This article considers the capacity of the military body to appropriate various modes of power, personnel and material, in terms of the tache. In particular we examine the (post)colonial military body, especially in Southeast Asia, and its intimate relations to the detachment of the colonial state from the colonial body and attachment to the global regimes of Cold War and neo-liberal post Cold War processes. We do so through a wide range of ‘texts’– including a Conrad novella, a Singaporean documentary (...) series, transformers (toys), and international money laundering – in which the defining logic that the (post)colonial military body deploys is its capacity to attach and detach at will. A series of related and homologous attachments and detachments proceed from this capacity: the power of sovereignty, the generation and circulation of capital, and the transformation of the colonial military body into the postcolonial military body. However, it is also the logic of this empowering connectivity that imposes intractable limits on the desire for ultimate control, as the tache always indicates something beyond the corpus, something outside the locus of control. (shrink)

The article examines the distinction between the state of emergency and the normal state and an inherent undecidability at the base of the distinction. We argue that states of emergency arise from strategic sovereign decisions to divide visible from invisible, enemy from ally, underground economy from above-ground, illegitimate war from legitimate war. The capacity to so divide is manifested, for instance, in the technology of air raid sirens in a way that indicates the momentum of the technicity that covertly underlies (...) sovereign power. The article, furthermore, shows how the distinction between the visible and the invisible can serve as a mystification, perpetuating the state of emergency by disguising the intrinsic connection between the two domains. (shrink)

This introduction to the special section ‘The Half-Life of the Avant-Garde: 50 Years On from 50 Years On’ explains why the section is conceived to look back at the century since the First World War. It is designed to offer ways of rethinking the concept and the role of the anniversary, where the First World War constitutes the memorialized event. The organization of the section follows the movement between often hidden or submerged forms of continuity. It attempts to think some (...) of the aesthetic and technological legacies and inheritances of the First World War in its durational 100th anniversary through a specific temporal strategy most succinctly captured in the phrase ‘50 years on from 50 years on’. The entry point is the middle of the 20th century, allowing contributors to work backward and forward by examining links between the three separate temporal frames. The consistency but also the strangeness of critical practices, as world history passes with its violent climaxes and depressions, has unique contours in each frame, with Dada providing an exemplary through-line. (shrink)

This article, which introduces the special section on The Urban Problematic, takes as its starting point the ways in which categories associated with the ‘urban’ have broken down, such that the once singular and coherent concept ‘city’ has disintegrated in certain ways: the notion has been demythologized, so that representations of the city must now be regarded as partial and invested; and cities themselves have become opaque and unpredictable both to urban scholars and to governments, planners and various kinds of (...) welfare organizations. The indications of crisis, captured for instance by concerns about the slums, favelas and shanty towns of the world’s megacities, also indicate that much of what counts in modern urban life is in some way connected with the marginal, the unofficial, and the supplemental. The article takes a supplemental view of the current state of urban dwelling. This involves at the same time a longer, more patient, historical view in its attempt to understand the current state of the city as part of a shift in the play of heterogeneous forces. With reference to the articles contained in The Urban Problematic, this introductory article finally draws attention to some of the urgent and critical issues of contemporary urbanism. (shrink)

Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. We examine several traditions including Indo-European mythology, (...) as well as Hindu, Taoist, and ancient Greek philosophy, before addressing the concept of violence in modern thought, as a revision of Christianity. We conclude with some discussion of epistemological violence and its critics. (shrink)

Argumentation schemes bring artificial intelligence into day to day conversation. Interpreting the force of an utterance, be it an assertion, command, or question, remains a task for achieving this goal. But it is not an easy task. An interpretation of force depends on a speaker’s use of words for a hearer at the moment of utterance. Ascribing force relies on grammatical mood, though not in a straightforward or regular way. We face a dilemma: on one hand, deciding force requires an (...) understanding of the speaker’s words; on the other hand, word meaning may shift given the force in which the words are spoken. A precise theory of how mood and force relate helps us handle this dilemma, which, if met, expands the use of argumentation schemes in language processing. Yet, as our analysis shows, force is an inconstant variable, one that contributes to a scheme’s defeasibility. We propose using critical questions to help us decide the force of utterances. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly encouraged (...) by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and foundational revisions in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his (...) structuralist inheritors. We also chart the parallel path of literary theory from Mallarmé through Blanchot and poststructuralism to deconstruction. We conclude, after making some observations about the politicization of language in the works of feminist and postcolonial theorists, with some remarks about how the question of language helps to problematize global knowledge. (shrink)

This book demonstrates that there is clear overlap between Leibniz’s “Discourse on Metaphysics” and his “Examination of the Christian Religion,” converging in the moral quality of God and man that Leibniz took as the cornerstone of his system in 1686.

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways (...) that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers. (shrink)

In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and foundational revisions in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his (...) structuralist inheritors. We also chart the parallel path of literary theory from Mallarmé through Blanchot and poststructuralism to deconstruction. We conclude, after making some observations about the politicization of language in the works of feminist and postcolonial theorists, with some remarks about how the question of language helps to problematize global knowledge. (shrink)

Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. We examine several traditions including Indo-European mythology, (...) as well as Hindu, Taoist, and ancient Greek philosophy, before addressing the concept of violence in modern thought, as a revision of Christianity. We conclude with some discussion of epistemological violence and its critics. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly encouraged (...) by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

The article examines the distinction between the state of emergency and the normal state and an inherent undecidability at the base of the distinction. We argue that states of emergency arise from strategic sovereign decisions to divide visible from invisible, enemy from ally, underground economy from above-ground, illegitimate war from legitimate war. The capacity to so divide is manifested, for instance, in the technology of air raid sirens in a way that indicates the momentum of the technicity that covertly underlies (...) sovereign power. The article, furthermore, shows how the distinction between the visible and the invisible can serve as a mystification, perpetuating the state of emergency by disguising the intrinsic connection between the two domains. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to deconstruct the language used in President Trump’s Facebook posts while on the campaign trail, and the subsequent comments which reiterate and reify this rhetoric, to understand how Syrian refugees are labeled as a dangerous population unworthy of asylum. By utilizing the theoretical groundwork of Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe, this qualitative content analysis will explore how Syrian refugees, as depicted by Facebook comments, represent a “disposable population.” We conclude that by reducing Syrian refugees to (...) a sub-human status and representing them as the dangerous and unworthy other, both President Trump who initiated this rhetoric, and those who responded in a way which legitimized his views, effectively labeled Syrian refugees as a dangerous population unworthy of asylum within the USA. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

In dialogue with Bishop and Phillips’ (2013) concern to establish what the category of the urban might mean in the context of megacities, this piece offers four provocations in the spirit of developing their analysis. The first is the need to attend to the specifics of megacities; the second insists on the importance of including those who navigate them in the analysis; the third is a concern to unwind different forms of urban traction, and the fourth is a need (...) to be mindful of the intersecting logics of translocality. Drawing on my own empirical research into the urban translocalities drawn by the flip-flop trail, it concludes that globalization is less solid and more fragile and shifting than many of its theorists suggest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spirituality in Nursing PracticeRegina Conway–PhillipsPersonally, I am a Christian and follow the principles of Unity, a new thought community that espouses that each individual creates their own reality and that God’s presence is within each individual. I am a spiritual being and I am sustained by my faith.Professionally, I have been a nurse for over 38 years in various capacities including clinical, administrative and academic. When I worked at (...) the bedside in the clinical capacity, I always believed that a person’s spirituality was most evident when dealing with an illness. In practice, I frequently prayed with and for patients that I was caring for regardless of their religion.In my administrative capacity I always encouraged my staff to feel free to incorporate their faith and belief into their practice. As an administrator I felt it important to be an example to my staff and allow them to see a professional practice in a spiritually faith–based capacity.Now, in my role as an academician, I stress to each of my students that it is important for them to get to know themselves. I challenge my students to know and understand what they believe about themselves and others, what they value and why. I encourage them to really reflect and be very honest with themselves about their worldview and what influences has shaped this worldview, their faith, beliefs and values. I explain that it is important for them to know themselves before they can help others. In the health care field it is important for my students to feel comfortable when they encounter a patient in need of spiritual support.Religion and spirituality are terms that are often used interchangeably in the health care setting. Although related, these terms have different meanings to health care practitioners, administrators, academicians and patients. Religion, religiousness, or religiosity is often referred to as membership and participation in the organizational structures, beliefs, rituals and dogma of religious faiths such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. While spirituality has been defined as believing in a Higher Power that guides ones life and is a source of unconditional love, peace and strength; as a result, one is able to cope with life’s situations and maintain a positive attitude and assurance that all is well.When presented with the opportunity to submit a story about how I, as a health care provider integrated faith into my practice, I jumped at the opportunity because I think it is an important factor in the care of others, be they patients, peers, students or oneself. One of the concepts I explored in my dissertation research was spirituality. I have always operated from a spiritual faith–based perspective both in my personal and professional life as a nurse and more recently as an academician. Personally, [End Page E3] I define myself as a spiritual being, governed by spiritual laws, guided by spiritual principles, living a human experience. I am a Christian and a beloved child of God, placed on this earth at this time to fulfill the divine potential and purpose I was sent to serve. I believe that every human being on the face of this earth is a spiritual being whether they acknowledge, believe it or accept it themselves. As such I believe we are all one with God and one with each other and I believe that everything in our lives happen for a reason and in due time. My faith and beliefs were never more clear to me than my experience in loosing my 84–year–old mother on January 18, 2013 after a four year battle with lung cancer.Professionally, I have been a nurse for over 38 years in various capacities including clinical, administrative and academic. When I worked at the bedside in the clinical capacity, I always believed that a person’s spirituality was most evident when dealing with an illness. In practice, I frequently prayed with and for patients that I was caring for regardless of their religion. I always felt it was a privilege to witness others resilience and faith. But it was as a cancer nurse navigator that I got to truly develop as a spiritual care... (shrink)

A wealth of cases – most notably blindsight and priming under inattention or suppression – have convinced philosophers and scientists alike that perception occurs outside awareness. In recent work (Phillips 2016a, 2018; Phillips and Block 2017, Peters et al. 2017), I dispute this consensus, arguing that any putative case of unconscious perception faces a dilemma. The dilemma divides over how absence of awareness is established. If subjective reports are used, we face the problem of the criterion: the concern (...) that such reports underestimate conscious experience (Eriksen 1960, Holender 1986, Peters and Lau 2015). If objective measures are used, we face the problem of attribution: the concern that the case does not involve genuine individual-level perception. Quilty-Dunn (2019) presents an apparently compelling example of unconscious perception due to Mitroff et al. (2005) which, he contends, evades this dilemma. The case is fascinating. However, as I here argue, it does not escape the dilemma’s clutches. (shrink)

Research on theory of mind has primarily focused on demonstrating and understanding the ability to represent others' non‐factive mental states, for example, others' beliefs in the false‐belief task. This requirement confuses the ability to represent a particular kind of non‐factive content (e.g., a false belief) with the more general capacity to represent others' understanding of the world even when it differs from one's own. We provide a way of correcting this. We first offer a simple and theoretically motivated account on (...) which tracking another agent's understanding of the world and keeping that representation separate from one's own are the essential features of a capacity for theory of mind. We then show how these criteria can be operationalized in a new experimental paradigm: the “diverse‐knowledge task.”. (shrink)

This paper provides an exploration of whistleblowing as a protracted process, using secondary data from 868 cases from a whistleblower advice line in the UK. Previous research on whistleblowing has mainly studied this phenomenon as a one-off decision by someone perceiving wrongdoing within an organisation to raise a concern or to remain silent. Earlier suggestions that whistleblowing is a process and that people find themselves inadvertently turned into whistleblowers by management responses, have not been followed up by a systematic study (...) tracking the path of how a concern is repeatedly raised by whistleblowers. This paper provides a quantitative exploration of whistleblowing as a protracted process, rather than a one-off decision. Our research finds that the whistleblowing process generally entails two or even three internal attempts to raise a concern before an external attempt is made, if it is made at all. We also find that it is necessary to distinguish further between different internal as well as external whistleblowing recipients. Our findings suggest that whistleblowing is a protracted process and that this process is internally more protracted than previously documented. The overall pattern is that whistleblowers tend to search for a more independent recipient at each successive attempt to raise their concern. Formal whistleblower power seems to determine which of the available recipients are perceived as viable and also what the initial responses are in terms of retaliation and effectiveness. (shrink)

The debate over persistence is often cast as a disagreement between two rival theories—the perdurantist theory that objects persist through time by having different temporal parts at different times, and the endurantist theory that objects persist through time by being wholly present at different times. This way of framing the debate over persistence involves both an important insight and an important error. Unfortunately, the error is often embraced and the insight is often ignored. This paper aims to correct both of (...) these mistakes, and thus clarify the debate over persistence. (shrink)

Scientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to understand their dynamics, (...) but faithful enough to reality that we can use them to analyze real scientific communities. To satisfy the first requirement, we must employ idealizations to simplify the model. The second requirement demands that these idealizations not be so extreme that we lose the ability to describe real-world phenomena. This paper investigates the status of the assumptions that Kitcher and Strevens make in their models, by first inquiring whether they are reasonable representations of reality, and then by checking the models' robustness against weakenings of these assumptions. To do this, we first argue against the reality of the assumptions, and then develop a series of agent-based simulations to systematically test their effects on model outcomes. We find that the models are not robust against weakenings of these idealizations. In fact we find that under certain conditions, this can lead to the model predicting outcomes that are qualitatively opposite of the original model outcomes. (shrink)

Linguistics as a science has rapidly changed during the course of a relatively short period. The mathematical foundations of the science, however, present a different story below the surface. In this paper, I argue that due to the former, the seismic shifts in theory over the past 80 years opens linguistics up to the problem of pessimistic meta-induction or radical theory change. I further argue that, due to the latter, one current solution to this problem in the philosophy of science, (...) namely structural realism :403–424, 1998; French in Proc Aristot Soc 106:167–185, 2006), should be viewed as especially enticing for linguists, as their field is a largely structural enterprise. I discuss particular historical instances of theory change in generative syntax before investigating two views on the nature of structural properties and eventually proposing an approach in terms of invariance :162–186, 2015) as a grounding for structural realism in the history and philosophy of linguistics. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a novel interpretationist account of linguistic content that has important consequences for thinking about intentionality. I solve the challenge presented by a foundational indeterminacy of reference argument to the effect that the meaning of linguistic expressions is radically indeterminate. Happily, my solution doesn’t require positing natural properties as “reference magnets”. Non-deflationist rivals to interpretationist metasemantics include various kinds of causal theories such as Fodor-style asymmetric-dependence accounts and Millikan-style teleosemantics. These accounts face their own indeterminacy challenges (...) that have yet to be solved, as well as similar indeterminacy of reference challenges at the level of individual words. Moreover, they must contend with our apparent reference to things that we are not plausibly causally acquainted with. If indeterminacy of reference arguments can be answered and we can avoid dubious use of natural properties, an interpretationist account like my own will be the strongest contender.. (shrink)

This article examines the dog-like aspects and associations of two marine monsters of Graeco-Roman antiquity: Scylla and the κῆτος. Both harbour recognizably canine features in their depictions in ancient art, as well as being referenced as dogs or possessing dog-like attributes in ancient texts. The article argues that such distinctly canine elements are related to, and probably an extension of, the conceptualization of certain marine animals, most prominently sharks, as ‘sea dogs’. Accordingly, we should understand these two sea monsters and (...) the sea dogs as being interrelated in the ancient imagination. Such a canine resonance to certain sea creatures offers a valuable insight into the Graeco-Roman imagination of the marine element as being the abode of creatures reminiscent of terrestrial dogs. (shrink)

■ Evidence from functional neuroimaging studies on resting state suggests that there are two distinct anticorrelated cortical systems that mediate conscious awareness: an “extrinsic” system that encompasses lateral fronto-parietal areas and has been linked with processes of external input (external awareness), and an “intrinsic” system which encompasses mainly medial brain areas and..

In her paper “Human Flourishing and Technology Affordances”, Avigail Ferdman argues that our descriptions and analyses of the relationship between digital technology, and the capacities approach to human flourishing, can be enriched by building ‘affordances’ into those descriptions and analyses. This commentary article serves as a supplement to Ferdman’s paper. Here I argue that, in building affordances into the capacities approach, Ferdman has developed the foundations of a method by which perfectionist ethics can be built into action-theoretic accounts of technical (...) function. However, this is possible only if she is willing to expand the ambit of her theory beyond digital technologies and into technology more generally. (shrink)

This paper attempts to describe and address a specific puzzle related to compositionality in artificial networks such as Deep Neural Networks and machine learning in general. The puzzle identified here touches on a larger debate in Artificial Intelligence related to epistemic opacity but specifically focuses on computational applications of human level linguistic abilities or properties and a special difficulty with relation to these. Thus, the resulting issue is both general and unique. A partial solution is suggested.