In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Unique Response to Death:Day of the Dead Fiestas and Communal Articulations of ResistanceDenise Meda-LambruIntroductionPhilosophers such as Octavio Paz and Emilio Uranga theorize death grounded in Mexican circumstances to show an intimate relational dynamic with life. In their view, death is embedded in the everydayness of the living. Carlos A. Sánchez, in "Death and the Colonial Difference," explains that the Mexican idea of death reveals much about the (...) life and the situatedness of those who subscribe to the relational dynamic between life and death. Death is linked to the living, especially for those who are situated in inferiorized positions. In the accounts promoted by Paz and by Uranga, the historical and social conditions of lived experience provide the context for how death is conceived, and, subsequently, treated. They advance Mexican conceptions of death and provide interesting perspectives into how some colonized peoples are resisting narrow narratives of death. This is to say that their approaches do not grant the dominant assumption that death is merely a biological event or a life event ceasing the life of the individual. In this essay, I examine their critiques of dominant assumptions of death to elaborate on conceptions of death contextualized within historical and social entanglements, namely, a Mexican analysis of death. In particular, I utilize Paz's work on Day of the Dead fiestas to study communal practices and theorize the ritual dimensions of the life and death relationship. Through an examination of a Mexican approach to death, I contend that rituals of death help locate the non-dominant social logics that engender resistant activity and cultivate a distinct interconnected communal relation.To develop this position, I clarify the historical and social distinctions between Mexican and Anglo-American approaches to death and analyze literature promoting a Mexican view of death. Ultimately, I share a similar view [End Page 31] with Paz, Uranga, and Sánchez who charge that there is a unique Mexican idea of death. However, to be clear, my interest in their work does not assume they represent the Mexican view of death (Brandes, Skulls to the Living). Rather, I am interested in exploring how their discussions of death, from a particular socio-historical situation, reveal ways in which colonized peoples refuse dichotomous narratives of death. Sánchez's work, in particular, provides valuable insights into the Mexican relation with death, particularly the role of coloniality/modernity with temporality. Lastly, as I return to Paz's own discussion of death, I refer to the sensibilities and practices relevant to the resistant dimensions of a Mexican relationship with death. An analysis of Paz's focus on fiestas offers a focus distinct from Sánchez in that it pays significant attention to the ritual dimensions of death and helps illustrate the resistant responses to hegemonic social norms. Thus, paying attention to communal practices, this essay emphasizes the relationship between death rituals and deviant activity to dominant modes of being.What Is Death? Examining the DistinctionsScholars have noted a distinction between the logics involved in European and Anglo-American approaches to death and those of Mexican people. Emilio Uranga asserts that "[f]or the North American (el norteamericano), death is a reality that must be hidden, a phenomenon that is silenced and masked as much as possible so that it will not disturb, with its impertinence, the flow of a life that unfolds in radical dedication to [self]-realization and work" (qtd. in Sánchez 180). Paz shares a similar view of this concealment. He writes that "the word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips" ("Day of the Dead" 57). Paz describes death for the Euro-Anglo as one that is treated as a stinging topic to be avoided. In both Uranga's view and Paz's view, the Euro-Anglo phenomenon of death is not socially discussed or regarded as part of the daily lived realities of the subject. If we take their accounts as at least generally accurate, then for Anglos, death is something that is to be treated as separate from life.1In distinction, however, the Mexican attitude toward death is described as... (shrink)

In this note, the problem of tracking random references and rejecting random perturbations in a quadrotor, both generated by an auxiliary system named exosystem, is solved by extending the deterministic tracking problem to the area of stochastic processes. Besides, it is considered that only a part of the state vector of the quadrotor is available through measurements. As a consequence, the state vector of the plant must be estimated in order to close the control loop. On this basis, a controller (...) to track random references and to reject random perturbations is developed by combining a Kalman filter to estimate the references and perturbations of an exosystem and an observer to estimate the states of a quadrotor. Besides, to obtain a more practical controller, the analysis is carried out in discrete time. Numerical simulations are used in a quadrotor to confirm the validity and effectiveness of the proposed control. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonial Movidas: María Lugones’s Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through CosmologiesDenise Meda CalderonIntroductionMaría Lugones advances a decolonial feminist methodology that allows one to see both dehumanizing social reductions of colonized peoples and the resistant relations operating within non-dominant socialities. By exploring this double “seeing,” I articulate the relationship between resistant socialities and Lugones’s notion of decolonial aesthesis. In her only published text on decolonial aesthesis, Lugones states: “Thinking about (...) aesthesis, I think about the body and permeability and all that permeability allows us to reconceive about the world we live in” (qtd. in Ortega 275). Lugones promotes a notion of decolonial aesthesis that engages a resistant permeable sensing and, I argue, is exposed by her distinct approach to cosmology.1My analysis begins with Lugones’s decolonial methodology to articulate a “seeing” of coloniality that I contend leads to her development of decolonial aesthesis. In particular, I show that Lugones sketches a view of decolonial aesthesis as a sensing that grounds resistance to dehumanizing social reductions and reveals a non-dominant social relationality expressed through concrete sensuous movements. I suggest that Lugones theorizes a communal interconnected dimension of resistance as decolonial aesthesis through cosmologic relation. To flesh out this point, I turn to two interlocutors central to Lugones’s intellectual genealogy: Gloria Anzaldúa and Rodolfo Kusch. I conclude by interpreting Lugones’s reading of Anzaldúa as a coalitional movida performing decolonial aesthesis.Moving to “Seeing” ColonialityLugones’s 2010 essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” constitutes a methodological intervention or movida in gender scholarship. Referring to the [End Page 22] expansive global power system, Lugones argues that gender is historically implicated as part of the colonial/modern project and sustains a dominative closure that marks alternative socialities as unintelligible. The colonial/modern system established norms that did not previously inform social communities. A gender binary was imposed onto colonized peoples, erasing the existing socialities that informed the everyday of those peoples. Lugones’s analysis of gender exposes the deep social fissures that emerge from coloniality, and the tremendous harm sustained by reading gender across all social arrangements and onto all knowledge systems.According to Lugones, the colonial/modern category of gender shows a pervasive subjugation to non-humanity of peoples whose sex status does not conform to binary logics. Regarding these reductive processes, Lugones writes: “This dehumanization and bestialization occurred precisely because these people were not understood by the colonizers and enslavers as social agents, and thus their sexual difference [was] not socializable. Thus, one does not find gender; animals do not have gender” (“Gender and Universality” 44). Since gender is assigned to humans, reading gender onto colonized peoples covers up dehumanization, even in calls for gender-based liberation.It is precisely through seeing coloniality that we can track the concealed social arrangements and see the worlds of sense that do not conform to the colonial/modern system. Lugones suggests this point in the following quote:To see the coloniality is to see both jaqi, the persona, the being that is in a world of being without dichotomies, and the beast, both real, both vying under different powers for survival. Thus to see the coloniality is to reveal the very degradation that gives us two renditions of life and a being rendered by them.(“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 751–52)As Lugones’s words indicate, seeing coloniality involves a complex sensing that goes beyond seeing from dominant social norms and gender roles.Lugones’s methodological movida of seeing coloniality reveals the dichotomous categorization as part of the immense violence committed against peoples as colonized subjects with non-human status. This move urges a recognition of the superimposed categories that continue to harm and separate colonized peoples from their fluid relations with cosmologies (Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 746). Seeing the coloniality of gender elicits a transition to the possibilities of sensing from the positionalities deemed animal, in search of socialities that are not mediated by modern/colonial categories. Subsequently, seeing coloniality is a pivotal methodological movida to theorizing resistance in non-dominative socialities, or what Lugones calls decolonial aesthesis.2 [End Page 23]Decolonial AesthesisLugones’s decolonial aesthesis is not concerned... (shrink)

_Many scholars argue that the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic practices and resistance have been undertheorized or omitted. This paper examines aesthetic processes taken up by Amelia Mesa-Bains (1994, 1999) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 2015) to theorize how some Chicanx artists employ an aesthetic based on spirituality as relational, memorial, and material practice to critique colonial ideologies embedded in dichotomies such as man/woman, subject/object, fine/folk art, and individual/community. By focusing on Mesa-Bains’ altar installations and Anzaldúa’s writing process, I draw out how (...) social relations and memory work operate to interpret the relationship between aesthetics and spirituality. I argue that the relational dynamic of their aesthetic sensibilities and techniques show ways some Chicanx scholars and artists subscribe to a sense of spirituality that maintains interconnected relations with others who have been disempowered and marginalized._ _ __To support this position, in the first half of the paper, I analyze the relational sensibilities central to_ _Chicanx aesthetic sensibility of _rasquache domesticana,_ which highlights the concrete spaces in which Chicanx, their aesthetic perception, and techniques generate a communal resistance that is sustained through spirituality. The second half turns to Mesa-Bains’ altar installation for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1994) and Anzaldúa’s writing process described in Borderlands (1987) to clarify ways in which aesthetics and spiritual relations engender practices of resistance to social dichotomies. _. (shrink)

COVID-19 forced many institutions of higher learning to make a sudden switch from face-to-face classes to emergency remote learning. This move was welcomed with mixed reactions by first year students. The purpose of this study was to investigate first year students’ experiences of emergency remote learning amidst the time of the global pandemic of COVID-19 in the United Arab Emirates. The study adopted a qualitative approach within an interpretivist paradigm and it was conducted as an exploratory case study in a (...) federal university. Three hundred and ninety two open-ended questionnaires were completed by first year students about their experiences of emergency remote learning. Data was analysed using content analysis. It was concluded that the best way to judge the validity of emergency remote learning is by taking context into consideration. The use of different online teaching strategies help cater for diverse needs of first year students and reduce dropout rates. (shrink)

Claims about coercion play a significant role in some of the most important questions in political philosophy: most ordinary citizens as well as philosophers think that the exercise of power by the state and other political institutions is coercive, and as such requires special justification. Political philosophy, it has been assumed, must assess both the truth of that claim and its relevance for whether or not states, in general, can be justified. Whether the state is always or necessarily coercive is (...) a central question in the philosophy of law. Under what conditions a state exercising coercive power can be justified is the question that informs all major works in the social contract tradition since Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. (shrink)

November 1936 PREFACE THIS book is, in slightly revised form, a dis sertation presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Yale University.

There is widespread agreement that the European Union is presently suffering from a lack of social justice. Yet there is significant disagreement about what the relevant injustice consists in: Federalists believe the EU can only remedy its justice deficit through the introduction of direct interpersonal transfers between people living in separate states. Intergovernmentalists believe the justice-related purpose of the EU is to enable states to cooperate fairly, and to remain internally just and democratic in the face of increased global pressure (...) on welfare states. I suggest that despite their fundamental differences, many of the most reasonable and prominent philosophical accounts of social justice in the EU nonetheless converge in their institutional prescriptions. In particular, they may each serve as a justificatory basis for introducing the European social minimum, an EU-wide income support scheme. (shrink)

Juri Lotman. Mask in an artistic world of Gogol, and the masks of Anatoli Kaplan. The paper deals with an intersemiotic problem — how it is possible to represent a verbal image by the means of sculpture. It was written as an afterword for a German edition of N. Gogol’s Dead Souls (illustrated by photos on mask-sculpures by Anatoli Kaplan) thus using a style meant for general reader. However, it includes a deep analysis and several important conclusions about the (...) fancy worlds of Gogol and Kaplan, and about the possibilities to create connections between them. It is stressed that the very artistic illustration is possible only due to its independence, due to the subjective seeing of the author. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 98-100.

Should we be worried that the concept of trust is increasingly used when we assess non-human agents and artefacts, say robots and AI systems? Whilst some authors have developed explanations of the concept of trust with a view to accounting for trust in AI systems and other non-agents, others have rejected the idea that we should extend trust in this way. The article advances this debate by bringing insights from conceptual engineering to bear on this issue. After setting up a (...) target concept of trust in terms of four functional desiderata (trust-reliance distinction, explanatory strength, tracking affective responses, and accounting for distrust), I analyze how agential vs. non-agential accounts can satisfy these. A final section investigates how ‘non-ideal’ circumstances—that is, circumstances where the manifest and operative concept use diverge amongst concept users—affect our choice about which rendering of trust is to be preferred. I suggest that some prominent arguments against extending the language of trust to non-agents are not decisive and reflect on an important oversight in the current debate, namely a failure to address how narrower, agent-centred accounts curtail our ability to distrust non-agents. (shrink)

When social media influencers post sponsored content, it should be recognizable as such. However, there is no European Union-wide legislation governing sponsorship transparency, and monitoring practices differ significantly across member states. In Romania, where we conducted our study, such regulations are only just emerging, and there are weak monitoring policies regarding advertising disclosure on SMI branded posts. In this study, we examined how two different types of advertising disclosure commonly used on Instagram are likely to affect consumers’ behavioral outcomes, such (...) as purchase intention and intention toward the SMI, mediated by the activation of conceptual persuasion knowledge, via negative affect and the trustworthiness of the SMI. We conducted a three-level between-subjects online experiment, manipulating the absence versus the presence of advertising, which came in one of two types, brand-unspecific and brand-specific. Considering the mediation path via the trustworthiness of the SMI, findings suggest that the paid partnership disclosure had positive outcomes for purchase intention and intention toward the SMI. (shrink)

Among other findings presented by Dinh et al. (2020), the authors conclude that people accept cognitive enhancement (CE) more readily when it is used by others than by themselves. In fact, in study...

The aim of this article is to argue that the principle of “publicity” constitutes a fundamental idea in Kant’s political thought. Publicity provides a central insight that binds together various strands of Kant’s political writings (on issues as diverse as the question of Enlightenment, the right of revolution, historical teleology, reflective judgment, cosmopolitan citizenship, democratic peace, and republican government), and moreover, it offers a much-needed cornerstone for a systematic exposition of his nonexistent political philosophy. Apart from some eminent examples, publicity (...) has been a rather neglected topic in the ever-expanding literature on Kant’s political ideas. Revisiting this notion will make us more attentive to his evocation of the “spirit of republicanism” over and above the letter of the law, and might prompt us to reconsider Kant’s reputation as a classical representative of liberal political thought. Indeed, it should inspire us to situate Kant’s appeal for the “public use of reason” in the vicinity of the republican ideal of political liberty. (shrink)

It is shown to be consistent that the reals are covered by ℵ1 meagre sets yet there is a Baire class 1 function which cannot be covered by fewer than ℵ2 continuous functions. A new cardinal invariant is introduced which corresponds to the least number of continuous functions required to cover a given function. This is characterized combinatorially. A forcing notion similar to, but not equivalent to, superperfect forcing is introduced.

Nakba is ignored in Western philosophy encyclopedias, and the notion of genocide is rarely explained. In turn, there is much talk about the Holocaust.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 546-564, June 2022.

El presente trabajo esboza la doctrina suareciana sobre el ejercicio del poder soberano en el contexto ideológico de la llamada Escuela de Salamanca, haciendo foco en la factibilidad de la resistencia al mismo, en los casos de tiranía y vinculando tal resistencia a la clave fundamental de la comunidad política que es el bien común, al cual está ordenada la potestad soberana. Nos interesa confrontar esta doctrina con la de un autor contemporáneo a Suárez y clásico por sus aportes a (...) la noción de soberanía de la República como lo fue Jean Bodin, con sus Seis Libros de la República. (shrink)

This article by Juri Lotman from the third volume of Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Sign Systems Studies) in 1967, deals with the problem of artistic modelling. The general working questions are whether art displays any characteristic traits that are common for all modelling systems and which could be the specific traits that can distinguish art from other modelling systems. Art is seen as a secondary modelling system, more precisely, as a play-type model, which is characterised simultaneously by practical and (...) conventional behaviour and constant awareness of the possibility of alternate meanings to the one that is currently being perceived. At the same time art has play-like elements but is not the same as play, since play is inherently rule-bound, whereas art is a more flexible model thepurpose of which is truth. Art is a special type of modelling system, since it is on one hand suitable for storing very large amount of complex information, but onthe other hand it can increase the stored information and transform the consumer. (shrink)

Since Popper and Lakatos, the demarcation line between science and non-science has been considered one of the fundamental issues of the philosophy of science. According to Lakatos, pseudoscience is a non-science, which appears as science, using science's public authority. Since then, mountains of texts have been published on how non-sciences, such as astrology, are not sciences. -/- But the enemy is not on the other side of the border. The enemy is in our midst. Science has been institutionalized. The best (...) way to do the pseudoscience is to fuss inside the big enterprise recognized as a science. (shrink)

Many attempts have been made to solve Hume's problem. However, the assumptions leading to the problem have remained largely unnoticed. Moreover, since Goodman introduced the predicate "grue", philosophers without relevant mathematical education have been confused. In addition, various delusive arguments from convergence have been presented. In this book, it is maintained that knowledge has to be feasible and relevant and that several solutions fail to meet that demand. It is argued that the crucial presupposition of the problem of induction is (...) that clairvoyance is impossible and that this presupposition is unproven. Generalized Goodman predicates are introduced. To criticize arguments from convergence, the notion of "undecided game" is introduced. A relationship between Zeno's paradox and the problem of induction is revealed. A distinction between "do not know" and "cannot know" is consistently held. It is concluded that, as yet, we do not know the future and that it is impossible to prove that it is impossible to know the future. This book should be useful to professionals in epistemology and philosophy of science, and might be of interest to logicians and mathematicians. (shrink)

Tõde või eimiski [= Truth or Nothingness]. A collection of philosophical essays 1990-2021. In Estonian. -/- Kogumikku hoolikalt valitud tekstid on ühelt poolt loomingulised, lugejat intrigeerivad ning interdistsiplinaarsed – kõige rohkem põimitakse filosoofilisi arutlusi psühholoogilistega. Kuid teisest küljest on esseed filosoofiliselt ranged, demonstreerides oskust jääda ka rakenduslikes teemaarendustes üdini filosoofiks. Raamatus leidub nii filosoofia olemuse üle arutlevaid tekste, kaasahaaravaid filosoofia suurkujude tõlgendusi, põhjalikult käsitletakse ka praktilise filosoofia alla kuuluvaid teemasid kuni meie kaasaja poliitilise olukorra diagnoosi ja kriitikani välja. Raamatu lõpus (...) on intervjuu väljaandjaga. (shrink)

It is shown to be consistent with set theory that every set of reals of size ℵ1 is null yet there are ℵ1 planes in Euclidean 3-space whose union is not null. Similar results will be obtained for other geometric objects. The proof relies on results from harmonic analysis about the boundedness of certain harmonic functions and a measure theoretic pigeonhole principle.

This article, first published in Russian in 1984 in Sign Systems Studies, introduces the concept of semiosphere and describes its principal attributes. Semiosphere is the semiotic space, outside of which semiosis cannot exist. The ensemble of semiotic formations functionally precedes the singular isolated language and becomes a condition for the existence of the latter. Without the semiosphere, language not only does not function, it does not exist. The division between the core and the periphery is a law of the internal (...) organisation of the semiosphere. There exists boundary between the semiosphere and the non- or extra-semiotic space that surrounds it. The semiotic border is represented by the sum of bilingual translatable “filters”, passing through which the text is translated into another language (or languages), situated outside the given semiosphere. The levels of the semiosphere comprise an inter-connected group of semiospheres, each of them being simultaneously both participant in the dialogue (as part of the semiosphere) and the space of dialogue (the semiosphere as a whole). (shrink)

To any metric space it is possible to associate the cardinal invariant corresponding to the least number of rectifiable curves in the space whose union is not meagre. It is shown that this invariant can vary with the metric space considered, even when restricted to the class of convex subspaces of separable Banach spaces. As a corollary it is obtained that it is consistent with set theory that any set of reals of size ℵ 1 is meagre yet there are (...) ℵ 1 rectifiable curves in R 3 whose union is not meagre. The consistency of this statement when the phrase "rectifiable curves" is replaced by "straight lines" remains open. (shrink)