An object in continuous motion is perceived ahead of the briefly flashed object, although the two images are physically aligned , the phenomenon called flash-lag effect. Flash-lag effects have been found also with other continuously changing features such as color, pattern entropy, and brightness as well as with streamed pre- and post-target input without any change of the feature values of streaming items in feature space . We interpret all instances of the flash-lag as a consequence of a more fundamental (...) property of conscious perception in general: acceleration of the speed with which samples of perceptual information become represented in explicit format immediately after the stimulation onset. Decreased visual latency of the samples of stimulus information from the streamed input leads to the relative perceptual lag for the separately flashed stimulus because it is not preceded by adjacent sensory input that would have accelerated its perception. Experimental support for the notion of perceptual acceleration is reviewed. (shrink)

The accelerating advances in the fields of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics have been garnering interest and raising new philosophical, ethical, or practical questions that depend on whether or not there may exist a scientific method of probing consciousness in machines. This paper provides an analytic review of the existing tests for machine consciousness proposed in the academic literature over the past decade, and an overview of the diverse scientific communities involved in this enterprise. The tests put forward (...) in their work typically fall under one of two grand categories: architecture and behaviour. Each category has its strengths and weaknesses. Architecture tests' main advantage is that they could apparently test for qualia, a feature that has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. Behaviour tests are more synthetic and more practicable, but give a stronger role to ex post human interpretation of behaviour. We show how some disciplines and places have affinities towards certain type of tests, and which tests are more influential according to scientometric indicators. (shrink)

This article analyzes the remarkable congruence between the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Mao Zedong regarding the role of consciousness, human will, and culture in socioeconomic change. These spiritual and humanistic concerns that are central to philosophical idealism were prominent in the young Marx’s writings, to which neither had access. Yet both theorists highlighted these elements as powerful, autonomous factors that can impede or accelerate socioeconomic change. It is argued that this congruence is best explained by the intersection of (...) the Italian and Chinese philosophical traditions resulting from the impact of Neo-Confucianism on European idealist philosophy. While their work anticipated the cultural turn in leftist philosophy, it represents a nexus of Chinese and European humanistic and spiritual values that both challenges assumptions regarding the incommensurability of Eastern and Western philosophies and reaffirms the continued significance of these concerns for the continuing struggle between democratizing and authoritarian forces. (shrink)

DeBerry presents a new model of human consciousness and takes a penetrating look at the relationship of consciousness and technology. Suggesting that we reintegrate the concept of consciousness into mainstream psychology, he uses his model to explore the deleterious effects of the "accelerated television video universe" on the quality of our lives. What role has technology played in the shifting of human consciousness to a predominantly impersonal dimension where only the material world matters? Intended for courses (...) in graduate psychology, this volume's interdisciplinary perspective makes it equally relevant for courses in all social sciences. (shrink)

Currently in psychology, after a long hiatus, there exists an accelerating interest in the nature and character of consciousness. As might be expected at this early point in our return to consciousness, much of the relevant discussion among psychologists proceeds at the commonsense level of understanding. However, some psychologies are already moving beyond ordinary thought, and providing one or more technical concepts of consciousness. Such psychologies may be useful in improving psychologists' conceptual grasp of the referents of (...) our ordinary concepts of consciousness. Among the ordinary concepts of consciousness, probably the most basic one is the concept of consciousness3 . Among the psychologies that could be helpful is the influential ecological approach developed by James J. Gibson. This article is propaedeutic to putting Gibson's technical concept of awareness to work in improving the concept of consciousness3. First, features of the latter concept are identified; and then, with this concept firmly in mind, Gibson's concept of awareness, mainly its perceptual application, is made explicit and discussed with regard to a number of its important features. In both these ways, and others to follow based on the same materials, I hope to contribute to the conceptual sophistication of psychologists as they again seek to address the topic of consciousness. (shrink)

Many philosophers of physics think that physical rates of change, like velocity or acceleration in classical physics, are extrinsic. Many philosophers of mind think that phenomenal properties, which characterize what it’s like to be an agent at a time, are intrinsic. I will argue that these two views can’t both be true. Given that these two views are in tension, we face an explanatory challenge. Why should there be any interesting connection between these physical quantities and consciousness in the (...) first place? In a speculative spirit, I close by developing a panpsychist view which promises to explain this connection in a particularly satisfying way. (shrink)

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the subject of animal consciousness. Conferences, journals, and new books are emerging at an accelerating rate. Why is this happening? In this article, I explain the ethical and scientific importance of animal consciousness that has fuelled this rising interest in animal minds. First, I will focus on the relevance of consciousness to the status of animals as subjects of moral concern. Second, I will explain the significance of (...) the scientific study of animal consciousness for understanding consciousness more broadly, including insights into ourselves. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the mystical experience as a kind of altered states of consciousness. The purpose of the article is to solve at the conceptual level the problem of distinguishing genuine mystical experience and various kinds of surrogate states with quasi-mystical content. The theoretical basis for solving this problem was the study of the panorama of moments of divergence and convergence of discourses of the humanities and natural sciences, as well as theology. In the course of (...) the conducted research, the infra-personal processes going on in the vector of the dissolving and spreading "I" were revealed. They correspond to both mystical (dissolution in the Deity, in emptiness, in cosmic consciousness, etc.) and clinical states (confused or floating consciousness). The authors also consider in detail the ultrapersonal processes occurring within the framework of the dissemination of personal consciousness and which correspond to both mystical (the scattering of reality into many spirits, souls, astral projections and quasi-persona) and clinical conditions (schizophrenic type disorders). The novelty of the article lies in revealing the diverse directions of inauthentic mystical experience based on the systematic study of altered states of consciousness, as well as in determining the range in which an outlet to authentic forms of mystical experience can open. It has been established that in the spectrum of infra-personal and ultra-personal states there is such a feature of mystical and occult practices with the prefix "neo" as the achievement of mystical states according to the "accelerated course" programs. However, due to the inversion of the view characteristic of modern consciousness, in the ideology of neo-mysticism, destructive processes are often perceived as a new, higher stage in the evolution of mankind. With this interpretation, conditions arise for the perception of science as a "new religion", as well as the desire to find in scientific concepts a support for modern occultism and neo-mysticism. (shrink)

Neurobiologist William Calvin explores the human brain, positing that the neurons in the brain operate in an accelerated version of biological evolution, evolving ideas through random variations and selections, and supports his hypothesis with numerous ca.

In this series of brilliant essays, Jacob Needleman uncovers the heart of religion, psychiatry, philosophy, culture, science, and medicine in the forgotten life of the soul. He sees these contemporary disciplines without deep roots in the contemplative life and calls his readers to re-establish these roots. 'Much in our world, much in our modern way of living, is at the end of its tether.' says Needleman. 'Not only philosophy, but medicine, religion, and technology have reached a profound impasse, where motion (...) accelerates but without direction. Almost every human endeavor, every pattern and form of life, seems to have broken from its moorings. And every one of us is riding in one of these rapidly accelerating vessels looking for a way, a direction, and a means of guiding it and ourselves.' Dealing with such themes as Eastern and Western spirituality, existentialism, spiritual traditions in our contemporary materialistic culture, disease and meaning, the loss of wholeness, being as a mystery, Needleman encourages every human being to begin 'the long and difficult work of awakening to himself.'. (shrink)

This article examines Olivier Rolin's use of stream of consciousness narration in L'invention du monde (1993). It draws upon philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Paul Virilio to propose that the novel—with its obsessions for information, technology, and space—depicts a crossroads of subjectivity. At that crossroads, natural and computational connotations of "stream" collide, fueling the novel's central crisis. The misadventures of Rolin's postmodern, post-industrial, satellite-inspired Phileas Fogg reveal a central conundrum of accelerated globalization: namely, that the informational and technological mastery of (...) our world comes at the price of sacrificing the ability to meaningfully position oneself within it. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: The city is not simply a location in space, but also a vehicle in time that can itself accelerate the evolution of consciousness. Like molecules packed into the membrane of a cell, the minds that are packed into a city take on a new life that is energized by the city's intensification of space and time. The first cities of ancient Sumer were ceremonial centres organized around the sacred precinct of the temple. Sumerian mythology stated that these (...) cities were founded and lived in by the gods. One of the earliest texts we have in Sumerian mythology is the story of how the goddess Inannna transferred the arts of civilization from the god Enki's favoured city of Eridu to her own beloved Erech. The text is a fundamental expression of the ancient Arithmetic Mentality, as it displays the numinosity of the list and delights in repeating, in strophe after strophe, the enumeration of these me's that were loaded on and unloaded from Inanna's riverine barge. (shrink)

From the beginning the process of education in Ukraine was based on such existential features of national self-consciousness as polyphony (tolerance to various spiritual features of other peoples), anteism (pronounced “earthly” material principle in culture and life), cosmocentrism (“cordiality” focused on “Inner” being), which are inextricably linked with individualism.The educational process in Ukraine has a clear anti-positivist humanistic orientation and is focused on the education of moral qualities which are characterized by heroic ideals. Nowadays we have necessary to accelerate (...) this process, especially in the direction of its existential-humanistic content. The teaching of any science can not ignore the worldview and moral assessments of those things which characterize, for example, a market economy. The basis of moral charity should be the national state of patriotism.The nation asserts its right to exist as an ethnic community when it reaches a level of self-awareness that requires active formation. The culture of the “national spirit” is an objectified spiritual form of human self-determination, which allows it to maintain positive personal qualities in the real contradictions of public life. The culture of national self-consciousness, as a factor of positive action on public life, includes an understanding of the real conditions for the implementation of the principles of morality and the objective historical situation in which social classes and specific individuals operate. Awareness of each person as an object and “demiurge” of the historical process, the generalization of personal practical position through the prism of social requirements of the modern time in a contradictory world, real social, national, professional and other differences in humanity is the main condition of human living.Individual opposites in their social essence can be spiritually identified. In the national self-consciousness, the opposite becomes identical, and this identity is affirmed with the help of appropriate philosophical considerations, which can determine people’s self-esteem of the essence of their existence. Conversely, the ability of individuals to rise above their objective differences and contradictions in order to solve national (and ultimately universal) tasks is an expression of their moral nobility and wisdom.To organize the practical life of individuals on the basis of national principles is a manifestation of a certain culture of their self-consciousness. This culture is not based on dogmatic attitudes, but it’s based on the truth of national interpersonal and social ties of individuals and on their real life. In public life, people are the bearers of only certain, defined national principles. This certainty is determined by the level of historical development of the nation, social relations, which are formed objectively. To a large extent, the culture of national self-consciousness is manifested in the language, which is the basis of ethnic consciousness, ethnocultural. Religious beliefs have a great influence on the formation of the culture of national self-consciousness. Freedom of conscience implies the right of citizens to profess any faith or to be an atheist, while respecting the views and beliefs of everyone. (shrink)

In this article, the author analyses and compares the views of Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Brodsky and Bakhtin, and examines the problem of time, space, and contemplation. Another subject of consideration is the finitude of being, which combines the three previous aspects.

The article is dedicated to the political activity of the Great Leader in the process of national state building. Heydar Aliyev, who holds an important place in our modern history as a symbol of our independence, is an example for every Azerbaijani with his rich and diverse heritage. The evolution of national consciousness accelerated with Heydar Aliyev's coming to power, and thanks to him, our independence became eternal and irreversible. The concept of successful and strong state building strengthened the (...) independence of Azerbaijan. Universal essence and the totality of the historically formed system of values, forming the basis of statehood, were intended for great prospects. On September 20, 1994, oil contracts were signed, which was a turning point in the latest history of Azerbaijan. The contract of the century was realized precisely as a result of Heydar Aliyev's visionary policy. This Agreement, called the "Contract of the Century", created a reliable foundation for the future development and security of our country, and strengthened Azerbaijan's position on the world map. Today, Azerbaijan has gained the image of the most reliable partner of the world states. It is shown in the article that after gaining independence, the people of Azerbaijan achieved important historical achievements thanks to the foresight, determination, iron will, and rich statecraft experience of their wise leader, and the integration of our country into the world was ensured. As a result of the intense activity of Heydar Aliyev, great successes were achieved in the economy, industry and agriculture, social, cultural, sports and educational fields, numerous industrial enterprises, cultural and educational institutions, medical institutions were built, new housing estates were built, roads were built, gas was supplied to remote regions. lines were drawn. More than one million refugees displaced from Western Azerbaijan and Karabakh due to the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict were temporarily provided with the necessary conditions. A new stage in the construction of the army has begun. In the article, the author talked about Heydar Aliyev's concept of advanced statehood, where the principles of nationalism, patriotism, giving importance to national-moral values prevailed and were determined as the main criteria in the history of our statehood. Establishing a multicultural society as one of the fundamental principles of a democratic legal state and, at the same time, ensuring the return to national identity is one of the main attributes of our state policy. As a result of the successful policy conducted in this direction, taking possession of our material and moral heritage, preserving it and passing it on to future generations is the main essence of our national ideology. Azerbaijanism, which became a national ideology, had more political and civic meaning than ethnic essence. This, in turn, ensured the unity of the state and the people. The people united around a single ideology and restored their national statehood, once again proving their national identity and existence. One of the important issues highlighted in the article is the comprehensive development strategy defined by the national leader Heydar Aliyev, which was successfully implemented in the last period under the leadership of the head of state, Mr. Ilham Aliyev, and the achievements in ensuring the sustainable development of our country and achieving the main goals and objectives. The basis of the current brilliant and magnificent achievements of our state is the successful policy implemented under the leadership of President Ilham Aliyev in accordance with national interests and modern global challenges. Azerbaijan is known in the world as a strong, influential state, an island of stability and a country with dynamic development, the great achievements made open new perspectives for our country. Having a strong international reputation and a positive image, Azerbaijan presented the world with examples of an effective economic development model, a model of multiculturalism that includes national and universal values, and the Azerbaijani model of national statehood. According to the decree of President Ilham Aliyev dated September 29, 2022, 2023 was declared the "Year of Heydar Aliyev" in the Republic of Azerbaijan. (shrink)

The conceptual basis of Hellenic theology was theoretical reflection on the essence of myth, the philosophy of mythology. Several stages can be distinguished in the history of Hellenic theology. The subject of this article is the Hellenic theology of the epoch of the high classics (Vt. half of the V century BC). The cultural roots of the High Classics go back to the ancient Enlightenment, which formed the rational attitude of the ancient consciousness to the world. The main event (...) of the era of High Classics is the Peloponnesian War, which accelerated the crisis of the polis system, its way of life, and cultural ideals. The war led to the rupture of social ties, accelerated the individualization of the consciousness of the individual, forced to seek new social and spiritual supports. Serious shifts have taken place in the existential foundations of Hellenic religion, the understanding of man's dependence on the will of the Olympian gods and the measure of human influence on them has changed. If at the beginning of the epoch of the High Classics there was a semantic harmony of the relations between the human and the divine, then by the end of the epoch it was replaced by the confrontation and alienation of the sacred and profane. Ideas about the dependence of man on the world of the gods and the possible influence on the sacred have "blurred", have become extremely uncertain. This tendency manifested itself in various forms - in the strengthening of the influence of sophistry with its skepticism, the opposition of Chthonic and Olympic mythologies, the actualization of the motive of the birth of new gods (while the old ones do not die at all), stories about the deification of bright personalities, etc. Including in the theology of the Hellenic religion, concentrated expressed by the plots and images of the ancient drama (Sophocles, Euripides). The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane made Hellenic religion meaningless, led it to self-denial. Under these conditions, Hellenic theology was faced with the need to transform the image of the sacred world. Firstly, by giving the otherworldly reality an abstract-conceptual transcendence. Secondly, through the ultimate generalization of mythological images of the gods, up to monotheism. These tasks were solved by the next epoch - the late classics. (shrink)

In the background of accelerated interdisciplinary development of phenomenology, there appears more clearly a deficiency of the epistemological groundingand methodological explanation of present research. This is particularly evident in the field of social phenomenology, in which the research positions extend fromthat of the “orthodox” transcendental phenomenologists to an endless search for a new foundation for pragmatic social phenomenology in philosophical anthropology, to a vague thesis about “fruitful discussion” between E. Husserl and A. Schutz. The main task of this article consists (...) in the establishment of the fundamental significance of the epistemological succession between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Schutz’s natural phenomenology. This confirms itself through the analysis of such concepts as sense and constitution, which play the prominent methodological role in the main works – Ideas-I and correspondingly The Phenomenology of the Social World. Such comparative analysis allows not only to highlight the most important similarities in the projects of both thinkers such as a “sense-giving function” of consciousness, but also to distinguish small deviations of the mundane phenomenology from the transcendental project, i.e., the rejection of transcendental reductions and the “pragmatic conditioning” of the subjective action’s sense through now- and so-states of the ego. It is proposed to interpret the famous Schutzian “turning away from Husserl” first of all as a skeptical turn; however, that does not mean that the essential transcendental prerequisites such as a correlation of “attitude – experience – world” should be abandoned. In the end, it is demonstrated that the main metaphysical statements of Husserl can still retain their value within the framework of the contemporary conventional research models such as the “scientific research program” by I. Lakatos, whereas further theoretical statements, i.e., of social phenomenology, can be bound with this “hard core” as “auxiliary hypotheses” in cooperation with empirical sciences. (shrink)

Society is at a crossroads. Interconnected systems, radical transparency, and rapidly increasing sophistication in skills, communications, and technologies provide a unique context for fostering social innovation at a planetary scale. We argue that unprecedented rates of systemic social change are possible for co-creating a future where humans and all life can thrive. Yet, this requires innovation in the conceptions, practice, teaching, and researching of social innovation itself to reimagine what it is and can be. As a multidisciplinary group of academics, (...) practitioners, and educators, we integrate our perspectives on social innovation and humanistic management to suggest the notion of systemic social innovation. We introduce the concept of “transformative collaboration” as central to facilitating systemic social innovation and propose a multilevel model for accelerating systems change. We then develop an integrated framework for conceptualizing systemic social innovation. Four levels of social impact are identified, and these levels are bracketed with a call for transforming individual consciousness at the micro level and new collective mindsets at the macro level. Blooom is presented as a case study to illustrate transformative collaboration, demonstrate the role of mindset shift in practice, and introduce four key ingredients to systemic social innovation. Finally, a call to action is issued for social innovation practice, teaching, and research. Most importantly, we seek to inspire and accelerate systemic social innovation that enables the flourishing of every human being and all life on earth. (shrink)

The complexity and challenges of the external environment accelerate the awakening of the new generation of enterprise employees’ self-consciousness. Facing the continuous expansion of the information-based work mode, the traditional management mechanism of enterprises has a more limited impact on employee performance. Based on the goal-oriented theory, developing and excavating the creative personality traits of employees, making full use of goal-oriented behavior to improve their own innovation performance management path, are expected to become a new path to continuously enhance (...) the innovation ability of enterprises. In this study, we take the employees of high-tech enterprises as samples to explore the influence mechanism of creative personality traits, goal orientation and employee innovation performance. The results show that goal orientation significantly moderates the relationship between creative personality traits and innovation performance. The mediating effects of learning goal orientation, performance certification orientation, and performance avoidance orientation are all significant. (shrink)

This paper seeks to reconstruct the role of schooling in a moment of accelerated social, political, economic, geo-political, climatic, indeed planetary crisis. It identifies the school as a potentially prefigurative institution, an evolutionary social frontier, capable of nurturing the democratic social character, a form of sensibility apart from which authentic political democracy is not possible. As theorized by Herbert Marcuse and Richard Hart and Antonio Negri, the “new sensibility” or “multitude” is characterized by greater psychological freedom, individuality, social creativity and (...) self-rule, comprising a “whole of singularities” that “acts in common”. It suggests a human subject with a vital, biological drive for liberation, with a consciousness capable of breaking through the material as well as ideological veil of a society based on hierarchy and domination, and is associated politically with democracy and social-anarchism, or what Murray Bookchin called “communalism”. This paper identifies three main characteristics of an institution informed by this form of modal subjectivity, all of them based on student-teacher dialogue: an emergent, project-based curriculum, whole-school direct democratic governance on all levels of the community, and the regular practice of communal philosophical inquiry, through which we problematize the concepts we live by, in the interest of their ongoing reconstruction. (shrink)

The holographic principle was proposed by Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft in the 1990s and it has also been modeled by Leonard Susskind and Stephen Hawking. We’ve heard light mentioned with regard to the fundamental nature of reality for a long time; God said Let there be light, we are the light of the world, etc. But we haven’t investigated a possible role for the speed of light in our illnesses. This paper will do just that. The central premise is (...) that light’s “speed” is a reflection of the degree to which the observer is removed from its source. In its Platonic state, light’s speed is zero. It is light from which time, by degrees, emerges. The Big Bang can be envisioned as a sphere, the center of which is a point, Alpha. Via expansion, Alpha becomes a sphere, Omega, by degrees, where each degree is c. For any given Alpha, the circumference of a circle on the sphere, Omega, is a set of resonant points that represent the speed of light or “end of time.” Every radius—every line drawn from Alpha to Omega—is an arrow of time, a parallel universe. Alpha and Omega increase in tandem, maintaining the degree of separation required by special relativity, E=mc^2. The holographic sphere of points equidistant from the Big Bang on which we find ourselves is not the only sphere of points equidistant from the Big Bang. There are spheres that are smaller and larger than ours. Where an arrow of time intersects a sphere-brane of light’s speed will be treated here as a “2D hologram.” For an observer behind the hologram, reality will appear to be accelerating/expanding. For an observer in front of it, reality will appear to be decelerating/contracting. For an observer at the speed of light, time is no longer a variable. (shrink)

Gentle handling of mammals , and lizards , but not of frogs and fish elevated the set-point for body temperature, i.e., produced an emotional fever, achieved only behaviourally in lizards. Heart rate, another detector of emotion in mammals, was also accelerated by gentle handling, from ca. 70 b/min to ca. 110 b/min in lizards. This tachycardia faded in about 10 min. The same handling did not significantly modify the frogs’ heart rates. The absence of emotional tachycardia in frogs and its (...) presence in lizards , together with the emotional fever exhibited by mammals and reptiles, but not by frogs or fish, would suggest that emotion emerged in the evolutionary lineage between amphibians and reptiles. Such a conclusion would imply that reptiles possess consciousness with its characteristic hedonic dimension, pleasure. The role of sensory pleasure in decision making was therefore verified in iguanas placed in a motivational conflict. To be able to reach a bait , the iguanas had to leave a warm refuge, provided with standard food, and had to venture into a cold environment. The results showed that lettuce was not necessary to the iguanas and that they traded off the palatability of the bait against the disadvantage of the cold. Thus, the behaviour of the iguanas was possibly produced, as it is in humans, through the maximization of sensory pleasure. Altogether, these results may indicate that the first elements of mental experience emerged between amphibians and reptiles. (shrink)

We use phenomenology to reflect on the experience of being with others as mediated by screens through videoconferencing platforms, a phenomenon accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and social isolation measures. We explore two directions to explain the intersubjective experience of a videoconference. One direction introduces a conceptual background based on previous contributions in phenomenology, while the other one is more speculative: we introduce the novel idea of a phantom other. First, we understand this phenomenon either as a correlate of image (...) consciousness or as a paradoxical perception. Then, we introduce the phantom other using ideas offered in phenomenological descriptions in which the phantom limb appears as a quasi-presence. The phantom other is the same flesh and blood body with whom I co-constitute senses of the world. In a videoconference, the other appears as a whole body with which I coordinate, although she appears as a phantom other. (shrink)

On examine dans cette étude les effets des flux sensoriels et informationnels continus et accélérés sur la conscience, sur les capacités de penser et de réfléchir. Ces flux conduisent – au-delà de l’inachèvement intrinsèque à toute science dont parlait Weber – à des formes instables, changeantes et illimitées, perçues comme telles par le sujet, et tendant dès lors à provoquer un état de crise de la conscience, d’insécurité psychique profonde dans la fluidité contemporaine.We deal here with the effects caused by (...) continuous, accelerated sensory and information flows on consciousness, on thinking. Quite beyond Weber’s conclusion on the intrinsically boundless character of science, those flows lead to unstable, changing and unlimited forms of knowledge, perceived as such by the individual, and tend from now on to induce a permanent state of crisis in consciousness, a strong psychological insecurity in contemporary fluidity. (shrink)

Advances in technology are accelerating the momentum for change in all sectors of society. There is at present a lag time between the actual development and implementation of new technology and the public consciousness of the issues involved. The rapid rate of social change, however, emphasizes the critical role of the educational system and the need to continually estimate and evaluate direction to best serve the common good. Forty-five influential Minnesota leaders in education, business/industry and government were interviewed on (...) issues related to education and the changing economy. (shrink)

The phenomenon of information culture in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war is analyzed. It has been proven that changes in the priorities of the development of information culture during the war are determined by the course of spiritual confrontation with the enemy, accelerated transformations of public consciousness, the peculiarities of state information policy, and the urgent need to protect the country’s information sovereignty. It is argued that under the influence of the war in Ukraine, including in the spiritual (...) and informational space, all components of information culture are being transformed, particularly its core - the information worldview. The features of the development of the information worldview as a fundamental component of information culture are identified. It is noted that living in an information society without possessing the necessary information culture poses a danger of getting lost in both virtual and real worlds simultaneously. Personal mastery of information culture in modern society is based on theoretical knowledge about the essence, content, features, and regularities of its functioning in societies with different levels of informatization. The negative impact of informational aggression on the formation of the information culture of modern youth is demonstrated. During the war, the information culture of youth is formed and changed at an accelerated pace due to the increase in information flows of both negative and positive nature and under the influence of new information technologies. One of the main problems in the process of forming the information culture of youth in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war is mastering methods of countering enemy propaganda, developing critical attitudes towards information, and having a value-based worldview barrier to countering fake and anti-Ukrainian narratives. The role of knowledge and the education system in the formation of the information culture of Ukrainian society is revealed. (shrink)

The article aims at expanding the horizon of phenomenological psychopathology of depression from a social theoretical perspective. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology, in the first section, depression is reinterpreted as a disruption of chiasm: it is not merely the illness of the body, the disorder of the mind, or a specific form of social suffering, but the interrelated distortion of time consciousness, agency, and interaffectivity. The phenomenological clarification of these components provides opportunity for connecting sociological and psychopathological insight. In (...) the second part, contemporary critical theories of acceleration, globalization, biopolitics, and system colonization are reinterpreted to highlight the structural and cultural context of late modern time consciousness, agency, and interaffectivity. In the third section, it is analyzed, how these social constituents shape the space of contemporary socialization processes, including the emergence of those intersubjective distortions, which potentially affect the entirety of chiasm in a depressive way. In the final section, the conclusions for therapy are explored, including the potentials for expanding the epistemological, substantive, and emancipatory horizon of phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948;Bearing in mind the (...) Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading The Second Sex Sixty Years LaterJulia KristevaTranslated by Timothy HackettPublished in 1949, today The Second Sex is a youthful sixty-year-old woman who has created a scandal, but also a school of thought: She marks a decisive stage in women's liberation and continues to accelerate it.Let's try to place ourselves in that year, 1949: The world has barely dressed its wounds from World War II and onto the scene (...) steps a young French woman—from an aristocratic and Catholic background, enjoying a liberal lifestyle and endowed with philosophical tenacity, pedagogical talents, and contagious style without precedent—who announces to her dumbfounded readers that the second sex is free. To be sure, she immediately issues the following qualification, "the free woman is just being born" (Beauvoir 2010, 751), and this remains the case today. It is, however, already a global phenomenon, one that has not yet finished leaving its effects, since what is at stake is a veritable anthropological revolution: I say "anthropological revolution" for, beyond the freedom of choice with respect to maternity and the right to social, economic, and political equality, what is at stake is a new form of assuring the continuity of the human species along with the bold definition of transcendence as freedom. What becomes of humanity if birth, freedom, and the spectacle are put in the hands of women? Obscurantists, fundamentalists, and puritans of all stripes become alarmed and decry the scandal. If the future is hereby opened up—with all the risks that this entails—does it welcome and offer new possibilities?This anthropological revolution has been in preparation since the beginning of time. The British suffragettes inscribed it in their political agenda and feminist movements after May '68 intended to deepen it. But this revolution [End Page 137] [elle] only became conscious of its magnitude and took the world by storm, thanks to the experience and the pen of Simone de Beauvoir.Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) is already a well-known philosopher and writer by 1949, when she begins to create something of a scandal: she has already published She Came to Stay, Pyrrhus and Cineas, The Blood of Others, Who Shall Die?, All Men Are Mortal, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and America Day By Day. Along with Jean-Paul Sartre and in the wake of the burgeoning (naissant) existentialist movement (whose genesis she would intimately describe in Les Mandarins, 1954), Simone de Beauvoir pursues an experience that is at once personal and political, as well as a philosophical project whose central theme and absolute objective is freedom, which she understands as a form of revolt and non-consent. It remains important to emphasize this today as we begin the third millennium, a time in which freedom, revolt, and non-consent tend to disappear in favor of other concerns that reflect a globalized world: fear, security, adaptation, and integration."Freedom" lies at the heart of the life and the work of the one whom the hostile press disparagingly calls "Sartrean." The freedom of Madame Roland, who acknowledged, "Oh what crimes are committed in thy name," is the same freedom whose risks Simone de Beauvoir downplays in The Ethics of Ambiguity, a work that denounces the ambivalent fascination with communism found in other existentialists.Freedom nevertheless; above all and at all costs: For Simone de Beauvoir, freedom (elle) remains and will remain the inextinguishable star that has incessantly guided philosophical inquiry since Socrates; inspired the noble heights of Christian thought, particularly in Pascal (who deemed man more noble than the universe that crushes him, for he knows that he dies while the universe doesn't). It is the same freedom that fueled the rebellious bodies and spirits of the Enlightenment; that forged the style of great European literature; it is the same freedom that animates Hegel's dialectic and even modern phenomenology, which existentialism takes as its support. So many references and experiences resonate in the work of this forty-year-old author as she sets out to write The Second Sex.Her first novels recount the relentless struggles that women undergo (jealousy, abandonment, solitude, violence, various injustices) in order to extricate themselves from their... (shrink)

The fact that sociology was born during the period of the Industrial Revolution does not authorize us to consider its discourse as lacking in philosophical elements that are rooted in a previous age. Neither can we consider as fully accomplished its role for modernity, nonetheless today, in an after-modern climate (in the sense of Donati 2009), sociology is trying to escape the prejudice of modern ethics to go beyond the clichés of postmodernity (Ardigò 1989). Filled with self-reflexivity and reductionist dichotomies, (...) the twenty-first-century sociologist feels the need to ?own factual reality again? and to rediscover ?a new metaphysics of the social world? (Donati 1993). If self-consciousness is in the world, sociology, perhaps, has to go beyond science and turn into ?globology? (Arnason 1990), or into a sociology on a global scale, which looks at how world unification has occurred. In order to accomplish this, it has to be careful about what it was able to do best in the past: ?to foresee and to enhance sustainable change,? to be aware of the ?relational connections,? which no mathematics will ever be able to show, to build new ?memes,? and to decide to accelerate or to go against the phenomena it encounters in its observation. Society in the twenty-first century will go beyond postmodern stagnation and turn into something new (After-modernity? Hyper-modernity? Trans-modernity?) if it is to be helped by the interpretations of sociology. Notwithstanding the endeavors to change, most Westernized countries are trapped in the lib-lab model, while China argues for a complete reconfiguration of the concepts of public and private, states and market, freedom and controls, copyright and copyleft. What is going to happen in the future? Are we going to fall into a technocratic and authoritarian form of neo-modernization? Are we going to rediscover the system of exchanging gifts? Are we going to create a fully ?relational? society, going beyond the Hegelian categories of right and left? It will be the role of a ?strong and relational? sociology to identify all the ?viable? scenarios and to prepare its advent in symbolic terms. (shrink)

Concussion is a form of mild traumatic brain injury that can occur as a result of contact to the head or other parts of the body that causes a rapid acceleration-deceleration force to the brain that may cause a functional disturbance in an individual’s ability to concentrate or learn new information. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a bruise to the brain, and there is usually nothing detectable on standard imaging such as a computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging. (...) Symptoms and signs are therefore important to detect and include decreased levels of consciousness, headache, nausea, difficulty concentrating, memory loss, and poor coordination. These signs and symptoms usually occur within minutes after the injury but may also appear several hours or even days later. (shrink)

The paper covers the origins, development, perspectives and solutions of the civilizational catastrophe of humanity. Humanity is defined as the restricted number of ideal, material, and temporal qualities of human beings. Its civilizational catastrophe is the contingent evolution of the specific element of human consciousness implementing rationality and technique, knowing no limits and no purposes, progressing outside ideal, material, and temporal boundaries of humanity, overcoming on its way limitations of human savagery and transcendental elements. Due to the particular quality (...) of civilizational development, the law of humanity catastrophe could be stated, as the stage of civilization is inversely proportional to the level of humanity in human beings. Civilization catastrophe couldfinalize into other-being or non-being of humanity. Its evolution canalizes into different fields of activity, which are named categories of humanity civilization catastrophe, because each of them leads towards cardinal qualitative changes of humanity or its annihilation. The basic categories are elimination – civilized ability of humans to kill one another, speedization – permanent acceleration of the overhuman speed of civilizational processes; babylonization – the cobeingof different collective qualitative realizations; supermanization – scientific production of over-human being; transsexualization – the negation of sexual immobility of humanity; ballastization – the overproduction of information; ritualizatin – the murder of simple love activity in Jesus manner into ecclesiastic discourse. The onlysalvation of humanity is the total negation of civilization and selftransformation of humankind on the basis of its transcendental element which is love knowing no exceptions. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

Cette communication examine les problèmes associés à l'usage de l'anglais comme un néoespéranto contemporain. Toutefois, l'anglais ne présente aucune des caractéristiques d'une langue internationale planifiée et son usage fait automatiquement retomber les organisations internationales qui l'utilisent comme langue de travail sous la houlette d'anglophones natifs. D'autre part, pour les natifs des autres langues, la perte des outils de définition et de représentation des connaissances stérilise leur créativité et les entraîne dans un conformisme réducteur, qui accélère leur déclin. La prise de (...) conscience de ces conséquences est essentielle avant que des mesures puissent être prises pour combattre efficacement la langue unique et aller plus loin que l'actuel multilinguisme et multiculturalisme de façade.This paper focuses on the problems caused by the use of English as if it were a new kind of Esperanto. However, English does not have any of the features of a language specifically designed for international communication. Moreover, the belief that English is neutral as a communication tool is just wishful thinking. Any international organization that uses English as its working language unavoidably falls back into the control of native English speakers. Furthermore, by spreading the use of English more and more into their own national settings, non-English natives lose their tools for definition and representation. This process turns them into trend followers, sterilizes their creativity and accelerates their decline. It is essential that people become conscious of the seriousness of the present situation for a mass reaction to crystallize that will eventually restore basic language rights which current national constitutions no longer guarantee beyond the paper on which they are written. (shrink)

The paper first introduces the concept of implicit and explicit temporality, referring to time as pre-reflectively lived vs. consciously experienced. Implicit time is based on the constitutive synthesis of inner time consciousness on the one hand, and on the conative–affective dynamics of life on the other hand. Explicit time results from an interruption or negation of implicit time and unfolds itself in the dimensions of present, past and future. It is further shown that temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity are closely (...) connected: While implicit temporality is characterised by tacit bodily functioning and by synchronisation with others, explicit temporality arises with states of desynchronisation, that is, of a retardation or acceleration of inner time in relation to external or social processes. These states often bring the body to awareness as an obstacle as well. On this basis, schizophrenia and melancholic depression are investigated as paradigm cases for a psychopathology of temporality. Major symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder, thought insertion, hallucinations or passivity experiences may be regarded as manifesting a disturbance of the constitutive synthesis of time consciousness, closely connected with a weakening of the underlying pre-reflective self-awareness or ipseity. This results in a fragmentation of the intentional arc, a loss of self-coherence and the appearance of major self-disturbances. Depression, on the other hand, is mostly triggered by a desynchronisation from the social environment and further develops into an inhibition of the conative–affective dynamics of life. As will be shown, both mental illnesses bear witness of the close connection of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

This is a performative piece of writing in the presence of and inspired by Richard Shusterman'sPhilosophy and the Art of Writing. It tries to show that the relationship between the act of writing and the formation of our human consciousness (philosophical and, more deeply, poietic) is a developing and growing process through history, and before it. The dominance of an image consciousness was slowly challenged and then replaced by a linguistic consciousness with the advent of writing, and (...) accelerated by the invention of printing and mass literacy. Shusterman teaches us an embodied kind of philosophizing that uses the word but isn't limited by it. This paper suggests that a return to image consciousness has already occurred and that the old book consciousness is disappearing. Lessons from the book consciousness are offered. (shrink)

This book explores the notion of the human psyche ('soul') and its continuing usefulness in the background of the ongoing and always accelerating techno-scientific revolution. The main argument here follows the assumption that this revolution, while not necessarily being a threat to humankind, is often blind or ignorant as to its subject, the 'human being'. In the first chapters, the reader is invited to reflect on the notion of 'thinking' as a phenomenon of consciousness that transcends merely 'having thoughts'. (...) Relating thinking to consciousness requires reconsidering the phenomena of 'inspiration' and 'ecstasy'. Provided that such a thing as 'inspiration' exists, it makes sense to revise the solipsist or substantialist account often given of the human mind. The book defines inspiration as a 'clairvoyance of one's psyche', and ecstasy as the experience of this clairvoyance. Next, a case is made for synchronicity experiences as a key to a better understanding of the human psyche. While being enigmatic all throughout, synchronicity experiences, both on the individual and on the collective level, help overcome both subject/object and body/mind dualisms. It is not likely, though, that the solution they could offer will be readily accepted by (what is called) 'science' today, since it challenges one of the latter's basic premises, 'causality'. As a more concrete example of a condensed synchronicity experience, the author dwells on 'physiognomy'. In the final chapter, death and suffering are discussed as extreme, and therefore relevant, experiences of consciousness. The book interprets death in terms of 'enhanced subliminality', and 'suffering' as unconscious resistance against maturing. Generally, this book explores a psycho-philosophical tradition, rooted in Romantic thinking (from Schelling and Schopenhauer until Klages and Jung), which has hitherto been unjustly neglected, if not repressed, by mainstream materialism and positivism. It makes a strong case for an intellectual account of the soul. (shrink)

At present, when we live under the duress of the speed/quantity/fleeting impressions dictatorship, no possibility avails to formulate one’s total identity in horizontal and vertical dimensions, and therefore a serious danger confronts us to loose our historical consciousness and the taste of the wholeness of life. Intrying to reach ever-new modes of acceleration, we tend to forget what is really worthwhile. Loosing of memories as to the events, emotions, places, people and things, culminates in the total loss of memory (...) concerning Memory itself – not only as a psychological quality of remembering, but Memory as a phenomenon of life-consciousness. This leads us to the question of memory and its connections with consciousness, with being (also with the forgetting of being) with time, with the past and with the future; also with death and the wholeness of life. In the paper different understanding of memory have been considered: memory as being inphilosophy of St. Augustin, memory as Bildbewustsein in Husserl’s phenomenology and memory and narrative in W. Benjamin’s philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Good Work:An Engaged Buddhist Response to the Dilemmas of ConsumerismDavid Landis BarnhillConsumerism is such an ingrained part of our culture, it is paradoxically difficult to avoid and easy to ignore. Sometimes it seems like the water we modern fish swim in.But the Buddhist call to awareness of our state of mind and the nature of reality leads us to reflect on it, to encounter it as directly as possible. (...) When we do, it is all too clear that consumerism goes directly against virtually everything Buddhism stands for. In thinking about a Buddhist response to it, what first comes to mind is the rich monastic tradition, with its trenchant analysis of the pervasiveness of desires, the ideal of life lifted free of craving, and the inviting simplicity of the communal life. But as an engaged Buddhist, I almost immediately feel that, compelling as it is, this monastic tradition is insufficient, particularly at a time when consumerism has become so devastating on a global scale. While the monastic tradition offers a model of a nonconsumer lifestyle, it does little to affect the industrialized world's accelerating exhaustion of natural resources. I sometimes put this point in mythical Buddhist imagery by saying that we live in a culture of hungry ghosts.1 But that would be optimistic. While hungry ghosts have a bloated stomach of insatiable cravings, their throats are as thin as pins. Modern culture has a gargantuan mouth and throat, and yet we still act as if our bellies are empty.So what can we as Buddhists do about such a destructive culture? Engaged Buddhism is a way of confronting social, political, and psychological poisons that threaten our world, and it offers an effective counter to consumer culture in at least three main ways. There is the extension of the Buddhist analysis of reality beyond the psychological and the metaphysical to the social, structural dimension of life of economic systems and political institutions. In the social context, the Buddhist truth of the mutual co-arising of phenomena takes on a more immense scope than the mere conditioning of consciousness, and a more concrete—and thus soiled—quality than Huayan Buddhism's mesmerizing metaphysics of Indra's net. The interpenetration of life (pratītya-samutpāda) includes billboards and boardrooms, peasants uprooted from their land as coffee is planted in their place. I live not just in interrelationship with the postglacial hills of Wisconsin but also with the mountains of toxins spewed [End Page 55] into the air to give us cheap, but very costly, energy. As Stephen Batchelor has said, "the contemporary social engagement of Dharma practice is rooted in awareness of how self-centered confusion and craving can no longer be adequately understood only as psychological drives that manifest themselves in subjective states of anguish. We find these drives embodied in the very economic, military, and political structures that influence the lives of the majority of the people on Earth."2 Engaged Buddhism gives us an incisive way to comprehend and critique our situation, and we stand on more solid ground as we view the vast and painful interconnections.Second, engaged Buddhism also can give us a vision of a social and political alternative, one that is based not on the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion but on generosity, compassion, and wisdom. But in doing so Buddhism must go beyond the limits of its own tradition and draw on the insights of contemporary social and environmental philosophies, from anarchism to bioregionalism. A creative merging of Buddhism and such ecosocial thought can help us work toward a modern life of communalism rather than consumerism, of contentment rather than self-perpetuating desire.3Third, engaged Buddhism gives us a basis for directly responding to a world of craving and suffering. Activism against the rising tide of consumerism—and against the social, political, and military structures and the deafening ideologies that support it—can emerge from a meditational steadiness. Contemplative activism avoids rage, burnout, and psychic numbness and allows us to meet greed and hatred with peace in a spirituality of resistance. Such a religiously based activism, however, needs to join hands4 with social philosophy and... (shrink)

Can we experience emotion without the feeling of accelerated heartbeats, perspiration, or other changes in the body? In his paper “What is an emotion”, William James famously claimed that “if we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind” (1884, p. 193). Thus, bodily changes are essential to emotion. This is known as the Subtraction Argument. The Subtraction Argument is (...) still used to support Embodied theories of emotion. Proponents of Disembodied theories, however, have different intuitions regarding the role of bodily changes in the experience of emotion. In order to advance this debate, I conducted a series of studies testing people’s intuitions regarding the Subtraction Argument. Results show that, against James’ claims, most people consider that their hypothetical (Study 1) and actual (Study 2) emotions persist in the absence of bodily feelings. Furthermore, Study 1 found that participants’ responses were not related to individual differences in reflection or interoceptive awareness. These results pose a problem for Embodied theories of emotion and challenge extant explanations for the persistence of emotional experience in cases of impaired interoception. (shrink)

As Malinowsky states, myth is closely related to rite, presenting the social and moral values that rite asserts in each cyclical repetition. Rite marks the threshold between the sacred and profane, allowing access to myth as an art form, as a narrative expression both of the sacred – in the extension of meaning Emile Durkheim introduced with the term ‘collective consciousness’ – and of the ‘collective unconscious’ as Jung defined it. If it is true that the rite of passage (...) to the adult world, the initiation rite, is one of the most archaic rites in aiming to protect society against the risk of cultural innovation inherent in the younger generations, then it is legitimate to ask what our new myths are regarding education. When technology accelerates the mechanisms eroding collective memory, which rites renew educational myths in everyday practice? When technology dematerializes the devices on which rite and its inherent techniques of control are based, what new forms does mythological narration assume? What roles do new media play in creating a direct channel between the collective consciousness and individual experience, between the nervous system and our environment, enveloping individuals in the telematic embrace Roy Ascott described in 2003, and which not only explains the concept of the Global Village that Marshall McLuhan introduced in 1966, but also delineates the space – time of students in contemporary learning processes? Reading the contemporary educational system through the lens of myth and rite, where new technologies play a central role, allows us to follow a path that traces the progressive impact of media on cognitive processes from the initial emergence of the concept ‘collective consciousness’ onwards, and that offers one of the most interesting interpretations of the ‘open school’ experience in Derrick de Kerkhove’s concept of ‘connective intelligence’ (analysed in my Ph.D. thesis). But myth also allows us to observe those cracks, breaks and discontinuities that mark the places in which contemporary knowledge is created, which is why we find Nietzsche (who dedicated much of his work to myth), Michel Foucault and Ivan Illich at the centre of International Debate on Education for the last decade due to their critical approach to institutions. (shrink)

We review the evolution of domestic animals, emphasizing the effect of the earliest steps of domestication on its course. Using the first domesticated species, the dog (Canis familiaris), for illustration, we describe the evolutionary peculiarities during the historical domestication, such as the high level and wide range of diversity. We suggest that the process of earliest domestication via unconscious and later conscious selection of human‐defined behavioral traits may accelerate phenotypic variations. The review is based on the results of a long‐term (...) experiment designed to reproduce early mammalian domestication in the silver fox (Vulpes vulpes) selected for tameability or amenability to domestication. We describe changes in behavior, morphology and physiology that appeared in the fox during its selection for tameability, which were similar to those observed in the domestic dog. Based on the data of the fox experiment and survey of relevant data, we discuss the developmental, genetic and possible molecular genetic mechanisms underlying these changes. We ascribe the causative role in evolutionary transformation of domestic animals to the selection for behavior and to the neurospecific regulatory genes it affects. (shrink)

As the pagan classical world was subsumed into Christianity sexually hyperactive gods and goddesses transmuted into saints, their former statues that glorified the perfection of their bodies smashed into pieces and reimagined as austere two-dimensional icons to be worshipped by the new faithful. That dualistic and polemic narrative, where the soul’s purpose was to annihilate the body, survives today in the distinction between software and hardware, algorithms and robots, the former as the “ghosts” that animate the empty vessels, the “machines”. (...) But how does this narrative impact our cultural and social fantasies in the twenty-first century as we accelerate toward coexisting, uniting, or merging with intelligent artifacts? How does “humanness” blur when it is claimed by no-biological human-like entities too, or when humans augment their perception, consciousness and physical power through genetic engineering, drugs, or software and mechanical prostheses? Suppose we are destined to remake ourselves in the image of our ancient gods. Will it be through the embodiment of technologies in the physical reality, or through the complete disembodiment of our minds inside virtual worlds? (shrink)

Does the ‘Zeitenwende’ herald the beginning of a new and as yet undefined open society realism? The present essay argues this question requires critical discussion of nature and value of realist political theory, particularly at a time where international society is accelerating to somewhere which is itself as yet unclear. Adding to revisionist research on political realism in International Relations (IR) theory I sketch how a political vision I call open society realism may be developed out of Classical realism, in (...) sharp distinction to academic IR neorealism for methodological and political reasons. To strip foreign policy realism from Continental philosophy, law, and history risks that we become what political liberalism ought to avoid: a closed society with a good conscience retreating from world politics, hiding behind the ‘national’ interest as if strategic great power management is a methodic function of structure rather than the politics of an ethically conscious diplomacy. (shrink)

I wish to draw attention to a connection between current changes in the concept of mind and cultural trends that disfavor the cultivation of conscious experience. There is a strain in contemporary philosophy and science that questions the very existence of consciousness. At the same time, trends in our culture, accelerated lately by technological developments, undermine the incentives and space to attend to conscious awareness. A view of the mind that denies the existence of consciousness leads us further (...) away from engagement with consciousness at a time when our ability for such engagement has already been seriously undermined by the digitalization of our lives, social media, and AI. At the same time, these technological changes might make us more receptive to the corrosive view that we lack consciousness. (shrink)

The article characterizes post-folklore as a cultural phenomenon of the network society and defines various aspects of its functioning − sociocommunicative, cultural and psychological. The research methodology consisted of a set of basic approaches, principles and methods of scientific research. To achieve the goal, a set of general scientific and special methods was used, including the methods of logical analysis, problemchronological, generalization, synthesis, induction, and analogy.Research results. It has been proven that post-folkloric creativity is important for the development of social (...) communications, as it promotes the exchange of information between users of social networks, conveys people’s knowledge, moods, feelings, and emotions. In the cultural aspect, the works of post-folklore appear as cultural heritage of modern urbanized society and are represented by various types and genres. From the point of view of psychology, post-folklore has an impact on individual and social consciousness, on the development of cognitive processes, etc. The emergence of post-folklore in the field of education is separately mentioned, which indicates its important importance for the formation of the worldview of school youth.Conclusions. Today post-folklore is the subject of scientific research as a phenomenon of mass culture and network society, as a means of social communication, as a phenomenon that has an impact on public and individual consciousness and is gradually being established in the field of education. In the era of accelerated development of information and communication technologies, everyone has the opportunity to become a collector or author of post-folkloric creativity. Further research is planned to be carried out in the direction of studying the prospects for the development of post-folklore in Ukrainian and foreign cultures. (shrink)

The article rejects various attempts to negate the subjectivity of human embryo, formulated among others in the Polish debate entitled 'Stem cells - life for life?' and organised by the Ministry of Scientific Research and Information Technology in 2003 and 2004. The Author thinks that the proposal to treat a human embryo as a deceased donor of organs, is wrong both in the field of embryology and philosophical anthropology. It is also wrong to question the subjectivity of human embryo using (...) various criteria of growth (developed nervous system, brain, consciousness, participation in the life of society and looking after one's own interests). For these criteria do not define humanity but describe human being in various phases of expressions of his/her human nature. That is why it is not acceptable to make the right to life conditional on the stage and degree of the actualization of humanity. Furthermore, one cannot justify the deprivation of the subjectivity of human embryo because of medical progress and the so-called good of humankind. The acceleration of progress cannot be done at the cost of life of some group of human beings. (shrink)

This article makes a contribution to interface criticism through the notion of chrono-design: the deliberate shaping of experiences of temporality and time through contemporary software techniques and digital technologies. This notion is articulated through discussions of network optimisation, user experience design, behavioural tracking, Hansen’s work on 21st-century media and Hayles’ framework of cognitive assemblages. In particular, the argument considers how contemporary user interfaces complicate conventional notions of the rational, self-reflexive subject by operating beyond consciousness at vast environmental dimensions and (...) accelerated micro-temporal speeds. These conditions, we argue, provide opportunities for new forms of behavioural suspense and captivation best exemplified through the figure of the trap. The politics and aesthetics of captivation, accordingly, should be considered as central to any expanded ecology of cognition. The article then concludes with a short demonstration of experimental uses of chrono-design methods applied critically to political economies of user tracking and data capture as a prompt for further interdisciplinary applied research in this domain. (shrink)