Parental substance use is a major risk factor for child development, heightening the risk of drug problems in adolescence and young adulthood, and exposing offspring to several types of traumatic event. First, prenatal drug exposure can be considered a form of trauma itself, with subtle but long-lasting sequalae at the neuro-behavioural level. Second, parents’ addiction often entails a childrearing environment characterised by poor parenting skills, disadvantaged contexts and adverse childhood experiences, leading to dysfunctional outcomes. Young adults born from/raised by parents (...) with drug problems and who develop a Substance Used Disorder (SUD) themselves might display a particularly severe condition in terms of cognitive deficits and impaired personality function. This preliminary study aims to investigate the role of early exposure to drugs as a traumatic event, capable of affecting the psychological status of young drug addicts. In particular, it intends to examine the neuropsychological functioning and personality profile of young adults with severe SUDs who were exposed to drugs early in their family context. The research involved 3 groups each consisting of 15 young adults (aged 18-24): a group of inpatients diagnosed with SUDs and exposed to drugs early, a comparison group of non-exposed inpatients and a group of non-exposed youth without SUDs. A neuropsychological battery (Esame Neuropsicologico Breve-2), an assessment procedure for personality disorders (Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure-200) and the Symptom CheckList-90-Revised were administered. According to present preliminary results, young drug addicts exposed to drugs during their developmental age were characterised by elevated rates of neuropsychological impairments, especially at the expense of attentive and executive functions; personality disorders were also common but did not differentiate them from non-exposed young people with SUDs. Alternative multi-focused prevention and intervention programs are needed for children of drug-misusing parents, addressing executive functions and adopting a trauma-focused approach. (shrink)

While there is a widespread acceptance of the link between religiosity and ethics, there is less certainty how this influence occurs exactly, necessitating further research into these issues. A main roadblock to our understanding of this influence from an Islamic perspective is the absence of a validated measurement tool. The purpose of this study therefore is to develop a Scale of Muslims’ Views of Allah. This article discusses how the SMVA was developed through the following five steps: establishment of content (...) and face validity; application of a cognitive interviewing technique to pretest the SMVA with sixteen participants; pilot testing of the SMVA with twelve participants; administration of the SMVA online to marketing and management professionals via a multi-stage cluster sampling process to verify the scale’s reliability and validity; and testing criterion-related validity. The results showed that the newly constructed 13-item scale had adequate psychometric properties. Finally, the implications for organisations, limitations and future research are discussed. (shrink)

While the notion of risk remains under-theorised in moral philosophy, risk aversion and moralist self-protection appear as dominant cultural tendencies saturating educational orientation and practice. Philosophy of education has responded to the educational emphasis on risk management by exposing the unavoidable and positive presence of risk in any endeavour to learn and teach. Taking such responses into account, I discuss how the theoretical connection of risk and education could be radicalised through an ethical approach combined with epistemological and existential concerns. (...) My aim is to propose an ethics that is sensitive to the difference between risks taken and risks imposed and to the cultural variations of what counts as danger. Finally, I explain how the educational relevance of such an ethics requires a prior questioning of the western understanding of self and world that has functioned as a subtext of the dominant view of risk. (shrink)

Marianna PapastephanouUniversity of CyprusSince Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (reali...

The mental model theory claims that the ability to falsify is at the core of human rationality. We assume that cognitive conflicts (CCs) and socio-cognitive conflicts (SCCs) induce falsification, and thus improve syllogistic reasoning performance. Our first study assesses adults’ ability to reason in two different conditions in a single experimental session. In both conditions the participants are presented with conclusions alternative to their own. In the CC condition they are told that these conclusions are casual, in the SCC condition (...) they are told they have been produced by another individual. The second study is analogous to the first, with the exception that the participants deal with the two conditions in two different experimental sessions. The overall results reveal that falsification is enhanced by conflicts experienced at the cognitive level. The results also reveal that learning to reason occurs in adults, when tested in two distinct experimental periods. (shrink)

Cet article revisite les constructions philosophiques vis-à-vis l’écologie politique de Félix Guattari, Bernard Stiegler, Isabelle Stengers et Bruno Latour, afin d’interroger les modes de transmission du savoir et l’articulation entre les dimensions esthétique, politique, technique, éthique et écologique en architecture et en urbanisme. Il réunit les démarches de ces penseurs pour problématiser le passage à l’acte, les pratiques architecturales et urbaines, et l’impact de l’industrialisation du geste sur les modes d’énonciation architecturale. La crise écologique renvoie à une crise plus générale (...) du social, du politique et de l’existentiel. La jonction conceptuelle entre l’environnemental, le social et le mental permet d’adopter une vision « transversaliste » de l’écologie politique. Guattari définit comme écosophie l’« articulation éthico-politique entre les trois registres écologiques, celui de l’environnement, celui des rapports sociaux, et celui de la subjectivité humaine ». L’intention de capturer d’un seul tenant cette nature tripartie de l’écologie reflète le caractère éthico-politique de l’écosophie guattarienne. Guattari imaginait « une écosophie de type nouveau, à la fois pratique et spéculative, éthico-politique et esthétique ». (shrink)

In this paper, I will focus on a type of confabulation that emerges in relation to questions about mental attitudes whose causes we cannot introspectively access. I argue against two popular views that see confabulations as mainly offering a psychological story about ourselves. On these views, confabulations are the result of either a cause-tracking mechanism or a self-directed mindreading mechanism. In contrast, I propose the view that confabulations are mostly telling a normative story: they are arguments primarily offered to justify (...) one’s attitudes, and they are produced by our argumentative reasoning mechanism driven by the biological goal of presenting ourselves as good reasoners and as reliable sources of information. (shrink)

The logic of Conditional Beliefs has been introduced by Board, Baltag, and Smets to reason about knowledge and revisable beliefs in a multi-agent setting. In this article both the semantics and the proof theory for this logic are studied. First, a natural semantics forCDLis defined in terms of neighbourhood models, a multi-agent generalisation of Lewis’ spheres models, and it is shown that the axiomatization ofCDLis sound and complete with respect to this semantics. Second, it is shown that the neighbourhood semantics (...) is equivalent to the original one defined in terms of plausibility models, by means of a direct correspondence between the two types of models. On the basis of neighbourhood semantics, a labelled sequent calculus forCDLis obtained. The calculus has strong proof-theoretic properties, in particular admissibility of contraction and cut, and it provides a decision procedure for the logic. Furthermore, its semantic completeness is used to obtain a constructive proof of the finite model property of the logic. Finally, it is shown that other doxastic operators can be easily captured within neighbourhood semantics. This fact provides further evidence of the naturalness of neighbourhood semantics for the analysis of epistemic/doxastic notions. (shrink)

The current study sought to determine research scientists’ sensitivity to various justifications for engaging in behaviors typically considered to be questionable research practices by asking them to evaluate the appropriateness and ethical defensibility of each. Utilizing a within-subjects design, 107 National Institutes of Health principal investigators responded to an invitation to complete an online survey in which they read a series of research behaviors determined, in prior research, to either be ambiguous or unambiguous in their ethical defensibility. Additionally, each behavior (...) was paired with either an ostensibly sound or unsound reason for the behavior. Consistent with hypotheses, the results indicated that scientists perceived QRPs as more appropriate and defensible when paired with a justifiable motive relative to when paired with a clearly unethical motive, particularly for QRPs that are more ambiguous in their ethicality. In fact, ambiguous QRPs were perceived as categorically defensible when given a justifiable motive. This suggests scientists are sensitive to contextual factors related to QRPs’ appropriateness, which could inform how institutions develop appropriate training modules for research integrity. (shrink)

Although episodes of captive breeding for display and acclimatization purposes date back to the 19th century, systematic breeding for species conservation first became the central mission for European zoological gardens in the interwar period. While most scholars explain this shift as a result of a decline in the global trade of exotic animals, my analysis points to the simultaneous renewed interest in native endangered and extinct species as a catalyst for captive breeding experiments. This article considers the role of zoos (...) in one of the earliest de-extinction projects, namely the breeding back of the Eurasian wild horse. By investigating two breeding programs, those initiated by Tadeusz Vetulani in Poland and the Heck brothers in Germany, my analysis reveals not only the political stakes, but also the different methods employed in these attempts to resurrect the tarpan. More specifically, I explore how scientific ideas about heredity and hybridization, as well as understandings of the porous boundary between domestic and wild horses, paved the way for selective breeding to be mobilized as a means of bringing back the extinct species. This ambitious goal reinvigorated the scientific function of the zoo by making it an experimental ground for undoing extinction, and laid the groundwork for its future role in the emergent wildlife conservation movement. In addition to mapping out knowledge exchange between zoologists, geneticists, and paleontologists, this article traces the circulation of specimens between natural history museums, zoos, and wildlife reserves to underscore the material dimension of ex situ conservation practices. (shrink)

With Ukraine as its subtext, this pamphlet-like text considers the recent U-turns of global reality and the need for well-meant universalist (pamphilic) ends. Such ends impel reconsideration of the standard educational-philosophical view on national affect, state sovereignty and international relations. After indicating interconnections of these issues with ecological and nuclear catastrophe, I discuss the argument that post-humanist educational theory has failed to critique the full and inherent educational complicities in the current global situation. While I agree with such diagnostics, I (...) argue that, instead of essentializing educational complicities, we may explore education as open to catastrophe in its double meaning of ‘disaster’ and ‘radical turn’. (shrink)

The conception of time that dominates in the educational world of today is that of measurable, invested and managed chronological time. It is the conception of time that corresponds to current priorities such as performativity, global synchronization of educational systems, raising standards and meeting the challenges of the market. The educational transformation of the self and the world, however, requires another conception of time, one that frames another kind of thought and another meaning of education. This article discusses these two (...) conceptions of time by employing the distinction between chronos and kairos. The aim is not to turn this distinction into a dichotomy; instead, the aim is to recuperate the conception of time as kairos and connect it with a desire of philosophy and with education as a lifelong effort towards transformation rather than success. In a complex relation with chronosophy as time management, kairosophy is thus introduced as a critical reflection on lived time. (shrink)

The article intends to explore the fruitful intellectual exchange between the historian of art and culture Aby Warburg and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer starting from their first meeting in 1924 and developed over ten years. The author analyses how the Cassirer’s concept of “symbolic form” and the Warburg’s conception that took shape in the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne are deeply linked to the interests of both for the origins of modern physics. The figure of Kepler as a “transitional figure between mythical and (...) mathematical thought” on which they focus on their first meeting has a central role in this reflection. The author wants to demonstrate how the analysis of the theory of symbol is inseparable from the study of the theory of myth, connected to cosmological, astrological and astronomical themes. The principles that inaugurate the scientific revolution of the modern age, present in nuce in the science of physics inaugurated by Kepler, are observed in the more mature results of Einstein's theory of relativity. A theory which played an important role both in Cassirer’s theory and in Warburg’s reflections. (shrink)

This study explored how disclosure of financial conflicts of interest influences naïve or “lay” individuals’ perceptions of the ethicality of researcher conduct. On a between-subjects basis, participants read ten scenarios in which researchers disclosed or failed to disclose relevant financial conflicts of interest. Participants evaluated the extent to which each vignette represented a FCOI, its possible influence on researcher objectivity, and the ethics of the financial relationship. Participants were then asked if they had completed a college-level ethics course. Results indicated (...) that FCOI disclosure significantly influenced participants’ perceptions of the ethicality of the situation, but only marginally affected perceptions of researcher objectivity and had no significant influence on perceptions of the existence of FCOIs. Participants who had previously completed a college-level ethics course appeared more sensitive to the importance of FCOI disclosure than those who lacked such background. This result suggests that formal ethical training may help individuals become more critical consumers of scientific research. (shrink)

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)

The philosophy of emotions has long been dominated by the view called «cognitivism». According to it, emotions are characterized not by mere physical impulses but by a cognitive evaluation of their object. However, despite their success, cognitive theories have to deal with various objections and are divided on how to answer to them. In this essay I want to defend the form of cognitivism claimed by Martha Nussbaum from the most common criticisms. After a brief summary of her account, I (...) confront some of the objections that have been raised against it. In Section 2 I deal with the classic problem of emotions in infants and animals, which lack linguistic abilities. Later, I confront the potential problem represented by cases in which one’s emotion and reasoned judgment seem to differ: in paragraph 3 I consider irrational phobias and fears, to show how they can be accounted for in terms of judgments and thoughts, and not only of perceptions; in paragraph 4 I deal with the objection that «judgementalist» theories violate the «principle of charity», for they ascribe an excessive irrationality to people. I argue that experimental evidence suggest that it is not implausible to assume that people have contradictory beliefs under conditions of uncertainty, and that perceptual theories of emotion fail to account for some fundamental aspects of these phenomena. Finally, in paragraph 5, I deal with the objection according to which a cognitive-evaluative theory cannot explain the sense of passivity that we commonly experience in emotions. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 3, Page 295-311, September 2021.

In her famous text ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, Martha Nussbaum argued for cosmopolitan education in ways that evoked a tension between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Among others, Charles Taylor considered her treatment of patriotism vague and lopsided, and pointed out that patriotism is not as secondary or as dispensable as Nussbaum seemed to imply. Later, Nussbaum gradually reconsidered the notion of patriotism in texts that remained largely unknown and rarely discussed. This article begins with a brief account of her shift from cosmopolitanism (...) to what she terms ‘a globally sensitive patriotism,’ and the task assigned to education within this framework. The examples Nussbaum uses to illustrate the principles she proposes for teaching patriotism are then discussed. Her conception of patriotism reflects broader preoccupations concerning patriotism in liberal and communitarian political philosophy and education that overlook what can be termed ‘an outward aspect of patriotism.’ In light of this critique, I attempt to formulate an account of patriotism that may be in line with cosmopolitanism and quite different from current liberal or communitarian patriotic accounts. (shrink)

Retractions have traditionally been reserved for correcting the scientific record and discouraging research misconduct. Nonetheless, the potential for actual societal harm resulting from accurately reported published scientific findings, so-called information hazards, has been the subject of several recent article retractions. As these instances increase, the extent of support for such decisions among the scientific community and lay public remains unclear. Undergraduates (Study 1) and federally funded researchers (Study 2) reported their support for retraction decisions described as due to misconduct, honest (...) errors, or potential information hazards. Participants supported retraction on the former two grounds more than the latter. Despite limited support, women remained more receptive to retractions based on information hazards. Activist tendencies additionally predicted undergraduate men’s receptivity. Receptivity toward retraction due to information hazards was unrelated to scientists’ engagement in activism, suggesting that formal scientific training affords researchers an ability to separate personal and professional values in scientific discourse. Findings could inform the development of educational materials that may aid less experienced scientists and the lay public in understanding retraction ethics. (shrink)

The capabilities approach is the theory according to which, in order to assess people's quality of life and reflect on the basic political entitlements, we should consider what people are capable of doing and being. Focusing mostly on Nussbaum's account, a number of scholars analysed the metaethical structure underlying the approach, showing her Aristotelian and Kantian sources. This article explores another aspect of Nussbaum's theory which has so far been somewhat overlooked: the role of emotions in the justification and motivational (...) support of the approach. After showing the importance Nussbaum places on compassion (and other benevolent emotions) to warrant her moral theory, I argue that – assuming her own cognitive account of compassion – her argument begs the question. I will then contend that Nussbaum's case does not have the inner tools to overcome such a circularity, trying to suggest, in conclusion, a possible way out which is consistent with it. (shrink)

Educational philosophy has not discussed Foucault’s publications on the Iranian Revolution and the related controversy. Foucauldian concepts are applied to education, though his only writings which ‘sidetracked’ him from exploring power within the state, namely, his journalistic accounts of his visits to Iran, remain unexplored in our field. Against moralist accusations of Foucault’s views on Iran as ‘singularly uncritical’, and beyond standard postcolonial charges of Foucault with exoticism and orientalism, I examine how the writings in question reveal ambivalences and limits (...) of Foucauldian philosophy and complicate the glorification of limit-experience in educational theory. (shrink)

Today humanity is in the midst of the massive expansion of new and fundamental technology, represented by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The ongoing revolution of these technologies and their profound impact across various sectors, has triggered discussions about the characteristics and values that should guide their use and development in a responsible manner. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review with the aim of pointing out existing challenges and required principles in AI-based systems in different industries. We (...) discuss our findings and provide general recommendations to be considered during AI deployment in production. The results have shown many gaps and concerns towards responsible AI and integration of complex AI models in the industry that the research community could address. (shrink)

Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in practices, new ethical and social issues emerge due to how these systems nudge users into making decisions and changing (...) behaviours. This article discusses how these AI-driven systems pose particular ethical challenges with regards to nudging. To confront these issues, the value sensitive design approach is adopted as a principled methodology that designers can adopt to design these systems to avoid harming and contribute to the social good. The AI for Social Good factors are adopted as the norms constraining maleficence. In contrast, higher-order values specific to AI, such as those from the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are adopted as the values to be promoted as much as possible in design. The use case of Amazon Alexa's Healthcare Skills is used to illustrate this design approach. It provides an exemplar of how designers and engineers can begin to orientate their design programs of these technologies towards the social good. (shrink)

At times, weird stories such as the Pizzagate spread surprisingly quickly and widely. In this paper I analyze the mental attitudes of those who seem to take those absurdities seriously: I argue that those stories are often imagined rather than genuinely believed. Then I make room for the claim that often these imaginings are used to support group ideologies. My main contribution is to explain how that support actually happens by showing that motivated cognition can employ imagination as a seemingly (...) rational tool to reinforce and protect ideologies. (shrink)

Though concerned with knowledge, this article begins with unknown political events that are ignored by the culture and educational practices of the societies in whose name the events took place. The questions that these events raise indicate a relation of epistemology with ethics and education that complicates some theoretical and managerial attitudes to knowledge. This relation, along with Richard Smith’s notion of knowingness, will frame an exploration of virtue-epistemologies that contests epistemic exaggerations of the knower as accomplished virtuous character. The (...) article emphasizes the need for a normative epistemology that critically invigorates the educational aim of transmitting knowledge and submits it to ethico-political considerations. (shrink)

Drawing on the critical discourse analysis of journals and working papers from 2011-2020 referring to the at-risk of poverty or social exclusion composite indicator (AROPE), we shed light on how benchmarks technicize academic discourse, particularly in its part contributed by economists. First developed to measure progress towards the poverty target set in the EU's Europe 2020 strategy, AROPE has easily permeated academic debate. Its anchoring in statistical procedures and expertise has allowed it to function in this debate as a neutral (...) and purely technical measurement tool, obscuring the interests and normative choices underlying its design and implementation. As a result, the discursive practices associated with the benchmark have led to the reproduction and legitimization of the anti-poverty policy objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. Simultaneously, AROPE has provided a 'cognitive infrastructure' that enabled an economic view of the world geared towards raising competitiveness. It has made it possible to assess which Member State is doing well and which is doing poorly, and making recommendations on how the laggards should improve. Our analysis shows that benchmarks such as AROPE support the process of shaping Europe as a supranational entity, creating a picture of common European problems with uniform definitions, on the basis of which it is possible to divide Member States into better and worse performers and even promote common solutions through good practices. We conclude by highlighting that the academic discourse around AROPE, generated mainly by economists, reflects the growing interdependence of the academic and political spheres and the pressure for research to have social and political impact. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan educational ideal and its theoretical underpinnings. I argue that, in spite of its merits, it overlooks the historical-relational dimension of cross-cultural encounters and the impediments posed by unresolved historical conflicts to the goal of cultural reconciliation. I suggest a rehabilitation of the historical-relational dimension by applying the insights of Paul Ricoeur to this context. My steps comprise a description of Nussbaum’s position, an exploration of its shortcomings, an interpolation of Ricoeur’s ideas and (...) some concomitant suggestions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate possibilities for conceptions of critical thinking beyond the established educational framework that emphasizes skills. Distancing ourselves from the older rationalist framework, we explain that what we think wrong with the skills perspective is, amongst other things, its absolutization of performativity and outcomes. In reviewing the relevant discourse, we accept that it is possible for the skills paradigm to be change‐friendly and context‐sensitive but we argue that it is oblivious to other, non‐purposive kinds (...) of rationality that are indispensable to critical thought. Our suggestion is that there is an aporetic element in critical thought that is missing from contemporary educational positions. We consider some other efforts to redeem the surplus of criticality that performativity fails to take into account and conclude that the aporetic element that we highlight accommodates better than other theories do the significance of thematizing the taken‐for‐granted instead of focusing on problem solving. (shrink)

The essay explores the possibilities afforded by Heidegger’s thought for addressing the question of the reality of the phenomenon within the framework of the theory of quantum mechanics. Heidegger’s conception of the task of phenomenology is seen to provide a crucial axis along which the phenomenon of quantum physics can be connected both to its appearance in language and to the historical unfolding of the horizon that grounds the possibility of an encounter with the phenomenon itself. The determinations of this (...) horizon, i.e. of the order of “phenomenality” that makes the appearance of the phenomenon possible, are analyzed in the instance of quantum mechanics, and compared to the ones presented by Heidegger in his considerations concerning the appearing of the phenomenon in Aristotelian and classical physics. The three main directives that structure the analysis of this order of phenomenality are the determinations of the conditions of experience of the phenomenon, of the function of language that makes this appearance possible, and of the subject function that constitutes, and is in turn constituted by, this experience. (shrink)

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the (...) upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. (shrink)

This article explores Jürgen Habermas’s critical employment of Noam Chomsky’s insights and the philosophical assumptions that motivate or justify Habermas’s early enrichment of his universal pragmatics with material drawn from generative linguistics. The investigation of the influence Chomsky’s theory has exerted on Habermas aims to clarify what Habermas means by universalism, reason embedded in language and the universal core of communicative competence—away from various misinterpretations of Habermas’s rationalist commitments and from reductive, conventionalist readings of his notion of consensus. Much against (...) hasty and unexamined incriminations of Habermasian pragmatics, a turn to a neglected and scantly researched topic such as the philosophical affinity of some Chomskian and Habermasian themes (and to the philosophical justification of the points where Chomsky and Habermas part company) will retrieve the kind of depth and nuance that may lead us beyond facile and simplistic understandings of what discursively reaching consensus might mean from a Habermasian point of view. (shrink)

Artistic practices of postmodern art do not only express the principles of the conceptions of the world of modern culture but on the whole they prepare the anthropological "project" of a cosmopolit. But the danger of leveling and even ruining the system of the Ukrainian world outlook traditions exists in the framework of this project. In this article the author investigates the peculiarities of Yu. Andrukhovych' creative work in the context of the Ukrainian postmodern art. Thanks to the ironic form (...) and extreme spontaneity in the choice of dedication and epigraph, postulates the model in which the contextual neo-mythological features are traced and the features reveal the essential peculiarities of the anthropological project of a "post-totalitarian" person. The author's tragic world-outlook and apocalyptical mood are hidden behind the humor and eclectic glare. It doesn't look like "banquet during the plague", but like the comprehension of the problem of one's existence under the totally new historic-cultural conditions. The neo-mythological axis is grounded on the Christian-mythological model-antithesis. The neo-mythological peculiarities analyzed by the author interact with each other in the dialectical unity and make the organic entirety of the artistic work, they are actual for a contemporary person finding himself under the conditions of a transitional period when culture is looking for stable landmarks in its development. It is proved that the neomyth by Yu. Andrukhovych was being built on the synthesis of Christianity and folk culture, ascertaining the European character of the Ukrainian culture and surge for its legitimacy, uniting together the Dianetical and Apologian features. It gave the author the chance to model the modern culture in the coordinates "Bu - bo - bu" and build the anthropological project in the direction of a Cosmopolitan pole. (shrink)

This paper argues that a new genre of therapy has appeared in the arena of contemporary spiritual alternative healing, which expresses an outlook never-before-seen in the history of medicine: postmodern therapy. Postmodern therapeutic methods express a popularization of postmodernist philosophy in regards to language’s role in the therapeutic process, expressing a novel cosmology. These methods are illustrated in the paper, and then analyzed in comparison to two other groups of methods: traditional/occult magic, and modern medicine. Finally, PTMs are characterized as (...) neo-magic, bearing features similar to modernistic outlook on the one hand, and features similar to pre-modern magic outlook on the other hand. Thus, these new outlook demonstrate a double appropriation and rejection of perceptions viewed as contradictory – traditional magic and secular science. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

The term ‘recalcitrant emotions’ refers to those cases where we feel an emotion that apparently contradicts our better judgements. For instance, one may be afraid of flying while claiming not to believe that it is dangerous. This phenomenon is commonly conceived as an objection to cognitivism, according to which emotions are based on the subject's beliefs, insofar as it would force us to ascribe to the subject who feels them an excessive degree of irrationality, comparing recalcitrant emotions to contradictory beliefs. (...) For this reason, many philosophers have developed perceptual theories which describe emotions as forms of perception, allowing us to explain recalcitrant emotions without attributing to the subject contradictory beliefs, treating them as perceptual illusions. Facing the most compelling of these attempts, the article shows that perceptual accounts fail to explain in what sense recalcitrant emotions (and people who feel them) are irrational, keeping the comparison with optical illusions, which are not. Having rebutted three popular perceptual proposals, I conclude that the analogy between emotions and perceptions is flawed and that the appeal of these theories lies on a surreptitious shift in the meaning of the term ‘perceive’. (shrink)