How to: win an argument, defend a case, recognize a fallacy, see through deception, persuade a skeptic, turn defeat into victory.

This is a review of a lecture series by Gillian Rose on Frankfurt School critical theory, which was delivered at the University of Sussex in 1979 and is now published under the title Marxist Modernism, edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott.

This chapter contains section titled: Utilitarian and Kantian Advice about Enhancement Moral Images and Moral Consistency Midgley's Scepticism about Consistency Harvesting Stem Cells: Research or Therapy? Are Enhancement Technologies wrong because they are ‘Yucky’? Why Food is Different Are Enhancement Technologies Wrong because they will Destroy Meaning?

In 2009, the United States Air Force aired a series of science fiction-themed recruitment commercials on network television and their official YouTube channel. In these advertisements, the superimposition of science fiction imagery over depictions of Air Force operations frames these missions as near-future sci-fi adventure, ironically summarized by the tagline: “It’s not science fiction. It’s what we do every day.” Focusing on an early advertisement for the Air Force’s Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle, this essay explores how themes essential to the (...) science fiction genre play a role in influencing contemporary attitudes about autonomous and semi-autonomous robotic weapons, as well as the way in which the aesthetic and functional qualities of these advanced technologies are used to frame moral arguments about their use. As a reconfiguration of the near-future battleground in the guise of science fiction, the “Reaper” ad reveals the way in which science fiction has come to serve as a functional-aesthetic benchmark and cultural sounding board, against which “every day” technologies can be measured and claims about their value, ethos, and social appeal are made. This essay explores the ethical entanglements between science fiction film and video games, and military technology, and the complex role science fiction plays in influencing public attitudes towards military technologies. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Aspects of Realism The Idealistic Dimension Conceptual Idealism.

While everyone acknowledges that the distinction between important and unimportant work is crucial in and for science, there is effectively no systematic investigation of how this distinction is to be conceived and implemented. This paper takes some tentative steps into remedying this deficiency.

1. Formal draft of Roerich Pact and Banner of Peace, Prepared by Dr. Georges Chklaver, August 19282. Treaty for the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments 19353. Call To World Unity.

This essay is an exercise in the phenomenology – and post-phenomenology – of reading in relation to Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel (1927), a novel that thematizes and reflects on the uncanny status of reading and provokes in response an experimental critical ABC. Special attention is given to the work of French psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin in foregrounding the role and effects of suggestion in reading. Engaging with the concerns of writing and reading fiction in the ‘Anthropocene’ (especially in the form of (...) what is here called twi-fi) and drawing on notions of literary anachrony, cryptaesthetic resistance, queerness and deferred effect, the essay offers a new critical appreciation of the singularity of Bowen’s novel. (shrink)

The idea is nowadays current that recent work in neurophysiology strongly counterindicates the doctrine of free will. The present piece seeks to exhibit the incorrectness of this view.