In 1704, Mary Astell, known by many scholars as the “first English feminist,” published Moderation Truly Stated, her contribution to the national debate over “occasional conformity.” This was the practice of periodic participation in the sacraments of the Church of England—above all, taking communion—in order to become eligible for public office. This practice was defended as an exercise of the virtue of “moderation,” viewed as the opposite of zeal and associated with politeness and reasonableness. In this article I recover Astell’s (...) critique on this new notion of moderation, as well as her own alternative conception of the virtue of moderation as scripture moderation, which she envisioned as zeal and indifference towards the right ends. My aim is threefold. First, to explore the dangers of conceiving of moderation as an “antidote to zeal,” which Astell argued would be detrimental to truth, salvation, and moral progress. Second, to demonstrate that her own conception of moderation as zeal and indifference towards the right ends was a radical subversion of the discourse on moderation at the time. Third, to shed light on the role of the Occasional Conformity debate in the transformation of moderation from a Christian virtue of temperance and control into a “modern” virtue construed as politeness and opposed to zeal, which was to become dominant in eighteenth-century England. (shrink)

Where does Neo-Confucianismâe"a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to itâe"fit into our story of Chinaâe(tm)s history? This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in Chinaâe(tm)s history. The book argues that as (...) Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible. (shrink)

While the demands for greater engagement in science in general and regulatory science in particular have been steadily increasing, we still face limited understanding of the empirical resonance of these demands. Against this context, this paper presents findings from a recent study of a potential participatory opening of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, a prominent regulatory scientific organization in the field of risk governance. Drawing upon quantitative surveys of the public and selected professional experts as well as in-depth (...) qualitative expert interviews, we identify a general support for greater engagement in science-based risk assessment. However, we also find significant contestation concerning its potential enactment and its normative and strategic merit. Underlying these contestations, we identify the persistence of a normal view of science and decisionist understanding of risk assessment, which create conflicting legitimacy demands for BfR and other regulatory scientific organizations. Together with concerns about imbalances in the power to participate, especially in highly specialized engagement processes, these pose significant challenges for the institutionalization of more participatory practices. (shrink)

Historians of political thought have done important and insightful work on women’s history of political thought. This scholarship has proliferated since the mid to late twentieth century and has focused largely on the feminist aspects of their thought. Although this was at first a necessary and crucial correction of prior neglect, I argue that by now this has turned into an overcorrection. By turning to the early reception and rediscovery of two eighteenth-century English female political thinkers, Mary Astell (1666–1731) and (...) Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791), I show that this feminist focus can stand in the way of inclusion by obscuring other important aspects of women’s political thought. I also contend that the feminist focus implies an unfair double standard where women – as opposed to canonical men – are thought of as worthy of inclusion only if they espoused or anticipated ideas that would seem agreeable from a present perspective. This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that, if we want to do justice to the feminist aim of comprehensive inclusion of past female thinkers, we must learn to look beyond women’s feminist thought in history and to embrace their afeminist and even anti-feminist thought. (shrink)

This article discusses the political economy of AI capitalism. It considers AI as a General Purpose Technology and argues we need to investigate the power concentration of Big Tech. AI capitalism is characterised by the commodification of data, data extraction and a concentration in hiring of AI talent and compute capacity. This is behind Big Tech’s unstoppable drive for growth, which leads to monopolisation and enclosure under the winner takes all principle. If we consider AI as a GPT—technologies that alter (...) society’s economic and social structures—we need to come up with alternatives in terms of ownership and governance. The commons is proposed as an alternative for thinking about how to organise AI development and how to distribute the value that can be derived from it. Using the commons framework is also a way of giving society a more prominent role in the debate about what we expect from AI and how we should approach it. (shrink)

The prime purpose of this paper is, first, to restore to discourse-bound occasion sentences their rightful central place in semantics and secondly, taking these as the basic propositional elements in the logical analysis of language, to contribute to the development of an adequate logic of occasion sentences and a mathematical (Boolean) foundation for such a logic, thus preparing the ground for more adequate semantic, logical and mathematical foundations of the study of natural language. Some of the insights elaborated in this (...) paper have appeared in the literature over the past thirty years, and a number of new developments have resulted from them. The present paper aims at providing an integrated conceptual basis for this new development in semantics. In Section 1 it is argued that the reduction by translation of occasion sentences to eternal sentences, as proposed by Russell and Quine, is semantically and thus logically inadequate. Natural language is a system of occasion sentences, eternal sentences being merely boundary cases. The logic has fewer tasks than is standardly assumed, as it excludes semantic calculi, which depend crucially on information supplied by cognition and context and thus belong to cognitive psychology rather than to logic. For sentences to express a proposition and thus be interpretable and informative, they must first be properly anchored in context. A proposition has a truth value when it is, moreover, properly keyed in the world, i.e. is about a situation in the world. Section 2 deals with the logical properties of natural language. It argues that presuppositional phenomena require trivalence and presents the trivalent logic ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ , with two kinds of falsity and two negations. It introduces the notion of Σ-space for a sentence A (or / A /, the set of situations in which A is true) as the basis of logical model theory, and the notion of / ${\bf P}^{A}$ / (the Σ-space of the presuppositions of A), functioning as a 'private' subuniverse for / A /. The trivalent Kleene calculus is reinterpreted as a logical account of vagueness, rather than of presupposition. ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ and the Kleene calculus are refinements of standard bivalent logic and can be combined into one logical system. In Section 3 the adequacy of ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ as a truth-functional model of presupposition is considered more closely and given a Boolean foundation. In a noncompositional extended Boolean algebra, three operators are defined: $1_{a}$ for the conjoined presuppositions of a, ã for the complement of a within $1_{a}$ , and â for the complement of $1_{a}$ within Boolean 1. The logical properties of this extended Boolean algebra are axiomatically defined and proved for all possible models. Proofs are provided of the consistency and the completeness of the system. Section 4 is a provisional exploration of the possibility of using the results obtained for a new discourse-dependent account of the logic of modalities in natural language. The overall result is a modified and refined logical and model-theoretic machinery, which takes into account both the discourse-dependency of natural language sentences and the necessity of selecting a key in the world before a truth value can be assigned. (shrink)

This paper investigates the impact of negative screening on the investment universe as well as on financial performance. We come up with a novel identification process and as such depart from mainstream socially responsible investing literature by concentrating on individual firms’ conduct and by studying a much wider range of issues. Firstly, we study the size and financial performance of fourteen potentially controversial issues: abortion, adult entertainment, alcohol, animal testing, contraceptives, controversial weapons, fur, gambling, genetic engineering, meat, nuclear power, pork, (...) stem cells, and tobacco. We investigate an international sample of more than 1,600 stocks for more than twenty years. We then analyze the impact of applying negative screens to a market portfolio. Our findings suggest that the choice for negative screening strategies does matter for the size of the investment universe as well as for risk-adjusted return performance. Investing in controversial stocks in many cases results in additional risk-adjusted returns, whereas excluding them may reduce financial performance. These findings suggest that there are opportunity costs to negative screening. (shrink)

One of the older questions in the debate about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is whether it is worthwhile for organizations to pay attention to societal demands. This debate was emotionally, normatively, and ideologically loaded. Up to the present, this question has been an important trigger for empirical research in CSR. However, the answer to the question has apparently not been found yet, at least that is what many researchers state. This apparent ambivalence in CSR consequences invites a literature study that (...) can clarify the debate and allow for the drawing of conclusions. The results of the literature study performed here reveal that there is indeed clear empirical evidence for a positive correlation between corporate social and financial performance. Voices that state the opposite refer to out-dated material. Since the beginnings of the CSR debate, societies have changed. We can therefore clearly state that, for the present Western society, “Good Ethics is Good Business.”. (shrink)

We generalize the modal interpretation of quantum mechanics so that it may be applied to composite systems represented by arbitrary density operators. We discuss the interpretation these density operators receive and relate this to the discussion about the interpretation of proper and improper mixtures in the standard interpretation.

Conceiving new technologies as social experiments is a means to discuss responsible deployment of technologies that may have unknown and potentially harmful side-effects. Thus far, the uncertain outcomes addressed in the paradigm of new technologies as social experiments have been mostly safety-related, meaning that potential harm is caused by the design plus accidental events in the environment. In some domains, such as cyberspace, adversarial agents may be at least as important when it comes to undesirable effects of deployed technologies. In (...) such cases, conditions for responsible experimentation may need to be implemented differently, as attackers behave strategically rather than probabilistically. In this contribution, we outline how adversarial aspects are already taken into account in technology deployment in the field of cyber security, and what the paradigm of new technologies as social experiments can learn from this. In particular, we show the importance of adversarial roles in social experiments with new technologies. (shrink)

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also (...) critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology. (shrink)

This book is about how to understand quantum mechanics by means of a modal interpretation. Modal interpretations provide a general framework within which quantum mechanics can be considered as a theory that describes reality in terms of physical systems possessing definite properties. Quantum mechanics is standardly understood to be a theory about probabilities with which measurements have outcomes. Modal interpretations are relatively new attempts to present quantum mechanics as a theory which, like other physical theories, describes an observer-independent reality. In (...) this book, Pieter Vermaas summarises the results of this work. The book will be of great value to undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in philosophy of science, and physics departments with an interest in learning about modal interpretations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

In this reply I try to show that, contrary to Milberry’s apparent assertion, the general intellect of the multitude does not have the explanatory robustness she accredits to it. Digital network technologies are currently overwhelmingly effective in proletarianizing and disempowering the cognitariat and only an active technopolitics of deproletarianization could reverse this hegemonic situation. In my response to Verbeek, I attempt to correct his misinterpretation of the Stieglerian approach as being dialectical in nature and show that, far from reinstating the (...) humanist dichotomy between human beings and technologies, my analysis assumes their original, albeit fundamentally ambiguous and even ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich] interconnection. I conclude with pointing out some implications of this view for a ‘really realistic’ political theory of technology. (shrink)

‘The art of living with ICTs ’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes (...) and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective. (shrink)

Mimesis or imitation comes in many forms, from animal and plant mimicry to artistic copies 'from life'. This book offers eighteen essays addressing mimesis from diverse perspectives. From the recreation of galaxies to Iron Age torcs, from counterfeit dragons to modern waxworks, each chapter explores facets of material mimesis from prehistory to the present day. The Matter of Mimesis invites readers to compare practices of imitating, faking, and synthesising materials and objects in nature, art and science, raising questions about skills, (...) techniques and politics of making that transcend historical and disciplinary boundaries and inform both our past and future worlds. (shrink)

he 4th Industrial Revolution introduced a highly automated and connected business environment. Nevertheless, many organizations are reeling in the wake of the speed and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact, catching many unawares, and placing their sustainability in question. Given the connectedness promulgated by the 4th Industrial Revolution, one might expect organizational resilience to be a given - only time will tell whether this was the case. This article considers the concept of cybernetics as contributing to systems-thinking, which may enable (...) resilience strategies to come to fruition. Cybernetics is a goal-driven approach in which constant feedback is analyzed and applied in correcting the current course. We reflect on the roots and principles of the cybernetic concept, developing it into a management cybernetics concept. We take a non-technological approach in acknowledging organizations as systems. Management theories such as stakeholder and stewardship theories are systems components that can play a crucial role in effectively communicating management information within the cybernetic loop. We conclude that an integrative and cooperative relationship with legitimate stakeholders can play an essential role in an organization's preparedness. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychiatrists invariably consider schizophrenia to be a paradox: how come natural selection has not yet eliminated the infamous ‘genes for schizophrenia’ if the disorder simply crushes the reproductive success of its carriers, if it has been around for thousands of years already, and if it has a uniform prevalence throughout the world? Usually, the answer is that the schizophrenic genotype is subject to some kind of balancing selection: the benefits it confers would then outbalance the obvious damage it does. (...) In this paper, however, I will show that the assumptions underlying such evolutionary accounts of schizophrenia are at least implausible, and sometimes even erroneous. First of all, I will examine some factual assumptions, in particular about schizophrenia’s impact on reproductive success, its genetics, its history, and its epidemiology. Secondly, I will take a critical look at a major philosophical assumption in evolutionary psychiatric explanations of schizophrenia. Indeed, evolutionary psychiatrists take it for granted that schizophrenia is a natural kind, i.e. a bounded and objectively real entity with discrete biological causes. My refutation of this natural kind view suggests that schizophrenia is in fact a reified umbrella concept, covering a heterogeneous group of disorders. Therefore, schizophrenia, as we now know it, simply doesn’t have an evolutionary history. (shrink)

Dr Seuren's study deals with the problem of presenting an adequate model of grammatical description. The model he proposes conforms in its main outlines to the transformational generative grammar established by Chomsky, but differs in important respects. These mainly affect that part of Chomsky's syntactic component known as the 'base', which generates basic or 'deep' structures. In the model of the base proposed here two main constituents are distinguished for every deep structure representation of a sentence, vis-a-vis the operators and (...) the nucleus. The deep structure of a sentence is thus seen to be very similar to the logical structure of a proposition. The arguments given in support of this analysis are based on mainly on considerations of simplicity and semantic adequacy. (shrink)

How do, according to Aristotle, peirastic arguments, which are employed by nonscientists to put professed scientists to the test, work, and how do they differ from genuine scientific arguments? A peirastic argument succeeds in unmasking a would-be scientist if it establishes an inconsistency among the answers given. These answers may only comprise: propositions which are proper to the field and which everybody can know; propositions which only scientists may know; “common” propositions that everybody, including various sciences, uses in all kind (...) of arguments. On the other hand, a peirastic argument fails to do its job if it either features or presupposes in addition propositions which would justify a fallacy, or if it purports to be scientific. The latter type of bad peirastic argument crucially depend on common propositions where scientific arguments explain by reference to combinations of the primitive items of the science in question. (shrink)

Essentialism is one of the most pervasive problems in mental health research. Many psychiatrists still hold the view that their nosologies will enable them, sooner or later, to carve nature at its joints and to identify and chart the essence of mental disorders. Moreover, according to recent research in social psychology, some laypeople tend to think along similar essentialist lines. The main aim of this article is to highlight a number of processes that possibly explain the persistent presence and popularity (...) of essentialist conceptions of mental disorders. One such process is the general tendency of laypeople to essentialize conceptual structures, including biological, social, and psychiatric categories. Another process involves the allure of biological psychiatry. Advocating a categorical and biological approach, this strand of psychiatry probably reinforced the already existing lay essentialism about mental disorders. As such, the question regarding why we essentialize mental disorders is a salient example of how cultural trends zero in on natural tendencies, and vice versa, and how both can boost each other. (shrink)

In the past two decades, individual explanations of scientific misconduct have increasingly given way to systemic explanations. Where did this interest in systemic factors come from? Given that research ethicists often present their interventions as responses to scientific misconduct, this article tests the hypothesis that these systemic explanations were triggered by high-visibility cases of scientific norm violation. It does so by examining why Dutch scientists in 2011 explained Diederik Stapel’s grand-scale data fabrication largely in systemic terms, whereas only fifteen years (...) earlier, in the René Diekstra affair, such explanations had been close to absent. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, the article suggests that cases like Stapel’s as such do not explain why early 21st-century commentators exchanged individual explanations for systemic ones. Only against the background of an existing discourse of criticism of the science system, developed in the 1990s and 2000s in response to rapidly increasing competition for research funding, could the Stapel affair achieve notoriety as an example of how systemic factors provoke bad conduct. (shrink)

This article presents the history of the medieval Latin translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It features the names of some key figures of the period like Burgundio of Pisa, Robert Grosseteste, and William of Moerbeke. The main focus lies on the question whether Robert Grosseteste had access to a complete copy of the earlier translation by Burgundio of Pisa, or only to the fragmentary version that has come down to us. To reach an answer, the Latin versions and their Greek (...) models are studied as “fluid texts”, which indicates that all individual witnesses of the text and of its translations contain readings and variants that differentiate them from each other and from the translator’s ultimate intentions. In their turn, the fluid elements cause changes to persist throughout the transmission process and continue to exert mutual influence. A detailed, though necessarily largely incomplete study of some of these aspects leads to unnoticed evidence and to an uncertain but optimistic conclusion. (shrink)

In this important new study, Pieter Duvenage shows that Habermas’s work on aesthetics, far from being marginal to his core concerns, is central to understanding and evaluating Habermas's entire theoretical enterprise. This important new study shows that Habermas's work on aesthetics is central to understanding and evaluating his entire theoretical enterprise. Duvenage demonstrates that, in the first phase of his intellectual career, Habermas emphasizes the communicative and societal relevance of art; in the second phase, the idea of a communicative (...) aesthetics is worked out in terms of a theory of rationality. Reveals that Habermas’s later work offers a third, albeit undeveloped, alternative that suggests a convergence of the two. Offers a critical perspective on the role of aesthetics in Habermas's work and proposes possible alternatives. (shrink)

This book argues that Protestant theological ethics not only reveals basic virtue ethical characteristics, but also contributes significantly to a viable contemporary virtue ethics. Pieter Vos demonstrates that post-Reformation theological ethics still understands the good in terms of the good life, takes virtues as necessary for living the good life and considers human nature as a source of moral knowledge. Vos approaches Protestant theology as an important bridge between pre-modern virtue ethics, shaped by Aristotle and transformed by Augustine of (...) Hippo, and late modern understandings of morality. The volume covers a range of topics, going from eudaimonism and Calvinist ethics to Reformed scholastic virtue ethics and character formation in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. The author shows how Protestantism has articulated other-centered virtues from a theology of grace, affirmed ordinary life and emphasized the need of transformation of this life and its orders. Engaging with philosophy of the art of living, Neo-Aristotelianism and exemplarist ethics, he develops constructive contributions to a contemporary virtue ethics. (shrink)

Since Mendeleev’s discovery in 1869, the periodic table has figured as the ultimate paper tool in chemical research. It has proved to be a vital research instrument in the arsenal of the chemical community. No chemistry textbook, lecture theatre or scientific laboratory is complete without a copy of the periodic table of the elements. -/- This however, should not necessarily imply that the periodic table has never had to contend with problems. In this thesis, the history of the accommodation of (...) the rare-earth elements in the periodic table will be addressed. When Mendeleev published his periodic table in 1869, the rare earths already constituted a major obstacle. Mendeleev was able to include only four members of the rare earths and he experienced great difficulties in positioning these elements. Question marks and wrong atomic weights reigned in the last rows of Mendeleev’s system. -/- This problematic accommodation quickly grew into one of the most serious threats for the periodic law. For over fifty years, chemists continually struggled with the placement of these maddeningly similar elements. As a consequence, a lot of chemists started to question the validity of the periodic law, but others took it as a sign that the concept of a chemical element had to be reconsidered. As a result, this work intends to retrace the mutual influence of the philosophical ideas about the nature of chemical elements and the development of the periodic table from its inception in 1869 to the discovery of Moseley’s law in 1913 and Bohr’s publication of his landmark paper On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules. -/- The aim of this thesis is to show how, on the one hand, the periodic table (as a research instrument) helped in reformulating the contemporary ideas about chemical elements, and how it aided in developing a new research program in order to resolve the rare earth crisis. On the other hand, the question will be taken up to what extent Crookes’ evolutionary ideas about meta elements helped in saving the periodic table from a severe downfall by solving the gnawing problem of the rare-earth elements. In particular, this work will also focus on the investigations of the Czech chemist, Bohuslav Brauner. It will be shown how Brauner, under the influence of Crookes’ ideas, was led to his formulation of the Asteroid Hypothesis, according to which all the rare-earth elements should be placed in a single case of the periodic table. (shrink)

In various publications over the past years, Floridi has developed a theory of semantic information as well-formed, meaningful, and truthful data. This theory is more or less orthogonal to the standard entropy-based notions of information known from physics, information theory, and computer science that all define the amount of information in a certain system as a scalar value without any direct semantic implication. In this context the question rises what the exact relation between these various conceptions of information is and (...) whether there is a real need to enrich these mathematically more or less rigid definitions with a less formal notion of semantic information. I investigate various philosophical aspects of the more formal definitions of information in the light of Floridi’s theory. The position I defend is that the formal treatment of the notion of information as a general theory of entropy is one of the fundamental achievements of modern science that in itself is a rich source for new philosophical reflection. This makes information theory a competitor of classical epistemology rather than a servant. In this light Floridi’s philosophy of information is more a reprise of classical epistemology that only pays lip service to information theory but fails to address the important central questions of philosophy of information. Specifically, I will defend the view that notions that are associated with truth, knowledge, and meaning all can adequately be reconstructed in the context of modern information theory and that consequently there is no need to introduce a concept of semantic information. (shrink)

La teoría democrática rara vez se ajusta a las prácticas democráticas y las fluctuaciones de la opinión pública rara vez coincide con la cobertura de ese mismo actor político en los medios de comunicación. En septiembre de 2010, el partido anti-inmigración sueco, los Sweden Democrats (SD), superaron el límite electoral necesario para participar en el parlamento de Suecia y su popularidad no ha cesado de crecer. En este artículo, analizamos el efecto que tiene la exposición mediática en las fluctuaciones de (...) las encuestas de opinión sobre los partidos políticos, o el llamado efecto mediático. Nuestros resultados muestran que el efecto mediático es más intenso en el caso del SD que en el de otros partidos parlamentarios. La exposición mediática repercute en ocasiones, pero no en el mismo grado ni necesariamente en el mismo momento. (shrink)

Ausgangspunkt der Betrachtung von Aristoteles’ Ansichten zur Ontologie mathematischer Gegenstände ist die Sichtweise seines Lehrers Platon auf die Gegenstände der Mathematik. Dieser war der Ansicht, dass die eigentlichen Gegenstände der mathematischen Wissenschaften Geometrie und Arithmetik sowohl unveränderlich als nicht wahrnehmbar sind, und daher als getrennt von den physikalischen Gegenständen existierend angenommen werden müssen. Die Gründe, die Platon dafür hatte, sind von zweierlei Art.

This is a commentary piece on Marco Pavanini's article ' ‘Multistability and Derrida’s Différance: Investigating the Relations Between Postphenomenology and Stiegler’s General Organology' in which I critically extend upon his comparative analysis of postphenomenology''s notion of multistability and Stiegler's conception of organology, focusing in particular on the pharmacological nature of Stiegler's organology and the latter's most recent re-interpretation of it in terms of entropy and negentropy. Among other things I show, and both are more intended as additions than criticisms with (...) respect to Pavanini’s very helpful comparison, that the most important concern for Stiegler in theorizing technology is the fact that the transductive relations between the three organ systems distinguished in his pharmaco-organology of technology open up affective or libidinal circuits between these systems, i.e., circuits either of desire or drive depending on the way the pharmakon is adopted or not, and that these circuits are fundamentally noetic circuits vulnerable to denoetization; and that these libidinal-noetic circuits as conditioned by technology should be interpreted in terms of entropy and negentropy. Both insights are lacking in postphenomenology, which generally fails to consider the irreducibly destitutive character of all technology, rightfully emphasized by Pavanini, since it lacks a genuine pharmacological awareness. (shrink)