Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983) claim that the relationship between age and crime is similar in all social and cultural conditions and that no current sociological or criminological theory can account for this similarity. We introduce the new field of evolutionary psychology and extend Daly and Wilson's (1988) work on homicide to construct a general theory of male criminality, which explains why men commit violent and property crimes. The theory can also explain the age-crime curve. It might also (...) account for some empirical anomalies such as why physically smaller boys are more delinquent, and why violent criminals desist more slowly. (shrink)

Two predictions concerning the perceived severity of crimes can be derived from evolutionary theory. The first, arising from the theory of inclusive fitness, is that crimes in general should be viewed as more serious to the degree that the victim is genetically related to the perpetrator. The second, arising from the deleterious effects of inbreeding depression, is that heterosexual sexual coercion should be perceived as more serious the closer the genetic relationship of victim and perpetrator, particularly when the victim (...) is a female of fertile age. Two hundred and thirty university students estimated the magnitude of the severity of brief crime descriptions in three separate studies. In the first two, the biological kinship of victim and perpetrator was varied, and in the third, the hypothetical genetic relatedness of the subject and the fictitious victim was varied. All three studies found the linear relationships between biological kinship and perceived crime severity predicted by theory. (shrink)

Sex- and age-specific rates of killing unrelated persons of one’s own sex were computed for Canada (1974–1983), England/Wales (1977–1986), Chicago (1965–1981), and Detroit (1972) from census information and data archives of all homicides known to police. Patterns in relation to sex and age were virtually identical among the four samples, although the rates varied enormously (from 3.7 per million citizens per annum in England/Wales to 216.3 in Detroit). Men’s marital status was related to the probability of committing a same-sex, nonrelative (...) homicide, but age effects remained conspicuous when married and unmarried men were distinguished.These findings and the treatment of age and sex effects by criminologists are discussed in the light of contemporary evolutionary psychological models of sex differences and life-span development. Same-sex homicides in which killer and victim are unrelated can be interpreted as an assay of competitive conflict. In every human society for which relevant information exists, men kill one another vastly more often than do women. Lethal interpersonal competition is especially prevalent among young men, which accords with many other aspects of life-span development in suggesting that sexual selection has maximized male competitive prowess and inclination in young adulthood. (shrink)

This essay enters the debate over the French appropriation of Poe not by seeking redress for the supposed political misdeeds of either Poe or the French, but rather, by addressing itself to the American response to the French reception of Poe. While American cultural studies critics in particular have sought to hold the French accountable for ignoring Poe's troubling biography — one in which the question of Poe's relationship to, and possible support of, antebellum slavery remains unanswered to this (...) day — I argue that the important question of how we as critics situate ourselves in relation to material history is too often buried under a moralizing rhetoric of accountability. Following from, and extending, Jacques Derrida's notion of ‘speciality,’ I maintain that material history is itself a kind of conjuration that belies any strict distinction between the material and the immaterial. Against the demand for accountability, the notion of history‐as‐conjuration allows us to address questions of historical responsibility in a manner that circumvents the impulse to hold Poe accountable for his crimes’. (shrink)

Violence is a known risk factor for health problems. In this epidemiological study across 5,385 male patients, we investigate the prevalence of perpetrated violence, exposure to violence, their overlap and the relationship between violence, mental, and psychosomatic health, as well as adverse health behaviors, such as self-harming behavior and the consumption of drugs. Participants completed an anonymous questionnaire addressing violence experience, age of victimization/perpetration, frequency, and perceived severity of violence exposure. We considered physical, psychological as well as sexual violence. (...) Information on health status and adverse health behaviors complemented the data. Results showed that 48.4% of the sample reported having experienced violence. The victim-perpetrator overlap formed the largest group, in which the incidence of having experienced multiple types of violence was significantly higher compared to victims and perpetrators. The age-crime curve flattened more slowly with increasing age in this group. Although the perceived severity of exposure to violence is lower in the overlap group, its health status and adverse health behaviors were worse. Interventions should focus on this group since they constitute a burden for the healthcare system. (shrink)

Since the Middle Ages, hospitable courts played a central role in the complex judicial landscape of the pre-modern age for the conflict resolution of parties of different regional origins, because civil disputes could be dealt with more quickly if at least one plaintiff or defendant was a (legal) stranger. With the obvious relationship between (social) belonging and law established by these courts, questions of asymmetries in law come to the fore, which under the common keywords of inequality, integration and (...) exclusion are a leading interest of research in the history of law, culture and crime, but which have so far hardly been dealt with in research within the framework of civil court practice. The Duisburg Hospitable Court shows that the historical civil proceedings concerning non-repaid loans, undelivered goods or disputed estates were no less important for social stability and order in the pre-modern period than criminal proceedings, even though social integration and exclusion were not the core issues of a civil lawsuit. Since the Middle Ages, hospitable courts concerned themselves with communication and trade practices and at the same time constituted an institution that offered legal security for both foreigners and locals. This was still true in the early modern period, which generally stands for a time that became increasingly hardened towards strangers and people on the move. (shrink)

While young people today expect gender equity in relationships, inequality persists. In this article, we use interviews with 25 young adults to investigate the link between gender meanings, age meanings, and continued inequality in relationships. Middle-class young adults tell relationship stories in a gender and age context that both reflect and perpetuate ideas about adult masculinity and femininity. While women often tell stories of poor treatment in relationships, they are able to reclaim agency over their experiences and believe that (...) they can solve their relationship problems by understanding their experiences as part of the normative path to adult womanhood. In contrast, men are able to explain their bad relationship behavior by attributing that behavior to youth and immaturity. By telling these stories, both women and men imagine that growing up will fix gender inequalities, obfuscating the persistence of gender inequalities in later adulthood. This work sheds light on the way narratives of age contribute to the persistence of gender inequality in romantic relationships. (shrink)

Divine providence is one of the most intriguing topics of today. Despite the scientific progress, individuals are aware that they cannot lead a life isolated from destiny. It is explained by social scientists from different perspectives. This study focuses on the knowledge of destiny and fatalism tendencies of people who are convicted of different crimes. The research has been conducted on 114 people who are convicted of different crimes at the General Directorate Probation in Bursa. Knowledge of destiny and fatalism (...) tendencies of convicted people have been investigated with socio-demographic variables and survey method. A direct relationship has been determined between education and economic level of convicted people as well as being happy to come to the world and being hopeful about future. An inverse relationship has been found between age and the knowledge of destiny of those people. A significant difference has been detected between the belief in fatalism and the state of violence in our study. There is destiny but not fatalism in Islam religion. The destiny belief does not eliminate responsibility of humans; rather it offers psychological wellness to people who struggle to survive in the world of difficulties. Our research aims to further demonstrate the relationship between belief in destiny and crime by means of quantitative evaluation and qualitative analysis. (shrink)

_Objective:_ Recent research has indicated that sub-clinical narcissism may be related to positive outcomes in respect of mental and physical health, and is positively related to an extended lifespan. Research has also indicated narcissism levels may decline over the lifespan of an individual. The aims of the present study were to investigate these issues, exploring age-related differences in levels and outcomes of narcissism. Specifically, narcissism’s relationship with loneliness, a deleterious but pervasive state among older-age individuals, was assessed. _Methods:_ A (...) total of 100 middle-aged ( M AGE = 48.07; SD = 5.27; 53% female) and 100 older-aged participants ( M AGE = 70.89; SD = 5.97; 51% female) completed the 40-item Narcissistic Personality Inventory and the UCLA Loneliness Scale, Version 3. _Results:_ Older-age participants had significantly lower levels of narcissism, and significantly higher levels of loneliness than middle-aged participants. Age and narcissism significantly predicted self-reported loneliness levels, with narcissism moderating the relationship between age and loneliness. _Conclusion:_ This study supports existing work, indicating that a degree of narcissism is of benefit to psychological functioning in respect of age-related loneliness, and is found to be a protective factor in mental health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Il Mostro e il sapiente: Studi sull'erotica grecaEva CantarellaRiccardo Vattuone. Il Mostro e il sapiente: Studi sull'erotica greca. Studi di Storia 11. Bologna: Pàtron, 2004. 345 pp. 15 black-and-white figs. Paper, €24."Il mostro e il sapiente" (the monster and the wise man), referred to in the title of Riccardo Vattuone's book, are, respectively, the loathed figure of the modern pedophile and an elected official who stands almost as (...) a symbol of wisdom, the great Athenian legislator Solon. Each of them, as Vattuone observes in the introduction, "loves" boys. No one, however, has ever for this reason considered the wise man Solon to be a monster, as today's media tend to view the modern pedophile. Thus it is clear from the title and made explicit in the foreword (7–10) that Vattuone is not merely interested in the past. As he repeats several times, "It is the past that puts the most significant questions to the contemporary age, and not vice-versa" (9, and passim). In this case, the past that interrogates the present is the pederastic relationship, and the question that this has asked Vattuone is whether or not there is a relationship between so-called Greek love and modern pedophilia. According to Vattuone, from the nineteenth century on, the immense quantity of literature about the pederastic relationship oscillates between radical condemnation and attempts to defend the past by "distancing it" (8). Il Mostro e il sapiente, he declares, was written to get away from this "ideological hypocrisy" and to dispel, if possible, "the suspicion that behind the contemporary pedophile there lurk the worst vices, the most obvious repressions of Western culture... and that that person is a creation of the system, constructed as a scapegoat for the unspeakable Other" (9).The following eight chapters are therefore dedicated to this objective. In the first, "Osservazioni preliminari: i crimini di Solone" (Preliminary Observations: the Crimes of Solon), Vattuone begins with an epigram of Straton (AP 12.246) to contest—in my opinion correctly—the reading of pederasty that he calls "anesthetic," according to which the pais would have experienced his relationship with the adult as a kind of social obligation, without feeling desire or pleasure. It is not only the adult that loves and desires, says Vattuone. Pederasty implies reciprocity of affection. On this point, as I observed years ago, I believe it very likely that Vattuone is approaching the truth. (See E. Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World [2d ed., Yale University Press, 2002], xii–xiii, and, at greater length, "A proposito di C. Calame, L'Amour en grece," Annales ESC 1999.)The second chapter, "Pais kalos. Una bellezza incomparabile" (Pais Kalos. An Incomparable Beauty), argues, correctly, against the idea that the boy's attractions depend on his resemblance to a woman. The scarce contact that Greek [End Page 461] men had with women has nothing to do with the reasons for which the paides from the age of approximately twelve to seventeen years were irresistible to the Greek man. Though their face and gaze might be soft, their body structure and ethos were virile. Pederasty was a relationship between males, among other things allowed and culturally valued only within the age limits to which an ample and exhaustive part of the chapter is dedicated.The third chapter, "Eros, un 'dovere' sociale?" (Eros, a Social "Duty?"), goes into the erotic aspect of the relationship, dedicating ample space to the problem of the so-called origins of pederasty. The Greeks considered that pederasty originated with a crime (the rape of Chrysippus), and modern scholars, according to Vattuone, have followed this line of thinking, concentrating their efforts on the attempt—this is a leitmotif of the book—to save the Greeks from accusations of immorality and perversion. A long section of criticism follows, attacking hypotheses of the historic-psychoanalytic type and those that link the social role of pederasty to "rites of passage," with the objective, according to Vattuone, of distancing it from us and the present world. I do not agree, however. As I have pointed out elsewhere, to connect a sexual relationship with a rite does not necessarily... (shrink)

Armando P. Ribas was born in Ciego de vila, Cuba, in 1932 and died in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2020. In 1956 he graduated as a Juris Doctor from Saint Thomas of Villanova University in Havana, Cuba. He later studied Law and Economics at Southern Methodist University and Columbia University in the United States. In Argentina, he worked as a journalist and economist and from 1889 to 1990 and was a Deputy in that country. This book clearly explains the ethical (...) and non-economic antagonism between socialism and the misnamed capitalism, as well as the importance of liberty for the individual to achieve prosperity with justice and solidarity. The " illuminism" fallacy clearly emerges from the work as a pretense of the course of reason in history. This explains how obscurantism arising from the confusion between reason and truth caused greater crimes in the West than the Manichean virtues of the Middle Ages. It explains the fundamental discrepancy between the reason of state, prevailing in Europe and the "rule of law" of Americans. The latter changed for the first time in history the relationship between the government and the citizen in defense of individual rights: to life, liberty, property and the search for their own happiness. Ribas also expands on the analysis of economic ideas, which, detached from private rights, have caused the recent failures of "democracies south of the Rio Grande." This book allows us to understand to a great extent the evolution and problems of the world that we have had to live, between the supposed globalization and the reality of terrorism. But just as he points out the problems, he also teaches the ways in which individual prosperity can be achieved for all men who know how to use their freedom. Armando Ribas has been pointed out as the most liberal of Cubans and also of Argentines, since he had two homelands in his life. (shrink)

America frequently talks about impeaching a president, but the impeachment provisions of the American constitution are widely misunderstood. In High Crimes and Misdemeanors, constitutional scholar Frank O. Bowman, III offers unprecedented clarity to the question of impeachment, tracing its roots to medieval England through its adoption in the Constitution and 250 years of American experience. By examining the human and political history of those who have faced impeachment, Bowman demonstrates that the Framers intended impeachment to be a flexible tool, adaptable (...) to the needs of any age. Written in a lively, engaging style, the book combines a deep historical and constitutional analysis of the impeachment clauses, a coherent theory of when impeachment should be used to protect constitutional order against presidential misconduct, and a comprehensive presentation of the case for and against impeachment of President Trump. It is an indispensable work for the present moment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Explode and Die!A Fat Woman’s Perspective on Prenatal Care and the Fat Panic EpidemicJennifer HansenClassifying obesity as a disease provides more ammunition for the “war on obesity.” I gather that this is supposed to be a good thing. The problem is that obesity isn’t a germ or a crime; it’s a word applied to a particular kind of body—and thus to the person inhabiting it.From a fat person’s (...) perspective, the “war on obesity” is a war on fat people. It’s a license to bully, shame, and ostracize fat people and deny us employment, medical care, and even ordinary family life because we don’t look right. Fat people, proclaimed by medical authority to be the enemy and identifiable on sight as outsiders, are made into targets for all kinds of free–floating anger. For example, I am apparently sucking away people’s tax dollars via my fat, and it’s also my fault that men expecting to fantasize about every woman they see on the street encounter my distasteful fatness instead. But no matter how many times we get told that we are wrong just for existing, we go on existing, in public even. How dare we? The answer, obviously, is to keep at us. If we would just admit that we have no right to exist, then we would all either vanish or become socially acceptably thin, and then the whole world would be unicorns and butterflies and everyone would be rich and nobody would get old. Or something like that. If obesity is a disease, then phrenology is a science.Of course, we get a lot of well–meaning flak along with the bullying; after all, concentrating on weight loss can only be good for us, because fat people are always about to explode and die. This assumption has definitely affected my relationship with the only medical practice I can reach that’s in my network. During the 20–plus years since I became visibly obese, I have gotten used to the constant drone of “You’re fat, you’re fat, you’re about to explode and die, we don’t care about what you actually came in for because it’s vitally important that we bug you yet again about your pants size,” but some things can still shock me. For example, during all three of my pregnancies, I never had a result that was even borderline for gestational diabetes (GD). And yet, some time after my last baby was born, someone wrote “HISTORY OF GESTATIONAL DIABETES” in my file. I first heard about it during my annual checkup, when the doctor referred to it when talking about my increased risk of Type 2 diabetes due to age (unavoidable), my first–ever non–whitecoat–syndrome borderline blood pressure (BP) reading (taken with a standard cuff, gee how could it possibly have been inaccurate), and GD (gosh, I felt so safe and supported at this fine reality–based practice). And of course my weight.Whoever wrote that felt free to make things up because I’m fat. To repeat, somebody with access to my file at my only source for affordable health care felt free to write things in it that were completely contradicted by the facts just a few sheets below. There’s no need to fact–check your assumptions when you can tell by looking at her that she’s F–A–T, and everybody knows what they are. They’ll explode and die, every last one of them. Better medicate them now before they inevitably break down!Speaking of which, there’s a particular OB at the practice who I’ll call Doctor Eeyore. At every appointment, Doctor Eeyore would take measurements, stare, and say, “Hmm … tch.” If I asked him to tell me what he had found, he would say, “Too big,” or, “Too small,” or indicate some other inadequacy in his glum, word–miserly way. He only bothered to produce complete sentences when he enthusiastically told me that I would die if I didn’t give birth with an IV in place to administer the life–saving drugs for my inevitable cardiac event... (shrink)

This study integrates corpus-assisted text analysis with frame semantics to study a social problem. Taking a cognitive-linguistic approach to critical discourse studies, in this article I examine the linguistic construction of minors in a corpus of 489 articles from the Uruguayan newspaper El País in the context of the so-called ‘Criminal Imputability Referendum’. Throughout, I focus on the construal operation of framing and identify a host of discursive patterns via which minors and adolescents are recurrently placed within the semantic frame (...) CRIME, and within this, they profile the frame elements of perpetrators of violent crimes rather than victims. I argue that, in the context of the referendum, these discursive strategies run the risk of facilitating the consolidation of a strong conceptual link whereby youth become readily associated with criminality, and are subservient to the political views of groups supporting a lower cut-off age for criminal responsibility and more stringent punishments. The observations arrived at in this instance set the foundations for a future experimental study testing whether the discursive patterns unearthed here have an effect on how readers conceptualize minors outside the texts. (shrink)

In the period 1819–1920 the ostensibly strict English common law rule that drunkenness was not an excuse to any criminal charge was modified. It was formally recognized that, at least for crimes requiring proof of a specific intention, intoxication could reduce liability. Legal historians have explained this course of development with reference to the establishment of a subjective pattern of criminal responsibility. Conceived as a mental condition excuse, intoxication could only be accommodated in legal doctrine once the defendant’s state of (...) mind became the focus for investigation. This article suggests reasons to revise this account. Drawing extensively on trial reports, it offers an interpretation that attends closely to the relationships between doctrine, policy and contemporary understandings of individual responsibility for drunken violence. It argues that, in an age of temperance, doctrinal development was driven by judicial concern to narrow the scope of the excuse and it was only late in the nineteenth century, as drunkenness became mixed with insanity in legal doctrine, that there was a sustained focus on the defendant’s state of mind. The article ends with a re-evaluation of DPP v Beard [1920] AC 479 (HL), which is still cited as a foundational case for the modern doctrinal approach to the issue. (shrink)

The topic was chosen for consideration is extremely relevant, as modern world is constantly evolving and influencing technological capabilities of information and communication technologies. The permanent development of information and technological sphere is constantly influenced by technologies both technological innovative techniques and means of techno world, which are reflected in an outlook and ideology of the modern person. The level of digital ideology and outlook of the modern man should include awareness and advanced technological training in order to operate with (...) digital world, to function in well-functioning communication throughout the country. Analyzing Recent Research and Publications - We draw on recent work in the digital world, namely Mark Goodman's Crimes of the Future, Max Tegmark's Life 3.0. The Age of Artificial Intelligence "by Stephen Pinker" Enlightenment Today. Arguments for Mind, Science, and Progress, Alex Ross, The Industries of the Future, Kevin Kelly, "12 Technologies That Shape Our Future," Eric Brianolfsson and Andrew McAfee, "The Second Age of Machines. Work, progress and prosperity in times of extraordinary technologies ”and a number of works by domestic authors - O. Kivlyuk, O. Sosnin, O. Punchenko, which explore the relevant topics of this problem. Methods are collections of knowledge about complex systems, since digital age requires systematic thinking in new categories in order to understand better and refine technological processes. System dynamics can have a greater impact on the development of the technological world and the ideology and outlook of the modern man than the parameters of its individual components. Highlighting previously unsettled parts of global problem addressed in this article. The basis of research is theoretical and practical aspects of digital worldview and ideology of modern people, which should be formed as a systemic thinking based on cyclical relationships between the components of the system and nonlinear cause and effect relationships within it. Usually, this avoids the unanticipated consequences increasing the risk of components being considered in isolation. The statement of the problem - analysis of the development of information and technological sphere and its impact on the digital worldview and ideology of modern man. The purpose of the article is to conceptualize the influence of the information and technological sphere on the digital worldview and ideology of modern man, which we present as systematic digitized thinking. Results of the research. It is proved that the development of information and technological sphere influences the designation of scientific and technical and innovative achievements of civilization, which transform reality, and require the formation of a digitized worldview and ideology. It is substantiated that the development of information and technological sphere and formation of digital outlook and ideology of modern man act as catalysts for increase of intellectual and digital capabilities of a person capable to live in the digital era. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration by Amy LevadLloyd SteffenRedeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration Amy Levad minneapolis: fortress press, 2014. 233 pp. $39.00.Amy Levad (University of St. Thomas) has added a theological voice to the national conversation that Michelle Alexander opened with her devastating critique of the American criminal justice system in The New Jim (...) Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander showed how policies grounded in the war on drugs have disproportionately distressed racial and ethnic minorities—African Americans and Latinos—and the poor, destroying lives and communities. Incarceration in the United States is today a system that perpetuates what Alexander called a “caste” system from which escape is, especially among black males, virtually impossible. In this informed and well-presented study, Levad takes up Alexander’s social justice analysis, extending it in new directions, offering a creative theological contribution to the mass incarceration crisis in the world’s first “genuine prison society.”Levad observes that a limitation in the Christian response to mass incarceration is the “lack of Catholic voices” (47), which her book makes an effort to correct. She draws on core insights of Catholic tradition to address conditions that foster crime while also responding “to the ways in which the criminal justice crisis both reflects and sustains social injustices” (48). Her book offers a wonderfully clear analysis of mass incarceration and related issues such as recidivism strategies and policing policies. She advocates “pulling levers,” policing policies that aim at avoiding prison, versus harsh “window-breaking” policies that for deterrence reasons criminalize even minor offences. Levad addresses theories of punishment, proposes ideas for prison reform, and, while acknowledging a limited need for prisons, sets forth constructive suggestions for how best to decarcerate society through restorative justice and rehabilitation practices that reintegrate offenders into society.The study is a provocative interdisciplinary conversation between criminology and theology. Levad’s focus is on liturgy and sacrament, the central resources of Roman Catholic theology, finding in the Eucharist the theological [End Page 204] model for inviting the marginalized and dispossessed into the common fellowship of human dignity. She then argues that penance and reconciliation yield attitudes and behaviors that parallel secular restorative justice efforts. Advocating alternatives to prison while denying the effectiveness of punitive retribution, Levad critiques the approaches of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other Catholics. She highlights Kathryn Soltis as a Catholic scholar who uses theological resources to affirm the dignity of prisoners, attend to the common good, and seek ways to repair relationships between victims and offenders.Some of Levad’s ideas could be developed further. Pluralism, for instance, is mentioned as a contextual issue for her theological work but never thoroughly developed. Utilitarianism is denied a constructive ethics role, but Levad’s discussion of recidivism appeals to it as a marker of the common good (122). And Levad’s attention to the internal failures of the Church in confronting social justice issues leads one to wonder whether the decarcerated vision of society she desires is practicable.Levad speaks to the heart of the incarceration crisis in America, challenging the willingness of Americans to “throw people away” (198) through imprisonment—especially the young, the poor, and minorities. With her underlying question of “what kind of people we want to be and what we want our communities to be like” (43), Levad presents readers with a distinctive “vision of justice in God’s reign conveyed by liturgy and sacraments” (197). With that, she has accomplished what she set out to do: confront the social injustice of mass incarceration with the best insights of modern criminology but also with a theological perspective that embodies the struggle to realize an engaged Catholic praxis of justice.Lloyd SteffenLehigh UniversityCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Intimacy contributes to our well-being and extends into older age, despite cognitive or physical impairment. However, the ability to enjoy intimacy and express sexuality is often compromised—or even controlled—when one moves into residential aged care. The aim of this study was to identify what factors influence senior residential aged care staff when they make decisions regarding resident intimate relationships and sexual expression. The study used vignette methodology and a postal survey to explore reactions to a fictionalised case study of a (...) couple—Norm and Carol—who develop a close, mutually satisfying relationship. Staff were first asked whether they would intervene in the relationship. Using an innovative approach, several variations to the case study were then presented to explore whether views about intervening changed according to varying contextual factors. Findings indicated that over 90% of respondents initially agreed that the relationship should continue, and only 10% indicated they would intervene. However, when the case study was varied, respondents indicated they were more likely to intervene, particularly if Norm was exhibiting distress in Carol’s presence (89%), but also if Norm was married and his wife was living in the community (40%). Other factors including level of cognitive impairment and family disapproval were also found to influence staff views. This study provides insight into how residential aged care staff make decisions regarding the intimacy and sexuality of older people living in residential aged care and how personal views and values likely guide practice in the absence of formal policies. (shrink)

The Cognitive Reserve (CR) hypothesis suggests that the brain actively attempts to cope with neural damages by using pre-existing cognitive processing approaches or by enlisting compensatory approaches. This would allow an individual with high CR to better cope with aging than an individual with lower CR. Many of the proxies used to assess CR indirectly refer to the flexibility of thought. The present paper aims at directly exploring the relationships between CR and creativity, a skill that includes flexible thinking. We (...) tested a sample of 72 adults (aged between 45 and 78) assessing both their level of CR and their creativity. To evaluate CR we used the proxies commonly used in literature, namely, three subtests from the WAIS (vocabulary, similarities, and digit span) and the years of education. We also used an ad-hoc test asking people to report how frequently they tend to perform activities that are believed to increase CR. We used verbal creativity tasks (alternative uses and generation of acronyms) to assess individual levels of creativity. We asked participants to describe their main occupation (present or past) and coded each occupation as creative or not creative. Results (controlling for age-related differences) showed that scores from the WAIS correlated positively with creativity performance, even though correlations varied across the subtests. Focusing on the frequency and type of activities that people perform, and comparing individuals who have or had a creative job to those with a routine job, a clear relationship between creativity and CR emerged. This effect was more relevant than the level of job complexity. Implications for the study of CR and aging are discussed. (shrink)

Game Transfer Phenomena refers to a cluster of involuntary phenomena related to playing videogames, including sensory and cognitive intrusions, transient changes in perception and self-agency. The Game Transfer Phenomena Scale has been used to measure the frequency of GTP with respect to five factors. The present study aimed to validate an instrument for assessing the multiple dimensions of GTP that helps clarify the distinction between GTP experiences. GTP were contextualized onto the spectrum of intrusive cognitions, perceptual distortions, and dissociations. The (...) relationship between GTP, involuntary phenomena without game content in terms of, e.g., hallucinations and perceptual distortions, and game-biased perceptions, as well as the positive and negative impact of GTP and level of distress were also examined. The data were collected using a survey. Separate confirmatory factor analyses of the dimensions of “inner intrusions/misperceptions,” “outer intrusions/distortions,” and “dissociations/mix-ups” produced acceptable fit indices. The findings show that phenomena manifesting as internal experiences are more common, while those manifesting as externalized intrusions are less common. Correlations between the GTP dimensions, INVWG, and GBPA, such as the insertion of game elements in thoughts, perceptions, and dreams, supported convergent validity. The correlations between the GTP dimensions and hours played supported criterion validity. Distress was correlated with outer intrusions and dissociations/mix-ups, but not with inner intrusions. Taken together, these results support the validity and reliability of the proposed assessment of GTP constructs. (shrink)

In this article, I try to make sense conventional notions of ‘premodernism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ as ways of relating to reality, and apply them to education. I argue for the additional notion of ‘neo-premodernism’ to make sense of recent attempts to engineer social reality. Each of these four approaches coexists and constitutes the four ages: the age of prayer, the age of reason, the age of social engineering and the age of responsibility. I try to trace these ages in modern (...) schooling and critically analyze their consequences and the power relations between teachers and students. (shrink)

Our sense of entitlement influences our interactions and attitudes in a range of specific relational contexts, one of them being aging parents’ relationships with their adult children. This study aimed to examine the factor structure of the Sense of Relational Entitlement—aging parents toward their offspring, an 11-item questionnaire that assesses aging people’s sense of relational entitlement toward their children, and examine the associations of its subscales with related personality and mental health constructs. One thousand and six participants, aged 65–99, with (...) at least one child, completed the SRE-ao, Brief Symptom Inventory, Loneliness Scale, and General Belongingness scale. The SRE-ao demonstrated good construct structure using confirmatory factor analysis. Both SRE-ao subscales were significantly and positively associated with anxiety, depression, somatization and sense of loneliness and negatively with sense of belonging. When all variables were entered into a regression model, age, anxiety, and low sense of belonging, but not sense of loneliness, positively predicted both restricted and inflated sense of entitlement. Somatization negatively predicted inflated sense of entitlement. The SRE-ao is a reliable and valid scale that can be used in clinical practice and research to enhance our understanding of parent–child relationships throughout the lifespan. (shrink)

Cross-cultural studies have revealed broad quantitative associations between subsistence practice and demographic parameters for preindustrial populations. One explanation is that variationin the availability of suitable weaning foods influenced the frequency and duration of breastfeeding and thus the length of interbirth intervals and the probability of child survival (the “weaning food availability” hypothesis). We examine the available data on weaning age variation in preindustrial populations and report results of a cross-cultural test of the predictions that weaning occurred earlier in agricultural and (...) pastoral populations because dairy and cereal production increased the availability of easily digestible, nutrientrich foods appropriate for weaning. We found that, contrary to predictions, supplementation with liquid foods other than breast milk was delayed in agricultural populations relative to less agriculturally dependent ones and complementary feeding with solid foods was delayed in pastoral populations relative to those less dependent on herding. Although the duration of breastfeeding was longer in populations dependent on hunting, there was no qualitative evidence that such populations lacked foods appropriate for weaning. The patterns observed suggest that the relationships between demography and subsistence observed among preindustrial societies cannot be explained by the “weaning food availability” hypothesis. We discuss the implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying prehistoric human demography, subsistence shifts, allocation to parenting and mating effort, and the evolutionary implications of tradeoffs between diet and disease. (shrink)

Psychological well-being manifests itself in all aspects of human activity and is essential to understanding whether young people experience life satisfaction and whether, as they mature, well-being can be associated with different levels of personal autonomy. This quantitative study was developed within the framework of international research on young people’s autonomy in the transition to adulthood. Its main objectives were to analyze the relationship between psychological well-being and autonomy and examine potential variations between the two variables according to age. (...) To this end, Ryff’s Psychological Well-Being Scale and the Transition to Adulthood Autonomy Scale designed by Bernal et al., were used with a sample of 1,148 young people aged 16–21 from Madrid, Spain, and Bogotá, Colombia. The results show that almost all the dimensions on the Psychological Well-Being Scale correlate significantly and positively with the dimensions on the EDATVA scale. Specifically, moderate correlations were obtained between self-organization on the EDATVA scale and purpose in life and environmental mastery on the Psychological Well-Being Scale. In turn, autonomy on Ryff’s scale obtained the highest correlation with understanding context on the EDATVA scale. It was also found that the older 18–21 age group obtained higher scores than the younger 16–17 age group in all dimensions on both the EDATVA and the Psychological Well-Being Scale. Earlier studies endorse the results found in this research, especially the differences in the scores for both scales according to age groups. This opens avenues for future research to analyze the relationship between psychological well-being and autonomy as independent variables in other sectors of the population. (shrink)

Intra-individual variability (IIV) refers to within-person variability in behavioural task responses. Several factors can influence IIV, including aging and cognitive demands. The present study investigated effects of aging on IIV of response times during executive functioning tasks. Known age-related differences in cognitive control and emotion processing motivated evaluating how varying the design of emotional response inhibition tasks would influence IIV in older and younger adults. We also tested whether IIV predicted inhibitory control across task designs and age groups. Older and (...) younger adults (N = 237) completed one of three versions of a stop-signal task, which all displayed happy, fearful, or neutral faces in Stop trials. An independent group of older and younger adults (N = 80) completed a go/no-go task also employing happy, fearful and neutral faces. Results showed older adults had more consistent responses (lower IIV) than younger adults in the stop-signal task, but not the go/no-go task. Lower IIV predicted more efficient emotional response inhibition for fear faces in the stop-signal task, but only when attention to emotion was task-relevant. Collectively, this study clarifies effects of aging and task design on IIV and illustrates how task design impacts the relationship between IIV and emotional response inhibition in younger and older adults. (shrink)

A positive attitude toward later life is crucial for wellbeing among older adults. Maintaining a healthy relationship with adult children can help reduce older parents’ sense of loneliness and nurture a positive life attitude. This study aimed to investigate the associations between multidimensional intergenerational relationship quality and attitudes toward later life among aging Chinese adults in Hong Kong and examine the mediating effects of a sense of loneliness. Representative survey data were collected from 801 participants with at least (...) one adult child. Multiple linear regression was employed to investigate the associations between overall intergenerational relationship quality with a sense of loneliness as well as the attitude toward later life. To examine the mediating effects of a sense of loneliness, causal mediational analyses were performed. Results demonstrated that overall intergenerational relationship quality was positively associated with aging parents’ attitude toward later life, and this relationship could be partially mediated by a sense of loneliness. Among the four subdomains of intergenerational relationship quality, the influences of structural-associational solidarity and intergenerational conflict on attitude toward later life were almost fully mediated by a sense of loneliness, whereas the influences of consensual-normative solidarity and affectual closeness were partially mediated. These findings contributed to an improved understanding of the relationship between intergenerational relationship quality, sense of loneliness, and attitude toward later life, and could inform future policies and service programs that promote aging adults’ social integration and positive aging. (shrink)

This research study is focused on detection of relationship between perfectionism and classroom climate in middle school aged children. To detect the level of perfectionism we used the Frost multidimensional perfectionism scale (F-MPS) and for assessing of classroom climate we used My Class Inventory (MCI). In research we also focused on gender differences among each variable. Our research sample consisted of 240 children who attend primary schools and their age was between 10 – 12 years. There were 160 girls (...) and 80 boys, who took part in this research. The results of the research point out that there is no statistically significant relation between perfectionism and positive classroom climate. We also observed no gender differences in variable perfectionism. (shrink)

The purpose of the startup approach is to find an appropriate course of action that adds value to the economy’s development. This study is aimed to determine the effect of the lean startup approach with mediating effect of business coaching to foster innovative work behavior in women entrepreneurs. Additionally, the study also examines the moderating effect of age on the lean startup approach and innovative work behavior. A quantitative approach was employed. The findings show that the relationship between the (...) lean startup approach and innovative work behavior is significant. Moreover, the findings also revealed a significant mediating effect of business coaching and moderating effect of age. This research encourages practitioners and scholars to deal with women entrepreneurship incubation initiatives in the lean startup methodology. Furthermore, this study also leads to a deeper understanding of women’s ideas for business exploration, growth, and implementation. The study contends that guidelines and directives are critical for creative entrepreneurial behavior. (shrink)

Religion and philosophy as two mutually exclusive domains experienced a paradigm shift during the Middle Ages. Philosophy became a vehicle of religion through which both Islamic and Christian thinkers developed a rational understanding of faith to develop new philosophical ideas. Using the systematic literature review methodology, with rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, this study analyzed several research articles with the use of keywords in reliable databases like ERIC and Google Scholar. The investigation of the relationships between philosophical speculation and religious (...) belief in early Middle Ages exposed the philosophical underpinnings of religion. It was felt that a religious belief was a core conviction that can be upheld logically without having to draw conclusions from other beliefs. It was also found that the study of a wide range of aspects of life is the primary goal of philosophy, an ancient academic subfield. It is recommended that both religion and philosophy should have combined foundations to resolve all sorts of queries, responses, and arguments, which can be defended by various ideologies. Let religion and philosophy be practiced in wide range of contexts, both should study people’s beliefs and behaviors in response to different situations. (shrink)

The dynamic balance is a significant skill in all age groups and it is required for regular daily activities, such as walking and running. Therefore, this study aimed at identifying the differences in concentration of attention, aerobic endurance and dynamic balance among female students in age group (9-12) years. As well as the relationship between attention concentration and ability of female students on aerobic endurance and dynamic, balance. To achieve the objectives of the study the researchers used the descriptive (...) approach on a sample consisting of (130) female students within age group (9-12) years in Khawla bint Al Azur school, Amman. For study data, the researchers used the mental abilities test, aerobic endurance test and dynamic balance test. To Processing the study data, the researchers used means, standard deviations, ANOVA, Scheffe and correlation coefficients. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences between the means of the results in the concentration attention ability, aero aerobic endurance and dynamic balance and for the benefit of category (11-12) years. Consequently, there were statistically significant correlation between the level of concentration of attention abilities and the level of the aerobic endurance and the dynamic balance of the students in age group (9-12) years. Therefore, researchers recommend that female students in the age group (9-12) should be encouraged to exercise physically for coordination abilities and physical abilities. (shrink)

The tourism and accommodation industry has long been a fertile field for digital entrepreneurial activities. However, sharing accommodation entrepreneurs have been ignored, whether in digital entrepreneurship or the sharing economy. This empirical study explored the relationship between start-up age and host growth based on the entrepreneurship learning theory to bridge the gap. In total, 348 hosts’ balanced panel data for 5 years were collected from the Airbnb platform. The results shown that there was a curvilinear relationship between start-up (...) age and host growth; a critical primary growth strategy significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship such that the inverted U-shaped relationship is less pronounced when the level of product supply is high. This study is helpful to understand digital entrepreneurs in the sharing accommodation and offers management suggestions for host growth. (shrink)

BÄCKSTRÖM B, ASPLUND K and SUNDIN K.Nursing Inquiry2010;17: 257–268 The meaning of middle‐aged female spouses’ lived experience of the relationship with a partner who has suffered a stroke, during the first year postdischargeStroke consequences present a great long‐term challenge to the spouses of the stroke sufferer. A longitudinal study with a phenomenological hermeneutic approach was used to illuminate the meanings of middle‐aged female spouses’ lived experience of their relationship with a partner who has suffered a stroke, during the (...) first year postdischarge. Four middle‐aged female spouses of stroke sufferers participated in the study. Narrative interviews were conducted 1, 6 and 12 month postdischarge (total of 12 interviews), audio‐taped and transcribed verbatim to a text and interpreted by a phenomenological hermeneutic method inspired by Ricoeur. The findings showed a process over time during which spouses come to know, recognize and acknowledge the residual changes in their partners’ cognitive and emotional conditions and the impact on their relationship. Spouses showed grief due to the loss of the marital relationship they once had and anxiety that they would not be able to continue in an undesired relationship in the future. Even if the partner is still alive, there is a loss to grieve and to be understood, an important meaning of the transition process in the relationship during the first year after the partner's discharge. (shrink)

In this issue of the American Journal of Bioethics, Kraft and colleagues (2018) provide important insights into the role trust plays in donor's decisions to contribute data and samples to local bio...

Crime stories attract audiences and social buzz, but they also serve as prisms for perceived threats. As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape our world, anxiety spreads. Because journalism plays a role in how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval, this unease raises the ethical stakes. Reporters can spread panic or encourage reconciliation by how they tell these stories. Murder in our Midst uses crime coverage in select North American and Western European countries as a key (...) to examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Working from close readings of news coverage, codes of ethics and style guides, and personal interviews with almost 200 news professionals, this book offers fertile material for a provocative conversation. We use our findings to divide the ten countries studied into three media models; we explore what the differing coverage decisions suggest about underlying attitudes to criminals and crime, and how justice in a democracy is best served. Today, journalists' work can be disseminated around the world without any consideration of whether what's being told (or how) might dissolve cultural differences or undermine each community's right to set its own standards to best reflect its citizens' values. At present, unique reporting practices persist among our three models, but the internet and social media threaten to dissolve distinctions and the cultural values they reflect. We need a journalism that both opens local conversations and bridges differences among nations. This book is a first step in that direction. (shrink)

The article seeks to develop a new conceptual framework suitable for analysing the ageing processes of objects in modern culture. The basic intuition is that object experience cannot be analysed separately from collective participation. The article focuses on the question of the ‘timeless’ nature of modernist design and seeks to understand why modernist objects age more slowly than other objects. First, inspired by the late Durkheim’s account of symbolism, I turn to the experiential effects of collective embeddedness. Second, I enter (...) the field of architectural practices and architectural theory. Visiting early modernist ideologue Adolf Loos, I seek to understand the modernist attitude as a direct response to experiences of the acceleration of ageing processes characteristic of modern culture. I then try to show how Loos’s explicit awareness of the collective dimension is ignored by the subsequent modernist movement and by architectural theory. Finally, I try to assess the consequences of this neglect. (shrink)

Pre-reading language skills develop rapidly in early childhood and are related to brain structure and functional architecture in young children prior to formal education. However, the early neurobiological development that supports these skills is not well understood. Here we acquired anatomical, diffusion tensor imaging and resting state functional MRI from 35 children at 3.5 years of age. Children were assessed for pre-reading abilities using the NEPSY-II subtests 1 year later. We applied a data-driven linked independent component analysis to explore the (...) shared co-variation of gray and white matter measures. Two sources of structural variation at 3.5 years of age demonstrated relationships with Speeded Naming scores at 4.5 years of age. The first imaging component involved volumetric variability in reading-related cortical regions alongside microstructural features of the superior longitudinal fasciculus. The second component was dominated by cortical volumetric variations within the cerebellum and visual association area. In a subset of children with rs-fMRI data, we evaluated the inter-network functional connectivity of the left-lateralized fronto-parietal language network and its relationship with pre-reading measures. Higher functional connectivity between the FPL and the default mode and visual networks at 3.5 years significantly predicted better Phonological Processing scores at 4.5 years. Together, these results suggest that the integration of functional networks, as well as the co-development of white and gray matter brain structures in early childhood, support the emergence of pre-reading measures in preschool children. (shrink)