Aesthetization, or aestheticization, has recently become a new key word in scholarly debates about culture and society, roughly concerned with the kind of phenomenon that pictorial turn describes. It is not that `aesthetization', in its literal sense, is making the unaesthetic aesthetic, nor does it point to the sort of topics typical of an aestheticized human life as favored by some traditional Chinese intellectuals; rather it is about a transaesthetization. This process differs not just in the range and extent of (...) aesthetization, but in its essence and nature: reality will no longer exist when it is transaesthetized and what is left is an aesthetic realm only; in other words, there will be no reality, but purely the `hyperreal'. Accordingly, transaesthetization can then often be associated with the concept of simulacrum, or the proliferation of images; it would thus result from the expansion of simulacra. However, there arises the problem that simulacrum is not identical with image. Assuming that the beauty of image consists in its rich connotations and its presentation at the level of form, it is doubtful that transaesthetization is configured merely by the simulacral. Why, and how could it be so? (shrink)

This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum, which Deleuze formulated in the context of his reading of Nietzsche’s project of “overturning Platonism.” The essential Platonic distinction, Deleuze argues, is more profound than the speculative distinction between model and copy, original and image. The deeper, practical distinction moves between two kinds of images or eidolon, for which the Platonic Idea is meant to provide a concrete criterion of selection “Copies” or icons (eikones) are well-grounded claimants to the transcendent (...) Idea, authenticated by their internal resemblance to the Idea, whereas “simulacra” (phantasmata) are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or deviation from the Idea. If the goal of Platonism is the triumph of icons over simulacra, the inversion of Platonism would entail an affirmation of the simulacrum as such, which must thus be given its own concept. Deleuze consequently defines the simulacrum in terms of an internal dissimilitude or “disparateness,” which in turn implies a new conception of Ideas, no longer as self-identical qualities (the auto kath’hauto), but rather as constituting a pure concept of difference. An inverted Platonism would necessarily be based on a purely immanent and differential conception of Ideas. Starting from this new conception of the Idea, Deleuze proposes to take up the Platonic project anew, rethinking the fundamental figures of Platonism (selection, repetition, ungrounding, the question-problem complex) on a purely differential basis. In this sense, Deleuze’s inverted Platonism can at the same time be seen as a rejuvenated Platonism and even a completed Platonism. (shrink)

As an atypical product of mass culture, the acclaimed series Westworld presents us with a layered dystopian narrative formed around several political issues relevant to our contemporary society. It uses a pastiche of the American history, staged as the Wild West­themed amusement park, presented in the form of simulacrum. As a reference with no referent, this park uses a network of historical signifiers to construct a space for the externalisation of fantasies of its clients, consequently commodifying the imaginary itself, (...) and creating surplus value for its owners. Simultaneously, within its reach, conscious androids conduct all of the necessary labour for its unimpeded functioning, although their consciousness and labour are not recognised and accepted. Because they structurally occupy a position of slaves in relation to humans, I will analyse this series as a political allegory on the master­slave dialectics established in the very heart of hyperreality that suggests a possibility of the return of the real, based on the rebellion of the androids. I intend to show how, because of the model of consciousness it maintains, the series is unable to fulfil what it implies. (shrink)

The very paucity of bridge principles in physics is important for increasing the explanatory power of fundamental theories, given that physics usually employs a few well‐understood principles to model many different aspects of physical processes. However, this also implies that the fundamental laws of physics do not govern objects in the real world, but rather only objects in models. Consequently, the proper account of explanation in science is the ‘simulacrum’ view. On this account, to explain is to construct a (...) model that fits the phenomenon into the basic framework of the theory, and then to derive analogues for its phenomenological laws. (shrink)

This essay presents a model-theoretic account of dispositional properties, according to which dispositions are not ordinary properties of real entities; dispositions capture the behavior of abstract, idealized models. This account has several payoffs. First, it saves the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. Second, it preserves the general connection between dispositions and regularities, despite the fact that some dispositions are not grounded in actual regularities. Finally, it brings together the analysis and the explanation of dispositions under a unified framework.

This comparative analysis of multiple variants of the aesthetics of simulacrum as equal and autonomous participants in the postmodern polylogue presents a principle of creation of a 'third reality', which unites foreign and Russian elements. Making an artifact out of an artifact leads to a theory of artistic relativism. This type of simulacra give artistic cross-cultural results with an additional aesthetic effect representing fragments of a postmodern mosaic culture.

While many of the most important figures in the history of philosophy have employed the concept of the simulacrum in one way or another, a detailed study of this usage has yet to be written. In this essay, I will attempt to tell the story of a sequence in that history of that usage, by focusing on one of Deleuze's case studies of the concept of the simulacrum. To do so, I will focus primarily on one the appendices (...) to The Logic of Sense: ‘Lucretius and the Simulacrum’. In order to understand what I will call the Deleuze–Lucretius encounter, I will proceed as follows. After a few initial guiding remarks regarding the general project of the ‘inversion of Platonism’, we will outline some of the most fundamental features of atomistic physics. This will allow us to discuss Lucretius’ thoughts on the clinamen, the swerve. This, in turn, leads directly to the concept of the simulacrum. With such a picture of Lucretian physics in hand, I will pivot to a discussion of Lucretius’ ethics. The ethics consists of a critique of superstition in terms of a general project of demystification. Although this sequence will concentrate mostly on what became one of the appendices to The Logic of Sense, I will end by looking at the more general usage of Lucretian atomism, especially as it functions in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that in Western postmodernism, both religion and the university are under the sign of simulacra. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “death of God” instigates a discussion of postmodernism and a simulacrum of religion. According to Jean Baudrillard and the theory of the Three Orders of the Simulacra, reality died and “hyperreality” took its place and now governs our existence. If, for Michel Foucault, the religious phenomenon today is outside theological beliefs and traditions, oriented towards (...) the body, power and panoptic supervision, for Jacques Derrida the phenomenon appears more as a negative theology of deconstruction. The theoretical objective seeks to explore the mutations that have occurred both in the academic environment and in religion under the phenomenon of globalisation and the technologisation of humanity. Here, the study of religion in universities is a third order simulacrum, the consequence of which is the illusion of knowledge and the unconditional independence of humanity, manipulated by technological evolution. The methodology used is Derridarian decon­struction, Nietzschean nihilism and the Baudrillardian criticism of the postmodern consumerist system. (shrink)

Lady Gaga’s celebrity DNA revolves around the notion of monstrosity, an extensively researched concept in postmodern cultural studies. The analysis that is offered in this paper is largely informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of monstrosity, as well as by their approach to the study of sign-systems that was deployed in A Thousand Plateaus. By drawing on biographical and archival visual data, with a focus on the relatively underexplored live show, an elucidation is afforded of what is really monstrous about (...) Lady Gaga. The main argument put forward is that monstrosity as sign seeks to appropriate the horizon of unlimited semiosis as radical alterity and openness to signifying possibilities. In this context it is held that Gaga effectively delimits her unique semioscape; however, any claims to monstrosity are undercut by the inherent limits of a representationalist approach in sufficiently engulfing this concept. Gaga is monstrous for her community insofar as she demands of her fans to project their semiosic horizon onto her as a simulacrum of infinite semiosis. However, this simulacrum may only be evinced in a feigned manner as a (dis)simulacrum. The analysis of imagery from seminal live shows during 2011–2012 shows that Gaga’s presumed monstrosity is more akin to hyperdifferentiation as simultaneous employment of heterogeneous and potentially dissonant inter pares cultural representations. The article concludes with a problematisation of audience effects in the light of Gaga’s adoption of a schematic and post-representationalist strategy in the event of her strategy’s emulation by competitive artists. (shrink)

With the recent deaths of both Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, it is an opportune moment to consider their respective contributions to social and cultural theory. The purpose of this article is not to establish an unbridgeable gap which allows no communication between Baudrillard and Derrida's thought. Rather, I will argue that there is an underlying assumption which brings them into close proximity: the idea that the dialectical order of the social, and its relationship to human mortality, has been radically (...) altered by the media-technological systems through which `the real' is represented. Baudrillard's concept of simulation attempts to show how the mass media have become the exclusive condition through which the social is staged, and that there is nothing outside of their operational logics (including the performance of political responsibility and the temporality of history). Derrida's conception of the spectre, on the contrary, presents a `quasi-messianic' figure which haunts the system of simulation; it is s/he who arrives through the intensification of social performativity which Baudrillard understands as completely self-referential. My aim is to show that the most political way of approaching Baudrillard is to read him as a kind of `evil genius' of simulation; as a provocation to acknowledge the spectral bodies who hover between life and death within the system of the hyperreal. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen’s short piece on the possibility of resurrection via simulacrum from 1978 has been regularly condemned for its overall implausibility. However, this paper argues that van Inwagen’s thesis has been unfairly criticized and remains a live and salutary option. It begins by summarizing the metaphysics of the simulacrum theory of the resurrection alongside the motivation for such a theory. Next, it challenges the four main criticisms against the van Inwagen styled simulacrum model. First, it argues (...) that while van Inwagen’s model may appear unnecessary or irrelevant for those that reject his metaphysics of human persons, an account like his is necessary for those that desire to maintain the traditional metaphysics of resurrection (e.g., the resurrection of the “self-same” body). Second, it argues that his model does not implicate God in mass deception or irreverence for the dead. Third, it rejects the idea that van Inwagen’s model is analogous to the implausibility of young earth creationism and its required claims like dinosaur bones being given the appearance of age. Fourth, it argues that his model is not metaphysically impossible for scenarios where someone is simultaneously killed and destroyed, such as in nuclear blasts. (shrink)

Education for Sustainable Development is a broad and varied field of study replete with compelling advocacies for a more humane world. Across a majority of its instances however, ESD might yet be seen to labour in stealth fidelity to a mode of political economy and model of human-nature relations complicit with planetary ecocide. This essay draws largely from the thinking of Jean Baudrillard in an effort to identify the implications of ESD’s mainstay commitments, particularly as expressed in the field’s lingering (...) fidelities to anthropocentric production and modes of protagonistic optimism. Such alliances are contrasted by the immanence of inhuman planetary difference as it might habilitate more eco-centric approaches and attitudes for thinking the very possibility of sustainable development in the present era of rapid ecological transformation. (shrink)

Deleuze adopts Nietzsche's manifesto for an overturning of Platonism. However, the consensus view is that Deleuze's project is best understood as a revision not a repudiation of Platonism. Deleuze's engagement with Platonism centres on The Sophist. Out of Plato's concept of phantasm, Deleuze fashions a new concept: simulacrum. In Difference and Repetition, simulacra are invited to rise and affirm their rights; and yet Deleuze later abandons the concept entirely. Why? Although suitable for the purposes of critique, it became otiose (...) in wider applications. More generally, and against the consensus view, I argue that the trajectory of the concept of the simulacrum is emblematic of Deleuze's anti-Platonism. (shrink)

This article argues for a new interpretation of the relation between Deleuze’s engagements with Nietzsche and Plato in the first chapter of Différence et répétition (1968). It (a) argues scholarship has overlooked important features of this relation, (b) reconstructs the text’s motivating problem of the reduction of difference to identity, (c) rethinks Deleuze’s use of “faire la différence” to show its methodological significance relative to Nietzsche and Plato, (d) proposes an account of the basic movement of differential being or becoming (...) figured as the Nietzschean “test” of the eternal return, (e) examines Deleuze’s derivation of the concept of simulacrum from Platonism for his revisionist theory of beings, and (f) proposes a solution to a problem unresolved in existing interpretations of the text: namely, how the text’s theory of beings as simulacra and its theory of being or becoming as the differential movement of the eternal return can have systematic unity. (shrink)

According to Karl Popper, science cannot verify its theories empirically, but it can falsify them, and that suffices to account for scientific progress. For Popper, a law or theory remains a pure conjecture, probability equal to zero, however massively corroborated empirically it may be. But it does just seem to be the case that science does verify empirically laws and theories. We trust our lives to such verifications when we fly in aeroplanes, cross bridges and take modern medicines. We can (...) do some justice to this apparent capacity of science to verify if we make a number of improvements to Popper’s philosophy of science. The key step is to recognize that physics, in accepting unified theories only, thereby makes a big metaphysical assumption about the nature of the universe. The outcome is a conception of scientific method which facilitates the criticism and improvement of metaphysical assumptions of physics. This view provides, not verification, but a perfect simulacrum of verification indistinguishable from the real thing. (shrink)

A single question marks our departure, a question that, while apparently straightforward, has assumed so many shapes and disguises that it would not be unjust to claim it has infected all of Western history. In its current manifestation, however, we will take our cue from Plato in phrasing it thus: What is a Sophist? When Plato first formulated the question in these terms, he well understood that its self-evident simplicity could be deceptive and that its effects might proliferate uncontrollably. As (...) Jacques Derrida comments, "The question of what the Sophists really were is an enormous question" (Olson 17). In Plato's case, attempting to "hunt down" the Sophist led from a disturbing journey through the world of images to an unsettling encounter with the existence of nonbeing. (shrink)

This paper offers an introduction to poststructuralist interpretivist research in information systems, through a poststructuralist theoretical reading of the phenomenon and experience of social networking websites, such as Facebook. This is undertaken through an exploration of how loyally a social networking profile can represent the essence of an individual, and whether Platonic notions of essence, and loyalty of copy, are disturbed by the nature of a social networking profile, in ways described by poststructuralist thinker Deleuze’s notions of the reversal of (...) Platonism. In bringing a poststructuralist critique to such hugely successful and popular social information systems, the paper attempts to further open up the black box of the computer ‘user’, extend interpretive approaches to information systems research to embrace poststructuralism, and explore how notions of the Self might be reflected through engagement with information system (IS), and how an IS appreciation of the phenomenon of global social networking may benefit from embracing such a poststructuralist approach. (shrink)

Carroll's uniqueness is to have allowed nothing to pass through sense, but to have played out everything in nonsense, since the diversity of nonsenses is enough to give an account of the entire uni...

This paper uses Lawrence Venuti's writings on foreignising translation as a point of departure to examine the relevance of Deleuze's work to the discipline of translation studies. It begins by using Deleuze's earlier work to define translation as a problem of difference, drawing on concepts such as the simulacrum, the Virtual and the Actual, before using ideas from his collaborative works with Guattari, such as the minor and the nomad, to consider more practical aspects in terms of language. It (...) concludes by introducing the concept of the texture of prose as a means to apply these ideas to literary texts. (shrink)

The urgency of the research is that the simulacra of the virtual-online culture of the information society and the conditions for its formation are analyzed. The term "simulacrum" by J. Baudrillard is related to the virtual-online culture of the information society, because a person uses substitutes, copies of things, and not their originals. Setting objectives. This problem is caused by the fact that today the personality is formed in an artificially created virtual world that distorts the personality and forms (...) its torn and inappropriate image. This type of society as a virtual-online one needs its interpretation and analysis of a new conceptual-categorical apparatus. Analysis of recent research and publications. These are works by J. Baudrillard "Simulacra and simulations", as well as R. Simmel, R. Bart, R. Deborah, G. Bataille, G. Lacan, M. McLuhan, M. Foucault, G. Deleuzae, J. Derrida.The questions of the philosophy of postmodernism and the theory of simulacra of J. Baudrillard are considered in the works of such researchers: A. Gritsanov, N. Katsuk, A. Dyakov, N. Zinchenko, N. Mankovskaya, O. Pechenkina, O. Scalatska, V. Ferroni and others. The question of the simulacrum is considered by J. Baudrillard in a number of works: "Symbolic Exchange and Death", "Seduction", "Simulacra and Simulation", "Transparency of Evil" and others. The selection of unexplored parts of the general problem is the conceptualization of the concept of "simulacrum" and its discovery in the virtual-online information society. The basis of the research is the conceptualization of the basic patterns of simulacra and the virtual-online culture of the information society, which is a scientific novelty. Setting the objective - the usage of approaches, in particular, structural-synergistic and practical synergetic methodology that makes it possible to analyze the simulacra of postmodern as complex constuctions. Presenting main material. The analysis of formation and development of online-virtual culture of personality which uses simulacra; the definition of "simulacrum" is presented; an analysis was made of the fact that the game constituent has become a dominant component of the modern virtual world, and the game itself became a marker of the postmodern society with the performing "I"-game in the middle; the definition of "online virtual culture" is given in the context of which "I" is implemented; the network society is shown as a new type of culture of virtual reality. Conclusions - the simulacra of the virtual-online culture of the information society in the conceptual survey of postmodernists has been formed. (shrink)

Stephen Davis's detailed assessment of the doctrine of the general resurrection suggests that it is the claim that those who have died will persist into a subsequent, embodied life by means of a divine miracle. The dualist's account of resurrection depends on the possibility that the identity of a person over time is preserved by the persistence of a simple immaterial substance with no necessary connection to a particular physical or psychological career. This chapter argues that the seemingly preposterous (...) class='Hi'>simulacrum model fails to offer animalists such as van Inwagen an account of the metaphysical possibility of resurrection. Thus the constitution view of persons is unsuccessful in offering the materialist an account of how an individual might die and yet appear again at the Resurrection. However, while dualist accounts ground personal identity in the persistence of a simple immaterial substance (a soul), the uninformativeness of the constitution view has a different and problematic source. (shrink)

The article deals with the role of Russian culture in the period of the RF war against Ukraine. The history is considered as the basic structure that shapes the discursive foundation of identity. Historical narratives as well as the cultural background of imperial identity and risks of the full scale representation of Russian culture in the Ukrainian social consciousness are analyzed. The two tendencies are also comprehended — junk science foundation of geopolitical projects and devalu- ation of the historically formed (...) senses. So the communicative action is penetrated by the strategic action bazed on the false reality fundament, this significant element of the war of the world. The vivid example of junk science is the neoeurasian ideology, that defines the strategy of Kremlin informational attack on the Ukrainian identity. Standoff between the identities takes place in the course of the imperial mobilization project development. The symbiosis of governmental authorities and artists plays the key role in its realization. The author outlines the main features of the strategic effect of penetration into the core of communicative process and the false reality building. Also the author develops the thought that the heartbreaking and impetuous change of con- tradictory narratives are the one of the fundamental resources of information war. In particular it deals with the great Russian Simulacrum as the vivid example of the instrumental reason that is in the base of the information war against Ukraine. It is also defined the historical origin of the simulacra as the instrument of the Russian special services and the role of their partners — the iconic figures of the Russian literature — in the projects of the public opinion manipulation. (shrink)

Can transcendental empiricism be the mainstay to devise a poetics of the modern novel? Deleuze synthesizes it into a formula borrowed from Butor: “telling multiple stories simultaneously”. This process, closely related to experimentation in the plastic arts, is based on a new transcendental imagination, which finds what concerns it specifically in the notion of disparation, drawn from Simondon. Cosmos is its emblematic novel. The construction of the Platonic simulacrum already embedded such disparity. But instead of showing several perspectives, the (...) literary simulacrum narrates them, in the form of series, following the structuralist model. They coexist without any of them being privileged, but are nonetheless perspectives on absolutely divergent worlds. In contrast to Finnegans Wake, a simulacrum that complicates all the stories of the world, Borges' Fictions rely on chance so that one and the same story can tell an infinity of outcomes. (shrink)

As an art theoretician, and as a father, I focus on the social and political consequences of Vanderbeeken’s postmodernist negative theology. I express doubts about the relevance of a poetics of catastrophe that conflates any possible alternative to the alleged technocracy under the sign of the simulacrum. To my opinion, the discourse about the virtual and the real are in a deadlock. Following the lead of American novelist Thomas Pynchon, I rephrase these critical doubts in Luddite terms: should we (...) imagine a counterattack as radical as the alleged dystopian nightmare dreamed up and sketched out by Vanderbeeken? I try to show that this line of thinking risks to result in a bold and speculative logic where ethical nuance collapses and, ultimately, the relationship between art, theory and the social culture is reduced to metaphorical analogy. To make this point I retake a critical, phenomenologically inspired reaction by Vivian Sobchack to Baudrillard’s account of Crash, J.G. Ballard’s controversial novel on techno-fetishism. My argument is that the scar that marks Sobchack’s ‘technobody’ might here stand for an alternative that approaches our technological condition not as a discursive machine but as a social pragmatics with deep ethical implications. (shrink)

박물관은 지금까지 주로 과거를 저장하고 전시하는 수동적인 공간으로 인식되어왔다. 따라서 박물관을 현재 그리고 미래와의 연관성 안에서 이해하는 연구는 부족한 실정이다. 특히, 박물관, 그 중에서도 추모 박물관들이 다수 존재함에도 불구하고, “두 번 다시는(Never Again)”의 메시지는 박물관 공간 안에서만 공허하게 울릴 뿐 전시된 과거의 끔찍했던 인권탄압은 전 세계적으로 반복되고 있다. 본 연구는 바로 이러한 추모 박물관의 과거와 현재 사이에 부재하는 연결고리에 집중하여 현대사회에서 박물관이 어떻게 소비되고 있는지 논의하고, 이를 통해 박물관 분석에 관한 새로운 접근방식을 모색하고자 한다.BR과거를 전시하는 박물관을 현재에 위치시키기 위해 본 (...) 연구는 과거와 현재의 다리 역할을 하는 방문자들의 경험을 쫓아 박물관을 탐색한다. 기존 박물관 연구는 전시와 그 전시를 기획한 배경 그리고 인물들에 관심을 집중한 반면 방문객들의 경험에 대해서는 무관심한 경향이 있다. 따라서 현재를 살고 있는 방문객들이 과거의 공간인 박물관을 어떻게 경험하는지 살핌으로서 과거에 머물러 있던 박물관에 대한 논의를 확장하여 현대사회에서 박물관이 어떠한 위치에 있으며 영향을 주는지 살펴보고자 한다. 다시 말해, 지금까지의 박물관 연구가 박물관 자체에 머물러 있었다면, 본 연구는 사회라는 넓은 틀 안에서 박물관의 역할을 분석함으로써 박물관에 대한 논의를 확대시키고자 하며 이를 통해 박물관의 사회적 역할을 재조명하려고 한다.BR이를 위해 추모 박물관은 두 갈래로 논의된다. 첫 번째로, 보드리야르(Jean Baudrillard)의 시뮬라크럼(Simulacrum) 이론을 통해 박물관 전시와 방문객들의 경험을 분석하고, 그의 현대 소비사회에 대한 이론을 바탕으로 추모 박물관이 소비사회 중심에 살고 있는 방문객들에 의해 어떻게 즐겁게 소비되고 있는지 논의한다. 두 번째로, 사라 아메드(Sara Ahmed)의 행복함(Happiness)에 대한 이론을 통해 추모 박물관이 어떻게 인권유린의 역사를 해피엔딩이라는 “완벽한 결말”로 왜곡시킴으로서 현재까지 지속되고 있는 사회갈등을 의도치 않게 감추는지 논의한다. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the phenomenon of the visual, namely, the analysis of the possibility and means of expressing the surrounding world through the concepts of photography and simulation, which are widely used in modern studies of visual culture. Through the expressions of authenticity, the authenticity and aura of Walter Benjamin, the simulacrum and simulation of Jean Baudrillard, an image of the city and an understanding of its reality in general and individual parts in particular arise. The interpretations of a (...) separate space by individual human units of the city with their own meanings and understanding of authenticity are the result of the visualization by the subject-bearer of a specific image of the urban space. (shrink)

Can computer systems ever be considered moral agents? This paper considers two factors that are explored in the recent philosophical literature. First, there are the important domains in which computers are allowed to act, made possible by their greater functional capacities. Second, there is the claim that these functional capacities appear to embody relevant human abilities, such as autonomy and responsibility. I argue that neither the first (Domain-Function) factor nor the second (Simulacrum) factor gets at the central issue in (...) the case for computer moral agency: whether they can have the kinds of intentional states that cause their decisions and actions. I give an account that builds on traditional action theory and allows us to conceive of computers as genuine moral agents in virtue of their own causally efficacious intentional states. These states can cause harm or benefit to moral patients, but do not depend on computer consciousness or intelligence. (shrink)

Before I even begin, before even a preface or an epigraph, allow me to make two confessions or concessions. Both of them have to do with the fable and the phantasm, that is to say, with the spectral. The fabulous and the phantasmatic have a feature in common: stricto sensu and in the classical sense of these terms, they do not pertain to either the true or the false, the veracious or the mendacious. They are related, rather, to an irreducible (...) species of the simulacrum or of virtuality. To be sure, they are not truths or true statements as such, but neither are they errors or deceptions, false witnesses or perjuries. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999) argues that (1) the fundamental laws of physics are true when and only when appropriate ceteris paribus modifiers are attached and that (2) ceteris paribus modifiers describe conditions that are almost never satisfied. She concludes that when the fundamental laws of physics are true, they don't apply in the real world, but only in highly idealized counterfactual situations. In this paper, we argue that (1) and (2) together with an assumption about contraposition entail the opposite conclusion (...) — that the fundamental laws of physics do apply in the real world. Cartwright extracts from her thesis about the inapplicability of fundamental laws the conclusion that they cannot figure in covering-law explanations. We construct a different argument for a related conclusion — that forward-directed idealized dynamical laws cannot provide covering-law explanations that are causal. This argument is neutral on whether the assumption about contraposition is true. We then discuss Cartwright's simulacrum account of explanation, which seeks to describe how idealized laws can be explanatory. (shrink)

Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, is in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix. Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of (...) theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations. The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort. It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period; Production for the industrial era; and Simulation, controlled by the code. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext's new Foreign Agents Series. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, was in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix.In effect Baudrillard's essay was upholding the only reality there was in a world that keeps hiding the fact that it has none. Simulacrum is its own pure simulacrum and the simulacrum is true. In his celebrated analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard demonstrates that its childish imaginary is neither true nor false, it is there to make us believe that the rest of America is real, when in fact America is a Disneyland. It is of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. Few people at the time realized that Baudrillard's simulacrum itself wasn't a thing, but a "deterrence machine," just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-stricken the production of the real is. (shrink)

The scale is the most famous emblem of the law, including intellectual property (IP). Because IP rights impose social costs on the public by limiting access to protected work, the law can be justified only to the extent that, on balance, it encourages enough creation and dissemination of new works to offset those costs. The scale is thus a potent rhetorical trope of fairness and objectivity, but also an instrument the law thinks with – one that is constantly invoked to (...) justify or to question the extent of available IP protection. The balancing act that underlies the legitimacy of IP is, however, literally impossible to perform. Because we are unable to measure the benefits that IP has for inventors or the costs it has for the public, the scale has nothing to weigh. It conveys a clear sense that IP law can be balanced, but in fact propagates only a visible simulacrum of balance – one that is as empty as it is powerful. (shrink)

Recent developments in artificial intelligence—AI--have caused considerable discussion among both philosophers of technology and psychotherapists. In particular, the question of whether or not new forms of AI will complement or even replace traditional psychotherapists has emerged as a major contemporary debate. This debate is not entirely new, as it has its origins in the Turing Test of 1950, and an early psychotherapy chatbot named Eliza, developed in 1966 at MIT. However, recent developments in AI technology, coupled with long waiting lists (...) and variable access to psychotherapists have raised the question of machine psychotherapists in an urgent manner. Already, there are psychotherapy apps that one can download onto a standard smartphone and use in lieu of a human psychotherapist. In the near future, this simulacrum of a human therapist may be enhanced by the use of android therapists, programed to duplicate the knowledge and behavior of human therapists instantly, appealing to convenience or self-gratification through technology. This raises a host of ethical questions: can such beings be equally effective, and if so, ought we to reason in a consequentialist manner in their favor so as to increase accessibility and reduce costs through technology? Would there be a psychological difference between automated and potentially anthropomorphic therapy and genuine human therapy, if only a subtle one? Even if a chatbot or robot therapist is transparently such, is there an element of emotional manipulation and potential dishonesty in this interaction? Can the security of clients and their data be thus secured? I will argue that key aspects of chatbot psychotherapy present major ethical and clinical challenges in these areas, although transparent forms of it should not be legally banned. Keywords: chatbots, technological momentum, automation, psychotherapy, trust, anthropomorphism, data. (shrink)

The usefulness of models that describe the world lies in their simplicity relative to what they model. But simplification entails inaccuracy, so models should be treated as provisional. Nancy Cartwright's account of science as a modeling exercise, in which fundamental laws hold true only in theory—not in reality, given the complexities of the real world—suggests that Rational Choice Theory (RCT) should not be rejected on the traditional basis of its lack of realism: that, after all, is to be expected of (...) any simulacrum model. But when RCT has been extended to domains, such as politics, in which there is no necessary reason to expect systemic pressures against people who depart too far from the model, RCT is a simulacrum without any particular claim to expressing underlying causal laws. This cautions against the tendency to rest content with models and to treat their assumptions as if they were true. (shrink)

The fact that real-world decisions made by artificial intelligences (AI) are often ethically loaded has led a number of authorities to advocate the development of “moral machines”. I argue that the project of building “ethics” “into” machines presupposes a flawed understanding of the nature of ethics. Drawing on the work of the Australian philosopher, Raimond Gaita, I argue that ethical dilemmas are problems for particular people and not (just) problems for everyone who faces a similar situation. Moreover, the force of (...) an ethical claim depends in part on the life history of the person who is making it. For both these reasons, machines could at best be engineered to provide a shallow simulacrum of ethics, which would have limited utility in confronting the ethical and policy dilemmas associated with AI. (shrink)

This book marks an important evolution in Jean Baudrillard's thought as he leavesbehind his older and better-known concept of the "simulacrum" and tackles the new problem of digitaltechnology acquiring organicity. The resulting world of cold communication and its indifferentalterity, seduction, metamorphoses, metastases, and transparency requires a new form of response.Writing in the shadow of Marshall McLuhan, Baudrillard insists that the content of communication iscompletely without meaning: the only thing that is communicated is communication itself. He sees themasses writhing in (...) an orgiastic ecstasy of communications. Baudrillard navigates the Object'smaelstrom with the euphoria of the astronaut reentering Earth's atmosphere with no possibility ofassistance from Mission Control. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of TeachingGayatri Chakravorty Spivak (bio)It is practically persuasive that the eruption of the ethical interrupts and postpones the epistemological—the undertaking to construct the other as object of knowledge, an undertaking never to be given up. Lévinas is the generic name associated with such a position. A beautiful passage from Otherwise than Being lays it out, although neither interruption nor postponement (...) is mentioned. That connection is made by Derrida [Adieu 51-59].Here, then, is Lévinas, for whom Kant's critical perspectivization of the subject and the rigorous limits of pure theoretical reason seem to have been displaced by the structuralist hermeneutics of suspicion. For Lévinas, structuralism did not attend to what in Kant was the mechanism that interrupted the constrained and rigorous workings of pure reason: "The interests that Kant discovered in theoretical reason itself, he subordinated to practical reason, become mere reason. It is just these interests that are contested by structuralism, which is perhaps to be defined by the primacy of theoretical reason" [Otherwise than Being 58; trans. modified].The relationship between the postponement of the epistemological in Lévinas and the subordination of pure reason in Kant is a rich theme, beyond the scope of this essay. Let us return to what Lévinas will perceive as a general contemporary hermeneutics of suspicion, related to the primacy of theoretical reason: "The suspicions engendered by psychoanalysis, sociology and politics weigh on human identity such that we never know to whom we are speaking and what we are dealing with when we build our ideas on the basis of the human fact."1 The political calculus thematizes this suspicion into an entire code of strategy defined as varieties of game theory and rational choice. This can be verified across cultural difference, backwards through history, and in today's global academic discourse. Over against this Lévinas posits the ethical with astonishing humility: "but we do not need this knowledge in the relationship in which the other is the one next to me [le prochain]" [Otherwise 59].Kant thought that the ethical commonality of being (gemeines Wesen—repeatedly mistranslated as "the ethical state") cannot form the basis of a state. Surprisingly, there is a clear line from the face-to-face of the ethical to the state in Lévinas.2 It has long [End Page 17] been my habit to scavenge and tinker in the field of practical philosophy. I will conserve from Kant the discontinuity between the ethical and the political, from Lévinas the discontinuity between the ethical and the epistemological. I will suggest that the discontinuities between the ethical and the epistemological and political fields are tamed in the nestling of logic and rhetoric in fiction.3Enabled by such a suggestion, I can move to another bit of prose on that page in Lévinas: "for reasons not at all transcendental but purely logical, the object-man must figure at the beginning of all knowing."The figure of the "I" as object: this representation of the holy man in Lévinas does not match our colloquial and literal expectations. My general suggestion, that the protocol of fiction gives us a practical simulacrum of the graver discontinuities inhabiting (and operating?) the ethico-epistemic and the ethico-political, can, however, take such a figure on board. I will continue to want to say that fiction offers us an experience of the discontinuities that remain in place "in real life." That would be a description of fiction as an event—an indeterminate "sharing" between writer and reader, where the effort of reading is to taste the impossible status of being figured as object in the web of the other. Reading, in this special sense, is sacred.In this essay I consider not only fiction as event but also fiction as task. I locate in Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and J. M. Coetzee (1940-) representations of what may be read as versions of the "I" figured as object and weave the representations together as a warning text for postcolonial political ambitions.4 I am obviously using "text" as "web," coming from Latin texere—"to... (shrink)

Ruben Berrios Queen’s University Belfast Anti-realism and Aesthetic Cognition Abstract At the core of the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism is the question of the relation between scientific theory and the world. The realist possesses a mimetic conception of the relation between theory and reality. For the realist, scientific theories represent reality. The anti-realist, in contrast, seeks to understand the relations between theory and world in non-mimetic terms. We will examine Cartwright’s simulacrum account of explanation in order to (...) illuminate the anti-realist position. Science consists of phenomenological and theoretical laws. The former are concerned with appearances, or those phenomena that can be directly observed; the latter involve the unobservable reality that is alleged to underlie appearances, and are capable only of indirect confirmation. Phenomenological laws are said to be descriptive, whilst theoretical laws are understood as explanatory. Cartwright is concerned with the theoretical. She claims that the standard realist account of the explanatory efficacy of theoretical laws is faulty. The explanatory power of theoretical laws consists in their ability to provide an explanation of physical phenomena. According to Cartwright, the realist claims that laws explain phenomena by providing an abstract description of them, in terms of their micro-structural features, that is alleged to be true. On this view, explanatory power is entirely dependent on descriptive adequacy. As phenomenological laws describe appearances, so theoretical laws describe the fundamental reality that governs appearances. Cartwright rejects the preceding view and in its place proposes a simulacrum account of explanation. According to Cartwright, the explanatory power of theoretical laws is related not to descriptive adequacy, but rather to the construction of adequate models. To explain a phenomenon is to construct a model which best or most adequately accommodates the phenomenon to a theory. The model will consist of various posited objects that serve to explain the phenomena in terms that are consistent with a set of theoretical laws. Cartwright claims that theoretical laws are true of, or describe, the objects of the model. The objects of the model, however, are not descriptive of reality. They are simulacra. They have, that is, the form or appearance of things, without possessing their substance or proper qualities. In light of the foregoing account we can summarise the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism as follows. The realist claims that theoretical laws literally represent real objects. The anti-realist claims that laws represent objects of a model that are simulacra of reality. Anti-realism has an aesthetic dimension. The movement from realism to anti-realism is also the movement from the mimetic conception of the scientist as holding a mirror to nature to the constructionist view of the scientist as engaging with nature through invention. There is a lot of the artist in the anti-realist’s view of the scientist. This is true for Cartwright as well as, for example, Van Fraassen in his doctrine of constructive empiricism. It would appear, then, that the philosophy of science has absorbed some concepts that are ordinarily housed in aesthetics. And it has done so profitably. The aim of this paper is to reverse the direction of disciplinary influence. Can art, in relation to its status as a cognitive enterprise, be illuminated by scientific anti-realism? I will argue that it can. In an unexpected reference to the Nicomachean Ethics, Cartwright draws a suggestive parallel between theoretical laws and general moral principles, on the one hand, and physical phenomena and everyday moral conduct, on the other hand. If we add to this the claim that a central component of art’s value is cognitive, then we have the basic materials with which to flesh out a broadly anti-realist view of art. In the production of art, artists can construct models that mediate between everyday ethical phenomena and general ethical tendencies. These models reveal the ways in which there are implicit consistencies or inconsistencies, conflicts or congruences and so forth, between the phenomena and the tendencies. On this basis art can contribute to the reflective understanding of ethical life. This constitutes to a large degree art’s status as a cognitive enterprise. To apprehend art cognitively as artist or critic is to engage in aesthetic cognition. (shrink)

There is a widespread, popular view—and one I basically endorse—that Nietzsche is, in one sense of the word, a nihilist. As Arthur Danto put it some time ago, according to Nietzsche, “there is nothing in [the world] which might sensibly be supposed to have value.” As interpreters of Nietzsche, though, we cannot simply stop here. Nietzsche's higher men, Übermenschen, “genuine philosophers”, free spirits—the types Nietzsche wants to bring forth from the human, all-too-human herds he sees around him with the fish (...) hooks, as he says, of his books—seem to engage in what looks like valuing. These free spirits are supposed to revalue the old values—revaluing, as is clear from the texts, is not simply to remove the old values from circulation (Nietzsche uses “umwerten” and not “entwerten”)—and they are supposed to create new values. And, of course, Nietzsche himself, free spirit that he is, takes on the task of revaluing all values and seems to assert many a strident evaluation. So we need to say more here. What are Nietzsche and his free spirits up to when they engage in what looks, for all the world, like a practice of valuing? What is the practice of valuing Nietzsche is recommending for his free spirits? I argue for two claims: (i) First, we end up facing an interpretive puzzle when we attempt to explain how Nietzsche's free spirits are supposed to engage in a practice of valuing. (ii) Second, we can solve the interpretive puzzle by taking Nietzsche's free spirits to be engaged in a fictionalist simulacrum of valuing. (shrink)

In this article, the author explores the metaphysical foundations of evil. Research shows that as a transcendental phenomenon, evil reveals itself in two “optics”. On the one hand, evil means certain ontological aspects, which are distortions of the mode of co-existence. On the other hand, evil is a deformation of the existential nature of man. Thus, evil is a condition for the deformation of the ontological foundations of being, penetrating the world through human. In other words, the metaphysical nature of (...) evil appears as, firstly, “absence”, “void”, and, secondly, “distortion”, “imperfection”. In this regard, evil appears as ontologically and chronologically secondary to good. It exists only on the basis of good as its distortion, defect, simulacrum. The emptiness, unreality of evil opens the sphere of its existence, that is, an illusion. This explains the fact that evil receives its “reality”, materiality and form only with the help of a person who is free in his choice and able to distort the nature of good and realize illusion. Good is knowledge, it can transform a person, it is a living spiritual knowledge that opens itself to a knowing person in the process of mastering the surrounding reality, it fills him / her with content and uniqueness. In this perspective, good is a universal value system, the basis of which is love, truth, faith, labor, spiritual perfection, etc. In contrast, evil realizes itself in the denial of higher values, distortion or inappropriate use of the Truth of human existence. The study shows that the nature of evil is selfish, atomic and separating. Evil is all that contradicts the interests of the whole, that is, love, good, truth, freedom. It is all that individualizes, fragmentes, distorts, destroys the Truth of the whole. Thus, the basic principle of evil is “It’s every man for himself, everyone is his own god”. Therefore, as noted by religious philosophers, evil in human is associated primarily with the loss of his / her integrity. A person who has embarked on the path of violence and self-destruction is evil. This person is mistaken and unhappy, because he has not formed as a person. Goodness in human is internal integrity, unity, submission of his / her mind and bodily life to a higher spiritual principles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against InauthenticityChristopher S. SchreinerScars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, by Geoffrey Hartman; xii & 260 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. $17.95 paper.Geoffrey Hartman is now an emeritus faculty member at Yale. All but the youngest readers of this journal will recognize him as a member of the now defunct Yale School of Criticism, which in its glory days included (...) Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Among these accomplished individuals, Hartman distinguished himself as the one most engaged with discussing the role of style in theoretically propelled criticism, and this remains his lasting contribution. The question he kept asking was the following: what demands do the books we read and the theories we use make on our own critical practice, and in particular, on our style? Works such as Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) and Saving the Text (1981) were concerned with promoting a philosophical criticism that is as creative as the literature it seeks to criticize, in opposition to the Arnoldian standard of a disinterested criticism that respects and preserves the canonical hauteur of literary classics and doesn't seek to imitate them. Yet over the decades Hartman's own prose, except when it lapsed into copying Derrida's, seemed more that of the Doctor and less the Explorer, to borrow the terms Lionel Trilling used to describe Matthew Arnold's criticism. This is an irony we are grateful for.Hartman's most recent book, Scars of the Spirit, takes up the problem of authenticity in the context of postmodern culture, seeking to reestablish its legitimacy as a serious topic and unmask what merely poses as authentic in the global marketplace. Today his agenda ignominiously crosses paths with the likes of Jane Fonda, whose autobiography is replete with New Age claims to recover "the authentic me." One of the issues never resolved by Hartman's book and which taunts his project behind its back is whether his Continental erudition makes his project any more authentic than Fonda's celebrity psychobabble. Authenticity was the Heideggerian concept that Adorno ruthlessly and ironically attacked in his The Jargon of Authenticity, and it has an old-fashioned existential ring to it to this day. For those readers who haven't read Being and Time lately, authenticity (Jemeinigkeit) was the resolute impetus of making time one's own, taking it back from the instrumental public world that had appropriated it so that one can live a sincerely mortal life and die one's own death, as it were properly. Professors valiantly conjured an ethic out of this retrieval of selfhood, of one's personal property of time and destiny in the Lost and Found of culture, not fully cognizant of its Nietzschean roots. The absence of altruism in this existential ethic inspired Emmanel Levinas's patient attempt to persuade us to demote our egoism in an insatiable responsibility to and for others, for whom we can never do enough.There is surely irony in the fact that the anachrony of authenticity as a concept was accelerated by the deconstructive theory that Hartman helped [End Page 501] promulgate. Hence his new book reads a bit like someone having to gingerly retrace his steps in a field of landmines planted by the Yale School of Criticism. The question of propriety, what is right and proper, what is one's own, stamped with one's unique or authentic properties, was deconstructed by Derrida, and Hartman reverently recorded the results in the incongruously titled Saving the Text, an analysis of Derrida's attempt to promote textual intercourse between Hegel and Jean Genet by setting them in parallel columns on one page. In a nutshell, the original source of an event or text, its material advent, is untraceable due to its derivativeness, the forces of semiosis (or textuality) at play in and between texts. In parallel to this discovery, Jean Baudrillard spoke of the simulacrum as a media-generated version behind which the original "thing itself" was forever irrecoverable. The very idea of authenticity came to sound illusory, denoting a mirage sought in a hopeless regressive inquiry or Ruckfrage which Husserl (with... (shrink)