This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence was an intentional (...) intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken. Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures. (shrink)

This article seeks to highlight and present two seemingly different conceptions of the philosophy of mind belonging to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty. In this context, we first consider Wittgenstein’s critique of private languages, which is then used to reject and deconstitute the privacy of consciousness. In addition, the paper follows the evolving and deconstitutive character of Rorty’s philosophy of mind, showing how the American philosopher constantly defined consciousness, mind, or later selfhood – using naturalistic methods. The authors maintain and (...) justify the thesis that both philosophers have a common denominator which manifests itself in the rejection of traditional and metaphysical conceptions of consciousness and identity, but they also try to point out certain shortcomings and inconsistencies within the two conceptions of the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the introduction to the 2015 reprint of her classical Partial Visions, Angelika Bammer cites the pithy injunction of the American poet and feminist thinker Adrienne Rich: “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth … the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence. … Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy (...) will develop new meaning; thinking itself will be transformed.” Based on sustaining, consoling, and radically altering the present dire state of human existence, the author leads to two sets of initial arguments: Where Are We, and What Are We Doing Wrong. What follows are samples of possible answers, perhaps representative beyond themselves. (shrink)

The paper traces a three-century-long tradition of a mistaken attribution of the Defence of Eunuchs by Theophylact of Ohrid. Since Peter Lambeck, chief librarian of the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, identified in 1671 the author of the treatise as Theodore Pedagogue, a poorly known tutor to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the incorrect attribution was readily adopted and further disseminated by a series of scholars of the next generations. Although the issue of the authorship was successfully resolved as early as 1768 (...) by Angelo Bandini, head of the Laurentian Library in Florence, the information remained unfamiliar to writers of the following centuries, leaving the entrenched error to persist until the late 1970s, on the eve of the first critical editions of the Defence. The article follows the tangled history of the erroneous attribution, attempting to establish a kind of stemmatic regularity between several branches of the abortive tradition. (shrink)

U članku se opisuje burna povijest eugenike u Sjedinjenim Državama tijekom cijelog 20. stoljeća. Premda je nacistička eugenika notornija po svojim groznim posljedicama, činjenica je da je većina američkih saveznih država imala zakone koji su dopuštali sterilizaciju “nesposobnih” i da je golem broj ljudi prisilno steriliziran. Neki su zakoni ukinuti tek 1967. ali postoje i naznake zakonodavstva o sterilizaciji koje bi mogle dopustiti zloupotrebe karakteristične za rane godine 20. stoljeća. Međutim, glavnina članka opisuje ideološke izjave najvećih američkih eugeničara poput Davenporta, (...) Laughlina, Estabrooka iz Eugenic Record Officea, Granta, Rossa i drugih, kao i socijalne motive koje su eugeniku činili tako popularnom ideologijom sve do Drugog svjetskog rata. Jedna od sugestija članka jest da su eugeničke ideje i dalje latentne u drukčijim oblicima “znanstvenog rasizma” koji traje i danas.The article describes a troubled history of eugenics in the US, from its beginnings at the end of the 19th century, through the whole of the 20th. It is a part of a larger historical study on eugenics. It focuses on Davenport, Laughlin, Estabrook and the Eugenic Record Office, on the early racist eugenicists like Grant and Ross, and on sterilization legislation in the twenties and thirties. The intention however was to put the historical debate into a contemporary context, or at least to show that some eugenic ideas have lived long after everybody thought they were dead. There are some hints and quotations that show it might still be possible to misuse sterilisation in the US today. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article refurbishes the view of antiutopianism as the ruling orthodoxy of late-capitalist common sense (pragmatics) and writings plus media (narrative). After a half-century descent into a contemporary neofeudalism (Fascism 2.0), the operation of totalized antiutopianism on utopian narrative genres is powerfully evident in the TV series Game of Thrones, a rigidly Social Darwinist fantasy world, reveling in mass slaughters and presupposing neofeudalism: a black fable for lesioned personalities.

The text seeks to provide insight into some of the basic theoretical considerations and problems that the Marxist theory of the state has met. In this sense, it does not pretend to provide an ultimate interpretation of the relation of the state and capital, but to present to a reader a basic argumentation of the main Marxist approaches and the general contribution of the Marxist theory to this problem. In the first part the text highlights some of the key issues (...) that materialist theory of the state should try to offer answers to, while the second part gives a review of a different approaches to this topic. Presented approaches and arguments should be seen more as an ideal-types, and they should introduce a reader to the general directions and problems of the Marxist approach to the state and capital relation. nema. (shrink)

The most widely used attractive logical account of knowledge uses standard epistemic models, i.e., graphs whose edges are indistinguishability relations for agents. In this paper, we discuss more general topological models for a multi-agent epistemic language, whose main uses so far have been in reasoning about space. We show that this more geometrical perspective affords greater powers of distinction in the study of common knowledge, defining new collective agents, and merging information for groups of agents.

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was ‘simultaneously dominator and dominated’ (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential (...) system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – ‘the Winston story’, the ‘Goldstein excerpts’, and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, ‘Tory anarchist’ stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell’s view there are ‘three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. ‘No economics’ entails here ‘no class struggle’, and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell’s textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable ‘totalitarianism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Antiutopianism: An IntroductionPatricia McManus (bio) and Darko Suvin (bio)Utopia is endangered today! Such a sentence seems redundant: utopia—the shape of the possibility that things could be better—is always in danger. But the present danger is something distinct from the dangers that historically have attended utopia. These have not gone away but, added to them, and largely superseding utopia’s other perils in our twenty-first century, is the disappearance of (...) utopianism from the culture and politics that dominate our collective sense of any future. Politically, this is a conscious and unconscious erasure serving the interests of ecocide and the present mass killings of poverty and declared or undeclared wars. Our axiom is that the unchecked drive for profits will necessarily continue serving such interests, so that we cannot take seriously either presumed new “green” interests as today enforced, or group “identities” unless they challenge that drive.The collection of essays that make up the following “bloc” contains an argument that there is a need, political and historical, to disentangle our understanding of antiutopianism today from the overt “anti-utopianisms” of previous epochs, giving weight if not shape to the Cold War identification of utopia with authoritarianism or uniformity under the fake sign of [End Page 289] “totalitarianism.” Where such older predecessors still linger, they have been turned to face the past, as if those past models of tyranny themselves buried not just particular utopias but also the need for utopia. We now have antiutopianism as a thing in itself, antiutopianism without utopia. It deserves to be taken very seriously, without the hyphen.This argument was first put forward by Darko Suvin in the final essays of his most recent collection Disputing the Deluge (Bloomsbury, 2022). The editor of that collection, Hugh C. O’Connell, glossed Suvin’s use of the unhyphenated term “antiutopianism” as follows: “we might think of antiutopianism today as the blurring of the boundaries between a stalwart negation of all utopian thought... and the hallucinatory proclamations of the End of History accompanying the triumph of the global capitalist world system.”Following the release of Disputing the Deluge, Suvin took up a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Research in Narrative, History and Memory. He developed the materials for a two-day workshop on antiutopianism in early April 2023. After conversation with Patricia McManus, that workshop was titled “Antiutopia as an Enforced Dominant Horizon of Mass Culture,” and it proposed to investigate the causes and consequences of this dominance for personality and utopianism today. It adopted the TV series Game of Thrones as its concrete exemplum. The first day of the workshop was introduced by Suvin’s presentation on the theory of antiutopia(nism), with a response by Antonis Balasopulos; the second day by McManus’s reading of Game of Thrones with a response by Lazar Atanasković. All of these presentations were rewritten for this volume of Utopian Studies. We were happy with the interest generated, which ran to over seventy registrants from all over the world.Suvin’s contribution, “On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative,” sets the scene for the interventions that follow it. It engages with two aspects of our present in some detail, the self or woebegone “personality” of late or catastrophic capitalism, and the gathering signs of “neofeudalism,” possibly issuing into a Fascism 2.0, as a way of probing the historical horizon of this capitalism.In his response on the first day, “Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation,” Balasopoulos picked up Suvin’s focusing on the “personality” in relation to both utopia and the bourgeois revolutions. That concept is here subjected to an analysis that traces its filiations with both Social Darwinist and Marxist conceptualizations of “survival.” [End Page 290]The two essays from the second day of the workshop move from the explorations opened by Suvin and Balasopoulos to focus on analysing HBO’s hit TV series Game of Thrones. Following up a suggestion by Suvin, McManus makes the case for understanding the series as articulating antiutopianism and thriving on so doing. Atanasković, in “On the Antiutopian Effect in Game of Thrones,” examines the series’s use of an aesthetic of “Fantastic history,” and... (shrink)

In medicine, professional behavior and ethics are often rule-based. We assessed whether instruction on formal criteria of authorship affected the decision of students about authorship dilemmas and whether they perceive authorship as a conventional or moral concept. A prospective non-randomized intervention study involved 203s year medical students who did (n = 107) or did not (n = 96) received a lecture on International Committee of Medical Journal editors (ICMJE) authorship criteria. Both groups had to read 3 vignettes and answer 4 (...) questions related to the distinction between conventional and moral domains. Written justification of student’ choices whether the authorship in a vignette was right or wrong was rated by 4 independent raters as based on justice or a rule. Formal instruction had no effect on students’ decisions on authorship in the vignettes (44, 34 and 39% ICMJE-consistent answers for 3 vignettes, respectively, by students receiving instruction vs. 38, 42 and 30% for those without instruction; P > 0.161 for all vignettes). For all dilemmas, more students decided contrary to ICMJE criteria and considered their decisions to be a matter of obligation and not a choice and to be general across situations and sciences. They were willing to change their decision if a rule was different only for peer situations but not for mentor–mentee situations. The number of students who used rule-based justification of their ICMJE criteria-consistent decisions was significantly higher in the instructed than in the uninstructed group. Instruction about formal authorship criteria had no effect on student’s decisions about authorship dilemmas and their decisions were related to the moral rather than a conventional domain. Teaching about authorship and other professionalism and integrity issues may benefit from interventions that bring intuitive processes into awareness instead of those fostering rule-based reasoning. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce a theory on the dynamic development of affective processes, affect regulation, and the relationship between emotions and sport performance. The theory focusses on how affective processes emerge and develop during competitive sport involvement. Based on Scherer’s component process model, we postulate six components of emotion that interact with each other in a circular fashion: triggering processes, physiological reactions, action tendencies, expressive behaviors, subjective experience, and higher cognitive processes. The theory stresses the dynamics of affective processes (...) and describes the consequences for performance in competitive sports. It assumes that the peculiarities of different sports must be taken into account in order to understand the affective processes, and offers starting points on which strategies can be used to effectively regulate affective states. Consequences for research and practice are derived and discussed. To study the development of affective processes, future research should test the assumptions in ecologically valid contexts, such as real competitions or competition-like situations, using multi-component measures of emotions. (shrink)

Publication date: 25 October 2017 Source: Author: Ivana Slavoljub Domazet, Darko Milivoj Marjanović The main aim of this work is to determine, on the basis of empirical research, whether and to what extent foreign direct investment has impact on the overall economic development of selected countries in the Western Balkans. Analyses made for the purpose of this paper were performed on the basis of available secondary data possessed by the World Bank for the period of 2000-2012. The research methodology (...) involved the use of the techniques of linear regression and correlation analysis. The first task was to determine whether there is an impact of foreign direct investment on the overall economic development of these countries. Where such influence occurred, it was necessary to define its level in comparison to the influence of other variables. The results of the analysis in this paper suggest that inflow of foreign direct investment does not affect to a significant extent the economic development of selected countries in the Western Balkans. (shrink)

Clarke and Beck use behavioural evidence to argue that approximate ratio computations are sufficient for claiming that the approximate number system represents the rationals, and the ANS does not represent the reals. We argue that pure behaviour is a poor litmus test for this problem, and that we should trust the psychophysical models that place ANS representations within the reals.

Autor je zamislio da objavi tri teksta u tri sveske "Filozofije i drustva" u kojima ce, oslanjajuci se na stvorenu iskustvenu naucnu evidenciju, pokazati obim i stepen religioznosti nekih evropskih drustava, potom u posebnom tekstu ruski slucaj i na kraju religioznost i vezanost ljudi za religiju i crkvu u Srbiji. Ovakav sled objavljivanja ima svoju logiku: ocekujuci sprovodjenje empirijskog ispitivanja pod nazivom "Evropsko istrazivanje vrednosti" u gotovo svim evropskim zemljama, i po prvi put u Srbiji sredinom 2008. godine, autor zeli (...) da najpre prezentuje rezultate prethodnih socioloskih istrazivanja, reprezentativne za evropski prostor, a potom i za pravoslavni prostor u zemlji sa najvecim brojem pravoslavaca u svetu. Tako ce u poslednjem prilogu autor moci da komparira religijsku situaciju u Srbiji ne samo sa religioznom Evropom nego i sa religioznom pravoslavnom Rusijom. (shrink)