The article deals with four forms of power grabs through the conceptual connection between touch and power, focusing on four structural breakthroughs that show the changing process that this relation underwent, from the secularisation of the sacral via profane materialism until contemporary vulgar-materialism: Christian _Noli me tangere; _monarchic _King’s Evil; _materialistic _Warenfetischismus_; and profane _Grab-’em-by-the-pussy. _.

During the pandemic there were many ways of handling the contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus, most of them in haptic terms, or in terms of touch: masks, hand disinfection, social distancing, quarantines, (self)isolations. Touch thus became not only the privileged object of the new bio-politics, striving to preserve life at all costs, but also what was lost during the pandemic. To be sure, a loss of something we never had that even the vaccine, which promised a return to normal, but actually (...) paved the way for a “brave new post-pandemic world,” could not rehabilitate. In short, one of the elements that radically changed with and in the (post-)pandemic world is precisely the elusive object of touch, which we propose to conceptually grasp through the coinage of the concept of its “mateReal hapticity.”. (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and its challenge to (...) structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

Singer's study of the technical problems of Santayana's systematic thought will not satisfy his friends nor his detractors. Her reduction of Santayana's Lucretian materialism to epiphenomenalism will seem inadequate to the former. The latter may see Santayana as merely technically inept. While Singer does not claim to offer a comprehensive study of Santayana's thought, her theses " that Santayana was a naturalist and a materialist in the same sense and on the same grounds throughout; that despite even radical changes in (...) terminology his 'later' ontology is a development of, and not inconsistent with, his 'earlier' philosophy; and that, nevertheless, from the start his materialism was touched with ambiguity", do need a comprehensive understanding of Santayana's materialism. The "ambiguities" of his materialism and his social theory in Dominations and Powers derive from the ontological complexities of his realms of Being. Santayana plays with the perspectives possible from each realm and Singer sometimes misses his viewpoint. Santayana's challenge to the liberalism of democracy is indeed based on his a-teleological materialism. Singer's study does draw attention to the analogy of the individual to the state implicit in Santayana's philosophy; she offers refutations of M. K. Munitz's theory of "early and "late" Santayana and W. K. Dennes' interpretation of Santayana's materialism.--A. T. (shrink)

A Touch of Doubt traces the theme of touch in the evolution of skepticism through Platonism, German idealism, Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. Haptic Scepticism, the field of ethics emerging from this study, explores the grasp-ability of contradiction. Contradiction is a haptic marvel. We can cup it in our palms, press it against our lips, dip our toes into its coolness, and, if we are not careful, we may even burn ourselves on its surface.

Genealogies of Speculation looks to break the impasse between the innovations of speculative thought and the dominant strands of 20th century anti-foundationalist philosophy. Challenging emerging paradigms of philosophical history, this text re-evaluates different theoretical and political traditions such as feminism, literary theory, social geography and political theory after the speculative turn in philosophy. With contributions from leading writers in contemporary thought this book is a crucial resource for studying cultural and art-theory and continental philosophy.

The most powerful assumption in French semiotic thought since Saussure has been the notion that a sign consists not of a name and the object it refers to, but of a sound-image and a concept, a signifier and a signified. Saussure, as amplified by Roland Barthes and others, has taught us to recognize an unbridgeable gap between words and things, signs and referents. The whole notion of "sign and referent" has been rejected by the French structuralists and their followers as (...) too materialistic and simple minded. Signs do not refer to things, they signify concepts, and concepts are aspects of thought, not aspects of reality. This elegant and persuasive formulation has certainly provided a useful critique of naive realism, vulgar materialism, and various other-isms which can be qualified with crippling adjectives. But it hasn't exactly caused the world to turn into a concept. Even semioticians eat and perform their other bodily functions just as if the world existed solidly around them. The fact that the word "Boulangerie" has no referent does not prevent them from receiving their daily bread under that sign. As Borges put it: "The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges." Obviously, the whole question of the relationship between words and things cannot be debated without any assistance from nonverbal experience seems to me highly unlikely. In my view, if language really were a closed system, it would be subject, like any other closed system, to increase in entropy. In fact, it is new input into language from nonverbal experience that keeps language from decaying. Robert Scholes, professor of English and director of the program in semiotic studies at Brown University, is co-author of The Nature of Narrative and author of Structuralism in Literature. A Guggenheim fellow for 1977-78, he is currently working on "A Semiotics of Fiction." He has also contributed "Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the (...) philosophical legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an “existentialist” or a “structuralist” union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of “vulgar materialism” in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade. (shrink)

The last decade has seen rise in technologies that allow humans to send and receive intimate touch across long distances. Drawing together platform studies, digital intimacy studies, phenomenology of touch, and ethics of technology, we argue that these new haptic communication devices require specific ethical consideration of consent. The paper describes several technologies, including Kiiroo teledildonics, the Kissenger, the Apple Watch, and Hey Bracelet, highlighting how the sense of touch is used in marketing to evoke a feeling (...) of connection within the digital sphere. We then discuss the ambiguity of skin-to-skin touch and how it is further complicated in digital touch by remediation through platforms, companies, developers, manufacturers, cloud storage sites, the collection and use of data, research, satellites, and the internet. Lastly, we raise concerns about how consent of data collection and physical consent between users will be determined, draw on examples in virtual reality and sex-robotics, and ultimately arguing for further interdisciplinary research into this area. (shrink)

Experimental aesthetics has shed light on the involvement of pre-motor areas in the perception of abstract art. However, the contribution of texture perception to aesthetic experience is still understudied. We hypothesized that digital screen-based art, despite its immateriality, might suggest potential sensorimotor stimulation. Original born-digital works of art were selected and manipulated by the artist himself. Five behavioral parameters: Beauty, Liking, Touch, Proximity, and Movement, were investigated under four experimental conditions: Resolution (high/low), and Magnitude (Entire image/detail). These were expected to (...) modulate the quantity of material and textural information afforded by the image. While the Detail condition afforded less content-related information, our results show that it augmented the image’s haptic appeal. High Resolution improved the haptic and aesthetic properties of the images. Furthermore, aesthetic ratings positively correlated with sensorimotor ratings. Our results demonstrate a strict relation between the aesthetic and sensorimotor/haptic qualities of the images, empirically establishing a relationship between beholders’ bodily involvement and their aesthetic judgment of visual works of art. In addition, we found that beholders’ oculomotor behavior is selectively modulated by the perceptual manipulations being performed. The eye-tracking results indicate that the observation of the Entire, original images is the only condition in which the latency of the first fixation is shorter when participants gaze to the left side of the images. These results thus demonstrate the existence of a left-side bias during the observation of digital works of art, in particular, while participants are observing their original version. (shrink)

In the last decades, the rapid growth of functional brain imaging methodologies allowed cognitive neuroscience to address open questions in philosophy and the social sciences. At the same time, novel insights from cognitive neuroscience research have begun to influence various disciplines, leading to a turn to cognition and emotion in the fields of planning and architectural design. Since 2003, the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture has been supporting ‘neuro-architecture’ as a way to connect neuroscience and the study of behavioral responses (...) to the built environment. Among the many topics related to multisensory perceptual integration and embodiment, the concept of hapticity was recently introduced, suggesting a pivotal role of touch and haptic imagery in architectural appraisal. Arguments have thus risen in favor of the existence of shared cognitive foundations between hapticity and the supramodal functional architecture of the human brain. Precisely, supramodality refers to the functional feature of defined brain regions to process and represent specific information content in a more abstract way, independently of the sensory modality conveying such information to the brain. Here we highlight some commonalities and differences between the concepts of hapticity and supramodality according to the distinctive perspectives of architecture and cognitive neuroscience. This comparison and connection between these two different approaches may lead to novel observations in regard to people-environment relationships, and even provide empirical foundations for a renewed evidence-based design theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche contra GirardAgonistic Steps for Mimetic StudiesNidesh Lawtoo (bio)It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilFriedrich Nietzsche's exemplary position in the history of philosophy owes as much to the untimely content of his thought as to the heterogeneous forms he used to (...) express it. It is thus no accident that both his philosophical logic (logos) and the formal affect (pathos) that animate his writings are now a source of inspiration for mimetic studies as well—a transdisciplinary field that goes beyond antiquarian approaches to mimesis in order to develop a new theory of imitation that accounts for the becoming other of homo mimeticus in the present and future.1If I opt for an agonistic title, then, it is not to set up a violent and rivalrous opposition of false polarities between mimetic theory and mimetic studies—for the debts and genealogical continuities between Girard and Nietzsche [End Page 145] are numerous, profound, and do not conform to the pathological dynamic of mimetic rivalry. Rather, I opt for this Nietzschean title to alert the reader in advance to the following methodological point: What appears, at first sight, as a straightforward antagonistic opposition might reveal, at a closer genealogic look, mirroring continuities and overturnings of perspectives. The goal is to go beyond rivalrous principles constitutive of violent pathologies to propose a new theory on the logic or logos of mimetic pathos. This also means that the "contra" in my title should be read with a genealogical understanding of what agonistic confrontations actually entail: namely, a complex double movement with and against worthy predecessors that, as I have shown elsewhere, are already constitutive of Nietzsche's mimetic "patho(-)logies," and that I now group under the rubric of "mimetic agonism."2 Whether Nietzsche and Girard have the same understanding of agonism, or not quite, is what these further steps for mimetic studies now aim to find out.If the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies emerges in the twenty-first century, its genealogy looks back to the foundations of philosophy and reaches, via Nietzsche and other modernist writers of mimesis, into the present. As an introductory gesture, let me first step back to the past century to recall why one of mimetic studies' major precursors, such as Nietzsche, continues to be read and reread today from different perspectives. Considered one of the "masters of suspicion" along with Marx, Freud, and, we should add, Darwin, Nietzsche is mostly known for overturning Western metaphysics, proclaiming the death of God, reevaluating the value of morality, undermining faith in rationality, and affirming an immanent world of becoming in constant tension, conflict, and transformation. Given his perspectival, often conflicted, and seemingly contradictory approach, it is not surprising that the name of Nietzsche has been associated with strikingly different and equally conflicting philosophical traditions: from existentialism to hermeneutics, materialism to psychoanalysis, structuralism to poststructuralism, modernism to postmodernism, critical theory to feminism, deconstruction to queer theory, and new materialism to environmental philosophy to posthumanism, among other emerging perspectives. Despite the disagreements he generates, or perhaps because of them, Nietzsche's perspectival thought powerfully informs, and continues to transform, some of the most heterogeneous philosophical traditions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Still, as the epigraph whereby we started suggests, Nietzsche was not only a philosopher; he was also one of the most formidable critics of philosophy—and in a characteristic overturning of perspectives, he often turned this critique into an attempt at self-critique. Nietzsche's philosophical diagnostics, in fact, [End Page 146] tend to be double-faced insofar as he is equally implicated in the phenomena he dissects—and this applies to his definition of philosophy as well. There is, in fact, a formal, confessional element at play in Nietzsche's famous account of philosophy as "confession [Selbstbekenntnis]" (BGE 6;47).3 The phrase performs what it describes, generating mirroring effects that run, like an undercurrent, throughout Nietzsche's entire oeuvre, giving it an experiential, autobiographical, and experimental tone that informs mimetic studies as well... (shrink)

This work is an examination of the metaphysical presuppositions involved in the science of organic form. Taking the dichotomy of structuralism versus functionalism in nineteenth century biology as the central subject of my study, I explore a network of unquestioned premises and isolate areas where empirical research programs and underlying metaphysical commitments both inform and hinder each other. ;I begin with the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate of 1830--a debate that clearly articulates the tensions between structuralist and functionalist approaches to organic form. On (...) the side of functionalism, I am led to confront the rich concept of teleological causality. The concept of teleology, frequently taken to be semantically univocal, in fact unfolds into a cluster of related notions. I begin to demarcate significant differences between "intentional," "heuristic," "cosmic," and "organismic" teleology. On the side of structuralism, I set out to unearth the presuppositions of materialist versus idealist conceptions of structure--showing where naturalists have been both liberated and enslaved by their respective metaphysical commitments. With the basic divisions between structuralist and functionalist drawn, I set out to trace the dichotomy through the paradigm shift from fixism to transformism. ;In Darwin's system the structural/functional tensions become synthesized into complementary principles of causality. Here I explore the underlying presuppositional shifts which enabled Darwin to harmonize the previously intractable oppositions. These shifts include: rethinking teleology without "design," rethinking the archetype as real progenitor, and adopting a pluralistic perspective regarding causal mechanisms. ;The relative success of Darwin's appropriation of structuralism and functionalism leads to a discussion of the dichotomous character of the central subject itself. I argue that at the root of the dichotomous characterization of structure and function lies an impoverished understanding of teleology. I then offer "organicist" teleology as a powerful alternative to the French-Anglo tradition of "intentional" teleology. Presupposing the alternative teleology forms a challenge to the way in which French-Anglo naturalists have understood structural and functional relations. Together with Darwin's causal pluralism, a richer notion of teleology provides a different set of metaphysical assumptions and leads to an alternative model for empirical research programs. (shrink)

In this study, we develop a theoretical model of monetary intelligence (MI), explore the extent to which individuals’ meaning of money is related to the pursuit of materialistic purposes, and test our model using the whole sample and across college major and gender. We select the 15-item love of money (LOM) construct—Factors Good, Evil (Affective), Budget (Behavioral), Achievement, and Power (Cognitive)—from the Money Ethic Scale and Factors Success and Centrality and two indicators—from the Materialism Scale. Based on our data collected (...) from 330 university students in Czech Republic, we provide the following findings. First, our formative models are superior to our reflective models. Second, for the reflective model, money represents Power, Good, Achievement, and not Evil, in the context of materialism. Our formative model suggests that those who pursuit materialism cherish Achievement (vanity) but Budget their money poorly. Third, multi-group analyses illustrate that humanities students (62.4 % female) consider money as Evil and Budget their money poorly, while those in natural sciences (37.6 % female) do not. Further, men are obsessed with Achievement, whereas women do not Budget their money properly, suggesting reflective temptation for males and impulsive temptation for females. Our novel discoveries shed new lights on the relationships between LOM and materialism and offer practical implications to the field of consumer behavior and business ethics. (shrink)

The essays gathered here demonstrate and justify the excitement and promise of cognitive historicism, providing a lively introduction to this new and quickly growing area of literary studies. Written by eight leading critics whose work has done much to establish the new field, they display the significant results of a largely unprecedented combination of cultural and cognitive analysis. The authors explore both narrative and dramatic genres, uncovering the tensions among presumably universal cognitive processes, and the local contexts within which (...) complex literary texts are produced. Alan Richardson's opening essay evaluates current approaches to the study of literature and cognition, locating them on the map of recent literary studies, indicating their most compelling developments to date, and suggesting the most promising future directions. The seven essays that follow provide innovative readings of topics ranging from Shakespeare (Othello, Macbeth, Cymbeline, The Rape of Lucrece) through Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, to contemporary authors Ian McEwan and Gilbert Sorrentino. They underscore some of the limitations of new historicist and post-structuralist approaches to literary cultural studies while affirming the value of supplementing rather than supplanting them with insights and methods drawn from cognitive and evolutionary theory. Together, they demonstrate the analytical power of considering these texts in the context of recent studies of cultural universals, 'theory of mind, ' cognitive categorization and genre, and neural-materialist theories of language and consciousness. This groundbreaking collection holds appeal for a broad audience, including students and teachers of literary theory, literary history, cultural studies, and literature and science studies. (shrink)

Architecture has always been a decisive manifestation of power. This volume represents an attempt to question and reflect on the relationship between power and architecture from three philosophical perspectives: materialistic, phenomenological and post-structuralist. -/- This collection opens an interdisciplinary investigation that aims to reflect on architecture and its interconnectedness with power within philosophy and cultural theory at large while presenting these concepts using practical examples from the built environment. Internationally recognised authors – philosophers, architectural theorists and historians – Andrew Benjamin, (...) Andrew Ballantyne, Mladen Dolar, Hilde Heynen, Nadir Lahiji, Jeff Malpas, Dean Komel, Elke Krasny, Robert Pfaller, Gerard Reinmuth, Luka Skansi, Douglas Spencer, Teresa Stoppani and Sven-Olov Wallenstein present their reflections in original unpublished essays and interviews. In the presented works, architecture is combined and transgressed by philosophy in a new discussion that focuses only on power. The contributions in this collection open a variety of architectural questions, one of the central among them being the impact of neoliberal capitalism on architecture. Architecture, with its implications on the complex contemporary political and social reality, is severely changing our space and, more globally, our environment. A reflection on the multilayered relation between architecture and power has never been as topical as it is today. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the philosophical side of Karl Marx's thought as well as some of the major debates about it in the secondary literature. It first examines Marx's early writings, focusing, in particular, on his views on religion, the limitations of political emancipation and the dehumanizing conditions of work under capitalism. Marx and Engels considered the theory of history to be one of Marx's most important theoretical achievements. In an autobiographical note Marx described it as the “guiding thread of his (...) studies,” and in a speech delivered at Marx's graveside Engels compared Marx's discovery of “the law of development of human history” with Darwin's discovery of the law of nature. The chapter examines Marx's materialist theory of history, the view that history is characterized by the development of productive power to free people from material scarcity. It also examines the problematic area of Marx's ethics. (shrink)

Stern’s Columbia School Theory contribution on English self-pronouns provides a wonderful illustration of the explanatory power of an approach that refuses to be taken in by a priori grammatical categories like reflexivity, which have the unfortunate consequence of giving the analyst the impression that he or she already knows all about the semantics of the form under study before looking at real usage, and attempts rather to uncover the semantic content of the linguistic sign -self based on careful observation and (...) deep reflection on what might explain the way this sign is used in English. Stern shows that a purely syntactic account is unable to account for the fact that self-pronouns occur not only in syntactically reflexive environments, but also in non-reflexive ones, and conversely that simple pronouns also appear in both types of contexts. A faint glimmer of the structuralist origins of Columbia School Theory shows through in one case however. (shrink)

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a (...) Zeitgeist-adjusted conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender. -/- Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means. -/- The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted. (shrink)

Sensationism, a philosophy that gained momentum in the French Enlightenment as a response to Lockean empiricism, was acclaimed by Hippolyte Taine as "the doctrine of the most lucid, methodical, and French minds to have honored France." The first major general study in English of eighteenth-century French sensationism, _The Authority of Experience_ presents the history of a complex set of ideas and explores their important ramifications for literature, education, and moral theory. The study begins by presenting the main ideas of sensationist (...) philosophers Condillac, Bonnet, and Helvétius, who held that all of our ideas come to us through the senses. The experience of the body in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching enabled individuals, as John C. O'Neal points out, to challenge the sometimes arbitrary authority of institutions and people in positions of power. After a general introduction to sensationism, the author develops a theory of sensationist aesthetics that not only reveals the interconnections of the period's philosophy and literature but also enhances our awareness of the forces at work in the French novel. He goes on to examine the relations between sensationism and eighteenth-century French educational theory, materialism, and _idéologie_. Ultimately, O'Neal opens a discussion of the implications of sensationist thought for issues of particular concern to society today. (shrink)

According to the substantialist, substances should be regarded as the fundamental ontological category. It is substances that are the bearer of properties, that are causally efficacious and that compose the things we see and touch around us. Cumpa has argued that this metaphysics fits poorly with classical physics and Buonomo has extended this argument into the quantum realm. After reviewing their claims, I shall argue that simple reflection on the form of the Standard Model also undermines substantialism. I will then (...) explore Dasgupta’s qualitative factualism in this context before suggesting that modern physics does not compel us to adopt such a stance. The alternative is to adopt a form of structuralism which, although it may be rendered compatible with factualism, can also stand as a ‘third way’ between these stances. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the interactional organization of an instructed object exploration among sighted and visually impaired people (VIPs) in order to contribute to studies of instructional activities and the observable accomplishment of haptic perception. We do this by showing the situated, interactional, and co-operative organization of achieving object understanding. We focus on the dynamics of haptic perception as being reliant on instructions, while at the same time being an observable production that furnishes further instructions. We (...) show the organization of visual and verbal instructions versus the touching of objects for haptic perception. Based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis of video data, we study a VIP’s haptic actions in interaction with a professional, sighted ICT consultant who provides instructions on what an object is and what it can do. We show how the instructions are sequentially adjusted to make them relevant for a simultaneous, emerging exploration in which the VIP uses their hands and fingers to perceive very specific details of the object. We argue that achieving object understanding is accomplished in and through the fine-tuned coordination of haptic exploration, both as a response to verbal instructions and also as a means of conveying perception-related actions, which the ICT uses to build new actions. The paper thus makes a case for instructed and distributed haptic perception as observable in social interaction and as a resource for building object understanding within phenomenal fields. (shrink)

Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role. We refer to these two hypotheses as instrumental agency (...) and constitutive agency, respectively. Evidence comes from a variety of fields, including neural, behavioral, and phenomenological research, but so far with confounds that prevent an experimental distinction between these hypotheses. Here we advance the debate by proposing a novel double-participant setup that aims to isolate agency as the key variable that distinguishes bodily movement in active and passive conditions of perception. We pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. There was no evidence favoring the stronger hypothesis of constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, we caution that during debriefing several participants reported using cognitive strategies that did not rely on spatial perception. We conclude that this approach is a viable direction for future research, but that greater care is required to establish and confirm the desired modality of first-person experience. (shrink)

This chapter examines the integrative nature of reflexive monism (RM), a psychological/philosophical model of a reflexive, self-observing universe that can accommodate both ordinary and extraordinary experiences in a natural, non-reductive way that avoids both the problems of reductive materialism and the (inverse) pitfalls of reductive idealism. To contextualize the ancient roots of the model, the chapter touches briefly on classical models of consciousness, mind and soul and how these differ in a fundamental way from how mind and consciousness are viewed (...) in contemporary Western philosophy and psychological science. The chapter then travels step by step from such contemporary views towards reflexive monism, and towards the end of the chapter, to more detailed comparisons with Hindu Vedanta and Samkhya philosophy and with Cosmopsychism (a recently emergent, directly relevant area of philosophy of mind). According to RM there never was a separation between what we normally think of as the “physical world” and what we think of as our “conscious experience”. In terms of its phenomenology, the phenomenal physical world is part-of conscious experience not apart-from it. This phenomenal world can be thought of as a biologically useful representation of what the world is like, although it is not the world as-described-by modern physics, and it is not the thing itself—supporting a form of indirect (critical) realism. The analysis then outlines how 3D phenomenal worlds are constructed by the mind/brain, focusing specifically on perceptual projection, and then demonstrates how normal, first-person conscious experiences (e.g. of phenomenal worlds) and their associated, third-person viewable neural correlates can be understood as dual manifestations of an underlying psychophysical mind, which can, in turn, be understood as a psychophysical form of information processing. This dual-aspect monism combines ontological monism with a form of epistemological dualism in which first- and third-person perspectives on the nature of mind are complementary and mutually irreducible—a principle that turns out to have wide-ranging applications for the study and understanding of consciousness. The chapter then considers the evolution and wider distribution of consciousness (beyond humans) through a brief analysis of the many forms of discontinuity theory versus continuity theory and argues that to avoid the “hard problem” of consciousness one may need to treat its existence as fundamental, and, as co-evolving with the evolution of its associated material forms. This, in turn, takes one to a central issue: What does consciousness actually do? The analysis argues that its central function is to real-ize existence (to know it in a way that makes it subjectively real). With these foundations in place we then come to the heart of the essay—the ways in which reflexive monism provides a very different view of the nature of the universe to those offered either by dualism or materialist reductionism. As summarised in the last paragraph of this section, “In this vision, there is one universe (the thing-itself), with relatively differentiated parts in the form of conscious beings like ourselves, each with a unique, conscious view of the larger universe of which it is a part. In so far as we are parts of the universe that, in turn, experience the larger universe, we participate in a reflexive process whereby the universe experiences itself.” The essay then considers the precise ways in which this reflexive monist understanding of “consciousness” and “mind” relates to later developments in Vedic philosophy and suggests a way of bridging contemporary Western and classical Vedic ways of understanding consciousness and mind. Finally, the chapter considers what can be said of mystical experience and the ground of being, following the principle that this ground must have the power to both manifest the universe in the form that science shows it to be and our ability to experience the universe in the way that we do. In this, RM is shown to be a dual-aspect monist form of cosmopsychism—a recent area of development within philosophy of mind. The essay compares and contrasts this with idealist versions of cosmopsychism and argues that RM allows for an integrated understanding of realism versus idealism, dualism versus monism, how ordinary experience relates to mystical experience, and how consciousness relates to mind. RM also provides an ‘open’ conceptual system that can, in principle, incorporate a range of parapsychological effects. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in research on mediated communication via social touch. Previous studies indicated that mediated social touch can induce similar positive outcomes to interpersonal touch. However, studies investigating the user experience of MST technology predominantly involve brief experiments that are performed in well-controlled laboratory conditions. Hence, it is still unknown how MST affects the relationship and communication between physically separated partners in a romantic relationship, in a naturalistic setting and over a (...) longer period of time. In a longitudinal explorative field study, the effects of MST on social connectedness and longing for touch among geographically separated romantic couples were investigated in a naturalistic setting. For 2 weeks, 17 couples used haptic bracelets, that were connected via the internet, to exchange mediated squeeze-like touch signals. Before and after this period, they reported their feelings of social connectedness and longing for touch through questionnaires. The results show that the use of haptic bracelets enhanced social connectedness among geographically separated couples but did not affect their longing for touch. Interviews conducted at the end of the study were analyzed following the thematic analysis method to generate prominent themes and patterns in using MST technology among participant couples. Two main themes were generated that captured the way the bracelets fostered a positive one-to-one connection between partners and the way in which participants worked around their frustrations with the bracelets. Detailed findings and limitations of this longitudinal field study are further discussed, and suggestions are made for future research. (shrink)

From a historical materialist perspective, the evolution of U.S. trade control policies toward China has been driven by the pursuit of economic and geopolitical interests. However, beyond material considerations, these policies also intersect with deeper ethical, philosophical, and even theological questions regarding justice, sovereignty, and the moral dimensions of economic power. Trade restrictions, embargoes, and economic coercion raise profound issues of fairness, global responsibility, and the ethical implications of economic warfare, particularly in the context of international relations shaped by ideological (...) and religious worldviews. Following World War II, the United States sought to consolidate global hegemony, using economic control as a key instrument in its Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union and socialist nations. Prior to the Korean War, U.S. policymakers attempted to manipulate trade relations to weaken Sino-Soviet ties, allowing limited trade between capitalist nations and China. However, after China’s involvement in the Korean War, the U.S. imposed increasingly stringent trade controls, culminating in a full embargo. This policy, while aimed at restricting China’s economic development, ultimately conflicted with America’s own ideological commitment to free trade and triggered dissent among allies such as Britain and Japan. The subsequent partial relaxation of trade controls under the Eisenhower administration in 1954 highlighted the contradictions between economic self-interest, Cold War ideology, and the ethical rhetoric of global economic liberalism. By framing these developments within a broader philosophical and religious discourse, this study explores the ethical dimensions of trade policy, drawing from Christian, Confucian, and Islamic perspectives on economic justice, fairness, and moral responsibility in global commerce. It argues that trade control policies should not be examined solely as instruments of power but also as moral choices that shape international justice, human welfare, and ethical economic governance. Future research should further investigate how religious and philosophical traditions inform perspectives on economic sanctions, trade ethics, and the moral responsibilities of nations in a rapidly evolving global order. (shrink)

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke, one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies. This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key (...) arguments and outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated ‘material turn’ of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birke’s oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice. (shrink)

In the Thirties, European personalism was an inspirational philosophical movement, with its birthplace in France, but with proponents and sympathizers in many other countries as well. Following the Second World War, Christian-Democratic politicians translated personalistic ideas into a political doctrine. Sometimes they still refer to personalism, but most often this reference is little more than a nostalgic salute. In the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, there are practically no references to personalistic philosophers. Is personalism exhausted as a philosophy or political (...) ideology? Yes and no. Paul Ricoeur, writing in Esprit , summed up the situation like this: “personalism is dead”, but he was careful to mention a “return of the person”. Indeed, no tradition or movement can simply perpetuate itself. It must, in order to continue making history, always abolish itself as a `system' so as to make room for the unsaid and the unthought in its tradition, an idea that Mounier also fervently believed in.To better situate the current discussion of personalism, however, it is necessary to look back to the original characteristics of personalism in the Thirties. As a response to the crisis provoked by the economic depression, failing democracy and existential uncertainty, there arose in France a number of `non-conformist movements' who labelled themselves personalistic. They did not constitute a unified movement with a commonly shared theory. It was rather a collection of `personalisms'. The article by the historian Christian Roy about the ecological personalism of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul sheds interesting light on the multiple origins of French personalism, which is all too easily identified with the work of Maritain and Mounier alone. The work of Jacques Maritain, and the network of writers and artists surrounding him, undoubtedly remains a significant historical reference point when speaking of personalism.Another group was formed around Alexandre Marc who, along with Raymond Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops and Denis de Rougemont, kept the journal Ordre Nouveau alive for five years . They elaborated the idea of federalism as a way out of liberalism and totalitarianism. The most important and durable group, however, was formed by the movement and journal Esprit, founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier and George Izard. In order to stress the historical importance of Esprit, we are including here a testimony from 1982, written by Paulette Mounier, the founder's wife, in which she looks back on 50 years of Esprit. After the war, some new and related groups formed, such as Economy and Humanism around Louis-Joseph Lebret. An historical survey of the dissemination of personalistic centres and movements, not only in France but over all of Europe, would be material for a stimulating historical research project. In this issue, there will also be mention of, among others, the Prague personalism of Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, the Leuven personalism of Louis Janssens, and the Polish personalism of Tadeusz Mazowiecki and others. But this list is far from exhaustive.What unites these various branches of the personalistic tree? It is a certain conception — or better perhaps: a certain attitude to the human person. Personalists were not seeking in the first instance a new academic theory about the person, but rather a practical philosophy of engagement. In the Thirties, quite a few personalists finished their university studies and chose not for an academic career but for non-conformist, demanding and vulnerable commitments with limited financial means. What motivated them? Primarily a strong sense that the time in which they were living was a turning point, one which was being ignored by the academic world. They interpreted the diverse economic, political and cultural crisis phenomena as symptoms of a more global crisis of civilization which demanded a response through radical change.Hence a certain rhetoric of a `new order', `spiritual revolution', `radical reform' and `rebirth'. But the rhetoric was supported by innovative ideas regarding political federalism, the third way economy and human alienation. The motivation for all this derived from a strong commitment to defend the concrete human person against the arrogance of systems, bureaucracies and ideologies, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of individualism — the reason why some personalists always qualified personalism as `communitarian'.In fact, much of what presents itself as communitarian philosophy today is a retrieval of personalistic themes from the Thirties applied to the current situation, a situation which is also interpreted by communitarians as a global cultural crisis. One should not forget, however, that alongside and sometimes opposed to the communitarian theme with its call to bring people back to their communitarian roots, personalists underscored the priority of metaphysics over politics, a theme that can likewise be found in the writings of personalistic dissidents in Eastern Europe. In the words of Mounier in Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme : “personalism combines faith in a certain human absolute with a progressive historical experience”.To what extent is personalistic thinking still relevant today? Its current relevance will be examined in three ways. In the first section, a number of articles are presented which illustrate the active presence of personalistic thought in the domains of politics and applied ethics. Vaclav Havel sent one of his recent addresses in which he links the theme of human rights with that of a world spirituality. His article is preceded by an introduction by Guido Van Heeswijck, situating Prague personalism.The need for an orientational philosophy of the person is not only manifest today in the political arena. Developments in economics, ecology, health care, the media, technology and in the world of the professions have had an extraordinarily large impact on the human person's lifeworld. The whole area of applied ethics requires a dynamic and orientational concept of the person. The contributions by Paul Schotsmans and Luk Bouckaert are seeking a personalistic point of departure for applied ethics. The more historical article by Christian Roy on ecological personalism has been included in the first section because it can be inspiring for an environmental ethics.The second section is more philosophical. To what extent does the `personalistic' conception of the person put forward in the Thirties still have any relevance today, following the waves of structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism? Paul Ricoeur's article, Approaching the Human Person — originally published in Esprit in 1990 and now translated for the first time — can be seen as a reference text. Ricoeur shows in what sense the concept of the person must be broadened in order to continue functioning. The person as `narrative identity' can only write history through the medium of language and institutions. Starting from very different assumptions, the articles by Louis Janssens & Joseph Selling and the analysis of Roland Breeur also explore the idea that a person is what he is only when his identity is opened up, touched by an exteriority or conceived as a focal point . It is this radical openness and vulnerability that gives the person its historical and transcendent dynamic, and prevents us from encapsulating it in existing systems, theories and power relations. The connection with Emmanuel Levinas and his hermeneutic of the idea of the infinite is an obvious one to draw.The third section contains a historical survey in which a number of active `personalistic' centres and journals are presented.Various European centres that appeal explicitly to some form of personalistic thinking were posed the following questions: What is the main historical reference to personalism at your centre? and How do you implement, today, a personalist credo in your work? John Dick organized the responses to these questions under a number of headings. This survey aims to provide not so much an exhaustive but a representative picture of the ways in which European personalism lives on as a mosaic of centres engaged in everyday history. (shrink)

This article presents a conceptual discussion on the phenomenon of incorporation of tools and other objects in the light of Maine de Biran’s philosophy of the relation between the body and the motor will. Drawing on Maine de Biran’s view of the body as that portion of the material world which directly obeys one’s motor will, as well as on his view (supported by studies in contemporary cognitive science) of active touch as the perceptual modality that is sensitive to (...) objects as fields of forces resisting the perceiver’s movements, we discuss the phenomena of motor incorporation and haptic incorporation, as well as the relation between them. Motor incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the motor system, i.e. when practice enables one to animate an object as directly, effortlessly and fluently as one is able to animate one’s own body. The subject then has the experience of acting there, where the object is located, not at the body–object interface. In order to better understand the phenomenon of motor incorporation, we highlight the phenomenological difference between directly and indirectly moving something. Haptic incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the haptic system, i.e. when an object is used as an instrument for the haptic perception of other objects. Finally, we seek to shed light on the phenomenon of transparency, understanding the transparency acquired by the incorporated object as both a relational property and a matter of degrees. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in DialogueDavid M. JohnsonChristopher Gill. Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. vii 1 510 pp. Cloth, $85.Gill’s book is a wide-ranging attempt to improve our understanding of Greek poetic and philosophical thinking about the self and its role in ethics. His thesis is that the Greeks had an “objective-participant” model (...) of personality which is different in important ways from the various “subjective” and/or “individualist” models which have often formed the basis of modern interpretations. While the subjective understanding of the person privileges a unitary first-person perspective in a Cartesian way, Gill argues that the Greeks—as do some modern thinkers—speak of an interplay between parts that is best studied from the outside. The individualist strand of thought makes individual autonomy a keystone of morality in a way indebted to Kant; Gill argues that the more communal mode of ethics advocated recently by Williams and MacIntyre is closer to the Greek ideal. Gill is surely right that Cartesian and Kantian assumptions have had a distorting effect on some readings of Greek texts, and he has made important progress by presenting a different framework based on modern work touching on Greek thought about ethics and the self.After an introduction spelling out his objective-participant framework Gill devotes his first chapter to Homeric decision-making and a critique of the interpretations of Snell and Adkins. It is a mistake, he argues, to make self-consciousness the criterion for a full-blown concept of the self or for what counts as moral decision making. Homeric deliberations are closer in form to Aristotle’s thinking about decision making and the modern action theory which has reasons (whether conscious or not) replace the will as the basis for action. Nor are the Homeric heroes rightly criticized for allowing shame and their status to be considerations in their decision making; as Williams has argued, internalized shame can be a rather effective ethical motivator, and as both he and MacIntyre have argued, there is much to be said for allowing one’s place in society to inform one’s decision making. Gill’s argument here does not seem particularly novel, as his frequent citation of Williams and MacIntyre makes clear, but he does apply it thoroughly to four important Iliadic monologues in a way which clarifies these ideas and confirms their relevance for Homer.The second chapter provides an analysis of why we feel sympathy for the problematic heroes of Greek epic and tragedy, particularly Achilles and Medea, despite their controversial deeds. Here Gill rejects the views of Bradley and Butcher, who argued that it was the power of the character’s self-conscious personality that won us over, and the structuralist view of Redfield, who made [End Page 119] Achilles a mediator between the need to protect society and the desire for personal glory. Gill interestingly—and originally, as far as I know—argues that it is rather the hero’s acting out of an ethically exemplary gesture, based on implied or explicit second-order reasoning about the best sort of human life, that gains our interest and sympathy. For Gill it is important that the hero’s ethical position fall within the communal framework of his or her society: Achilles’ refusal to return to the fight is his way of showing how Agamemnon has undermined the code of heroic reciprocity; Medea’s murder of her children is, even more paradoxically, her means of showing Jason the importance of the bonds of philia.Taking Achilles as our example, Gill rejects the view of Parry and Whitman that Achilles’ heroism is deeply subjective. Gill argues that Achilles, in his great speech of book 9, is not rejecting the heroic code itself but only Agamemnon’s perversion of it. While this reading makes good sense of much of Achilles’ speech in Iliad 9, it is difficult to square with the end of the speech, in which Agamemnon seems to have faded from view, leaving Achilles to question the heroic code itself. This is not to say that Achilles puts... (shrink)

Previous research in the social sciences has shown that haptic interaction rituals are critical for maintaining social relationships. However, during the coronavirus pandemic, ‘social distancing’ was encouraged in order to avoid the spread of disease. Drawing on data from self-ethnography as well as publicly available resources, in this study we explore some new, locally negotiated haptic trajectories to accomplish interaction rituals in the time of coronavirus. First, we present self-ethnographic observations of distancing in face-to-face encounters from our everyday (...) lives. Second, utilizing methods of microanalysis of naturally occurring interaction, we investigate video recordings of the embodied negotiation of space and touch among politicians. We analyze three different ways in which politicians negotiate transitional moves in this haptic ritual when one party initiates a handshake: repairing, declining and apologizing. Our analysis shows that politicians adapt their entire bodies in conjunction with talk, gestures and laughter not only to accomplish the greeting but also to remedy the potentially face-threatening situation of not getting the greeting right. This research has implications for better understanding the spontaneous ability of human beings to invent new ways of engaging with each other. Moreover, it adds to our knowledge of how the materiality of human bodies can impact forms of sociality. (shrink)

Haptic object recognition is usually an efficient process although slower and less accurate than its visual counterpart. The early loss of vision imposes a greater reliance on haptic perception for recognition compared to the sighted. Therefore, we may expect that congenitally blind persons could recognize objects through touch more quickly and accurately than late blind or sighted people. However, the literature provided mixed results. Furthermore, most of the studies on haptic object recognition focused on performance, devoting (...) little attention to the exploration procedures that conducted to that performance. In this study, we used iCube, an instrumented cube recording its orientation in space as well as the location of the points of contact on its faces. Three groups of congenitally blind, late blind and age and gender-matched blindfolded sighted participants were asked to explore the cube faces where little pins were positioned in varying number. Participants were required to explore the cube twice, reporting whether the cube was the same or it differed in pins disposition. Results showed that recognition accuracy was not modulated by the level of visual ability. However, congenitally blind touched more cells simultaneously while exploring the faces and changed more the pattern of touched cells from one recording sample to the next than late blind and sighted. Furthermore, the number of simultaneously touched cells negatively correlated with exploration duration. These findings indicate that early blindness shapes haptic exploration of objects that can be held in hands. (shrink)

This article explores forms of haptic sociality in interspecies interaction. Data examined are taken from a corpus of equine assisted therapy sessions, in Finland and France. During these sessions, therapists invite clients to pay close attention to the horse’s behavioral displays of comfort or discomfort and to react accordingly. In this way, the horse is regarded as a living, sentient creature, whose body has haptic and kinesthetic properties, resulting in socialization practices that cultivate forms of care. The study (...) discusses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “esthesiologic body”, in light of analytical instances, draws on contemporary re-examinations of phenomenological notions (such as intersubjectivity and intercorporeality) by ethnomethodologists and analysts of social interaction, and proposes to respecify them in the particular context of human–animal interactions. The argument is inspired by a conversation analytic approach, sensitive to the orderly character of social actions. Two formats, displaying diverse ways in which participants interact with the horse as an _esthesiologic_ body, are examined in detail. The analysis shows the fundamental role played by touch and haptic practices in the practical accomplishment of intercorporeality. (shrink)

What causes adolescents to develop consumer’ ethical beliefs? Prior research has largely focused on the negative influence of peers and negative patterns of parent–child interactions to explain risky and unethical consumer behaviors. We take a different perspective by focusing on the positive support of parents and peers in adolescent social development. An integrative model is developed that links parental and peer support with adolescents’ self-worth motives, their materialistic tendencies, and their consumer ethical beliefs. In a study of 984 adolescents, we (...) demonstrate support for a sequential mediation model in which peer and parental support is positively related to adolescents’ self-esteem and feelings of power, which are each associated with decreased materialism as a means of compensating for low self-worth. This reduced materialism is, in turn, associated with more ethical consumer beliefs. (shrink)

Alzheimer’s disease is emerging into public view in unprecedented ways. Foremost among these is the embodied form of elderly men and women appearing in commercial imagery for patient advocacy groups or pharmaceutical advertisements, but scientific imagery also seeps into the visual media cultures that surround us. The recent reconfiguration of Alzheimer’s disease is due to expanding ageing populations, an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry becoming a fast-growing material-semiotic realm that is providing powerful images of both gendered and racialized embodiment. Such a visual, (...) and yet highly material, realm is in need of feminist interventions, engaging with the images and ideas that circulate around ageing, medicine, human and non-human embodiment. From a non-representationalist and posthumanist perspective identified as feminist visual studies of technoscience, the authors seek to further the discussion in the direction of understanding the ‘scattered ontologies’ of Alzheimer’s — in laboratory practice, the realm of medical media and in commercial appeals to coherent individuality and human cognition — as gendered domains of figural reality and performative matter. (shrink)

Detailed arguments are provided, chiefly with regard to recent Darwinian accounts of genetic selectionism (Dawkins, Dennett) and the Chomskyan view of natural language, but touching also on reductionism in general and computational accounts of the mind, that demonstrate that we are very far from supporting the adequacy of reductive materialism in science.

Ontic structural realism argues that structure is all there is. In (French, 2014) I argued for an ‘eliminativist’ version of this view, according to which the world should be conceived, metaphysically, as structure, and objects, at both the fundamental and ‘everyday’ levels, should be eliminated. This paper is a response to a number of profound concerns that have been raised, such as how we might distinguish between the kind of structure invoked by this view and mathematical structure in general, how (...) we should choose between eliminativist ontic structural realism and alternative metaphysical accounts such as dispositionalism, and how we should capture, in metaphysical terms, the relationship between structures and particles. In developing my response I shall touch on a number of broad issues, including the applicability of mathematics, the nature of representation and the relationship between metaphysics and science in general. (shrink)

It is through touch that we are able to interact directly with the world; it is our primary conduit of both pleasure and pain. Touch may be our most immediate and powerful sense—“the first sense" because of the central role it plays in experience. In this book, Matthew Fulkerson proposes that human touch, despite its functional diversity, is a single, unified sensory modality. Fulkerson offers a philosophical account of touch, reflecting the interests, methods, and approach that define contemporary philosophy; but (...) his argument is informed throughout by the insights and constraints of empirical work on touch. Human touch is a multidimensional object of investigation, Fulkerson writes, best served by using a variety of methods and approaches. -/- To defend his view of the unity of touch, Fulkerson describes and argues for a novel, unifying role for exploratory action in touch. He goes on to fill in the details of this unified, exploratory form of perception, offering philosophical accounts of tool use and distal touch, the representational structure of tangible properties, the spatial content of touch, and the role of pleasure in tactual experience. -/- Fulkerson’s argument for the unique role played by exploratory action departs notably from traditional vision-centric philosophical approaches to perception, challenging the received view that action plays the same role in all sensory modalities. The robust philosophical account of touch he offers in The First Sense has significant implications for our general understanding of perception and perceptual experience. (shrink)

The feminist migration literature in geography has contributed to bringing several critical social theoretical themes to the forefront of migration studies. Specifically, feminists have foregrounded the politics of scale, mobility as political process, questions of subjectivity/identity and critical theorizations of space and place. This article provides an overview of the feminist migration literature organized around these themes. In addition, it argues that feminist migration studies can play a pivotal role in the ongoing project of marrying the materialist concerns (...) of political economy to those of critical social theorists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The technocratic dimension of government—its reliance upon knowledge claims, usually in scientific guise—is of great importance if we wish to understand modern power and governance. In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, Jeffrey Friedman investigates the often-overlooked question of the relationship between technocratic knowledge/power and ideas. Friedman’s contribution to our understanding of technocracy can therefore be read as a contribution to governmentality studies, one that introduces the possibility of adding normative solutions to this critical tradition.

The paperback edition of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development”, which was published in 2014, almost coincided with the publication of two book reviews; one kindly written by Fabienne Gfeller and one by Jacob Klitmøller. A third review of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development” has recently been published with Power and Education. As a first response to the discussion, which the book provoked, I try to briefly explore below a central question: Is linking post-structuralist thinking and Vygotskian scholarship meaningful?

ABSTRACT The concepts of liberty and representation reveal tensions in Hobbes's political anthropology that only a study of the development of his philosophical materialism can fully elucidate. The first section of this article analyses the contradictory definitions of liberty offered in De cive, and explains them against the background of Hobbes's elaboration of a deterministic concept of conatus during the 1640s. Variations in the concepts of conatus and void between De motu and De corpore will shed light on ideas of (...) individuality, unity and agency that carry direct political relevance. The second section explains why the concept of representation that Hobbes elaborated at the end of the decade in Leviathan cannot be interpreted within an exclusively political and juridical framework. Rather, I will claim that it should be explained in the light of Hobbes's materialist theory of the power exerted by the sovereign persona on human imagination. (shrink)

Our great teacher and leader Chairman Mao always stressed the study and propagation of materialist dialectics and dedicated himself to the application of materialist dialectics in analyzing problems, directing revolution and, through practical struggle, advancing the dialectics of revolution ceaselessly. In that immortal collection of Marxist-Leninist essays, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, Volume Five, Chairman Mao provided us with a new chapter of materialist dialectics. Essays of particular interest included in Volume Five are: "On the Policies for Our Work in (...) Tibet — Directive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China," "In Refutation of ‘Uniformity of Public Opinion,’" "On the Ten Major Relationships," "Speech at the Second Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China," "Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Committees," "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," "Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propoganda Work," and "A Dialectical Approach to Inner-Party Unity." These essays provide us with important educational materials for learning Chairman Mao's new thought and new conclusions concerning dialectics, and comprise a supremely powerful weapon of thought for carrying through the wise political policies of Chairman Hua and deeply criticizing the "gang of four.". (shrink)

As touch remains commonly defined by the closeness it physically implies and it rhetorically evokes, the mere notion of distant touch and of distal haptic perception seems peculiar. But Aristotle’s perspective, which I wish to take as a point of departure, is firm: we perceive the objects of touch, the hot and the cold, the hard and the soft, the curved and the sharp, through other things: δι' ἑτέρων. In this article, I would like to explore this ἕτερος by (...) showing how the otherness of perception always implies an intermediary, a middle point (μέσος), i.e. an other not so other, an other that is able to translate the much more distant otherness of the perceived object. To explore these forgotten layers of alterity that fall into what we commonly conceive of as the impalpable emptiness of distance, I propose to study the idea of distant touch from the perspective of phenomenological aesthetics. In order to do so, I will first examine some aspects of the Husserlian account of perception and will then focus on the phenomenology of distant touch in Alejandra Costamagna’s novel El Sistema del Tacto [The System of Touch] (2018). (shrink)

Evil remains a primary source of inquiry in contemporary literature of French expression, even among its most secular writers. In considering French-speaking authors from France, Belgium, the United States, the Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this collection delineates a rich international perspective on some of the most disturbing events of our time. Each essay testifies to the urgency expressed in works of fiction to give an account of human catastrophes, from the Shoah and the Rwandan genocide to the terrorist attacks of (...) September 11, and the ongoing oppression of women in Islamic nations. Themes underlying this volume include an investigation into the origins of evil, its representations in writing, and the ethical responsibilities of authors who write on human suffering. Contemporary fiction on evil confronts us with fundamental questions: Can evil be attributed to intentionality, is evil "subconscious," or is it the result of impersonal forces? Which styles of writing are ethically appropriate or effective for depicting evil? Can we speak of a veritable "poetics of evil" shared by contemporary authors? When does a literary text on evil become "evil"? In providing informed and nuanced answers to these important questions, the scholars engage in crucial theories of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, address a number of issues raised by trauma and genocide studies, and draw from critical frameworks in literary theory on testimony, the limits of representing the extreme, and "transgressive" writing. (shrink)

The boundary work approach has been established as one of the main ways to study controversies in science. However, it has been proposed that it does not meet the power dynamics of the scientific field sufficiently. This article concentrates on the intertwining of boundary work and power. It combines the boundary work approach developed by Thomas Gieryn and the analysis of power in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Based on a literature review and an analysis of a controversy over therapeutic (...) touch, it finds four forms of boundary work: intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary, between science and society, and between science and other knowledge systems. The article shows how the different forms of boundary work reveal multiple power struggles, hierarchisations and tensions. The controversy appeared in Finnish nursing science when the Finnish Association of Sceptics gave its annual Humbug Award to a book on therapeutic touch. The book was based on a master’s thesis at the University of Tampere department of nursing science. The nursing scholars in the department reacted abruptly and banned certain books, which astonished the students, and a lively public debate followed. In the debate, nursing science was both defended and challenged. The framework of the study shows that the boundary work approach can be used to study different aspects of power. The article proposes that the framework could be used in other controversies as well to study the layers of power in boundary work. (shrink)

Though currently marginalised in Western philosophy, tenth-century Arabic philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi is one of the most important thinkers of the medieval era. In fact, he was known as the ‘second teacher’ (after Aristotle) to philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. As this epithet suggests, Alfarabi and his successors engaged in a critical and creative dialogue with thinkers from other historical traditions, including that of the Ancient Greeks, although the creativity of his part is often marginalised as well. In this (...) article, I offer a new interpretation of Alfarabi’s sweeping volume, The Principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous Community. My focus is the materialism that overflows Alfarabi’s account of soul in general and the imaginative power in particular. The political conclusion of this account is that Virtuous Community does not directly present Alfarabi’s ideal ruler or community. Instead, it offers a materialist critique that prefigures critical theory and post-structuralism and thereby provides guidelines for how to more effectively engage monotheistic communities in the pursuit of social justice – including along the axes of race, gender and sexual orientation. (shrink)