Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that the GDPR will legally mandate a ‘right to explanation’ of all decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the (...) right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive meaningful, but properly limited, information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a ‘right to be informed’. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the ‘right not to be subject to automated decision-making’ contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged ‘right to explanation’ stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative and policy steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018. (shrink)

By the start of the twenty-first century, the notion of ‘the sublime’ had come to seem incoherent. In the last ten years or so considerable light has been shed by empirical psychologists on a related notion of ‘awe’, and a fruitful dialogue between aestheticians and empirical psychologists has ensued. It is the aim of this paper to synthesize these advances and to offer what I call a ‘two-tiered’ theory of the sublime that shows it to be a coherent aesthetic category. (...) On this theory, sublime experiences begin in an ‘awe response’ (the ‘thin sublime’) and might, with the additional element of temporally-extended reflection, turn into a ‘thick sublime’ response. Building on accounts of the sublime as a species of ‘aesthetic awe’ (Clewis, 2019a and 2019b; Arcangeli, et al., 2020) I aim to show that this two-tiered theory helps to explain why sublime experiences seem to have a basic, primordial core, but also seem to be historically and culturally quite variable (as Nicolson, 1963 [1959]; Battersby, 2007; and McMahon, 2017 have stressed). On this model, the cultural and historical variability comes in largely at the point of the temporally-extended reflection characteristic of the thick sublime, due to the cognitive stock that the subject brings to the encounter. Thus, sublime experiences really lend themselves to being interpreted quite variously by the subject (as well as by the theorist) of these experiences, as, for example, affording insight into the Divine, our moral vocation, or our metaphysical unity with the entire universe, among other lofty thoughts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article assesses the proliferation of international accountability standards (IAS) in the recent past. We provide a comprehensive overview about the different types of standards and discuss their role as part of a new institutional infrastructure for corporate responsibility. Based on this, it is argued that IAS can advance corporate responsibility on a global level because they contribute to the closure of some omnipresent governance gaps. IAS also improve the preparedness of an organization to give an explanation and a justification (...) to relevant stakeholders for its judgments, intentions, acts and omissions when appropriately called upon to do so. However, IAS also face a variety of problems impeding their potential to help address social and environmental issues. The contribution of the four articles in this special section is discussed in the context of standards’ problems and opportunities. The article closes by outlining a research agenda to further develop and extend the scholarly debate around IAS. (shrink)

Recent calls to address racism in bioethics reflect a sense of urgency to mitigate the lethal effects of a lack of action. While the field was catalyzed largely in response to pivotal events deeply rooted in racism and other structures of oppression embedded in research and health care, it has failed to center racial justice in its scholarship, pedagogy, advocacy, and practice, and neglected to integrate anti-racism as a central consideration. Academic bioethics programs play a key role in determining the (...) field’s norms and practices, including methodologies, funding priorities, and professional networks that bear on equity, inclusion, and epistemic justice. This article describes recommendations from the Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force commissioned by the Association of Bioethics Program Directors to prioritize and strengthen anti-racist practices in bioethics programmatic endeavors and to evaluate and develop specific goals to advance REDI. (shrink)

This book articulates and defends an interpretation of Schopenhauer's ethics as an original and credible contribution to the history of ethics. It presents Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion in direct tension with his resignationism and aims to show surprising continuities with Kant's ethics.

In this paper, I articulate two Hobbesian models of interpersonal power relations that can be used to understand gender relations in society: what I will call the dominion model and the deference model. The dominion model discerns vertical subjection to another's will, whereas by contrast the deference model places individuals in a complex and shifting webs of favor and disfavor. Hobbes himself analyses gender relations through the dominion model. Indeed, more broadly this is the most prominent model of interpersonal power (...) relations throughout his texts. It is this model which is also reflected in the very rich existing feminist literature on Hobbes. However, the deference model, emerging only late in Hobbes's oeuvre, offers a superior general rubric for understanding interpersonal power relations. In particular, in light of its ability to grasp informal and diffuse relations of power, I argue that it offers useful insights for thinking about gender relations in our post-coverture era. (shrink)

The European Hobbes Society Online Colloquium featured my book, Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics, with critical commentaries from Alissa MacMillan, Chris Holman, and Justin Steinberg. This is my response to their commentaries.

Is there something about the deep logic of democracy that destines it to succeed in the world? Democracy, the form of politics that includes everyone as equals – does it perhaps suit human nature better than the alternatives? After all, surely any person who is excluded from the decision-making in a society will be more liable to rise up against it. From ancient thinkers like Seneca to contemporary thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, we can see some version of this line of (...) thought. Seneca thought that tyrannies could never last long; Fukuyama famously argued that liberal democracy is the end of history. I want to focus instead on the person credited with giving the most direct and uncompromising statement of this thought: Benedict de Spinoza. However, in this article, I argue to the contrary that Spinoza’s view of aristocracy should give pause to radical democrats. He does not see a historical movement towards democracy, nor does he see the superiority of democracy as written into human nature. (shrink)

This essay is a critical review of Sandra Harding's The Science Question in Feminism. Her text constitutes a monumental effort to capture an overview of recent feminist critique of science and to develop a feminist dialectical and materialist conception of the history of masculinist science. In this analysis of Harding's work, the organizing categories as well as the main assumptions of the text are reconstructed for closer examination within the context of modern feminist critique of science and feminist theory (...) in general. Although a postive review of Harding's text is presented, questions are raised concerning the adequacy of socialist feminist assumptions for such a project, the limitations of Harding's theorization of gender, and the appropriateness of "postmodernism" as a final category of residence. (shrink)

Environmental crises, which are consequences of resource-intensive lifestyles and are characterized to a large extent by both a changing climate and a loss of biodiversity, stress the urgent need for a global social-ecological transformation of the agro-food system. In this regard, the bioeconomy and bioeconomic innovations have frequently been seen as instrumental in addressing these grand challenges and contributing to more sustainable land use. To date, the question of how much bioeconomic innovations contribute to sustainability objectives remains unanswered. Against this (...) background, we study four bioeconomic innovations using the case study of animal production and manure utilization in relation to their potential contributions to a social-ecological transformation. The analysis is based on the application of analytical categories derived from the literature that assess the normativity of these innovations and their implicit cultural changes. The results show that the innovations examined manifest existing thought styles and the incumbent socio-technical regime rather than contribute to a more fundamental transition. In this respect, we stress the importance of evolving alterative ideas in innovation design, applying more integrative approaches, such as embedding innovation processes into transdisciplinary processes, and developing adaptive and reflective governance approaches. In return, bioeconomic innovations should adjust towards the design mission of a social-ecological transformation and include a multitude of actors to discuss and harmonize contesting imaginaries and ethical concerns. (shrink)

The current literature in business ethics is tending toward an unacknowledged moral pluralism, with all the problems this position entails. An adequate moral pluralism cannot be achieved by a synthesis of existing theoretical alternatives for moral action. Rather, what is needed is a radical reconstruction of the understanding of the moral situation that undercuts some of the traditional dichotomies, provides a solid philosophical grounding which is inherently pluralistic, and offers a new understanding of what it is to think morally. The (...) philosophical position of American pragmatism, as briefly sketched in this paper, offers one such possible reconstruction. (shrink)

This research seeks to understand the relationship between philosophy and the formation of concepts in childhood from the perspective of Matthew Lipman. As our own research in the area of philosophy of education, we pose the following question as a problem to be analyzed: how can philosophy contribute to the concept formation process in childhood according to Lipman? The development of this problem was organized in five stages. A first seeks to understand and deepen Lipman's conception of Philosophy for Children, (...) especially the idea of thinking skills and philosophical dialogue in the research community; the second stage consisted of planning philosophical practice with the children at school, in a class with 32 students from the 3rd year of elementary school in a public school in the city of Londrina / PR, in the period of one semester; the third was to carry out the classroom experience with the students and the teacher from the previous stages; the fourth step was the evaluation of the practice and the planning of the following classes after each meeting; and the fifth stage was concerned with the registration, analysis and systematization of the observed. In order to investigate the contribution of philosophy to the concept formation process in childhood, according to Lipman, part of the research methodology was qualitative, analyzing the concepts of philosophy, thinking and the research community of this philosopher. For this, his main works and those of his commentators were consulted. Action research procedures were also employed through the practice of students from Elementary School I, in order to carry out an experience of the analyzed concepts. As a result of the research, it is possible to highlight the fundamental role of Lipman’s Philosophy for Children in the formation of concepts, because, through philosophical practices, the children were more reflective in approaching concepts that in their daily lives could go unnoticed. The work of questioning and dialogue in the research community made it possible to highlight the difficulty of conceptualizing at the beginning of the work, the progress along their approach and the need to seek more in-depth answers. With that, it can be highlighted that the Philosophy classes contributed to such advances and that without them the skills would remain stagnant. This study is added to the philosophical educational movement of teaching philosophy from childhood, which is considered essential for the formation of more reasonable subjects, and most importantly, with the acquisition of skills that will facilitate life in and out of school. (shrink)

This article explores the function of Israeli narrative films’ persistent, albeit marginal, portrayal of women as victims of sexual violence during the Holocaust. While the marginalization of such characters may be attributed to the difficulty of representing sexually-related trauma/post-trauma, their portrayal attests both to the ubiquity of sexually-related crimes in the Holocaust and to its aftermath: namely, the persistence of women’s trauma. The first of the two waves of ‘retro films’ examined here evinces the importance of the visual, cinematic representation (...) of women’s trauma. Its main function is to legitimize its disclosure through cinematic aesthetic/artistic mediation, for sexual violence was a crime committed against helpless victims. The second wave includes films made from the point of view of ‘the second generation’, and explores the topic further by dealing with the transmission of post-traumatic symptoms of women’s trauma to the second generation. (shrink)

This book focuses on binomials (word pairs such as heart and soul, rich and poor, or if and when), and in particular on the degree of reversibility that English binomials demonstrate. Detailed and innovative corpus linguistic analyses investigate the correlates of the degree of reversibility, linguistic constraints that influence the ordering and reversibility of binomials and the diachronic development of reversibility. In addition, judgment data are analyzed for their convergence and divergence with corpus data regarding degrees of reversibility. The book (...) thus establishes reversibility as a complex characteristic of the binomial construction, at the same time throwing light on general questions in phraseology, lexicalization, language structure and language processing. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es visualizar la evolución de la evaluación del nivel de logro académico de los estudiantes en las políticas públicas colombianas de 1968 a 2020, a la luz del cierre de brechas sociales, económicas y educativas que posibiliten la convivencia pacífica, el respeto a los derechos humanos y la inclusión genuina. Con una metodología mixta, se obtuvo que la evaluación pasó del resultado sumativo a un enfoque formativo y significativo, pero los resultados están distanciados de las (...) metas en las políticas públicas que pretenden acercar a los estudiantes colombianos a una mejor calidad de vida. (shrink)

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative (...) framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices. (shrink)

Adaptation to novel visuomotor transformations for example when navigating a cursor on a computer monitor by using a computer mouse, can be explicit or implicit. Explicit adjustments are made when people are informed about the occurrence and the type of a novel visuomotor transformation and intentionally modify their movements. Implicit adjustments, in contrast, are made without reportable knowledge of a novel visuomotor transformation and without a change intention. The relation of implicit adjustments to explicit adjustments needs further clarification. Here we (...) show that these two types of adjustment occur at the same time and remain functionally independent. The size of total adjustment turned out to be the sum of explicit and implicit adjustments measured in isolation, even when both processes produce opposite outcomes. In perspective our results demonstrate that automatic, implicit processes of motor control are not superseded by intentional, explicit ones, but only superposed. (shrink)

Precision medicine relies on data and biospecimens from participants who willingly offer their personal information on the promise that this act will ultimately result in knowledge that will improv...

In order to highlight the intimate relationship between imagining, drawing and making worlds, this essay questions the educational meaning of children to initiate in the action of drawing in face of the growing cultural tendency of the body being less and less required to produce senses. The incarnated action of drawing, as an aesthetic action of touching and being touched by the world when transposing the visible limits and entering into the intimacy of worldly invisibility, constitutes an experience that is (...) as recurrent and trivialized in school daily life as it is existentially complex due to its poetic power to enter the invisible and inaugurate worldviews. The historical disqualification of the image and imagination in Western thought, supported by the separation between subjectivity of the body and objectivity of the world, does not allow educational thought to consider the phenomenon of poetic imagination as an existential experience of language insertion in the world from the gesture of drawing. Gesture that finds its specificity in the instant the hand traces and inscribes lines on the surface of the supports as infinitely creative writing. The aesthetic gesture of drawing, temporalized by the rhythm of the body in the emergence of the fabulation that accompanies the repetition of the marks, implies a poetic experience of language that involves the fusion of two senses: that of the gesture in materiality and that of the mark configured in it, marked and cicatrized in the surface of the support by the body’s action that performed it. The approximation between education, arts and childhood allows us to highlight the philosophical and pedagogical tensions that involve the question of poetic imagination and to take another look at the action of drawing in the context of children's education. What emerges, from the dialogue between Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, is the relevance of the educational intention of caring for the vital function of language as an aesthetic and poetic experience that is constituted in the processuality of the body to make something appear that produces and contains presence, that which promotes and expands the existential density of the real. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Respecting the Boundaries of Knowledge:Teaching Christian Discernment with Humility and Dignity, a Response to Paul O. IngramSandra Costen KunzNatural Science and Buddhist Philosophy and Practice as Resources for Christian Spiritual DiscernmentBoundary Questions Arise When Teaching Spiritual Discernment in Western ContextsMy response to Paul Ingram's chapter titled "Constrained by Boundaries" in The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science1 will examine ways the Buddhist-Christian-natural science "trilogue" he advocates might (...) address some recurring problems encountered when teaching spiritual discernment in Western Christian contexts. These problems are examples of what Ingram calls boundary questions. He describes boundary questions as issues raised within a tradition of learning (such as an academic discipline or a religious community) that cannot be completely resolved within this tradition because of the culturally constructed "constraints" of the scope of its investigations and the assumptions and methods with which it makes its investigations. Ingram argues that boundary questions push hard against the cultural constraints that define a tradition. He gives examples of ways these questions can engender renewal within a tradition of learning if they are addressed honestly in conversation with another tradition (or traditions) of learning. This requires humility, but such conversation can help a tradition distinguish between the cultural constraints that still sharpen its core discovery processes and those that impede its quest in its current context.I will argue that dichotomous habits of thought endemic in modern Western cultures have constructed unnecessary boundary constraints within Western Christian theological anthropology and practical theology. I have watched Western Christians who are trying to discover God's guidance through spiritual discernment slam up against these constraints, and I have listened to the recurring boundary questions they [End Page 175] pose at these borders. Dichotomous assumptions and methods of investigation often weaken Western Christian spiritual discernment processes.I will suggest that particular Buddhist and natural science theories and practices of discovering knowledge—and some of the knowledge these practices have discovered—can be useful in teaching Christians spiritual discernment. This is because they can widen the scope of what human beings notice. This scope includes what people notice in their mental imagery, in the practices of their culture, and in creation around them. Spiritual discernment, as I describe it, involves the interplay of human imagination and discovery with God's guidance of all of creation, including human imagination and discovery. The human side of this interplay is made possible by the human spirit that (following practical theologian James E. Loder [1931-2001]) I describe as those unique human capacities that (1) allow us to reflect on our thinking and thus make partially free unselfish choices, and (2) draw us toward loving harmony with our creator and fellow creatures.2I am writing as a practical theologian specializing in Christian education who has studied cognitive neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy and practice. My job is to prepare those who lead Christian churches and schools to teach Christians how to continue Jesus's mission to rescue this world. I believe the most effective way I can help Christian organizations engage in positive, long-term social transformation is to teach their leaders how to teach their members time-tested spiritual discernment practices framed within the context of Christian faith.Spiritual Discernment and Christian Spiritual DiscernmentI assume that all cultures and communities that have sustained a healthy life together have done so in part because at least some of their members have practiced at least some form of spiritual discernment. Therefore I assume all healthy Christian and non-Christian religious communities have developed practices of spiritual discernment. I do distinguish, however, between spiritual discernment in general and specifically Christian spiritual discernment. Drawing on Christian, Buddhist, and neuroscience perspectives on decision making, creative problem solving, and behavioral change, I describe spiritual discernment in general as a transformative "process of divine-human cooperative imagination, focused upon reconfiguring the relationships among the actors and the other factors in a specific situation. This reconfiguration often begins in the imaginative rearrangement of mental images of these relationships, and continues in concrete social actions which eventually result in the actual rearrangement of social structures."3I thus describe spiritual discernment as... (shrink)

This comprehensive Handbook offers a leading-edge yet accessible guide to the most important facets of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophical system, the last true system of German philosophy. Written by a diverse, international and interdisciplinary group of eminent and up-and-coming scholars, each of the 28 chapters in this Handbook includes an authoritative exposition of different viewpoints as well as arguing for a particular thesis. Authors also put Schopenhauer's ideas into historical context and connect them when possible to contemporary philosophy. Key features: Structured (...) in six parts, addressing the development of Schopenhauer's system, his epistemology and metaphysics, aesthetics and philosophy of art, ethical and political thought, philosophy of religion and legacy in Britain, France, and the US. Special coverage of Schopenhauer's treatment of Judaism, Christianity, Vedic thought and Buddhism Attention to the relevance of Schopenhauer for contemporary metaphysics, metaethics and ethics in particular. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook is an essential resource for scholars as well as advanced students of nineteenth-century philosophy. Researchers and graduate students in musicology, comparative literature, religious studies, English, French, history, and political science will find this guide to be a rigorous and refreshing Handbook to support their own explorations of Schopenhauer's thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBesides physiological, behavioural, and affective effects, romantic love also has cognitive effects. In this study, we tested whether individual differences in infatuation and/or attachment level predict impaired interference control even in the absence of a love booster procedure, and whether individual differences in attachment level predict reduced adaptive cognitive control as measured by conflict adaptation and post-error slowing. Eighty-three young adults who had recently fallen in love completed a Stroop-like task, which yielded reliable indices of interference control and adaptive cognitive (...) control. We did not observe the predicted negative association between infatuation or attachment level and interference control. It might be that reduced interference control with love only happens when people are actively thinking about their beloved. In addition, we observed only weak evidence for the prediction t... (shrink)

A good deal of attention is beginning to be focused on Peirce’s understanding of perceptual judgments and the issue of foundations, and ultimately the nature of the percipuum is central to this issue. An examination of Peirce’s understanding of the dual senses of the percept, the perceptual judgment, and the percipuum, as well as the role of the ponecept and ponecipuum, in the logic of perceptual awareness, reveals the radical nature of his rejection of foundationalism. It will be seen that (...) Peirce uses the term “percipuum” in two different senses, a wide sense and a narrow sense, highlighting two corresponding senses of the perceptual judgment, and that what is “given” at the most fundamental level of perceptual awareness is in fact a “taken”, incorporating both the nature of the taking and the nature of what is taken. For Peirce, perceptual facts at their very primordial core emerge neither from mind alone nor from the dynamic reality of the universe alone, but rather from the interaction of the two which constitutes experience. (shrink)

This paper is based on a case study involving construction of a new petrochemical plant near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the controversy surrounding its location. The paper will explore ethical issues raised by this plant, utilizing a pragmatic perspective that differs from traditional ethical frameworks. In developing and exploring the implications of this case, the complexities of its moral dimensions will be discussed, as well as the way the insights of classical American pragmatism provide a useful orientation for trying to (...) come to grips with these complexities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to reflect upon the presence of the language acquisition theme in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin and Émile Benveniste, in order to, based on such reflection, describe how this presence gave rise to work perspectives around the theme in research panorama in Brazil. Three major perspectives for studying language acquisition in the country are highlighted: based on Saussurean assumptions, there are the social interactionist studies; in the Bakhtinian perspective, the dialogic-discursive approach; from the (...) Benveniste perspective, the enunciative acquisitional perspective. The reflection presents a summary table with the configuration of each perspective derived from its affiliation with the authors in question. (shrink)

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value (...) equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention. (shrink)

Archaeological theory -- Philosophy and archaeology -- Critical realism as critique of Western philosophy -- Critical realism as philosophical underlabourer -- Diversity and impasse in current archaeological theorising -- The contradictions of archaeological theory -- The material in archaeological theory -- Critical realism, the material, and absence -- Time, scale, and the ontology of the material -- Conclusions, implications, and further research.

Robust ex vivo expansion of umbilical cord blood (UCB) derived hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) should enable the widespread use of UCB as a source of cells to treat hematologic and immune diseases. Novel approaches for HSPC expansion have recently been developed, setting the stage for the production of blood stem cell derived products that fulfill our current best known criteria of clinical relevance. Translating these technologies into clinical use requires bioengineering strategies to overcome challenges of scale‐up, reproducibility, and (...) product quality assurance. Clinical‐scale implementation should also define criteria and targets for cost‐effective cell manufacturing. As production strategies become more effective, new opportunities in the therapeutic use of ex vivo expanded hematopoietic cell products will emerge. Herein we examine key technological milestones that need to be met in order to move ex vivo expanded HSPC therapies from the bench‐top to the bedside in a robust and reliable manner. (shrink)

Rustin Cohle, the protagonist of the first season of True Detective, declares that he is "in philosophical terms, a pessimist". The doctrine of "pessimism" espoused by Rust is remarkably similar to the view adumbrated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who holds that conscious life (both human and nonhuman animal) involves a tremendous amount of suffering that is essentially built into the structure of the world and there is no Creator (providential or otherwise) to redeem all of this suffering, by, say, punishing the (...) wicked and rewarding the good. Rust finds some grounds for hope, and he chooses to continue on the path of compassion and justice, the path to try to improve the world. This prompts the question of whether he ever really embraced suicide in principle, and just lacked the constitution to pull it off, or whether, like Schopenhauer, he perhaps always found the intellectual grounds for such a radical decision to be shaky. (shrink)

Although much recent work in Anglo-American aesthetics on tragedy has focused exclusively on the ‘problems’ of tragic pleasure, in the long tradition of reflection on tragedy philosophers have focused more on tragedy as a genre of particular moral and political-philosophical significance. In this paper, we investigate the tragedy of our day in light of these latter concerns in order to determine what works of this genre reveal about the sense of the terrible necessities or near-necessities with which our contemporary Western (...) culture must grapple. We do this by focusing on cinematic tragedies since film is a medium that has become more popular than theatre. Surprisingly, contemporary aestheticians do not have a good definition of tragedy as it has developed to the present. Thus, we start with some definitional work taking Aristotle as a base. After adumbrating some plausible necessary conditions for tragedy, we note that there are not many films today that are genuine cinematic tragedies. Many contemporary films partially court a tragic structure but operate much more in the mode of melodrama. We shall categorize such films that share the pathos and suffering protagonists of the tragic genre but which generally eschew the tragic ending as part of what we call the ‘silver-lining genre’, a sub-genre of melodrama. Finally, we turn to a film that constitutes a genuine, contemporary cinematic tragedy, Into the Wild (dir. Sean Penn, 2007) and offer an analysis that reveals what this film says about our culture’s most serious and possibly intractable ethical and political problems. (shrink)