Third Line is an installation of video projections and selected artefacts presented at the 2014 International Žižek Studies Conference: Parallax Future in Art and Design, Ideology, and Philosophy, with the support of the Ontario Arts Council. Third Line represents a self-referential and speculative study of haiku structure, in conjunction with the idea of optical interference and parallax. The title refers to Žižek’s explanation of the haiku function: the third line of haiku stands for the momentary event where reality loses its (...) substantial mass. The objective was to create a visual experience that affiliates the haiku structure with an experiential system of visual perception. We designed a dual, parallax video projection system, with one facet of the screen revealing a sequence of haiku text – metaphrasms systematically extracted from Žižek’s books – as the other side showed a video of ambient, material dissolution. The installation also featured a tableau of collected objects, referencing the project’s material development and ideological framework. (shrink)

Brain-Computer Interface is a set of technologies that are of increasing interest to researchers. BCI has been proposed as assistive technology for individuals who are non-communicative or paralyzed, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or spinal cord injury. The technology has also been suggested for enhancement and entertainment uses, and there are companies currently marketing BCI devices for those purposes as well as health-related purposes. The unprecedented direct connection created by BCI between human brains and computer hardware raises various (...) ethical, social, and legal challenges that merit further examination and discussion. To identify and characterize the key issues associated with BCI use, we performed a scoping review of biomedical ethics literature, analyzing the ethics concerns cited across multiple disciplines, including philosophy and medicine. Based on this investigation, we report that BCI research and its potential translation to therapeutic intervention generate significant ethical, legal, and social concerns, notably with regards to personhood, stigma, autonomy, privacy, research ethics, safety, responsibility, and justice. Our review of the literature determined, furthermore, that while these issues have been enumerated extensively, few concrete recommendations have been expressed. We conclude that future research should focus on remedying a lack of practical solutions to the ethical challenges of BCI, alongside the collection of empirical data on the perspectives of the public, BCI users, and BCI researchers. (shrink)

A structure has a (finite-string) automatic presentation if the elements of its domain can be named by finite strings in such a way that the coded domain and the coded atomic operations are recognised by synchronous multitape automata. Consequently, every structure with an automatic presentation has a decidable first-order theory. The problems surveyed here include the classification of classes of structures with automatic presentations, the complexity of the isomorphism problem, and the relationship between definability and recognisability.

Amid a global zeitgeist of impending catastrophe, this book explores the culture of fear so prevalent in today's politics, economic climate, and religious extremism.

Throughout the critical period Kant enigmatically insists that reason is a ‘unity’, thereby suggesting that both our theoretical and practical endeavors are grounded in one and the same rational capacity. How Kant's unity thesis ought to be interpreted and whether it can be substantiated remain sources of controversy in the literature. According to the strong reading of this claim, reason is a ‘unity’ because all our reasoning, including our theoretical reasoning, functions practically. Although several prominent commentators endorse this view, it (...) is widely thought to lack exegetical support. This paper seeks to strengthen the case for this reading by showing how theoretical reason's positive function, as Kant presents it in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, may be construed as fundamentally practical. I argue that reason's supreme regulative principle ought to be understood as a categorical practical imperative. This interpretation, I suggest, resolves the apparent inconsistencies that blight Kant's account of the principle in the Appendix, while bringing greater overall coherence to his account of theoretical reason's regulative function. (shrink)

For a century the Bahá’í Faith has been classified, within the German academy, as a world religion. This article highlights the major historical milestones in this process of recognition. The process was initiated on the eve of the First World War by the two Jewish Germanophone orientalists Goldziher and Vambery. In the inter-war period, the categorization of this faith as a world religion – rather than a sect of Islam, as it had once been viewed – was further propelled by (...) academics outside the field of theology and religious studies, such as the natural scientist Auguste Forel. It was only after the catastrophic experience of World War II, a period when the German Bahá’í community evinced a spirit of resilience in the face of Nazi oppression, that scholars in the field of Christian theology and religious studies, such as Heiler, Mensching and Benz, who represented the school of Religionswissenschaft des Verstehens, began to adopt the classification of the Bahá’ís as new world religion. (shrink)

In this article I undertake an analysis of erotic sexual intercourse - commonly, and more accurately, designated as love-making - in the spirit of Durkheim's social analysis of religion. Thus, based on a phenomenological semiotic analysis of the peculiar things we do and feel in the course of making love, I propose, first, to uncover the implicit `logic' that generates and governs these distinctly sociable doings and sociable feelings. Second, I proceed to suggest that the sameself logic, albeit in an (...) attenuated version, also generates and governs the broad class of `social occasions proper', and that this homology calls for gathering erotic and social occasions under one and the same rubric, which I propose to call the `socio-erotic' (since the term `social' has been denatured through overuse). Third, I conclude with a discussion of how socio-erotic domains fit into a larger world structured and governed mainly by interest-driven and power-driven conflictual fields. (shrink)

Designing and developing a digital musical instrument (DMI) to a level of refinement that provides musically rich applications and nuanced interaction capabilities requires a long-term commitment to both technical and creative aspects. This process often leads to the acquisition of sensory, communicative, and intuitive knowledge—dimensions of instrument design that are typically overlooked in mainstream discussions. This paper explores this development journey through the lens of three instruments: the Resonant Object Interface (ROI), the Floors, and the Table Floor. These instruments have (...) undergone extensive development, with the latest instrument building upon the lessons learned from the previous two. We discuss the challenges encountered during the ongoing refinement of these devices and our evolving interaction with their physical complexities. A key focus is the tacit knowledge gained through hands-on engagement, which, though often taken for granted once established, requires significant time and effort to develop. Further, we reflect on our experiences sharing these instruments with other musicians, highlighting how tacit engagement plays a critical role in the creation of new processes, materials, sensing technologies, and sensory experiences in the realm of digital musical instrument design. (shrink)

Through myths that pattern and repeat we figure the world to ourselves. The desire to be done with myth, to surpass mythic thinking in favor of a “more” rational way of thinking, is but one way of perpetrating violence in the guise of similitude. The rejection of muthos by logos is itself a form of violence, with significant ramifications. The following analysis will explore the work of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, focusing on (...) the ways in which myth becomes mythology, and the inescapable question of violence that attends this operation. This paper, although touching upon the matter, is not an attempt to answer the larger question of what myth is. The scope of this analysis is constrained to a discussion of both Nancy and Irigaray’s understanding of myth as foundational, as well as interrogating the nature of the violence of representation. I will briefly touch upon the long and elaborate conversation surrounding the muthos–logos divide. (shrink)

Levinas's project throughout Totality and Infinity and in his earlier works Existence and Existents and Time and the Other is to situate the primacy of the ethical as foundational first philosophy. For Levinas, myth is intimately connected to being, the being before reflection and thought. The entering into reflection and thought Levinas terms transcendence, the epoché, or first ethical gesture. In order to situate his ethics, Levinas turns to the Cartesian notion of infinity: the idea of infinity as an overflowing (...) presence, the container capable of containing more than it can draw from itself, from its own being.1 This idea of infinity is grounded in an experience of the Other as primal.2 The presence of a face... (shrink)

ABSTRACTSharing experiences with others, even without communication, can amplify those experiences. We investigated whether shared stressful experiences amplify. Participants completed the Cold Pre...

The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the nuclearity of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear matters and queries the logic of solids and fluids by developing the notion of elemental memory. An attention to elemental memory – an element’s capacity (...) to auto-affect over time – reveals the inadequacy of terms like solid and fluid, and highlights the expressiveness of solid fluid substances. Empirically, the author demonstrates, first, how elemental memory informs the solid-fluid processuality of radioactive glasses, especially trinitite. Second, engaging with the work of artists Mari Keto and Erich Berger, she addresses the slow auto-transformations of radioactive minerals. (shrink)

Catherine Elgin proposes a novel principle for identifying epistemic virtue. Based loosely on Kant’s Categorical Imperative, it identifies autonomy as our fundamental epistemic responsibility, and defines the epistemic virtues as those traits of character needed to exercise epistemic autonomy. I argue that Elgin’s principle fails as a criterion of epistemic virtue because the instrumental conception of autonomy on which it relies leads to an untenable relativism. Despite this, I suggest that autonomy may yet furnish a plausible criterion for epistemic virtue, (...) provided we construe autonomy as Kant does, as grounded in categorical rather than instrumental reason. (shrink)

Despite a growing effort in recent years to theorize epistemic justice as a species of distributive justice from within a Rawlsian framework, there is as yet no well-worked out capabilities-based account. In this paper, we set out to provide one. According to our sufficientarian conception, epistemic justice requires a distribution of capabilities that ensures to all individuals opportunities for minimal epistemic agency, publicly conceived. We argue that this conception has advantages over existing resourcist accounts of distributive epistemic justice inspired by (...) Rawls as well as over Miranda Fricker’s tentative capabilities-based alternative. We contend that epistemic justice concerns a plurality of capabilities for epistemic agency, where the scope and nature of these capabilities is ultimately left open to discernment through public reasoning, but where equal emphasis is placed on contributing as well as retrieving epistemic goods and resources from common pools and on exerting combined capabilities as well as developing internal ones in the first place. (shrink)

McCullough et al. hypothesize that evolution has selected mechanisms for revenge to deter harms and for forgiveness to preserve valuable relationships. However, in highly dependent relationships, the more adaptive course of action may be to remain unaware of the initial harm rather than risk alienating a needed other. We present a testable model of possible victim responses to interrelational harm.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) calls for medical practitioners to “integrate” our best available evidence into clinical practice. A significant amount of the literature on EBM takes this integration to be unproblematic, focusing on questions like how to interpret evidence and engage with patient values, rather than critically looking at how these features of EBM can be implemented together. Other authors have also commented on this gap in the literature, for example, identifying the lack of clarity about how patient preferences and evidence (...) from trials is supposed to be integrated in practice. In this paper, I look at this issue from an epistemological perspective, (looking at how different types of knowledge in EBM can be used to make sounds judgements). In particular, I introduce an epistemological issue for this integration problem, which I call the epistemic integration problem. This is essentially the problem of how we can use information that is both general (eg, about a population sample) and descriptive (eg, about what expected outcomes are) to reach clinical judgements that are individualized (applying to a particular patient) and normative (about what is best for their health). (shrink)

Our commentary summarises the current understanding of how testosterone can be used as a mechanism to link quality to external traits potentially used in sexual signalling, particularly female choice. Testosterone-dependent traits may reveal male's status to rivals and immunocompetence to females. We highlight some interesting unanswered questions and suggest that cross-disciplinary collaboration would help solve them.

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist who wrote extensively on the themes of love, goodness, religion, and morality. In this article, we explore her notion of ‘moral vision’; the idea that morality is not just about how we act and make choices, but how we see the world in a much broader sense.

Ectogenesis, or “artificial womb technology,” has been heralded by some, such as prominent feminist Shulamith Firestone, as a way to liberate women. In this chapter, we challenge this view by offering an alternative analysis of the technology as relying upon and perpetuating a problematic model of pregnancy which, rather than liberating women, serves to devalue them. We look to metaphysics as the abstract study of reality to elucidate how the entities in a pregnancy are related to one another. We consider (...) two models of the metaphysics of pregnancy: (1) the Parthood Model, whereby the fetus is a part of what/who gestates it; and (2) and the Fetal Container Model, whereby the gestator is a container for the fetus. We suggest that under the assumption of the Fetal Container Model, we are more likely to think that any container will suffice for gestation, even an artificial one. In contrast, under the assumption of the Parthood Model, we are less likely to treat the gestator as interchangeable or replaceable, given the parthood relationship between gestator and fetus. This chapter argues that ectogenesis is conceptually linked to the Fetal Container Model and advocates a more cautious approach in promoting ectogenesis as a tool for women’s liberation. (shrink)

Disagreements about scientific ontology have frequently been reconstructed as the result of a dispute between rival epistemic stances. In this paper, (i) we characterize some of these disagreements as deep disagreements. In addition, we show that deep disagreements about scientific ontology can arise not only from the adoption of different epistemic stances, but also between positions that fall within the same stance. The development of this point allows us, in turn, to establish a distinction between types of deep disagreement and (...) to explore the possibility that there are differences of degree between them. (shrink)