Reflections on digital mourning in the wake of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando 2016.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Night ShiftCalvin R. GrossI don't like working at night anymore. Too much goes wrong when you're alone.I'm sitting at my desk in the middle of the cardiac intensive care unit, and it's far later than I'd like to be awake—two or three in the morning. Things are calm, almost pleasant. I can hear the occasional alarm going off—an imperfectly positioned blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter with a (...) poor waveform, a ventilator with secretions in it. The night's initial frenzied work is done; my new admissions are tucked away, and my overnight to-dos are completed. Now it's just time to sit and wait. I could sleep, but despite the calm, I'm too afraid to leave the unit to rest. The fellow has gone to bed hours ago, and now it's just me. Sure, I'm surrounded by experienced nurses who know their work well, but somehow, I'm the one in charge. A brand-new second-year resident, the only doctor there. I'm no intern, that's for sure, but I've never led a code before, and I've only ever placed one central line without supervision. As second years go, I'm as fresh as they come.The daytime, you see, is far different than nights. There's a large (and even bloated) team of two attendings, two fellows, two pharmacists, and more importantly, multiple other residents. When you don't know what to do for a patient, there's always someone there to bounce ideas off of. When something difficult or surprising happens, there are peers and mentors to process with. At night, it's the opposite—no peers, no mentors, only a group of experienced nurses, whose circle is closed to me, the outsider. I long to be a part of that large and bloated daytime team."Can you come into 23? I think his pupils are a different size."I'm startled out of my thoughts. 23 … All I can remember from sign-out that evening is that he's young, close to my age, and supposedly stable. I look at my notes, a catalogue of tragedies: early onset heart failure, multiple prior suicide attempts, intubated because of pulmonary edema, and a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) that's malfunctioning. I walk over to the room and look at the nurse at the other side of the bed. She's in the early phases of her career too—less than a year on the job—but she's still more experienced than me. I take a flashlight, open his eyelids, and look at the pupils. Sure enough, one of them is much larger than the other. When I shine the light into each eye, the large one doesn't change. When I turn his head from side to side, his eyes stay fixed. We look [End Page 83] at each other, she and I. We both know something terrible is happening."Should we maybe wake the fellow up?" she asks tentatively.I nod my head in agreement, glad to have been offered a suggestion. It's the right thing to do. I walk to the fellow's call room, knock on the door, and wake him up. He's set to work 24 hours and would like nothing more than to keep resting. He sleepily comes with me to the bedside, looks at the pupils as well, and says, "With the sedation on, your exam isn't going to be the most accurate. We should start by scanning his head, and then go from there. Wake me back up if you need me, but I know you've got this one."I don't think that I deserve the confidence he has in me. I walk back to my desk, open the patient's chart, and place the order for an urgent CT scan. The machinery of the hospital starts to rumble as the imaging schedulers find a spot in the queue for the scan, the patient's nurse and respiratory therapist disconnect and reconnect cables and tubes, the technicalities of the scan are ironed out, and he is... (shrink)

China deeply enters "here now" to make sense of life's ongoing millennia fresh. China thinks as it tropes along myriad things in life world, their opposites and levels interpenetrating. China thinks story-way to express all things inter-weaving into history, an "open system" that keeps growing. Chinese wisdom is alive today millennia young. The West is objective; China is intersubjective. The West is logically systematic; China coherently story-thinks to compose history. Western philosophy is analytically abstract; Chinese wisdom is actually sensible. As (...) existence is inter-existence, so China welcomes the West to interculture equally, globally. Filled with concrete stories in depth, this volume has four parts. Part I depicts Chinese wisdom as not prudence or theories but "vignettes of life-thinking", to present thinking in shifting actuality. Part II sketches heart-logic pulsing in seasons, to cyclone-breathe things as music-historic reason in Chinese Wisdom Alive. Part III depicts such story-thinking that musically includes all, melodious and dissonant, to undergo pain to comprehend all, factual, historical, futuristic, and imagined. Part IV shows how Chinese wisdom is alive today, rooted in its tradition millennia fresh, in ten abiding features cosmic-concrete, making sense intercultural. Such Chinese wisdom is so alive today as to be resiliently comical, chanting odes to the ultimate joy of heartbeat alive, thriving precisely on joys and bloody tragedies of days and ages. No usual logic can parse such "musical reason" singing through pain and death through time, birthing without ceasing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We Need to Cut the Neck!”Confronting Psychological and Moral Distress during Emergency Cricothyrotomy1Stephanie CooperEnoughYou didn’t die in the ER, but rather, began your inexorable demise. The last, first, and only words I ever heard you utter was the weak mewl “tight, tight” as the blood pressure cuff constricted your left arm. You were 98–years–old, bed–bound, at the end. Your world was already partitioning itself from us, your brain tunneling (...) down the uneven corridors of consciousness. A concretion of otoliths muffled your hearing, and fatigue burdened your ancient heart.Your name–band encircled your skinny ankle like a bird. Deformed by arthritis, you were caged within yourself, imprisoned by senescence. You could not declare yourself to us. Words disintegrated into moans and your grimace became animal.When you came back from x–ray—hypotensive with multiple neck fractures confirmed—you could speak no more. Your pulse slowed, your blood pressure plummeted. I jammed a gloved finger against your femoral pulse, faint and tired. [End Page E5]“What’s her DNR status?” I gravely asked your nurse.The DNR paperwork for once had arrived with the patient. “No CPR” she said with relief. But then the paperwork went on, forcing me—the waitress of tragedy—to serve up the hash of an impossible menu.As health care providers, we are all often tasked with performing contradictory actions: the pain of IV insertion followed by the morphine push, drilling deeper into broken bone in order to plate it, the inadvertent cracking of ribs during chest compressions. We sometimes must perform violent action in the hope of sustaining and resurrecting life. We are asked to perform the impossible, the contradictory, the painful. And sometimes the actions we must take catalyze an inexorable chain reaction of actions, which can end in death–prolonging and painful interventions that we did not intend.Although our culture may imagine that one can choose one’s meal at the end–of–life fast–food franchise of death, such is not the case. You can’t suddenly decide you’re a vegetarian. You can’t order the cheeseburger without the cheese—and we all are getting the burger, in the end. Ordering the heart–squeezing drugs without the CPR to circulate them, or the antibiotics without the fluid to counter dehydration, is like ordering the burger without the bun. Sometimes the possible choices are not necessarily realistic choices. You get served what you get served, and perhaps we should question the assumption that we have the ability to choose at all.Your DNR form proclaimed no CPR but then said that antibiotics and intubation were okay—the cheeseburger without the cheese. An unfortunate choice for you, me, and the rest of us, as your death menu led to a very unhappy meal.You were comatose. I stuck a tongue blade deep into your desiccated throat. You did not gag. This means I should have intubated you, but morally, I couldn’t. To what end? You were 98 years old, broken, moribund. If you hadn’t suffered multiple neck fractures, or if you were a vibrant elder who had just walked off Mt. Rainier, maybe the story would have been different. But you? I doubted that you truly had a chance of ever feeling joy again. You were somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. I knew this step would lead to the domino of unstoppable steps. I refused to flog your corpse.I called your daughter Kay on her cell phone, told her that you were in critical condition and that she should come to the ER immediately. But how to begin to tell a daughter her mother is dying, let alone over a cell phone? Gentle but surreal and impersonal, my voice tried to tell your daughter that the interventions you needed would likely kill you. I have seen enough human suffering to know. To me, the choices were clear: death by nature’s irrefutable course, versus a more painful, protracted, and violent death by what we’d do to you.Kay arrived in a wheelchair and scooted up to your bedside. Like all daughters, she wasn’t ready for you... (shrink)

This paper argues that an analysis of the dissatisfactory outcomes of international negotiations concerning climate change must take into account procedures of political decision‐making in democracies. Although the normative ideal of republican democracy has means of dealing with such dissatisfactory results, political processes in republican democracies take too much time and risk becoming stuck in tragic or dilemmatic decision structures when facing challenges such as climate change. Consequently, this paper discusses possibilities for redesigning republican democratic institutions to counter‐act these negative (...) forces. However, all possibilities discussed either call into question the normative ideal of republican democracy itself or would take too much time to be realized. (shrink)

Game theorists tend to model climate negotiations as a so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’. This is rather worrisome, since the conditions under which such commons problems have historically been solved are almost entirely absent in the case of international greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I will argue that the predictive accuracy of the tragedy model might not stem from the model’s inherent match with reality but rather from the model’s ability to make self-fulfilling predictions. I then sketch (...) some possible ways to dispel the tragedy, including (1) recognizing some ways the assumptions of the model fail, (2) taking seriously recent work suggesting that increasing greenhouse gas emissions is not in most nations’ own self-interest, and (3) preferring alternative models like collective risk dilemmas, bargaining games, or cooperative models. (shrink)

DIVUses C.L.R. James’sThe Black Jacobins as a jumping-off point for a reconsideration of colonial and postcolonial concepts of history, politics, and agency./div.

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods. Seaford (...) argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal. (shrink)

Consent can only be voluntary, freely given and uncoerced. Can this legal adult standard also apply to children? High-risk surgery is seldom a wanted choice, but compared with the dangers of the un...

C. I. Lewis was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. In this book, Sandra B. Rosenthal explores Lewis’s philosophical vision, and links his thought to the traditions of classical American pragmatism. Tracing Lewis’s influences, she explains the central concepts informing his thinking and how he developed a unique and practical vision of the human experience. She shows how Lewis contributed to the enrichment and expansion of pragmatism, opening new paths of constructive dialogue with other traditions. This book (...) will become a standard reference for readers who want to know more about one of American philosophy’s most distinguished minds. (shrink)

The epistemic regress problem is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on evidence. The problem of the criterion is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on general standards for distinguishing what is true from what is false. These problems are similar. Each is constituted by a set of propositions about epistemically valuable relational properties—being supported by evidence and being authorized by a criterion of truth—that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent, a paradox. The propositions (...) that constitute one problem have the same forms as the propositions that constitute the other. In particular, each problem turns on the claim that a belief can have a valuable relational property only by means of an endless regress and that this requirement cannot be satisfied. Finally, since evidence and criteria are kinds of reasons, each problem is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on reasons. (shrink)

In cases in which many causes together bring about an effect, it is common to select some as particularly important. Philosophers since Mill have been pessimistic about analyzing this reasoning because of its variability and the multifarious causal and pragmatic details of how it works. I argue Mill was right to think these details matter but wrong that they preclude philosophical analysis of causal selection. I show that analyzing the pragmatic details of scientific debates about the important causes of the (...) Bhopal Gas Tragedy can illuminate causal reasoning about disasters and shed new light on causality and causal selection. (shrink)

C. A. J. Littlewood approaches Seneca's tragedies as Neronian literature rather than as reworkings of Attic drama, and emphasizes their place in the Roman world and in the Latin literary corpus. The Greek tragic myths are for Seneca mediated by non-dramatic Augustan literature. In literary terms Phaedra's desire, Hippolytus' innocence, and Hercules' ambivalent heroism look back through allusion to Roman elegy, pastoral, and epic respectively. Ethically, the artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds, events, and (...) people are literary constructs, responds to the contemporary Stoical dismissal of the public world as mere theatre. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote (...) that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progression seems too linear and simplistic, we find that the now much more inclusive comic stage has something to offer their audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world. (shrink)

Human civilization is moving into the digital age. Many believe that total digitalization is bringing humanity closer to the dream age of general wellbeing and happiness. However, although there is a real revolution in the knowledge and mastering of the world, the tension and conflicts within human society do not stop, and people do not feel happier. This determines the aim and the tasks of the research, which are based on the analysis of deep contradictions and conflicts existing in modern (...) society, including military conflicts, to find out the factor of consciousness in their emergence and development, as well as the role and significance of information and communication technologies in formation of positive or negative trends. The research methodology has a complex nature and is based on a philosophical and cultural analysis of the problems of the influence of digitalization on the formation of the consciousness of our contemporary, which leads to constructive or destructive directions of the development of society. To solve the specific tasks of the research, the principles of historicism, systematicity, objectivity, the connection of the historical and the logical were also used.Research results: The reasons for deep contradictions tearing modern societylie, first of all, in the material sphere. However, the possibilities of the extensive path are practically exhausted today, it is necessary to go in the direction of improving the mental sphere, to look for new ideas that could help to find new opportunities for the further development of human civilization. However, this is where one of the main conflicts of our time arises, namely: the human consciousness, which is intended for the production of constructive ideas and solutions, is often directed in the exact opposite direction, towards destruction and violence. The search for reasons and discussions on this matter have not stopped for many decades and are becoming increasingly acute.Discussion. The most contradictory human consciousness manifests itselfin the conditions of war. One of the main causes of wars and military conflicts is the deformation of people’s consciousness, the mental sphere at the local and global levels. Modern information and communication technologies create great opportunities to shape human consciousness with given properties, to direct it in one direction or another. Modern highly developed societies, where democracy reigns and the Global Network plays a huge role, seem to be the territory of freedom and pluralism. However, precisely thanks to digital technologies, the satisfaction of spiritual needs has turned into a kind of mass production, when tastes are lowered below the lowest level, and worthy things are replaced by informational surrogates.Conclusions. In order to be able to distinguish a high-quality informationproduct from a fake, veiled or outright lie, a fairly high level of intellectualdevelopment of the individual is required. It is necessary to form an own information environment, where priorities will be clearly defined, as well as curtains and mental filters will be installed, which do not allow the penetration and accumulation of unnecessary and harmful information. The triumph of man in the modern information and digital age lies in the fact that we have reached the level of a society of mass information consumption. But the tragedy is that people were not ready for such a rapid turn in the development of our civilization. There is a real risk of losing one’s humanity, turning not into spiritual beings, but into something similar to machines, homo technologicus, for whom not only higher spiritual needs disappear, but also the value of life in general. In order to avoid a negative scenario, it is necessary to seriously revise the attitude to information, to make information hygiene at all levels the norm of our life. (shrink)

Critics have charged Dewey with a failure to recognize the tragic dimension of human existence. Randolph Bourne argued that Dewey's pragmatism "has never been confronted with the pathless and the inexorable". For Bourne, Dewey's support of America's entry into World War I "subordinates idea to technique" in service of undemocratic ends. Raymond Boisvert accuses Dewey of a hubristic Baconian scientism in thinking that technical intelligence could solve all social problems. Cornel West claims that Dewey "has not come to terms with (...) the sense of the tragic" in failing to "confront candidly individual and collective experiences of evil". As we can see from this selection of... (shrink)

Important medical advances over the last several decades have vastly improved the technical capacity to control human pain. Millions of patients suffering from cancer, HIV/AIDS, and other conditions have been able to find relief from incapacitating chronic and acute pain. However, despite these developments, pain remains severely under treated worldwide, particularly in developing countries. The tragic consequence is that for millions of people around the globe, excruciating pain is an inescapable reality of life.

The fundamental argument of this book is that the evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy—from Emerson to Rorty—results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises. In this sense, American Pragmatism is less a philosophical tradition putting forward solutions to perennial problems in the Western philosophical conversation initiated by Plato and more a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that (...) attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment.The goal of a sophisticated neopragmatism is to think genealogically about specific practices in... (shrink)

This fourth installment of Harry Redner's tetralogy on the history of civilization argues that intellectuals have a brilliant past, a dubious present, and possibly no future. He contends that the philosophers of the seventeenth century laid the ground for the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. They, in turn, promoted a fundamental transformation of human consciousness: they literally intellectualized the world. The outcome was the disenchantment of the world in all its cultural dimensions: in art, religion, ethics, (...) politics, and philosophy. In this fascinating study, Redner demonstrates how secularization took the sting out of both the dread and promise of an afterlife and intellectuals learned to die without the hope of immortality popularized by philosophy and religion. Ultimately, they produced the ideologies that generated the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which subsequently exterminated these intellectuals through mass murder on a scale never before experienced. The book traces the sources of this fatal entanglement and goes on to examine the contemporary condition of intellectuals in America and the world. Wherein lies the future of the intellectuals? Redner suggest that in the present state of globalization, dominated by technocrats, experts, and professionals, their fate remains uncertain. (shrink)

Greek tragedy, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, represents the performative realization of binary political difference, for example, “private versus public,” “man versus woman” or “nation versus state.” On the other hand, Roman comedy and French Revolutionary Terror, in Hegel, can be taken as radical expressions of political in-difference, defined as a state where all mediating structures of association and governance have collapsed into a world of “bread and circuses.” In examining the dialectical interplay between binary, tragic difference and comedic, (...) terrible in-difference, the paper arrives at hypothetical conclusions regarding how these political forms may be observed today. (shrink)

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in (...) modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic. (shrink)

Kant admits that there are two kinds of human works that have something sublime about them, the work of the poet, e.g., tragedy, and the work of the politician, i.e., war. This paper will explore Kant's reasoning about the sublime element in these two human works.

The aim of this paper is to explore the metaphysical foundations of Throne of Blood , Kurosawa's reworking of Shakespeare's Macbeth . Using Hegel's theory of tragedy, I develop the distinction between Greek and modern tragedy, with their differing bases in ethical and subjective freedom. I then show that Noh drama also includes a very different metaphysical account, stemming from its theoretical roots in Buddhism. I then use these three differing accounts (Greek, modern and Noh drama) to explore (...) the effect of Kurosawa's use Noh aesthetics in Throne of Blood on the metaphysical ground of the film itself. (shrink)

In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets to new arenas – to courts and government committees, in particular – and switched to (...) a techno-managerial discourse of maintaining river health. What accounts for this change? This article traces the trajectory of cultural politics around Indian rivers within the larger imagination of the nation, the rise of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism, and the emergence of environmental bureaucracies. It argues that, alongside being shaped by this context, current anti-dam campaigns also contend with the legacy of earlier social movements, their gains as well as losses. This political field has narrowed the potential for radical critique, large-scale collective mobilization and, ultimately, keeping rivers alive. (shrink)

Precision targeting of specific white matter bundles that traverse the subcallosal cingulate has been linked to efficacy of deep brain stimulation for treatment resistant depression. Methods to confirm optimal target engagement in this heterogenous region are now critical to establish an objective treatment protocol. As yet unexamined are the time-frequency features of the SCC evoked potential, including spectral power and phase-clustering. We examined these spectral features—evoked power and phase clustering—in a sample of TRD patients with implanted SCC stimulators. Electroencephalogram was (...) recorded during wakeful rest. Location of electrical stimulation in the SCC target region was the experimental manipulation. EEG was analyzed at the surface level with an average reference for a cluster of frontal sensors and at a time window identified by prior study. Morlet wavelets generated indices of evoked power and inter-trial phase clustering. Enhanced phase clustering at theta frequency was observed in every subject and was significantly correlated with SCC-EP magnitude, but only during left SCC stimulation. Stimulation to dorsal SCC evinced stronger phase clustering than ventral SCC. There was a weak correlation between phase clustering and white matter density. An increase in evoked delta power was also coincident with SCC-EP, but was less consistent across participants. DBS evoked time-frequency features index mm-scale changes to the location of stimulation in the SCC target region and correlate with structural characteristics implicated in treatment optimization. Results also imply a shared generative mechanism between evoked potentials evinced by electrical stimulation and evoked potentials evinced by auditory/visual stimuli and behavioral tasks. Understanding how current injection impacts downstream cortical activity is essential to building new technologies that adapt treatment parameters to individual differences in neurophysiology. (shrink)