For more than twenty years, Swiss photographer Tobias Madörin has been working on his photo series Topos. Creating staged tableaux in the manner of nineteenth-century painters, Madörin investigates the interaction between the inhabitants and their surrounding environments in countries as diverse as Spain, Uganda, Indonesia, and Japan. His large-scale images examine communal spaces, the outskirts of metropolises, waste disposals sites, and landscapes marked by agriculture and mining. Madörin's work reveals that these locations are the products of human visions and ideals, (...) yet they are also places of environmental exploitation. This tension, as well as Madörin's intelligent and empathetic approach to his subjects, makes his photographs evocative and complex. This book includes lavish, full-page photographs, many of which have never been published, and an introductory essay by Nadine Olonetzky that explains and contextualizes the photographer's oeuvre. (shrink)

Fox and Spector use multiple instances of the exhaustivity operator EXH to derive the correct meaning of utterances that include pitch-focus marked disjunction in downward-entailing environments. They argue that the \ operator evaluates alternatives to be used by EXH. Though the method is sound and gets the right result, we argue that the way in which EXH would need to interact with other instances of EXH, as well as other focus-sensitive elements, is at odds with how EXH is used to (...) explain other phenomena. Specifically, the analysis in Fox and Spector predicts intervention effects for cases where EXH interacts with other focus-sensitive elements. This is problematic for many cases in which EXH is used to derive the desired inferences. We propose a different way of focus association for EXH that would work for the approach introduced in Fox and Spector as well as elsewhere. In addition, our account does not require a covert element to be focused. (shrink)

Supervenient libertarianism maintains that indeterminism may exist at a supervening agency level, consistent with determinism at a subvening physical level. It seems as if this approach has the potential to break the longstanding deadlock in the free will debate, since it concedes to the traditional incompatibilist that agents can only do otherwise if they can do so in their actual circumstances, holding the past and the laws constant, while nonetheless arguing that this ability is compatible with physical determinism. However, we (...) argue that supervenient libertarianism faces some serious problems, and that it fails to break us free from this deadlock within the free will debate. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the German discourse particle denn that captures the meaning contribution of this particle in polar questions, wh-questions, and certain conditional antecedents in a unified way. It is shown that the behavior of denn exhibits an asymmetry between polar and wh-interrogatives, which can be captured by treating the particle as sensitive to the property highlighted by its containing clause, in the sense of Roelofsen and Farkas :359–414, 2015). In addition, the paper argues that highlighting-sensitivity should (...) be incorporated in the account of another discourse particle, German überhaupt, and discusses how the proposed account of discourse particle denn may be extended to also cover the use of denn as a causal conjunction. (shrink)

This paper argues that Chris Marker's 1982 film Sans Soleil derives its affective force from doublings and ‘faces’ of horror and beauty that reveal a twofold synthesis of actual and virtual. While a focus upon the material, ever in relation to transient yet lingering sensations, cannot discharge the power and force of the film, this paper endeavours nevertheless to assess and evoke Marker and Deleuze's own interrogative methods that thoroughly explore, in the manner of a revelatory ‘schizoanalysis’ or empiricism, molecular (...) and variable operations beneath our ‘molar’ structures and organisations. As Sans Soleil's voiceover states, ‘If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black’, a provocative remark that invokes indefinable singularities and the darkness of a wound, cracking of time and splitting of self in film, life and death. Considerations of death, consciousness and subjectivity extend this paper's examinations. (shrink)

Background The worldwide increase in older persons demands technological solutions to combat the shortage of caregiving and to enable aging in place. Smart home health technologies (SHHTs) are promoted and implemented as a possible solution from an economic and practical perspective. However, ethical considerations are equally important and need to be investigated. Methods We conducted a systematic review according to the PRISMA guidelines to investigate if and how ethical questions are discussed in the field of SHHTs in caregiving for older (...) persons. Results 156 peer-reviewed articles published in English, German and French were retrieved and analyzed across 10 electronic databases. Using narrative analysis, 7 ethical categories were mapped: privacy, autonomy, responsibility, human vs. artificial interactions, trust, ageism and stigma, and other concerns. Conclusion The findings of our systematic review show the (lack of) ethical consideration when it comes to the development and implementation of SHHTs for older persons. Our analysis is useful to promote careful ethical consideration when carrying out technology development, research and deployment to care for older persons. Registration We registered our systematic review in the PROSPERO network under CRD42021248543. (shrink)

The claim that theoretical foundations are historically contingent does not draw the same intensity of fire as it did one or especially two decades ago. The aftermath of debates on the political boundaries created by foundations allows for a deeper exploration of the foundations of feminist theory. This article re-examines the (anti)-Hegelian foundations of the feminist standpoint put forward by Nancy Hartsock and argues that the Hegelian subject of the early Phenomenology of Spirit resists gender codification in its experience of (...) ongoing rediscovery and fallibility in knowing. The subject against which the feminist self was constituted does not fit the masculinity thought to be natural. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and phenomenological subject reveal contradictions that cannot be resolved by an opposing feminist standpoint, and may provide resources that resist the rigid gender categories upon which the standpoint depends. Key Words: abstract masculinity • feminist standpoint • feminist theory • foundations • Nancy Hartsock • Hegel • master-slave dialectic • subjectivity. (shrink)

Proponents of modern Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples generally accept that we cannot construct successful FSCs in which there are no alternative possibilities present. But they maintain that we can construct successful FSCs in which there are no morally significant alternatives present and that such examples succeed in breaking any conceptual link between alternative possibilities and free will. I argue that it is not possible to construct an FSC that succeeds even in this weaker sense. In cases where any alternatives are clearly insignificant, (...) it does not appear at all obvious that the agent can be held responsible. Present popular FSCs include alternatives that are ambiguous in their significance, and when the examples are sharpened to remove this ambiguity, they lose their force. Moreover, the proponent of such examples faces a problem: We can easily construct scenarios in which any alternatives are obviously insignificant, and in such scenarios, we are not intuitively inclined to suppose the agent is responsible. The proponent of new FSCs must therefore distinguish any alternatives she includes from the sorts included in these scenarios. The difference must now be such that this helps to make it seem intuitively likely that the agent is responsible where the agent otherwise would not appear responsible, and these alternatives are irrelevant to any judgment about whether the agent is responsible. I maintain that it is impossible to achieve both of these goals at once. (shrink)

How do the practices of philosophy and film converge in ethical and political theory? Untimely Affects is an ethical and aesthetic interweaving of Deleuzian philosophy and close film analysis to discern how thought persists productively after the horrors of World War II. In the first extensive analysis of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais' films, Nadine Boljkovac draws on concepts and images that interrogate 'what we are now living through', in the words of Klossowski's Nietzsche. Mindful of the seen and (...) unseen 'that quicken the heart', this book of film-philosophy discerns new and deeply ethical life-affirming possibilities through its weave of cine-philosophy. As such, this book speaks directly to essences of cinema, thought and life through creative untimeliness and the idea of the 'ever new'. (shrink)

Susser and Cabrera (2024) assess the role of bespoke neuro-privacy regulations including the creation of a novel right to mental privacy. They argue that focusing on what distinguishes mental priva...

ABSTRACT Despite Institutional Review Board concerns about psychological harm arising from research participation, evidence from trauma-questionnaire research suggests that participation is typically well-tolerated by participants. Yet, it is unclear how participant experiences of in-lab trauma simulations align with IRB ethical guidelines. Thus, we compared reactions to a trauma film paradigm with reactions to a positive film task or cognitive tasks. Overall, relative to other conditions, the trauma film was well-tolerated by participants: they generally reported low-to-moderate negative emotions, moderate benefits, and (...) that participation was not worse than everyday stressors. Our results have implications for the research community in designing trauma-based research. (shrink)

The current assumptions of knowledge acquisition brought about the crisis in the reproducibility of experiments. A complementary perspective should account for the specific causality characteristic of life by integrating past, present, and future. A “second Cartesian revolution,” informed by and in awareness of anticipatory processes, should result in scientific methods that transcend the theology of determinism and reductionism. In our days, science, itself an expression of anticipatory activity, makes possible alternative understandings of reality and its dynamics. For this purpose, the (...) study advances G-complexity for defining and comparing decidable and undecidable knowledge. AI and related computational expressions of knowledge could benefit from the awareness of what distinguishes the dynamics of life from any other expressions of change. (shrink)

A “contrastive explanation” explains not only why some event A occurred, but why A occurred as opposed to some alternative event B. Some philosophers argue that agents could only be morally responsible for their choices if those choices have contrastive explanations, since they would otherwise be “luck infested”. Assuming that contrastive explanations cannot be offered for causally undetermined events, this requirement entails that no one could be held responsible for a causally undetermined choice. Such arguments challenge incompatibilism, since they entail (...) that causal determinism is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. However, I argue that for a significant class of choices, even if we stipulate that they are determined, we will be unable to provide a relevant contrastive explanation. Hence causal determinism is no remedy for luck infestation, and compatibilists do not fare much better than incompatibilists in the face of this requirement. This should serve to weaken its philosophical appeal. (shrink)

In her recently published monography Transformative Experience L.A. Paul has defended a concept of ‘lived experience’ that is meant to account for the transformative effects of major life decisions. According to Paul, “humans vary so much and so deeply, that even small differences (contextually speaking) in experiences between people can prevent us from knowing what it is like to be a different type of person” (Paul 2014, 7). In this article I will argue that Paul's account results from a problematic (...) conception of lived experience that cannot account for the intersubjective dimensions of personal experience, i.e. for the fact that our lived experience is intrinsically tied to our relationships with others. These, however, are of central import to our ethical practice, e. g. in raising awareness for the particular experiences and needs of others. After providing some introductory remarks concerning the concept of ‘lived experience’ in section I, the aim of section II is to critically investigate Paul's conception of ‘lived experience’ and to show that her approach not only rests on highly contestable assumptions but yields several unplausible consequences. Given these problems, I will suggest an alternative account of lived experience in section III. I will argue that mental phenomena like pain, sadness or desperation have characteristic manifestations in linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour which are part of the concept of a particular mental phenomenon. It is due to this that we possess intersubjective criteria that enable us to ascribe mental properties to ourselves as well as to others. The alternative account can thereby avoid the problems that are concomitant with Paul's approach. It can nevertheless take into account the distinct perspective of first person ‘lived experiences’. (shrink)

Incompatibilism is often accused of incoherence because it introduces randomness in support of freedom. I argue that the sort of randomness that's thought to be detrimental to freedom results not from denying causal determinism, so much as denying what we might call ‘rational determinism’: denying that agents' actions are determined by their reasons for acting. Compatibilists argue that introducing the ability to decide differently allows agents to make choices that are irrational, and this undermines rather than furthering freedom. I maintain (...) that this argument neglects scenarios in which reasons are in conflict with one another. In such scenarios, we can preserve rationality without claiming that the agent's choices are rationally determined. (shrink)

The paper aims to show how the Tv series True Detective (season 1, 2014 – created and written by Nic Pizzolatto) aids us understanding the status of power whether in its political, judicial or religious form. The conjunction of sex and death is depicted through acts of paedophilia, rape, and murder of women and children. The study aims to elucidate the logic which is inherent to those acts of violence and which founds the reproduction of social domination mechanisms.

The visual arts have managed to make the zombie an essential figure in popular culture. The cinematographic medium has contributed to building with him an imaginary of disaster against the backdrop of a pandemic. We will show the adequacy of the zombie with a collective imagination for which the world to come is inscribed under the sign of zombie collapse.

This article argues that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex continues to teach academic feminism why difference feminism holds productive and generative potential for feminists and why equality feminism has been consistently subject to criticism since the second wave of feminism. Using Hegel's master—slave dialectic as a lens to interpret subjectivity in The Second Sex, this text reveals an aspect of equality feminism that relies upon masculine subjectivity, a subjectivity that inherently constitutes otherness. This reliance on masculine subjectivity is anathema (...) to difference feminism because the otherness inherently constituted by such subjectivity simultaneously and paradoxically constitutes women's ongoing subordination. In assuming equality with men by adopting masculine subjectivity, women are not immune to constituting women as other. Difference feminisms, on the other hand, start from where women are as they choose to see themselves socially, economically, racially, sexually. The Second Sex reveals that difference feminisms imagine freedom in order to identify the difference that would empower women, not strictly towards sex equality with a stable referent, but towards emancipatory projects that make a difference for women themselves. The Second Sex portends that such imagined freedom has not been actualized, thus the present remains circumscribed by power that subordinates the difference in question. When read alongside The Second Sex, the tension between equality and difference feminisms can still be read as feminisms that coexist with one another, each with their limitations, each with productive potential and cautionary rejoinders. (shrink)

"2009 realisierte [Jules Spinatsch] im Rahmen seiner "Surveillance Panorama Projects" während des Wiener Opernballs ein riesiges Panorama, das aus 10 008 Einzelbildern besteht. Zwei computergesteuerte Kameras nahmen diese vom Einlass der rund 7000 Gäste um 20:32 Uhr bis zum Ende des Balls um 05:17 Uhr auf. Das Sittengemälde aus chronologisch zusammengesetzten Fragmenten des umtriebigen Gesamtgeschehens zeigt eine ganze Reihe fotografischer Genres: Porträts, Stillleben, filmische Szenen und Paparazzi-Schnappschüsse.... Das Opernball-Panorama führt die Fotografie als Medium der Dokumentation, aber auch Überwachung vor Augen."--P.5 (...) of v.3. (shrink)

In January 2022 the new Dutch Civic Integration programme was launched together with promises of improvements it would bring in facilitating the ‘integration’ of newcomers to the Netherlands. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts intended for municipalities to take on their new coordinating role in this programme. The analysis aims to understand the discourse in the texts, which actors are mobilized by them, and the role these texts and these actors play in processes of governmental racialization. The (...) analysis demonstrates shifting complex assemblages are brought into cascades of governance in which all actors are disciplined to accept the problem of integration as a problem of cultural difference and distance, and then furthermore disciplined to adopt new practices deemed necessary to identify and even ‘objectively’ measure the inherent traits contributing to this problematic. Lastly, the analysis displays that all actors are disciplined to accept the solution of ‘spontaneous compliance’; a series of practices and knowledges, which move the civic integration programme beyond an aim of responsibilization, into a programme of internalization, wherein newcomers are expected to own and address their problematic ‘nature’, making ‘modern’ values their own. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Agents in Frankfurt-style counterexamples only appear to be responsible insofar as they act willingly in the actual sequence, but would need to be manipulated against their will into forming the relevant intention in the alternative sequence. This difference appears ineliminable and unavoidably morally significant. ‘Neo-Frankfurtians’ concede that the sequences must be physically differentiated, but deny their moral differentiation. In contrast, I explore whether the alternatives could be physically undifferentiated, despite their moral difference. The reason there is an ineliminable moral (...) difference is because there is an ineliminable causal one: The agent’s choice must be caused by his own inclinations in one sequence, but by Black’s manipulation in the other. Whether this causal difference entails a physical one depends on whether we suppose causal relations conform to Humean supervenience. The denial of the latter requires us to either reject any broadly Humean view of causation, or else to suppose that we can individuate events or their qualities independently of the physical facts. If these are coherent possibilities, such examples may show that physically differentiated alternatives are not required for moral responsibility. This could support compatibilism, but only if such examples adequately parallel determinism, and I remain sceptical on this point. (shrink)

In his article “Issues of Pragmaticism” published in 1905, in The Monist, Charles S. Peirce complains that “Logicians have been at fault in giving Vagueness the go-by, so far as not even to analyze it.” That same year, occupying himself with the consequences of “Critical commonsensism,” he affirmed, “I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness,” a statement that causes the majority of the commentators on his work, including the editors of the Collected Papers to ask (...) where this logic is to be found. The fever for finding Peirce's manuscripts is fed by the hope of some researchers of discovering the logic of vagueness, a hope that has grown since Carolyn Eisele's publication of his mathematical works. Others - and I count myself among them - believe that in reality this is a matter of something already known. That is, they interpret the affirmation ending the paragraph of reproach addressed to logicians, “The present writer has done his best to work out the Stechiology, Critic, and Methodeutik of the subject,” as a tripartite semiotic of the vague, still limited, according to Peirce's older works, to symbols, that is, to the signs of natural language examined from the perspective of logic. (shrink)

The Druze movement originated at the beginning of the eleventh century and developed out of the Ismā'īlī faction of Shī'ī Islām. Founded by the Ismā'īlī Ḥamza ibn 'Alī, the Tawḥīd is a philosophical and spiritual path that incorporates the fundamentals of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism referred to in the Qur'ān, together with the ancient philosophies of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and others. It is a synthesis and a unification of the most contradictory thoughts, a synthesis that leads to the real (...) Tawḥīd or "third course".The specificity of the Tawḥīd consists in establishing a bridge between monotheism and non-dualism. To say that God is One does not merely mean... (shrink)

Aus einer philosophisch-phanomenologischen und literaturwissenschaftlichen Perspektive heraus gewinnt Nadine Benz nahere Erkenntnisse uber das temporale Phanomen des Wartens. Zunachst wird die historische Entwicklung der Zeitvorstellung aus philosophisch-phanomenologischer Sicht thematisiert, spezifisch im Hinblick auf die Fragen nach Messbarkeit, Vermitteltheit und nach objektiven und subjektiven Komponenten von Zeiterfahrung in ihrer Aporetik. Im Anschluss wird vom Konzept der Lebenswelt zur Literatur ubergeleitet: Die vorliegende Studie bindet die Aporien der Zeit zunachst theoretisch in eine Narratologie von Zeiterfahrung ein, die vor allem den Faktor (...) des Fiktiven produktiv berucksichtigt. Schliesslich werden die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse und Instrumente fur eine Analyse von Erzahltexten des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts fruchtbar gemacht. Hier erlangen die literarischen Konfigurationen von Wartezeit als Semantiken des Wartens fur die Subjekte der fiktiven Zeiterfahrung einen konstitutiven Status. (shrink)

Experiential learning in food and agricultural higher education takes many different forms. This paper highlights an immersive, comparative approach to a graduate food studies course in the dairy sector. It explores how students in this class experience a particular combination of field trips, culinary workshops, hands-on activities, and classroom discussions, and explores how the structure and combination of these course elements contributes to reflection, critical thought, and a more nuanced and complex understanding of food systems (or not). Results suggest that (...) this intensive compare/contrast approach to field trips and applied experiences, accompanied by multiple venues for in-depth verbal and written reflection on these experiences, can help facilitate (1) self-reflection, critical thinking, and broader systems thinking, (2) an understanding of and empathy towards conflicting views on food systems issues, and (3) an acceptance of and ability to work across differences, within the contradictions and complications that characterize food systems work. (shrink)

Trois lois ont, entre 1993 et 2002, codifié le dispositif français dit de « l’accouchement sous X », qui autorise une femme à accoucher gratuitement dans une maternité sans révéler son identité. La première a durci ce dispositif en l’insérant dans le code civil, la seconde a tenté de l’assouplir et la dernière a créé un organisme chargé de faciliter, pour les personnes nées « sous X », l’accès à la connaissance de leurs origines. Dans les débats parlementaires qui ont (...) précédé l’adoption de ces lois, l’histoire a largement été utilisée comme argument, mais on est passé de l’histoire nationale à l’histoire personnelle, et de la « tradition française » justifiant le maintien du secret de l’accouchement, au droit à la vérité de la biographie légitimant la possibilité de la réversibilité du secret. (shrink)