In this paper, I consider a view that explains colour experience by the independent representation of surface and illumination. This view implies that surface colour is a phenomenal perceptual content. I argue from facts of colour phenomenology to the conclusion that surface colour is not a phenomenal perceptual content. I then argue from results of surface-matching experiments to the conclusion that surface colour is neither a perceptual content of any kind nor any sort of (...) computational output of the perceptual system. These conclusions contradict widely accepted views in both the philosophy of perception and colour science. I finish by considering and rejecting a competing account of the surface-matching results, according to which surface colour is represented indeterminately in perception. (shrink)

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how (...) they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the dominant view of musical sampling embodies an impoverished conception of the expressive capabilities of sampling. There are two respects in which it goes wrong. First, it overlooks the possibility of samples representing their sample sources. Second, it overlooks the possibility of samples that are not instances of their sample sources. En route to bringing out why the dominant view is impoverished, I introduce a theoretical framework that illuminates some of the ways in which (...) sample-based musical works can function as realistic representations of their sample sources. (shrink)

Vision is known to improve human postural responses to external perturbations. This study investigates the role of vision for the responses to continuous pseudorandom support surface translations in the body sagittal plane in three visual conditions: with the eyes closed, in stroboscopic illumination and with eyes open in continuous illumination with the room as static visual scene. In the frequency spectrum of the translation stimulus we distinguished on the basis of the response patterns between a low-frequency, mid-frequency, (...) and high-frequency range. With EC, subjects’ mean sway response gain was very low in the LFR. On average it increased with EO/SI and more so with EO/CI. In contrast, the average gain in the MFR decreased from EC to EO/SI and further to EO/CI. In the HFR, all three visual conditions produced, similarly, high gain levels. A single inverted pendulum model controlling center of mass balancing about the ankle joints formally described the EC response as being strongly shaped by a resonance phenomenon arising primarily from the control’s proprioceptive feedback loop. The effect of adding visual information in these simulations lies in a reduction of the resonance, similar as in the experiments. Extending the model to a double inverted pendulum suggested in addition a biomechanical damping effective from trunk sway in the hip joints on the resonance. (shrink)

Small changes in daylight in the environment can produce large changes in reflected light, even over short intervals of time. Do these changes limit the visual recognition of surfaces by their colour? To address this question, information-theoretic methods were used to estimate computationally the maximum number of surfaces in a sample that can be identified as the same after an interval. Scene data were taken from successive hyperspectral radiance images. With no illumination change, the average number of surfaces distinguishable (...) by colour was of the order of 10,000. But with an illumination change, the average number still identifiable declined rapidly with change duration. In one condition, the number after two minutes was around 600, after 10 min around 200, and after an hour around 70. These limits on identification are much lower than with spectral changes in daylight. No recoding of the colour signal is likely to recover surface identity lost in this uncertain environment. (shrink)

Trichromacy may result from an adaptation to the regularities in terrestrial illumination. However, we suggest that a complete characterization of the challenges faced by colour perception must include changes in surface surround and illuminant changes due to inter-reflections between surfaces in cluttered scenes. Furthermore, our trichromatic system may have evolved to allow the detection of brownish-reddish edibles against greenish backgrounds. [Shepard].

Deamination of adenosine in RNA to form inosine has wide ranging consequences on RNA function including amino acid substitution to give proteins not encoded in the genome. What determines which adenosines in an mRNA are subject to this modification reaction? The answer lies in an understanding of the mechanism and substrate recognition properties of adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADARs). Our recent publication of X‐ray crystal structures of the human ADAR2 deaminase domain bound to RNA editing substrates shed considerable (...) light on how the catalytic domains of these enzymes bind RNA and promote adenosine deamination. Here we review in detail the deaminase domain‐RNA contact surfaces and present models of how full length ADARs, bearing double stranded RNA‐binding domains (dsRBDs) and deaminase domains, could process naturally occurring substrate RNAs. (shrink)

By illuminating the striking affinity between the most innovative aspects of postmodern thought and religious mystical discourse, Shadow of Spirit challenges the long established assumption that western thought is committed to nihilism. This collection of essays by internationally recognized scholars explores the implications of the fascination with the "sacred," "divine" or "infinite" which characterizes much contemporary thought. It shows how these concerns have surfaced in the work of Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray and others. Examining the connection between this postmodern (...) "turn" and the current search for a new discourse of ethics and politics, it also stresses the contribution made by feminist thought to this unexpected intellectual direction. (shrink)

Collinearity or correspondence between the contours of the inducing figure to allow `contour continuation' or `figure completion' were, according to G. Kanizsa, the necessary conditions for producing anomalous surfaces or contours. Since Kanizsa's early work various hypotheses have been advanced to explain the phenomenon, but very few examples of anomalous contours that do not satisfy the above conditions have been reported. When two small white discs (1 cm in diameter) are set on a larger black disc in slow rotation, the (...) two discs, after some observation time, will appear as the extremities of a rigid cylinder displaced in depth. The surface of the cylinder, under dim illumination, appears as a whitish transparent surface. However, when the two discs are substituted by a circle and a semicircle of the same size, a clear anomalous contour appears to form the cylinder, even under clear light conditions and when the colours are reversed; i.e., black circles on white disc. The anomalous contours are not apparent when the configuration is stationary. I will demonstrate how the anomalous contours of a stereokinetic cylinder can be obtained even without the “interruption” of the lines in the semicircle. (shrink)

When objects are illuminated, the light they reflect does not simply bounce off their surface. Rather, that light is entirely reabsorbed and then reemitted, as the result of a complex microphysical event near the surface of the object. If we are to be physicalists regarding color, then we should analyze colors in terms of that event, just as we analyze heat in terms of molecular motion, and sound in terms of vibrations. On this account, colors are not standing (...) properties of objects, but events, or (more cautiously) properties associated with events. Accordingly, objects in the dark are no more colored than a turned-off stove is hot. Such an account requires rejecting some of what folk ordinarily say about color, but this is the most coherent version of color physicalism. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore bodily changes following weight loss surgery. Our empirical material is based on individual interviews with 22 Norwegian women. To further analyze their experiences, we build primarily on the phenomenologist Drew Leder`s distinction between bodily dis-appearance and dys-appearance. Additionally, our analysis is inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Julia Kristeva. Although these scholars have not directed their attention to obesity operations, they occupy a prime framework for shedding light on different dimensions of (...) bodily change. In doing so, we were able to identify two main themes: The felt “inner” body versus the visible “surface” body and the “old” body versus the “new” body. In different, though interconnected ways, these main themes encompass tensions between changes the women experienced as contributing to a more “normal” and active life, feeling more accepted, and changes that generated ambivalence. In particular, their skin became increasingly problematic because it did not “shrink” like the rest of the body. On the contrary, it became looser and looser. Moreover, badsmelling folds of skin that wobbled, sweated and chafed at the smallest movement, aprons of fat hanging in front of their stomachs, batwing arms, thick flabby thighs and sagging breasts were described as a huge contrast to the positive response they received to their changed body shape when they were out and about with their clothes on. At the same time, they expressed ambivalence with regards to removing the excess skin by means of plastic surgery. Through their own and other women`s experiences they learned removing the excess skin by means of surgery could be a double-edged sword. By illuminating the experiences of the ones undergoing such changes our article offers new insight in a scholarly debate predominated by medical research documenting the positive outcomes of weight loss surgery. (shrink)

We can start with a definition. “[C]olour constancy is the constancy of the perceived colours of surfaces under changes in the intensity and spectral composition of the illumination.” (Foster et al. 1997) Given the definition we can now ask a question: Does human color vision exhibit color constancy?1 The answer to the question depends in part on how we interpret it. If the question is understood as asking whether human color vision displays constancy for every possible scene across every (...) possible illumination then the answer is no.2 If the question is understood as asking whether human color vision displays some degree of constancy for some scenes across some range of illuminants then the answer is yes. The more interesting questions involve characterizing the degree of constancy human vision displays, the types of scenes and ranges of illuminants for which approximate constancy can be achieved and the.. (shrink)

On the surface, stoicism and emotion seem like contradictory terms. Yet the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were deeply interested in the emotions, which they understood as complex judgments about what we regard as valuable in our surroundings. Stoicism and Emotion shows that they did not simply advocate an across-the-board suppression of feeling, as stoicism implies in today’s English, but instead conducted a searching examination of these powerful psychological responses, seeking to understand what attitude toward them expresses (...) the deepest respect for human potential. In this elegant and clearly written work, Margaret Graver gives a compelling new interpretation of the Stoic position. Drawing on a vast range of ancient sources, she argues that the chief demand of Stoic ethics is not that we should suppress or deny our feelings, but that we should perfect the rational mind at the core of every human being. Like all our judgments, the Stoics believed, our affective responses can be either true or false and right or wrong, and we must assume responsibility for them. Without glossing over the difficulties, Graver also shows how the Stoics dealt with those questions that seem to present problems for their theory: the physiological basis of affective responses, the phenomenon of being carried away by one’s emotions, the occurrence of involuntary feelings and the disordered behaviors of mental illness. Ultimately revealing the deeper motivations of Stoic philosophy, Stoicism and Emotion uncovers the sources of its broad appeal in the ancient world and illuminates its surprising relevance to our own. (shrink)

In this paper we offer a theory of cross-modal objects. To begin, we discuss two kinds of linkages between vision and audition. The first is a duality. The the visual system detects and identifies surfaces ; the auditory system detects and identifies sources . Surfaces are illuminated by sources of light; sound is reflected off surfaces. However, the visual system discounts sources and the auditory system discounts surfaces. These and similar considerations lead to the Theory of Indispensable Attributes that states (...) the conditions for the formation of gestalts in the two modalities. The second linkage involves the formation of audiovisual objects, integrated cross-modal experiences. We describe research that reveals the role of cross-modal causality in the formation of such objects. These experiments use the canonical example of a causal link between vision and audition: a visible impact that causes a percussive sound. (shrink)

One of the virtues of Fred Dretske's recent work has been the salutary openness with which he has described the motivations he discovers controlling his thought, and this candor has brought a submerged confusion close to the surface. Since this confusion is widely shared by philosophers and others working on the problem of content ascription, an analysis of its influence on Dretske will at the same time illuminate the difficulties it is creating for other writers.

Where are we to look for the unique hues? Out in the world? In the eye? In more central processing? 1. There are difficulties looking for the structure of the unique hues in simple combinations of cone-response functions like ( L − M ) and ( S − ( L + M )): such functions may fit pretty well the early physiological processing, but they don’t correspond to the structure of unique hues. It may seem more promising to look to, (...) e.g., Hurvich & Jameson’s ‘chromatic response functions’; but these report on psychophysical behaviour, not on underlying physiology. So ‘opponent processing’ isn’t any particular help on the unique hues—and even physiology in general seems not to have come up with any good correlate or explanation. 2. Wright ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2: 1–17, 2011 ) looks in a different place: to (a) magnitude of total visual response that a stimulus light provokes, the maxima and minima of which, he thinks, give us the boundaries of the main hue categories (Wright connects these with Thornton’s ‘prime’ and ‘antiprime’ colours in an illuminant: Journal of the Optical Society of America 61 ( 1971 ): 1155–1163); and (b) the ratio of chromatic to achromatic response, the maxima and minima of which, he suggests, give us the focal points of the unique hues. The suggestions are extremely interesting; but the desired correspondences have some counterexamples; and where they hold, one could wonder how much they depend upon the particular choice of functions to measure (a) and (b); and one could hope for more of an explanatory linkage between the sets of items in question. 3. Could the unique hues come from, so to speak, the external world? White and black can easily be defined as particular kinds of reflectance. What of the standard four unique hues? Variation in kinds of sunlight and skylight coincides well with variation along a line from unique yellow to unique blue (cf. Shepard 1992 , Mollon 2006 ). If we wanted something to calibrate our standards for unique yellow and blue as the lens of the eye changes with age, and despite interpersonal cone differences, this would be a good basis—and there are several ways this can be extended to surface colours. But is there any essential connection between these things: is there any rationale why the light of the sun and the sky should be counted as unique hued ? An answer may be: because in our environment, these illuminants are as close to white (or the natural illuminant colour) as you can get—to see things tinged with sunlight or skylight should be to see them minimally tinged with any alien colour. Whereas other hues in an illuminant would be treated as tinging with a more alien colour the thing seen. (shrink)

While recent studies have illuminated the social and cultural realities underlying the cult of the saints in late antiquity, this communication focuses on Augustine’s beliefs regarding the metaphysical status of the saints’ humanity after death and the interaction between the saints and temporal human beings. Augustine’s representation of the lives of the saints in works such as his Sermons on the saints, On the care of the dead, the City of God, and On the predestination of the saints and On (...) perseverance at the end of his life reveals the dichotomies in his thinking on the saints with which both he and his reader must contend. The most striking dichotomies are those between popular, or lay, Christianity, and the intellectualized Christianity of a bishop like Augustine; the different historical periods to which Augustine’s works refer, namely, the persecution of the martyr-saints in the third century and faithful Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries; and the different metaphysical and spiritual frameworks of the here and now and the life to come. Against the background of these dichotomies that surface in Augustine’s writings on the saints, I explore the coherence of Augustine’s doctrine of the saints with respect to the following three concerns: a consideration of who the saints are, and what their status is after death, the relevance of the interaction between the saints and temporal human beings for living a good life now in preparation for death, and the effect that the doctrines of predestination and election have on Augustine’s determination of what can be known with respect to who is and is not saved among the saints. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Air of Liberty:A Transatlantic PerspectiveKieran M. Murphy (bio)"En somme le rôle du critique serait sans cesse de faire de l'air dans le plein du monde mais non pas forcement de faire du vide."—Roland Barthes"Dèyè mòn, gen mòn" ["Behind mountains, there are mountains"]—Haitian proverbThe phrase "I can't breathe" has become a worldwide rallying cry against injustice. Ben Okri deems "I can't breathe" the "mantra of oppression" that should "spark (...) the real change our world so desperately needs." He attributes the phrase's remarkable impact to how it taps into our primal fear of suffocation, encouraging empathy for "seemingly insignificant people." He also brings attention to how, as a slogan, "I can't breathe" subverts institutional racism through poetic means: "Not even William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin or Toni Morrison at their most eloquent came out with anything as simple in the genius of its truth as: 'I can't breathe.'" This truth is airborne: "'I can't breathe' suddenly equates racism with the deprivation of air, which is what it always was." The chokehold of racism emerged with the transatlantic slave trade and, Okri concludes, has been ever since the prohibition of breathing "freedom."The powerful convergence of poetics and politics in the slogan "I can't breathe" comes from its essential truth: the aerial nature of freedom. More than just a concept or metaphor, freedom is also something you breathe. Freedom is a kind of concept-image that depends on our intimate, life-sustaining relationship with the atmosphere. "I can't breathe" brings attention to this relationship to help redress the failure of our institutions to bestow freedom equally.The aerial nature of freedom is even more apparent in the related slogan "the air of liberty." References to "the air of liberty" occurred frequently during the French Revolution to convey the origin of the "human rights" that have become the bedrock of our democratic institutions. Today, these human rights continue to exert their legal weight for the defense of equality. Yet, when confronted with the evasive mechanism of institutional racism, they keep falling short. This predicament is partly due to [End Page 200] their supposed airtight foundation. "The air of liberty" offers a window to the turbulent time when human rights sprang conspicuously from the atmosphere, that we can reopen to shift the focus from the legal to the aerial origin of freedom. This strategy unleashes historical winds that swept across the Atlantic world, including a critical undercurrent from the Haitian Revolution that prefigured the "I can't breathe" movement and its critique of the white chokehold on freedom. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Detail of Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier, Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, circa 1789 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)The best-known depiction of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Fig. 1) portrays the origin of liberty in a scene unfolding in the sky. Spreading its light and dissipating the clouds of error, the Enlightenment's eye of reason levitates like an aerostat. Its liberating power illuminates the law symbolized by a winged figure pointing to the tablets below containing the articles proclaiming that "men" are born free and equal. Despite the prominence given to the eye of reason, it is in the atmosphere in which it elevates that we must look for the elemental spring of liberty.References to the aerial nature of liberty most intriguingly surfaced in contemporary debates concerning the universality of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The revolutionary and abolitionist Jacques Pierre [End Page 201] Brissot characterized the 1791 slave rebellion that ravaged the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) as a fight for a purer, healthier air. In a speech delivered the same year at the National Assembly, he argued that, following the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the "atmosphere" of inequality hovering over the plantations of Saint-Domingue had become noxious not only for the enslaved but also for the troops that France might dispatch to restore order in the colony... (shrink)

A play's text is nearly all talk, and in the performance of a play the physical activity is sparse and exceedingly limited. Used of a play, the term ‘action’ does not mean what it normally means. Its true meaning is illuminated by reference to J. L. Austin and his doctrine of speech-acts. Dramatic action is, for the most part, speech-action. And a skilful manipulation of speech-acts enables the gifted dramatist not only to tell a story but to communicate what is (...) going on below the surface. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 286—310. This mad play of writing —Stéphane Mallarmé Somewhere in between mathematics and theory, light and dark, physicality and projection, oscillates the poetry of Alessandro De Francesco. The texts hold no periods or commas, not even a capital letter for reference. Each piece stands as an individual construction, and yet the poetry flows in and out of the frame. Images resurface from one poem to the next, haunting the reader with reincarnations of an object lost in the (...) grass or a representation of a pear in a Dutch still life, embedded in cycles of cinematic close ups and multiple dimensions. As a whole, De Francesco’s oeuvre suggests, to use the title of one of his works, a redefinition —linguistic, epistemological, personal. The poem The End (un’agenda) (The End (an agenda)) opens with a quote by literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, which may be translated as follows: Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from this optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated out approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.[1] In writing, De Francesco seeks to redefine our approach to things. His poems, like Blanchot’s writings, speak to both illuminate and to obscure. The reader hangs in an absence of reality within language that necessitates an attempt at interpretation, yet renders such a search ultimately futile. De Francesco draws the anonymous images that appear in this poem from the city of Paris, his current home. The fragmented narrative depicts an inner doubt of realness, calling for a confirmation of a physical existence beyond verbalization and cogitation. Cyclical references to film throw into question the reliability of the reality he creates. The light, sometimes red and safe, other times absent and murky, cannot necessarily be trusted as a guaranteed means of illumination. Blanchot’s distinction between language and visualization, and the relationship of each to reality, though linked specifically to The End (un’agenda) , can be a lens through which to read any of the three works that follow. assente obliqua (absent oblique) is composed of descriptions of six still life paintings, ranging from Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century to 1960s minimalism. The actual images of the paintings are absent, and the text is the sole source and object of a virtual reality created around the artwork. “Absent oblique” refers to the light source placed outside of the frame, which both informs and distracts viewing of the scene. Although mere description can be unreliable and unsatisfying in its necessary limitation, the representational act of description is shown as more than just a human want. It is a need, a means by which to grapple with an unsure reality. As the illustrations progress, they descend into abstraction and chaos. The precariously placed plate triggers the movement: the bottle bursts and the objects collapse into the movement of a tracking film camera. corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale (foreign body in ascending motion) is prose poetry in action. Its objective tone of description is skewed by the subjectivity of the narrative as horrific images are relayed in fragmented but matter-of-fact manner. A “foreign body” is both a mass of cancerous cells, and a corporeal description, and the poem takes the reader on a journey back and forth between the two, destination unclear. Beyond a questioning of the real, corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale is an examination of the possible. De Francesco’s poetry becomes a camera obscura through which to observe the constant flux of light and dark that blurs our reality. His work is colored by the idea of apo koinou , a Greek term meaning “from the common” that involves a construction of two clauses with a shared word or phrase. Through such melting of meaning, De Francesco creates a fluid ambiguity that is nonetheless grounded in bodily concepts. In assente obliqua , the reader is confronted with a description of a still life that rapidly transforms into a more chilling scene: the membrane of the mushroom in the basket emerges behind the white cloth a body could hide itself that asks for help In the realm of pure description, there is a mushroom that peeks out from behind a white cloth in a basket. Behind the white cloth, too, there could be a body, hiding, asking for help. Such an elision elicits disorienting mistrust in temporality, but also expands the planar possibilities of syntactical meaning. A white cloth is not merely a construct in still life painting, but veil that both shields and reveals potential mysteries. It is a proposed alternative to a traditional Western binary of subjectivity and objectivity. The apo koinou construction is rare in modern English, having slipped out of use after its resurgence in Old English poetry. De Francesco reintroduces this blur of object and subject relations into a modern light. He draws inspiration from a device used by Gruppo 63 founder and avant-garde poet Antonio Porta tended toward repetition of phrases in third person perspective. In Italian, it is perfectly grammatically correct to omit the subject, including only a verb conjugation. Gender, even humanity unknown, the subject dissolves into the action, thus giving to the poetry the power to change the reader’s perception of who or what is actually acting. To further push the relative boundaries of experience, De Francesco expands his written poetry into what he calls “reading environments.” In these sound experiments, De Francesco’s voice reading his poetry is manipulated by real time digital voice processing. The written is transformed to the spoken, and then injected with currents of electric sound. “At each activation of word in the darkness,” (from The End (un’agenda) ) language is permutated into a nonphysical yet all-encompassing being. In these projects, realized all over Europe, De Francesco continues his examination of the word’s potency beyond the page and into an “n-dimensional space,” where the lines between nature and affect are intertwined. To publish excerpts of De Francesco’s oeuvre is to show screen shots of full-length film, to read pull quotes from a philosophy treatise. In these poems, there are questions, not to be answered, but to be questioned again. The words will oscillate in and out of the square construction found in his poems, out of the borders of the page, out of the rectangle of the laptop screen. NOTES (1) Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation . Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 27. EDITORS' NOTE The .pdf above contains about twenty pages of translation and the original Italian poetry. Below we provide only a brief account. The End (an agenda) Parler, ce n’est pas voir. Parler libère la pensée de cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis des millénaires notre approche des choses et nous invite à penser sous la garantie de la lumière ou sous la menace de l’absence de lumière. —Maurice Blanchot in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through the half-closed shutters becomes an event enunciation we stay without explanation like parallel curves on the back of a solid growing older she enters the garden always repeats certain phrases the elevator to be redone the neighbor’s music the steps the pavement furls like the leaves of a fern when touched she is framed from behind while she moves rocking she covers distances slowly a bag overflows from the wardrobe something stirs inside but then the suitcase comes open not even by my hand it’s the objects that are starting to filter out the little red haired monster watches idling the appointments written on one of your agendas two years old still seem urgent each letter holds itself upright on the page with flourishes and arabesques each angle has its own geography i’m trying to describe the path the fingers trace on the carpet the zipper takes the opposite route we are suspended on the stairs above the water in the center is the summer seen from above the darkness of the city passes from one headlight to the next the surfaces of our arms cohere and are shiny underneath the blinking of a sign each pore is an open expanse the body dreams the hair gives form to the possible some daring swimmers were throwing themselves into the seine they swam upstream up to the first quay look there could exist behind the screen a room where even when the lamp is out and the curtains drawn even when the suitcase wasn’t closed everything seemed red everything calm construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron by R. Courant – H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1941  . (shrink)

The main purpose of this book is to look at a range of ubiquitous phenomena that make up our daily life and to ask not so much "whether" but "what" psychoanalytic thinking can add to our current understanding of these phenomena. Could there be another layer, below the obvious surface-layer, that needs to be explored further? And if so, can psychoanalytic light reflect upon and illuminate some of the new contours and shapes perhaps previously not fully seen or appreciated? (...) What interim conclusions can we reach as a result of this reflection upon our modern world? This book is linked to its immediate predecessor Psychoanalytic Perspectives on a Turbulent World but it differs significantly in tone, light and composition. This new book no longer addresses itself to the complex and troubling issues such as war, conflict, the global financial crisis and our struggle with leadership, instead, it tends to focus on the lighter side of life. (shrink)

This article examines how Italian commercial broadcast news on Mediaset’s three terrestrial channels has covered the transition to digital terrestrial television. Mediaset is the largest commercial broadcaster in the country and is owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. By drawing on critical discourse analysis of broadcast news, it is argued that linguistic elements such as pronouns, choice of words, and metaphors, together with tendentious editing and framing of interviews, were part of a strategy of positive representation of the broadcaster’s (...) interests in the transition and negative representation of media policies opposing such interests. In particular, the analysis brings to the surface the ideological usage of interviews. Interviews in this case did not function as an act of control over the powerful, but as a way to illuminate the broadcaster’s strategic interests while obfuscating the reasons behind attempts to regulate the transition to digital television and open the market to competition. The data attest that the way in which news programs covered the digital transition exposes the connections between media content, media ownership, and governmental institutions. Indeed, all three news programs, TG5, TG4, and Studio Aperto, despite their different target audience and the reputation of one of them as the most objective and authoritative newscast on Italian commercial television, echoed each other in unified support of the sort of interests and media legislation that best fitted the corporation, especially at times when those interests were threatened. The corpus consists of 13 newscasts grouped in two clusters aired in 2006 and 2009. The main participants in the story were Mediaset’s president, often interviewed as the ‘expert’ on the TV industry, the communications minister for the center-left Prodi government, and the communications undersecretary for the center-right Berlusconi government. Citizens and consumer groups were never given the opportunity to voice their positions or be an active part of the narration. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's historical and philosophical investigations have gone through many phases: the archaeological, the genealogical, and the ethical among them. What remains constant, however, is the question that motivates them: who are we? Todd May follows Foucault's itinerary from his early history of madness to his posthumously published College de France lectures and shows how the question of who we are shifts and changes but remains constantly at or just below the surface of his writings. By approaching Foucault's work (...) in this way, May is able to offer readers an engaging and illuminating way to understand Foucault. Each of Foucault's key works - "Madness and Civilization," "The Archaeology of Knowledge," "The Order of Things," "Discipline and Punish" and the multi-volume "History of Sexuality" - are examined in detail and situated in an historical context that makes effective use of comparisons with other thinkers such as Freud, Nietzsche and Sartre. Throughout this book May strikes a balance between sympathetic presentation and criticism of Foucault's ideas and in so doing exposes Foucault's contributions of lasting value. "The Philosophy of Foucault" is an accessible and stimulating introduction to one of the most popular and influential thinkers of recent years and will be welcomed by students studying Foucault as part of politics, sociology, history and philosophy courses. (shrink)

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind? Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all (...) its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities. Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world. (shrink)

With Wind Wizard, Siobhan Roberts brings us the story of Alan Davenport, the father of modern wind engineering, who investigated how wind navigates the obstacle course of the earth's natural and built environments--and how, when not properly heeded, wind causes buildings and bridges to teeter unduly, sway with abandon, and even collapse. In 1964, Davenport received a confidential telephone call from two engineers requesting tests on a pair of towers that promised to be the tallest in the world. His resulting (...) wind studies on New York's World Trade Center advanced the art and science of wind engineering with one pioneering innovation after another. Establishing the first dedicated "boundary layer" wind tunnel laboratory for civil engineering structures, Davenport enabled the study of the atmospheric region from the earth's surface to three thousand feet, where the air churns with turbulent eddies, the average wind speed increasing with height. The boundary layer wind tunnel mimics these windy marbled striations in order to test models of buildings and bridges that inevitably face the wind when built. Over the years, Davenport's revolutionary lab investigated and improved the wind-worthiness of the world's greatest structures, including the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Tower, Shanghai's World Financial Center, the CN Tower, the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Sunshine Skyway, and the proposed crossing for the Strait of Messina, linking Sicily with mainland Italy. Chronicling Davenport's innovations by analyzing select projects, this popular-science book gives an illuminating behind-the-scenes view into the practice of wind engineering, and insight into Davenport's steadfast belief that there is neither a structure too tall nor too long, as long as it is supported by sound wind science. (shrink)

Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one’s children. On the surface, dad jokes are puns that are characterized by only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, which makes them lame and unfunny. Only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, however, is itself a violation of the norms of joke-telling, which makes dad jokes a type of anti-humor. Fathers may in turn seek to embarrass their children by purposively violating (...) the norms of joke-telling in this way, thus weaponizing the lame pun against their children as a type of good-natured teasing. Given their personality profile, it makes sense that fathers should be particularly prone to weap­onize dad jokes teasingly against their children like this, with the phenomenon bearing an illuminating resemblance to the rough-and-tumble play that fathers have engaged their children in since before the dawn of our species. (shrink)

Purpose While online classes have enabled many universities to carry out their regular academic activities, they have also given rise to new and unanticipated ethical concerns. We focus on the “dark side” of online class settings and attempt to illuminate the ethical problems associated with them. The purpose of this study is to investigate the affordances stemming from the technology-user interaction that can result in negative outcomes. We also attempt to understand the context in which these deleterious affordances are actualized. (...) Design/methodology/approach We obtain the data from narratives written by students at a top private university in Bangladesh about their experiences of online classes and exams and from focus group discussions with them. We use the lens of affordance theory to identify the abilities that goal-oriented actors – primarily students – obtain from the technology-user interactions, which result in negative outcomes. We also attempt to understand the contextual actualization of those affordances through the lens of Routine Activity Theory (RAT). Findings We find three deleterious affordances and three associated deviant outcomes. Non-monitorability which results in academic dishonesty, disguiseability which results in cyber-truancy, and intrudeability which results in embarrassment and harassment. Our findings reveal a deeper underlying problem with the existing educational approach in the universities of Bangladesh and suggest that there is a need to introduce more modern teaching techniques focused on issues such as student engagement and interactive learning. Originality/value To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that combines affordance theory with RAT to identify unethical practices observed in online class settings in the context of a least developed country like Bangladesh and to examine the environmental components that give rise to the pre-conditions for the unethical practices to surface. (shrink)

Talcott Parsons is often identified as the ‘master’ of mid-twentieth-century social theory. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, his writings were hardly any longer discussed, but mostly neglected. The American University is Parsons’s last monograph published during his lifetime. On the basis of extensive archival research, this paper discusses the conception, construction and publication of this monograph. The first section clarifies how and why some fine distinctions were made within ‘the team,’ viz. between co-author, collaborator and editorial associate. The second (...) section focuses on the two epilogues of this monograph, viz. Smelser’s epilogue to The American University and Parsons’s epilogue to Smelser’s coeval study on Public Higher Education in California, in which the tensions within ‘the team’ surfaced most visibly. The third section looks at the publication of the monograph and the failed attempts to complete related research projects. Altogether, this reconstruction of the making of The American University clearly illuminates the descending phase of Parsons’s scientific career. It also sheds light on the substantive problems of the work Parsons produced in the latter part of his life and career. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between skin, ego and second skins. It does so conceptually by re-examining Freud’s suggestion, in The Ego and the Id, that the ego is first and foremost a bodily entity, while also being a projection of a surface (i.e. skin). Drawing upon Anzieu, a dynamic model of inter-weaving surfaces can be seen to underpin an understanding of the ego — and skin ego. This model is fundamentally spatialized. Even so, an appreciation of the spatialities (...) of skin and ego can be developed further. To illuminate these spatialities, this article examines two key experiences of T.E. Lawrence during his military service in Arabia (c. 1917), as he describes them in his autobiographical account Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a meeting with British military police, and in the notorious Deraa rape incident, what is at stake is Lawrence of Arabia’s skins. Reading these experiences using Freud and Anzieu, the article argues that these events re-present an ongoing chafing of Lawrence’s skin, ego and second skins, which can be called his ‘skin of suffering’. (shrink)

Over the course of the nineteenth century mathematicians became vividly aware that great advances in intuitive “understanding” could be obtained if novel definitions were devised for old notions such as “conic section”, for one thereby often gained a deeper appreciation for why old theorems in the subject had to be true. From a naïve philosophical standpoint, such definitional alterations look as if they must properly displace the “propositional contents” of the very theorems they seek to illuminate. Haven’t our reformers merely (...) “changed the subject”, rather than truly provided. The conceptual enlightenment they claim? Many practitioners of the time claimed that “Science” enjoys a special prerogative to ignore “surface content” in its search for truth, a sentiment with which Frege often concurs, at least in his early writings. Yet it is hard to render these opinions consistent with his official views on sense andreference, as this essay details. It also surveys Russell’s views on such topics, although he was generally less aware than Frege of the revolutionary mathematical work pursued within the “search for fruitful definitions” program. (shrink)

Drawing on work done by Helmholtz, I argue that Reid was in no position to infer that objects appear as if projected on the inner surface of a sphere, or that they have the geometric properties of such projections even though they do not look concave towards the eye. A careful consideration of the phenomena of visual experience, as further illuminated by the practice of visual artists, should have led him to conclude that the sides of visible appearances either (...) look straight, in which case their angles appear to approximate Euclidean measures, or their angles do not appear to approximate Euclidean measures for straight line figures, in which case their sides do not look straight. (shrink)

In addition to being a means of communication between people, writing is the only way of recording government affairs. Writing has an important place in the preservation of knowledge and its transmission to future generations. Writing is an activity that occurs through processing meaningful words on a certain surface with a pointed object. As understood from the archaeological data, the first examples of writing were created by engraving on a clay tablet with a pointed object. Throughout history, people have (...) discovered and developed different writing materials depending on geographical and economic conditions. Writing has developed and become widespread in the early Islamic history in a way that serves political, religious and social purposes. The tradition of keeping records, which began at a simple level in the early periods of Islamic history, reached an advanced level as a result of interaction with other civilizations during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. On the other hand, new writing styles have emerged due to aesthetic concerns. The writing culture, which was shaped depending on the administrative life, was soon reflected in the class that was engaged in science and art. Depending on these developments, writing materials have diversified. In this article, the writing materials used by the clerks working in state institutions in the first two centuries of the Abbasids were tried to be illuminated in the light of historical data. (shrink)

In addition to being a means of communication between people, writing is the only way of recording government affairs. Writing has an important place in the preservation of knowledge and its transmission to future generations. Writing is an activity that occurs through processing meaningful words on a certain surface with a pointed object. As understood from the archaeological data, the first examples of writing were created by engraving on a clay tablet with a pointed object. Throughout history, people have (...) discovered and developed different writing materials depending on geographical and economic conditions. Writing has developed and become widespread in the early Islamic history in a way that serves political, religious and social purposes. The tradition of keeping records, which began at a simple level in the early periods of Islamic history, reached an advanced level as a result of interaction with other civilizations during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. On the other hand, new writing styles have emerged due to aesthetic concerns. The writing culture, which was shaped depending on the administrative life, was soon reflected in the class that was engaged in science and art. Depending on these developments, writing materials have diversified. In this article, the writing materials used by the clerks working in state institutions in the first two centuries of the Abbasids (132-334/750-945) were tried to be illuminated in the light of historical data. (shrink)

Colour constancy refers to the ability to extract information about surface colours independently of illumination conditions. A ripe strawberry, for example, appears the same red when viewed under a blue sky or a reddish sunset. Since Land's pioneering work, discussion has centred on the issue whether colour constancy is achieved primarily in the retina or visual cortex. Recently, the debate has shifted to a consideration of the constraints imposed by various psychophysical tasks and instructions. Humans can judge illuminant (...) colour, reflected-light colour, surface colour, and the relationship between surface colours within a scene. Such observations suggest that colour constancy may not be a unitary phenomenon, and that its different aspects may be mediated at different levels in the visual system. Several questions therefore arise: are the tasks of surface estimation and illuminant estimation complementary, insofar as good performance in one implies poor performance in the other? How does retinal adaptation alter performance? Is colour vision tuned to the statistical composition of natural surfaces and illuminants? What role does colour-opponent processing in retina and cortex play in colour constancy? These and related questions are explored here in order to better understand what we mean when we ask: "Why do strawberries look red?". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 80-97 [Access article in PDF] Literary Truth as Dreamlike Expression in Foucault's and Borges's "Chinese Encyclopedia" Robert Wicks ALTHOUGH THE TOPIC REMAINS MOSTLY unexplored, Michel Foucault had an aesthetic and intellectual attraction towards writers and artists in the Spanish-speaking tradition. For example, at the conclusion of his Histoire de la folie (Madness and Civilization, 1961)—a book which brought him extensive intellectual recognition in France—Foucault (...) drew his readers' attention to José de Goya y Lucientes's (1746-1828) well-known etching, El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, Plate 43 of Los Caprichos, 1797). In Foucault's estimation, by revealing a "night which is doubtless that of classical unreason," Goya's work represented a socially removed condition within which people encounter "what is most solitary" and experience what is "deepest" within themselves. With his reference to Goya's imagery, Foucault illustrated a major theme of his history of madness, namely, how people referred to as "mentally ill" experienced a gradual, physical exclusion from participation in public society, and how they were eventually isolated in a more frightening way: within their physical confinement, they were subject to techniques of psychological and spiritual alienation that reduced them to a condition of utter solitude.In a comparable, if not more central manner, Foucault used as thematic motifs for the preface, first and second chapters of a book for which he is widely known, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966), the work of three major writers and artists from the Spanish-speaking world: Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), and Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Among these references, the most popular is probably Foucault's discussion of [End Page 80] Velázquez's Las Meninas—a painting which captured Foucault's interest as a perfect exemplar of its time period—and which inspired him to devote the entire first chapter of his book to decoding the mechanics of its perspectival arrangement. And within the community of those who read, write and discuss the interrelationship between Foucault's thought, literary theory and the contemporary emphasis upon the multivocal quality of textual meaning, Foucault's citation of an excerpt from a short story by Borges—the subject of this essay—is also familiar. Foucault introduced his 1966 book, The Order of Things, with the following words: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies." In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. 1The short story from which Foucault extracted the above, quasi-cubistic, excerpt was published in Borges's 1952 collection, Otras Inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions), and is entitled, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." Although this story's entirety is rarely surveyed in discussions of Foucault, appreciating its broader contents helps illuminate why Foucault began The Order of Things with this entertaining and bizarre segment. Borges's original... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 325-327 [Access article in PDF] Introduction John F. Donahue The present special issue of the American Journal of Philology takes as its focus dining in the Roman world. It grew out of the APA/AIA Joint Panel on that subject, which was part of the annual meeting held in Philadelphia in 2002. The topic is both timely and engaging. Indeed, owing largely to its (...) perishability, its diversity, and the ease with which it can be manipulated for any number of social or political ends, food has proven to be an especially amenable topic for scholarly analysis of all sorts.The articles gathered in this special issue further illuminate the nature and function of this elemental yet highly complex social practice, offering a variety of approaches—historical, sociological, literary, cultural, and material—to food and dining in the Roman world.In the first article, "The Way We Used to Eat: Diet, Community, and History at Rome," Nicholas Purcell shows clearly that food and dining can be profitably approached from a cultural perspective. Here, Purcell explores Roman self-consciousness about nutrition and the way in which diet (and implicitly agriculture) were transformed into a narration of historical change. The process is evident in the "comestible historiography" of the elder Pliny, in which the simple foods associated with earlier Roman history provide insight into the ways in which the Romans thought about time and change by focusing on food. Especially influential in this type of approach was Varro and, before him, Dicaearchus. Thus for the Romans, food played a notable role in the relationship of the present to various pasts; in the process it becomes an important marker in helping us to map the intellectual and cultural history of the Republican period.Turning to Roman literature, John Wilkins, in "Land and Sea: Italy and the Mediterranean in the Roman Discourse of Dining," reminds us that Roman dining was linked both to the ideology of the early Imperial period and to the mythography of the agricultural base of Republican politics. The result is a body of texts that moralize against luxury and excess, however much this viewpoint may be at odds with actual Roman practice. In a refreshing departure from the Latin texts that typically treat these themes, the author points to the Greek writers of the second [End Page 325] century C.E., namely, Athenaeus and Galen. Both were interested in eating and dining, but from a much broader perspective than the moralizing approach typical of so much of Roman dining literature.While approaches of this sort help to illuminate both the universality of the dining experience and its uniquely Roman aspects, the sharing of food also intersects in interesting ways with gender and the body. Matthew Roller, in his article "Horizontal Women: Posture and Sex in the Roman Convivium," examines literary texts, Roman urban funerary monuments, and Campanian wall painting in order to understand more completely the complexities of female posture at Roman convivia. On a historical level such evidence argues for women assuming a reclining posture; on an ideological level, the reclining woman symbolizes many of the same things that a reclining posture symbolizes for men—otium, privilege, and pleasure. Even so, the matter of female sexual propriety is never far below the surface, especially in the non-literary sources.John Donahue, in "Toward a Typology of Roman Public Feasting," examines public banqueting during the Principate against the background of modern typologies of commensality in order to understand not only the form but also the deeper social function of public dining. Donahue assembles a wide cross section of Roman testimonia and weaves them into a coherent (if imperfect) framework of festal typologies, while employing a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach, in this instance from French sociology. The Roman evidence is categorized into useful typologies, which, in turn, enrich our understanding of public dining and its place in Roman daily life.Not to be overlooked within the Roman festal landscape were servants, the "human props" of the elite-sponsored banquet, as John D'Arms appropriately characterized them. 1 Here, in the final entry, Katherine M.D. Dunbabin... (shrink)

A Reader for Navigating the Depths of Our Lives The Universe holds us and tosses us about, only to hold us again. With Things That Join the Sea and the Sky, Mark Nepo brings us a compelling treasury of short prose reflections to turn to when struggling to keep our heads above water, and to breathe into all of our sorrows and joys. Inspired by his own journal writing across 15 years, this book shares with us some of Mark’s most (...) personal work. Many passages arise from accounts of his own life events—moments of "sinking and being lifted"—and the insights they yielded. Through these passages, we’re encouraged to navigate our own currents of sea and sky, and to discover something fundamental yet elusive: How, simply, to be here. To be enjoyed in many ways—individually, by topic, or as an unfolding sequence—Things That Join the Sea and the Sky presents 145 contemplations gathered into 17 themes, each intended to illuminate specific situations. The themes include: Unraveling Our Fear, Beyond What Goes Wrong, The Gift of Deepening, The Practice of Relationship, What Holds Us Up, Right-Sizing Our Pain, The Reach of Kindness, Burning Off What’s Unnecessary, How We Make Our Way and many more. For those interested in either beginning or expanding their own journaling explorations, this reader also provides a guide to the practice of daily writing, with 100 compelling questions to get us started. "Joy is the sea that holds all," writes Mark, "the Unity of Being where feelings don’t separate, but surface like waves to remind us we are alive." Here, he helps us swim in those waters until we are held in the mystery of their buoyancy. (shrink)

I believe that the long-neglected ideas on science and scientific method of Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce can illuminate some of the current attacks on science that have surfaced: misconduct and fraud in science and anti-scientism or the "new cynicism." In addition, Royce and Peirce offer insights relevant to the ferment in contemporary philosophy of science around the various forms of pluralism advocated by a number of philosophers (see Kellert, Longino, and Waters). "Pluralism" is the view that "plurality in (...) science possibly represents an ineliminable character of scientific inquiry and knowledge (about at least some phenomena) . . . and that analysis of metascientific concepts (like theory .. (shrink)

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the „Evangelist of Racism“, had a major influence on German Emperor Wilhelm II, especially in forming his nationalistic and anti-Semitic views. The monarch and the author developed a mutual understanding and appreciation that lasted over 25 years. This article illuminates the circumstances of their initial acquaintance through the edition and analysis of two documents which were two hitherto unpublished documents: Chamberlain's diary for the dates 28.–31. 10. 1901 and a letter to his aunt Anne Guthrie of 11. (...) 11. 1901. Both documents are compared to other known reports of this meeting. Chamberlain accepted Wilhelm's invitation to Germany where they met in Liebenberg in 1901 in a circle of select members of the German aristocracy. Their first contact is reconstructed here showing the extent to which Wilhelm's thoughts coincided with those of Chamberlain. The author concludes that the meeting with Chamberlain in 1901 was most decisive in the development of Wilhelm's own thinking and had serious consequences for the later course of historical events. In addition, this first meeting is particularly interesting because of the participation of Adolf Harnack who was at that time very close to the Emperor and also corresponded with Chamberlain. The differences in character and views between Chamberlain, Wilhelm and Harnack also surfaced during this memorable meeting. (shrink)

Byrne & Hilbert's thesis, that color be associated with reflectance-type, is questioned on the grounds that it is far from clear that the human visual system is able to determine a surface's reflectance-type with sufficient accuracy. In addition, a (friendly) suggestion is made as to how to amend the definition of reflectance-type in terms of CIE (Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage) coordinates under a canonical illuminant.

In Legality, Scott Shapiro – a leading legal positivist – analyses the problem of a wicked legal system in a way that brings him close to natural law positions. For he argues that a wicked legal system is botched as a legal system and I show that such an argument entails a prior argument that there is some set of standards or criteria internal to law which are both moral and legal. As a result, the more successful a legal order (...) is legally speaking, the better the moral quality of its law, and the more it is a failure morally speaking, the worse the legal quality of its law. It is such moral features of law that Shapiro concedes make it plausible to account for law’s claim to justified authority over its subjects. However, Shapiro cannot, as a legal positivist, accept this entailment. His book thus brings to the surface and illuminates a central dilemma for legal positivism. If legal positivists wish to account for the authority of law they have to abandon legal positivism’s denial that law has such moral features. If they do not, they should revive a form of legal positivism that specifically abjures any claim to account for law’s normative nature. (shrink)

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine constitutes a poignant reminder of the enduring relevance and potential devastation associated with nuclear weapons. For decades, the possibility of such catastrophic conflict has not seemed so imminent as in the current world affairs. -/- This contribution presents a comprehensive analysis of nuclear strategy for the 21st century. By examining the evolving geostrategic landscape the talk illuminates key concepts such as nuclear posture, credible deterrence, first & second strike capabilities, flexible response, EMP , variable yield, (...) counterforce & countervalue, limited war and escalation dominance, thereby providing a nuanced understanding of the delicate balance of power in the nuclear arena in modern conflicts. Furthermore, it concentrates on the era that started with the war in Ukraine, offering insights into how recent geopolitical developments influence nuclear doctrines. -/- Through conceivable real-world scenarios, we gain perspective on the multifaceted challenges posed by newer technologies and potential escalation dynamics involving global nuclear actors. -/- Such scenarios include: -/- 1. A non-weaponised or sub-critical test within Russia to intimidate opponents into understanding Russia’s resolve and capabilities. Prior norms have restricted testing since 2000, apart from North Korea. In case of a full surface test, Russia could detonate in uninhabited areas within its own vast territory with minimal fallout. While clarifying military strength, demonstrations risk hardening resistance without incentivising surrender. -/- 2. Coercive atomic threat to compel Ukraine or its supporters to make concessions. By leveraging the spectre of nuclear warfare, Russia could expect to achieve its objectives through intimidation and fear. However, the effectiveness of such a strategy is questionable, as it may provoke a strong international response and further galvanise support for Ukraine. -/- 3. Demonstration detonation over/under the Black Sea to signal resolve without targeting Ukraine itself; possibly amidst negotiations to gain diplomatic leverage, whilst limiting human casualties to zero or causing a mild, non-destructive tsunami. -/- 4. Ukraine could decide to launch a pre-emptive strike on Russian nuclear facilities or weapons, fearing an imminent attack. Such an action would have a high risk of failure and might even provoke a nuclear retaliation from Russia. It could also lead to a broader conflict, as neighbouring countries might feel compelled to intervene. -/- 5. Limited tactical strike against Ukrainian military or infrastructure to weaken capacity and morale. Russia’s 2000+ non-strategic arsenal could target positions using short-range missiles with 0.3 – 5 kiloton yields. Objectives like crippling Kharkiv defences might create no-go zones hindering advances. However, Ukraine might maintain drone and cyber offensive capabilities regardless. -/- 6. Electromagnetic Pulse attack designed to disable critical infrastructure in Ukraine and NATO countries without radioactive fallout. This aims to hinder the war effort and economy without provoking the same conventional military response as a blast. However, an EMP attack affecting NATO shall still be considered an act of war warranting retaliation. -/- 7. A weapon could be deployed accidentally or without proper authorisation. This could occur due to a technical malfunction, miscommunication, human error, or the actions of rogue elements. The consequences of such an event could be catastrophic, leading to a rapid escalation of the conflict and potentially triggering a global crisis. -/- 8. Sub-strategic offensive targeting NATO in the European theatre, so as to fracture allied resolve, against arms routes in Poland, Baltic stockpiles, British naval bases, American troop concentrations in Germany etc. Putin may perceive defeat or deposition as an existential threat, viewing such an option as self-preservation despite adverse consequences. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Wittgenstein’s frequent and pervasive of the adjective “complicated.” I begin by comparing and contrasting the adjective’s use in the Tractatus and the much later manuscripts on the philosophy of psychology. While there are a number of important and illuminating affinities between these uses, I argue that these need to be balanced against the wide disparities between them: in contrast to the Tractatus, the later philosophy preserves a sense of “surface” complexity while jettisoning the idea (...) of a deep—but hidden—simplicity that logical analysis promises to reveal. The notion of a surface must thus be reconceived as complicated in terms of its “spread” rather than in relation to what lies “beneath” it. Wittgenstein’s later appeals to what is complicated need to be read in tandem with his critique of the idea of there being an “absolute sense” of “simple.” Doing so prevents our seeing in his later appeals to complexity a new, more substantive notion of complexity that a more adequate philosophical theory must capture or reflect. On the contrary, the appeal to something as complicated plays a recollective and corrective role that challenges the viability of a theoretical-explanatory perspective. (shrink)

Anti-capitalist thinkers in the West have long argued that the expansion of markets creates new wants faster than it can satisfy them, and that consumption under capitalism is a form of addictive behavior. Recently, however, the relentless expansion of desire has come to be seen as a strength rather than a weakness of capitalist regimes. To understand this change socialists must consider whether there is a point to consumer spending that goes beyond satisfaction with what one gets. Freud's notion of (...) instinctual ambivalence illuminates the ways in which spending itself is a fusion of the desires to lose and to gain. This helps to explain how the socialist distinction between satisfying and addictive consumption misses the mark. Broadening this insight, we can see that Western thought about justice, originating in Judeo-Christian theology, conceals a fundamental ambivalence about both domination and gain by suggesting that inequality (beginning with that between God and man) is justified when the dominating party loses and the gainer submits. Ironically, however, the new post-utilitarian rationale for capitalism undermines this putative justification of social inequality in consumer-oriented capitalist societies by bringing our internal ambivalence about gain and dominance to the surface. This development creates an opportunity for a new beginning in Marxian social theory. The final sections of the essay suggest that social theory has been trapped in a debate over whether predators (and their human counterparts) kill in order to eat or eat in order to kill (Marx vs. Nietzsche). To break this trap we must shift the basis of social criticism from the metaphor of predation to the metaphor of parasitism. This changes the focus of critical analysis from unmasking the predator in every situation to identifying in every social structure the mechanisms of incorporation, mutual subversion, asymmetrical exchange, and surplus-creation (as distinct from equilibrium). If neither the desire for gain nor the desire for dominance are self-explanatory, then the Marxian critique of Nietzsche and the Nietzschean critique of Marxism both have valid points. The essay concludes with reflections about the importance of addressing the post-utilitarian rationale of capitalism with the same depth and comprehensiveness that we find in Marx's critique of its utilitarian rationale. (shrink)

A quarter of a century ago, the first systematic behavioral experiments were performed to clarify the nature of color constancy—the effect whereby the perceived color of a surface remains constant despite changes in the spectrum of the illumination. At about the same time, new models of color constancy appeared, along with physiological data on cortical mechanisms and photographic colorimetric measurements of natural scenes. Since then, as this review shows, there have been many advances. The theoretical requirements for constancy (...) have been better delineated and the range of experimental techniques has been greatly expanded; novel invariant properties of images and a variety of neural mechanisms have been identified; and increasing recognition has been given to the relevance of natural surfaces and scenes as laboratory stimuli. Even so, there remain many theoretical and experimental challenges, not least to develop an account of color constancy that goes beyond deterministic and relatively simple laboratory stimuli and instead deals with the intrinsically variable nature of surfaces and illuminations present in the natural world. (shrink)

This paper resolves a paradox concerning colour constancy. On the one hand, our intuitive, pre-theoretical concept holds that colour constancy involves invariance in the perceived colours of surfaces under changes in illumination. On the other, there is a robust scientific consensus that colour constancy can persist in cerebral achromatopsia, a profound impairment in the ability to perceive colours. The first stage of the solution advocates pluralism about our colour constancy capacities. The second details the close relationship between colour constancy (...) and contrast. The third argues that achromatopsics retain a basic type of colour constancy associated with invariants in contrast processing. The fourth suggests that one person-level, conscious upshot of such processing is the visual awareness of chromatic contrasts ‘at’ the edges of surfaces, implicating the ‘colour for form’ perceptual function. This primitive type of constancy sheds new light on our most basic perceptual capacities, which mark the lower borders of representational mind. (shrink)

The silence surrounding the Holocaust continues to prevent healing - whether of the victims, Nazis, or the generations that followed them. The telling of the stories surrounding the Holocaust - all the stories - is essential if we are to understand what happened, recognize the part of human nature that allows such atrocities to occur, and realize the hope that we can prevent it from happening again. Seeking to shed light on the collective silence surrounding the Holocaust in Germany, the (...) contributors offer compelling accounts, histories, and experiences that illuminate the ways in which contemporary Germans continue to grapple with the consequences of the Holocaust. Denial in the older generations, as well as anger and confusion in the younger ones, comes vividly to the surface in these evocative stories of coping and healing. Told from the vantage points both of therapists and of patients, these stories encompass the psychological plight of all those facing the legacy of genocide - from the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official to the children of Jewish immigrants, from those raised in the Hitler Youth Movement to those born well after the war. (shrink)