shipwreck. Auschwitz was a revolutionary event, in the sense that it overthrew our culture. Insofar as we seek ways to cover up such revolution with trips to the moon or with genetic manipulations, we are counter-revolutionaries: we are inverting the course of history in order to cover up the past. The unspoken in Auschwitz is not the mass murder, it is not the crime . It is the ultimate reification of people into amorphous objects, into ashes. The Western tendency towards objectification was finally realized and it was done so in the shape of an apparatus . The SS were functionaries of an extermination apparatus, and their victims functioned in function of their own annihilation. The extermination camp's program, once it started functioning, developed in an automatic fashion, autonomous from the decisions of the initial programmers, even if, as it effectively did, it contributed to the defeat of the programmers. The SS and the Jews functioned one in function of the other like cogwheels. The models for such functionality were provided by the highest of Western values: the SS behaved like “heroes” and the Jews like “martyrs”. This is an apparatus that functions at a borderline situation: objective even beyond death. What has just been said is intolerable. We cannot accept it and so we mobilize arguments against it. Good arguments. The SS behaved like criminals: they removed the gold teeth from the cadavers. The Jews behaved like victims: they rose up in the Warsaw ghetto. Such arguments are true, but they do not reach the nucleus, the “ eidos ” of the phenomenon: they do not grasp it. Although there was “normal” behavior: (theft, murder, revolt, heroism), there was also “abnormal” behavior: functionality during a borderline situation. And this is what counts. There, for the first time in the history of humanity, an apparatus was put into operation that was programmed with the most advanced techniques available, which realized the objectification of man, together with the functional collaboration of man. The previous horrors committed by Western society against other societies and against itself (and there are many) were crimes . They were violations of Western models of behavior: anti-Christian, anti-human, irrational. So that it is possible to condemn them and continue to be Western, even if the horror is so colossal, such as the enslavement of Africans. However, it is not possible to condemn Auschwitz and continue to adhere consciously to the West. Auschwitz is not a violation of Western models of behavior, it is, on the contrary, the result of the application of such models. Our culture allowed its mystifying mask to fall and must be rejected in toto if we admit that the purpose of every culture is to allow for the convivial existence of men that recognize each other mutually as subjects. However: it is not possible to reject one's own culture. It is the ground we tread . Those who seek to reject their own culture (as Nietzsche did in rejecting Judeo-Christianity), fall victim to madness. Those who reject their culture's models, are incapable of grasping the world in which they live. Cultural models are traps to catch the world. Those who seek to substitute their own models for other's (for example by shouting “Hare Krishna”) will find that such exotic models have already been caught by the very models to be substituted. There is no exit: we are condemned to use our models and to serve such models, even after they have been unmasked, if we wish to continue living. The only alternative would be to commit suicide. That is: we must continue our economic, political, scientific, artistic, philosophic activities despite Auschwitz. We must continue progressing despite everything . That is why there are those who recommend that we should seek to forget what happened, that we should repress the event. They sustain that enough has already been said and written about the subject and that it is time to “overcome” it. But such an ostrich strategy reveals itself disastrous. Because the result is that Auschwitz transfers itself from Poland of the 1940s to the post-industrial society of the future. What characterizes the extermination camp is precisely that it is not an event that can be “overcome”, because it is the first realization of an inherent virtuality within the Western project, which will repeat itself in other formats unless we become totally conscious of it. The advantage (if this is an appropriate term) that Auschwitz offers us, is to give us a concrete example of the West’s tendency towards the apparatus. For the first time in our history it is possible for us to experience concretely the utopia inherent in our culture. For the first time in our history we have the experience that utopia, no matter in what form, towards which we progress, is the extermination camp. Everywhere we can observe, as of now, the emergence of variations on the theme “Auschwitz”. Everywhere apparatus spring, just like mushrooms after a Nazi rain, from the ground that has become rotten. Certainly: such new apparatus are not externally similar to the Nazi extermination camps. Their labels are different, as are the ideologies that pretend to inspire them. Even the apparatus that admittedly envision extermination, such as the Gulags, the ones of a future nuclear war, or the ones that functioned in Vietnam, claim to be different from Auschwitz. Others claim to be “friends of mankind”, such as the scientific, technical and administrative apparatus. But such labels and such ideologies are deceptive and serve only to cover up the essence of apparatus. They are all just like Auschwitz, black boxes that function with complex inner-workings in order to realize a program. They all function according to an inertia that is inherent to them and such functionality escapes , from a certain point, the control of their initial programmers. In a final analysis such apparatuses function, all of them, towards the annihilation of all their functionaries, including their programmers. Exactly because they objectify and dehumanize man. Thus Western culture reveals itself as a project that seeks to transform itself into an apparatus. What characterizes the West is its capacity for an objectifying transcendence. Such transcendence allows for the transformation of all phenomena, including the human phenomenon, into an object of knowledge and manipulation. The space for such transcendence opened up thanks to Judeo-Christianity and resulted, in the course of our history, in science, technique and recently, in Auschwitz. The ultimate objectification of the Jews into ashes is the ultimate victory of the spirit of the West. It is social technique taken to the extreme. Certainly: the transformation of men into ashes is primitive, incipient social technique that progressively refines itself. It will be followed by less brutal objectifications, such as the robotization of society. But it does not matter which form it will assume: it will always be an objectifying manipulation of mankind. Although the apparatus of the immediate future are not necessarily incineration ovens, all will be, and not only the nuclear ones, apparatus for the annihilation of man. The Western program contains several virtualities, not only apparatus. Numerous virtualities have not yet been realized. In this sense the “history of the West” has not ended yet, the Western game continues. But all not-yet realized virtualities are infected by apparatus. That is why it has become currently impossible to engage ourselves in the “ progress of culture .” As it would be to engage ourselves in our own annihilation. We have lost our faith in our culture, in the ground we tread. That is: we have lost faith in ourselves. It is this hollow vibration that follows our steps towards the future. What remains is for us to analyze the event “Auschwitz” in all its details in order to discover the fundamental project that realized itself there for the first time, so that we may nurture the hope to project ourselves out of that project. Out of the history of the West. This is the “post- historical” climate in which we are condemned to live from hereon. NOTES 1. In Portuguese representar (to represent) also means “to act” or “to play a role.&rdquo. (shrink)

The study aim was 2-fold (i) to describe and compare the in-season variations of acute: chronic workload ratio (ACWR) coupled, ACWR uncoupled, and exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) through session-rated perceived exertion (s-RPE), total distance (TD), high-speed running distance (HSRD), and sprint distance across different periods of a professional soccer season (early, mid, and end-season) between starters and non-starters; (ii) to analyze the relationship the aforementioned measures across different periods of the season for starters and non-starters. (...) Twenty elite soccer players (mean ± SD age, 29.4 ± 4.4 y; height, 1.8 ± 0.1 m; and body mass, 74.8 ± 2.3 kg). They were divided into starter and non-starter groups and were evaluated for 20 weeks. ACWR had general changes throughout the season. At the beginning and end of the mid-season, the highest ACWR was observed in three parameters: s-RPE, TD, and HSRD. ACWR and EWMA through sprint distance were higher at the beginning of the early-season than at any other time of the season.The ACWR coupled of s-RPE shows a significant higher value for non-starters than starters (p = 0.015;g = −1.01 [−1.98, −0.09]) and the ACWR coupled of TD shows a significant higher value for starters than non-starters in early-season (p < 0.01;g = 3.01 [1.78, 4.46]) and shows a significant higher value for non-starters than starters in mid-season (p < 0.01;g = −2.52 [−3.83, −1.39]), and end-season (p < 0.01;g = −2.57 [−3.89, −1.43]). While the EWMA of TD shows a significant higher value for starters than non-starters in early-season (p < 0.01;g = 2.25 [1.17, 3.49]) and mid-season (p < 0.01;g = 2.42 [1.31, 3.71]), and shows a significant higher value for non-starters than starters in end-season (p < 0.01;g = −2.23 [−3.47, −1.16]). Additionally, we found some correlations between external and internal load measures during three periods of the in-season. The study’s main finding was that the indexes of ACWR and EWMA were useful to detect differences between period and between playing status with the exception for the sprint variable. In addition, the necessary work for non-starter players’ improvement is not done during training, and these players lose their readiness as the season progresses. Consequently, these players perform poorly during the match. Therefore, coaches and their staff should consider devising new activities to keep non-starter players physically fit. This deficit must be accounted for in training because they compete in fewer matches and have less burden than starters. (shrink)

This study aimed at exploring the impact of post-epidemic era on teachers’ behavioral intention of distance education. In this study, purposive sampling method was used to enroll 390 teachers in colleges and universities, high schools and vocational schools, and junior high and elementary schools to be the research subjects for the questionnaire survey. A total of 360 questionnaires were collected for statistics, and AMOS 23.0 statistical software was used to analyze the correlation between variables. Meanwhile, a structural equation (...) model was used to analyze and verify the impact of the technology acceptance model, information system success model, and diffusion of innovations theory. According to the results, the system quality of distance teaching platforms certainly affected perceived usefulness, and perceived usefulness affected teachers’ attitudes toward using distance teaching systems. In addition, perceived ease of use had an impact on perceived usefulness, and trialability had an impact on teachers’ attitudes toward using distance teaching systems. Finally, teachers’ attitude toward using a distance teaching system also affected their behavioral intention. According to the results, suggestions were made in this study to teachers and students for distance teaching. Additionally, the main contribution of this study lies in providing specific strategies for further distance teaching through empirical results in combination with on-site teaching. (shrink)

As social animals, humans need to live in groups. This contact with conspecifics is essential for their evolution and survival. Among the recommendations to reduce transmission of the new coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 are social distancing and home confinement. These measures may negatively affect the social life and, consequently, the emotional state and eating behavior of individuals. We assessed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the anxiety, premenstrual symptoms, and eating behavior of young women. Data collection was conducted in (...) person and online. A total of 71 participants, average age of 21.26 years, took part in the study. Trait anxiety during the pandemic was significantly lower than in the prepandemic period. Investigation of the “anxiety/stress” symptom of the Premenstrual Symptoms Screening Tool revealed that this symptom was more severe before the pandemic. There was a decline in the desire for sweet and fatty foods during the pandemic. However, craving for traditional foods rose significantly in the same period. Uncontrolled and emotional eating were significantly lower during the pandemic. The results suggest that the pandemic may have had a positive impact on anxiety and eating behavior of the participants, which may be due to differences between urban and rural populations and the latter living with their families. These findings are important for raising a discussion regarding the effects of the current environment on the regulation of cognitive and dietary adaptations. (shrink)

The author intends to investigate the role of social distancing laws in the new normal as well as the effectiveness of forced shift to media online learning. This research indicates that student involvement had a moderating influence during the epidemic. This study is based on social learning theory, which endeavors to emulate the behavior, perceptions, and emotions of other individuals. The data were obtained from various Chinese universities. We gathered data utilizing the stratified sample approach as well as Google Form. (...) A total of 256 students enrolled in a variety of programs at Chinese universities completed a questionnaire for this investigation. The direct, mediating, and moderating effects of the variables were evaluated using partial least square structural equation modeling in this study, using the Smart-PLS software 3.0. According to the findings, forced shift to media online learning acts as a mediator between the lack of social interaction, perceived harm, perception of maintaining social distancing, and the law, and the effectiveness of media online learning has a significant effect on the effectiveness of media online learning. In addition, student engagement appears to be a moderator between the forced shift to media online learning and its effectiveness. A future study might concentrate on gaining a deeper understanding of the numerous online engagement-promoting behaviors. Teachers must go above and above to provide themes that enable pupils to connect while learning. Instructors and educational institutions will benefit from the research since it will allow them to define methods for boosting social interaction in online learning and analyze methods for enhancing the efficacy of media in online learning. (shrink)

Ethics position theory (EPT) maintains that individuals’ personal moral philosophies influence their judgments, actions, and emotions in ethically intense situations. The theory, when describing these moral viewpoints, stresses two dimensions: idealism (concern for benign outcomes) and relativism (skepticism with regards to inviolate moral principles). Variations in idealism and relativism across countries were examined via a meta-analysis of studies that assessed these two aspects of moral thought using the ethics position questionnaire (EPQ; Forsyth, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology39, 175–184, 1980). (...) This review identified 139 samples drawn from 29 different countries, for a total sample of 30,230 respondents, and concluded that (a) levels of idealism and relativism vary across regions of the world in predictable ways; (b) an exceptionist ethic is more common in Western countries, subjectivism and situationism in Eastern countries, and absolutism and situationism in Middle Eastern countries; and (c) a nation’s ethics position predicted that country’s location on previously documented cultural dimensions, such as individualism and avoidance of uncertainty (Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, 1980). Limitations in these methods and concerns about the validity of these cross-cultural conclusions are noted, as are suggestions for further research using the EPQ. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to explore how Chinese Football Super League referees’ physical performance and decision-making distance varied according to match type and match halves. Data from 107 matches played by top-4 ranked and bottom-4 ranked teams during 2018–2019 CSL seasons were collected. Level of matches was classified into three groups: upper-ranked teams against top-4 teams, top-4 teams against lower-ranked teams, and bottom-4 teams against bottom-4 teams. Two-way ANOVA and Scheirer-Ray-Hare test were used to examine the statistical (...) differences of referees’ physical and spatial related distance variables among different match levels and halves. The Euclidean distance to the ball at the following three variables were statistically different among three match types: clearance, running with the ball, and shot off target. In addition, referees’ distance to the ball at three events were statistically different between both match halves: pass, reception, and running with the ball. The total running distance was statistically different between both match halves. The findings indicated that although CSL referees showed little difference in physical performance when officiating matches of three competitive levels and two halves, distinct rhythms of competitions determined that they needed to adjust running strategies to maintain proper distance to the ball. This study implied that the CSL referees’ match performance was affected by the teams’ style of play and match status. (shrink)

In their attempts to come know the first principle of reality, the One, the Neoplatonic philosophers employ a negative theological approach. In the case ofPlotinus, this approach can be described as a “taking away” : as the One is in its purity present to the soul, the task of the soul consists in taking away—that is, removing—all positive approaches. The case of Proclus is different as he departs from a different metaphysical presupposition: taking away will not work, because the One (...) as it is remains distant from the soul. Instead he pleads for an approach by means of negations, which ought to awaken our awareness of the totally different character of the trace of the One in us, but can never lead to an experience of the One as it is. The two approaches function in different metaphysical contexts. Hence it may be surprising that Pseudo-Dionysius, a keen reader not only of Proclus but also of Plotinus, invokes both approaches and thinks them reconcilable. This essay attempts to describe the nature of this compatibility and to reconstruct the metaphysical context that it presupposes. (shrink)

One of the many drastic changes caused by Covid-19 was the quick implementation of distance learning which represented a great technological challenge to many teachers and students. In fact, Italy ranks 24th amongst the 27-EU member countries in digital competitiveness which testifies to the significant delays and gaps in basic digital skills amongst the population. Based on the difficulties encountered in organizing distance learning, we assumed that teachers' perceived stress increased. Given that transversal skills can be associated with (...) this relationship, we hypothesized that among these skills, self-efficacy mediated the relationship between the difficulties in organizing distance learning and perceived stress. Since we targeted teachers from Italy and other European countries, we also hypothesized that this mediator effect would be different for both samples. Our sample was composed of a total of 366 primary/middle school teachers of which 86% female. After doing a mediation analyses with Process, Hayes' Model 4, we confirmed H1 but not H2: resulting in a partial mediation effect of self-efficacy for each individual group of teachers. Since difficulties of distance learning can affect the perception of stress, we believe that the promotion of transversal skills, such as self-efficacy, can better equip teachers when facing stressful situations. (shrink)

Verteilung des Aktionsstromes längs zwei Nerven Die vonN. Rashevsky entwickelten Formeln für die Verteilung des Aktionsstromes in einer unendlichen Nervenfaser werden auf den Fall von zwei in Serie aneinander anliegenden Fasern verallgemeinert.Distribution du Courant d'action lelong de deux nerfs en série La théorie mathématique développée parN. Rashevsky pour le cas d'un nerf d'extension indéfinie est généralisée pour le cas d'un nerf aboutissant à distance finie à un autre nerf.

IN this paper I would like to suggest that by reconstructing the relationship between time and teleology --as this relationship might be implied by Kant's theory--one of the most complicated problems of this theory may be solved. This problem concerns a construction of time suitable to the particular needs of Kant's doctrines of the history of reason and philosophy, or of the history of mankind, which proceeds according to the total imperative of morality. Teleological time, a concept which I (...) shall attempt to present in this paper, has to do with the two employments of judgment, the determinant and the reflective. This teleological time is not merely a form of intuition, nor is it subject to the schematism of deterministic causality, and it is exempt from some impediments which render rational history, in the domains of theory and praxis alike, impossible, if indeed such a history requires time. Thus, I shall attempt in this paper to suggest a solution to the so-called Kantian "antinomy of history": Kant's theory employs time as a form of intuition, which, on the one hand, has mechanical-deterministic qualities and, on the other, a rational history, although it seems that these two are in antagonism. I attempt to suggest a solution to this antinomy without claiming that the history of reason is a "pure supra-temporal processuality." This is a crucial problem in Kant's theory and the possibility of solving it is necessary for the success of the theory. This is also a problem of systematization: How is it possible to solve the problem of the duality of time and reason? (shrink)

We conducted a rapid review and quantitative summary of meta-analyses that have examined interventions which can be used by individuals during quarantine and social distancing to manage anxiety, depression, stress and subjective well-being. A literature search yielded 34 meta-analyses (total number of studies k = 1,390, n = 145,744) that were summarized. Overall, self-guided interventions showed small to medium effects in comparison to control groups. In particular, self-guided therapeutic approaches (including cognitive-behavioral, mindfulness, and acceptance-based interventions), selected positive psychology interventions, (...) and multi-component and activity-based interventions (music, physical exercise) showed promising evidence for effectiveness. Overall, self-guided interventions on average did not show the same degree of effectiveness as traditional guided individual or group therapies. There was no consistent evidence of dose effects, baseline differences and differential effectiveness of eHealth interventions. More research on the effectiveness of interventions in diverse cultural settings is needed. (shrink)

My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are (...) relevant to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture. Through the structuring of the argument within the thesis - and overtly within the conclusion - I have articulated a non-teleological creative strategy which provides the basis for an unconstraining integration of noologies (ways of semblancing the thinking process). This strategy provides a means of exemplifying - and for honoring - various methods of thinking. This structuring strategy is consistent with the 'hacker ethic' as defined by Steven Levy, as a demand that access to computers - and anything which might teach us something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. To follow this strategy, this dissertation has set out to understand how topical conceptions of virtual immersion connect to pre-existing systems of thought as revealed in art as they have extended out of antecedent ontological self-understandings, historical human self-understandings which have evidenced themselves in the elaboration of technological objectives. To do this I have forged a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality within this dissertation by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with the relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. (shrink)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, cities and states adopted social distancing, social isolation, or quarantine measurements to slow the transmission of the disease. Negative mental health outcomes including depression and anxiety have been associated with social distancing or social isolation. The purpose of the present study was to examine changes in psychological health and physical activity over an 8 week period under social distancing policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods: Ninety individuals participated in this study. Qualifying participants answered questions using an (...) online survey regarding their loneliness, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, mood state, and physical activity over four time points each lasting two weeks.Results: Symptoms of depression and state anxiety were increased in the population when compared to nationwide statistics from before the COVID-19 pandemic. Time point 2, ~1 month into social isolation, showed the most significant effects on mental health. During this time point, 100% of the participants showed symptoms of depression. There were no significant changes in physical activity over the 8 weeks. Loneliness, depressive symptoms, fatigue, and mood state were negatively associated with participation in physical activity. Vigor and state anxiety were associated with participation in physical activity.Conclusion: Social isolation and social distancing practices have had a negative effect on depression, anxiety, and mood over time. It appeared that depressive symptoms and total mood disturbance was elevated during time point two. Depressive symptoms were much higher than average compared to previous epidemiological data. Physical activity amount did not change over time but was associated with poor mental health. (shrink)

The paper reviews methods, and their difficulties, in the measurement of the daily energy expenditure of rural women under field conditions in developing countries. Since all methods need to be validated against a reference method which is usually based on indirect calorimetry, examples of the use of this technique are given. The energy costs of most agricultural and daily tasks of rural women in developing countries have been measured. Large intra- and inter-individual variations in the cost of a single activity (...) occur, so repeated measurements are needed to obtain a valid mean energy cost for a specific activity for a homogeneous group of individuals.Much work remains to be done on the assessment of the duration and the intensity of the physical activity of the rural adolescent and adult female population. Studies indicate that the workload of most rural women in developing countries is excessive and frequently associated with acute poverty. (shrink)

In the education context, The Motivational Strategies for Learning Questionnaire is extensively used in assessing self-regulated learning strategies. However, more research is needed to address whether it is applicable for distance education. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were used to test the Chinese version of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire part-B for distance learning using two samples totalling 385 participants. This paper substantiates MSLQ-B-DL's criterion-related, convergent, and factorial validity, as well as its internal consistency, in China. (...) Specifically, the concurrent validity of the MSLQ-B-DL was shown from three aspects: the negative correlation of MSLQ-B-DL with trait procrastination; the positive correlation of MSLQ-B-DL with self-control; and the positive correlation of MSLQ-B-DL with instrumental help-seeking and the former's negative correlation with help-seeking avoidance and executive help-seeking. Finally, this study highlights the MSLQ-B-DL's validity and reliability in evaluating the learning strategies in adult distance education in China. (shrink)

Background Research on the impact of ethics reflection groups (ERG) (also called moral case deliberations (MCD)) is complex and scarce. Within a larger study, two years of ERG sessions have been used as an intervention to stimulate ethical reflection about the use of coercive measures. We studied changes in: employees’ attitudes regarding the use of coercion, team competence, user involvement, team cooperation and the handling of disagreement in teams. Methods We used panel data in a longitudinal design study to measure (...) variation in survey scores from multidisciplinary employees from seven departments within three Norwegian mental health care institutions at three time points (T0–T1–T2). Mixed models were used to account for dependence of data in persons who participated more than once. Results In total, 1068 surveys (from 817 employees who did and did not participate in ERG) were included in the analyses. Of these, 7.6% (N = 62) responded at three points in time, 15.5% (N = 127) at two points, and 76.8% (N = 628) once. On average, over time, respondents who participated in ERG viewed coercion more strongly as offending (p < 0.05). Those who presented a case in the ERG sessions showed lower scores on User Involvement (p < 0.001), Team Cooperation (p < 0.01) and Constructive Disagreement (p < 0.01). We observed significant differences in outcomes between individuals from different departments, as well as between different professions. Initial significant changes due to frequency of participation in ERG and case presentation in ERG did not remain statistically significant after adjustment for Departments and Professions. Differences were generally small in absolute terms, possibly due to the low amount of longitudinal data. Conclusions This study measured specific intervention-related outcome parameters for describing the impact of clinical ethics support (CES). Structural implementation of ERGs or MCDs seems to contribute to employees reporting a more critical attitude towards coercion. Ethics support is a complex intervention and studying changes over time is complex in itself. Several recommendations for strengthening the outcomes of future CES evaluation studies are discussed. CES evaluation studies are important, since—despite the intrinsic value of participating in ERG or MCD—CES inherently aims, and should aim, at improving clinical practices. (shrink)

Clark reports on a variationist analysis of intervocalic word‐medial /t/ from recorded spontaneous speech monologues. The results provide evidence that tokens are more likely to be realized as voiced if the preceding token was voiced, an effect which is weaker with increased temporal distance between the prime and target.

This study investigates whether there is a relation between the semantics of linguistic expressions that indicate temporal distance and the spatial properties of their co-speech gestures. To this date, research on time gestures has focused on features such as gesture axis, direction, and shape. Here we focus on a gesture property that has been overlooked so far: the distance of the gesture in relation to the body. To achieve this, we investigate two types of temporal linguistic expressions are (...) addressed: proximal (e.g., near future, near past) and distal (e.g., distant past, distant future). Data was obtained through the NewsScape library, a multimodal corpus of television news. A total of 121 co-speech gestures were collected and divided into the two categories. The gestures were later annotated in terms of gesture space and classified in three categories: (i) center, (ii) periphery, and (iii) extreme periphery. Our results suggest that gesture and language are coherent in the expression of temporal distance: when speakers locate an event far from them, they tend to gesture further from their body; similarly, when locating an event close to them, they gesture closer to their body. These results thus reveal how co-speech gestures also reflect a space-time mapping in the dimension of distance. (shrink)

This study investigates whether and how the intensity of social distancing from the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic influences the corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure index. An empirical examination is carried out based on data from the Shanghai Stock Exchange from 2020 to 2022. CSR disclosure index is measured by the percentage of CSR-related press releases from the total press releases published on a certain day. The intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic is measured by the daily confirmed cases among (...) the population in China. This research uses the two-stage least squares regression model to alleviate the endogeneity issues. Findings reveal a reverse correlation between the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the CSR disclosure. The results are consistent and robust to endogeneity tests and sensitivity analyses. Findings support the stakeholder–agency theory and indicate that Chinese managers tend to satisfy the shareholders' interests rather than those of other broad stakeholders. Moreover, Chinese managers tend to choose short-term survival rather than long-term development in times of social distancing. (shrink)

Lévinas is the philosopher of the absolutely Other, the thinker of the primacy of the ethical relation, the poet of the face. Against the formalism of Kantian subjectivity, the totality of the Hegelian system, the monism of Husserlian phenomenology and the instrumentalism of Heideggerian ontology, Lévinas develops a phenomenological account of the ethical relation grounded in the idea of infinity, an idea which is concretely produced in the experience with the absolutely other, particularly, in their face. The face of the (...) other, irreducible to any ontological structure of being or any epistemological intentionality of representation, reaches out from on high across the abyss of the isolated ego, commanding respect all the while granting the possibility of murder. This experience overflows the subjective capacity of the separated ego, forcing it “beyond being.” This anarchic relation with the Other is the groundless condition of possibility for ethical life, that is, truly human life. The structure of the ethical relation can then be determined in hindsight as the ground of meaning for what it is to be an I at all. -/- This is a pretty uncontroversial reading of Lévinas' work, especially Totality and Infinity. And yet, there is one small problem. If this is what Lévinas is doing, then why does the largest section of Totality and Infinity – section II, “Interiority and Economy” – have nothing to do with ethics, the other, or the face at all? Why is it devoted to an arduous analysis of what he calls separation, egoism, economy, enjoyment, labour, and possession? In other words, why does Lévinas spend so much energy on writing about the egoist at the heart of his magnum opus, which is supposedly a text devoted to the Other? And furthermore, why is this section one of the least discussed in the secondary literature on Lévinas? -/- These questions motivate the present inquiry, which modestly seeks to understand what Lévinas is up to in this section. Once laying out the basic story, I will focus on the concepts of labour and possession, for I think these are the unrecognized pivots upon which the transition from ego to Other turns. I will also make some slight attempts to interpret Lévinas' direct or indirect comments on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. For although he distances himself from these giants, he stands on their shoulders as well. (shrink)

Male white-rumped munias sing syntactically simpler songs than their domestic counterparts, Bengalese finches. The differences in song structure may reflect differences in natural selection pressures between wild and domestic environments. Deacon (2010) proposed song simplicity of the wild strain could be subject to natural selection. We hypothesized the selection pressure may be species identification. Thus, we compared song variations in relation to ecological factors and dispersal history of white-rumped munias to understand song evolutionary processes. We found geographic variations of song (...) syntactical complexity. The difference of song syntactical complexity did not corresponded to genetic distance, but did to that of the proportion of mixed flocks with sympatric related species. Birds that inhabited the areas with more mixed flocks sang simpler songs. The song complexity might be constrained to intensify distinct conspecific signals from related species. Our field work provided empirical evidence supporting a proposal made by Deacon (2010). Keywords: birdsong; evolution; masking hypothesis; Bengalese finches; song geographic variation; genetic variation. (shrink)

Male white-rumped munias sing syntactically simpler songs than their domestic counterparts, Bengalese finches. The differences in song structure may reflect differences in natural selection pressures between wild and domestic environments. Deacon proposed song simplicity of the wild strain could be subject to natural selection. We hypothesized the selection pressure may be species identification. Thus, we compared song variations in relation to ecological factors and dispersal history of white-rumped munias to understand song evolutionary processes. We found geographic variations of song syntactical (...) complexity. The difference of song syntactical complexity did not corresponded to genetic distance, but did to that of the proportion of mixed flocks with sympatric related species. Birds that inhabited the areas with more mixed flocks sang simpler songs. The song complexity might be constrained to intensify distinct conspecific signals from related species. Our field work provided empirical evidence supporting a proposal made by Deacon. Keywords: birdsong; evolution; masking hypothesis; Bengalese finches; song geographic variation; genetic variation. (shrink)

A well-known relativistic action at a distance interaction of two unequal masses is altered so as to yield purely Newtonian radial forces with fixed particle rest masses in the system center-of-momentum inertial frame. Although particle masses experience no kinematic mass increase in this frame, speeds are naturally restricted to less than the speed of light. We derive a relation between the center-of-momentum frame total Newtonian energy and the composite rest mass. In a new proper time quantum formalism, we (...) obtain an L2(R4 ⊗ R4, C) Hilbert space by varying individual particle rest masses. We propose the use of density operators, recognizing that the auxiliary proper time parameter is not an observable. The quantum formalism is applied to our altered version of the relativistic harmonic oscillator. Our generalized coherent states yield four-dimensional wave packets which follow the correct classical world lines. Appendices contain reviews of classical Hamiltonian reparametrization (incorporating our notion of manifest covariance), and a comparison of this work with the literature. (shrink)