Focusing on Joyce’s use of Aristotle’s De Anima, and on Aquinas’s response to Aristotle, this essay takes, as its starting point, the recourse to two areas of enquiry in recent work on modernism: animal studies and phenomenology. In this essay we examine the intersection within Ulysses of the concept of the soul in Aristotle and Aquinas, show how this relates to questions of animality, and open the way to asking what implication the theological reflection on the soul at the centre (...) of Ulysses might have for a process of uncovering theological contents in the concept of “life” in modernist studies more generally. (shrink)

What is the objective of ideology critique today? A unique answer to this question can be found in the work of Bernard Stiegler: the object of ideology critique is stupidity. Stiegler’s work will be situated with regard to the study of ideology and post-structuralism, reframed as respective versions of a dichotomy between critical and neutral theories, to show how Stiegler’s conception of ideology encompasses both. How he thinks ideology 'after' post-structuralism will be explored through his reading of Deleuze and Guattari. (...) First, by seeing how Stiegler capitalises upon the theoretical developments of Deleuze and Guattari to rethink the notion of ideology. Second, by seeing how this understanding of ideology is folded back on their work, in order to discern how post-structuralism can be critiqued by a theory of ideology that utilises its views. From the perspective of his reading of desire in Deleuze, Guattari, and Freud, Stiegler shows how ideology destroys the desire to rethink ideas, and enforces stupidity. Third, after Stiegler’s theoretical labour, we arrive at a notion of ideology dichotomised between the critical and the stupid, tasking critique with the invention of new forms of desire, and the struggle against stupidity. (shrink)

The central aim of this thesis is to examine five of Norma Shearer's pre-Code films - all made between 1930 and 1934 - and to place these films and their accompanying fan magazine rhetoric into a wider context, both within Shearer's career and within Hollywood history. It does this for two reasons. Firstly, it hopes to problematise the now commonly held view of Shearer as a noble, respectable, but ultimately rather dull star by demonstrating the ways in which these films (...) allowed her to become an active advocate for a particular brand of often sexually transgressive modernity, in which she embraced consumer and leisure culture, female employment, companionate marriage and even the sexual single standard. Secondly, the thesis examines the fan magazine rhetoric on the star alongside these films and shows how her successful and happy marriage to MGM Head of Production Irving G. Thalberg served to strengthen, rather than soften, her position as a quintessential modern both on and off screen. After all, the marriage, in which Shearer and Thalberg were professional as well as romantic partners, allowed Shearer to promote a certain kind of companionate marriage, complete with mutual professional satisfaction, successful parenthood, and sexual compatibility. At the height of her fame, Shearer was the star who demonstrated to her female fans that a woman, in the brave new world of the early 20th century, should be able to have it all. Finally, then, the thesis examines how Shearer's ultra-modern reputation came to an end in the mid-1930s, and attributes this development primarily to two influences, one historical and one biographical. Firstly, in July 1934, the Hays Production Code was enforced; particularly targeting female sexual transgression on screen, this censorship text would make it virtually impossible for Shearer to make the types of films she had become most famous for. Secondly, then, in September 1936, Shearer's husband's premature death ensured that the star, who had previously been characterised as a modern wife, now became identified as a tragic, aristocratic, noble widow. Since her films no longer allowed her to develop an alternative persona, this is how Shearer remained known after her retirement, after her death, and to this day. (shrink)

This paper explores the concepts of ‘embodiment’, as well as those of ‘conditioned relativism’ and ‘dispositional diversity’ as first devised by the paper’s author some fifteen years ago as an undergraduate student, and applies them to debates regarding neurodiversity. These concepts were devised by the author many years prior to being diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, having been previously assessed as “suffering” from a number of mental illnesses by a number of psychiatrists in his youth. Drawing upon Marxist (...) and Phenomenological theories in particular, these concepts are explained through an eclectic citation of references ranging from Lao Tsu to Jimi Hendrix. These philosophical/sociological conceptions will be contrasted with those of others within the neurodiversity movement as a way of highlighting the need for “autistic solidarity” and the disabling effects of being isolated from others of similar disposition. It is hoped that through this overview, a theoretical account of autistic difference being a normal part of the diversity characteristic of all nature, and thus hopefully dislodging the hegemonic dominance of what constitutes “normalcy”. This paper was first delivered at the Theorising Normalcy Conference 2012. (shrink)

In this paper, we will argue that, of the various grammatical and discourse constraints that affect acceptability in Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), only the structural parallelism constraint is unique to VPE. We outline (previously noted) systematic problems that arise for classical structural accounts of VPE resolution, and discuss efforts in recent research on VPE to reduce explanations of acceptability in VPE to general well-formedness constraints at the level of information structure [e.g. Kehler, 2000, 2002, Kertz, 2013, Kehler, 2015]. In two (...) magnitude estimation experiments, we show that — in line with Kehler’s predictions — degradation due to structural mismatch is modulated by coherence relation. On the other hand, we consistently find residual structural mismatch effects, suggesting that the interpretation of VPE is sensitive to structural features of the VPE antecedent. We propose that a structural constraint licenses VPE, but that sentences violating this constraint can nevertheless be interpreted. The variability in acceptability is accounted for not by additional constraints on VPE in the grammar, but by the numerous general biases that affect sentence and discourse well-formedness, such as information structural constraints [as proposed by Kertz, 2013], discourse coherence relations Kehler [2000], sensitivity to Question Under Discussion structure [e.g. Ginzburg and Sag, 2000, Kehler, 2015], and thematic role bias at the lexical level [e.g. McRae et al., 1998]. We test the prediction that thematic role bias (Experiment 3) and QUD structure (Experiment 4) will influence both elliptical and non-elliptical sentences alike, while structural mismatch continues to degrade elliptical sentences alone. Our proposal differs from existing proposals in cutting the explanatory pie in a different way with respect to how variations in acceptability are accounted for. We suggest that degradation can result from at least two distinct and separable sources: violating construction-specific grammatical constraints, or from complexity differences in interpretation related to very general discourse level information. (shrink)

From Machiavelli via Hobbes, Locke and Grotius to J.S. Mill and John Rawls, the liberal (and republican) tradition pivots about the primacy of the individual over all forms of human association and allied to this primacy is the replacing of notions of substan¬tive goodness or truth with the ultimate foundation of society upon subjective rights secured by the power of the central state. Those rights are grounded in the human will and the artifice of the social contract that has supplanted (...) older ideas of covenantal relationships governed by a logic of reciprocity or gift-exchange. Liberalism is therefore inherently atomistic and oscillates between the isolated individual and some collective unity either objectively compounded or artificially supposed – ‘Leviathan’ was both. By positing an asocial ‘state of nature’, liberal contractualism purports to invent the artificial order of politics. By contrast, Romanticism – in the works of Novalis, Schlegel, Carlyle, Coleridge, de Biran and Bulgakov – develops develop in novel ways the ancient and Christian idea that human beings as social, political creatures have a natural desire for objective, substantive values by which to orientate their lives and give them that coherent shape which alone engenders a sense of real fulfilment. This teleological space cannot be equated with the impersonal, absolute sovereignty of national states and transnational markets but requires interpersonal relations within a mediated polity that has a transcendent outlook. So whereas liberalism merely regulates the evil and violence which it views as primary (and which therefore it perpetuates and even reinforces), Romanticism offers a vision of partial redemption in this life just because the Fall and original sin never fully destroyed the fundamentally peaceful, ontological ordering of the world. Rather, as fallen creatures equally capable of vice and virtue, human beings can discover their own particular purpose and place in society that is ordered to the good of the whole cosmos ultimately rooted in God’s creative action. By practising virtue, we can be redeemed in this life up to a point and we can begin to redeem the promise of an original harmony. (shrink)

Research in information systems includes a range of approaches which make varied contributions in terms of knowledge, understanding, or practical developments. In these days of “fake news” and spurious internet content, scholarly research needs to be able to demonstrate its validity – are its finding true, or its recommendations correct? We argue that there are fundamental validation criteria that can be applied to all research approaches despite their apparent diversity and conflict. These stem from current views of the nature of (...) truth, and the related but wider concept correctness, within philosophy. There has been much debate about the nature of truth – is it correspondence, coherence, consensual or pragmatic? Current debates revolve around the idea of a pluralist view of truth – that there are different forms of truth depending on the context or domain. Related to truth is the wider concept of correctness – propositions may be true but correctness can also be applied to actions, performances or behavior for which truth is not appropriate. We develop a framework for research validity and apply it to a range of research forms including positivist, interpretive, design science, critical and action-oriented. The benefits are: i) a greater and more explicit focus on validity criteria will produce better research; ii) having a single framework can provide some commonality between what at times seem conflicting approaches to research; iii) having criteria made explicit should encourage debate and further development. The framework is applied to a variety of empirical papers employing varied research approaches. (shrink)

The general aim of this project is to fundamentally re-think the design of teaching materials in view of what is now known about cognitive deficits and about what Howard Gardner has termed ‘multiple intelligences’. The applicant has implemented this strategy in two distinct areas, the first involving the writing of an English language programme for Chinese speakers, the second involving the construction of specialized equipment for teaching elementary logic to blind students. The next phase is to test the effectiveness of (...) the logic device, because in theory – the one to be tested – materials the design of which is informed by the above rationale will provide a richer learning experience for non-impaired users. (shrink)

I shall give an account of my efforts trying to propose, formalise and succeed variously in running philosophically framed courses as part of academic programmes defined by another discipline, namely education. Philosophy of education as a sub-discipline has a long pedigree, institutionally placed normally under education rather than philosophy, despite the celebration in western philosophy of the agenda for epistemology set by Socrates, who, as described in the Meno, infamously teaches Pythagoras’s Theorem in his distinctive way to the slave boy. (...) However, the academic schools of education in higher education institutions normally focus on learning and teaching issues in compulsory schooling environments. In trying to set up a new philosophy-oriented course in programmes focusing on learning and teaching and other aspects of practice at professional and higher education levels, I met with unprecedented tangible resistance. I find a significant cause of this to lie in the placing of education as a concrete discipline typically within the social sciences fold and its concomitant performance indicators. The attempt to refine the disciplinary credentials of education by, for instance, establishing certain methodologies has given rise to the sort of problem Barry Stierer notes in observing the difficulties variously experienced by higher education lecturers in writing their assignments for academic development programmes. Education is not instead a sub-discipline, and therefore a different sub-disciplinary concern respectively for each regular discipline. Education is, rather, as Keith Hoskin explains, supra-disciplinary. This means, among other things, that, as long as the pedagogical approaches are sound, the learning of new disciplinary practices will not demand too much of course participants competent in their own various different disciplines. For pedagogies to be sound, they need to be thoroughly disciplinary but at the same time they may foster ‘transdisciplinarity’ in the learner, making them, in Michael F.D.Young’s term, ‘connective specialists’. It remains another interesting question whether or not, for instance, studying philosophy, rather than other subjects, enables graduates to be more transdisiplinary. My concern has been how to integrate non-philosophers into relatively philosophically oriented courses and what sort of attainment to expect out of them. I illustrate this through my setting up two courses: one on issues in research practice, aimed primarily at science research students on professionally oriented programmes such as the Engineering Doctorate; and one on philosophical issues in higher learning, aimed at higher education lecturers. (shrink)

What are the possibilities and limits of legal interpretation? Are lawyers neutral interpreters of legal texts? Can they ever become unprejudiced, say, through resort to a method? Are there words that can constrain the most activist of judges? Must even the adherent to the strongest form of judicial restraint accept that words carry inherent interpretative latitude? Does legal interpretation involve more than the simple application of the law to the facts? To what extent do economic, socio-political or religious factors influence (...) the interpretation of law and how legitimately so? Ought the age and gender of the interpreter to play a determining role in the understanding of legal texts? Can rules of interpretation lead the interpreter to the correct meaning of the law? Is there the exact meaning of the law in any event? Further, one may ask whether it is not problematic that the interpretation of international legal texts should vary significantly from one country to another. For example, does one expect Chinese and Japanese judges to adopt the same approach to the legal interpretation of an international treaty? Can we at least assume that English and North-American lawyers read legal texts in English in the same way? Is it possible to achieve a uniform interpretation of an international legal instrument across a great number of different countries or Member States? This collection of essays explores the matter of reading the law and inquires into the emergence of meaning within the dynamic between reader and text against the background of the reader’s worldly finiteness. It wishes to contribute to an improved appreciation of the merits and limits of law’s hermeneutics which, it argues, is emphatically not to be reduced to a simple tool for textual exegesis. In this regard, the various chapters purport to supplement and update the body of work to be found in the available literature on legal hermeneutics, whether ancient or recent. More precisely, the contributions to this volume aim to revisit legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to such other disciplines as philosophy, sociology and linguistics. (shrink)

Traditional accounts conceive of the autistic individual as being locked in his/her own world due to difficulties in social interaction, communication and imagination (Wing 1996). The paradoxical association between autism and creativity is one of the reasons the condition causes such fascination and yet remains an enigma. This essay draws upon practical research exploring applications of performance to engage with atypical neuro-cognitive experience. The research explores new insights into the imagination and perception in autism through the multisensory multimodalities of performance, (...) which, it is speculated, offer a space for ‘encounters’ with autistic states of being. We draw upon our AHRC practice-based project ‘Imagining Autism’, which explores the phenomenology of autism through a series of immersive, multi-sensory installations, puppetry and interactive digital media, to facilitate communication and social interaction with 7-11 year olds across the spectrum. These methods are developing new understanding of the imagination in autism and how it may be differently inflected from the recreative imaginations of neurotypicals. How can atypical experience be accessed through performance vocabularies? Does autism predispose to talents and if so, why? What is the nature of autistic creativity alongside neurotypical creativity? We reconceptualise the imagination in autism, challenging dualisms between the rational and the intuitive, the aesthetic and non-aesthetic and most crucially, imaginative creativity versus the recreative imagination. Two interactions between facilitators and children in the immersive and deeply sensory performance environments of ‘Imagining Autism’ are closely analysed to evidence cognitive development via the autistic imagination at work. A comedic exchange between a practitioner and a non-verbal child reveals ideation in the child building in rhythmic stages of somatic interaction; another child evidences imaginative engagement through shape, colour, texture, sound and movement while immersed in ‘outer space’. These examples suggest that the somatic interaction of body and the environment are as much part of cognition and the creative imagination as the brain and its functioning. (shrink)

My study aims to offer a Schopenhauerian reading of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and D. H. Lawrence's The White Peacock. Throughout the dissertation, I am driven by two goals. First, I aim to examine the selected novels by considering Schopenhauer's philosophy. Secondly, I shall investigate why characters, especially the heroines, having recognised that their marriage was basically a mistake, still remained in their tormented relationships. Why it is important to answer this question and what makes this a (...) unique concern, especially in James's novel, is the possibility that previous studies and many other critiques have questioned the destiny of these heroines in regard to the novelists' anti-feminist tendencies or their social and personal concerns, while I believe that by using Schopenhauer's philosophy I can provide a deeper conceptualisation of the novels' ending. In so doing, in the second chapter I will describe the reception of Schopenhauer's philosophy in England, and the direct and indirect presence of his philosophy in Lawrence's and James's Works. In the third chapter, I concentrate on Schopenhauer's concept of freedom, morality and the will in James's novel. My fourth chapter considers Lawrence's philosophy of love and reveals how his philosophy differs from Schopenhauer's. Furthermore, it draws his readers' attention to the Schopenhauerian notion of the will-to-live, acknowledged in Lawrence's novel. (shrink)

This essay addresses the controversial status of subjectivity in Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics and articulates it using Recalcati’s psychoanalytical theory, with the aim of promoting a non-vitalistic affirmative biopolitics. In biopolitical theory in general, and in Esposito’s especially, subjectivity has a problematic status: while life precedes intersubjectivity, it is not clear whether subjectivity is regarded as a consequence or as the precondition of intersubjectivity. Esposito acknowledges such an aporia, the subjectum suppositum, but fails to recognise it in his own reasoning, ultimately (...) envisioning a powerful interpretative and transformative paradigm—affirmative biopolitics—whilst leaving at its core a life-less subject. In this essay, I read Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics through Recalcati’s clinical approach to the ‘new symptoms’, with the aim of envisioning a subjectivity compatible with the ontogenetic primacy of life posited by biopolitical theory. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to suggest that an affirmative biopolitics, grounded on the promotion of neither a pre-subjective bare life, nor of a lifeless subject, but of a fully subjective life, a living subject is possible. (shrink)

Woolf's modernist animals affected Deleuze and Guattari's animal philosophy, as they describe in A Thousand Plateaus. This essay focuses on the significance of these references to Woolf's aesthetics for Deleuzian philosophy, whilst also considering how we can better understand Woolf's broader exploration of animality through close engagement with Deleuze's conceptual framework. In mapping various appearances of one of the oldest domesticated animals, cows, in the work of both, the essay builds an argument about the shared bovine territory in their writings (...) and the ontological and ethical implications of this. It therefore expands upon the relationship between Deleuze and Woolf at the same time as affirming the importance of their animal ontology, ethics and aesthetics for animal studies more widely. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a Žižekian analysis of theatre performance that goes be-yond disclosing the ideological workings of the symbolic and imaginary orders at the level of plots, characters, and representation. Linking Žižek’s revision of Hegelian (negative) subjectivity with approaches from German ‘theatrality stud-ies’, I instead focus on the (formal) level of theatral presentation. Discussing Flemish director Guy Cassiers’s intermedial production of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities (2009-12), I argue that the dynamic force of ‘thea’ cre-ates a reflexive experiential (...) loop of ‘watching ourselves watching’. This induces a parallax split, which dramatizes the negative dialectic force of Hegelian-Žižekian subjectivity. (shrink)

Through a philosophical analysis of realist interpretations of Madhyamaka Buddhism, I will argue that the Madhyamaka is not well represented when it is represented as nihilism, absolutism or as some non-metaphysical alternative. Indeed, I will argue that the Madhyamaka is misrepresented when it is represented as anything; its radical context sensitivity entails that it cannot be autonomously volunteered. The Madhyamaka analysis disrupts the ontic and epistemic presuppositions that consider inherent existence and absolute truth to be possible and necessary, and so (...) the ultimate truth, śūnyatā, is not an absolute truth or ultimate reality. However, I will argue that śūnyatā does qualify as a universal truth and should be understood as a context-insensitive, non-propositional truth in a non-dual dependent relationship with the multitudinous context-sensitive, propositional truths. This analysis will prove helpful in an investigation of those tensions, discernible within Buddhist modernism and the discourse of scientific Buddhism, that arise when Buddhist apologists claim a timeless modernity and a non-hostility with respect to contemporary worldviews. I will argue that apologists can resolve these tensions and satisfy their intuitions of timelessness, but only if they are willing to foreground the crucial distinction between their Buddhist worldview (their context-sensitive propositional truths) and their Madhyamaka attitude towards that worldview (the context-insensitive truth of śūnyatā). I will go on to generalise this result, showing that this Madhyamaka analysis opens up the possibility for frictionless co-operation between any and all worldviews, and that we therefore have a philosophical basis for a workable and sensitive theory of worldview pluralism. I will find it necessary to defend this position by demonstrating that, despite its context-insensitivity, the ultimate truth’s non-dual relationship with conventional truth mitigates against moral and epistemic relativism. I will further substantiate my claim as to the universal truth of śūnyatā by showing that, in Karan Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we find a revealing example of śūnyatā being articulated from within a non-Buddhist context. Thus, I hope to demonstrate some of the good effects of the Madhyamaka message, and show that this message can only be communicated clearly when it is distinguished from the discourses of Buddhism. In this manner, not by giving it a voice but through finding its voiceless authority, I hope to enable the Madhyamaka speak to the West. (shrink)

The last 15 years has seen an explosion of studies that use cognitive science to understand theatre, what McConachie and Hart called ‘the cognitive turn’ in theatre studies, whilst at the same time theatre-makers are using their artistic practice to interrogate research questions. Although these two areas might seem distinct, perhaps even opposed, in this book Shaun May suggests that there is a great deal to be gained from analysing them together and carefully attending to their conceptual foundations. After arguing (...) that much of the work in the cognitive turn is conceptually flawed, May draws on the work of Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein to suggest a rethinking of the concept of mind and, moreover, argues that this should form the foundation for our understanding of the kind of ‘doing-thinking’ that is characteristic of practice as research. (shrink)

Literature increasingly deals with marginalized individuals, criticizes dominant structures, uncovers hidden traces from a suppressed past and attempts to restitute the voices of marginalized people. Orhan Pamuk and W. G. Sebald engage with what is considered to be marginal in various ways in their prose: marginal spaces, marginal times, marginalized people and objects are the main subject matters in their works. The empathic engagement with the marginal constitutes a poetic principle in their narratives, in which the marginal is attributed with (...) a specific significance and as a model of knowledge is given ethic-aesthetical value: a poetics of the marginal. (shrink)

As far as we know, only human beings have a sense of humour – although chimps might laugh when tickled, and dogs respond similarly in play, Seth McFarlane's fan-base is comprised exclusively of humans. Whilst animals and robots might feature as prominent characters in our favourite comic movies, shows and stand-up routines, we have no reason to suspect that their real-life brethren get the joke. Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Shaun May attempts to address this issue – suggesting (...) that there is something distinctive about human beings which grounds our ability to make and comprehend jokes. Guiding the reader through a range of examples, including the films of Charlie Chaplin, the stand-up of Francesca Martinez, the TV show Family Guy and Samuel Beckett's Endgame, he demonstrates that in order to get the joke you have to 'be there'. (shrink)

Online bullshit consists in online claims offered by speakers misrepresenting themselves as being concerned about the truth or falsity of what they’re saying. I’ll argue that if some practice is epistemically detrimental, we have pro tanto reason to censor it; a practice of OB is epistemically detrimental; and we thereby have pro tanto reason to censor such a practice. After having considered, and rejected, the three most promising arguments to the effect that is either false, or the reasons involved tend (...) to be defeated, I defend, and finally conclude by inferring. (shrink)

The notion of the "impolitical" developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity's political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity. The book's reconstruction of the impolitical lineage-which is anything but uniform-begins with (...) the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil's The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille's Sovereignty to Ernst Junger's An der Zeitmauer. The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories. (shrink)

An account of the challenges and potential in thinking about and with animals. Provides a discussion of theoretical approaches to animals in modern and contemporary philosophy. Offers a guide to concepts in animal theory. Intervenes in current debates by engaging with theoretical issues and suggesting new ways to consider human-animal relations.

The fiction of the world is a huge thing because it is in Derrida's words ‘the only thing that can make it possible that I can live and have or let you live, enjoy or have or let you enjoy, to carry you for a few minutes without anything happening,’ in a movement of farewell without beginning, without mourning, with the irresistible force of a whirlpool, or a maelstrom: what Poe calls ‘the immense sweeps and swelters of the whirl.’ The (...) maelstrom sweeps, it is an immense sweep, a sweeping away, it is ‘going going away, leaving no trace.’ Throw away your watch; let go the iron ring. (shrink)

‘This experience of conversion’ is a phrase of Derrida's. It struck me as something that couldn't be imagined: ‘not an as if.’ Nor a fantasy, nor a pretence. Not mediated. A magic word. That is what I managed to imagine. I had no idea how to bring an experience of conversion about—not for myself, still less for you. But, I told myself, a word can be read, and read out. And I told myself: the point, with a word like this, (...) is to speak it, or speak to it …. (shrink)

Speaks to and helps us address where we are now, institutionally, environmentally and in thinking about reading Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, Plato’s Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts. Masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis. The acquiescence of reading, Wood shows, allows us to make contact with the unthinkable.

Phenomena covered by the term duality occur throughout the history of mathematics in all of its branches, from the duality of polyhedra to Langlands duality. By looking to an “internal epistemology” of duality, we try to understand the gains mathematicians have found in exploiting dual situations. We approach these questions by means of a category theoretic understanding. Following Mac Lane and Lawvere-Rosebrugh, we distinguish between “axiomatic” or “formal” (or Gergonne-type) dualities on the one hand and “functional” or “concrete” (or Poncelet-type) (...) dualities on the other. While the former are often used in the pursuit of a “two theorems by one proof”-strategy, the latter often allow the investigation of “spaces” by studying functions defined on them, which in Grothendieck's terms amounts to the strategy of proving a theorem by working in a dually equivalent framework where the corresponding proof is easier to find. We try to show by some examples that in the first case, dual objects tend to be more ideal (epistemologically more remote) than original ones, while this is not necessarily so in the second case. (shrink)

A review of D. McManus' Heidegger and the Measure of Truth.

Poststructural criticisms of classical and neoclassical economic conceptions of human motivation and agency often include rejections of how market exchange is conceived to involve only the desires and rationality of a solitary human agent. While many of these criticisms are illuminating, they also tend not to offer a positive, constructive alternative. In this chapter, I discuss the contributions of Paul Ricoeur's understanding of mutual recognition and how it can be used--albeit perhaps despite Ricoeur's own intention and critical assessment of economics--to (...) retrieve a theory of exchange in which mutuality is possible. My analysis consists of five sections. First, I recapitulate Ricoeur’s criticism of exchange. Second, I examine how the economist Richard Ebeling attempts to read mutuality in exchange through the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and why this attempt fails. Third, I revive Ricoeur’s broader conception of value in relation to care for the other. This allows me, in the fourth section, to correlate Ricoeur’s discussion of ethical value to exchange-value. Finally, I join exchange to mutual recognition via Ricoeur’s discussion of epieikeia. (shrink)

Despite the way we think of saints as belonging to a certain historical period and confronting specific historical obstacles, we tend to see their acts as being universally meaningful, and therefore, that these acts are practices which should be imitated in some manner. However this understanding carries with it a significant difficulty: namely, there is a risk of interpreting the lives and actions of saints as providing rules of conduct to be followed, as if their enactment was an end in-itself. (...) In other words, a simplistic notion of imitation can lead to the problem of voluntarism, where the intention to imitate an action is viewed to be sufficient or equal to actualizing goodness or piety. But there is a further, perhaps more significant problem with this understanding, and this involves how we tend to conflate the performance of actions with their meaning. Does an action, especially that of a saint, have a meaning that is identical to its effect? Or, does the action itself produce a sense of meaning that outruns its effect? If the answer to this last question is affirmative, then the actions of a saint can be said to predicate an emergent meaning, that is, a meaning that has not yet been articulated, let alone realized. A saint would therefore be less a figure of convention and more a figure of innovation. In this chapter, I employ Paul Ricoeur’s theory of symbol to show how, beyond the historical specificity of the lives of saints, their actions can be understood to offer new ways of understanding the possibility for being, which I will unapologetically link to the Christian notion of “the New Being.” My discussion will first include a summary of Ricoeur’s theory of symbol, turning next to an application of this theory to saints and the contrasting context of the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. The chapter will conclude with an elaboration of a symbolic understanding of action in relation to the New Being. (shrink)

This book investigates three issues in particular which have captured the public imagination as ‘problems’ emerging directly from the contemporary use of communications technology: online anti-social behaviour; the problem of privacy; and the problem of free speech online. Through a critical and philosophical examination of each of these cases in turn, I will argue that these problems have at their root the issue of presence, and are evoking what I call a ‘crisis of presence’. I argue that the use of (...) ubiquitous communication technologies has created a disjuncture between how we think we exist in the world, and how we actually do exist in the world through our use of such devices. The main problem here, I suggest, is a lack of awareness of our own and others’ presence in the world through these technologies, and thus the inability to make proper judgements about the consequences of our social actions and ethical stances in online contexts. By focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, I argue that the real task for networked humanity is the recognition that these problems are at least in part the result of a certain ‘stance’ taken to the world and enabled by technology. The solution therefore, is not to focus exclusively on content and its regulation as much as it is to examine the alienating aspects of the media itself by understanding and resisting the more destructive tendencies in technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction, disembodiment and mediation which increasingly appear in our social encounters and presences. I suggest that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes. (shrink)

This paper is a theoretical investigation into the question of affinity and belonging in everyday life contexts. I argue that Sociology has tended to focus attention on the conceptual binaries of ‘individual/community’ or ‘individual/social structure’ when discussing experiences of inclusion, solidarity or belonging in social life. This has meant that such experiences are generally conceived in terms of ‘a part of’ or ‘apart from’. Such a focus has meant that incidents of belonging or affinity which lie between these extremes and (...) which may be intense, intimate and meaningful, but at the same time fluid, ephemeral or tenuous tend to escape sociological analysis. Largely inspired by sociological phenomenology, but multi-disciplinary in nature, this paper will try to address this issue by positing ‘resonance’ as a useful concept by which sociologists and social scientists more generally, can engage with the more fluid forms of belonging and affinity achieved in everyday life contexts. (shrink)

Traditional approaches in access control rely on immutable criteria in which to decide and award access. These approaches are limited, notably when handling changes in an organisation’s protected resources, resulting in the inability to accommodate the dynamic aspects of risk at runtime. An example of such risk is a user abusing their privileged access to perform insider attacks. This thesis proposes self-adaptive authorisation, an approach that enables dynamic access control. A framework for developing self-adaptive authorisation is defined, where autonomic controllers (...) are deployed within legacy based authorisation infrastructures to enable the runtime management of access control. Essential to the approach is the use of models and model driven engineering (MDE). Models enable a controller to abstract from the authorisation infrastructure it seeks to control, reason about state, and provide assurances over change to access. For example, a modelled state of access may represent an active access control policy. Given the diverse nature in implementations of authorisation infrastructures, MDE enables the creation and transformation of such models, whereby assets (e.g., policies) can be automatically generated and deployed at runtime. A prototype of the framework was developed, whereby management of access control is focused on the mitigation of abuse of access rights. The prototype implements a feedback loop to monitor an authorisation infrastructure in terms of modelling the state of access control and user behaviour, analyse potential solutions for handling malicious behaviour, and act upon the infrastructure to control future access control decisions. The framework was evaluated against mitigation of simulated insider attacks, involving the abuse of access rights governed by access control methodologies. In addition, to investigate the framework’s approach in a diverse and unpredictable environment, a live experiment was conducted. This evaluated the mitigation of abuse performed by real users as well as demonstrating the consequence of self-adaptation through observation of user response. (shrink)

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the (...) ‘normal’ one that has to do with a constitutive need to balance growth of abstract wealth with demand for concrete commodities. Rather, it marks a meta-crisis of capitalism that is to do with the difficulties of sustaining abstract growth as such. This meta-crisis is the tendency at once to abstract from the real economy of productive activities and to reduce everything to its bare materiality. By contrast with a market economy that binds material value to symbolic meaning, a capitalist economy tends to separate matter from symbol and reduce materiality to calculable numbers representing ‘wealth’. Such a conception of wealth rests on the aggregation of abstract numbers that cuts out all the relational goods and the ‘commons’ on which shared prosperity depends. (shrink)

The size of the human population is relevant to the development of a sustainable world, yet the forces setting growth or declines in the human population are poorly understood. Generally, population growth rates depend on whether new individuals compete for the same energy or help to generate new energy. It has been hypothesized that exponential and super-exponential growth in humans has resulted from carrying capacity, which is in part determined by energy availability, keeping pace with or exceeding the rate of (...) population growth. We evaluated the relationship between energy use and population size for countries with long records of both and the world as a whole to assess whether energy yields are consistent with the idea of an increasing carrying capacity. We find that on average energy use has indeed kept pace with population size over long time periods. We also show, however, that the energy-population scaling exponent plummets during, and its temporal variability increases preceding, periods of social, political, technological, and environmental change. We suggest that efforts to increase the reliability of future energy yields may be essential for stabilizing both population growth and the global socio-economic system. (shrink)

Towards the end of his life, Michel Foucault turns his attention to antiquity where he locates an additional process by which the subject is constituted. Technologies of the self comprise an important contribution to the study of subjectivity, however Foucault employs these findings to set out towards a new direction, challenging the way we think about morality. Against a singular truth and a singular way of life as promulgated by western moral theories, Foucault understands his work as a toolbox capable (...) of assisting in the exploration of multiple styles of living. Nevertheless, references to this new direction are not only scattered but also incomplete. Drawing upon his most recent understanding of subjectivity and the latest reformulation of his work, the dissertation attempts to piece together Foucault’s ethical project. In doing so, the dissertation will address two major limitations arising from Foucault’s ethical endeavour. As his ethical project draws upon technologies of the self, it has been misinterpreted as an aesthetic turn while his ethical findings have also been challenged as conceptually erroneous. However, the study indicates that Foucault’s ethical project comprises of two components: enhancing de-subjectification and the intensification of processes of subjectivation. By pulling together various elements of Foucault’s work, the dissertation indicates how he perceived the study of subjectivity as a counter-effect to processes of subjectification but also to the promotion of a singular way of life. Moreover, a study in Stoicism shows that Foucault was not wrong in identifying the care of the self in antiquity but most importantly, that his focus on the self is not an aesthetic turn but a call for transformation. The dissertation therefore proposes a reading of Foucault’s ethical project not as aesthetic but as relational and transversal. (shrink)

This thesis will address the question of whether there are any situated cognition concepts of memory functioning as investigative kinds in the sciences of memory. Situated cognition is an umbrella term, subsuming extended, embedded, embodied, enacted and distributed cognition. I will be looking closely at case studies of investigations into memory where such concepts seem prima facie most likely to be found in order to establish a) whether the researchers in question are in fact employing such concepts, and b) whether (...) the concepts are functioning well – functioning as investigative kinds – and should therefore continue to be employed, or whether something has gone wrong in the practice of the science and they should employ a different kind of concept. An historically situated approach to the case studies will allow me to answer part b) here. -/- Along the way, I will argue for a way of construing scientific research that I call the dynamic framework account, an account of (im)maturity for science, a variety of conceptual role semantics with respect to scientific concepts, and the historically situated case study-based method I will employ in answering the central question. My conclusions, and the way I reach them, constitute contributions to debates about situated cognition particularly, and to philosophy of science more generally, as well as recommendations for scientific practice. (shrink)

In this article I consider the recent revival of moral intuitionism and focus on its prospects, especially by thinking about what it means to understand a moral claim. From this I consider the implications for both generalists and particularists in normative ethical theory, or at least those who are also intuitionists. I conclude that the prospects for both theoretical families are bleak, and hence that intuitionism itself is in trouble and has some work to do.

I wish to begin my paper with a statement by Foucault, how considers, in concluding his Histoire de la folie, madness as a graft onto the world of reason. The social implications of this thesis cross all of his work: as a plant grafted onto another plant not only produces a new species but also depends on the host for nutrition, so happens with madness. There is no autonomous space for something like an identity of madness in the contemporary culture. (...) The social body defines its reason setting against an excluded background and affirming itself in a negative fashion. This social graft has an important echo in each individual be it sane or insane. The age of the asylum opened the gates to the so called positivist psychiatry. In turn, this current could be said to graft onto man’s nature mental illness, rendering him corrupt and dangerous in his very essence. In order to overcome this discriminating reductionist naturalism, phenomenological psychiatry introduces a new relationship between the physician and the patient, modelled on the idea that both their subjectivities have to be called into question. This is achieved primarily through and epoché: the psychiatrist has to bracket all his illusions of objectivity, as well as any organicist categories, in order to approach a fellow human being. This perspective is adopted and yet surpassed by Franco Basaglia, the psychiatrist who reformed Italian psychiatric health care. Not only should the psychiatrist bracket his assumptions in order to avoid treating madness as a graft onto the nature of man, but also he has to fight the asylum, that physical and metaphorical space from which madness could live only grafted, according to Foucault, onto the world of reason. Therefore, if there is something like an identity of madness, from these three perspectives we understand that it has to be sought to a paradoxical return: a return from a state in which it is grafted; a return to a state in which it has never been. (shrink)

This thesis is an in-depth critical analysis of the nature of the science/religion relationship. The purpose of this project is to expose the problems associated with the many fallacies related to these phenomena, and to evaluate the reasons behind certain perceptions. It outlines the damage done through years of misconceiving and misunderstanding the concepts of science and religion, and to address what led to such inadequacies in interpretation, emphasizing the use of insufficient and archaic methodologies. A number of the methodological (...) problems that will be assessed are the following: Chapter One will focus primarily on the issues related to the definition of religion and will evaluate how this was/is a contributing factor in how ‘religion’ is received and recognized in the academic community as well as in more popular circles. The main emphasis here will be on the false conception that ‘religion’ is a stagnant concept rather than a dynamic one, and will be examined through an appraisal of its chromatic history. This will be followed by an examination of the primarily Christocentric and Western ideologies that are endemic to this field of study, and will demonstrate how these beliefs are related to the Western construction of ‘religion’ and are tied strongly to the spread of imperialism throughout the world. Chapter Two will build on these issues, through highlighting the Western conceptualizations of religion and science, especially the erroneous belief that these phenomena are universally shared. Similarly evaluated in this chapter will be a number of other factors: (1) The subjective approaches taken by some scholars who insist on making ‘science’ sound more like ‘religion’ through the use of clever machinations. (2) Related to this is the concept of inclusivism, which will call attention to the negative effects that Western biases (in academia) have on non-Western practices, mainly denuding them of their cultural uniqueness. (3) Furthermore, this chapter will examine the over simplification of complex cultural phenomena in academia and will evaluate the inefficacy of certain works in dealing with these phenomena. This will be garnished with a critical assessment of this scholarship and will gauge how years of misinformation and negligence (within the academy) has led to a troubling relationship between science and religion. This will be proceeded by a case-study of the ‘scientific movement’ known as transhumanism as a means to demonstrate the long lasting and problematic effects that years of misinterpretation has had on the popular understanding of the science/religion phenomena, from at least one perspective. This will be concluded with an examination of the future of this evolution. Evidenced here through the use of SF film, is how transhumanism, because of its relationship to science and religion and its communion with popular transcultural SF ideas, has the potential to become a site for a belief system that translates well cross-culturally and incorporates both of these phenomena. (shrink)

Lost Film Found Film In an age where the historical event is mediated increasingly through the still and moving image, new stress is placed on the archival image as surviving evidence of and performer of history. Lost Film Found Film asks what the scope is for re-intervention by artists who engage with the documentary archival. What is found in their reappropriation? What is lost in the remix? Through a discussion of key works by Jean-Luc Godard, Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki, Jayce (...) Salloum, Johan Grimonprez and Eyal Sivan, Lost Film Found Film offers a definition and a description of what I have called the Cinema of Aftermath. I define this as cinema that evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War, that deploys found footage film not only as a form of critique but also as a form of participation in wider historical and political events. I argue that the Cinema of Aftermath comments on politics and is also political. Central to its project is a questioning of the potency of the archival image in both its self-reflexive and wider cultural use. In three chapters, I explore how the Cinema of Aftermath recalibrates the meaning and renews the formal possibilities of the documentary, and analyse the performance of memory, truth and evidence by this aestheticisation of archival image. (shrink)

The modern wave of environmentalism that swept most of the Western world since the 1960s, has generated considerable academic interest and has been widely documented. However there are apparent gaps in the knowledge, understanding and academic coverage of the phenomenon in the developing world, particularly in Africa. This thesis is an empirical exploration into the nature of environmentalism in Ghana, West Africa dwelling on the phenomena of environmental consciousness and movement activity. It identifies the presence of a small yet viable (...) indigenous environmental movement. The movement is most visible through the partnering and collective networking activities of small, institutionalized local organizations that came together to form coalitions, share resources and work together on broad thematic issues that were of common concern. (shrink)

Actin is a highly conserved protein in eukaryotes which forms dynamic cytoskeletal structures. Rapid remodeling of actin filaments is important for the regulation of a broad range of critical cellular processes. The cytoskeleton is acutely responsive to stresses and there are multiple interactions between actin and signaling pathways, positioning it centrally to a cells ability to adapt and respond to their environment. Here I provide further evidence that a dynamic actin cytoskeleton regulates processes including endocytosis, mitochondrial respiration, and signal transduction. (...) Results presented here show that actin is embedded in the signaling networks which control the responses to environmental change. Change to the dynamic status of actin modulates the activity of the transcription factor Ste12p which regulates both the mating and filamentous/invasive growth responses. The activity of these pathways are linked to cortical patch organisation, and our data suggests that there is crosstalk between multiple pathways. I propose that the links between actin dynamics and environmental sensing pathways leave it well positioned for a role as a biosensor. Actin dynamics is altered by changes in internal or external conditions, leading to adapted of cellular responses which may provide a protective function for a population. (shrink)

The epistemic theory of causality maintains that causality is an epistemic relation, so that causality is taken to be a feature of the way an agent represents the world rather than an agent-independent or non-epistemological feature of the world. The objective of this essay is to cause problems for the epistemic theory of causality. This is not because I think that the epistemic theory is incorrect. In fact, I spend some time arguing in favour of the epistemic theory of causality. (...) Instead, this essay should be regarded as something like an exercise in stress testing. The hope is that by causing problems for a particular version of the epistemic theory, the result will be a more robust version of that theory. My gripe is with a particular version of the epistemic theory of causality, a version that is articulated with the help of objective Bayesianism. At first sight, objective Bayesianism looks like a plausible theory of rational belief. However, I argue that it is committed to a certain theory of evidence, a theory of evidence that recent work in epistemology has shown to be incorrect. In particular, objective Bayesianism maintains that evidence is perfectly accessible in a certain sense. But evidence just is not so perfectly accessible, according to recent developments in epistemology. However, this is not the end of the line for the epistemic theory of causality. Instead, I propose an epistemic theory of causality that dispenses with the assumption that evidence is perfectly accessible in the relevant sense. (shrink)

This reflexive account is of a phenomenological study that took place over two years. It explores how a group of primary-aged children perceive, express and reflect on their embodiment through movement. Children aged between four and eleven took part in sessions of yoga, somatic movement and developmental play during the school day. The data include field notes, observations, a reflexive journal, photographs of and by the children, their drawings, mark-makings, writing and posters. Children were also interviewed at the end of (...) the study, when they had an opportunity to reflect on all their work and experiences. All the children were capable of expressing and reflecting on their experiences, and the oldest children in particular appeared to enjoy and seemed to benefit from the reflective process. By linking together a sense of self-awareness and reflection, the children appeared able to gain insight into their embodied experience and reflect on emotions, feelings and events. Embodiment is a process as much of a state of being, and as such has implications for perceptions of mind and body, learning, and reflective practice. This approach to embodied reflective practice thus has potential for educators, and teacher trainers as well as direct work with children. (shrink)

The central subject of this thesis is the nature of the self. I argue against an atomistic conception which takes the human self to exist self-sufficiently and prior to social relations, and in favour of a holistic conception which takes the self to be constitutively dependent on social relations. I defend this view against criticisms that a holistic account undermines the need for what I call 'critical distance' between subjects and their communities. This involves answering the charges that such constitutive (...) dependence: 1) removes the possibility for individuals to determine themselves freely apart from the communities in which they engage; and 2) deprives us of an external standard with which to engage critically with those constitutive communities. I argue that the above criticisms are encouraged by reliance on a certain epistemological picture. This picture involves a foundationalist construal of knowledge that ultimately depends on a notion of an immediately given epistemic content that can serve to give us an absolute conception of an objective reality with which we can do away with partial or relative conceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit. It is this that leads the critic to demand a standard external to communities, which in turn encourages a notion of the self and freedom that can ultimately be grounded apart from the "distortions" of social practice. I directly attack the notion of an immediately given epistemic content through a series of transcendental arguments, showing that the condition of possibility for our forming any conception of ourselves or the world is participation in social forms of life. I further argue that properly human identities are essentially shaped by the self-conceptions these forms of life make available to us. Since freedom can no longer depend on radical detachment, I offer a new account of freedom as a social achievement, based on a notion of rational progress which allows us to develop ourselves and our social world critically, drawing only on those standards available within our practices. With the notion of an immediately given epistemic content undermined, I have shown not only that freedom and rational progress are consistent with a holistic account, but that in fact they depend on such a holistic account. (shrink)

To what extent can we rely on others for information without such reliance becoming epistemically problematic? In this paper, this question is addressed in terms of a specific form of reliance: cognitive outsourcing. Cognitive outsourcing involves handing over (outsourcing) one’s information collection and processing (the cognitive) to others. The specific question that will be asked about such outsourcing is if there is an epistemic problem about cognitive outsourcing as such. To ask if there is an epistemic problem with x for (...) S is to ask if x is a problem for S’s ability to acquire true belief and avoid false belief. To ask if there is a problem for S with x as such is to ask if it is impossible to solve the problem for S while leaving x as is. I argue that, if we consider the five most plausible candidate epistemic problems raised by cognitive outsourcing—i.e., unreliability, gullibility, irrationality, dependency, and lack of epistemic autonomy—we see for each candidate that it is either not an epistemic problem, or not a problem about cognitive outsourcing as such. (shrink)

To the consequentialist, virtues are dispositions producing beneficial consequences. After outlining a consequentialist theory of epistemic virtue, I offer an account of an epistemic virtue of deference, manifested to the extent that we are disposed to defer to, and only to, people who speak the truth. I then look at what informed sources can do to instill such virtues of deference, in light of social-psychological evidence on compliance. It turns out that one way of doing so is through a complementary (...) epistemic virtue of lending an ear, that I then relate to philosophical work on open-mindedness. Finally, I respond to two concerns about the present account to the effect that it sanctions gullibility and is manipulative. (shrink)

This is a text on the concept of identity and its use in social anthropology, with particular reference to matters of emotion and morality.

This article explores the abolition in 1846 of the deodand – the object or animal declared responsible for death by an inquest jury – and its relationship with the family of the deceased. Drawing on the work of Jacques Donzelot, it argues that the deodand brought contingency into the heart of law, and that its replacement with a legal right to compensation for dependents was a move to rationalize the investigation of death. This rationalization had consequences; limiting the place of (...) the unruly community, centering and regulated the family, and disconnecting the inquest from the material of death. (shrink)