"Open Democracy envisions what true government by mass leadership could look like."—Nathan Heller, New Yorker How a new model of democracy that opens up power to ordinary citizens could strengthen inclusiveness, responsiveness, and accountability in modern societies To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative (...) democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people—with the right suit, accent, wealth, and connections—are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the lost openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy in which power is genuinely accessible to ordinary citizens. Hélène Landemore favors the ideal of “representing and being represented in turn” over direct-democracy approaches. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Landemore recommends centering political institutions around the “open mini-public”—a large, jury-like body of randomly selected citizens gathered to define laws and policies for the polity, in connection with the larger public. She also defends five institutional principles as the foundations of an open democracy: participatory rights, deliberation, the majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency. Open Democracy demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, today more than ever, urgently needed. (shrink)

The maze and the masses -- Democracy as the rule of the dumb many? -- A selective genealogy of the epistemic argument for democracy -- First mechanism of democratic reason: inclusive deliberation -- Epistemic failures of deliberation -- Second mechanism of democratic reason: majority rule.

When more scientists describe independently the same species under different valid Latin names, a case of synonymy occurs. In such a case, the international nomenclature rules stipulate that the first name to appear on a peer-reviewed publication has priority over the others. Based on a recent episode involving priority determination between two competing names of the same fungal plant pathogen, this letter wishes to open a discussion on the ethics of scientific publications and points out the necessity of a correct (...) management of the information provided through personal communications, whose traceability would prevent their fraudulent or accidental manipulation. (shrink)

This paper takes stock of a recent but growing movement within the field of deliberative democracy, which normatively argues for the epistemic dimension of democratic authority and positively defends the truth-tracking properties of democratic procedures. Authors within that movement call themselves epistemic democrats, hence the recognition by many of an ‘epistemic turn’ in democratic theory. The paper argues that this turn is a desirable direction in which the field ought to evolve, taking it beyond the ‘fact of disagreement’ that had (...) previously blocked the conceptual road to acknowledging more than intrinsic properties to democratic decision procedures. The paper shows how two authors in particular – Joshua Cohen and David Estlund – have successfully lifted the Rawlsian requirement of epistemic abstinence and defends epistemic democrats and the implications of the epistemic turn in democratic theory against various misconceptions. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of the epistemic properties of inclusiveness in the context of democratic deliberative assemblies and derives the implications of this argument in terms of the epistemically superior mode of selection of representatives. The paper makes the general case that, all other things being equal and under some reasonable assumptions, more is smarter. When applied to deliberative assemblies of representatives, where there is an upper limit to the number of people that can be included in the group, (...) the argument translates into a defense of a specific selection mode of participants: random selection. (shrink)

Consensus plays an ambiguous role in deliberative democracy. While it formed the horizon of early deliberative theories, many now denounce it as an empirically unachievable outcome, a logically impossible stopping rule, and a normatively undesirable ideal. Deliberative disagreement, by contrast, is celebrated not just as an empirically unavoidable outcome but also as a democratically sound and normatively desirable goal of deliberation. Majority rule has generally displaced unanimity as the ideal way of bringing deliberation to a close. This article offers an (...) epistemic perspective on this question of consensus versus disagreement. For ensuring the production of better decisions, we argue, the normative appeal of consensus varies depending on the deliberative task – whether it entails problem solving or prediction. We argue that in pure problem-solving contexts, consensus retains a strong normative appeal and forms the ideal deliberative outcome of deliberation. In contrast, on predictive tasks, consensus should generally not be used as a stopping rule noris it likely to be epistemically desirable as an outcome. Instead deliberators may be better served by ending the deliberation with a form of deliberative disagreement we call ‘positive dissensus’, which paves the way for more accurate aggregate predictions. (shrink)

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of type of noise, age and gender on children’s speech intelligibility and sentence comprehension. The experiment was conducted with 171 children between 11 and 13 years old in ecologically-valid conditions (collective presentation in real, reverberating classrooms). Two standardized tests were used to assess speech intelligibility (SI) and sentence comprehension (SC). The two tasks were presented in three listening conditions: quiet; traffic noise; and classroom noise (non-intelligible noise with the same spectrum and temporal (...) envelope of speech, plus typical classroom sound events). Both task performance accuracy and listening effort were considered in the analyses, the latter tracked by recording the response time using a single-task paradigm. Classroom noise was found to have the worst effect on both tasks (worsening task performance accuracy and slowing response times), due to its spectro-temporal characteristics. A developmental effect was seen in the range of ages (11-13 years), which depended on the task and listening condition. Gender effects were also seen in both tasks, girls being more accurate and quicker to respond in most listening conditions. A significant interaction emerged between type of noise, age and task, indicating that classroom noise had a greater impact on response times for SI than for SC. Overall, these results indicate that, for 11- to 13-year-old children, performance in SI and SC tasks is influenced by aspects relating to both the sound environment and the listener (age, gender). The presence of significant interactions between these factors and the type of task suggests that the acoustic conditions that guarantee optimal SI might not be equally adequate for SC. Our findings have implications for the development of standard requirements for the acoustic design of classrooms. (shrink)

Hélène Landemore ,Aude Bandini | : Cet article présente les bases d’un argument épistémique en faveur de la démocratie définie comme procédure de décision collective. Il explore également les implications d’un tel argument épistémique par rapport à d’autres justifications établies de la démocratie, par rapport aux explications scientifiques de ses succès empiriques, et en termes de politiques publiques à mener. En ce qui concerne l’argument épistémique proprement dit, il repose sur le concept de « raison démocratique », autrement dit (...) l’intelligence collective des individus dans le domaine politique, et propose, de manière contre-intuitive, que la raison démocratique est davantage tributaire de la diversitécognitive des individus qui prennent par aux décisions que de leurs aptitudes personnelles. Généralement, l’argument de la raison démocratique complète les arguments procéduraux basés sur l’équité et l’égalité pour offrir une explication fonctionnaliste complète de la démocratie. Pour finir, cet article défend l’idée de réformes institutionnelles favorisant la participation citoyenne dans le processus de prise de décision collective. | : This paper presents the foundations of a systematic epistemic case for democracy as a collective decision-rule and explores the implications of this epistemic claim for normative justifications of democracy, scientific explanations of its empirical success, and policy reforms. As far as the epistemic case is concerned, the paper proposes an account based on the concept of “democratic reason,” or the collective intelligence of the people in politics. The paper argues that, counter-intuitively, democratic reason is more a function of the cognitive diversity of the individuals taking part in the decision than of their individual ability. As an account of democracy’s epistemic benefits, the argument from democratic reason supplements procedural accounts based on fairness and equality to provide a complete functionalist explanation of democracy. Finally, the argument supports policy reforms increasing citizens’ participation in the collective decision-process. (shrink)

This book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous is an account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia; Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" muses on a host of motifs, including his varied responses to "Savoir.".

_Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: _The School of the Dead_--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; _The School of Dreams_--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and _The School of Roots_--the importance of (...) depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka. (shrink)

On the basis of Anton Marty’s 1867 Preisschrift, this article offers a reconstruction of the semiotic and linguistic investigations the Swiss philosopher develops just before becoming a student of Brentano. The paper then compares this account with the view on signs that will be given in Marty’s later work, as well as within the Austro-German tradition.

Inequity has been a hallmark of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, especially in the sharply disproportionate impacts among people of color. Recent studies have confirmed that t...

In Insister, Hlne Cixous brings a unique mixture of theoretical speculation, breath-taking textual explication and scholarly erudition to an extremely close reading of Derrida's work, always attentive to the details of his thinking. At the same time, Insister is an extraordinarily poetic meditation, a work of literature and of mourning for Jacques Derrida the person, who was a close friend and accomplice of Cixous's from the beginning of their careers.

Disclosure is a common response to conflicts of interest; it is intended to expose the conflict to scrutiny and enable it to be appropriately managed. For disclosure to be effective the receiver of the disclosure needs to be able to use the information to assess how the conflict may impact on their interests and then implement a suitable response. The act of disclosure also creates an expectation of self-regulation, as the person with the conflicting interests will be mindful of their (...) own potential biases and aware that their decisions may be monitored. This article discusses some of the problems of relying on disclosure as a solution to address conflicts of interest in research, including the added complexities around institutional conflicts of interest. The case of Dan Markingson illustrates these issues and highlights the vulnerable position relying on disclosure as a solution leaves research participants in. (shrink)

Hélène BOUCHILLOUX. — Apologie et théologie dans les Pensées de Pascal, p. 3. Comment concilier l’entreprise apologétique de Pascal avec sa théologie du péché et de la grâce? L’apologiste peut-il persuader de la vérité du christianisme celui dont le cœur n’a pas été préalablement converti par Dieu? S’il ne le peut, quel sens y a-t-il à prétendre précéder l’action divine en proposant à l’incrédule un discours de la preuve? On montre 1 / que la réflexion pascalienne sur l’art de (...) persuader exclut une persuasion sans conversion, puis 2 / qu’en dissociant efficacité et utilité des preuves, les Pensées ne visent autre chose qu’à faire apercevoir une vérité qu’on ne saurait pourtant recevoir sans une humiliation de la raison et une conversion du cœur. (shrink)

In the burgeoning debate about neuroscience’s role in contemporary society, the issue of brain optimization, or the application of neuroscientific knowledge and technologies to augment neurocognitive function, has taken center stage. Previous research has characterized media discourse on brain optimization as individualistic in ethos, pressuring individuals to expend calculated effort in cultivating culturally desirable forms of selves and bodies. However, little research has investigated whether the themes that characterize media dialogue are shared by lay populations. This article considers the relationship (...) between the representations of brain optimization that surfaced in a study of British press coverage between 2000 and 2012 and interviews with forty-eight London residents. Both data sets represented the brain as a resource that could be manipulated by the individual, with optimal brain function contingent on applying self-control in one’s lifestyle choices. However, these ideas emerged more sharply in the media than in the interviews: while most interviewees were aware of brain optimization practices, few were committed to carrying them out. The two data sets diverged in several ways: the media’s intense preoccupation with optimizing children’s brains was not apparent in lay dialogue, while interviewees elaborated beliefs about the underuse of brain tissue that showed no presence in the media. This article considers these continuities and discontinuities in light of their wider cultural significance and their implications for the media–mind relationship in public engagement with neuroscience. (shrink)

ML-HCAs have the potential to significantly change an entire healthcare system. It is not even necessary to presume that this will be disruptive but sufficient to assume that the mere adaptation of...

Ideomotor actions are behaviours that are unconsciously initiated and express a thought rather than a response to a sensory stimulus. The question examined here is whether ideomotor actions can also express nonconscious knowledge. We investigated this via the use of implicit long-term semantic memory, which is not available to conscious recall. We compared accuracy of answers to yes/no questions using both volitional report and ideomotor response . Results show that when participants believed they knew the answer, responses in the two (...) modalities were similar. But when they believed they were guessing, accuracy was at chance for volitional report , but significantly higher for Ouija response . These results indicate that implicit semantic memory can be expressed through ideomotor actions. They also suggest that this approach can provide an interesting new methodology for studying implicit processes in cognition. (shrink)

This article discusses the meanings that motherhood has in the everyday life of women in Sweden and how they practice their mothering. The empirical foundation is qualitative interviews conducted with mothers who live in Sweden. Social constructionist and discursive psychology inspired the article, and according to the analysis three discursive positions were identified. The first position deals with the child-mother relationship and indicates that the child's psychological well-being is dependent on the mother's accessibility. The second discursive position deals with the (...) child-mother-woman relationship. Within this framework, motherhood involves finding contentment in life beyond the child, to be able to convey that well-being to the child. The third discursive position focuses on the mother as a working woman rather than a mother. These three discursive positions are discussed in relation to a pronounced discourse within Swedish society, which centers on an intense politically induced struggle for gender equality. (shrink)

This article explores through the lens of Type 1 Diabetes what a body in fluctuation feels, and what kind of ecosystem has to be recreated to be able to survive, an ecosystem made of sensations, senses, sensors and more. It investigates the complexity of relying on sensations that appear or disappear, on other beings that have their own agendas, or on machines that could help or kill. It describes the fear of feeling estranged from one’s ‘extended body’ when it functions (...) alone, it tracks the experience of low blood sugar through the memory of the body or the instruments left in its surroundings. It is a story about the fiction of bodily integrity, of the combat between life and death, and of the impossibility of controlling the texture of life. (shrink)

The use of information technology in linguistic research gave rise in the 1950s to what is known as Natural Language Processing, but that framework was created without paying due attention to the need for logical reconstruction of linguistic concepts which were borrowed directly from barely formalised structural linguistics. The Computer-aided Acquisition of Semantic Knowledge project based on the Knowledge Discovery in Databases technology enabled us to interact with computers while gathering and improving our knowledge about languages. Thus, with the help (...) of data mining tools, as a result of revisiting two sorts of generally admitted linguistic theories, we succeeded in improving these local linguistic approaches by proposing to unify the Associative Semantics theory with the Meta-Informative Centering theory. The resulting Distributed Grammar program treats, in addition to the above types of information, the third one, para-information which – despite many studies – had no uniform theoretical background in general linguistics. This DG program aims to lay the foundations for creating the theoretical background of Conceptual Linguistics. (shrink)

This article furnishes a philosophical background for the current debate about responsibility and culpability for war crimes by referring to ideas from three important just war thinkers: Augustine, Francisco de Vitoria, and Michael Walzer. It combines lessons from these three thinkers with perspectives on current problems in the ethics of war, distinguishes between legal culpability, moral culpability, and moral responsibility, and stresses that even lower-ranking soldiers must in many cases assume moral responsibility for their acts, even though they are part (...) of a military hierarchy and act under orders. The questions addressed in this article are arguably among the hardest and most muddled in military ethics and deserve close philosophical analysis and scrutiny. (shrink)

NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) refers to an oppositional attitude from local residents against some risk generating facility that they have been chosen to host either by government or industry. The attitude is claimed to be characteristic of someone who is positive to a facility but who wants someone else to be its host. Since siting cannot be provided if everyone has this attitude, society ends up in a worse situation. The attitude is claimed to be egoistic and irrational. Here (...) it is argued that the NIMBY critique rests on questionable assumptions about the rightness of weighing total benefit against total cost. This weighing-principle will sometimes have to yield so that the rights of individuals can be acknowledged. (shrink)

Objective: Basic temporal dysfunctions have been described in patients with schizophrenia, which may impact their ability to connect and synchronize with the outer world. The present study was conducted with the aim to distinguish between interval timing and synchronization difficulties and more generally the spatial-temporal organization disturbances for voluntary actions. A new sensorimotor synchronization task was developed to test these abilities. Method: Twenty-four chronic schizophrenia patients matched with 27 controls performed a spatial-tapping task in which finger taps were to be (...) produced in synchrony with a regular metronome to six visual targets presented around a virtual circle on a tactile screen. Isochronous (time intervals of 500 ms) and non-isochronous auditory sequences (alternated time intervals of 300/600 ms) were presented. The capacity to produce time intervals accurately versus the ability to synchronize own actions (tap) with external events (tone) were measured. Results: Patients with schizophrenia were able to produce the tapping patterns of both isochronous and non-isochronous auditory sequences as accurately as controls producing inter-response intervals close to the expected interval of 500 and 900 ms, respectively. However, the synchronization performances revealed significantly more positive asynchrony means (but similar variances) in the patient group than in the control group for both types of auditory sequences. Conclusion: The patterns of results suggest that patients with schizophrenia are able to perceive and produce both simple and complex sequences of time intervals but are impaired in the ability to synchronize their actions with external events. These findings suggest a specific deficit in predictive timing, which may be at the core of early symptoms previously described in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Trade secret theft is a problem that almost all organizations face. The greatest threat is employee mobility and potential unethical post-employment behavior. This study investigates the role of individual personality traits in judgments about trade secret misappropriation. Our hypotheses were tested in three studies addressing three different situational contexts: current employees, employees about to be laid off, and students who had quit their job. Relationships were estimated with robust regression. The results show that some personality traits predict judgment about another (...) person's trade secret misappropriation, and that the situational context in which individuals formulate their ethical judgment moderates the impact of personality traits on ethical judgment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Mutz argues that there is an inverse correlation between deliberation and participation. However, the validity of this conclusion partly depends on how one defines deliberation and participation. Mutz's definition of deliberation as ?hearing the other side? or ?cross-cutting exposure? is narrower than a minimal conception of deliberation with which deliberative democrats could agree. First, a minimal conception of deliberation would have to revolve around the principle of a reasoned exchange of arguments, as opposed to mere exposure to dissenting views. (...) Second, Mutz's almost exclusive focus on participation as partisan activism gives the impression of an essential tension between participation and deliberation. But another form of civic participation, which I call ?critical-deliberative involvement,? is perfectly compatible with the incentives for reasoned exchange of arguments with others. We should thus encourage people to participate in politics in ways that engage their reasoning faculty, not just their party loyalty. This also requires teaching people how to disagree constructively. (shrink)

As a cornerstone of public health, epidemiology has lately undergone substantial changes enabled by, among other factors, the use of biobank infrastructures. In biobank-related research, the return of results to participants constitutes an important and complex ethical question. In this study, we qualitatively investigated how individuals perceive the results returned following their participation in cohort studies with biobanks. In our semi-structured interviews with 31 participants of two such German studies, we observed that some participants overestimate the nature of the personal (...) information they will receive from the study. Although this misestimation does not seem to jeopardize the validity of the consent provided at recruitment, it may still represent a threat for participants’ trust in research and thus their long-term commitment, crucial for such studies. We argue that such misestimation may have ethical consequences on the principles guiding the reflection on the return of results in biobank research, i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and reciprocity. We suggest that shifting from the idea of directly benefiting participants through the return of research results could help focusing on benefiting society as a whole, thereby increasing research trustworthiness of population-based studies using biobanks. (shrink)

The task of being oneself lies at the heart of human existence and entails the possibility of not being oneself. In the case of schizophrenia, this possibility may come to the fore in a disturbing way. Patients often report that they feel alienated from themselves. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that schizophrenia sometimes has been described with the heideggerian notion of inauthenticity. The aim of this paper is to explore if this description is adequate. We discuss two phenomenological accounts of (...) schizophrenia: Binswanger’s account of schizophrenia as a form of inauthenticity and Blankenburg’s account of schizophrenia as a loss of common sense, which seems construable as a loss of inauthenticity. We argue that the accounts are highlighting aspects of the same underlying phenomenon, viz. schizophrenic autism. Moreover, we argue that Binswanger’s description of schizophrenia as a form of inauthenticity is inadequate and we discuss experiences of self-alienation in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Once Apollonius' Conics had been translated from Greek into Arabic, they became a main reference and the principal tool in studying solid problems, algebraic equations of 3rd and 4th degrees, infinitesimal mathematics, etc. Mathematicians of the 9th–10th centuries also studied the conic sections' constructions, as well as their continuous drawing and their drawing by points. Ibrāhīm ibn Sinān, as his grandfather Thābit ibn Qurra, was one of the most active and inventive mathematicians in these fields. Late Hélène Bellosta examined (...) in this article Ibn Sinān's contribution.Une fois les Coniques d'Apollonius traduits en arabe, ces livres sont devenus la référence indispensable et le principal instrument dans l'étude des problèmes solides, des équations algébriques des 3e et 4e degrés, des problèmes des mathématiques infinitésimales, etc. Les mathématiciens des ixe-xe siècles ont également étudié les constructions des sections coniques ainsi que leur tracé par points et leur tracé continu. Ibrāhīm ibn Sinān, comme son grand-père Thābit ibn Qurra, était l'un des mathématiciens les plus actifs et les plus inventifs en ce domaine. Dans cet article, la regrettée Hélène Bellosta a examiné la contribution d'Ibn Sinān.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.DE L'USAGE DES CONIQUES CHEZ IBRĀHĪM IBN SINĀNVolume 22, Issue 1Hélène Bellosta DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423911000129Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. DE L'USAGE DES CONIQUES CHEZ IBRĀHĪM IBN SINĀNVolume 22, Issue 1Hélène Bellosta DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423911000129Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. DE L'USAGE DES CONIQUES CHEZ IBRĀHĪM IBN SINĀNVolume 22, Issue 1Hélène Bellosta DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423911000129Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 415-428 [Access article in PDF] Brief Mention Tantalus Helene P. Foley John Barton's Tantalus bills itself repeatedly as "leftovers from the epic cycle." 1 Although his cycle of plays--nine in the stage performance and ten, with prologue and epilogue, in the published script--also remakes some late Euripidean plays, the spirit of the piece as a whole is far more reminiscent of what we (...) know of cyclic epic than tragedy or even the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, which, as Aristotle's Poetics points out, are plotted in a distinctively tragic manner with a single unifying action. Sir Peter Hall and Edward Hall's performance version, which premiered in fall 2000 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and then traveled to England, is conveniently divided into hour-long segments with intermissions and meal breaks that cater to the sensibilities and attention spans of viewers accustomed to televised series like Masterpiece Theater. Any attempt to recapture the tight plotting, intensity, complexity, and tension of tragedy would inevitably fail in a performance of this scale. Instead, the viewer is drawn into a long and varied narrative replete with surprising shifts in tone, ranging from ironic to lyrical, from painful to comic; episodes drawn from obscure mythological sources or, occasionally, invented, take center stage, while episodes familiar from Homer and tragedy are deliberately deleted. Viewers can follow characters and children of characters over the series of plays and see the traits of siblings and parents emerge with variation in close relatives--an effect enhanced onstage by the fact that these relatives are often played by the same actors. Like cyclic epic, Tantalus fills in the gaps left by Homer [End Page 427] in the Trojan saga and aspires to tantalize its viewers with the possibi415lity of multiple and unstable versions of mythic truth. In addition, although the play repeatedly evokes the image of the rock of Tantalus poised to crash with finality on everyone's head, it largely espouses a cyclic and inconclusive view of history, in which events and human errors relentlessly repeat themselves without acquiring accessible meaning. "Until the great rock falls / What has happened already / Will happen again: / That is god-law, Agamemnon, / As it's man-law on earth. / Epikou Kuklou leipsana" (362).Playwright Barton and the directors fell out during the rehearsal process; the Irish playwright Colin Teevan shortened, revised, and in some critical ways transformed and trivialized Barton's original script. The stage version retains Barton's concern with the futility of war and human action but radically revises the major point of the original. Barton's script above all engages its audience in the myth-making process and the elusive truth of stories: "Who is to Blame? What is the Truth? Could it be Otherwise?" His script opens with a group of twelve "girls" (Barton's term) sleeping on barren ground. Nine (in the performance, ten) of the girls become a chorus, and the remaining ones (the script says four, though the total of twelve demands three, so there may be an error in the script here) play various female parts throughout the cycle. The group has missed the (real or mythical) boat and begins to tell one another conflicting myths about the origin of the world. The chorus, which claims to know all the traditional Greek myths, wants to know which version is true. It debates whether to drink from the nearby oracular streams of Trophonius. (One stream makes one forget the present moment; the other makes one remember even things one does not consciously know.)A poet (and tutor to Dionysus) enters with a wine bag. The skeptical chorus, which at first prefers its own stories and one truth, is lured into testing out the poet's bag of masks and engaging with multiple conflicting stories. "If you want to know the future / You must go into the past" (511). The poet and the four women don new roles and reenact story fragments for the increasingly engaged chorus. The chorus women toss stones over their shoulders in imitation of the Greek creation... (shrink)

Intellectual historians have rarely attended to the genre of fighting manuals, but these provide a new window on long-debated questions such as the relationship between Scholasticism and Humanism. This article offers a close comparison of the first known fencing manual, the 14-th century Liber de Arte Dimicatoria (Leeds, Royal Armouries FECHT 1, previously and better known as MS I.33), and the corpus of fighting manuals which underwent a remarkable expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries. While the former clearly shows (...) its origins in a scholastic background, the latter is mainly viewed as reflecting its humanist context. To this historiographical division corresponds a linguistic one: MS I.33 is a Latin text, while the rest of the corpus is mainly written in German and Italian. However, exceptions arise, amongst which, Heinrich von Gunterrodt’s Sciomachia et Hoplomachia: sive de Veris Principiis Artis Dimicatoriae (1579), the first text which explicitly refers to I.33. This article will compare these two texts, in order to interrogate their common relation to Scholasticism, namely the traditional frame of the knowledge within the medieval and early modern universities. The intent is to show that (at least some) Renaissance fight books include references to Scholasticism and to provide a better qualification of the nature of such references. The general hypothesis is that a large part of the texts―and products of culture―of the Renaissance that have been read, until recently, exclusively in relation to a humanist intellectual background can valuably be interpreted in the context of a Scholasticism that is still vivid during the period in question. (shrink)

La Divine Comédie est le récit poétique d'une vision, d'une expérience surnaturelle qui se fait toujours plus intense, et que le langage peine toujours davantage à traduire. La mission de Dante consiste à rapporter cette vision. La question que nous pose la Divine Comédie réside dans la différence entre l'intraduisible et l'indicible: y a-t-il un intraduisible dicible? Ou en d'autres termes : quelle est, au-delà du topos de l'indicible poétique, et au-delà de la figure rhétorique de la prétérition, la signification (...) conceptuelle de l'expression du "dire" dans la Divine Comédie? (shrink)

Public sector adoption of AI techniques in welfare systems recasts historic national data as resource for machine learning. In this paper, we examine how the use of register data for development of predictive models produces new ‘afterlives’ for citizen data. First, we document a Danish research project’s practical efforts to develop an algorithmic decision-support model for social workers to classify children’s risk of maltreatment. Second, we outline the tensions emerging from project members’ negotiations about which datasets to include. Third, we (...) identify three types of afterlives for citizen data in machine learning projects: (1) data afterlives for training and testing the algorithm, acting as ‘ground truth’ for inferring futures, (2) data afterlives for validating the algorithmic model, acting as markers of robustness, and (3) data afterlives for improving the model’s fairness, valuated for reasons of data ethics. We conclude by discussing how, on one hand, these afterlives engender new ethical relations between state and citizens; and how they, on the other hand, also articulate an alternative view on the value of datasets, posing interesting contrasts between machine learning projects developed within the context of the Danish welfare state and mainstream corporate AI discourses of the bigger, the better. (shrink)