Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial, colonial or capitalist) is an acosmic technology that rejects its belonging to the cosmos. The Space Age and what is now called New Space (both of which have neo-colonial aims) are perfect illustrations of white technology and its anthropocentric enthusiasm. Rejecting this colonial and exploitative technology, Afrofuturism – from the music and poems of (...) Sun Ra to the paintings of Wangechi Mutu to the poems and activism of Alexis Pauline Gumbs – is first and foremost an attempt to use outer space not as a space open to conquest, but as a mediation, a stellar detour thanks to which our terrestrial condition could be politically and anthropologically rethought. At odds with any geoengineering project, Afrofuturism conjures up an “epoch of being” (Heidegger) in which technology would be constantly inhabited by a form of uncanny that would definitively prevent human beings from considering technology as a way of mastering the Earth. (shrink)

An online world exists in which businesses have become burdened with managerial and legal duties regarding the seeking of informed consent and the protection of privacy and personal data, while growing public cynicism regarding personal data collection threatens the healthy development of marketing and e-commerce. This research seeks to address such cynicism by assisting organisations to devise ethical consent management processes that consider an individual’s attitudes, their subjective norms and their perceived sense of control during the elicitation of consent. It (...) does so by developing an original conceptual model for online informed consent, argued through logical reasoning, and supported by an illustrative example, which brings together the autonomous authorisation (AA) model of informed consent and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Accordingly, it constructs a model for online informed consent, rooted in the ethic of autonomy, which employs behavioural theory to facilitate a mode of consent elicitation that prioritises users’ interests and supports ethical information management and marketing practices. The model also introduces a novel concept, the informed attitude, which must be present for informed consent to be valid. It also reveals that, under certain tolerated conditions, it is possible for informed consent to be provided unwillingly and to remain valid: this has significant ethical, information management and marketing implications. (shrink)

Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial,...

Background: Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve high diagnostic accuracy for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, they are not yet applied in clinical routine. One important reason for this is a lack of model comprehensibility. Recently developed visualization methods for deriving CNN relevance maps may help to fill this gap as they allow the visualization of key input image features that drive the decision of the model. We investigated whether models with higher accuracy (...) also rely more on discriminative brain regions predefined by prior knowledge. Methods: We trained a CNN for the detection of AD in N = 663 T1-weighted MRI scans of patients with dementia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and verified the accuracy of the models via cross-validation and in three independent samples including in total N = 1655 cases. We evaluated the association of relevance scores and hippocampus volume to validate the clinical utility of this approach. To improve model comprehensibility, we implemented an interactive visualization of 3D CNN relevance maps, thereby allowing intuitive model inspection. Results: Across the three independent datasets, group separation showed high accuracy for AD dementia versus controls (AUC ≥ 0.91) and moderate accuracy for amnestic MCI versus controls (AUC ≈ 0.74). Relevance maps indicated that hippocampal atrophy was considered the most informative factor for AD detection, with additional contributions from atrophy in other cortical and subcortical regions. Relevance scores within the hippocampus were highly correlated with hippocampal volumes (Pearson’s r ≈ −0.86, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The relevance maps highlighted atrophy in regions that we had hypothesized a priori. This strengthens the comprehensibility of the CNN models, which were trained in a purely data-driven manner based on the scans and diagnosis labels. The high hippocampus relevance scores as well as the high performance achieved in independent samples support the validity of the CNN models in the detection of AD-related MRI abnormalities. The presented data-driven and hypothesis-free CNN modeling approach might provide a useful tool to automatically derive discriminative features for complex diagnostic tasks where clear clinical criteria are still missing, for instance for the differential diagnosis between various types of dementia. (shrink)

A collection of essays in French or English on the reception of Cartesian philosphy.

This book traces the contributions of the Lévy-Bruhl family to social and political thought and expertise in 20th-century France, shaping the anticipation of economic and health crises. How French Moderns Think tells the story of the French sociological tradition through four generations of the Lévy-Bruhl family: Lucien, who founded the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris; his son Henri, who founded the Institute of Roman Law; his grandson Raymond, who took part in the creation of the National Institute (...) of Statistics and Economic Studies; and his great-grandson Daniel, a vaccine specialist at the Institute of Public Health. This family history casts a new light on the philosophical debates about “primitive mentality” and the “savage mind.” By drawing on the expert knowledge inherent in this family genealogy, the articulation between the logical and the “pre-logical” is not a cognitive question but rather a problem of anticipating unpredictable events. By relating Lévy-Bruhl’s engagements from the Dreyfus Affair to the Minister of Armaments during the First World War, Keck narrates the confrontation of the socialist ideal of justice and truth with the French colonial experience and its transformations in global technologies preparing for pandemics. (shrink)

The article deals with the concept of “justness” as it is treated by the Genevan psychologist Henri-Fréderic Amiel (1821-1881) in his Journal. Justness has its seat in the domain of “doing” rather than in the domain of “saying” or “thinking”: its non-propositional nature entails that one can “do just” while having false beliefs and vice-versa. The virtue of justness concerns the sphere of interpersonal interactions and goes hand in hand with moderation as virtue concerning the sphere of personal action. In (...) both cases, it is an excess of effort on the part of the will vis-à-vis the intelligence that keeps one away from virtue. This “Taoist moment” in Amiel also implies a critique of the activism of modern Western civilization and of the overweight of rules (“categorical imperatives”) that accompany it. (shrink)

Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics. Edited by Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 161. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxvii + 881. $179, €149 ; $162, €135.

The article is about Adam Smith’s short account of J. J. Rousseau’s Deuxième Discours in a Letter to the Edinburgh Review (1756). Special attention is payed to how the report deals with its subject. Smith proposes a surprising rapprochement between Rousseau and Mandeville. Both deny the natural sociability of man (while recognizing his aptitude to pity others) and show the biased nature of the principles of civil life. The difference would be only “stylistic”: whereas the “aristocrat” Mandeville makes the apologue (...) of the civil life in the commercial society the “republican” Rousseau criticizes it and affirms the superiority of the state of nature. In his own TMS Smith develops a theory of “sympathy” that can be understood as a critique of the negation of natural sociability common to both Mandeville and Rousseau. (shrink)

Daniel Marcelle, Aron Gurwitsch, The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch, Volume I: Constitutive Phenomenology in Historical Perspective, Dordrecht: Springer, 2009; Volume II: Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Dordrecht: Springer, 2010; Volume III: The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin, Dordrecht: Springer, 2010; Claudia Șerban, Jean-Luc Marion, Certitudes negatives, Paris: Grasset, 2010; Christian Rössner, Hans-Dieter Gondek, László Tengelyi, Neue Phanomenologie in Frankreich, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011; Daniel Dwyer, Hans-Helmuth Gander, Husserl-Lexikon, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010; Délia Popa, Jean-François Lavigne, (...) Acceder au transcendantal? Reduction et idealisme transcendantal dans les Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie pure et une philosophie phénoménologique de Husserl, Paris: Vrin, 2009; Mădălina Diaconu, Lambert Wiesing, Das Mich der Wahrnehmung. Eine Autopsie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009; Mădălina Diaconu, Sam B. Girgus, Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption. Time, Ethics, and the Feminine, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010; Rolf Kühn, Frédéric Seyler, ≪ Barbarie ou culture ≫ : L’ethique de l’affectivitedans la phenomenologie de Michel Henry, Paris: Kimé, 2010; Stephan Steiner, Mette Lebech, On the Problem of Human Dignity. A Hermeneutical and henomenological Investigation, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. (shrink)

Summary John Frederic Daniell (1790–1845) invented the constant battery in 1836. He meant it to be a philosophical instrument to be utilized in both lecture demonstrations and electrochemical laboratory research. But the constant battery was taken up in electrometallurgy, not primarily as a source of electric current but more as an electrodeposition device. As such it became an essential tool in the development of galvanoplastics (electroforming). This article traces the tortuous transformation of this lecture demonstration apparatus into an electrometallurgical (...) tool, and includes some aspects of British and French patent laws, and the electrogilding industry. (shrink)

Why and how do norms emerge? Which norms emerge and why these ones in particular? Such questions belong to the ‘problem of the emergence of norms’, which consists of an inquiry into the production of norms in social collectives. I address this question through the ethnographic study of the emergence of ‘norms against violence’ in the political collective Occupy Geneva. I do this, first, empirically, with the analysis of my field observations; and, second, theoretically, by discussing my findings. In consequence (...) of two episodes categorized as sexual assaults that occurred in their camp, the members of Occupy Geneva decided to tackle those issues in a general assembly. Their goal was to amend their first charter of good conduct in order to reform its norms and complete it with norms aiming to regulate ‘facts’ of ‘unjustified violence’. During a collective deliberation, new norms were devised, debated and consensually adopted. The writing of the new charter took place in a second general assembly during which the wording of the written norms was collectively decided. I show that indignation over the sexual assaults was the main motive that led to the collective deliberation, and that the entire process of the making of these norms was characterized by different collective emotions. Indeed, indignation, contempt and fear played major roles in the emergence of norms prohibiting violence, allowing punishment and exclusion of wrongdoers, and prescribing collective intervention against an aggressor to neutralize the threat represented. These findings prompt me to hypothesize that social norms emerge from emotions thanks to the latters’ internal structure; and that emotions provide causal and grounding explanations for this emergence. Thus, emotions allow us to answer the questions: ‘Why do norms emerge?’ and ‘Why do they have their specific forms?’ In short, I argue that social norms have emotional foundations. (shrink)

“We accept the original theoretical path opened by Michel Henry, which consists in considering the body from the point of view of the flesh and, hence, of life. But, precisely, the question is to know what is the meaning of life that is attested through the phenomenon of the flesh.”1 Such is Renaud Barbaras’s starting point in La vie lacunaire, one of his most recent contributions to a phenomenology of life and to the debate with Michel Henry’s concept of life (...) as immanent auto-affection.2 The support given to Henry’s pioneering path, however, seems to contrast with the prospect of developing a phenomenology of life radically opposed to that of Henry, a prospect mentioned already in Desire and Distance and... (shrink)

In Karl Jaspers' Theory of Irrationality, Daniel Adsett explains how a Jaspersian view of irrationality makes better sense of the irrationality of delusions and worldviews than competing views, offering a novel contribution to contemporary debates about the character of reason.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 193-194 [Access article in PDF] A Comment on Christopher Ciocchetti:"The Responsibility of the Psychopathic Offender" Daniel W. Shuman Questions of responsibility for serious harm are complex and potentially divisive. The way in which we frame these questions and the criteria by which we assess answers to them are colored, in part, by the lens though which we view them. I am a (...) law professor whose writings includes issues relating to criminal responsibility of person with mentally disabilities and I come to this commentary from that perspective. For me questions of moral responsibility raise psychological and philosophical, as well as legal, questions.Ciocchetti's (2003) paper addressees the criminal responsibility of the psychopathic offender. Not sure quite what the author meant by this label, I began to try to understand the concept of psychopathic offender by picking up my DSM-IV-TR and found no reference to such a diagnostic category. Absent a handy reference in the DSM, I looked in the paper for some other definition or recognition of the category of psychopathic offender and found no satisfactory grounding in any body of sound research. Left with the author's unsupported assertions that such a category of persons exists and that they behave in ways the author asks me to accept without support, my lawyer instincts cautioned me to proceed carefully. The psychopathic offender the author describes might well exist, but I am not persuaded of that, nor would be my legal colleagues, absent proof.Next, to the author's thesis that "[t]he offender must have the capacities necessary to understand relationships to justify holding that offender responsible" (p. 176) and that because psychopaths lack this capacity they should not be held criminally responsible. Is the author proposing a new test for criminal responsibility? Certainly no test for criminal nonresponsibility based on mental disability (i.e., insanity defense) in Anglo-American jurisprudence, or any other with which I am familiar, makes status (i.e., a diagnostic category) exculpatory for criminal responsibility. Rather, every test addresses the impact of a mental illness or disorder on the cognitive or volitional capacity of the offender at the time of the offense. The author offers no reason to reject the approach taken for the last several hundred years [End Page 193] by Anglo-American jurisprudence. Moreover, to the extent that status or diagnostic category is relevant in the insanity defense in Anglo-American jurisprudence, character or personality disorders (the genus to which I take it that psychopathy belongs) are often specifically excluded from consideration. For example, the Texas Penal Code (Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 8.01 (Vernon 1994)) states that:It is an affirmative defense to prosecution that, at the time of the conduct charged, the actor, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, did not know that his conduct was wrong. The term "mental disease or defect" does not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct.The federal Insanity Defense Reform Act raises the same issue: The government relies on the legislative history of 18 U.S.C. § 17, which states: "The concept of severity was added to emphasize that non-psychotic behavior disorders or neuroses such as an 'inadequate personality,' 'immature personality,' or a pattern of 'antisocial tendencies' do not constitute the defense.".... The government argues that because Dr. Lorenz would have testified that Salava was not psychotic but suffered from antisocial personality disorder, his testimony was not relevant to either prong of the insanity defense under the statute.... As a general matter, the government's point is well-taken. It seems clear that Congress intended by its inclusion of the modifier "severe" to place certain "disorders" outside the purview of the insanity defense altogether. United States v. Salava, 978 F.2d 320, 323 (7th Cir. 1992) Nowhere in the paper does Chiochetti acknowledge or address these societal judgments of moral responsibility that have already rejected a far more modest version of his proposal in categorically ruling out character or personality disorders from inclusion as... (shrink)

Daniel, Michael E Review of: Words from the wound: selected addresses, letters and homilies of archbishop mark coleridge, by Mark Coleridge, edited by Anthony Ekpo and David Pascoe, pp. 342, $24.95.

If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel M. Gross provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening-and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger's early lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric, where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross goes on (...) to show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom-all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear. (shrink)

This book explores ways in which educational leaders can apply the wisdom of the Tao in their day-to-day work in schools. It offers an alternative to the standard ways of western thinking to give the leader more possibilities when confronting a situation. We tend to value immediate and decisive action, winning, directing, and getting one’s way. Taoist Lessons for Educational Leaders offers another way of approaching the workplace. We can also value waiting and reflection before acting, seeing all participants as (...) winners or at least no one as a loser, following as a form of leadership, and giving away some victories, as beneficial to the governance of a school. There is more than one way to “win” and more than one way assert one’s authority, as illustrated by this book. (shrink)

If we understand modernity as the construction of a distinction –i.e. subjectivity vs. objectivity– postmodernity can be considered the abolition of that distinction, after the experience of its apories. In this paper the interest points towards a non disjunctive direction, towards a kind of thought that may embrace both ambigüity and the relative indiscernibility of the opposites.

El artículo busca profundizar en las elaboraciones de Freud respecto de la agresividad y la inconvertibilidad de la violencia, con el objeto de indagar en los posibles aportes que la perspectiva psicoanalítica puede realizar frente a los problemas sociopolíticos contemporáneos. Este trabajo se detiene en las problemáticas referidas a la naturalización de las identidades, la radicalización de las retóricas comunitarias y los escenarios de exclusión. Sostiene, en este sentido, la importancia de los procesos sublimatorios en el trabajo de diferimiento frente (...) al empuje pulsional. (shrink)

This note argues for the presence of an allusion to Ennius “Annales” 1 Sk. (Musae, quae pedibus magnum pulsatis Olympum) at Appendix Vergiliana “Dirae” 48 (undae, quae uestris pulsatis litora lymphis). This has ramifications not only for the interpretation of the poem, but also for the dating of the “Dirae”, and for the question as to whether Enn. Ann. 1 Sk. is in fact the first line of Ennius’ epic poem.

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the (...) main focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

This paper investigates the evaluation of ritual frame indicating expressions (RFIEs) in two groups of L2 learners: British English learners of Chinese and Mainland Chinese learners of English. RFIEs are expressions by means of which speakers confirm their awareness of rights and obligations in a particular standard situation. Previous research in applied linguistics has largely ignored the production and evaluation of such forms, despite the fact that they are pragmatically-loaded and, as such, are very important for the development of the (...) (meta)pragmatic competence of L2 learners. In our study, we have conducted an experiment in which we exposed our learners to both authentic and constructed uses of RFIEs. The evaluation of their (meta)pragmatic competence has revealed notable linguacultural differences between the two groups of L2 learners. (shrink)

Je défends la classification carnapienne des disciplines sémiotiques en montrant qu'elle permet de caractériser adéquatement la nature de la pragmatique. J'indique, en particulier, comment une notion de système pragmatique pourrait être développée par analogie avec celles de système syntaxique et de système sémantique.I defend Carnap's classification of semiotic disciplines by showing that it leads to an adequate characterization of the nature of pragmatics. In particular, I indicate how a notion of pregmatic system could be constructed on the analogy with those (...) of syntactic system and semantic system. (shrink)

How do people adapt to technology? This study examines one mechanism people may be using to personalize technology—talking to machines. Communicating to machines is similar to other forms of personalization and can be explained using attribution theory. Characteristics of machines (such as relationship to emotions, predictability, and familiarity) may affect people's willingness to communicate. A survey study that examined people's communication to machines showed that people do communicate to some machines, and hypotheses about the characteristics of machines were supported. A (...) second survey study examined the differences between communicating with cars and computers, comparing issues such as frequency, emotionality, and the perceived gender of the machines. Overall, these studies show some of the ways people are adapting to their increasingly computerized, technological environment. (shrink)

Stollenwerk, Daniel J In our contemporary age that has lost confidence in both faith and reason, Pope Benedict XVI insisted throughout his pontificate upon the need for a new synthesis of both. In this article I consider Benedict's study of faith in relation to the ecumenical dialogue and point out that the schism between the Reformed Churches and the Roman Catholic Church occurred at the same time as the breakdown in the Western synthesis of faith and reason. I argue (...) that Benedict's call for a new synthesis may be the only way toward unity at the same time that such a synthesis would fulfil Christianity's call to help direct history and thus construct a more hopeful future. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim’s (2005) most recent formulation of the so-called Supervenience Argument against Non-Reductive Physicalism is discussed. The two stages of Kim’s argument can be seen as instances of, what I will call, the Generalized Exclusion Argument.