This paper challenges a pervasive curricular justification for educationally acquainting young people with stories of genocide and other moral horrors from history. According to this justification, doing so favours the development of psycho-social soft skills connected with interpersonal awareness and the establishment and maintenance of positive relationships. It is argued that this justification not only renders the specific historical content incidental to the development of these skills. The educational intention of promoting such psycho-social soft skills by way of studying (...) moral horrors in history constitutes an ethically problematic instrumentalisation of the historical material itself. (shrink)

Although scientific interest in facial attractiveness has developed substantially in recent years, few studies have contributed to our understanding of the ontogeny of facial preferences. In this study, attractiveness of 30 male faces was evaluated by four female groups: girls at puberty, nonpregnant and pregnant young women, and middle-aged women. The main findings are as follows: (1) Preference for sexy-looking faces was strongest in young, nonpregnant women. (2) Biologically more mature girls displayed more adultlike preferences. (3) The intragroup consistency for (...) postmenopausal women was relatively low. (4) In terms of the preference pattern, pregnant women were more similar to perimenopausal women than they were to their nonpregnant peers. (5) Preference for youthful appearance decreased with the age of the women. I argue that the life history of female preferences for male faces is, to a large extent, hormone-driven and underpinned by a set of evolutionary adaptations. (shrink)

We present the methodological principles underlying the scientific activities of the DHST Commission on the History and Philosophy of Computing. This volume collects refereed selected papers from the First International Conference organized by the Commission.

In this book, one of the world's leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism." Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek (...) historiography--Herodotus's broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides' contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question. The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley's highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past. (shrink)

Articles, speeches, etc. on communism and Christianity.

In his Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher argues that in the 21st century Western culture is in a state of stasis, which ‘has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of “newness”, of perpetual movement’. To substantiate this claim Fisher contrasts contemporary pop music, particularly that with a ‘classic’ sound – such as recordings by Adele, Amy Winehouse and Arctic Monkeys – with the pop of the 1970s and ‘80s, the ‘mutations’ of which enabled listeners of his generation to (...) ‘measure the passage of cultural time’, concluding that today it is ‘the very sense of future shock which has disappeared from’ music and from culture generally. In this paper I apply Fisher’s observations to science fiction cinema focusing, on three recent time travel movies – Sound of My Voice (2011), Looper (2012) and About Time (2013) – and arguing that only the first can truly be considered science fiction, even though its relationship to the genre is the most problematic, since it may not involve time travel at all, and that the others, where time travel is used unambiguously, are instead exercises in what I term ‘genre-splicing’ – the introduction of elements of one type of narrative to another – a process which, like the ‘classic’ pop sound, is an indication of the lack of a sense of the future in current Western culture. A key element of Sound of My Voice is the promise of a future in which the culture industry has been replaced by an authentic folk culture; while this may appear merely a nostalgic fantasy, also identifiable in Looper’s fetishism of aspects of the Old West and the use of ‘nu-folk’ on About Time’s soundtrack, I argue, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on nostalgia, that the Sound of My Voice’s representation of a ‘folk future’ is not an escapist fantasy but, like the uncertainty of the film’s generic status, a provocation, which asks us to reconsider our relationship both to contemporary capitalism and to the future which can be made to happen. (shrink)

Major depressive disorder is a highly prevalent psychiatric disorder, and recurrent depression is associated with severe and chronic impairment. Identifying markers of risk is imperative to i...

LANDSCAPING THE HUMAN SOUL In 1996 Lance Armstrong was diagnosed with stage-four testicular cancer. Doctors gave him a forty percent chance of survival. ...

In this paper, I explore the philosophical apprehension of the face through art history in order to signal a moment of rupture in the contemporary times of the face and its signifying relationship to the subject. Drawing from Francis Galton’s nineteenth century photographic experiments on analytical portraiture, one sees how the face when conceived as an atlas, functions very differently for the subject and its recognition than when understood as a mere image. With the advent of futuristic technology like (...) AI and machine learning feeding in much of our technocratic imaginations, where does the face and its constituency lie? Modernist artists found in the face, various motivations of their own – it was a field to explore their own subjectivities and those inclined towards the transcendental managed to liberate the subject from its image i.e. the face. This manner of freeing the subject of its image and thinking of the face as a structure of the subject, has potential to help us imagine new kinds of polyvalent subjectivities, as can be seen in works of contemporary artist- philosophers like Hito Steyerl. This paper articulates this journey of the face which began its story as the constitutive technology of the subject in the 19th century but today find its best reckoning as an insufficient one, in our quest for understanding new post-humanist subjectivities. (shrink)

The Faces of Reason traces the history of philosophy in English Canada from 1850 to 1950, examining the major English-Canadian philosophers in detail adn setting them in the context of the main currents of Canadian thought. The book concludes with a brief survey of the period after 1950. What is distinctive in Canadian philosophy, say the authors, is the concept of reason and the uses to which it is put. Reason has interacted with experience in a new world and (...) a cold climate to create a distinctive Canadian community. The diversity of political, geographic, social, and religious factors has fostered a particular kind of thinking, particular ways of reasoning and communicating. Rather than one grand, overarching Canadian way of thinking, there are “many faces of reason,” “a kind of philosophic federalism”. The book has two dimensions: “it is a continuos story which makes a point about the development of philosophical reason in the Canadian context.... it is a reference work which may be consulted by readers interested in particular figures, ideas, movements, or periods.”. (shrink)

The Natural Contract (1990) marks the emergence of the environmental question in Serres’s work that became central in his later publications. Over the twenty years when the Anthropocene emerged as a distinct narrative entangling geological time with the history of human technology, Serres developed a rather similar “Grand Récit” embracing deep geological time, biological evolution, the process of hominization, and the future of humankind, although he did not enter into conversation with the leading figures of the interdisciplinary field of (...) Anthropocene studies. This paper seeks to characterize Serres’s position in the field of environmental philosophy as it has been reconfigured by the introduction of the concept of the Anthropocene. It first briefly surveys the personal pathway that led Serres to his diagnosis of a global climate crisis. It then compares the concepts that guided his analysis with the concepts debated in Anthropocene studies. Finally, I will suggest that the ethical measures proposed by Serres to face the crisis did not help to bring him into dialogue with the Anthropocene scholars. (shrink)

Face recognition depends upon the uniqueness of each human face. This is accomplished by the patterns formed by the unique relationship among face features. Unique face-patterns are produced by the intrusion of random factors into the process of biological growth and development. Processes are described which enable a unique face-pattern to be represented as a percept in the visual sensory system. The components of the face recognition system are analyzed as is the manner in which the precept is connected through (...) microcircuits to a memory file so that the history of a perceiver’s encounters with a familiar face enables the perceiver to access a memory store that is a record of the outcome of past encounters with the perceived. The importance of the face recognition system in enabling humans to individuate members the social group is discussed, as well as the importance of face recognition in the development of the individual’s social identity and ability to be a collaborative member of the social groups to which it belongs. The role of prosopagnosia—the inability to recognize familiar faces—in furthering an understanding of the face recognition system is examined, as is its importance in demonstrating the crucial nature of face recognition in human social functions. It is proposed that human face recognition is not a unique phenomenon but is an elaboration of processes existing in nonhuman primates as well as in lower animals. (shrink)

The project 'Facing Forward' started with a collaboration between five institutions: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, De Appel arts centre, W139, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the art magazine Metroplis M. Having previously organized the lecture series and publications 'Right About Now: Art & Theory in the 1990s' (2005/2006) and 'Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century' (2008/2009), the organizing committee decided to take the (...) final step in this timeline and turn its attention to the far horizon. Informed by a shared interest in the role that history, speculation, and utopianism play in the field of contemporary art and design (as well as the larger context of global, socio-economic and political developments), a selection of seven themes emerged from the conversations of the initial organizers. These would eventually shape the seven lecture and discussions events - collected in this volume of essays - publicized under the banner Art & Theory From a Future Perspective. A great number of internationally renowned speakers were invited to reflect on the proposed themes during often sold-out events, which were presented at the Oude Lutherse Kerk in Amsterdam in 2011/2012. Yet, however compelling our desire as organizers to go beyond the framework of contemporary events and the current interest, well-nigh obsession, with history, it is obviously an illusion to think that we can escape the past by means of a turn towards the future."--Page 8. (shrink)

Despite being often criticized, the notion of face has recently begun to be applied in diachronic pragmatic investigations on directives, requests, apologies, and terms of address. The present study also uses the notion of face to investigate the use of Dank ‘thanks’, Dankbarkeit ‘thankfulness’, and danken ‘to thank’ in expressions of gratitude in Old Saxon and Old High German, laying the foundations to a better understanding of the speech act of thanking in the history of German. The data suggest (...) that, although the manifestation of gratitude was common, the expressions containing Dank, Dankbarkeit, and danken could mostly be found when the addresser was in a lower social position than the addressee. The same situation was observed when these nouns and verbs were used with the meaning of “to reward” and “to praise.” These findings provide evidence to the claim that the effects of a speech act on the speaker’s or hearer’s face are mostly situational rather than being an intrinsic property. They also suggest that, in strictly hierarchical societies such as the Old Saxon and Old High German ones, addressers would threaten their own negative face only if they were in a lower social position than the addressees. (shrink)

“Thank you Andrew and Ann Goldman for the persistence that it took to achieve the portraits in Facing North. It is a historic document for Ely, Minnesota that has worldwide interest as a snapshot of a unique northern community. You so accurately captured my friends and neighbors and I will always cherish this book.” —Will Steger “My work as a photojournalist has involved assignments about people and faraway cultures as often as about raw nature. Alas, I always felt there (...) were more stories per square foot in Ely as anywhere else I have been. Look into these Ely faces Goldman has captured with his razor-sharp lens and read the stories in their eyes.” —Jim Brandenburg, from the Foreword Perched on the edge of the northern woods at the gateway to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Ely, Minnesota, holds special meaning for hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. But what is it like for the people who live there year-round? Ann and Andrew Goldman offer a revealing portrayal of the unique people who call Ely home. Featuring more than one hundred portraits as well as vivid essays, Facing North tells the story of life in this Northwoods community: its breathtaking beauty, surprisingly diverse character, and complex history. A thriving destination area, Ely is a changing community, yet its traditions remain vibrant and strong. From resort owners and fishermen to canoe makers and artists, Facing North is an evocative tribute to the enduring nature of Ely and its people. This project is made possible in part by a grant from the Donald G. Gardner Humanities Trust. Andrew Goldman is a freelance commercial photographer. His clients include ESPN and Playboy Enterprises, and his photographs have appeared on more than forty magazine covers. Ann Goldman is a freelance writer and presenter whose professional background is in museum and nonprofit management. They live in Boulder, Colorado, with their two sons. The work of award-winning nature photographer Jim Brandenburg has been featured in National Geographic magazine since 1978. His many books include Chased by the Light and Looking for the Summer. He lives near Ely, Minnesota, where his work can be seen at Brandenburg Gallery. (shrink)

The present study investigates and thematizes the interrelation between face masking, concealment, and deceit. It starts from the premise that the significance of disguise and deceit in the history of ideas should be reversed as these methods of the management of human appearance are not only regarded as coercive methods to manipulate and exert power over others but also as tactics skillfully used by the weak in order to outmaneuver those who are in a position of power. The study (...) traces the matrix of simulation and dissimulation as forming the structure of deceit, it reviews some of the main theories of disguise within the field of semiotics, and it singles out two main dimensions of disguise, one geared upon dynamism and the other based on the static features of the face. This study suggests that classifications of masks elaborated in semiotic theory hitherto are useful but insufficient to encompass the full scope of such phenomenon. For this reason, the study provides a new typology of masks. (shrink)

The 25th of January, 2011 witnessed a wave of political unrest all over Egypt, with repercussions that have re-shaped the future of contemporary Egypt. For the first time in the modern history of Egypt since the 1952 Nasserite revolution, grass-root protestors went to streets chanting slogans against the military regime headed by the (since then ex-) President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. This placed the then regime, as well as its mainstay, the National Democratic Party (NDP), in a political crisis (...) on both local and international scales. It is this critical moment that led Mubarak to give his unprecedented speech on February 1st, 2011. The speech has brought about epoch-making political changes in the history of contemporary Egypt. Under public pressure, two seminal declarations were made in this speech: (1) Mubarak’s intention not to nominate himself for a new presidential term; (2) a call on the Houses of Parliament to amend articles 76 and 77 of the constitution concerning the conditions on running for presidency and the period for the presidential term in Egypt. The present paper seeks to answer the following overarching question: what are the discursive strategies used for saving the political face of Mubarak in his speech on February 1st, 2011? I follow a text-analytic framework based on the socio-semantic theory of social actors and the pragmatic models of speech acts and face-threatening acts. The analysis reveals Mubarak’s attempt to save his positive political face as a legitimate President who regarded himself as the official ruler invested with absolute power over Egypt. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with what seem to be standard practices of at least some organizations that use models in their ad campaigns. These organizations know that many of their models have had drug problems but refuse either to tolerate this or to help them. Some organizations have, allegedly in the name of a responsibility for the health of their customers, rather opted for a firm condemnation of the practices in which models such as Kate Moss apparently engage. This raises (...) questions about hypocrisy. The paper uses Levinas's concept of the face critically to describe what might be going on in the conflict between Moss and some of the companies she worked for. Moss is arguably understood by these companies as a role model who should not engage with drugs or street life. Against these more or less patronizing tendencies, the paper claims that it is not so much the face but processes of defacement that should trouble us from a moral perspective. The face, it is maintained, is not only ethical but also has a materiality. In opposition to what is maintained by at least some scholars of Levinas, art, literature and history have alerted us over and over again that the face is anything but indelible. Some examples from art show us the versatility and vulnerability of the face. The gossip and hype about what came to be known as the Kate Moss affair stands, it is argued, in a long misogynic tradition of defacement. (shrink)

From Homeric heroes, Lucifer and Faust to the phenomenology of individual and social emotions, this book unfolds historical dimensions, literary recreations and philosophical analyses of the most ambivalent emotion of pride, from worst of sins to noblest feeling.

This paper deals with modern history and the contemporary subject. Marx’stheory of modern societymust be corrected and completed. The dominant class includes two social forces: the capitalists on the market and the ‘competent’ in the organisation, facing the fundamental or popular class. A ‘régime of hegemony’ is a mode of arrangement between these three forces. Under neoliberalism, when a World-State is emerging, the capitalists occupy an overwhelming position.The ‘neoliberal subject’ can be described as subjected to a universal commodification. (...) But a realistic understanding supposes to confront this subject with the contradictory plurality of this régime of hegemony. The subject is ‘interpellated’ from all sides of this social triangle, across all the scales of social life. Only in this local and universal context can the potential of the ordinary human being appear. (shrink)

"Few of Randall's nearly 1800 photographs were seen or even printed until 1998, when he donated the negatives to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. The following year, more than 100 of the photographs were exhibited on that campus as part of a commemoration of the 35th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Those photographs are now presented in this book, enhanced by Bobs Tusa's extensive introduction. Faces of Freedom Summer offers a rare and moving visual record of a remarkable era (...) in American history."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Résumé Le problème complexe de la réception tardive de tout l’œuvre du marquis de Sade doit être considéré dans le contexte de l’histoire de la censure en Hongrie au cours de plusieurs siècles. Mon article se nourrit de mon expérience de traductrice, en particulier de ma traduction de La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1989). L’aperçu historique sur l’absence de réception de ses textes avant 1989 puis sur la période suivante qui a commencé avec le changement de régime et une grande (...) liberté dans le domaine éditorial, illustre bien les limites et les avatars de la censure en Europe Centrale et Orientale. (shrink)

Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes (...) that the face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models, adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence. (shrink)

Paul Ekman is an American psychologist who pioneered the study of facial behaviour. Bringing together disciplinary history, life study, and history of science, this paper focuses on Ekman’s early research during the twenty-year period between 1957 and 1978. I explicate the historical development of Ekman’s semiotic model of facial behaviour, tracing the thread of iconicity through his life and works: from the iconic coding of rapid signs; through the eventual turn from classifying modes of iconic signification using gestalt (...) categories to classifying modes of producing iconic sign-functions using minimal units; to the role and importance of iconicity for the study of the facial expression of emotion, both in terms of the similarities between iconic and analogue signs as well as the differences between facial coding and linguistic signification. In this intellectual genealogy, I argue not only that Ekman relied extensively upon conceptualizations and terminologies from semiotic thought for the creation of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), but also that the question of iconicity is the pivotal problem across the many discoveries and innovations in what I term ‘Ekmanian faciasemiotics’. (shrink)

Current debates in the analytic mainstream about the existence of God have often an air of the fantastic about them. Discussions of the God question typically begin with an inventory of properties definitive of the disputed entity and then proceed to a consideration of the question whether there is anything that answers to the definition. The theist adduces arguments to show, not so much that God actually exists—an enterprise much to bold for anyone laboring in the shadow of the Kantian (...) Critiques—but that the divine existence is logically possible, or at best, of some degree of probability. His opponent presents arguments designed to impugn the rationality of belief in God by showing either that the existence of God is improbable or even logically impossible. Of course, theist and atheist also each work at discrediting the other’s positive arguments. Now all of this makes for a lively and instructive exchange, except that an important assumption common to both partners in the dialogue is seldom mentioned, let alone defended. This assumption, which is responsible for the aura of the fantastic mentioned above, is that God, if he exists, is a being among beings, albeit the highest being. It may seem that this assumption is so unproblematic as neither to require nor be capable of defense. If the affirmation of God is not the affirmation of a being, what could it be? Surely, if God is anything at all, God is a being. Or so it will seem to many. But as I shall argue, the assumption, far from being obvious, is in fact false: God is not an existent among other existents, but existence itself. (shrink)

Recently there has been a renewed interest in moral inquiry among American scholars in a variety of disciplines. This collection of accessible essays by scholars in philosophy, political theory, psychology, history, literary studies, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and legal studies affords a view of the current state of moral inquiry in the American academy, and it offers fresh departures for ethically informed, interdisciplinary scholarship. Seeking neither to reduce values to facts nor facts to values, these essays aim to foster (...) discussion about inquiry and moral judgment, and demonstrate that moral inquiry need not be either dispassionate and value-free or moralistic and preachy. (shrink)

(2005). Wonder in the face of scientific revolutions: Adam Smith on Newton's ‘Proof’ of Copernicanism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 697-732. doi: 10.1080/09608780500293042.