Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film’s outset. In (...) fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance…but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film’s vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. (shrink)

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, ...

The notion of ubuntu and communalism is of great importance in anAfrican educational discourse, as well as inAfrican Philosophy of Education and in Africanphilosophical discourse. Ubuntu is aphilosophy that promotes the common good ofsociety and includes humanness as an essentialelement of human growth.

In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.

Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.The book calls on ...

Defende-se que a análise da produção do conhecimento orientada pela perspectiva da concepção materialista e dialética da história deve pautar-se: pela percepção da realidade como totalidade pré-existente e independente da sua fragmentação em disciplinas; pelo entendimento de que a produção do conhecimento expressa no plano das ideias o embate travado no âmbito das relações de produção, por forças que disputam o controle e a direção das forças produtivas. Defende-se que não é suficiente classificar a produção do conhecimento conforme as orientações (...) epistemológica mas necessário e urgente situar esta produção na realidade que a produz. (shrink)

This innovative collection points to the need for a reevaluation of the origins of toleration theory. Philosophers, intellectual historians, and political theorists have assumed that the development of the theory of toleration has been a product of the modern world, and John Locke is usually regarded as the first theorist of toleration. The contributors to Difference and Dissent, however, discuss a range of conceptual positions that were employed by medieval and early modern thinkers to support a theory of toleration, and (...) question the claim that Locke's theory of toleration was as original or philosophically adequate as his adherents have asserted. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented or created the concept of self as an inner space--as space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. This concept of inwardness, says Cary, has worked its way deeply into the intellectual heritage of the West and many Western individuals have experienced themselves as inner selves. After surveying the idea of inwardness in Augustine's predecessors, Cary offers a re-examination of Augustine's own writings, making the controversial point (...) that in his early writings Augustine appears to hold that the human soul is quite literally divine. Cary goes on to contend that the crucial Book 7 of the Confessions is not a historical report of Augustine's "conversion" experience, but rather an explanation of his intellectual development over time. (shrink)

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son, Hellmut Wilhelm, the Book of Changes represented not just a mysterious book of oracles or a notable source of the Taoist and Confucian philosophies. In their hands, it emerges, as it did for C. G. Jung, as a vital key to humanity's age-old collective (...) unconscious. Here the observations of the Wilhelms are combined in a volume that will reward specialists and aficionados with its treatment of historical context--and that will serve also as an introduction to the I Ching and the meaning of its famous hexagrams. (shrink)

A textbook anthology of important works of political thought revealing the development of ideas from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It includes new translations of both well-known and ignored writers, and an introductory overview.

In this article the authors analyse narratives of the ‘agents’ associated with book publishing in Latvia, instrumentalizing the Bourdieusian theoretical framework of habitus–capital–field in order to understand the particulars of power relationships in the national book publishing field. Based on the results of the narrative analysis, authors conclude that power relationships in book publishing in Latvia have historically shifted during periods when major social transformations have taken place in other fields of the social world and echoed in the publishing field (...) in the form of altered conditions. Depending on each agent’s position in the field, these changes have meant that values and meanings linked with the practice of publishing have either had to be adjusted or been significantly disruptive. (shrink)

Unique in its collation of major theorists rarely considered together, Critical Environments incorporates detailed discussions of the work of Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Niklas ...

Text recycling, often called “self-plagiarism”, is the practice of reusing textual material from one’s prior documents in a new work. The practice presents a complex set of ethical and practical challenges to the scientific community, many of which have not been addressed in prior discourse on the subject. This essay identifies and discusses these factors in a systematic fashion, concluding with a new definition of text recycling that takes these factors into account. Topics include terminology, what is not text recycling, (...) factors affecting judgements about the appropriateness of text recycling, and visual materials. (shrink)

Only a few of the many political treatises from the early 1300s have been made available to English readers, and Nederman (political science, Texas A&M U.) helps remedy the situation by translating from the Latin several important commentaries on the political scene in England during the early years.

During the Latin Middle Ages, as today, “tyranny” connotes the exercise of power arbitrarily, oppressively, and violently. Medieval thinkers generally followed in the footprints of early Christian theologians and ancient philosophers regarding the tyrant as the very embodiment of evil rulership and thus as the polar opposite of the king, who governed for the good of his people according to virtue and religion. However, examination of the writings of some well-known and influential authors from ca. 1150 to ca. 1400—including John (...) of Salisbury, Ptolemy of Lucca, William of Ockham, Bartolous of Sassoferrato, and Nicole Oresme—reveals three very diverse and distinct conceptions of tyranny, each of which justified the tyrant in one way or another. (shrink)

Mid-Republican censors were bound by few formal restrictions in their lectiones of the Senate. So holds the scholarly communis opinio, at any rate, based primarily on Carolus Sigonius' emendation of Livy 23.23.6. This article shows Sigonius' emendation to be fatally flawed, however, and popular election to be a legal requirement for senatorial enrollment – and not just a social desideratum. This prerequisite is shown to originate in the fourth-century lex Ovinia, with ramifications for models of aristocratic rule at Rome, mid-Republican (...) political developments, and the curia itself. (shrink)

Patients with apraxia perform poorly when demonstrating how an object is used, particularly when pantomiming the action. However, these patients are able to accurately identify, and to pick up and move objects, demonstrating intact ventral and dorsal stream visuomotor processing. Appropriate object manipulation for skilled use is thought to rely on integration of known and visible object properties associated with ‘ventro-dorsal’ stream neural processes. In apraxia, it has been suggested that stored object knowledge from the ventral stream may be less (...) readily available to incorporate into the action plan, leading to an over-reliance on the objects’ visual affordances in object-directed motor behaviour. The current study examined grasping performance in left hemisphere stroke patients with (N = 3) and without (N = 9) apraxia, and in age-matched healthy control participants (N = 14), where participants repeatedly grasped novel cylindrical objects of varying weight distribution. Across two conditions, object weight distribution was indicated by either a memory-associated cue (object colour) or visual-spatial cue (visible dot over the weighted end). Participants were required to incorporate object-weight associations to effectively grasp and balance each object. Control groups appropriately adjusted their grasp according to each object’s weight distribution across each condition, whereas throughout the task two of the three apraxic patients performed poorly on both the memory-associated and visual-spatial cue conditions. A third apraxic patient seemed to compensate for these difficulties but still performed differently to control groups. Patients with apraxia performed normally on the neutral control condition when grasping the evenly weighted version. The pattern of behaviour in apraxic patients suggests impaired integration of visible and known object properties attributed to the ventro-dorsal stream: in learning to grasp the weighted object accurately, apraxic patients applied neither pure knowledge-based information (the memory-associated condition) nor higher-level information given in the visual-spatial cue condition. Disruption to ventro-dorsal stream predicts that apraxic patients will have difficulty learning to manipulate new objects on the basis of information other than low-level visual cues such as shape and size. (shrink)

IntroductionEvery day, it seems, we advance into darkness we have not known before. It is not a journey we have sought out or chosen for ourselves. We are swept along by a current of malice that can only be avoided if we hide from the news. The spectacle of a mass anti-Zionist and antisemitic “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia University’s central quad and elsewhere has structural predecessors, to be sure, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, but parallels with mass antisemitism (...) require comparison with earlier historical moments. As the University of Chicago’s president, Paul Alivisatos, wrote straightforwardly in a public letter, “the impact of an encampment depends on the degree to which it disrupts study, scholarship, and free movement around campus.”1 The Occupy Wall Street movement was notably accompanied by a substantial body of theoretical work, whereas the Columbia occupation is supported by little more than a Manichaean view of a world divided between oppressor and oppressed peoples. The chants are sounded without any plausible theory of how they could actually lead to the dissolution of the Jewish state. The students breaking windows and occupying a building at Columbia were certainly employing theory of a sort when they asserted that the university had a moral responsibility to deliver meals to them, but observers found the theory difficult to endorse. The students promise to remain until Columbia meets their divestment demands—which presumably means they will be in their tents for a very long time indeed, since for governing boards to cede their investment authority to mob action means giving up their other responsibilities as well. But Brown University’s governing corporation has agreed to meet with student representatives and hold a vote on divestment in the fall.2 I expect the results of the vote will disappoint the protestors. (shrink)

This volume deals with the development of moral and political philosophy in the medieval West. Professor Nederman is concerned to trace the continuing influence of classical ideas, but emphasises that the very diversity and diffuseness of medieval thought shows that there is no single scheme that can account for the way these ideas were received, disseminated and reformulated by medieval ethical and political theorists.

Comedy is sacred—it's woven through the Bible. James Cary has rare first-hand experience of writing comedy for the BBC—and has a degree in theology. He and former actor and comedian, Barry Cooper (co-writer of Christianity Explored) do a weekly podcast called Cooper and Cary Have Words. This is an intelligent, funny, informative book for anyone who likes comedy.

This article challenges two dominant views of religious and cultural toleration, namely, that it is modern and that it is Western. It claims instead that both medieval Latin thought and many non-Western traditions embraced a position that coherently defends tolerance beliefs and practices. Specifically, the article identifies four approaches that clearly favour toleration: scepticism, functionalism, nationalism and mysticism.

For many years before his composition of the Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli produced a vast body of writings in a range of genres, which are seldom studied. The Rope and the Chains examines these texts in order to locate the intellectual origins of the Machiavelli with whom people are widely familiar.

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” A considers what it might mean for the administrative state to be antipolitical. Two conceptions of an antipolitical administrative state are identified. The first of these—antipolitics as in opposition to administrative discretion—holds that, in a democracy, value judgments should be made only by elected officials and that all administrators should do is carry out technical tasks calling for expertise. Administrators, however, inevitably make policy decisions that call for value judgments, making this first (...) conception unattainable. On the other hand, a second conception or standard—one of antipolitics as in opposition to favoritism—is both realistic and desirable to expect of those who occupy positions of administrative power. It holds that administrators should avoid making decisions for self-interested reasons. Many doctrines of administrative law follow from aversion to favoritism, as the law aspires to free the administrative state from decision-making that is based on the interests of administrators and their partisan overseers or friends. Today, as the state comes under increasing threat from populist and authoritarian attempts to capture its power, distinguishing between these two conceptions of antipolitics—one unrealistic, the other imperative—can help to channel antipolitical impulses where they are most needed. (shrink)

During the past ten or twenty years this question has begun to concern a great many thinkers. The interest which it holds for our time is not only of an academic order. The vigorous growth of various forms of teaching of translation and interpreting; and the setting under way of gigantic programs of translation by electronic machines (to cite only two “spectacular” facts) illustrate its practical importance.