This chapter contains sections titled: Nature, Nurture, and the Female Serial Killer Introduction Female Nurture and Human Nature: Some Philosophical Background Female Serial Killers: A Typology Of Poets and Monsters: Our Common Nature.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American PsychoCarla Freccero (bio)R.L.: Do you believe in God?B.E.E.: Are you asking me if I was raised in a religious family or if I go to church? I was raised an agnostic. I don’t know—I hate to fly, I have a fear of flying. That means either that I have no faith in air traffic controllers or (...) that I’ve done something really bad, and this is God’s way of getting at me. Maybe I’m caught in the middle.... But no, I don’t believe in God. That’s such a strange thing to admit in an interview.—Robert Love, “Psycho Analysis,” Rolling Stone interview with Bret Easton EllisBefore Capitol Hill acts on these dimwitted proposals, we should remember what the writer Bret Easton Ellis might have said, but didn’t: “Doing bad stuff is wrong.”—Ted Rall, “Meet the Cusp Kids”US mass media has become a much-publicized target of censorious commentary within American public culture in recent years. Censorship, as E. S. Burt notes, may take at least two forms: philosophical censorship, such as that discussed by Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing, and the more commonly applied form of US censorship enacted against “pornography” or “obscenity.” Philosophical censorship, in this reading, entails the state’s persecution of message-bearing texts or utterances that counter the doxa and threaten to disrupt the state, while the second form of censorship involves “a language use that falls outside the interpretive scheme defining the work as the intentional act of a moral being” [Burt 25]. In the United States, state censorship of the first kind may perhaps be practiced through the “incitement to riot” escape clause provision in the First Amendment, while obscenity censorship—in certain forms—is explicitly written into legislation as excluded from speech protection.Extending Strauss’s argument to the liberal state, Burt suggests in effect that these two forms of censorship become related insofar as the state’s censorious intent is directed not so much at the content of the expression as at the degree to which it confirms the axiom, what Burt calls the “very fundamental, convening assumption of the... liberal state” [25] that “virtue is knowledge” [see Strauss 25]. Thus obscenity is a form of expression that cannot be interpreted as productive knowledge but instead as a certain repetitive excess, “dirt for dirt’s sake” [Burt, quoting Judge Woolsey 28]. The problem here, of course, is that such distinctions do not apply comfortably to that category of utterance termed the literary, and especially to the use of figurative language, where “art for art’s sake” can be [End Page 44] seen precisely to resemble the nonproductivity of obscenity. The text I am going to discuss in depth here, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, has been attacked on both grounds—as an active (and violent) disruption of the doxa that is also obscenely nonproductive of knowledge—and as such, it serves as an illustrative, and I will argue, noncoincidental, case of “censorship” in the liberal state.It may be useful here to begin by surveying and making distinctions among the various popular and popularized censorships in recent US media: Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” was probably the most authentic case of “philosophical” censorship, even though its silencing did not derive directly from the state (the liberal state often does not function in some of the ways supposed when the definition of censorship is restricted to state censorship). “Cop Killer” is a song about killing policemen, and thus came closest—in the list I am going to propose of silenced works—to tempting the state’s retaliation. It was written and sung by a black man (a black man who often plays a gangster and a cop in popular films), in a genre already regarded as threateningly disruptive to the state: rap. The result is that the CD containing this song was pulled from the shelves of music stores and can no longer be purchased. There was no trial. The author withdrew his work from public circulation in the face of... (shrink)

This article looks at the way the Brazilian writer and educator Nísia Floresta addresses issues of race and class within her construction of nationhood. This is achieved through a consideration of the specific subject of maternal breast-feeding as discussed by Floresta in two texts, written in Brazil and France, respectively. A comparison of these works reveals a very different engagement with race and class factors in determining women's claim to citizenship. Floresta, in common with early 19th-century European feminism, (...) believed this claim to lie within the domestic sphere, primarily in the role of mother and educator. The article considers how, as a vital aspect of that role, she portrays maternal breast-feeding as both natural and patriotic. It also highlights the extent to which Floresta was influenced by the prevailing concerns of her contemporaries regarding the risks of wet nursing and the threat posed by household slaves, before going on to consider how this discourse leads Floresta to exclude black slave women from her vision of patriotic motherhood, while acknowledging the maternity of women of all classes in a European context. Patriotic concerns, shaped by racial prejudices, overshadow Floresta's feminism, prohibiting the kind of unifying discourse of motherhood, which she claimed to profess. (shrink)

_Serial Killers - Philosophy for Everyone_ investigates our profound intrigue with mass-murderers. Exploring existential, ethical and political questions through an examination of real and fictional serial killers, philosophy comes alive via an exploration of grisly death. Presents new philosophical theories about serial killing, and relates new research in cognitive science to the minds of serial killers Includes a philosophical look at real serial killers such as Ian Brady, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer (...) and the Zodiac killer, as well as fictional serial killers such as Dexter and Hannibal Lecter Offers a new phenomenological examination of the writings of the Zodiac Killer Contains an account of the disappearance of one of Ted Bundy's victims submitted by the organization Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims Integrates the insights of philosophers, academics, crime writers and police officers. (shrink)

Research on ‘moral learning’ examines the roles of domain-general processes, such as Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning, in the development of moral beliefs and values. Alert to the power of these processes, and equipped with both the analytic resources of philosophy and the empirical methods of psychology, ‘moral learners’ are ideally placed to discover the contributions of nature, nurture and culture to moral development. However, I argue that to achieve these objectives research on moral learning needs to overcome nativist (...) bias, and distinguish two kinds of social learning: learning from and learning about. An agent learns from others when there is transfer of competence—what the learner learns is similar to, and causally dependent on, what the model knows. When an agent learns about the social world there is no transfer of competence—observable features of other agents are just the content of what-is-learned. Even learning from does not require explicit instruction. A novice can learn from an expert who is ‘leaking’ her morality in the form of emotionally charged behaviour or involuntary use of vocabulary. To the extent that moral development depends on learning from other agents, there is the potential for cultural selection of moral beliefs and values. (shrink)

The self has been a consistently central theme in philosophy and the social sciences and, in the last decades of the 20th century, the fragmentation of the modern self has engendered extensive academic commentary. In order to contribute to current discussions about self, it is perhaps most effective to map the transformation of a single representation of the self in contemporary culture. As a cultural ‘flashpoint’, the serial killer could provide an apposite analytical focus. Drawing critically on Mark (...) Seltzer's work on serial killers this article interprets serial killing as a form of commodified transgression. In contrast to the modern self, established through state-institutionalized routines, serial killers establish their identities through ecstatic intercourse. These acts of bodily and ethical transgression are facilitated by the use of commodities. In this way, the serial killer represents a self which is consistent with the colonization of interpersonal relations by multinational capital. The serial killer signifies the appearance of a postmodern self. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Historical Survey with Interviews Moral Skepticism and the Serial Killer A Brief History of Serial Killers Serial Killers of the Ancient World Serial Killers of the Renaissance Serial Killers of the Nineteenth Century Serial Killers of the Early Twentieth Century The Golden Age of Serial Killers Serial Killers Today: Conversations on Motivation.

Keller explains the persistence of the nature/nurture debate by a chronic ambiguity in language derived from classical and behavioral genetics. She suggests that the more precise vocabulary of modern molecular genetics may be used to rephrase the underlying questions and hence provide a way out of this controversy. I show that her proposal fits into a long tradition in which other authors have wrestled with the same problem and come to similar conclusions. - Review of 'The mirage of a (...) space between nature and nurture' by Evelyn Fox Keller, Duke University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780822347316. (shrink)

In a late reminiscence, Goethe recalled that during his close association with the poet Friedrich Schiller, he was constantly defending “the rights of nature" against his friend's “gospel of freedom.”1 Goethe’s characterization of his own view was artfully ironic, alluding as it did to the French Revolution's proclamation of the "Rights of Man." His remark implied that values lay within nature, values that had authority comparable to those ascribed to human beings by the architects of the Revolution. During the (...) time Goethe made his defense, he also faced another revolution, in which Schiller was a partisan—that of Kant in the intellectual sphere. Both upheavals had undermined the autonomy of nature, replacing her authority with that of human will and understanding. Previous papers in this volume have recorded the shifting fortunes of nature that brought her to this stage of jeopardy. In the early classical period, nature as a unified whole had not yet arisen. Animate and inanimate objects had natures— characteristic modes of action—but there was as yet, according Slatkin, no articulate concept of nature as a whole standing over against human beings. Park has described a long period of transition, when nature became personified in the form of a didactic female, a figure imaginatively based, it would seem, upon the system of a 1 natural philosophy that stood in contrast to the revealed wisdom of God. Nature in this guise yet derived her authority and nurturing capacity from that higher, divine power. During the seventeenth century, writers like Mandeville, as Allen has shown, began to suspect that nature might be a chimera, a fictive creature that disguised humanity's own hidden desires and inclinations. These doubts grew during the next century—with the likes of Hume accelerating the skepticism— till finally, in the two revolutions that so troubled Goethe, nature was completely stripped of her authority. Goethe had become confirmed in his defense of the rights of nature during his travels to Italy during the years 1786-1788. (shrink)

Problem: The underlying assumption of all feminist theories is that in order to achieve our emancipatory goals we have to resolve the so-called female subjectivity problem first. That is, we have to answer the question of what is (is not) the nature/essence/main feature of being a woman. The debate about where and how we should look for that essence seems to be endless and it still continues in contemporary feminist theories. This stalemate blocks the initial political and social power (...) of the whole feminist movement. It also seems to contradict the idea that philosophy can serve practical purposes, which was a driving force behind feminist theories as such. Solution: While analyzing contemporary feminist theories we can discover that they are dualistic with respect to the cognitive situation. Using tools taken from Josef Mitterer's philosophy and the idea of emancipation developed by Bruno Latour, I want to consider the idea of avoiding stalemate situations in discussions on female subjectivity. I claim that this strategy can be more effective in achieving certain practical goals that are important from a feminist point of view. Benefits: We are able to show that the aim of our theoretical activity is not to agree about what a woman is and what kind of woman we are going to emancipate, but rather to define which problems should be solved in order to improve the situation of women. We just have to learn how to formulate the description from now on of initial matters of concern that is acceptable to all those involved in a given dispute. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Allure of Monsters Explaining the Allure: First Look Stalking the Deeper Reasons Closing in for the Kill Removing Empathy The Prison of Rules Conclusion.

Predation games—games in which the player is actively encouraged and often required to hunt and kill in order to survive—have historically been the purview of male players. Females, though now much more involved in digital games than before, generally play games that stress traditionally feminine values such as socializing with others, shopping, and nurturing. This article argues that playing games that virtually simulate predation has many benefits for female players. Predation play teaches participants how to survive and succeed (...) in stressful, competitive, aggressive environments. To remain in the game, players have to understand and enjoy the acquisition and negotiation of power, learn to face fear, willingly accept challenges, and accept the inevitability of failure without allowing it to deter future attempts. Through predation play, females can learn to excel in and enjoy high-risk high-reward environments. The author proposes that such play might help address gender disparities outside of play. (shrink)

The literature on the aetiology of serial killing has benefited from analyses which offer an alternative perspective to individual/psychological approaches and consider serial murder as a sociological phenomenon. The main argument brought to bear within this body of work identifies the socio-economic and cultural conditions of modernity as enabling and legitimating the motivations and actions of the serial killer. This article interrogates this work from the standpoint of a gendered reading of modernity. Using the Yorkshire (...) Ripper case, it emphasizes how in addition to the political economy, gender relations and masculinity shape the dynamics of serial murder and its representation. (shrink)

_Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants _makes philosophy fun, tactile, and popular. Moral thinking is simple, Ruwen Ogien argues, and as inherent as the senses. In our daily experiences, in the situations we confront and in the scenes we witness, we develop an understanding of right and wrong as sophisticated as the moral outlook of the world's most gifted philosophers. By drawing on this knowledge to navigate life's most perplexing problems, ethics becomes second nature. Ogien explores, through (...) experimental philosophy and other methods, the responses nineteen real-world conundrums provoke. Is a short, mediocre life better than no life at all? Is it acceptable to kill a healthy person so his organs can save five others? Would you swap a "natural" life filled with frustration, disappointment, and partial success for a world in which all of your needs are met, but through artificial and mechanical means? Ogien doesn't seek to show how difficult it is to determine right from wrong or how easy it is for humans to become monsters or react like saints. Helping us tap into the wisdom and feeling we already possess in our ethical "toolboxes," Ogien instead encourages readers to question moral presuppositions and rules; embrace an intuitive sense of dignity, virtue, and justice; and pursue a pluralist ethics suited to the principles of human kindness. (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens (...) skills in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 17-19 [Access article in PDF] A Kleinian Contribution to the External World Robert D. Hinshelwood Radical feminism overstates its case and ignores the importance of individual psychology; at the same time, an individual psychology like psychoanalysis lacks a broader perspective that feminism might supply. Sarah Richmond's paper advocates a mutual enhancement of both psychoanalysis and feminism by combining the two perspectives. It is (...) a version of the old controversy over social influences versus innate influences--nature versus nurture.Richmond's thesis places a stress on the kind of psychoanalysis that might be most amenable to a reconciliation between social and psychological causations of individual attitudes. Interestingly, she argues that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which, by reputation, gives the greatest emphasis to the internal world of individuals, is the most suited for any reconciliation with the social--an argument that I would in fact endorse. It is simply because Kleinian psychoanalysis dwells on the internal world as a little society of internal beings that it may be most suited to bringing into contact with social explanations.One important dimension of this kind of reconciliation is that the world of internal objects (a kind of internal society) and the world of social persons could be seen in some correspondence, and indeed in the Kleinian view, there is a real correspondence between the two. That correspondence is actively and continuously mediated by phantasies of internalizing or externalizing persons and internal objects. The interchange can profoundly alter an individuals' internal objects, an influence determined by the external world of other persons and vice versa.This kind of correspondence between internal and external worlds (the individual and the social) can accomplish a mutual influencing of perceptions of other people and of the self. It can be the mechanism for the development of sets of attitudes on a social/cultural basis--including attitudes to gender. Similarly, the internalization of actual relations that exist between persons becomes the individual's accepted expectations of relationships, including sexual and erotic ones.The whole exchange process of internalization and externalization involves a primary evaluation of persons/objects and of the relations between them. Kleinian psychoanalysis argues that a primary function of the earliest ego in the individual is to evaluate objects as good or bad. Gendered persons are then internalized as objects having high or low values.Richmond exemplifies the necessary convergence of social and individual/personal points of view by considering the personal experiences that occur in anorexia. Clearly, the incidence of eating disorders varies between the genders, and the implication is that this is in part socially aroused--especially through the use of slender female bodies [End Page 17] in advertising and fashion. But also it is clearly mediated through individual agency (albeit probably the unconscious motivations known to psychoanalysts). Two Kleinian authors are examined to explore the possibilities of this kind of analysis.Richmond's thesis is applicable to gender relations in important ways, enriching both the psychoanalytic and socio-economic approaches that she is concerned with. However, where more work needs to be done, it seems to me, is in terms of power relations. Power relations are not theorized in psychoanalysis. There is thus little from the individual point of view that can contribute to a feminist analysis of power. And indeed this might be one significant point that Richmond refers to, where psychoanalysis can learn something from the social point of view.Elsewhere I have tried to conceptualize what a Kleinian view of power relations might be. 1 The account of Kleinian psychoanalysis above and in Richmond concerns the interchange of persons and internal objects, but we must also take account of Klein's descriptions of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein 1946). There, the exchange of parts of the self with other persons is central. As an example, the study of institutionalization as an interpersonal process indicates an exchange between certain sub-groups within an institution of active and powerful parts of the self, as well the interchange of weak and submissive parts of the self. In a mental hospital, for instance, this ends... (shrink)

Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants makes philosophy fun, tactile, and popular. Moral thinking is simple, Ruwen Ogien argues, and as inherent as the senses. In our daily experiences, in the situations we confront and in the scenes we witness, we develop an understanding of right and wrong as sophisticated as the moral outlook of the world's most gifted philosophers. By drawing on this knowledge to navigate life's most perplexing problems, ethics becomes second nature. Ogien explores, through (...) experimental philosophy and other methods, the responses nineteen real-world conundrums provoke. Is a short, mediocre life better than no life at all? Is it acceptable to kill a healthy person so his organs can save five others? Would you swap a "natural" life filled with frustration, disappointment, and partial success for a world in which all of your needs are met, but through artificial and mechanical means? Ogien doesn't seek to show how difficult it is to determine right from wrong or how easy it is for humans to become monsters or react like saints. Helping us tap into the wisdom and feeling we already possess in our ethical "toolboxes," Ogien instead encourages readers to question moral presuppositions and rules; embrace an intuitive sense of dignity, virtue, and justice; and pursue a pluralist ethics suited to the principles of human kindness. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Serial Killers, Real and Imagined Dexter Gacy Are Serial Killers Morally Responsible? Moral Responsibility: Emotions and Cognitive Frames.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Epistemology of Murder Violence and Human Nature The Gestation of Terrorists and Serial Killers Conclusions.

Determining the degree to which persistent human behaviors and traits are the result of genetics or environment is important for a host of theoretical reasons in psychology. This article asks whether the results of such determinations are relevant to the practical tasks of individual change as attempted, for example, through therapy, parenting techniques, or self-transformation. Examples from the psychological literature on happiness or "subjective well-being" illustrate the common idea that a trait being largely genetic implies that it is more difficult (...) to modify than one that is largely environmental. The most widely known theoretical approach to disentangling genetic from environmental effects in humans is behavioral genetics, with its central concept of heritability (h2). This article argues that measures of h2 do not predict the ease or difficulty of modifying behaviors or traits of individuals. A concept different from h2, that of innateness, is explicated, but it, too, is found not to be a useful predictor of individual modifiability. The general conclusion is that knowing only the degree to which a human characteristic results from nature or nurture has no implications for the ease or difficulty of altering that trait. (shrink)

"A wild and exuberant romp through the terrain of the monstrous . . . Oppenheimer's lucid explanations are the perfect antidotes to the sordid scenes he recreates." -American Book Review "A masterly and original study of one of the most frightening topics with which human beings have to struggle." -Literary Review "What is compelling, different and page-turning about this impressive book is that the author analyses evil through the medium of films and literature . . . Cinema buffs will (...) find it a fascinating read." -Evening Standard The notion of evil- does it exist? what forms does it take? -has always fascinated humankind. The evil underlying such atrocities as the Holocaust, Communist China's Tibetan abattoir, and the murderous ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs and Croats seems beyond explanations or analysis. In this powerfully original work, Oppenheimer analyzes the phenomenon of evil in a mental behavior that emerges in particular conditions. Oppenheimer argues that evil contains specific, predictable ingredients. By understanding its nature, we can diagnose its specific manifestations in mass murder, genocide, and serial killings. Utilizing a variety of cinematic and literary genres in developing its evidence, the book considers such familiar films as The Silence of the Lambs and Brazil , and draws upon such literary works as Richard III, Oedipus the King and the Picture of Dorian Gray. Evil and the Demonic takes a bold first step, providing a framework in which to place the horrors of human existence. (shrink)

The debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both deficiencies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet (...) the methodological standards appropriate to evolutionary research. I contend that the efforts of E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Charles Lumsden, and others to generate conclusions about human nature are flawed, both because they apply evolutionary ideas in an unrigorous fashion and because they use dubious assumptions to connect their evolutionary analyses with their conclusions. This contention rests on analyses of many of the major sociobiological proposals about human social behavior, including: differences in sex roles, racial hostility, homosexuality, conflict between parents and adolescent offspring, incest avoidance, the avunculate, alliances in combat, female infanticide, and gene–culture coevolution.Vaulting Ambitionthus seeks to identify what is good in sociobiology, to expose the errors of premature speculations about human nature, and to prepare the way for serious study of the evolution of human social behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bioshock and the Art of RaptureGrant TavinorI am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No!" says the man in Washington, "It belongs to the poor." "No!" says the man in the Vatican, "It belongs to God." "No!" says the man in Moscow, "It belongs to everyone." I rejected these answers; instead, I chose (...) something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture! A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.Andrew Ryan, opening BioshockIBioshock is the Masterpiece of recent gaming. Genre-wise the game is a first person-shooter survival-horror game—already a complicated mix of gaming forms—and Bioshock is excellent in these gaming terms: playing the game is a consistently engaging, challenging, and tense experience. The narrative of the game, set in Rapture, a dystopian city beneath the sea, fits perfectly with this interactive gaming form. The premise of Bioshock is a parody of Ayn Rand's objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged. Led by the magnate Andrew Ryan, the industrialists, artists, and scientists have retreated from the world and built Rapture through sheer force of will. But when the player enters the city at the beginning of the game, it is evident that nature is pushing back, and that the sea is slowly but surely retaking Rapture, while its citizens have become corrupted by the arts and sciences the city was built upon: as genetically manipulated "splicers" they now creep through Rapture's darkened halls bemoaning their lost humanity. Andrew Ryan "chose the impossible," [End Page 91] and inevitably his hubris is being repaid by the recalcitrance of human nature and the impermanence of human achievement. Much of the immense fun of Bioshock derives from the irony of an objectivist utopia running amok.The immediate visual impact of Bioshock, depending on its employment of cutting-edge high definition 3D computer graphics, is striking. The aesthetic qualities of the water, in particular, have drawn wide praise. The world of Rapture is also presented through an engaging and excellent style. To depict this decaying world, Bioshock draws on the architectural motifs and cultural themes of 1930s and 1940s America. Portrayals of decaying art deco facades, faded Hollywood socialites, and echoes of Hearst, Hughes, and Citizen Kane, are combined with period music and philosophical and literary references to produce a coherent artistic statement.Two features of Bioshock bear out its unique artfulness as a game. First is the role in the game-world of the Little Sisters: cute little girls that pose a game obstacle with which the player must decide how to deal. In Bioshock, the task of harvesting the game-world resources needed to survive is given a moral dimension in that the resources can be extracted only from the Little Sisters by killing them, and so a key part of the gameplay rests on an emotionally provocative moral choice. The second artful aspect of the game that warrants special attention is a narrative twist partway through the game where it becomes evident that player's principle sympathetic source of information in the game-world is a dissemblance. Bioshock has an interactive twist on an untrustworthy narrator, which clouds and complicates the decisions the player has made in Rapture. Rather than an actor, the player-character is a pawn in someone else's game. At the forefront of both of these aspects of Bioshock are considerations of freewill and morality.To really appreciate the art of Bioshock we need to understand its nature as a game, and moreover, to treat the gaming nature seriously and with sympathy. Bioshock is a videogame, and it is also clearly art; but it is not as if the game is art despite its being a videogame and that the art is a mere gloss or veneer. Rather, Bioshock's nature as a game allows it to be art of a distinctive kind. Treating videogames as a kind... (shrink)

This book is about the work of the Holy Spirit in the world, as distinct from the Spirit’s work in the church. One traditional term for this work is ‘common grace’. The book argues that there are four kinds of unity that the Spirit is working to bring about, and it takes one example of each. After the first chapter which is introductory, the second chapter takes up the first kind of unity: unity between us and the material world. The (...) example chosen is our experience of the beautiful and the sublime, and Immanuel Kant’s treatment of how this experience takes us to a divine being who lies behind both our faculties and the beautiful and sublime things we experience. The chapter uses two pieces by Beethoven, including the first movement of his Eroica symphony, as illustrations of the kind of unity that Kant has in mind. The second kind of unity is unity within a human life, and the third chapter discusses the example of gender transition within the life of a person assigned female at birth. The third kind of unity is unity between human beings, and the fourth chapter discusses the example of love of our country (patriotism) and its relation to the ideal of cosmopolitanism. The fourth kind of unity is unity of human beings with God, and the fifth chapter discusses the unity we can achieve in contemplation. Finally, the sixth chapter discusses the nature of unity itself and its relation to the Spirit’s love. (shrink)

While philosophers tend to consider a single type of causal history, biologists distinguish between two kinds of causal history: evolutionary history and developmental history. This essay studies the peculiarity of development as a criterion for the individuation of biological traits and its relation to form, function, and evolution. By focusing on examples involving serial homologies and genetic reprogramming, we argue that morphology (form) and function, even when supplemented with evolutionary history, are sometimes insufficient to individuate traits. Developmental mechanisms (...) bring in a novel aspect to the business of classification—identity of process-type—according to which entities are type-identical across individuals and natural kinds in virtue of the fact that they form and develop through similar processes. These considerations bear important metaphysical implications and have potential applications in several areas of philosophy. (shrink)

This is a book about the bond between sentient beings. It explores the non-verbal space between two entities, and asks questions like; What is a healthy human being? Is it nature? Nurture? Nature via nurture? How are we born with personality traits, emotion, mood, language abilities, and intelligence? What do we know about attachment, family structure and genetic inheritance? Robert Ingersoll and Dr Anna Scarnà use the life history of the chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky and his family: parents Carolyn and (...) Pan, companion Lilly, their daughter, Sheba, and an assortment of human carers, to explain the hallmarks of healthy human psychological development. What makes humans 'human', and chimpanzees, 'chimpanzees'? Do chimpanzees have a personality, or should we consider them to have a "chimpanality?" Robert, close friend and carer of Nim, gives the facts about Nim's upbringing and first degree relatives, and Anna reports with reference to theories of brain, personality, self, and language. Together they explain what can be drawn from psychological research and reanalyse the chimpanzee work from the 1960s and 1970s in order to honour and respect the memory of those animals. (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

The ArgumentNaturalization confers authority on beliefs, conventions, and claims, but what kind of authority? Because the meaning of nature has a history, so does that of naturalization:naturalization is not the same tactic when marshaled in, say, eighteenth-century France and in late nineteenth-century Britain. Although the authority of nature may be invoked in both cases, the import of that authority depends crucially on whether nature is understood normatively or descriptively, within the framework of the natural laws of jurisprudence or within that (...) of the natural laws of mechanics. During the early modern period, the denotative center of gravity of the word “nature” shifted dramatically. Writings about the female intellect are particularly well suited to reflect and focus these changes for three reasons: first, as with so many aspects of gender identity, what was distinctively female about women's way of thinking was usually alleged to be part and parcel of their “nature”; second, thepolitical and social implications of the female intellect were debated heatedly and in unprecedented detail, particularly in France; and third, the actual content of beliefs about what traits sex the intellect as female remained relatively constant during this period, despite sharp differences of opinion over their putative “natural” causes. The female intellect was naturalized not once but repeatedly, and therein lies its value for a history of naturalization. (shrink)

The effects of natural selection as a process in natural populations differs from ''survival of the fittest'' as it was formulated by Darwin in his ''Origin of Species''. The environment of a population exists of continuous changing conditions, which are heterogeneous in space. During its life each individual successively meets with differing conditions. During these confrontations the individual may appear to be ''unfit'' or ''unlucky'' and may die. If it survives it will meet the following conditions to which it (...) is ''tested'' anew, a.s.o. Hence, many individuals being less fit under certain conditions will survive and reproduce, because they did not meet a deadly moment. Therefore, being ''fit'' only refers to special prevalent conditions. In each generation the individuals thus being ''unfit'' will be eliminated together with the ''unlucky'' ones. All other individuals will survive and reproduce, notwithstanding their properties.Hence, natural selection results in the ''non-survival of the non-fit'' rather than in ''survival of the fittest'', because being ''fit'' simply means ''having survived and reproduced'', whereas being ''unfit'' can be connected with many kinds of properties and environmental conditions, e.g. being killed by a predator. Only after many generations (hundreds or even thousands) the effect of eventually dominating properties of the survivors may result in a set of properties suggesting an overall ''survival of the fittest''. This was what Darwin wanted to explain as he was mainly interested in evolutionary processes. (shrink)

The most widespread statement of political philosophy is presented here in the simplified and trivialised form of “man is X; he must become Y. ” Man must do so at the same time for himself, for his own survival, but also for the good of all, of the Community, of the City: the plurality must absolutely, in any way whatsoever, give way to unity, subject to [sous peine] and under threat of chaos. The essential question found confronting political doctrines, moreover (...) since the prominence of the idea of democracy is the following: how to bring about the existence of a united society across a heterogeneous social body? The response from philosophy articulates itself around three principle schemas: the theoretical construction of a unified community under the order of similar laws to those of nature (Platonic schema); the search for the best regime, which will have as its ultimate end the moderation and perpetual regulation of conflicts, by an optimal combination of freedom and stability (Aristotelian schema); and the theorisation of the “end of politics” by the locating of a “social wrong” inscribed in a structure doomed to collapse by the practical negation of its ideological foundations (Marxian schema and derivatives). The mode of thought which imposes itself here is decisional. Beyond the third schema which constitutes in some way a meta-political critique, and necessitates that it alone has a particular analysis, in the two preceding, man constitutes a kind of material – raw or primary, depending – that philosophy will work on, and sculpt to give it a form that harmonises fully with the Whole that it prescribes. In political philosophy, we always turn more or less around the “Let’s make man” of Hobbes, that is, around the technical transformation of a material given. Or to say it otherwise: the creation of an oeuvre from crude and imperfect elements, an oeuvre thought like a masterpiece – that is to say, one that contains within it an idea of perfection and permanence – but doomed here to serial reproduction. (shrink)

Evidence from many species suggests that social, developmental, and cognitive variables are important influences on aggression. Few direct activational or organizational effects of hormones on aggression and dominance are found in nonhuman primates. Female aggression and dominance are relatively frequent and occur with low testosterone levels. Social, cultural, and developmental mechanisms have more important influences on dominance and aggression than hormones.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 42-70 [Access article in PDF] "O Happy Living Things" Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety Anne-Lise François With all the flowers Fancy e'er could feignWho breeding flowers will never breed the same. —John Keats, "Ode to Psyche" And I could wish my days to beBound each to each in natural piety. —William Wordsworth, "My heart leaps up" O happy living things! no tongue (...) Their beauty might declare:A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware!Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I bless'd them unaware. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" "O happy living things!"—vitamin-enriched grains; potatoes equipped to kill their predators; silk-producing goats; fast-growing salmon that hardly require feeding. Is it possible to predicate the breathless exclamation that escapes Coleridge's mariner, unaware not of water snakes but of the fantastic array of genetically modified creatures—animals and plants—currently under design or production by biotech industries? Already in May 2000 a New York Times article was announcing the imminent arrival of "fast-growing trout and catfish, oysters that can withstand viruses, and an 'Enviropig,' whose feces are less harmful to the environment because they contain less phosphorus." An article inset describes the emergent production of "pharm-animals":These domesticated beasts—cows, pigs, goats, sheep, and chickens—have been given the ability to produce pharmaceuticals and other valuable substances in their milk, eggs or semen. Endowed by scientists with foreign genes, often taken from humans, these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories. Two companies, the Genzyme Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., and PPL Therapeutics, a Scottish company, already have products from pharm animals being tested in clinical trials supervised by the Food and Drug Administration. Many other animals are [End Page 42] still in the development stage. For example, Nexia Biotechnologies in Canada is working on a goat that carries a gene from spiders allowing it to produce spider silk in its milk. When the spider silk, which consists of extremely strong, light proteins, is extracted from the goat's milk, the substance, potentially, can be used in applications like bulletproof vests. [Yoon] This last sentence is intriguing. The genetic revolution often bills itself as a second green revolution that will prevent starvation and alleviate disease, promising to feed the world's growing population in terms that tend to essentialize poverty and hunger as inevitable symptoms of a human condition, rather than understand them through the lens of specific colonial and postcolonial histories. But bulletproof vests? The indignant leftist response here would be to deride the collusion between biotechnology and the military-industrial complex—bulletproof vests leaving little doubt as to whose desires count as universal, timeless needs. Yet such a response is perhaps too quick to attribute reason to these genetic experiments in cross-species breeding, and too quick to accept the terms in which biotechnicians present themselves—as the instruments of reason, whether of global capitalism or universal human progress. Part of what this essay wishes to suggest is that to dream up such things and to think of wanting to do them—make a goat produce spider silk in its milk—involve particular fantasies, fantasies not simply about recreating the world in one's image, but about learning to desire the world again, to be excited by it or "surprised" by its existence, to borrow a phrase from Stanley Cavell. The journalist's parenthetical "potentially" indicates that no use has yet been determined, no burning need fuels such experiments, and hints at the boredom behind them—what William Wordsworth might have called the "state of almost savage torpor" in which desire itself has to be invented.As the New York Times writer's double metaphor of animal as laborer- and factory-in-one suggests—"these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories"—the binaries animal-human, machine-animal... (shrink)

In remote regions of the eastern Andaman, into the 1990s, a remarkable rapport with nature's forces was occurring.1 Most strikingly expressed during adolescence, it emerged spontaneously from a local type of consciousness. Both the capability and the underlying consciousness were conceived within a pervasive milieu of lushly sensual infant nurture.2 So dependable was the pattern of affection, it spawned a tactile language long before onset of speech. Speech, learning and sociality then followed in the eros‐driven paradigm already set. So (...) did a rare rapport with nature's forces.With nothing in the culture to discourage it, eros was not walled‐off as children grew. It remained firmly at the root of consciousness on through teens. To be a child out in those seas was to move spontaneously and digressively out into life pursuing sundry passion pulses. When erotic power escalated during adolescence, rapport with natural forces dramatically increased. Spectacular gambolings with nature began bursting forth—sometimes astonishingly complex rhythmic ones. No clouds of moody adolescent angst discouraged spontaneity; no flattening of affect suppressed adolescent verve; no emotional dissimulation confounded purpose. Adolescence was a time for a blossoming of affect, for melding deeply and dynamically with habitat. It was a time to profoundly dance with nature's forces.Possessing a protean character, love lies more fluidly within the human frame than language. Following its own inner protocols, love seems able to evade the stable kinds of labeling required for logical inquiry. In exotic cultures it is hard to see at all. In the eastern Andaman, its workings were initially invisible to Western eyes. It was necessary to firm up subliminal awarenesses before the workings out of eros could even be detected there. Though difficult to deal with scientifically, love plays such a profound role in the affairs of humankind that it begs experimental types of scrutiny.A fracturing of love into Bacchanalian and Sublime occurred during the early Greek foundations of Western culture. Out of that schism Western ethos grew. The ethos molded the Western type of consciousness. In the eastern Andaman, eros was not cleaved at all. It shaped a type of psyche not countenanced by the West since its prehistory. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

In spite of these efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to initiate ongoing research on contraception, the subject of birth control remained a problem of concern primarily to the social activist rather than to the research scientist or practicing physician.80 In the 1930s, as has been shown, American scientists turned to the study of other aspects of reproductive physiology, while American physicians, anxious to eliminate the moral and medical dangers of contraception, only reluctantly accepted birth control as falling within their (...) professional domain.As a result, the problem of cheap, effective, and safe contraception was not solved by these earliest attempts. Consideration of the subject was initiated afresh by private philanthropy after World War II, sparked by a new wave of interest in population studies.81 Summarizing such efforts to support research in the reproductive sciences, a recent Ford Foundation study has noted: “To initiate and sustain serious research in the reproductive sciences has required for more than half a century concerted effort by interested individuals and private organizations, mainly from outside the mainstreams of the biomedical research community.”82The early laboratory research on chemical contraception described in this paper was but one important outcome of the concerted effort made by reformers in the 1920s to eliminate a variety of social problems thought to derive from excessive fertility. Scientific arguments and expertise were employed to advocate reform as well as to define the appropriate solution to such social problems. Scientists were recruited as advocates for the movement, but they were also employed as researchers in laboratory investigations sponsored by these same reformers.Sponsors of these early laboratory studies noted the difficulty of obtaining first-class investigators.83 The routine analyses necessary for such research, as well as the traditional scientific aversion to applied problems, provide only a partial explanation for this response. The real difficulty lay in recruiting investigators to a field that had previously been taboo. Once opened up — first as socially relevant, and finally as scientifically sound — there was much interest in this area, and the appeal to researchers of the scientific issues surrounding fertility and reproduction soon surpassed that of the reforming value of birth control.A survey of the kinds of experimental investigations sponsored by birth control advocates indicates the range of physiological problems explored by contraceptive research. The most definitive work was done on the efficacy and safety of spermicides, but the potential of other contraceptive methods was also examined. Investigators attempted to develop spermatoxins that would effectively immunize women against sperm, and they also tried to elucidate the mechanism of hormonal control of reproduction. In fact, speculations about the possible hormonal manipulation of fertility were expressed at the Seventh International Birth Control Conference held in Zurich in 1930.84In the 1920s, clinical studies were undertaken to assess the effectiveness of the various birth control methods. Laboratory investigators complemented this work by screening spermicides for safety and testing for their ability to kill sperm. There were a variety of birth control preparations on the market, but no one really knew whether these were effective or even safe.85 Although the physiology of other major organ systems was well advanced, the scientific study of reproductive physiology and contraceptive technology was clearly in its infancy in this period. Routine analyses simply could not be conducted, because the fundamental research establishing baselines had not yet been done. Scientists used this fact to redirect attention to basic research on reproduction.Laboratory research on contraception indicated important unexplored areas for physiological investigation. Social activists, who had encouraged prominent scientists to become interested in both the social value and the genetic implications of birth control, found these investigators revising the goals of their research. The biologists had formed their own network and had begun to seek out funding, reformulating the justification for sponsorship of further investigations. The eugenic motivations underlying these studies, which had initially made them theoretically attractive to biologists, were gradually eroded. Concern with “human evolution” ceded its place to interest in physiological mechanisms. Crew and others began to note that the use of biological theory to justify essentially political decisions had serious limitations. Biologists had become uncomfortable with those very arguments which had originally captured their interest. Recognition of the potential political abuse wrought by applying scientific principles to society was expressed by Crew just one year after the Zurich meeting. Referring to previous assessments of the role of sex in reproduction, he generalized: “In the past the biologist has justified feudalism, Manchester Liberalism, socialism and every other type of social organization and political programme by reference to selected biological phenomena.”86 By 1932 Crew had also begun to question the biological logic of regulated breeding, and had made it clear to his American sponsor that there was no simple correspondence between the practice of birth control and the genetic improvement of the human race.87Biologists further began to recognize, however, that although the hopeful genetic solution to human problems was probably an illusion, contraception still remained one tangible means to alleviate, human misery. Some laboratory scientists, like Crew, acknowledged the applicability of their own particular skills to this problem. For a few brief years, social needs and scientific goals were mutually supportive and closely intertwined. But as laboratory researchers gained interest in the study of reproduction and established their own priorities in this field, they temporarily withdrew from the arena of debate over birth control as an important mechanism for social reform.With the rise of Hitler, the genetic arguments for birth control rapidly lost their appeal. But by that time the scientific problem of how to achieve effective contraception had entered the professional consciousness. Both physicians and scientists began to be aware of birth control as a subject within their domain of expertise, although outside the principal focus of their research. Scientific discussion of birth control permanently altered from a question of justification to a problem of method: How could one achieve reliable and safe contraception? This had been Sanger's and Dickinson's goal from the beginning. Laboratory scientists had indeed been persuaded to undertake this work; this research had in turn affected biologists' perceptions of the whole field of reproductive physiology, encouraging further study of reproductive mechanisms. The promise of new knowledge provided for continued funding of this research, despite the caution by scientists that the social benefits would not be as immediate or as far-reaching as advocates and they themselves had first argued.The activities of birth control activists and their supporting agencies, and the financial backing of private contributors and foundations, notably the Rockefeller philanthropies, provided an important new stimulus to the development of research on the biology of reproduction in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Biologists were able to claim an enlarged realm of issues for scientific study through their activities as advocates and as investigators for the birth control movement. At the same time, they promised as-yet-undiscovered possibilities for regulating human reproduction once its physiology was understood. The knowledge and control that they promised lay in understanding the whole reproductive cycle — not merely in evaluating the toxic effects of presumptive spermicides.Chemical spermicides never summoned the interest of scientists as the contraceptive pill was to do, yet that research did reinforce the widespread perceptions of scientific research as essential to social reform. Spermicide investigations focused research efforts in reproductive biology by challenging traditional taboos, defining problems for further study, and providing laboratory investigators the opportunity to assert the social and scientific value of their own skills. Crew echoed this attitude as he observed in 1934:Man has turned from the adventurous conquest of his environment to the conquest of himself. To-day is the day of biological invention, eagerly used for the control of the undesirable and the unwanted. Sex and reproduction are no longer hedged around by myth and taboo; they are no longer accepted as mysteries that defy understanding. They are matters inviting examination and explanation; they are regarded as expressions of physico-chemical forces, the nature of which is to be displayed. It is accepted that when knowledge is sufficient, control will be absolute, and, though knowledge is not yet sufficient, readers... must be persuaded to the view that this will not always be so.88The synergism between reproductive biology and social needs has been temporary and sporadic, but recurring, since the 1920s. Scientific research programs have clearly been influenced by issues raised by public debate. Nevertheless, reproductive biologists have continued to assert their own professional goals. For the most part, they have rejected problems without inherent scientific interest and have spurned applied research except as it has had a direct bearing on current research themes. This attitude, apparent among American and British investigators in the 1930s, created the intellectual context for the invention and acceptance of the technically sophisticated oral contraceptive pill. It did not foster the production and improvement of the simple, safe, effective, and cheap vaginal contraceptive desired by early birth control advocates. (shrink)

Hempel and Giere contend that the existence of provisos poses grave difficulties for any regularity account of physical law. However, Hempel and Giere rely upon a mistaken conception of the way in which statements acquire their content. By correcting this mistake, I remove the problem Hempel and Giere identify but reveal a different problem that provisos pose for a regularity account — indeed, for any account of physical law according to which the state of affairs described by a law-statement presupposes (...) a Humean regularity. These considerations suggest a normative analysis of law-statements. On this view, law-statements are not distinguished from accidental generalizations by the kind of Humean regularities they describe because a law-statement need not describe any Humean regularity. Rather, a law-statement says that in certain contexts, one ought to regard the assertion of a given type of claim, if made with justification, as a proper way to justify a claim of a certain other kind. (shrink)

Political imputations in science are notoriously a tricky business. I addressed this issue in the context of the nature–nurture debate in the penultimate chapter of my book Making Sense of Heritability (Cambridge U. P. 2005). Although the book mainly dealt with the logic of how one should think about heritability of psychological differences, it also discussed the role of politics in our efforts to understand the dynamics of that controversy. I first argued that if a scholar publicly defends a (...) certain view (say, hereditarianism) in the debate about IQ, race and genetics this fact alone cannot justify attributing a political motivation to that person. But then later I suggested that the pressure of political correctness could explain some peculiarities of the contemporary controversy about the heritability of group differences in IQ. Several reviewers of my book raised a tu quoque objection. Am I not doing here the same thing that I condemn others for? (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: In Cold Bold: The Moral Psychology of Fictional Serial Killers I Think I'll Eat Your Heart: The Lack‐of‐Empathy Explanation Dexter and the Extreme Lack of Understanding The Hot‐Blooded Reality: Sex, Rage, Fame My Evil Just Happened to Come Out: Empathy Inhibits? Serial Killing Because They Care? “Angels of Death” “I didn't want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them”: Empathic Dissonance The Serial Killer Next Door?

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims (...) of a wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

In the spirit of the work edited by Michel Foucault (1975) on Pierre Rivière, I propose to put philosophy to work by tackling a case study in which I shall analyse certain court transcripts that pertain to the defence of serial killer, Stewart Wilken, in Die Staat Teen Stewart Wilken. My analysis of these documents is intended to uncover the practices and struggles of the discourses that come together, and into conflict, at this event. The analysis is divided (...) into two parts. In Part One, I thematize subjectivity in relation to the idea of enlightenment autonomy. Here I aim to show that the discourses in law, psychiatry and psychology that dominated at Wilken's trial, appear to have undergone “normalization.” In other words, what Foucault uncovered as early internecine struggles among discourses for supremacy have given way to a unanimous stance concerning the nature of the autonomous subject and its legal ramifications; effectively silencing alternatives. In Part Two, I shall skirt around the frayed edges of these dominant discourses, with the aim of showing in more detail how internal theoretical tensions, such as those evident in the expert testimony given at Wilken's trial, may open up spaces for other accounts of subject- formation. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(4) 2003: 289-305. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Killing God, Liberating the “Subject”: Nietzsche and Post-God FreedomMichael LackeyIIndeed, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations. 1After God’s death, if Michel Foucault is to be believed, the death of the subject followed quite naturally. But how, one might ask, did (...) that fateful event of God’s death necessarily lead to the demise of that most noble animal? Answering this question is crucial, for once we understand how, for Nietzsche, God’s existence and His metaphorical participation in the creation of humanity are most destructive of what is most vital within the human, then we will see how, in killing God and His crown of creation, Nietzsche does not become the quintessential nihilist; rather, he becomes, to his mind, the first sane voice crying in the intellectual wilderness: make way the coming of a new human, a “subject” which can only become a “self “ when it paradoxically learns to overcome its very constructed “self.” Nietzsche’s logic therefore runs as follows: so long as God exists, a subject which overcomes itself cannot come into being; for as Richard Schacht rightly notes, the God-hypothesis serves as a support for the traditional subject-hypothesis in Nietzsche’s writings. So to produce a self-overcoming subject Nietzsche must first kill what he considers that stodgy old tyrant of the soul. But this raises the question of how one goes about doing away with [End Page 737] God. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche gives his reader a puzzling answer to this question when he says that he fears that “we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (“Reason,” 5). 2 Given Nietzsche’s logic, to kill off God he needs to eliminate belief in grammar, and once God is dead, he can then do away with the subject. In what follows I will show how Nietzsche tries to eliminate God and the traditional subject through his extended analysis of what it means to “believe in grammar.”IIIf there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to “believe”—or a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live—well, they will know it tomorrow. 3To understand what it means to believe in grammar, it is best to note how Nietzsche contrasts belief and freedom. More starkly, we could say that for Nietzsche to have faith means, necessarily, to lack freedom; or to be free means, necessarily, to reject faith. Nietzsche makes this clear in the fifth book of GS when he says: “Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes ‘a believer.’ Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses” (§ 347). I isolate this passage not in order to outline Nietzsche’s criticism of belief but rather to understand how Nietzsche defines freedom by contrasting it with belief. Such an analysis of course begs the question how it is possible that belief necessarily precludes freedom. Intuitively, it would seem that belief and freedom entail no contradiction. For instance, given two choices, to believe in God or not to believe in God, I exercise my freedom in choosing one belief over the other. With this example, it would seem that belief necessarily presupposes freedom. So how is it that Nietzsche concludes that freedom and belief are irreconcilable?That Nietzsche considers faith obscene is clear when he tells us in AC that belief of any kind is a “sign of decadence” (§ 50) which leads to “self-alienation” (§ 54). In fact he goes so far as to claim that faith is actually “slavery in a higher sense” (§ 54). To see why belief implies slavery we must first understand what Nietzsche means by faith. While the standard view suggests that faith is... (shrink)

A popular protective chant in South‐East Asia and Sri Lanka salutes eight arahats, companions of Gotama Buddha. The chant says that these arahats “sit” to protect the person who chants to them, with the Buddha at the center. The nature of arahatship is an issue that needs to be addressed. In an early Buddhist Abhidhamma root chant, three kinds of states are described: those of beings not in training, those of beings in training, and those of beings who are (...) neither in nor not in training. Two figures tower over early Buddhism: Sāriputta and Moggallāna, the chief disciples of the Buddha. The presence and description of female arahats is a testament to the Buddha's rejection of caste, gender, or status as an impediment to meditation and the attainment of enlightenment. In the study of Buddhist texts it is inevitably the doctrinal and philosophical expositions that have received the most attention. (shrink)

Despite several decades of criticism, dichotomous thinking about behavioral development remains widespread and influential. This is particularly true in study of birdsong development, where it has become increasingly common to diagnose songs, elements of songs, or precursors of songs as either innate or learned on the basis of isolation-rearing experiments. The theory of sensory templates has encouraged both the dichotomous approach and an emphasis on structural rather than functional aspects of song development. As a result, potentially important lines of investigation (...) have been overlooked and the interpretation of existing data is often flawed. Evidence for a genetic origin of behavioraldifferencesis frequently interpreted as evidence for the genetic determination of behavioralcharacters. The technique of isolation rearing remains the methodology of choice for many investigators, despite the fact that it offers only a rather crude analysis of the contribution of experience to song development and provides no information at all about genetic contributions to development. The latter could in principle be elucidated by the application of developmental-genetic techniques, but it is unlikely that these can easily be applied to the study of birdsong. Because developmental questions are so often posed in terms of the learned–innate dichotomy, “experience” is taken to be synonymous with “learning” and the possible role of nonobvious contributions to song development has largely been ignored. An alternative approach, based on Daniel Lehrman's interactionist theory of development, permits a more thorough appreciation of the problems that have yet to be addressed, and provides a more secure conceptual foundation for theories of song development. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: How Common Are Serial Killings? What is a Serial Killer? I Think Therefore I Kill: The Philosophical Musings of Serial Killers Can You Blame Them? Ethics, Evil, and Serial Killing Dangerous Infatuations: The Public Fascination with Serial Killers A Eulogy for Emotion: The Lack of Empathy and the Urge to Kill Creepy Cognition: Talking and Thinking about Serial Killers Psycho‐ology: Killer Mindsets and Meditations on Murder (...) A Solemn Afterword: A Message from the Victim's Network A Timeline of Serial Killers Notes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagination in Inquiry by A. Pablo IannoneAmy KindIANNONE, A. Pablo. Imagination in Inquiry. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. xxvi + 254 pp. Cloth, $110.00; eBook $45.00Though imagination is often associated with the fanciful and the fictional, over the course of the last decade philosophers have begun to devote considerable attention to more practical uses of imagination. Philosophers of imagination have increasingly focused on ways in which imagination (...) can play an important epistemic role in activities such as decision-making, planning, and scientific discovery; more generally, there has been attention to a variety of ways in which imagination can teach us about the world in which we live. Iannone’s discussion in Imagination in Inquiry can be seen as part of this general trend—even if his discussion is not itself situated directly within contemporary philosophy of imagination but, rather, in a broader interdisciplinary approach.Iannone works with an expansive conception of what imagination is. In his view, we should not limit our understanding of imagination simply to the ability to generate images. Rather, imagination is a diverse set of different abilities that aim “at figuring out cognitively, emotively, or practically, alternatives for dealing with actual, probable, plausible, foreseeable, or merely possible challenges or problems, abstract or concrete, theoretical or practical being faced, or notions being considered, and determining or deciding which is (are) preferable in the circumstances, and acting accordingly.” Moreover, this set of abilities should not be seen as operating in isolation; rather, imagination functions as part of an ecology of human abilities. Iannone refers to his view of imagination as the “homeostatic model,” so called because he sees imaginative processes as maintaining stability by way of a system of self-correcting feedback and methods for incorporating and adjusting to any new information received.Iannone also operates with an expansive conception of what counts as practical use of imagination. In his view, imagination is put to practical use in a wide range of circumstances, for example, when a dancer imagines the next steps of a dance in the process of spontaneous improvising, when a combatant imagines how to block an expected blow from an opponent, and when an environmental activist imagines a new set of corrective policies to address pollution. All these uses fall under the activity of what Iannone calls “inquiry,” that is, the activity of finding a solution to a problem or challenge. The problems and challenges that might prompt the use of imagination can be both personal and interpersonal, and the imaginative processes used will involve strategies such as discovery, creation, and anticipation.In the first part of the book, Iannone develops his basic conceptual apparatus. In the next part of the book, he puts this apparatus to work in the context of philosophy, that is, he shows how imagination plays a role in philosophical inquiry. In the third part of the book, he looks at the role of imagination in other disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Here, the interdisciplinary nature of his discussion is especially on display. In the fourth part of the book, he applies his model of imagination to a number of different contexts; in particular, he discusses the role of [End Page 354] imagination in language, in humor, in vision (both at the personal and the societal level), and in morality. Finally, the last part of the book offers a variety of case studies involving dance, technology, and artificial intelligence. Of the four chapters in this part of the book, three are written by other authors: two by Alejandra Iannone, a scholar and practitioner of dance and theater (and the author’s daughter), and one by Rocci Luppicini, an expert in technology studies. In light of the explosive pace with which new AI technologies are being developed, the book’s discussion of whether and how such technologies present challenges for our capacity for imagination is especially timely and important.In addition to affirming the practical importance of imagination, Iannone also affirms the practical importance of nurturing imagination—something he repeats at several points throughout the book. But how do we do this? One natural way that imagination is nurtured is simply by its regular use... (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reveal with an overall approach, how the psycho-social background, starting from woman image in first periods and reach modern day, is embraced by outstanding theorists of modern psychology, and also how these collected works are reflected in their definitions of woman. If it is considered that woman has been discussed with reflections against and not from primary sources throughout history, it can be seen that the most essential roots of woman narrations (...) can be found in oral culture and the parts of written texts are made over symbol, metaphor, proposition and story. However myths (stories) that take place in oral and partly written culture about primitive man, are sacred tales, they will also present data regarding human image. Therefore with a limited effort of human being to understand the infinite, it can be understood what human being think, feel and how they interpret rather than gods/goddesses ontology. From this point of view, this article that consists of two parts, first of all will mention especially about perception of Goddess in those reflected to image of God, maintaining its efficiency in conscious or unconscious as a system of symbols intrinsic to human nature and cultural code background and then the woman image will be roughly discussed with a descriptive style over the world of mythology, psychology and faith. In the second part, it will be examined in detail how all the written and oral information about understanding woman by modern anthropologists are interpreted with the perspective of modern psychology specific to theorists such as Freud, Jung and Fromm. Eventually, it will be emphasized that past and future are integrated with information, experience and feelings with an active relationship; perception and approach of woman have stayed up to date in time continually; mythology, psychology and religion are important factors within this matter.Summary: Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy. Despite the dominance of male gender in the images of God in these analogies which are the products of human experience, female Gods that is to say Goddesses are not few. The matter of how the image of goddess come to the fore in a distinctly male-dominant society is a noteworthy matter. The narration of Earth Mother over female symbol in myths in which the harmony is constantly secured within the inner and exterior world and mention about living in harmony with the universe is an important data in order to understand female characteristics attributed to God. Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy.The woman subject is influenced by transferred life experience within the historical process, and it is an undeniable fact that ancient “woman perception” has reflections to the present day. Within the history of humanity, striking definitions about woman can be seen in sacred statements in symbol language. Therefore, it is proper to examine primarily the image of sacred and then examine female meaning that is charged on that image. The aim of this study can be summed up with two themes: a) try to understand the general framework of reflections of the present image of woman, style of narration and comprehension in psychological, sociological, and religious terms by getting help from myths which mention about ancient image of God, although there is centuries old difference between those stories and us, b) reveal the image of woman in Freud, Jung, and Fromm’s approach which establishes a bond between mythology that is a system of symbols special to human nature and human psychology and discuss this subject by using psychology of religion.When reviewed ancient Far East and Middle East myths and also Ancient Greek mythology, it can be seen that gods are not cloistered supernatural beings who do not have abstract personalities and also do not lead a wholly metaphysic life. The crucial issue here is; the reality that Gods and Goddesses are shown as a model to both man and woman. Psychologists who examine religion in terms of psychology state that first outcomes about the image of God come up not with behavior but with emotion. The attributions of gender, related to the emotion in question are cited during the transfer of those emotions as well. Therefore; philosophers, culture and religion historians, theologians, anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, and sociologists have contributed to this transfer when they discuss the cult of God or Goddess throughout the history. It is interesting that the usage of the term of God maintains while the usage of the term of Goddess decreases. Civilization historians claim that the appearance of divine religions particularly quickens the course of transition from goddess to god. According to them, during this period in which there is a transfer from polytheist image of God to monotheist image of God, the quantitative change in the perception of God comes with a qualitative change. According to Fromm, during this power gathering period, there has been a transfer from mother and feminine (woman) centered religion to father and masculine (man) centered religious experience/ God image. According to him, in the second stage of humanity development, “the children of Earth Mother turn into the children of divine father”, there is a transition from unconditional love of mother to authoritarian sympathy of father, from an image of supplemental and surrounding Goddess to authoritarian image of God who makes requests by his nature, lays down principles and laws, and supports the power and search for a successor to deliver the power.The perception of women who led to Prophet Adam deviated from the truth and expelled from heaven is spread around especially the regions of one-God religions. This has strengthened the idea that divine religions have a negative view towards women. Including Islam, the reason of all divine religions’ encountering with claims that they have a negative approach against woman stem from applying to that religions’ human resources rather than essential religious sources which are existing or lost earliest forms.Oedipus complex is an important thesis of Freud which explains the development of religion and morals; establish the base of his psychology, and in fact, important in terms of his making connection with difference of kinds and flow or non-flow of request and needs while explaining human behaviors. According to Freud who points to sexuality and aggression which are the most powerful two instinct in the biology of male or female; the first three or five years of a newly born human- this is the period in which the basic part of personality is formed- the definition of self is extremely influenced by his/her gender (in both biological and sociocultural terms). Freud who put forward father-son conflict in the struggle to survive between Zeus and his sons in Moses and Monotheism (1998c) and Totem and Taboo (1998a), makes an explanation about the origin of religion and humanity over two male characters. Jung pays attention to goddess image as much as the image of god and do not approach this situation only as a polytheism or sociocultural explanation or childish appearances of a primitive mind. He accepts goddesses as a reflection of archetypes in human. Male has a feminine side, female has a masculine side, and a unity occurs when both complete each other. According to Fromm, a taxonomy referring to woman and man is primarily a sociology-based approach rather than a biology-based one. Fromm (1995) thinks that the whole depiction shows individuals’ own desire and needs, that is to say, their psychology rather than a theology. Transition from mother (woman) centered religion to father (man) centered religious experience and God image is essentially one of the most important breaking/inversion points of human being, not humanity. As a result, it can be said that it is an important point to clearly understand the story of mankind to examine that intense freshness at hand and centeredness of quantitative and qualitative changes of divine or God image of ancient societies come down after psychological, sociological, religious, economic, political, and cultural changes. (shrink)

I argue that the completeness of physics is composed of two distinct claims. The first is the commonly made claim that, roughly, every physical event is completely causally determined by physical events. The second has rarely, if ever, been explicitly stated in the literature and is the claim that microphysics provides a complete inventory of the fundamental categories that constitute both the causal features and intrinsic nature of all the events that causally affect the physical universe. After showing that these (...) claims are distinct, I argue that they can be used to solve a difficulty with existing responses to the exclusion problem—namely, that these existing responses also undermine the powerful causal argument for physicalism. Recognizing that there are two kinds of completeness opens up room for the nonreductive physicalist to solve the exclusion problem while also endorsing a modified, cogent causal argument for a kind of physicalism compatible with her position. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of LiteratureJoseph CarrollIBefore the advent of purely culturalist ways of thinking in the early decades of the twentieth century, the idea of "human nature" was deeply ingrained in the literature and the humanistic social theory of the West.1 In the past three decades, ethology, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology have succeeded in making the idea of "human nature" once again a commonplace of (...) public discourse, but the actual shape and content of human nature, even among Darwinian social scientists, remains controversial. Human nature is the product of evolution, and for Darwinians, concepts about the structure of human nature are necessarily bound up with concepts about the course of human evolution. My purpose in this essay will be to examine two chief alternatives in the current Darwinian understanding of human evolution and human nature, to advocate one of these alternatives, and to assess its implications for Darwinian literary study. One alternative can be identified with evolutionary psychology, and the other, the one I shall advocate, with evolutionary anthropology and cognitive archaeology. For the sake of economy, I shall refer to the former as the EP model and to the latter as the EACA model.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the main theoretical controversy in Darwinian social science was that between the sociobiologists and Darwinian anthropologists, on the one side, and the evolutionary psychologists on the other. The point at issue was whether "fitness maximization" or the desire to maximize reproductive success could serve as a direct motive in human behavior. The sociobiologists tended to assume it could; the [End Page 33] evolutionary psychologists instead insisted that fitness maximization was mediated through "proximal mechanisms" such as the male desire for sex and the female desire to acquire resources from male sexual partners. In the arena of received professional opinion, the evolutionary psychologists won this debate, and evolutionary psychology is now the mainstream, establishment creed in Darwinian social science.2 Its hegemony is evidenced by a flood of popular expositions and textbooks. The majority of these expositions give little evidence that the authors are themselves alert to the speculative character of the fundamental concepts of their creed, and the chief tenets of the creed have often been reiterated in a naively uncritical way.The chief tenets of orthodox evolutionary psychology are (a) that the structure of the human mind stabilized during the Pleistocene (beginning about 1.6 million years ago); (b) that the human mind is "modular" in character—consisting of discrete bits of dedicated neural circuitry automatically activated by environmental releasers; (c) that human cognitive aptitudes and motivational structures are firmly adapted to the hunter-gatherer life-style of the Pleistocene—the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" or EEA; and (d) that the adaptation to Pleistocene conditions carries with it, as a necessary corollary, a "mismatch" between the adapted human mind and all cultural ecologies more complex than that of hunter-gatherers. The core concept, the idea on which all the others depend, is that of the EEA:What we think of as all of human history—from, say, the rise of the Shang, Minoan, Egyptian, Indian, and Sumerian civilizations—and everything we take for granted as normal parts of life—agriculture, pastoralism, governments, police, sanitation, medical care, education, armies, transportation, and so on—are all the novel products of the last few thousand years. In contrast to this, our ancestors spent the last two million years as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and, of course, several hundred million years before that as one kind of forager or another. These relative spans are important because they establish which set of environments and conditions defined the adaptive problems the mind was shaped to cope with: Pleistocene conditions, rather than modern conditions.3For evolutionary psychologists, the difference between our Paleolithic ancestors and ourselves is a difference not in anatomical and neurological character but only in external "circumstances." In the EP model, the structure of the human mind at the present time and the structure [End Page 34] of the mind of, say, half a million years ago, would be the same. They would be equally the mind of the Pleistocene.The EP model of... (shrink)

The presence of parasites in a population has an impact on mate choice and has substantial evolutionary significance. A relatively unexplored aspect of this dynamic is whether or not the presence of parasites increases the likelihood of hybridization events, which also have a significant role in ecological adaptation. One explanation of increased hybridization in some areas and not others is that stress from parasites results in selection for an increase of novel genotypes. Two swordtail species Xiphophorus birchmanni and Xiphophorus malinche (...) maintain an active hybrid zone. The patterns of hybridization are unique in that they do not match up directly with expectations. We set out to test whether or not individuals can sense, using chemical cues, whether conspecifics in their immediate vicinity have high parasite loads and also whether this has an effect on mating and association behavior toward both conspecific and hybrid mates. Our hypothesis being that females will have greater association times with hybrid/heterospecific mates if conscpecifics are heavily parasitized. We found that females exposed to parasitized males had a weaker preference for conspecific odor than those exposed to unparasitized males, both relative to a water control and relative to hybrids. The empirical investigation described above is coupled with a historical and philosophical discussion of some of the issues surrounding the acceptance and understanding of the concept of hybridization. This discussion takes as its major themes: an analysis of the role that social views have on the formation of scientific hypothesis; the lag between epochal change in the scientific community and the assimilation of the consequences into social beliefs; the survival of hierarchical and teleological thinking in our concept of species and purity; and the failures of contemporary evolutionary theory to provide satisfactory explanations about the meaning and upshot of hybridization. Two specific misconceptions about hybridization are addressed. First, that hybridization clashes with the belief in kinds/types/species having separate and pure identities. Secondly, the teleological view that reads purpose into nature and places all instances of variation on a hierarchical scale; the top and bottom of which are determined by estimated closeness to the predetermined perfection of a type. < <. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Killing Our Way Out of ViolenceEngaging Wrangham's The Goodness ParadoxChris Haw (bio) and Richard Wrangham (bio)Wrangham's Goodness Paradox (GP) offers excellent anthropological research for mimetic theorists interested in the questions of human evolution and violence. It theorizes a framework of how group killing played a selective function in the emergence of our species, but it leaves open plenty of questions and concerns for productive, critical dialogue. Wolfgang (...) Palaver has written a short affirmation of the book, and Melvin Konner reviewed it for The Atlantic.1 But as one who has taken keen interest in the evolutionary and theological dimensions of mimetic theory,2 I offer here a longer engagement with the book and the author. I begin by extrapolating Wrangham's argument, I offer some critique, and then I share an edited version of my extended conversation with him.Wrangham's overall paradox is that humanity emerged through killing our way out of violence. More precisely, proactive coalitionary killing against aggressive, alpha-male individuals selected out, in a genetic pressure over hundreds of thousands of years, the more temperamental threads of Homo, resulting in a species (sapiens) who are relatively more domesticated and docile.3 [End Page 63]The argument proceeds as follows. First: Domestication is a real, genetic thing. Various domesticated species tend to share an odd, seemingly unrelated set of features called a "domestication syndrome." This refers to some combination of phenotype differences as compared to nondomesticated cousins: reduced skeleton mass, reduced/rounder cranium sizes and jaw lines, floppier ears, white patches of fur, extended juvenility, more frequent fertile periods, males with greater approximation to female characteristics, and so on. Beneath all these is a genetic reduction in "reactive aggression," which is the propensity for violence related to irascibility and short-fused tempers.Two: Domestication can happen intentionally or just randomly in nature. Humans have domesticated foxes in quick succession, breeding only ones with reduced reactive aggression, resulting in a domestication syndrome.4 The same seems to have happened slowly, with increasing intentionality over time, in the domestication of wolves into dogs. (This perhaps first began with the natural selection of wolves who were least aggravated by getting near humans to eat their camp detritus.) But domestication can also happen outside the human sphere, as in bonobos, who are basically a domesticated cousin of chimpanzees—evidenced not only in their reduced aggression but in their own domestication syndrome.5 This happened, he argues, largely through contingent, niche ecological features related to landscape, dramatic climate variations, and changes in competition over food.Three: It has long been asked whether humans are a "domesticated" species or whether such a thought is just anthropocentrism. The answer is definitely yes, but who domesticated us? A traditional answer, of course, was that God made us (or that some humans are properly domesticated, and others savage); but what if we ask in a more specifically scientific, causal framework? One early anthropologist posed that perhaps some now-extinct super-species domesticated us.6 Wrangham's answer is that we unintentionally domesticated ourselves by persistently killing off the genetic lines of the most aggressive individuals. This has resulted in Homo sapiens being basically a domesticated version of Homo neanderthalensis, erectus, and so on. Girard's not-unrelated answer is that religion domesticated us. By "religion" Girard means an integrated pattern of chaotic/exceptional and ordered/normal behaviors that contain violence, mediated through our mimetic capacity: chaotic mimetic violence restrained and channeled through mimetic ritual, taboo, and myth. This created an increasing feedback loop that exercised and intensified our mimetic capacity while protecting against its dangerous excess. Whatever the case, compared with our hominin cousins, the human phenotype shows strong signs of a domestication [End Page 64] syndrome: reduced cranium and jaw sizes, smaller skeleton mass, and a likely decreased reactive aggression in comparison to previous Homo.Fourth, and finally: Wrangham argues this domestication is related to a long, prehuman arc of transition, throughout the mid-Pleistocene (the Pleistocene ranges from about 2 million years ago to the thawing of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago), from older alpha-dominance patterns to tyrannies of egalitarian patriarchy. Wrangham draws upon hunter... (shrink)