Software piracy is a serious problem in the software industry. Software authors and publishing companies lose revenue when pirated software rather than legally purchased software is used. Policy developers are forced to invest time and money into restricting software piracy. Much of the published research literature focuses on software piracy by end-users. However, end-users are only able to copy software once the copy protection has been removed by a ‘cracker’. This research aims to explore why, if copy protection is so (...) difficult to remove, do crackers invest their skill and time in this activity instead of more lucrative and legal employment. This study develops a framework of neutralisation, justification and motivation and goes directly to the initial software crackers to determine what motivates their activities. The study first applies this framework in an anonymous online survey of crackers. The study then conducts cognitive interviews with eight crackers to explore and further validate the survey’s findings. The study finds the challenge of removing the copy protection from software as the strongest motivation for the actions of crackers. Desire for social participation, while found to be rewarding, was considered unnecessary for crackers to continue their actions. Higher social status was not a motivational factor but was a perceived by-product of cracking. The study also raises areas for future research. (shrink)

First Love: A Phenomenology of the One explodes two great myths that remain unquestioned in psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy: that first love is a love of the mother and, in French philosopher Alain Badiou’s phrasing, ‘the One is not.’ The bold, central argument of the book claims that, with its unprejudiced acceptance of first love as mother love, psychoanalysis is at risk of missing the full potential of its own thought: the existence of an uncounted One as named and held (...) faithful to in the literary tradition. In detailed, sensitive readings of the First Love of Samuel Beckett, Ivan Turgenev, Eudora Welty, John Clare and Søren Kierkegaard, Jöttkandt considers the ways love is conceptually ‘first’ for these writers. With this groundbreaking work, Jöttkandt suspends the contemporary philosophical stricture against every idea of an ‘all’ to unmask the shadowy figure concealed behind the traditional psychoanalytic myth of first love: One that - or perhaps who - is not purely an effect of structure. (shrink)

For Badiou, love must be regarded in terms of an exceptional logic that simultaneously confirms the philosophical counting operation, while generating another number that is not a product of ordination.

V najnovejšem zborniku spisov o sodobni globalni krizi, Against the Double Blackmail, Slavoj Žižek trdi, da potrebujemo Wiederholung Evrope. Tako, denimo, zapiše: »na podlagi kritičnega soočanja s celotno evropsko tradicijo moramo ponoviti vprašanje 'kaj je Evropa?' ali, raje, 'kaj za nas pomeni biti evropejci?' in na tej podlagi zgraditi novo vizijo«. V danem prispevku raziskujem, kako se takšno ponovno prisvajanje »Evrope« skozi ponavljanje že dogaja, kot to nakazuje niz potez, znamenj in drugih sledi, izdolbenih s stopinjami beguncev in prosilcev za (...) azil med njihovo potjo od juga proti severu. Če je v Žižkovi knjigi »evropska tradicija« sinekdohalno predstavljena kot dvojna figura Edgarja Allana Poeja in Mary Shelley, je to zato, ker sta pisatelja z vnaprejšnjo izključitvijo vseh možnosti izhoda, uprizorila izvirno fantazmo severa, na podlagi katere se današnji begunci sklicujejo svoje pravice. Izkazalo se je, da je bila »sanjska dežela« ali Ultima Thule, od samega začetka logika vpisa. Iz te perspektive bi bilo dejanje iskanja zatočišča način »mišljenja s stopali«, kot je nekoč škandalozno zatrdil Lacan, pri čemer bi bilo besedilo, stkano kot »Evropa«, nezavedno te misli. (shrink)

... Press for their editorial perspicacity, to the National Institutes of Health for the partial financial support they gave me while I was writing some of the chapters, and to Donald Michie for suggesting the title Good Thinking.

_A comprehensive examination of Lacan’s seminar on ethics._.

Introduction to the life and work of Sam Gillespie.

As philosophers from Jacques Derrida, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to Alain Badiou have shown, the concept of border entails a logic of exclusion that sustains itself on an empty place. In the absence of this empty place, what does the contemporary experience of being ‘without boundaries’ imply mathematically? This paper suggests that if the Anthropocene confirms Deleuze and Guattari's insight that the older, ‘castrative’ logic of the border-cut is extinct, this does not require us to abandon the categories (...) that traditionally inscribed us as subjects altogether. Rather, it helps us to understand how the Symbolic Law is being logically inscribed. One often talks loosely about the ‘perversity’ of the Law, but this analysis of three parables of climate change enables us to pinpoint more precisely the structure of how the Law presents today. It suggests that to try to ‘diagnose’ the contemporary experience of the Law, we should look not to perversion but to the ‘prime zero’ of a specifically ‘feminine’ psychosis. (shrink)

This paper addresses an apparent shift in Alain Badiou’s thinking on sex and the universal. Previously Badiou had maintained that sex was a particularity that requires subtraction from the universal, together with the other predicative descriptions of identity such as nation, race, and class. However in a recent paper, “Figures of Femininity in the Contemporary World,” Badiou contends that the sexuation of philosophical and symbolic thought is “inevitable.” Taking Badiou’s readings of Samuel Beckett as its guide, and addressing Badiou’s discussions (...) of change in Logics of Worlds and Subject of Change, this paper works through the implications of this new claim. It asks whether Badiou’s thought allows the possibility of a real change in his philosophy, including thereby the potential to change one’s sex. (shrink)

Long recognised as a painting ‘about’ painting, Velázquez’s Las Meninas comes to Lacan’s aid as he explicates the object a in Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis (1965–1966). The famous seventeenth century painting provides Lacan with a visual mapping of the ‘ghost story’ he discovers in the Cartesian cogito, insofar as it depicts the unravelling of the Cartesian representational project at the moment of its founding gesture. This article traces Lacan’s argument as he turns to art, linear perspective and topology (...) to model how the object a persistently eludes the grasp of scientific knowledge. Following a discussion of distance-point perspective in Renaissance Italy and the role this innovation played in enabling distorted depictions of objects in space, I propose Henry James’s ghost story, “The Jolly Corner,” as the sequel to Lacan’s reading of Las Meninas. In James’s tale, we obtain a narrative account of what the figures in Velasquez’s painting might ‘see’ as they return our gaze towards us. (shrink)

Evoking the contemporary Zeitgeist of looming ecological, political and economic disaster, a distinguished group of thinkers invite a compelling reconsideration of the ways we, as representing subjects, might be more deeply implicated in catastrophic events than we ordinarily imagine"--Provided by publisher.

It is shown by means of a simple example that a good explanation of an event is not necessarily corroborated by the occurrence of that event. It is also shown that this contention follows symbolically if an explanation having higher "explicativity" than another is regarded as better.

... the topic of 'meaning' is the one topic discussed in philosophy in which there is literally nothing but 'theory' - literally nothing that can be labelled or even ridiculed as the 'common sense view'. Putnam, 'The Meaning of Meaning' This book explores some truths behind the truism that experimentation is a hallmark of scientific activity. Scientists' descriptions of nature result from two sorts of encounter: they interact with each other and with nature. Philosophy of science has, by and large, (...) failed to give an account of either sort of interaction. Philosophers typically imagine that scientists observe, theorize and experiment in order to produce general knowledge of natural laws, knowledge which can be applied to generate new theories and technologies. This view bifurcates the scientist's world into an empirical world of pre-articulate experience and know how and another world of talk, thought and argument. Most received philosophies of science focus so exclusively on the literary world of representations that they cannot begin to address the philosophical problems arising from the interaction of these worlds: empirical access as a source of knowledge, meaning and reference, and of course, realism. This has placed the epistemological burden entirely on the predictive role of experiment because, it is argued, testing predictions is all that could show that scientists' theorizing is constrained by nature. Here a purely literary approach contributes to its own demise. The epistemological significance of experiment turns out to be a theoretical matter: cruciality depends on argument, not experiment. (shrink)

The work of the French Lithuanian Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, describes a perceptive rethinking of the possibility of concrete acts of goodness in the world, a rethinking never more necessary than now, in the wake of the cruel realities of the twentieth century—ten million dead in the First World War, forty million dead in the Second World War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Soviet gulags, the grand slaughter of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” the pointless and gory Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide and (...) many an attempted extermination from the face of the earth of entire nations of indigenous peoples. The list of horrors goes on and on—daily holocausts that do not distinguish between the civilian and the soldier, the guilty and the innocent, those deserving of life and those less deserving. (shrink)

The causal propensity of an event F to cause another event E is explicated as the weight of evidence against F if E does not occur, given the state of the universe just before F occurred. This definition, first given in 1961, is sharpened, defended, and applied to several examples. In this definition the concept of weight of evidence in favor of a proposition, provided by another one, is to be understood in a technical sense that is intended to capture (...) its most customary informal meaning. (shrink)

Political correctness in Canada: the McEwen report on the political science department at UBC -- The new sectarianism: gender, race, sexual orientation -- Theory 1: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche -- Theory 2: Constructionism, ideology, textuality -- Presentism: postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism -- The carceral vision: Geertz, Greenblatt, Foucault, and culture as constraint -- The liberal humanist vision: Northrup Frye and culture as freedom -- Conclusion: the hegemony of theory and the managerial university.

Cadherins are a large family of single‐pass transmembrane proteins principally involved in Ca2+‐dependent homotypic cell adhesion. The cadherin molecules comprise three domains, the intracellular domain, the transmembrane domain and the extracellular domain, and form large complexes with a vast array of binding partners (including cadherin molecules of the same type in homophilic interactions and cellular protein catenins), orchestrating biologically essential extracellular and intracellular signalling processes. While current, contrasting models for classic cadherin homophilic interaction involve varying numbers of specific repeats found (...) in the extracellular domain, the structure of the domain itself clearly remains the main determinant of cell stability and binding specificity. Through intracellular interactions, cadherin enhances its adhesive properties binding the cytoskeleton via cytoplasmic associated factors α‐ catenin, β‐catenin and p120ctn. Recent structural studies on classic cadherins and these catenin molecules have provided new insight into the essential mechanisms underlying cadherin‐mediated cell interaction and catenin‐mediated cellular signalling. Remarkable structural diversity has been observed in β‐catenin recognition of other cellular factors including APC, Tcf and ICAT, proteins that contribute to or compete with cadherin/catenin functioning. BioEssays 26:497–511, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Bioethicists teaching and writing about the uses of prenatal genetic testing sometimes use “difficult cases” in which people with a disability want to test and select for the presence of their disability. Such cases challenge our stereotypes but also play into them.

I argue that thought experiments are a form of experimental reasoning similar to real experiments. They require the same ability to participate by following a narrative as real experiments do. Participation depends in turn on using what we already know to visualize, manipulate and understand what is unfamiliar or problematic. I defend the claim that visualization requires embodiment by an example which shows how tacit understanding of the properties of represented objects and relations enables us to work out how such (...) objects might behave in a postulated world. This knowledge is that of embodied agents. That thought experiments require embodied participation is what makes them experiments rather than arguments. Unlike real experiments, from which ordinary perception has been displaced by instrumentation, thought experiments still appeal to relatively unmediated common sense, even when their purpose is to criticize or subvert common sense notions. (shrink)

Contributors; Preface; Introduction; Part I. Instruments in Experiments: 1. Scientific instruments: models of brass and aids to discovery; 2. Glass works: Newton’s prisms and the uses of experiment; 3. A viol of water or a wedge of glass; Part II. Experiment and Argument: 4. Galileo’s experimental discourse; 5. Fresnel, Poisson and the white spot: the role of successful predictions in the acceptance of scientific theories; 6. The rhetoric of experiment; Part III. Representing and Realising: 7. ’Magnetic curves’ and the magnetic (...) field: experimentation and representation in the history of a theory; 8. Artificial clouds, real particles; 9. Living in the material world; 10. Justification and experimentation; Part IV. The Constituency of Experiment: 11. Extraordinary experiment: electricity and the creation of life in Victorian England; 12. Why did Britain join CERN?; Part V. Hallmarks of Experiment: 13. From Kwajalein to Armageddon? Testing and the social construction of missile accuracy; 14. The epistemology of experiment; Select bibliography; Name index; Subject index. (shrink)

This study demonstrates that Dewey did not reject Hegelianism during the 1890s, as scholars maintain, but developed a humanistic/historicist reading that was indebted to an American Hegelian tradition. Scholars have misunderstood the "permanent Hegelian deposit" in Dewey's thought because they have not fully appreciated this American Hegelian tradition and have assumed that his Hegelianism was based primarily on British neo-Hegelianism. ;The study examines the American reception of Hegel in the nineteenth-century by intellectuals as diverse as James Marsh and Frederic Henry (...) Hedge and how it flowered in late nineteenth-century St. Louis. The St. Louis Hegelians read Hegel as a particularly practical and politically liberal philosopher whose social philosophy promoted both social diversity and unity. Led by W. T. Harris, they studied Hegel in German and published their own scholarship, as well as translations of German scholarship, in their Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their efforts to make "Hegel talk English" and to base the St. Louis public schools on Hegel's philosophy of education won them national, and even, international attention. The St. Louis Hegelians sought to adapt Hegel's thought to their American context by assuaging elitist elements within it; Dewey's intellectual development was profoundly shaped by their appropriation of his philosophy. ;Dewey drew upon Hegel's argument that humans form societies because of their differences, not in spite of them. Hegel's rejection of the self-sufficient, atomistic individual entailed that the individual is dependent upon others for the satisfaction of material needs. Moreover, like Hegel, Dewey rejected the hedonistic basis of the British political tradition by arguing that humans seek recognition from their equals as well as satisfaction of material needs. Dewey believed Hegel's emphasis upon equality and diversity provided a model of society in which there was fertile ground for the individual to conceive and articulate cultural criticism. The study ends by comparing recent Hegel scholarship to Dewey's, demonstrating that American Hegelianism has returned, in important ways, to a Deweyan reading of Hegel. (shrink)