Graphical AbstractThe sea anemone Nematostella vectensis has developed into a model organism for studying genome evolution and animal development.

In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological debates and consider how they relate to the emergence (...) of big and broad social data as a product, reflexive artefact and organizational feature of emerging global digital society. We then explore the challenges and opportunities afforded to social science through the widespread adoption of a new generation of distributed, digital technologies and the gathering momentum of the open data movement, grounding our observations in the work of the Collaborative Online Social Media ObServatory project. In conclusion, we argue that these challenges and opportunities motivate a renewed interest in the programme for a ‘public sociology’, characterized by the co-production of social scientific knowledge involving a broad range of actors and publics. (shrink)

Mindfulness and compassion meditation are thought to cultivate prosocial behavior. However, the lack of diverse representation within both scientific and participant populations in contemplative neuroscience may limit generalizability and translation of prior findings. To address these issues, we propose a research framework calledIntersectional Neurosciencewhich adapts research procedures to be more inclusive of under-represented groups. Intersectional Neuroscience builds inclusive processes into research design using two main approaches: 1) community engagement with diverse participants, and 2) individualized multivariate neuroscience methods to accommodate neural (...) diversity. We tested the feasibility of this framework in partnership with a diverse U.S. meditation center (East Bay Meditation Center, Oakland, CA). Using focus group and community feedback, we adapted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) screening and recruitment procedures to be inclusive of participants from various under-represented groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, gender and sexual minorities, people with disabilities, neuropsychiatric disorders, and/or lower income. Using person-centered screening and study materials, we recruited and scanned 15 diverse meditators (80% racial/ethnic minorities, 53% gender and sexual minorities). The participants completed the EMBODY task – which applies individualized machine learning algorithms to fMRI data – to identify mental states during breath-focused meditation, a basic skill that stabilizes attention to support interoception and compassion. All 15 meditators’ unique brain patterns were recognized by machine learning algorithms significantly above chance levels. These individualized brain patterns were used to decode the internal focus of attention throughout a 10-min breath-focused meditation period, specific to each meditator. These data were used to compile individual-level attention profiles during meditation, such as the percentage time attending to the breath, mind wandering, or engaging in self-referential processing. This study provides feasibility of employing an intersectional neuroscience approach to include diverse participants and develop individualized neural metrics of meditation practice. Through inclusion of more under-represented groups while developing reciprocal partnerships, intersectional neuroscience turns the research process into an embodied form of social action. (shrink)

Throughout the critical period Kant enigmatically insists that reason is a ‘unity’, thereby suggesting that both our theoretical and practical endeavors are grounded in one and the same rational capacity. How Kant's unity thesis ought to be interpreted and whether it can be substantiated remain sources of controversy in the literature. According to the strong reading of this claim, reason is a ‘unity’ because all our reasoning, including our theoretical reasoning, functions practically. Although several prominent commentators endorse this view, it (...) is widely thought to lack exegetical support. This paper seeks to strengthen the case for this reading by showing how theoretical reason's positive function, as Kant presents it in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, may be construed as fundamentally practical. I argue that reason's supreme regulative principle ought to be understood as a categorical practical imperative. This interpretation, I suggest, resolves the apparent inconsistencies that blight Kant's account of the principle in the Appendix, while bringing greater overall coherence to his account of theoretical reason's regulative function. (shrink)

A structure has a (finite-string) automatic presentation if the elements of its domain can be named by finite strings in such a way that the coded domain and the coded atomic operations are recognised by synchronous multitape automata. Consequently, every structure with an automatic presentation has a decidable first-order theory. The problems surveyed here include the classification of classes of structures with automatic presentations, the complexity of the isomorphism problem, and the relationship between definability and recognisability.

The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the nuclearity of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear matters and queries the logic of solids and fluids by developing the notion of elemental memory. An attention to elemental memory – an element’s capacity (...) to auto-affect over time – reveals the inadequacy of terms like solid and fluid, and highlights the expressiveness of solid fluid substances. Empirically, the author demonstrates, first, how elemental memory informs the solid-fluid processuality of radioactive glasses, especially trinitite. Second, engaging with the work of artists Mari Keto and Erich Berger, she addresses the slow auto-transformations of radioactive minerals. (shrink)

Amid a global zeitgeist of impending catastrophe, this book explores the culture of fear so prevalent in today's politics, economic climate, and religious extremism.

Designing and developing a digital musical instrument (DMI) to a level of refinement that provides musically rich applications and nuanced interaction capabilities requires a long-term commitment to both technical and creative aspects. This process often leads to the acquisition of sensory, communicative, and intuitive knowledge—dimensions of instrument design that are typically overlooked in mainstream discussions. This paper explores this development journey through the lens of three instruments: the Resonant Object Interface (ROI), the Floors, and the Table Floor. These instruments have (...) undergone extensive development, with the latest instrument building upon the lessons learned from the previous two. We discuss the challenges encountered during the ongoing refinement of these devices and our evolving interaction with their physical complexities. A key focus is the tacit knowledge gained through hands-on engagement, which, though often taken for granted once established, requires significant time and effort to develop. Further, we reflect on our experiences sharing these instruments with other musicians, highlighting how tacit engagement plays a critical role in the creation of new processes, materials, sensing technologies, and sensory experiences in the realm of digital musical instrument design. (shrink)

Thrasyllus, best known as the Roman emperor Tiberius' astrologist, figured prominently in the development of ancient Platonism. How prominently and to what effect are questions that have puzzled philosophers down to our day; Harold Tarrant's important new book attempts to answer them.

Harold Tarrant here explores ancient attempts to interpret Plato's writings, by philosophers who spoke a Greek close to Plato's own, and provides a fresh, ...

Despite a growing effort in recent years to theorize epistemic justice as a species of distributive justice from within a Rawlsian framework, there is as yet no well-worked out capabilities-based account. In this paper, we set out to provide one. According to our sufficientarian conception, epistemic justice requires a distribution of capabilities that ensures to all individuals opportunities for minimal epistemic agency, publicly conceived. We argue that this conception has advantages over existing resourcist accounts of distributive epistemic justice inspired by (...) Rawls as well as over Miranda Fricker’s tentative capabilities-based alternative. We contend that epistemic justice concerns a plurality of capabilities for epistemic agency, where the scope and nature of these capabilities is ultimately left open to discernment through public reasoning, but where equal emphasis is placed on contributing as well as retrieving epistemic goods and resources from common pools and on exerting combined capabilities as well as developing internal ones in the first place. (shrink)

In the first half of the first century BC the Academy of Athens broke up in disarray. From the wreckage of the semi-sceptical school there arose the new dogmatic philosophy of Antiochus, synthesized from Stoicism and Platonism, and the hardline Pyrrhonist scepticism of Aenesidemus. With his extensive knowledge of the ways in which Plato was read and invoked as an authority in late antiquity Dr Tarrant builds a most impressive reconstruction of Philo of Larissa's brand of Platonism and of (...) its arrival in Middle Platonism, particularly that of Plutarch, long after the Academy's institutional demise. Particularly valuable is his exploitation for this purpose of a text barely discussed since its publication 80 years ago - a commentary on Plato's Theaetetus whose unidentified author Dr Tarrant has cogently argued to be a follower of Philo. Among many other achievements, Dr Tarrant throws much light on the relation of Aenesideman scepticism to the Academy. (shrink)

Through myths that pattern and repeat we figure the world to ourselves. The desire to be done with myth, to surpass mythic thinking in favor of a “more” rational way of thinking, is but one way of perpetrating violence in the guise of similitude. The rejection of muthos by logos is itself a form of violence, with significant ramifications. The following analysis will explore the work of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, focusing on (...) the ways in which myth becomes mythology, and the inescapable question of violence that attends this operation. This paper, although touching upon the matter, is not an attempt to answer the larger question of what myth is. The scope of this analysis is constrained to a discussion of both Nancy and Irigaray’s understanding of myth as foundational, as well as interrogating the nature of the violence of representation. I will briefly touch upon the long and elaborate conversation surrounding the muthos–logos divide. (shrink)

Levinas's project throughout Totality and Infinity and in his earlier works Existence and Existents and Time and the Other is to situate the primacy of the ethical as foundational first philosophy. For Levinas, myth is intimately connected to being, the being before reflection and thought. The entering into reflection and thought Levinas terms transcendence, the epoché, or first ethical gesture. In order to situate his ethics, Levinas turns to the Cartesian notion of infinity: the idea of infinity as an overflowing (...) presence, the container capable of containing more than it can draw from itself, from its own being.1 This idea of infinity is grounded in an experience of the Other as primal.2 The presence of a face... (shrink)

For a century the Bahá’í Faith has been classified, within the German academy, as a world religion. This article highlights the major historical milestones in this process of recognition. The process was initiated on the eve of the First World War by the two Jewish Germanophone orientalists Goldziher and Vambery. In the inter-war period, the categorization of this faith as a world religion – rather than a sect of Islam, as it had once been viewed – was further propelled by (...) academics outside the field of theology and religious studies, such as the natural scientist Auguste Forel. It was only after the catastrophic experience of World War II, a period when the German Bahá’í community evinced a spirit of resilience in the face of Nazi oppression, that scholars in the field of Christian theology and religious studies, such as Heiler, Mensching and Benz, who represented the school of Religionswissenschaft des Verstehens, began to adopt the classification of the Bahá’ís as new world religion. (shrink)

Catherine Elgin proposes a novel principle for identifying epistemic virtue. Based loosely on Kant’s Categorical Imperative, it identifies autonomy as our fundamental epistemic responsibility, and defines the epistemic virtues as those traits of character needed to exercise epistemic autonomy. I argue that Elgin’s principle fails as a criterion of epistemic virtue because the instrumental conception of autonomy on which it relies leads to an untenable relativism. Despite this, I suggest that autonomy may yet furnish a plausible criterion for epistemic virtue, (...) provided we construe autonomy as Kant does, as grounded in categorical rather than instrumental reason. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSharing experiences with others, even without communication, can amplify those experiences. We investigated whether shared stressful experiences amplify. Participants completed the Cold Pre...

Third Line is an installation of video projections and selected artefacts presented at the 2014 International Žižek Studies Conference: Parallax Future in Art and Design, Ideology, and Philosophy, with the support of the Ontario Arts Council. Third Line represents a self-referential and speculative study of haiku structure, in conjunction with the idea of optical interference and parallax. The title refers to Žižek’s explanation of the haiku function: the third line of haiku stands for the momentary event where reality loses its (...) substantial mass. The objective was to create a visual experience that affiliates the haiku structure with an experiential system of visual perception. We designed a dual, parallax video projection system, with one facet of the screen revealing a sequence of haiku text – metaphrasms systematically extracted from Žižek’s books – as the other side showed a video of ambient, material dissolution. The installation also featured a tableau of collected objects, referencing the project’s material development and ideological framework. (shrink)

In this article I undertake an analysis of erotic sexual intercourse - commonly, and more accurately, designated as love-making - in the spirit of Durkheim's social analysis of religion. Thus, based on a phenomenological semiotic analysis of the peculiar things we do and feel in the course of making love, I propose, first, to uncover the implicit `logic' that generates and governs these distinctly sociable doings and sociable feelings. Second, I proceed to suggest that the sameself logic, albeit in an (...) attenuated version, also generates and governs the broad class of `social occasions proper', and that this homology calls for gathering erotic and social occasions under one and the same rubric, which I propose to call the `socio-erotic' (since the term `social' has been denatured through overuse). Third, I conclude with a discussion of how socio-erotic domains fit into a larger world structured and governed mainly by interest-driven and power-driven conflictual fields. (shrink)

Tarrant examines whether the relationship between Socrates and his young followers could ever have been treated by Plato in the same fashion as it is treated in the Platonic Theages, where the terminology of synousia is repeatedly applied to it. In minimizing the part played by knowledge and maximizing the role of the divine and of eros, the work creates a "Socrates" who conforms to the educational ideology of the Academy of Polemo in the period 314-270 BC.

In the Platonic work Alcibiades I, a divinely guided Socrates adopts the guise of a lover in order to divert Alcibiades from an unthinking political career. The contributors to this carefully focussed volume cover aspects of the background to the work; its arguments and the philosophical issues it raises; its relationship to other Platonic texts, and its subsequent history up to the time of the Neoplatonists. Despite its ancient prominence, the authorship of Alcibiades I is still unsettled; the essays and (...) two appendices, one historical and one stylometric, come together to suggest answers to this tantalising question. (shrink)

This article tackles the sole surviving ancient commentary on what was perhaps the second most important Platonic work, with special interest for the manner in which the ancients tackled the setting of Plato's dialogues, Socratic ignorance, Socratic eros, the central myth-like Palinode, and the question of oral as against written teaching.

J M Tarrant; J. Wilson and B. Cowell on the Democratic Myth, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 123–127, https://doi.org.

Harold Tarrant - Plato's Natural Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 150-151 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Harold Tarrant University of Newcastle, Australia Thomas K. Johansen. Plato's Natural Philosophy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. vi + 218. Cloth, $75.00. This major study of the philosophy of the Timaeus—provided with excellent argumentation, a fine bibliography, and useful indices—is of wider significance to the interpretation of (...) Plato than might initially be expected. Most obviously, it takes the dialogical unit as the Timaeus-Critias, as the majority do today. It does not interpret Critias's Atlantis story as such, for this "natural philosophy" is that expounded in Timaeus's monologue, but the Critias is important to chapters 1, 2, and 9, and the groundwork is laid for a better understanding.. (shrink)