In the 21st century, the screen - the Internet screen, the television screen, the video screen and all sorts of combinations thereof - will be booming in our visual and infotechno culture. Screen-based art, already a prominent and topical part of visual culture in the 1990s, will expand even more. In this volume, digital art - the new media - as well as its connectedness to cinema will be the subject of investigation. The starting point is a two-day symposium organized (...) by the Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/TBA, in collaboration with the _L&B _ series and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Issues which emerged during the course of investigation deal with questions such as: How could screen-based art be distinguished from other art forms? Could screen-based art theoretically be understood in one definite model or should one search for various possibilities and/or models? Could screen-based art be canonized? What are the physical and theoretical forms of representation for screen-based art? What are the idiosyncratic concepts geared towards screen-based art? This volume includes various arguments, positions, and statements by artists, curators, philosophers, and theorists. The participants are Marie-Luise Angerer, Annette W. Balkema, René Beekman, Raymond Bellour, Peter Bogers, Joost Bolten, Noël Carroll, Sean Cubitt, Cãlin Dan, Chris Dercon, Honoré d'O, Anne-Marie Duquet, Ken Feingold, Ursula Frohne, hARTware curators, Heiner Holtappels, Aernout Mik, Patricia Pisters, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Sloterdijk, Ed S. Tan, Barbara Visser and Siegfried Zielinski. (shrink)

The late John Burrow, one of the most stimulating promoters of the distinctively interdisciplinary enterprise that is Intellectual History, was a vital member of what has become known as the ‘Sussex School’. In exploring the resonances of his singular and richly idiosyncratic contribution, this article places his unique historical sensibility within a series of interpretative contexts, demonstrating the vitality of writings that will continue to inspire and inform scholarship in the field for decades to come. ☆ The Sussex Centre for (...) Intellectual History Lecture delivered at the University of Sussex on 21st October, 2010. I am deeply indebted to Noël Sugimura for reading and commenting on an earlier version of the present essay with her customary sense and sensibility. (shrink)

The use of placebo as a control condition in clinical trials of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders continues to be an area of ethical concern. Typically, opponents of placebo controls argue that they violate the beneficent-based, “best proven diagnostic and therapeutic method” that the original Helsinki Declaration of 1964 famously asserted participants are owed. A more consequentialist, oppositional argument is that participants receiving placebo might suffer enormously by being deprived of their usual medication(s). Nevertheless, recent findings of potential for (...) suicidality in young people treated with antidepressants, along with meta-analyses suggesting that antidepressants add no significant clinical benefit over placebos, warrant a re-evaluation of the arguments against placebo. Furthermore, the nature of placebo treatment in short-term clinical trials is often not well understood, and lack of understanding can foster opposition to it. This paper will show how scientific justifications for placebo use are morally relevant. The fundamental ethical importance of placebo controls is discussed in relation to several aspects of clinical trials, including detection of adverse events, accurate assessment of clinical benefit, advancing understanding of the heterogeneity of depression and anxiety disorders and respecting informed consent requirements. Prohibiting the use of placebo controls is morally concerning in that such prohibitions allow for the possibility of serious adverse public health consequences. Moral worries that research participants receiving placebo are being unduly jeopardised will be shown to be exaggerated, especially in relation to the net benefits for end-users to be gained from the quality of data resulting from using placebo controls. (shrink)

In Balanced Wonder, Jan B. W. Pedersen digs deep into the alluring topic of wonder, in dialogue with Neo-Aristotelian philosophers, arguing that the experience of wonder, when balanced, serves as a strong contributor to human flourishing.

The study of historiography is undergoing a revolution akin to that which took place in the history of political thought in the 1960s, and the work of J.G.A. Pocock is central to both. Pocock's continuing exploration, in Barbarism and Religion (1999-), of the intellectual contexts of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is central to this enterprise, and this essay situates the origins of his own work within a pre-‘Cambridge School’ Cambridge and its experience of (...) what might be called the Butterfieldian moment. That was marked by a desire to treat religion seriously as a driving force in history; and the same concern is applied here to further understanding an eighteenth-century controversy in which history and religion were dramatically involved, and which profoundly affected Gibbon's own historical and religious views. The work of Conyers Middleton and John Jortin is critically examined from this perspective. These preludes to Gibbon lead to a series of postludes examining the particular contexts in which Victorian and twentieth-century historians and writers, from Henry Hart Milman to Evelyn Waugh, variously appreciated and interpreted Gibbon. The whole is to be seen as a reflexive engagement with Pocock's vitally illuminating studies in eighteenth-century historiography. ☆ A slightly revised version of a lecture given at the University of Sussex on 22nd May 2008, on the occasion of a colloquium devoted to J.G.A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion. It had originally acted as a prelude to a lecture by Pocock on the same occasion, subsequently published as ‘Gibbon and the invention of Gibbon: chapters 15 and 16 reconsidered’, History of European Ideas 35 (2009), 209–16. In this sense, therefore, the present essay has become a postlude. I am deeply grateful to Noël Sugimura for generously reading and commenting on the rescoring of a lecture into an essay. (shrink)

This short and highly compact book derives from Paul Ricoeur’s lectures at Texas Christian University in fall 1973. After the expansiveness of earlier works on evil, Freud, and metaphor, this book moves to consolidate and sum up this previous work, and to chart a certain shift in Ricoeur’s standpoint that has occurred within it.

The dynamics of single populations up to ecosystems, are often described by one or a set of non-linear ordinary differential equations. In this paper we review the use of bifurcation theory to analyse these non-linear dynamical systems. Bifurcation analysis gives regimes in the parameter space with quantitatively different asymptotic dynamic behaviour of the system. In small-scale systems the underlying models for the populations and their interaction are simple Lotka-Volterra models or more elaborated models with more biological detail. The latter ones (...) are more difficult to analyse, especially when the number of populations is large. Therefore for large-scale systems the Lotka-Volterra equations are still popular despite the limited realism. Various approaches are discussed in which the different time-scale of ecological and evolutionary biological processes are considered together. (shrink)