We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory-affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to incendiary artworks that provoke mass boycotts, many of the images in our media culture strike as beyond the pale of consumption. Yet what does it mean to proclaim a media object "unwatchable": disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, Unwatchable (...) offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in our global visual culture, from cinema, television, and video games through museums and classrooms to laptops, smart phones, and social media platforms. This anthology assembles 60 original essays by scholars, theorists, critics, archivists, curators, artists, and filmmakers who offer their own responses to the broadly suggestive question: What do you find unwatchable? The diverse answers include iconoclastic artworks that have been hidden from view, dystopian images from the political sphere, horror movies, TV advertisements, classic films, and recent award-winners. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 123-126, Winter 2020.

This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological (...) entities seem to be free to either reach their ends or not, it was assumed that they could not be deterministic. Mayr’s modern account of teleonomy adheres to this basic assumption. Yet, the seeming tension between teleology and determinism is illusory because freedom and agency do not, in fact, conflict with a deterministic world. To show this, we present a taxonomy of different types of freedom that we see as inherent in teleological systems. Then we show that our taxonomy of freedom, which is crucial to understanding teleology, shares many of the features of a philosophical position regarding free will that is known in the contemporary literature as ‘compatibilism’. This position maintains that an agent is free when the sources of its actions are internal, when the agent itself is the deterministic cause of those actions. Our view shows that freedom is not only indispensable to teleology, but also that, contrary to common intuitions, there is no conflict between teleology and causal determinism. (shrink)

There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of this paper. I (...) begin with an overview of McShea’s field theoretic account of teleology. I start with the field theoretic account because it presents a promising analysis of teleological systems. It is promising because, in not making any assumptions about life’s special status in teleological systems, it avoids counterexamples that have problematized other accounts. I then consider some of the prominent efforts that have been made to attempt to avoid ascribing functions or teleology to some form of inanimate nature. In my assessment, none of the efforts are successful. I conclude by offering mineral evolution as a case study to show how inanimate nature can be both teleological and functional. The evolution of mineral species reveals that teleology and function extend to inanimate nature, and that teleology and function come in degrees. (shrink)

Condorcets historiefilosofi.--Samuel Pufendorf.--Den osynliga handen.--John Locke och hans samtid.--Polemiken i första boken av Lockes "Essay."--Politikern Kallikles.--Idéhistorien som vetenskap.--Om tolkningen av filosofiska texter.--Johannes av Salisbury.--Filosofiens tillämpning.--Ett motiv i Hans Larssons författerskap.--Filosofi och idéhistoria.--Vetenskapsmannen och samhällslivet.--Vetenskapens nytta.--"Förnuftets list."--Demokrati, socialism, kommunism.

Vi som är radikala i socialpolitik bör vara det också i kulturpolitik. Så kunde man uttrycka sig i svensk kulturdebatt för femtio år sedan. Därmed anslås ett ledmotiv i denna essä: växelspelet mellan modernitet och modernism och dess konsekvenser för musikens vidkommande. Vi får följa denna utveckling från mitten av 1800-talet till slutet av 1960-talet med personer som Wagner, Baudelaire och Nietzsche, Schönberg, Stravinskij och Adorno, de italienska futuristerna och fransmännen kring den konkreta musiken i blickpunkten. Vi möter reflexioner kring (...) avantgardism och dess svenska varianter i symbios med folkhemmet och det hela utmynnar i ett sammanflöde av modernism och modernitet med Luciano Berios berömda Sinfonia i centrum. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn Umsetzung der EU-Verordnung Nr. 536/2014 hat der deutsche Gesetzgeber mit § 40b Abs. 4 AMG die gruppennützige Arzneimittelforschung mit Nichteinwilligungsfähigen zugelassen, sofern der Proband zuvor in einwilligungsfähigem Zustand nach den Regeln der Patientenverfügung darin eingewilligt hat. Die Anwendungsvoraussetzungen schließen forensische Psychiatriepatienten nicht aus, obgleich das kategorische Verbot für zwangsweise Untergebrachte formell-rechtlich unverändert geblieben ist. Damit stellt sich die praxisrelevante Frage nach dem rechtssystematischen Verhältnis der neuen Erlaubnis zum bisherigen Verbot – und letztlich zu den Perspektiven einer angemessenen Arzneimittelversorgung von (...) Patienten mit forensisch relevanten Störungen. (shrink)

Ending world hunger remains one of the central global challenges, but the question of how to measure and define the problem is politically charged. This article chronicles and analyses the indicator selection process for SDG 2.1, focusing in particular on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) indicator. Despite alleged efforts to separate political and technical aspects in the indicator selection process we find that they were entangled from the start. While there was significant contestation around which indicators should be selected, (...) the process was characterized by pathway lock-in: The complexity of food security quantification and the resource constraints in the process favored already established data infrastructures and milieus of expertise, locking in the position of FAO and its established food security indicators. The SDG 2.1 indicators frame food insecurity in terms of caloric supply and demand and individual experience, arguably excluding dimensions of democratic agency, sustainability and other dimensions and drivers of food insecurity. The lock-in has thus embedded a narrow concept of food security in the major global indicator framework for food security monitoring. This is likely to have significant effects on how food insecurity is addressed nationally and internationally. Addressing the knowledge politics of food security indicators is important to broaden and open the agenda for sustainable transformation of food systems. Statistics and indicators are important tools in this agenda, but a diversity of approaches and data infrastructures from the local to the international level are needed to understand the multiple dimensions and drivers of food insecurity. (shrink)

In a metaphorical sense, a thing is complex if it comprehends a magnitude of homogeneous or different things. However, it depends on the kind of comprehension, if we conceive something that consists of many things as complex or not. It is perhaps most distinctive for complex phenomena that their properties and behavior aren't reducible to the properties and behavior of their elements. This poses some challenging metaphysical problems. The articles in this anthology don't follow a leitmotif - aside from all (...) essays having a look at complexity problems in different areas of scientific research and showing in which ways the challenges of complexity can be answered. (Series: Applied Philosophy / Anvendt Filosofi - Vol. 4). (shrink)

Das thermische Material erscheint vor dem Hintergrund realer Kunstentwicklung und traditioneller philosophischer Ästhetik (Kant, Hegel, Warburg, Adorno) denkbar ungeeignet für die künstlerische Verwendung: Zu unerheblich mutet das expressive Potential aufgrund geringer Formbarkeit an und allzu sehr erschwert die Unmittelbarkeitswahrnehmung durch die Haut den Transfer ins Ideelle, Geistige oder Metaphorische. Die Studie zeigt hingegen, dass der Bruch mit dem Visualitätsparadigma eine Reihe von unterschiedlichen Aneignungsstrategien des Thermischen hervorgebracht und zu funktionsvariabler Verwendung im ästhetischen Gesamtzusammenhang geführt hat: illustrative, affektive, indexikalische, mythische, utopische, (...) sinnlichkeitsschulende, assoziative und kritische Funktion werden im Kunstwerk zur Geltung gebracht. Trotz der semantischen Verfügbarmachung zeigt das thermische Moment eine Widerständigkeit gegen die Intellektualisierung, was eine tiefergehende Kenntnisnahme durch die Kunstwissenschaft und Kunstkritik bisher verhindert hat. In zwei historischen Exkursen zur Romantik und zum Ästhetizismus um 1900 wird die These vertreten, dass als Voraussetzung für thermo-künstlerische Wahrnehmung ein auf Sinnlichkeit orientiertes Subjekt angenommen werden muss. Allerdings geniesst dieser Subjekttypus in der Tradition einer auf Reflexion ausgerichteten Kunstphilosophie keine besondere Wertschätzung. Insofern ist die Studie auch das Plädoyer für einen neuen Ästhetizismus. (shrink)

We defend a contextualist account of deontic judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends, against recent objections that turn on practices of moral disagreement. Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice; we suggest in response that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Weatherson, Schroeder and others have raised (...) parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism; we argue for a parallel solution. (shrink)

Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological explanation. No (...) consensus has seemed possible in this debate. This paper takes a different approach. It argues that teleology is a perfectly acceptable scientific notion, but that the debate took an unfortunate misstep some 2300 years ago, one that has confused things ever since. The misstep comes in the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics when a distinction is made between two types of teleological explanation. One type pertains to artifacts while the other pertains to entities in nature. For Aristotle, artifacts are guided by something external to themselves, human intentions, while natural entities are guided by an internal nature. We aim to show that there is, in fact, only one type of legitimate teleological explanation, what Aristotle would have considered a variant of an artifact model, where entities are guided by external fields. We begin with an analysis of the differences between the two types of explanation. We then examine some evidence in Aristotle’s biological works suggesting that on account of his natural-artifactual distinction, he encountered difficulties in trying to provide teleological accounts of spontaneous generation. And we show that it is possible to resolve these difficulties with a more robust version of an artifact model of teleology, in other words, with an externalist teleology. This is McShea’s model, in which goal-directed entities are guided by a nested series of upper-level fields. To explain teleological behavior, this account invokes only external physical forces rather than mysterious internal natures. We then consider how field theory differs from other efforts to naturalize teleology in biology. And finally, we show how the account enables us to grapple with certain difficult cases – genes and intentions – where, even in biology today, the temptation to posit internal natures remains strong. (shrink)

What kind of a science is psychoanalysis? What constitutes its domain? What truth claims does it maintain? In this unique and scholarly work concerning the nature of psychoanalysis, Gunnar Karlsson guides his arguments through phenomenological thinking which, he claims, can be seen as an alternative to the recent attempts to cite neuropsychoanalysis as the answer to the crisis of psychoanalysis. Karlsson criticizes this effort to ground psychoanalysis in biology and neurology and emphasizes instead the importance of defining the psychoanalytic (...) domain from the vantage point of the character of consciousness. His understanding of the unconscious, the libido and the death drive offer new insights into the nature of psychoanalysis, and he also illuminates and develops neglected dimensions such as consciousness and self-consciousness. Karlsson's approach to psychoanalysis is rigorous yet original, and this book fills an intellectual gap with implications for both the theoretical understanding and clinical issues of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born...

This article examines the relevance of Hegel’s theory of recognition within educational theory and practice in relation to the development of a non-affirmative theory of education. The article argues that Hegel’s theory of recognition can serve as a fruitful starting point for articulating an educational theory that can contribute to the subject’s open-ended formation in modern society. To start with, the article surveys the connection between Hegel’s educational thought and his concept of recognition. Against this backdrop, the article singles out (...) how Hegel’s theory of recognition provides a compelling theory of intersubjectivity that calls attention to the role of norms in personal development and the construction of the social world. In continuation of a non-affirmative principle, it is argued that Hegelian recognition underlines, first, that the subject’s formation can fruitfully be an open-ended and dynamic process and, second, that in order to underpin this process it is necessary to critically assess norms and norm-generating practices within an educational context. (shrink)

Discusses Eddy Nahmias' “Is Free Will an Illusion?”.

This chapter provides an overview of field theory and the notion of agency that the theory entails. Field theory offers an account of how goal-directed systems work by noting how goal-directed entities are guided by upper-level fields that are structured hierarchically. Following field theory, we show that while all agential entities are goal-directed, the presence of goal directedness does not necessarily entail agency. Rather, agency comes about when a goal-directed entity has the right kind of internal, hierarchical organization, and as (...) a result of that organization, the entity has some degree of control over its internal processes and gross behavior. In this view, control is independent of determinism. An entity that is completely determined, whether by external or internal processes, can nevertheless be agential. This view of agency has several unintuitive consequences. In particular, it shows that an entity can be maximally agential when it lacks all external guidance, even when it moves randomly or behaves maladaptively. Agency means doing what you want, not what you should. (shrink)

Manuscript originally written in 1995. Discusses various attempts to characterize alternatives relevant for deliberation and for the formulation of act-consequentialist accounts of what actions ought to be performed.

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an agent (...) responsible for bringing about bad than for bringing about good side effects that the agent is indifferent about (Knobe 2003). Elsewhere, we have presented an analysis of the everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, and accounts for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. -Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. -Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI -Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions, Noûs 41:4, 663-685. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the ethical implications and problems in elite sport as it gets closer to the human performance limit. Modern elite sport must be viewed on the background of the idea of systematic progress. The Olympic motto, 'citius, altius, fortius'- faster, higher, stronger-gives a precise concentration of this idea. Modern sport is also influenced by the liberal idea of a free market where actors can perform, compete and be rewarded according to performance. (...) However, one may ask why and how athletes are willing to risk their health and even their life on the free market of sport when they do the extreme: push limits, break records, set new standards, develop new events. This paper discusses what may be the result as sport moves toward the limits of human performance. The ethical focus on the development of the elite sport should not be restricted to the individual athlete, but should also include the various systems that make up elite sport. Other actors, like coaches, leaders, sponsors, medical personnel, service people, etc., are taking part in the same development. One problem in the modern context is that society is divided into different moral sectors. What is accepted in entertainment or art may not be accepted in sport. It is suggested that we should develop a common ethic for all performance-centered activities like music, painting, science and research, acrobatics and stunts, acting, top politics and business. Or one could include all situations and events where people are put under extreme stress and have to perform well, like during expeditions, in idealistic humanitarian work, during hazards, and catastrophes. At the same time, one should not develop a sort of elite ethic. We need a new ethic that defines the ethical tolerance level in elite sport and that also points to some of the possibilities for development of both character and virtues under extreme pressure. (shrink)

Buddhistiska ballader och larodikter. Bokförlaget Forum, Tegnérgatan 40, S-113 59 Stockholm.

The way information and communication technology (ICT) develops can promote or hinder the democratic potential of this critical societal infrastructure. Concerns about the role standards development organizations (SDOs) play in this context predate the “digital age” but are reemerging amid substantial changes in the institutional landscape of standardization. This article explores the increasingly critical link between the institutional design of SDOs and the democratic design of ICT. We review some principles of democracy in terms of the design of technology, apply (...) these to standardization, and discuss the role public policy may play here, while distinguishing between input and output legitimacy. (shrink)