In this article, we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses, and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this contradiction of digital marketing is resolved via the notion of relevance, which represents what Fredric Jameson (...) calls a symbolic act. The notion of the symbolic act lets us see the centering of relevance as a creative act of digital marketers who undertake to symbolically resolve a contradiction that cannot otherwise be resolved. Specifically, we suggest that relevance allows marketers to believe that in the age of surveillance capitalism, the manipulation of choice contexts and decision-making is the same as consumer empowerment. Put differently, relevance is the moment when marketing manipulation disappears and all that is left is the empowered consumer. To create relevant manipulations that are experienced as empowering by the consumer requires always-on surveillance, massive analyses of consumer data and hyper-targeted responses, in short, a persistent marketing presence. The vision of digital marketing is therefore a fascinating one: marketing disappears at precisely the moment when it extends throughout the life without limit. (shrink)

Why was it that, with belief in the old gods discredited and scepticism spreading widely, Stoic ideals attracted the attention and ultimately won the adhesion of the most thoughtful Romans?Mr. Moellering traces this, first, to Stoicism's appeal to the Roman religious sense, and, secondly, to the Roman character itself. Aeneas, he believes, is the very embodiment of Roman Stoicism.

Comparing expression patterns of orthologous genes between insects and vertebrates, we have recently proposed that the ventral nerve cord in insects may correspond to the dorsal nerve cord in vertebrates. Here we show that the early development of the insect and vertebrate brain anlagen is indeed very similar. Insect and vertebrate brains express similar sets of genes in comparable areas with similar functions in the adult. In addition, early axogenesis establishes surprisingly similar patterns of axonal connectivity in both groups. We (...) therefore propose that insect and vertebrate brains are built according to a common ground plan, and that specific areas of the insect and vertebrate brains be considered as homologous, meaning that these areas already existed, with their specific functions, in their common ancestor. (shrink)

Looks at the life and career of the the German philosopher who is credited as the developer of critical theory.

. The ability to enforce the provisions of a code of conduct influences whether the code is effective in shaping behavior. Enforcement relies in part on the willingness of organization members to report violations of the code, but research from the business and educational environment suggests that fewer than half of those who observe code violations follow their organizations procedures for reporting them. Based on a review of the literature in the business and educational environments, and a survey of 3605 (...) students at a mid-sized comprehensive university, this paper attempts to make conceptual sense of the non-reporting phenomenon. We present a conceptual framework based on four distinct factors which we have labeled: (1) factual non-responsibility; (2) moral non-responsibility; (3) consequential exoneration; and, (4) functional exoneration. Each of these factors suggest a different remedial strategy as well as provide a theoretical foundation for future research. Testable propositions for future research are developed, and some implications for organization leaders are discussed. (shrink)

Two facets of diagnostic reasoning related to scientific thinking are recognizing the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence and selecting appropriate interventions that could provide learners the evidence necessary to make an appropriate causal conclusion (i.e., the control-of-variables strategy). The present study investigates both these abilities in 3- to 6-year-old children (N= 57). We found both competence and developmental progress in the capacity to recognize that evidence is confounded. Similarly, children performed above chance in some tasks testing for the selection (...) of a controlled test of a hypothesis. However, these capacities were unrelated, suggesting that preschoolers’ nascent understanding of the control-of-variables strategy may not be driven by a metacognitive understanding that confounded evidence does not support a unique causal conclusion, and requires further investigation. (shrink)

Justice, equality, and righteousness—these are some of our greatest moral convictions. Yet in times of social conflict, morals can become rigid, making religious war, ethnic cleansing, and political purges possible. Morality, therefore, can be viewed as pathology-a rhetorical, psychological, and social tool that is used and abused as a weapon. An expert on Eastern philosophies and social systems theory, Hans-Georg Moeller questions the perceived goodness of morality and those who claim morality is inherently positive. Critiquing the ethical "fanaticism" of Western (...) moralists, such as Immanuel Kant, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Rawls, and the utilitarians, Moeller points to the absurd fundamentalisms and impracticable prescriptions arising from definitions of good. Instead he advances a theory of "moral foolishness," or moral asceticism, extracted from the "amoral" philosophers of East Asia and such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Niklas Luhmann. The moral fool doesn't understand why ethics are necessarily good, and he isn't convinced that the moral perspective is always positive. In this way he is like most people, and Moeller defends this foolishness against ethical pathologies that support the death penalty, just wars, and even Jerry Springer's crude moral theater. Comparing and contrasting the religious philosophies of Christianity, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism, Moeller presents a persuasive argument in favor of amorality. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of marketing as an ideological set of practices that makes cultural interventions designed to infuse social relations with biopolitical injunctions. We examine a contemporary site of heightened attention within marketing: the rise of online communities and the attendant profession of social media marketing managers. We argue that social media marketers disavow a core problem; namely, that the object at stake, the customer community, barely exists. The community therefore functions ideologically. We describe the ideological gymnastics necessary (...) for maintaining momentum behind a practice that barely exists and we ponder why such ideologies are necessary, and what they allow the marketer to do. Working with such concepts as ‘the wild’, ‘communicative capitalism’, and ‘biopolitical marketing’, we explore a genre of popular business literature that proselytizes for online customer communities and we reflect on the broader implications. (shrink)

This book presents an innovative reading of Daoist philosophy that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Moeller and D'Ambrosio show how the Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of "genuine pretending" the paradoxical skill of enacting social roles without submitting to them or letting them define one's identity.

The essence of the path integral method in quantum physics can be expressed in terms of two relations between unitary propagators, describing perturbations of the underlying system. They inherit the causal structure of the theory and its invariance properties under variations of the action. These relations determine a dynamical algebra of bounded operators which encodes all properties of the corresponding quantum theory. This novel approach is applied to non-relativistic particles, where quantum mechanics emerges from it. The method works also in (...) interacting quantum field theories and sheds new light on the foundations of quantum physics. (shrink)

ExcerptMisunderstandings are the medium for communicating the incommunicable. Theodor W. Adorno, “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin”You can hear the terror in the words. If you can't hear it, you cannot understand the words. The history of the critical response to Adorno can be read as a history of misunderstandings. “The whole is the false.”1 Who can understand this if he doesn't know Hegel's philosophy? Adorno formulated this aphorism in Minima Moralia in German even though he had been living in America (...) for some years. But he did not write this sentence for an American or…. (shrink)

Between 1933 and 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that brought him into increasingly open opposition to the Hitler regime in Germany. As a result, he was forced to leave Austria in 1938, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo as he fled to Switzerland and later to the United States. Twenty years later, he was invited to Munich to become Director of the new Institute of Political Science at Ludwig-Maximilian University. In 1964, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures on (...) what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, and its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these questions demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans and of the order of German society during and after the Nazi period. _Hitler and the Germans,_ published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era. Voegelin interprets this era in terms of the basic diagnostic tools provided by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Judeo-Christian culture, and contemporary German-language writers like Heimito von Doderer, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. Responding to publications on National Socialist Germany, Voegelin discusses the historian Percy Schramm's "Anatomy of a Dictator," along with studies of the churches and the legal profession. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide. While most of the lectures deal with what Voegelin called his "descent into the depths" of the moral and spiritual abyss of Nazism and its aftermath, they also point toward a restoration of order. His lecture "The Greatness of Max Weber" shows how Weber, while affected by the culture within which Hitler came into power, has already gone beyond it through his anguished recovery of the experience of transcendence. _Hitler and the Germans_ provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime and its continuing implications. This comprehensive reading of the Nazi period has yet to be matched. (shrink)

This article discusses the background to Walter Benjamin's famous 'letter to an unknown correspondent', which was part of a series of letters between Benjamin and Norbert Elias. Elias had just finished writing the first volume of The Civilizing Process, and he wrote to Ben jamin asking him to review it, but Benjamin declined. The reasons for his reluctance are discussed. The letters themselves are reproduced at the end of the article.

Williamson and others have argued that contextualist theories of the semantics of ‘know’ have a special problem of accounting for our practices of ‘consuming’ knowledge attributions and denials made in other contexts. In what follows, I shall understand the objection as the idea that contextualism has a special problem of accounting for how we are able to acquire epistemically useful information from knowledge claims made in other contexts. I respond to the objection by arguing that the defeasibility of knowledge makes (...) it difficult for everyone to acquire epistemically useful information from knowledge claims made in other contexts, and that there is no special problem for contextualism when it comes to acquiring epistemically useful information from knowledge claims made in other contexts. (shrink)

Various passages in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, the two most important texts of “philosophical Daoism,” critically mock Confucian sacrificial rites. Perhaps the best known of these criticisms refers to a practice involving straw dogs (Laozi 5, Zhuangzi 14). This article will attempt to expose the philosophical dimensions of these passages that show, in my reading, how Daoist philosophy looks at such sacrificial rituals as a sort of evidence of the Confucian misconceptions of time, of death and life, and of (...) cosmic and social order. (shrink)

Imagination: Cross-Cultural Philosophical Analyses is a rare intercultural inquiry into the conceptions and functions of the imagination in contemporary philosophy. Divided into East Asian, comparative, and post-comparative approaches, it brings together a leading team of philosophers to explore the concepts of the illusory and illusions, the development of fantastic narratives and metaphors, and the use of images and allegories across a broad range of traditions. Chapters discuss how imagination has been interpreted by thinkers such as Zhuangzi, Plato, Confucius, Heidegger, and (...) Nietzsche. By drawing on sources including Buddhist aesthetics, Daoism, and analytic philosophy of mind, this cross-cultural collection shows how the imagination can be an indispensable tool for the comparative philosopher, opening up new possibilities for intercultural dialogue and critical engagement. (shrink)