Every two years Rene Stettler, owner and director of the Neue Galerie in Luzerne, organizes and hosts the Swiss Biennial on Science, Technics + Aesthetics, an international gathering of scientists, philosophers, and artists for the purpose of discussing their views on a topic of general interest. Stettler has done this since 1995, with each conference centred on a thought-provoking topic. The topic of this year's conference focused on consciousness and teleportation. The conference publicity material posited some interesting discussion points: Are (...) there connections between brain functions, mental phenomena, and quantum physics? What does quantum entanglement tell us about ourselves? What role does consciousness play in the universe (or the universe in consciousness)? Will it ever be possible to teleport human bodies over distance? (shrink)

January 6th, 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Hisashi Nakao.

January 6th, 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Hisashi Nakao.

January 6th, 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Hisashi Nakao.

January 6th, 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Hisashi Nakao.

The events on January 6th should signal to us just how divided the United States is as a country and prompt us to think through some of the challenges we face—as well as what we can reasonably hope for in terms of restoring a belief in the most coveted ideals of American democracy as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, namely, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Upon analyzing Trump’s rise to political power via the (...) lenses of Hannah Arendt’s concept of ideology and Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, I try to find hope through these dark times through looking at the increased momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Youth Climate Movement, two social movements I interpret through the frame of Johan Galtung’s conception of positive peace, that is, as potential infrastructural social systems aligned with social justice that we should enact to promote human flourishing. (shrink)

Lecture on dangers of trend towards colonized mentality in Thai philosophy; delivered originally at village primary school, Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand, January 6th, 1989.

Lecture on dangers of trend towards colonized mentality in Thai philosophy; delivered originally at village primary school, Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand, January 6th, 1989.

Often cited quotation from the Communist Manifesto that capitalism can have an anti-racist, anti-sexist bourgeoisie is the starting point of this analysis. Deploying Žižek's work on the "rotary motion" in the Indivisible Remainder, along with aspects of Marx's analysis of Ideology in the German Ideology to give readers a deeper analysis of Trump's exploitation of white voter's 'new racism as the fear of the 'theft of enjoyment' pinned on the Other' who either threatens to snatch from "us" the treasure of (...) our 'way of life', which conceals a deeper ressentiment which exploded on January 6th, and circulates through the back corners of the internet in white supremacist chatrooms. While these reports have been widely covered in mainstream news sources, a psychoanalytical treatment of "Replacement Theory" through Žižek's work (alongside a deeper reading of Marx, which would take much further work beyond the scope of this paper) reveals that the ideology behind so-called "Replacement Theory" is grounded in a metaphysics of scarcity, which would not exist in a truly communist society of automatic production, plenitude, and common property rights. (shrink)

Hyperpolitics and Political Commitment in the Twenty-First Century What do the January 6th invasion of the Capitol and the anti-racist demonstrations of mid-2020 have in common? Both birthed some of the largest protest movements in American history, but also diminished rapidly after their initial, pre-revolutionary peak. This article reads the recent political sequence through the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’. In contrast to previous types of post-politics or mass politics, ‘hyperpolitics’ stands for a distinctly novel mode of political commitment characteristic of (...) the 2010s, in which a formerly apolitical public sphere finds itself intensely repoliticized, imposing itself on other domains such as the private, cultural, or economic. The return in question yet also runs across parameters that are more low-cost, low-entry, and low-duration than previous twentieth-century types, in stark contrast Max Weber’s typology of politics as the ‘slow boring of hard boards.’. (shrink)

BackgroundThe coronavirus 2019 pandemic placed unprecedented pressures on healthcare services and magnified ethical dilemmas related to how resources should be allocated. These resources include, among others, personal protective equipment, personnel, life-saving equipment, and vaccines. Decision-makers have therefore sought ethical decision-making tools so that resources are distributed both swiftly and equitably. To support the development of such a decision-making tool, a systematic review of the literature on relevant ethical values and principles was undertaken. The aim of this review was to identify (...) ethical values and principles in the literature which relate to the equitable allocation of resources in response to an acute public health threat, such as a pandemic.MethodsA rapid systematic review was conducted using MEDLINE, EMBASE, Google Scholar, LitCOVID and relevant reference lists. The time period of the search was January 2000 to 6th April 2020, and the search was restricted to human studies. January 2000 was selected as a start date as the aim was to capture ethical values and principles within acute public health threat situations. No restrictions were made with regard to language. Ethical values and principles were extracted and examined thematically.ResultsA total of 1,618 articles were identified. After screening and application of eligibility criteria, 169 papers were included in the thematic synthesis. The most commonly mentioned ethical values and principles were: Equity, reciprocity, transparency, justice, duty to care, liberty, utility, stewardship, trust and proportionality. In some cases, ethical principles were conflicting, for example, Protection of the Public from Harm and Liberty.ConclusionsAllocation of resources in response to acute public health threats is challenging and must be simultaneously guided by many ethical principles and values. Ethical decision-making strategies and the prioritisation of different principles and values needs to be discussed with the public in order to prepare for future public health threats. An evidence-based tool to guide decision-makers in making difficult decisions is required. The equitable allocation of resources in response to an acute public health threat is challenging, and many ethical principles may be applied simultaneously. An evidence-based tool to support difficult decisions would be helpful to guide decision-makers. (shrink)

I discuss the origin and development of logic prizes around the world. In a first section I describe how I started this project by creating the Newton da Costa Logic Prize in Brazil in 2014. In a second section I explain how this idea was extended into the world through the manifesto A Logic Prize in Every Country! and how was organized the Logic Prizes Contest at the 6th UNILOG in Vichy in June 2018 with the participation of 9 logic (...) prizes winners from 9 countries. In a third section I discuss how this project will develop in the future with the creation of more logic prizes, an Encyclopædia of Logic, the book series Logic PhDs, as well as the creation of a World Logic Day, January 14, day of birth of Alfred Tarski and of death of Kurt Gödel. (shrink)

The Reverend Professor Colin Gunton (*19th January 1942 † 6th May 2003).

These are the 22 notebooks of Nietzsche’s last notebooks from 1886-1889. Nietzsche stopped writing entirely around 6th of January 1889. There are 1785 notes translated here. This group of notes translated in this book is not complete for the year 1886. There are at least two other notebooks that were done in the year 1886. However, Nietzsche wrote in his notebooks sometime from back to front and currently the notebooks are only in a general chronological order. Refer to the (...) German Nietzsche philology literature for more exact dating. (shrink)

At the end of the nineteenth century, the main source of information about the city of Łódź were not local periodicals (as there were no such publications), but correspondence printed in Warsaw papers. Apart from regular reports, m years 1898 and 1899, in one of leading Warsaw daily papers, Kurier Warszawski, there appeared a series of articles under the title “Znasz-li ten kraj?” signed by Antoni Sygietyński. It was the aftermath of the writer’s visit in Łódź (as it was noticed (...) in Goniec Łódzki, Sygietyński arrived in the city on 3rd of December 1889). The reports concerning the life of the textile city appeared in six issues of Kurier Warszawski, dated from 5th, 6th, 15th and 17th of December 1989 and from 6th and 8th of January in the next year. The author of Na skałach Calvados underlined that the title of the series is not unintentional, because Łódź, according to him, was a fully developed city, which had vast contacts with other regions of the world (Russia, Far East, South and North America) rather than with the rest of Polish cities. The writer compares Łódź to a mushroom, which develops rapidly in favourable conditions, whereas in unfavourable circumstances it becomes a latent form of life. Sygietyński underlines also that the city’s growth and organization reminds an American model. The writer attempts to change a stereotypical opinions about the city, mainly concerning its rapid development of industry, huge number of inhabitants or a triplenational character of the textile metropolis. The author aims at acknowledging a true Lodzermensch, he scrutinizes the cultural life of the city. During his visit in Łódź Sygietyński took part in the opening night of Hauptman’s Dwór zatopiony, and in Christmas party in a catholic shelter for children. The meeting with the youngest citizens gave an opportunity for a closer examination of the conditions they lived in as well as of the financial straits their caretaker, Father Szmidel, was facing. The experience triggered an idea of a charity concert, which Sygietyński decided to organize in Łódź The income was donated for modernization of the shelter. The concert was organized on 25th of March 1899 with the participation of the most famous Warsaw artists (Kruszelnik Borcewicz, Michałowski, Wierzbiłowicz, Trenkiel). Such was the social and cultural scale of the event that it was reported in a number of newspapers. Głos underlined Sygietyński’s input into organization by describing him as „a moral impresario of the show”. The author of Wysadzony z siodla while organizing the concert had two main aims: first - to collect money for the shelter, and the second - to arouse a passion for art among the citizens of Łódź. (shrink)

Recenzja książki: Ewa Bińczyk, _Epoka człowieka. Retoryka i marazm antropocenu_, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa, 2018, ss. 325.

The metropolis of Cairo has witnessed unprecedented transformations since the January revolution of 2011. It witnessed evidently an escalation of war zones and confrontations between protesters and police forces; it also witnessed the militarization and policing of the urban sphere, the creation of segregating buffer walls that paralysed entire areas. However, the Tahrir effect remains evident in that it revolutionized the very notion of what a public space is about. It succeeded in imposing an entirely unprecedented novel choreography for (...) the city in which the ‘stage’ of Tahrir was the exemplary moment that triggered extended and replicated dramaturgical violent public confrontations, public performances and occupations in all the squares of Egypt. This article traces the transformations in relation to the debates pertaining to the ‘right to the city’ relating to the expanding visibility of the street vendors. Despite the military taking over after the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, Cairo has witnessed for the past three years a mesmerizing flourishing art scene. (shrink)

This paper has two parts, a historical and a systematic. In the historical part it is argued that the two major axiomatic approaches to relativistic quantum field theory, the Wightman and Haag-Kastler axiomatizations, are realizations of the program of axiomatization of physical theories announced by Hilbert in his 6th of the 23 problems discussed in his famous 1900 Paris lecture on open problems in mathematics, if axiomatizing physical theories is interpreted in a soft and opportunistic sense suggested in 1927 by (...) Hilbert, Nordheim, and von Neumann. To show this, Section 2 recalls first some of Hilbert's views about the axiomatic approach to physical theories as these were formulated in his 6th problem. It will be .. (shrink)

This paper analyses Etienne Balibar’s thesis of an “ontology of relation”, considering two moments of his theoretical production: his reading of Marx’s 6th thesis on Feuerbach as the grounds for a relational ontology or a thought on transindividuality; and an analysis of the development of this thesis in terms of what Balibar calls “anthropological differences”. Following Balibar, in this paper I suggest that the basic theoretical elements of a thought on transindividuality can be found in both Althusser and Balibar’s contributions (...) to Lire Le Capital (1965), which opens the possibility of conceiving a “Marxist principle of individuation”. I conclude by discussing the limits and the effects of Balibar’s proposal. (shrink)

Professor Ilya Prigogine (January 25, 1917 -- May 28, 2003), Nobel Laureate 1977 in chemistry, was one of the great visionaries of our time. Not content to rest on his laurels, he continued hard technical scientific publication, often with junior colleagues, for 25 years after the Nobel Prize was awarded to him. His fields of work included non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the emergence of dissipative structures and complex behavior, and the foundations of the arrow of time in natural science. He directed (...) two major research institutions: the Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems at the University of Texas at Austin and the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry at Brussels. (shrink)

The Nicomachean Ethics announces itself as a treatise on the highest human good, the “end” (t°low) of human life—eÈdaiµon€a or happiness. In the last chapter of the work (X 9) Aristotle makes it clear that the study of the happy lives of contemplation and political leadership, the virtues, friendship, and pleasure that has by then been carried out in investigating that good—these are the leading themes of the Ethics that he mentions there (1179a33-35)— leaves the treatise’s objectives not yet completely (...) achieved. He began the work by saying (I 1- 2) that the study it contains is intended as a contribution to “political knowledge” (politikØ §pistƵh) or the political capacity or power (dÊnaµiw).1 Its work will not be complete, he now says, until a successful reader (or hearer) has been brought actually to possess that knowledge or power—political knowledge, that is, the fully accomplished capacity for expert political engagement in affairs of state. In effect, the reader of the Nicomachean Ethics needs now to learn, further, the subjects of study to which Aristotle’s own Politics is devoted. Before the aim announced at the beginning of the Ethics can be achieved—that is, before we can fully define and explain in the right sort of way the highest human good, or eÈdaiµon€a (I’ll say more in just a moment about what this right sort of way is)—we need, as he puts it in NE X 9 (1180a32 ff.), to become expert in the establishment of good laws (noµoyetikÆ) and good constitutions (polite›ai, cf. 1181b14, 19, 21). One might find this a surprising claim. As Aristotle himself is in no doubt, eÈdaiµon€a is a feature of the lives of individual persons. On his account it is an activity, or a unified set of ac-. (shrink)

According to Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī, al-Ghazālī was the renewer of the Muslim faith at the end of the 5th / 11th century, whereas al-Rāzī was the renewer of faith at the end of the 6th / 12th century. That al-Ghazālī deserves such an honour can hardly be disputed, and his importance in the history of Islamic thought is generally recognised. However, the same cannot, as easily, be said of al-Rāzī, whose historical significance is far from being truly appreciated, and some (...) of the most important books of whom still await publication. Much is known about his views on particular philosophical and theological problems, and about the historical backgrounds to, and the relations amongst, some of these views. Some rather general observations on his thought are also common; for instance, that he is a heavily philosophising Ash‘arī mutakallim, a master dialectician, and an influential critic of Ibn Sīnā. (shrink)