One of the pleasures of watching Saturday Night Live (SNL) comes from knowing the show is live. The not‐ready‐for‐prime‐time‐players, their guest hosts, the unannounced walk‐on cameos, the house band, and the guest musicians are all in New York at the very moment the show airs, offering us a mocking, postmodern representation of reality through absurd (and sometimes very juvenile) humor. From guest hosts spoofing themselves in sketches, to the various impersonations of cultural figures, to the parody commercials to the pseudo‐news (...) of “Weekend Update,” SNL humorously captures the present and reflects it back to us, satirically revealing the hidden realities we all experience. This chapter explores if Plato (427–347 BCE) and his Cave Myth, and Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) and his conception of simulacra, can help us better understand the nature of SNL's reality. (shrink)

Agent Ross's interrogation of Ulysses Klaue doesn't just explain the significance of vibranium, it frames vibranium as “the most valuable metal known to man,” which, in turn, establishes what ends up being a moral dilemma for T'Challa – when Agent Ross gets shot and, later, when T'Challa learns the truth about his father's past. The scene also adds to the fabled mystery that the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) narrative weaves throughout the other films. Although the metal's uses are fictional, (...) the concept and presence of vibranium in Black Panther and the depiction of Wakanda in the larger MCU narrative present some philosophical issues with regard to vibranium's value. While vibranium's use value is important to Wakandans and its exchange value is important to villains like Klaue, another way to understand the value of vibranium is to examine its cultural value. (shrink)

This is an interesting reinterpretation of masculine and feminine that speaks to contemporary perspectives on to what extent gender is a spectrum, especially when we consider the fates of all the so‐called "masculine" men in Dune. On one level, in Denis Villeneuve's Dune women become empowered, while the men become emasculated. Examining gender in Dune would be incomplete without a look at Baron Harkonnen, who, in both Frank Herbert's book and in David Lynch's 1984 film, is clearly depicted not just (...) as gay, but as embodying a sort of deviant sexuality. So, it appears that the traditional masculine/feminine gender binary is challenged throughout Villeneuve's part one, with many of the male characters embodying a feminized masculinity and with most of the female characters existing within a feminine imaginary to the point that Dune 's society borders on the androgynous. (shrink)

This chapter explains some sort of feminist transformation from Snow White to Moana. There are four waves of feminist philosophy which can help us understand the progressing role of Disney princesses since Snow White's debut in 1937. Disney's three waves of princesses reflect the waves of feminism from which they emerge. In subtle but profound ways, Disney princesses have evolved as each wave of feminism has crashed upon the shores of culture. They shift people's focus from reinforcing patriarchy, to challenging (...) it, and finally turning it on its head, redefining their very understanding of what it means to be feminine and masculine. The implication is that equality is not based on making women and men equal to one another, but rather on making them balanced within themselves. Going forward, people can only imagine what the next batch of Disney princesses will offer. (shrink)

Blue is a significant color in science fiction: Star Trek, Star Wars, Avatar, Marvel, and DC all have aliens, mutants, and superheroes that come in shades from aqua to cerulean to cobalt. In Dune, however, blue is not a skin tone, it is an eye color – not for aliens, but for humans. Specifically, it is meant to visualize and symbolize the Fremen, and anyone who is either addicted to spice or has been around it long enough for their eyes (...) to change. Accordingly, the blue eyes of Zendaya and Duncan‐Brewster are not just visually striking, they are culturally striking, especially in light of contemporary philosophy of intersectionality and critical race theory. Thus, Denis Villeneuve's Dune is not just re‐colored, it is re‐contextualized to fit a twenty‐first‐century awareness regarding diversity and cultural pluralism. (shrink)

This essay examines how Black Mirror presents mortality as a moral dilemma, asking if we should use technology to rewrite the rules of existence. Through the exploration of philosophical perspectives from Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Sigmund Freud, the essay illustrates the choices Black Mirror presents regarding how we should deal with the death of others and the death of ourselves, as well as the meaning of death and whether we should defer it or embrace it.

In The Empire Strikes Back, African American actor Billy Dee Williams turned the trio into a quartet as Lando Calrissian. Novelist and social activist Alice Walker coined and defined colorism as the “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same‐race people based solely on their color,” according to Kimberly Jade Norwood and Violeta Solonova Foreman. For Norwood and Foreman, colorism is concerned with the lightness and darkness of skin tone, with preference given to whiteness. Colorism in the United States took root during (...) the period of slavery, when “coalescence of needs, beliefs, justifications, and practices had the effect of placing white skin at a premium and dehumanizing black skin.” Jennifer Bloomquist writes that there is “a protracted history of Whites creating Black caricatures,” which includes “underdeveloped Black characters” in American entertainment. Boyega overlooks the presence of culture and the representation of other races and ethnicities throughout the Star Wars films and even throughout the various television series. (shrink)

This chapter looks at several ways philosophy deals with natural law, especially through the work of Ayn Rand, whose thought was a major influence on one of the creators of Doctor Stephen Strange, Steve Ditko. Rand's philosophy, known as objectivism, covers a lot of ground, but the chapter focuses on what she perceives to be its foundation, the three basic axioms of life: existence, consciousness, and identity. For an Objectivist like Mordo, knowledge must serve natural law. For Strange knowledge serves (...) the mission: he sees violating natural law as another option, and one that sometimes allows him to uphold it in a broader sense. Strange was not only willing to defend Earth by using his knowledge and choosing to violate natural law, but in doing so he became the only one able to stand up to Dormammu and defeat him. (shrink)

Wakandan women can play stereotypically male roles because of the political construction of Wakandan identity. Wakandan women emerge, for starters, in a radically different cultural context than women of color in other countries and cultures. Despite their tacit representation of feminist ideals, Wakandan women resist the full‐throated feminism we associate with the modern era: the no‐husband, no‐children feminism championed by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In 1966 Black Panther, the Marvel comic superhero, made his debut during the height of (...) second‐wave feminism. Back in Wakanda, M'Baku's renouncement of Shuri's non‐domestic activities makes an implicit appeal to the feminine mystique. Recognizing feminist and womanist elements within Wakanda helps explain the masculine and feminine performances of Wakandan women. Demystifying Wakanda requires us to recognize and reckon with The Panther Mystique : uncoerced appropriations of masculine and feminine norms for the sake of collective, communal freedom. (shrink)

The just-war framework neatly distinguishes between jus ad bellum, the criteria that address political leaders’ decisions for waging war, and jus in bello, the criteria that address soldiers’ condu...

How can expressivists make sense of the practice of communication? If communication is not a joint enterprise aimed at sharing information about the world, why do we engage in communication the way we do? Call this *the problem of communication*. Starting from basic assumptions about the rationality of speakers and the nature of assertion, we argue that speakers engaging in conversation about normative matters must presuppose that there is a unique normative standard on which the attitudes of conversational participants ought (...) to converge. This gives the beginning of a solution to the problem of communication on behalf of expressivists. (shrink)

In this chapter, we will summarize recent empirical results highlighting how different groups of people solve pure coordination games. Such games are traditionally studied in behavioural economics, where two people need to coordinate without communicating with each other. Our results suggest that coordination choices vary across groups of people, and that people can adapt flexibly to these differences in order to coordinate between groups. We propose that pure coordination games are a useful empirical platform for studying aspects of mindshaping. Drawing (...) on existing psychological literature on alignment during interactions, we suggest that experience of successful interaction leads people to develop aligned intuitions about what is relevant and appropriate that support coordination when interaction and communication is not possible. Consistent with arguments made in the literature on mindshaping we believe that such alignment is more important for coordination than mindreading inferences about mental states, and indeed that mindreading is instead a form of coordination behaviour that is dependent upon intuitive alignment. (shrink)

​This paper examines the life and work of the Novohispanic philosopher Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who used a great deal of irony to respond to what, we argue, were gender-based microaggressions in 17th century New Spain. The case of Sor Juana is particularly interesting not only because it suggests that microaggressions are not the product of our time, as has been suggested in the literature, but also because it reveals some of the advantages as well as limitations of (...) using irony when one is subject to microaggression. The case of Sor Juana also provides insights regarding the difficulties of using irony to address microaggressions that take place in the classroom. (shrink)

The notion of a correct appreciation of nature, like the one put forward in Carlson’s environmental account, has been rejected by many other authors in the aesthetics of the natural environment. Their critics challenge the idea that only scientific cat- egories can ground the aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature, and they hold that there is not a correct way of appreciating nature. However, they may share with Carlson the idea of correctness under an objectivist paradigm of aesthetic appreciation, according (...) to which correctness means the adequation of the experi- ence to properties of the object. My aim in the article is to claim that it is necessary to endorse an aesthetic standard of correctness that takes into consideration the subjective character of aesthetic appreciation. An aesthetic standard of correct- ness implies universal assent, or validity for everyone in Kantian terms, in place of an objectivist notion. This notion of correctness permits the inclusion of expressive perception of nature as an essential form of aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

McLeod's Conscience in Reproductive Health Care offers a number of valuable contributions to the literature, both within and beyond reproductive care. In this commentary, I begin by discussing two potential applications of her argument that healthcare professionals—specifically, those "who are charged with gatekeeping access to healthcare services" —have a fiduciary duty of loyalty to prioritize the interests of their patients over their own. Then, I turn to a couple of concerns one might raise about extending this fiduciary duty to pharmacists (...) who function as gatekeepers of reproductive services. Finally, I pose some questions about the ways in which McLeod conceives of the harms and wrongs of... (shrink)

This book present research in ethics with topics including a step-by-step guide to students; wellbeing and disadvantage; ethical disposition of accounting and business management students; collegiality of journals and self-citation on annual bibliometric scorings; trends of tainted publications and their authors' publication profiles; from bioethics to biopolitics and the limits of liberalism.

brazil has gone through a long process of colonization that still leaves violent marks in the ways of relating to quilombola communities, producing the devaluation of their cultures and knowledge. Through colonization, the lives of quilombola children and young people have become invisible in the face of scientific knowledge that uses European authors as a reference and the urban middle classes as a model. In this text, we present the results of an interventional research carried out between 2017 and 2019, (...) with about 30 children and young people living in a quilombola community in Cafuringa, in Campos dos Goytacazes-RJ. We seek to understand how the experiences of childhood and youth are constituted from the relationships that children and young people establish with the territory, their uses and appropriations, and the modes of subjectification in the face of conflicts experienced in the community. Children take ownership of the territory through collective games held outdoors, in which they explore community spaces, and interact with the land, animals, plants and trees. For these children, these spaces can be "bewitched", "haunted", "sacred", and while fascinating, also generate fear. These ways of relating to the territory are in conflict with the agricultural produce and horse breeding farms, which consider the land as a business, and animals and plants as goods. The children's estrangement in encountering of the electric fence placed by the farm, which symbolizes the private use of the land, social inequalities, and the racial discrimination experienced in their daily lives, leads us to question the project of the overall “civilizing” project built into modernity. (shrink)

‘You mean to say we’re not the only people in the world with the problem of a national park?’ This question was raised during a focus group discussion held with an indigenous community whose ancestral domain overlaps entirely with a national park in the Philippine Cordillera. The question encapsulates an experience shared across the Philippines, particularly in spaces where both the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act and the National Integrated Protected Areas System are implemented. This paper examines recent developments in indigenous (...) leaders’ participation in, and critique of, the implementation of these two laws and the development of environmental policies. It follows an emerging, multi-sectoral movement calling for the recognition of Indigenous Communities Conserved Areas and Territories (ICCAs), which has led to the crafting of a draft law. The ICCA bill is envisioned as a law that will resolve indigenous peoples’ problems with national parks, while meeting biodiversity conservation targets. The authors direct attention to how indigenous leaders campaigning for the ICCA bill are asserting their right to delineate space and make decisions in the contexts of policy-making and implementation. It is argued here that their articulations are registers of indigenous critique. Taking these critiques seriously has the potential to drive conservation policy-making past the stewardship stalemate, where conservation goals are pursued at the cost of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and indigenous peoples are expected to perform harmony with nature. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of recent attempts, by George Sher and others to justify compensation to be paid to descendants of deceased victims of past wrongs. This recent attempt is important as it endeavours to avoid some well-known critiques of previous attempts, such as the non-identity problem. Furthermore, this new attempt is grounded in individual rights, without invoking a more controversial collectivist assumption. The first step in this critique is to differentiate between compensation and restitution. Once this important distinction (...) is clear, an examination of several factors follows: the importance of the passage of time vis-à-vis claims for compensation and/or restitution, the responsibility of the would be payers, the responsibility of the descendants of the victims, the welfare level of the descendants of the victims, information-related issues, and several additional factors. The conclusion is that once we take into account the distinction between compensation and restitution, and the additional factors mentioned, the case for compensation and/or restitution under the ‘continuing injustice argument’, is highly limited. (shrink)

We present a deductive theory of space-time which is realistic, objective, and relational. It is realistic because it assumes the existence of physical things endowed with concrete properties. It is objective because it can be formulated without any reference to cognoscent subjects or sensorial fields. Finally, it is relational because it assumes that space-time is not a thing but a complex of relations among things. In this way, the original program of Leibniz is consummated, in the sense that space is (...) ultimately an order of coexistents, and time is an order of succesives. In this context, we show that the metric and topological properties of Minkowskian space-time are reduced to relational properties of concrete things. We also sketch how our theory can be extended to encompass a Riemannian space-time. (shrink)

This article has two objectives: firstly, studying the main contributions and deficiencies of the Law No. 103.13 on the fight of violence against women, enacted in Morocco on March 12th 2018. Secondly, studying ideological stress points between the civil society that is most committed with gender violence in Morocco, whose referents are based on the international declarations and conventions, and the governmental institutions of the Justice and Development Party, in power from January 2012, whose approaches are determined by the Islamist (...) ideology and by certain symbolic-religious Islamic specialties. (shrink)

We present an axiomatization of non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics for a system with an arbitrary number of components. The interpretation of our system of axioms is realistic and objective. The EPR paradox and its relation with realism is discussed in this framework. It is shown that there is no contradiction between realism and recent experimental results.

Desde un recorrido por algunas de las transformaciones desarrolladas en la práctica religiosa cotidiana de distintas comunidades, producidas en los meses iniciales de la pandemia del COVID 19, se abordaron las respuestas de estas comunidades religiosas, mediadas por las Tics. La investigación tenía el objetivo de profundizar en los procesos de adaptación de los rituales y celebraciones religiosas, desde un acercamiento a los procesos de virtualización y digitalización. Asimismo, analizar el espacio que ocuparon los Mass Media en la formulación de (...) relatos sobre las prácticas religiosas en el contexto pandémico. Por último, comprender el papel que tuvieron las comunidades religiosas en la resolución de muchos de los conflictos e incertidumbres existenciales generadas durante ese período. En este sentido, quería dar respuesta a cuestiones cómo ¿Qué implicó la situación de Pandemia para las comunidades religiosas? ¿En qué medida podemos hablar de una redefinición de los espacios sagrados? ¿Qué lugar ocuparon las tecnologías a la hora de solventar las dificultades cultuales en las congregaciones religiosas? ¿Cuál fue el relato de los Mass Media sobre las prácticas de estas comunidades religiosas? Para dar respuesta a estas cuestiones se optó por la etnografía virtual de los espacios mediados por las Tics, y la realización de entrevistas para recoger las experiencias religiosas offline. Los resultados revelaron que la resiliencia mostrada por las personas de estas comunidades religiosas reflejaba su capacidad para reformular y redimensionar las prácticas religiosas, desde las herramientas digitales. (shrink)

This article introduces some soft computing methods generally used for data analysis and flow pattern detection in fluid dynamics. These techniques decompose the original flow field as an expansion of modes, which can be either orthogonal in time, or in space or in time and space, or they can simply be selected using some sophisticated statistical techniques. The performance of these methods is tested in the turbulent wake of a wall-mounted square cylinder. This highly complex flow is suitable to show (...) the ability of the aforementioned methods to reduce the degrees of freedom of the original data by only retaining the large scales in the flow. The main result is a reduced-order model of the original flow case, based on a low number of modes. A deep discussion is carried out about how to choose the most computationally efficient method to obtain suitable reduced-order models of the flow. The techniques introduced in this article are data-driven methods that could be applied to model any type of non-linear dynamical system, including numerical and experimental databases. (shrink)

Frente a la extendida opinión de que la filosofía es un saber genérico, en este trabajo se muestra el vínculo interno entre los conceptos matemáticos —número, forma geométrica, demostración...— y el discurso filosófico que da cuenta de ellos en algunos momentos fundamentales de los Diálogos de Platón.

En el número 8 de la revista mexicana Cuadrivio, lamentablemente desaparecida, se incluía el artículo titulado «La astuta excepción de lo humano» que ahora se reproduce. Respondía a una creencia inferida del antiguo calendario mesoamericano conocido como cuenta larga, que situaba el fin de la humanidad en el solsticio de invierno de 2012. En el artículo nos preguntábamos si tenía sentido hablar de la posibilidad del fin total de lo humano. Recordábamos algunos momentos en los que la Humanidad quedaba en (...) suspenso: la «Solución final/definitiva» (Endlösung) que tenía como objetivo el exterminio del pueblo judío (1945); o el uso de la bomba nuclear en una guerra generalizada. Salvado este camino, nos preguntamos: ¿está asegurada la continuidad de la Humanidad? El proceso de globalización en el que sobrevivimos, nos conduce a una situación de equilibrio inestable en la que cualquier parámetro que sobrepase un cierto valor puede provocar rupturas y singularidades, y extraños vínculos entre democracias y estados totalitarios difíciles de prever. Quizá estemos viviendo ya plenamente ese momento de donde saldrá un nuevo sujeto de la historia. (shrink)

Recently, Alper, Bridger, Earman and Norton have all proposed examples of dynamic systems that, in their view, are incompatible with classical (Newtonian) mechanics. In the first section of the present paper I shall show that their arguments are all undermined by the same fallacy. The second section proves that their conclusions of incompatibility are indeed false, and that what we are really looking at are new forms of indeterminist evolution of the same kind as that found recently in the literature (...) on supertasks. In the third section of the paper, I argue that one of these new forms of evolution is particularly interesting, and that analysis of it leads to a new vision of the relation between interaction by contact and impenetrability. Introduction The fallacy Understanding some physical supertasks A philosophically interesting implication: contact and impenetrability. (shrink)

Kripke formula cuatro objeciones en contra de una solución disposicionalista simple al enigma wittgensteiniano sobre seguir una regla. En este trabajo presento dos propuestas parcialmente disposicionalistas diferentes a la teoría disposicionalista simple que Kripke discute y defiendo que aquellas cuatro objeciones no les afectan. Una de esas dos propuestas puede atribuirse, con cierta precaución, al propio Wittgenstein. La otra, que me parece preferible, invoca una noción teleológica de disposición. Ambas propuestas apelan al concepto de simplicidad, o —alternativamente— al concepto de (...) similitud natural. Rechazo también ciertas críticas que Kripke hace del uso de tales conceptos para solucionar el enigma sobre seguir una regla. (shrink)

Choreographing Space is a reflection on the collaborative work of e+i studio, a New York City based architecture practice. Founders Eva Perez de Vega and Ian Gordon guide the reader through a dynamic selection of projects, each one opening us up to their relationship with the choreography of human and nonhuman forces at play. -/- Born as a retrospective and future-oriented book, it engages philosophical thought with architectural projects located in Europe, Asia, and the US, as well as speculative scenarios (...) that offer an alternative, less human-centric way of practicing architecture. -/- Organised into four parts, each part opens with a philosophical text that acts as an insightful prelude to the topics, questions and reflections posed by each project. Each part concludes with a speculative scenario, where one of the projects is imagined thriving in a future where life is now almost extinct. These are not intended as apocalyptic or even nostalgic scenarios, but rather as affirmative alternatives to the bleak imaginary arising from the world’s current climate crisis. (shrink)

El presente trabajo se pregunta qué puede aportar la obra de Levinas a una sociedad post-secular como la nuestra. Para ello se analiza qué entiende el pensador francés por religión. A partir de ahí se desarrolla su crítica al pensamiento mítico y a la teología. En este recorrido veremos cómo nuestro autor entiende la trascendencia como un «acontecimiento ético». Eso permitirá ver la pertinencia de una racionalidad o una inteligibilidad diferente a la ontológica, como aportación de la tradición bíblica que (...) es posible traducir al griego. (shrink)

En relación con los derechos humanos de las mujeres y con la finalidad de poder alcanzar sociedades más justas, pacíficas e inclusivas, el acceso a la justicia, la igualdad y la paz, se presentan como metas importantes en la Agenda 2030 sobre Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) de Naciones Unidas. Para la consecución de estos objetivos y para evitar la discriminación que todavía su­fren las mujeres en el disfrute de sus derechos en los conflictos armados con la utilización de los (...) métodos tradicionales de justicia, la mediación se presenta como método idóneo en el que ellas pueden mostrar sus saberes y habilidades y construir, junto con los hombres, una convivencia más armónica y en paz. (shrink)