Political deepfakes have prompted outcry about the diminishing trustworthiness of visual depictions, and the epistemic and political threat this poses. Yet this new technique is being used overwhelmingly to create pornography, raising the question of what, if anything, is wrong with the creation of deepfake pornography. Traditional objections focusing on the sexual abuse of those depicted fail to apply to deepfakes. Other objections—that the use and consumption of pornography harms the viewer or other (non-depicted) individuals—fail to explain the objection that (...) a depicted person might have to the creation of deepfake pornography that utilises images of them. My argument offers such an explanation. It begins by noting that the creation of sexual images requires an act of consent, separate from any consent needed for the acts depicted. Once we have separated these out, we can see that a demand for consent can arise when a sexual image is of us, even when no sexual activity was actually engaged in, as in the case of deepfake pornography. I then demonstrate that there are two ways in which an image can be ‘of us’, both of which can exist in the case of deepfakes. Thus, I argue: if a person, their likeness, or their photograph is used to create pornography, their consent is required. Whenever the person depicted does not consent (or in the case of children, can’t consent), that person is wronged by the creation of deepfake pornography and has a claim against its production. (shrink)

Challenging previous interpretations of Levinas that gloss over his use of the feminine or show how he overlooks questions raised by feminists, Claire Elise Katz explores the powerful and productive links between the feminine and religion in Levinas’s work. Rather than viewing the feminine as a metaphor with no significance for women or as a means to reinforce traditional stereotypes, Katz goes beyond questions of sexual difference to reach a more profound understanding of the role of the feminine in (...) Levinas’s conception of ethical responsibility. She combines feminist interpretations of Levinas with interpretations that focus on his Jewish writings to reveal that the feminine provides an important bridge between his philosophy and his Judaism. Katz’s reading of Levinas’s conception of the feminine against the backdrop of discussions of women of the Hebrew bible points to important shifts in contemporary philosophy toward the creation of life and care for the other. (shrink)

Strawson contends that the proper subject matter of a theory of meaning includes what is meant on an occasion of utterance. If his contention is correct, it rules out a recent proposal that Davidsonian semantic theory should limit its scope so that it does not capture the extension of what is meant or what is said. In this paper, I reject Strawson's arguments for his contention. Despite the persuasive ring of his claim that the essential character of linguistic rules is (...) that they are rules for communicating, his case remains unproven. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans le catalogue E-Cité/Europe, Strasbourg, Apollonia, 2015, p. 26-30. Nous remercions Claire Dehove et WOS-Agences des hypothèses de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. WORKSHOP EN PARTENARIAT AVEC LA HEAR ET LA FACULTÉ DES ARTS DE STRASBOURG – Wos agence des hypothèses/Claire Dehove avec François Duconseille, et avec les étudiants de scénographie HEAR et du Master Critique-essais de Strasbourg, Inès Sassi, Raimonda Tamuleviciute, Ikhyong Park, Laura Perrone, Loue Aveline – - Arts plastiques (...) et autres – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem (...) with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates. (shrink)

The introduction first goes back on Jeremy Bentham’s historical scheme to highlight lesser-known traits and show how it was not limited to carceral applications, a versatility which has been reflected in literature. It then moves on to Foucault’s chapter on panopticism in _ Discipline and Punish, _ foregrounding its most influential aspects as well as others which are often overlooked. The third part focuses on the reception of Foucault’s panopticism in literary criticism, from the seminal studies of D.A. Miller and (...) John Bender to contemporary times. The fourth part deals with the influence of panopticism within the field of surveillance studies, as well as the input offered by literature for these discussions. The introduction then presents the structure of the issue and offers a summary of each of the five articles and of the final interview. (shrink)

PALP est un outil de communication tactile à distance fabriqué avec le micro d'un téléphone portable obsolète connecté à Internet. L'échange effectué par impulsion manuelle permet l'invention d'un langage clandestin à l'échelle individuelle ou communautaire. La proximité physique s'établit entre deux personnes qui utilisent à distance et simultanément leur PALP ou collectivement. Les principes de réalisation en open source de PALP permettent à chacun de fabriquer son propre kit. Toute communauté reliée par PALP (...) - Arts plastiques et autres – (...) GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

As the author himself notes in the prologue, the book – An Advanced Introduction to Law and Literature – seeks to “advance” the discussion. Written by Peter Goodrich, one of the leading and most prolific scholars on the topic, the work may not be suitable for first-comers to the Law and Literature movement looking for a systematic overview of the field. The latter may be found in the numerous already-existing handbooks, research guides or critical introductions. While the prologue mentions la...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How I Hate You, CancerClaire YarMigraine. That’s what we thought. They run in my family, so why not? My beautiful, bright, extroverted ten–year–old daughter’s neurological exam was unremarkable, but she had a bad headache and was vomiting in the early morning hours. Migraine didn’t seem that much of a stretch. Our savvy pediatrician had a gut feeling that it was more than a migraine and sent her for an (...) MRI.We had not even left the children’s hospital before I received a voicemail to call our pediatrician. When I returned the call, on our way to pick up Ellie’s younger brother from school and already running late I heard the words that no parent wants to hear, “I have bad news. We found a brain tumor and it’s rather large”. This conversation would turn our lives into a frenzy of fear and leave unanswered (unanswerable?) questions. I was told to bring her to the ER where we would be met by a neurosurgeon and oncologist. I could not process this information. My initial fears were too scary to utter. Was she going to die? Do children survive brain surgery “intact”? Is it operable? Oncologist = scary cancer, doesn’t it? Did we do something to cause it? What if our insurance doesn’t cover the best treatment?Clinging to the life I knew before—needing to stay in the “before,” not even pulling the car over, I reached backwards, held Ellie’s leg and spoke the words out loud for the first time. That’s what a brain tumor diagnosis does to your family. It breaks up time into “before” and “after”. Her reaction was a terrified wail and then, oddly, hysterical laughter. Is that what shock looks like? My own reaction to the call was of stunned silence. The sound of my heartbeat and the blood rushing in my ears meant I could not ask the questions I had in that moment.Ellie has always been exceptional. She is a bright light in any room. At only ten–years–old, she spoke like a teenager; had the vocabulary of an adult. Never again would I be able to take this for granted. In every waking moment that our lives were unoccupied with the practicalities of a brain tumor diagnosis, the questions I couldn’t think of or say out loud during that terrible phone call continually flooded my thoughts. Your child’s brain is everything after all; it’s what makes them “them.”An avid horse rider, she had been off her favorite horse’s back for a few weeks saying that the bouncing hurt her neck. I had kept her off school for several days, but we had seen marked improvement in [End Page E12] the day or two leading up to that devastating D–Day of diagnosis, and she had been back at school doing well. Only a week before, Ellie had been dancing at a party with friends. How could she have a brain tumor?We rushed home and hurriedly packed our bags for “at least a week”—and I recall that life seemed to be both in slow motion and traveling at the speed of light. I desperately wanted to turn the clock back to the innocence we had known a few hours before. This was way too much news to hear in one day. Even when I heard the diagnosis, I was surprised that we would have to go to the hospital that day. Now! Don’t people get time to process or plan and get second opinions? We had no time to tell family and friends or ask for help. We didn’t have the luxury of time. Time is another thing I no longer take for granted.Upon arrival at the large children’s hospital we felt as if we were given so much information, but looking back, I now know that these angels are trained in giving parents only what they can handle—in tiny pieces, nibble by nibble. You don’t (can’t) hear half of it anyway. Our families live far from us, and trying to gather and figure out... (shrink)

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

In the year 2000 the artist Eduardo Kac made TV news by declaring he had ordered the « creation » of a genetically modified bunny. In 2004 the artist Steve Kurtz was detained by the FBI on the suspiscion of bioterrorism, because of the laboratory equipment he uses in installations that demistify biotechnology. The contrast between an artist-publicist who lends a showy allure to biotech and an artist-researcher who critiques its effects serves as the departure point for an examination of (...) the functions of science and art in a neoliberal society. Faced with trade secrets, the privatization of knowledge and ever-tightening control of laboratories, the artist-researcher can intervene to make public the research process and the consequences of commercializing a given discovery, particularly by using installations that allow the participant to manipulate both lab equipment and scientific concepts. But to do so, the artist must also interrupt the normal functioning of the neoliberal art world, where institutions supported by private sponsorship retain exclusive rights over fetishized products, destined to feed financial speculation. The article closes with a look at the work of Brandon Ballangee, an artist-researcher working in the field of ecology. (shrink)

This paper has already been published on Rhuthmos.eu in February 2014. C'est une interprétation particulière du marxisme, se revendiquant du « romantisme révolutionnaire », qui a permis à Henri Lefebvre de développer une œuvre originale. Marqué par une jeunesse passée auprès des surréalistes durant laquelle il découvre l'idéalisme allemand et le marxisme, il cherche dans les années 1930 à comprendre le matérialisme dialectique à partir de la notion de praxis ou de pratique sociale. En partant de - Sociologie – Nouvel (...) article. (shrink)

This paper describes a method for analyzing a corpus of descriptions collected through micro-phenomenological interviews. This analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences which have been described, and in particular their diachronic structure, while unfolding generic experiential structures through an iterative approach. After summarizing the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview, and then describing the process of preparation of the verbatim, the article presents on the one hand, the principles and conceptual devices of the analysis method and on (...) the other hand several dimensions of the analysis process: the modes of structural unfolding of generic structures, the mutual guidance of the processes of structural and experiential unfolding, the tracking of analysis processes, and finally the assessment of analysis results. (shrink)

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on learning outside the classroom (LOtC) in places such as in museums and art galleries, in forests, and by natural water courses; this has bec...

In this book, Claire Horisk argues that the real problem with so-called offensive jokes-such as racist, sexist, and ethnic jokes-is not that they are offensive but that they are harmful, because they transmit and reinforce stereotypes and ideas that contribute to a network of unjust disadvantage for the derogated group. She distinguishes between belittling jokes, which shore up unjust disadvantage for social groups, and disparaging jokes, which derogate powerful groups such as doctors but do not contribute to unjust disadvantage. (...) She uses philosophy of language and linguistics to argue that both belittling and disparaging jokes communicate ideas by generalized conversational implicature, and to argue that defenses of derogatory remarks as 'just a joke' are inadequate, because jokes can be used to convey what people believe to be true. She focuses on jokes in ordinary conversation, showing that canonical accounts of cooperative conversation need to be enriched: Some people have greater power to shift the common ground of a conversation, and to introduce new presuppositions, than others, and there are alliances that exclude some parties to the conversation, and yet are powerful in setting the future course of the conversation. She also gives a new account of the morality of listening, arguing that sometimes people who listen to derogatory speech may be culpable for doing so. Throughout, she draws on a wealth of interdisciplinary evidence to support the book's claims and to explain why humor is an especially effective means of unjust discrimination. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the description of the experience associated with listening to a sound. In the first part, we describe the method we used to gather descriptions of auditory experience and to analyse these descriptions. This work of explicitation and analysis has enabled us to identify a threefold generic structure of this experience, depending on whether the attention of the subject is directed towards the event which is at the source of the sound, the sound in itself, considered (...) independently from its source, the felt sound. In the second part of the article, we describe this structure. The third part is devoted to a discussion of these results and the paths they open up in various fields of theoretical and applied research. (shrink)

Husserl and Cantor were colleagues and close friends during the last 14 years of the nineteenth century, when Cantor was at the height of his creative powers and Husserl in the throes of an intellectual struggle during which he drew apart from people and writings to whom he owed most of his intellectual training and drew closer to the ideas of thinkers whose writings he had not been able to evaluate properly and had consulted too little. I study ways in (...) which Husserl and Cantor might be said to have been alike, while pointing to dissimilarities between them. In particular, I discuss how their ideas overlapped and crisscrossed with regard to mathematics and philosophy, Platonic idealism, abstraction, empiricism, psychologism, actual consciousness and pure logic, Frege’s reviews of their works, metaphysics and mysticism, sets, arithmetization, strange and imaginary numbers and manifolds. I conclude that Cantor was among those of his mentors from whose ideas Husserl drew away and Lotze and Bolzano were among those to whose ideas he drew closer. (shrink)

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. In (...) Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

Au viie s., l’extension des territoires d’Argos et de Sparte dans le Péloponnèse était telle que le mont Parnon est devenu la zone de contact entre les deux cités : après l’annexion de la Thyréatide par Sparte, au vie s., l’époque classique continue à être ponctuée de conflits entre les deux cités, Argos cherchant à en reprendre le contrôle. Les auteurs anciens sont de peu de secours pour démêler l’écheveau de l’histoire politique de cette région, sise aux confins des territoires (...) argien, arcadien et spartiate, aux ve et ive s. : ils la mentionnent rarement, celle‑ci étant demeurée hors des grands conflits. Aussi, les sources archéologiques prennent‑elles toute leur importance. Cette contribution s’efforce de prolonger les enquêtes topographiques conduites par nos aînés en recourant à l’étude des fortifications, source de choix pour appréhender l’histoire régionale. Ainsi, l’étude des ouvrages fortifiés de Thyréatide (enceintes urbaines, tours isolées) permet d’éclairer l’histoire de cette région si convoitée ainsi que certains points de l’histoire du Péloponnèse à l’époque classique. De la période archaïque à l’époque hellénistique, la Thyréatide a été à la fois un ensemble cohérent et une partie des confins (eschatiai) d’un ensemble politique plus vaste, une région frontalière, aux marges du territoire lacédémonien ou argien, qui a conduit à l’implantation d’un réseau de villes fortifiés et de tours de guet. Après avoir fait l’inventaire de ces fortifications, leur analyse architecturale comme celle de leur implantation topographique nous ont souvent permis, d’abord d’y distinguer plusieurs phases de construction, ensuite de replacer ces ouvrages dans le réseau fortifié auquel ils appartiennent. Enfin, on a pu proposer parfois qui, de Sparte ou d’Argos, était le commanditaire de ces ouvrages fortifiés et vers quels ennemis ceux‑ci étaient tournés. Nous avons ainsi pu montrer que plusieurs de ceux qui étaient attribués à Sparte sont en fait à considérer plutôt comme argiens. (shrink)

Cette recension a déjà paru dans la Revue de l'Institut français d'histoire en Allemagne, le 1er janvier 2011. Janina Wellmann, Die Form des Werdens. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Embryologie 1760-1830, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2010, 429 p. Dans cet ouvrage tiré d'une thèse, Janina Wellmann s'attache à une période-clef, les années 1760 à 1830, au cours desquelles la biologie fut définie comme science du vivant. Dorénavant, les savants ne s'attachèrent plus tant à collectionner, dresser des inventaires et - Recensions.

In “Function and Concept” and “On Concept and Object”, Frege argued that certain differences between dependent and independent meanings were inviolable and “founded deep in the nature of things” but, in those articles, he was not explicit about the actual consequences of violating such differences. However, since by creating a law that permitted one to pass from a concept to its extension, he himself mixed dependent and independent meanings, we are in a position to study some of the actual consequences (...) of his having done so. To make certain of Frege’s ideas about the inviolability of logical form more tangible, I describe a string of very interrelated consequences that his attempt to transform dependent meanings into independent meanings actually brought in its wake. (shrink)

The Middle English Partonope of Blois possesses two characteristics which are more in keeping with twelfth-century French romance than with fifteenth-century English literature: a strong focus on place and the forceful presence of the heroine. Both Melior and her city undergo a substantial shift in identity: Melior is transformed from a dominating woman who seeks to control the hero into a more passive figure; Chef d'Oire changes both in character — from being an otherworldly magical place with its own independent (...) sense of time to a tournament venue more grounded in reality — and in the terminology which is used to describe it. Throughout the work Melior and her city are portrayed as interdependent and inseparable, and in order to convert the initially subversive and powerful Melior into a more conventional romance heroine it is also necessary to adapt the image of her city. (shrink)

Our topic is the moral task of righting one’s wrongful actions and the extent to which this should be considered primarily as a task for the wrongdoer alone, an interaction between the wrongdoer and victim, or a more broadly communal act. In considering this question, we are asked to consider what it means for justice to be served with regard to both victim and wrongdoer.

A consideration of the differences between Shakespearean comedy and tragedy in light of the historically particular inflection of dramatic irony in the English Reformation. The essay compares classical and humanist understandings of literary response and then proposes that we consider that response as a function of knowledge with respect to (and hence feelings about) a protagonist and his plight. The essay compares the structures of suspense in Sophocles’ and Seneca’s Oedipus plays, and then goes on to examine the ways in (...) which two early modern versions of Seneca’s play demonstrate different manners of crafting an audience’s affective relation based on epistemological advantage. The author argues that the peculiarities of these repsonses, and their difference from Shakespeare’s handling of dramatic irony, can be illuminated by the English response to Calvin’s understanding of predestination as a matter of being known about. The analysis concludes with examples from Much Ado About Nothing and Othello that demonstrate the different affective charge of privileged information. (shrink)

It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world’s languages, whereby inflections tend to be added to the end of words. A corpus analysis of child‐directed speech in English found that suffixes were more (...) accurate at cuing the grammatical category of the root word than were prefixes. An artificial language experiment found that there was a learning advantage for suffixes over prefixes in terms of grammatical categorization within an artificial language. The results are consistent with an account of language universals that originate in general purpose learning mechanisms. (shrink)