Jung’s paper ‘Synchronicity – an acausal connecting principle’, defining the phenomenon as a ‘meaningful’ coincidence depending on archetypal activation, was published in 1952, together with a conceptually related piece by physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli entitled, ‘The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler’. Slavoj Žižek, in The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, suggests that, in contrast to any notion of a ‘pre-modern Jungian harmony’, the main lesson of quantum physics was that not only (...) was the psychoanalytic, empty subject of the signifier constitutively out-of-joint with respect to the world, but that the Real in itself was already incomplete, out-of-joint, ‘not-all’. Yet while Žižek frequently tries to separate Jung from his own ontology, this paper shows that his ontology is not as different as he suggests. Consistent with our earlier publications on Jung and Zizek, a closer investigation reveals an underlying congruence of both of their approaches. In this paper we show that this affinity lies in the rejection by both Jung and Žižek of the ideology of reductive materialism, a rejection that demonstrably draws on quantum physics in similar ways. While Jung posits an inherently meaningful universe, Žižek attempts to salvage the freedom of human subjectivity by opposing his Lacanian ‘dialectical materialism’ to reductive materialism. (shrink)

Peterson, A.. Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compassionate Children, Schools and Communities. In this thoughtful and scholarly work, Peterson tackles the nature of compassion as a relational human property and applies it to the context of education. Essentially, Peterson’s argument is that compassion is a human virtue which shapes an individual’s personal and social life and that it comprises ‘particular emotional, cognitive and active responses which recognize common humanity with one’s fellow human beings’. Peterson’s wide-ranging discussion of compassion’s cognitive and emotional (...) domains establishes a convincing case that young children can learn about, and value, compassion as a defining aspect of the human condition through their education. (shrink)

This paper examines two novels, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Senselessness by Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Both novels approach death and dying as a global concern and place readers in the global North at the centre of events that happened, or are happening, in the South. This paper argues that both novels express the human potential in desire for, and to create, excess, universalising guilt against a tendency to (...) contextualise or localise events of mass murder in Central and South America. Both 2666 and Senselessness represent death and dying while expressing an uncanny excess of life at the level of form and content. Reading them, we are bombarded with the details of crimes and harrowing witness testimonies, but neither novel results in closure or allows us to mourn the dead. Instead, the excess of life traces a void that, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and others, is at the centre of the subject of desire. It is at the level of desire that we can locate ourselves in both novels and understand our part in the events of mass murder they narrate. (shrink)

There is little discussion of fatalism in the road safety literature, and limited research. However, fatalism is a potential barrier to participation in health-promoting behaviours, particularly among the populations of developing countries and to some extent in developed countries. Many people still believe in divine discretion and magical powers as causes of road crashes in different parts of the world. Fatalistic beliefs and beliefs in mystical powers and superstition appear to influence perceptions of crash risk and consequently lead people to (...) take risks and neglect safety measures. Fatalistic beliefs may cause individuals to be resigned to risks because they cannot do anything to reduce these risks. (shrink)

The interpretation of natural language utterances in argumentation is largely a tacit procedure, that is to say, a procedure transacted for the most part sublinguistically, inattentively, automatically and involuntarily. In the particular case of the interpretation of argumentative texts, the tacitness thesis provides that interpreters are able to discern intended messages without forming -- and usually without being able to -- propositional representations that wholly contain their contents. How is this done? In this paper, we propose the following theses: Interpretation (...) can be represented as collapse of meaning in a semantic space model. Semantic collapse, in turn, can be likened to the quantum collapse of superpositional states of word meaning. Non-trivial structural similarities with quantum collapse are discernible in matrix models of memory. The advantage of is that it provides independent reason to suppose that quantum structures admit of psychological construal. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

The grounding of semiotics in the finiteness of cognition is extended by examining the assumption that cognition can be compared or described. To this end, the two means by which qualitative values for cognition are putatively derived – introspection and observation – are framed in terms of the semiosic field as metacognition and trans-metacognition. These recovery functions are seen to be complex and mutable, dependent on context and habitus rather than objective encapsulation of past thought. An alternative view of cognitive (...) similarity is offered: that recovery functions stabilise a mythology of cognition that facilitates its allocation by important discourses such as psychology, neurology, philosophy, and indeed semiotics. These superstructural discourses, in turn, operate to shape the context and habitus of new agents, including the proliferation of recovery functions. To formalise this cyclically determinative process, a concept of semioformation is introduced that locates the ontogeny of agents among the cumulative externalities of other agents. Determination, rather than description, is therefore posited as the effect of the assignment of qualitative or equivalence values to cognition. With this in mind, technology is highlighted as a critical area in which to examine recovery functions and semioformation. In particular, the category of the real is seen as undergoing rapid mutation. (shrink)

This book proposes a metaphysical understanding of interculturality, by reviewing popular cultural and religious narratives found in multicultural society. By doing so, it develops an alternative pedagogy for multicultural education founded on the concept of intercultural hermeneutics. Beginning with a critical review of multicultural policies and existing models of multicultural education, Dreamson advocates the necessity of an intercultural approach to multicultural education. He then moves on to argue for the methodological aspects of interculturality by reviewing and adopting philosophical hermeneutics theories. (...) Throughout the book, it is argued that values incarnated as a cultural framework are networked and interact via our minds to sustain our intercultural realities. Furthermore, when intercultural interactions transpire, which is the goal of multicultural education, we can see a larger part of the world that, in turn, helps us cultivate ourselves for further intercultural interactions. (shrink)

During the New York Climate Week in 2014, I saw Naomi Klein speak about her new book, This Changes Everything. She inscribed my copy, with the message ‘Stay Brave.’ Naomi Klein was a dynamic, energetic public intellectual during the hectic series of events in September. She launched her book at The New School; attended a civic meeting, with Bill McKibben, Bernie Sanders, Kshama Sawant, Chris Hedges, and Brian Lehrer; and spoke at Brooklyn Book Fair. Naomi Klein has promoted community-led responses (...) to climate change — such as the People’s Climate March. She was a prominent figure at the 400,000 strong People’s Climate March through the streets of New York on the 21 September 2014. She highlighted the Flood Wall Street protests over the linkages between capitalism and climate change on the 22 September 2014. Naomi Klein offered a critique of the outcome of the United Nations Climate Summit on the 23 September 2014. Naomi Klein made her name in 2000 with the brilliant book, No Logo — a mythbusting work about trans-national companies and their well-known trade marks, and the Mad Men of advertising and marketing. She displayed a strong interest in critical responses to Big Brands — looking at the tactics of culture-jamming, AdBusting, and the No Logo Movement. In 2002, Naomi Klein published Fences and Windows. This collection of work particularly focused upon battles over globalisation. In 2007, Naomi Klein published The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This book is particularly interested in how free market neo-liberal policies have been foisted upon nation states at times of crisis, disaster, war, and shock. At the Copenhagen Climate talks in 2009, Naomi Klein showed a strong interest in climate debt. Since then, she has joined the board of 350.org, promoted fossil fuel divestment, and has written a number of pieces on climate change. Naomi Klein was particularly concerned about the impact of Hurricane Sandy upon New York. Her 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate represents the culmination of this intellectual engagement with climate change. This Changes Everything is also being transformed into a documentary film by Avi Lewis. In her literary style, Naomi Klein is a writer of sweet reason and cool logic.. Having deconstructed brands and turned them inside-out, Naomi Klein has a gift for marketing. Her writing is often pithy and epigrammatic. Naomi Klein is also an empathetic soul. She is sympathetic to the particular human costs of climate change. Naomi Klein has great intellectual curiosity. She ranges far and wide, in terms of her subject matter, and the geographic spread of her investigations. Naomi Klein is also a fearless critic. She is brave, gutsy, and always willing to speak truth to power. Naomi Klein is also not afraid to criticise fellow travellers for their compromises and hypocrisy. She shows courage in her call for climate action. (shrink)

Coherence between propositions promises to fix the vexing circumstance of prior probabilities for subjective Bayesians. This paper examines the role of coherence as a source of justification for Bayesian agents, particularly the argument that all propositions must cohere within an agent’s ‘web of belief’, aka confirmational holism. Unfortunately, Confirmational holism runs across a potentially devastating argument that a more coherent set of beliefs resulting from the addition of a belief to a less coherent set of beliefs is less likely to (...) be true than the less coherent set of beliefs. In response, I propose confirmational chorism to avoid this troubling outcome. CC posits that coherence adds epistemic justification by limited, logically consistent sets of beliefs exhibiting a satisficing degree of strength, inferential and explanatory connection. Limited coherence may resolve the above argument, but raises the need for another kind of justification: coordination. Belief coordination requires suppressing some beliefs and communicating other beliefs to ensure convergence on the right action for performance success. Thus, a Bayesian formed belief in any particular context is justified not just because it is reliably formed and coherent, but also because of how it is coordinated between local and holistic goals. (shrink)

This research addresses the justificatory role of conscious reflection within a naturalized, reliabilist epistemology. Reliabilism is the view that implicit, mechanistic processes can justify beliefs, e.g. perceptual beliefs formed after a history of consistent exposure to normal lighting conditions are justified in a given context with normal lighting. A popular variant of reliabilism is virtue epistemology where the cognitive circumstances and abilities of an agent play a justificatory role, e.g. the cooperation of the prefrontal cortex and primary visual cortex of (...) the individual perceiving the Müller-Lyer illusion partly justify the belief that the lines are equi-length. While virtue epistemology is a well-endorsed reliabilism for implicit beliefs, its application to explicit, consciously reflective processes is more controversial. Critics ask: How can iterations of dumb reliabilist processes produce higher order justification? To respond to this concern, I draw on another agent-centred, normative and reliabilist epistemology—Bayesian epistemology. A Bayesian virtue epistemology argues that reflective hypothesis-testing generated by implicit Bayesian mechanisms offers higher order reliabilist justification for beliefs. Iterative Bayesian mechanisms explain the development of higher order beliefs about abstract concepts such as causation, natural laws and theoretical entities traditionally explained by recourse to vague concepts such as ‘the a priori’, ‘intuition’ or ‘the intellect’. A hybrid Bayesian virtue epistemology offers an iterative reliabilist framework to explain how conscious reflection justifies beliefs. However, I acknowledge limitations on Bayesian accounts of justification such as confirmational holism, commutativity, and the frame problem. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of coherence as a source of epistemic justification, particularly the argument that all beliefs must cohere within one’s ‘web of belief’, aka confirmational holism. Confirmational holism runs across a potentially devastating argument that a more coherent set of beliefs resulting from the addition of a belief to a less coherent set of beliefs is less likely to be true than the less coherent set of beliefs. I propose confirmational chorism to avoid this troubling outcome. CC (...) posits that coherence adds epistemic justification by limited, logically consistent sets of beliefs exhibiting a satisficing degree of strength, inferential and explanatory connection. Limited coherence may resolve the above argument, but raises the need for another kind of justification: coordination. Belief coordination requires suppressing some beliefs and communicating other beliefs to ensure convergence on the right action for performance success. Thus, a belief in any particular context is justified not just because it is reliably formed and coherent, but also because of how it is coordinated between local and holistic goals. (shrink)

_Free to read on publishers website_ In normal child development, both individual and group pretense first emerges at approximately two years of age. The metarepresentational account of pretense holds that children already have the concept PRETEND when they first engage in early group pretense. A behavioristic account suggests that early group pretense is analogous to early beliefs or desires and thus require no mental state concepts. I argue that a behavioral account does not explain the actual behavior observed in children (...) and it cannot explain how children come to understand that a specific action is one of pretense versus one of belief. I conclude that a mentalistic explanation of pretense best explains the behavior under consideration. (shrink)

My research investigates why nouns are learned disproportionately more frequently than other kinds of words during early language acquisition. This question must be considered in the context of cognitive development in general. Infants have two major streams of environmental information to make meaningful: perceptual and linguistic. Perceptual information flows in from the senses and is processed into symbolic representations by the primitive language of thought. These symbolic representations are then linked to linguistic input to enable language comprehension and ultimately production. (...) Yet, how exactly does perceptual information become conceptualized? Although this question is difficult, there has been progress. One way that children might have an easier job is if they have structures that simplify the data. Thus, if particular sorts of perceptual information could be separated from the mass of input, then it would be easier for children to refer to those specific things when learning words. It would be easier still, if linguistic input was segmented in predictable ways Unfortunately the frequency of patterns in lexical or grammatical input cannot explain the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic tendency to favor nouns over verbs and predicates. There are three examples of this failure: 1) a wide variety of nouns are uttered less frequently than a smaller number of verbs and yet are learnt far more easily ; 2) word order and morphological transparency offer no insight when you contrast the sentence structures and word inflections of different languages and 3) particular language teaching behaviors have little impact on children's tendency to prefer concrete nouns in their first fifty words. Although the linguistic solution appears problematic, there has been increasing evidence that the early visual system does indeed segment perceptual information in specific ways before the conscious mind begins to intervene. I argue that nouns are easier to learn because their referents directly connect with innate features of the perceptual faculty. This hypothesis stems from work done on visual indexes by Zenon Pylyshyn. Pylyshyn argues that the early visual system segments perceptual data into pre-conceptual proto-objects called FINSTs. FINSTs typically correspond to physical things such as Spelke objects. Hence, before conceptualization, visual objects are picked out by the perceptual system demonstratively, like a finger pointing indicating ‘this’ or ‘that’. I suggest that this primitive system of demonstration elaborates on Gareth Evan's theory of nonconceptual content. Nouns are learnt first because their referents attract demonstrative visual indexes. This theory also explains why infants less often name stationary objects such as plate or table, but do name things that attract the focal attention of the early visual system, i.e., small objects that move, such as ‘dog’ or ‘ball’. This view leaves open the question how blind children learn words for visible objects and why children learn category nouns, rather than proper nouns or higher taxonomic distinctions. (shrink)

In the last decade much has occurred to build towards reforms in the ways qualitative research is constructed and conducted based upon other ways of viewing, creating and experiencing the world. These research spaces are available because of the persistent work and assertion of the cultural and theoretical standpoints of researchers who were once the researched, namely Aboriginal peoples. This paper describes the framework of an Indigenist research paradigm based upon the ontological, epistemological and theoretical positions of my people, the (...) Noonuccal people of Quandamoopah. It provides discussion of the conceptual, cultural and practical tensions that arise within the research interface towards centering Aboriginal worldviews and knowledges as research epistemology and then methodology. This paper is one contribution to the continuing reform of Indigenous research and the reclamation of Indigenous cultural spaces in Australia. (shrink)

This is the introductory chapter for the international co-edited collection Exploring Emotions Aesthetics and Wellbeing in Science Education Research.

Learning science involves situated social practices that are inherently emotional. Despite this fact, research in science education has focused predominantly on learning as a cognitive process with scant attention directed at emotion in the past. There are now a growing number of studies of emotion and affect partly due to international concerns regarding student disaffection with school science. In this chapter, I discuss theoretical orientations to the sociology of emotion that have attracted increasing interest from science education researchers in recent (...) years. In particular, interaction ritual theory has provided a way forward for understanding science learning as an emotional and situated social practice. Fruitful perspectives about emotional engagement have been developed from its application in empirical studies of school and preservice teacher education classes. I begin with an overview of interaction ritual theory and by outlining the outcomes of selected empirical studies to illustrate the basic tenets of the theory. In the second part of the chapter, I consider what else we can learn about the interrelationships between emotion and cognition by taking up some of the roots of interaction ritual theory in Emilé Durkheim’s social epistemology of knowledge. From this foundation, I propose in the third part of the chapter a microsociology of learning as a fruitful direction for research on learning experiences. Exploring Emotions, Aesthetics and Wellbeing in Science Education Research. (shrink)

"The obsession with Whiteness and its power systems that govern the world are the focus of this volume. At the same time, it also shows ways in which various peoples emulate, cope with as well as debunk the dominant rhetorics of Whiteness."--Publisher website.

Le Corbusier participated in an urban dialogue with the first group in France to call itself fascist: the journalist Georges Valois’s militant Faisceau des Combattants et Producteurs, the “Blue Shirts,” inspired by the Italian “Fasci” of Mussolini. Le Corbusier’s portrait photograph materialised on the front cover of the January 1927 issue of the Faisceau League’s newspaper Le Nouveau Siècle edited by the former anarcho-syndicalist journalist Georges Valois, its leader, who fashioned himself as the French Mussolini. Le Corbusier was described in (...) the Revue as one of les animateurs of the Party1 – meaning a member of the technical elite who would drive the Faisceau’s plans. On 1 May 1927, the Nouveau Siècle printed a full-page feature “Le Plan Voisin” on Le Corbusier’s 1922 redesign of Paris : the architect’s single-point perspective sketch appeared below an extract lifted from the architect’s original polemic Le Centre de Paris on the pages of Le Corbusier’s second book Urbanisme published two years earlier, a treatise on urbanism.2 Three weeks later, Le Corbusier presented a slide show of his urban plans at a fascist rally for the inauguration of the Faisceau’s new headquarters on the rue du faubourg Poissonniere, thereby crystalising the architect’s hallowed status in the league... (shrink)

This book was written to serve two functions. First it is an exploration of what I have called Socratic pedagogy, a collaborative inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning suitable not only to formal educational settings such as the school classroom but to all educational settings. The term is intended to capture a variety of philosophical approaches to classroom practice that could broadly be described Socratic in form. The term ‘philosophy in schools’ is ambiguous and could refer to teaching university style (...) philosophy to high school students or to the teaching of philosophy and logic or critical reasoning in senior years of high school. It is also used to describe the teaching of philosophy in schools generally. In the early and middle phases of schooling the term philosophy for children is often used. But this too is ambiguous as the name was adopted from Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children curriculum that he and his colleagues at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children developed. In Britain the term ‘philosophy with children’ is sometimes employed to mark two methods of teaching that have Socratic roots but have distinct differences, namely Philosophy for Children and Socratic Dialogue developed by Leonard Nelson. The use of the term Socratic pedagogy and its companion term Socratic classroom avoids the problem of distinguishing between various approaches to philosophical inquiry in the Socratic tradition but also separates it from the ‘study of philosophy’, such as university style philosophy or other approaches which place little or no emphasis on collaborative inquiry based teaching and learning. The second function builds from the first. It is to develop an effective framework for understanding the relationship between what I call the generative, evaluative and connective aspects of communal dialogue, which I think are necessary to the Socratic notion of inquiry. In doing so it is hoped that this book offers some way to show how philosophy as inquiry can contribute to educational theory and practice, while also demonstrating how it can be an effective way to approach teaching and learning. This has meant striking a balance between speaking to philosophers and to teachers and educators together, with the view that both see the virtues of such a project. In the strictest sense this book is not philosophy of education, insofar as its chief focus is not on the analysis of concepts or formulation of definitions specific to education with the aim of formulating directives that guide educational practice. It relinquishes the role of philosopher as ‘spectator’, to one of philosopher ‘immersed in matter’ – in this case philosophical issues in education, specifically those related to philosophical inquiry, pedagogy and classroom practice. Put another way, it is a book about philosophical education. (shrink)

En route from Birmingham to Syria in 2013, British-Jihadi neophytes aged 22, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed purchased two books via Amazon to prepare for their mission in Syria after joining ISIS: The Koran for Dummies and Islam for Dummies. Journalists were swift to disparage their reading. The book’s author, Princeton University campus imam, Sohaib Nazeer Sultan remarked “Even though they may have ordered it, I don't think they read it.” In 1933, aged 27, Adolf Eichmann moved to Berlin to (...) join the Sicherheitsdienst SD whereupon he read Immanuel Kant’s book the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft for the first time. After his trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt of course dismissed Eichmann’s reading of the German philosopher as thoroughly vacuous. Ever since, writers have sought to undermine the veracity of Eichmann’s account. The global Jihadis are illiterate, a journalist recently commented: they’re not well read in the Qur’an, and if they have read it, they have thoroughly misunderstood it. He cited as evidence Abdul Raqib Amin’s YouTube rhetorical: Forget everyone. Read the Koran, read the instruction of life. Find out what is jihad. Eichmann on the other hand was not illiterate in his youth. Before Berlin, he had already read Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ; he would also re-read the Critique of Practical Reason, and from his testimony and terminology we can infer he was familiar with Kantian concepts that extend beyond both books.. (shrink)

This paper considers recent discussion of the possible use of ‘love drugs’ and ‘anti-love drugs’ as a way of enhancing or diminishing romantic relationships. The primary focus is on the question of whether the idea of using such products commits its proponents to an excessively reductionist conception of love, and on whether the resulting ‘love’ in the use of ‘love drugs’ would be authentic, to the extent that it would be brought about artificially.

Blurb: This empirical study analysed consumer emotional responses towards interactive products, specifically looking at properties that persuasively induce the pursuit of pleasure at an instinctual level of cognition, now known as ‘visceral hedonic rhetoric'. By analysing three different types of interactive products results found hierarchical and inter-relatable attributes with the potential to provide a positive consumer-product relationship that is more meaningful, less disposable and more sustainable in the future.

For Adorno writing in 1953, Hollywood cinema was a medium of “regression” based on infantile wish fulfillment manufactured by the industrial repetition of the filmic image that he called a modern “hieroglyphics”—like the archaic language of pictures in Ancient Egypt, which guaranteed immortality after death in Egyptian burial rites. From that 1953 essay Prolog zum Fernsehen to Das Schema der Massenkultur in 1981, Adorno likened film frames to cultural ideograms: What he called the filmic “language of images” constituted a Hieroglyphenschrift (...) that visualised forbidden sexual impulses and ideations of death and domination in the unconscious of the mass spectator. In his famous passage he writes, “As image, the image-writing is a medium of regression, where the producer and consumer coincide; as writing, film resurrects the archaic images of modernity.” In other words, cinema takes the spectator on a journey into his unconscious in order to control him from within. It works, because the spectator begins to believe the film is speaking to him in his very own image-language, making him do and buy whatever capitalism demands. Modernity for Adorno is precisely the instrumentalisation of the collective unconscious through the mediatic images of the culture industry. (shrink)

This chapter illuminates the philosophical underpinnings of phenomenology and identifies two key approaches that have used phenomenological perspectives in particular ways. The main intention of the chapter is to untangle some of the conceptual threads and coils that make up the web of phenomenology. This is done in order to present a more accessible way of understanding what has been described as “one of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century‿.

Concerns have been raised over ADHD from within a range of different disciplines, concerns which are not only voiced from within the hard sciences themselves, but also from within the social sciences. This paper will add the discipline of philosophy to that number, arguing that an analysis of two traditionally philosophical topics - namely "truth" and "free-will" - allows us a new and unsettling perspective on conduct disorders like ADHD. More specifically, it will be argued that ADHD not only fails (...) to meet its own ontological and epistemological standards as an 'objective' pathology, but it also constitutes one more element in what has already become a significant undermining of a crucial component of social life: moral responsibility. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno was opposed to the cinema because he felt it was too close to reality, and ipso facto an extension of ideological Capital, as he wrote in 1944 in Dialectic of Enlightenment. What troubled Adorno was the iconic nature of cinema – the semiotic category invented by C. S. Peirce where the signifier does not merely signify, in the arbitrary capacity attested by Saussure, but mimics the formal-visual qualities of its referent. Iconicity finds its perfect example in the film’s (...) ingenuous surface illusion of an unmediated reality – its genealogy, since classical antiquity, lay in the Greek term eikōn which meant “image,” to refer to the ancient portrait statues of victorious athletes which were thought to bear a direct similitude with their parent divinities. For the postwar, Hollywood-film spectator, Adorno said, “the world outside is an extension of the film he has just left,” because realism is a precise instrument for the manipulation of the mass spectator by the culture industry, for which the filmic image is an advertisement for the world unedited. Mimesis, or the reproduction of reality, is a “mere reproduction of the economic base.” It is precisely film’s iconicity, then, its “realist aesthetic... [that] makes it inseparable from its commodity character.”... (shrink)

This article applies a Wittgensteinian approach to the examination of the intelligibility of religious belief, in the wake of the recent attack on the Judeo-Christian religion by Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion. The article attempts to show that Dawkins has confused religion with superstition, and that while Dawkins's arguments are decisive in the case of superstition, they do not successfully show religion to be a delusion. Religious belief in God is not like belief in the existence of a planet, (...) and genuine religious faith is not like the belief in something for which there is not yet enough evidence, like belief in dark matter. The Christian doctrines of the resurrection and eternal life are misconstrued if they are understood as factual claims because they are then merely shallow superstitions, and not the great religious riddles they are meant to be. (shrink)

This paper discusses the question of when pain and distress relief known to hasten death would cross the line between permissible conduct and killing. The issue is discussed in the context of organ donation after cardiac death, and considers the administration of analgesics, sedatives, and the controversial use of paralysing agents in the provision and withdrawal of ventilation.

The experiences and constructs of time, space and bodies saturate human discourse—naturally enough, since they are fundamental to existence—yet there has long been a tendency for the terms to be approached somewhat independently, belying the depth of their interconnections. It was a desire to address that apparent shortcoming that inspired this book, and the interdisciplinary meetings from which it was born, the 1st Global Conferences on ‘Time, Space and the Body’ and ‘Body Horror’ held in Sydney in February 2013. Following (...) the lively, often provocative, exchange of ideas throughout those meetings, the writing here crosses conventional boundaries inhabiting everyday life and liminal experiences, across cultures, life circumstances, and bodily states. Through numerous theoretical frameworks and with reference to a variety of media, the authors problematize or deconstruct commonplace assumptions to reveal challenging new perspectives on the diverse cultures and communities which make our world. If there is an overarching theme of this collection it is diversity itself. The writers here come from numerous academic fields, but a good number of them also draw on first-hand cultural production in the arts: photography, sculpture and fine art instillation, for example. Of course, however laudable it might be, there is a potential problem in such diversity: does it produce fruitful dialogue moving toward creative, workable syntheses or simply a cacophony of competing, incomprehensible, barely comprehending voices? To a large degree this depends upon the intellectual, existential ambitions as well as the old-fashioned goodnatured tolerance of both writers and readers. But we hope three unifying characteristics are discernable in the following chapters viewed as a whole: firstly, a genuine concern for the world humans inhabit and the communities they form as bodies in space and time; secondly, an emphasis upon the experience of the human subject, exemplified perhaps by the number of chapters drawing on phenomenology; thirdly, an adventurous, explorative impulse associated with an underlying sense that being, since it is inseparable from the body’s temporality, is always becoming, and here the presence of poststructuralist influences is unmistakable, often explicit. Our challenge as editors has been to present the enormous variety of subjects and views in a way that would render the book coherent and at the same time encourage readers to make explorations themselves into realms they might usually consider beyond their field of interest. To that end we have divided the book into six sections around loosely defined themes, each offering different angles on how time and/or space unfold in and around bodies. (shrink)

While the body, time and space are fundamental to human experience, comparatively little attention has been given to the connections between them. Here scholars from a wide range of disciplines explore important themes of embodied life in time and space across cultures, activities and bodymind states. Motivated by a common desire to deepen and extend our comprehension of these phenomena and the connections and conversations between them, this book emerged from intense inter-disciplinary dialogue during the 1st Global Conferences on Time, (...) Space and the Body and Body Horror. A plenitude of theoretical approaches and media are deployed to investigate assumptions and pose problems, to creatively deconstruct and reconstruct the terms through which experience is rendered meaningful, pleasurable, and functional. These investigations, pursued through various research methods in fields of the arts, social and psychological sciences and humanities, invite readers into a genuinely pluralistic conversation around the most basic and profound aspects of being. (shrink)

According to recent studies in developmental psychology and neuroscience, symbolic language is essentially intersubjective. Empathetically relating to others renders possible the acquisition of linguistic constructs. Intersubjectivity develops in early ontogenetic life when interactions between mother and infant mutually shape their relatedness. Empirical fndings suggest that the shared attention and intention involved in those interactions is sustained as it becomes internalized and embodied. Symbolic language is derivative and emerges from shared intentionality. In this paper, we present a formalization of shared intentionality (...) based upon a quantum approach. From a phenomenological viewpoint, we investigate the nonseparable, dynamic and sustainable nature of social cognition and evaluate the appropriateness of quantum interaction for modelling intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Given the level of debate and theorising in Western thought on the topic of justice, it is curious that the concept of injustice has not attracted the same attention. While many schools of thought have sought to address various injustices, most define injustice solely as the opposite of their vision of a just society – it seems they have not been interested in exploring injustice per se. With this as a starting point, Eric Heinze’s The Concept of Injustice addresses this (...) oversight and, by taking injustice itself as an object of analysis, adds a new dimension to these discussions.. (shrink)

The making of the modern world has long been fuelled by utopian images that are blind to ecologi- cal reality. Botanical gardens are but one example – who typically portray themselves as miniature, isolated 'edens on earth', whereas they are now in many cases self-evidently also the vital ‘lungs’ of crowded cities, as well as critical habitats for threat- ened biodiversity. In 2010 the 'Remnant Emergency Art lab' set out to question utopian thinking through a creative provocation called the 'Botanical (...) Gardens ‘X-Tension’ - an imagined city-wide, distributed, network of 'ecological gardens' suited to both bat and human needs, in order to ask, what now needs to be better understood, connected and therefore ultimately conserved. (shrink)

Long Time, No See? is a crowd-sourced project that asks people to reflect upon what kind of long term future they would each like to promote. It is an evolving experiment in the social practice of ‘everyday futuring’. To participate download the Long Time, No See? IPhone APP that gently guides you during a short walk, encouraging you to experience new places, sensations and thoughts in your locality. At nine stages along that journey you donate ‘field notes’ as images, texts, (...) sounds and ‘themes’, offering a unique opportunity to reveal possible pathways towards more sustaining futures. The APP records the shape of your walk on the ground and draws an island on the ‘map’ shown here, populated by your nine sets of responses. The themes you have chosen then connect your island into an evolving ‘world’ map of connections and possibilities, which you can then explore at your leisure. In these ways, Long Time, No See? doesn’t ask you for lofty visions or ask you to lay out a program of action, but instead asks you to consider what is around you today, steering your eyes, ears and embodied experiences towards new futures that demonstrate your ‘care’ for what comes after you. Please use the contribute tab below to learn how to add your voice! **PARTICIPATE** To contribute 1: Download the APP {[bit.do/ltns]}, iPhone/iPad is supported right now. 2: Register a ‘walker name’. 3: Take a leisurely walk and contribute image, text, sound and themes when asked. 4: Wait while we verify and upload your walk 5: View your contributions via your ‘walker name’ and discover how it relates to others, here at the Cube and at [www.long-time-no-see.org]. NB You can undertake each walk over more than one day if that suits. You may even drive, cycle or move by other modes. DOWNLOAD THE APP: [bit.do/ltns] FIND OUT MORE [www.long-time-no-see.org]. (shrink)

A new form of media installation combining image, multi-channel sound and internally lit objects into a mysterious, deep image plane. Staged on the very edge of spectrum blackout, and moving into the deep of night, Version 1 for ISEA 2013 examined the many shades of 'nocturnal', threats to night biodiversity and the myriad myths and stories that have shaped our cultural understandings of life after light. Barely recognisable images float within landscapes of media, noise and sound as the work asserts (...) a profound resistance to today's all consuming media mesh. Version 2 for the Queensland State Museum examined contemporary ideas around the ‘night’ and the 'nocturnal'. Beginning with the dark myths and stories that have long shaped our cultural understandings of life after light, NIGHT FALL considers how fearful ideas have often underpinned actions that continue to reduce Australia’s extraordinary night biodiversity. Today’s growing hostility towards Australia’s ancient, iconic flying foxes - who have been quietly pollinating our forests for millennia - hints at just how far we have yet to travel in our thinking. Enter the darkened tunnel to experience mysterious, edge-of-perception 3D forms, enhanced by a range of cinematic, illusionary and animatronic techniques, and become immersed in a strangely familiar sound track based upon seasonal field recordings made after dark, sourced from across the eastern coast of Queensland. (shrink)

Michel Foucault: The unconscious of history and culture The French thinker, Michel Foucault, is noted for his extensive and controversial forays into the historical disciplines. When his work first began to circulate in the 1950s and 1960s, historians did not quite know what to make of it and philosophers resented the appearance of what they saw as the importation of the tedium of concrete events into the pure untainted realm of ideas. If these responses to his work remain alive and (...) well decades after Foucault's death, the uptake of his work has become far more complex. To restrict ourselves to the discipline of history here: if one very visible and vocal camp of historians remains deeply ambivalent about his work, this merely disguises the fact that a far larger contingent of historians of all kinds – not just those located in history departments – use his ideas quite unremarkably.. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian of ideas who was born in Poitiers in France in 1926 and died in Paris in 1984. Since his death his work has had a steadily increasing impact across the social sciences and humanities, generating new research methodologies, new areas of empirical interest, and a whole panoply of theoretical concepts. Foucault produced some 11 books during his lifetime and a collection of 364 of his shorter writings was published in 1994. From 1970 (...) to 1984, in his capacity as Professor of Systems of Thought at the research institution the Collège de France, he also produced an annual series of lectures reporting on his research. These lectures have gradually appeared in print since 1997. This entry provides an overview of Foucault’s overall philosophy and methodology, looks at key concepts in his work and provides descriptions of his best known books. (shrink)

The queer studies field works to deconstruct dominant western discourses which cast gay men as hedonistic partygoers. Concurrently it examines the real social ramifications for some gay men for whom partying, illegal drugs and casual sex is an everyday reality. Another reality of gay male culture is HIV/AIDS and the legal prescribed medicines which accompany these conditions. Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs explores these realities and the discourses surrounding them. Exploring the embodiments of illegal and prescription drug (...) users, this book problematises the binary between prescription medicine use, where drug use is configured as a matter of consumer choice, and 'illicit' drug use which is heavily policed and condemned. Returning to the gay community it reviews community approaches to safe sex and drug use, and individual practices, to demonstrate alternative approaches to condemning drug usage. (shrink)

Queer university student print media often represents capitalism in a framework which could be classified as Marxism. However, at the same time, queer student media extensively publishes ideas which could be classified as academic queer theory. This chapter features analysis of these representations from the 2003, 2004 and 2006 editions of national queer student publication, Querelle, and from a sample of queer student media from four Australian universities. The perspectives of Marxism and academic queer theory are often argued to be (...) contradictory (See for example, Hennessy 1994; Morton 1996b; Kirsch 2007), and thus the students’ application of these theories in tandem could be considered problematic. McKee asks ‘Who gets to be an intellectual?’ (2004) and suggests that the intellectualising undertaken by mainstream and alternative cultural creators is just as valid as that undertaken by university academics. He also raises concerns that the concept of theory is seen to be kept separate from everyday culture (McKee 2002). This chapter argues that in the construction and representation of their politics in this manner the queer student activists are creating their own version of queer theory. This analysis of queer student media contributes to research on queer communities and queer theory, demonstrating how one specific cultural subset theorises queerness and queer politics, thereby contributing to the genealogy of queer. (shrink)

Global communication is being transformed by new forms of meaning-making in a culturally diverse world. This article concerns these shifts, releasing key findings of a critical ethnography that investigated how a teacher implemented the multiliteracies pedagogy. The study documented a series of media-based lessons with a teacher's culturally and linguistically diverse Year 6 class. The reporting of this research is timely because teaching multiliteracies is a key feature of Australian educational policy initiatives and syllabus requirements. This article moves the field (...) of literacy research forward by examining the intersection of pedagogy for multimodal textual practices and issues of equity. The important findings concern the differing degrees to which learners utilised the affordances of media for specific cultural purposes through a pedagogy of multiliteracies. Some students reproduced existing designs whereas others applied their knowledge of texts with substantial innovation and creativity. Comparisons are made between the learning demonstrated by students who were of the dominant Anglo-Australian, middle-class culture and by those who were not. Recommendations are given for applying the multiliteracies pedagogy to enable meaningful designing. (shrink)

How do agents with limited cognitive capacities flourish in informationally impoverished or unexpected circumstances? Aristotle argued that human flourishing emerged from knowing about the world and our place within it. If he is right, then the virtuous processes that produce knowledge, best explain flourishing. Influenced by Aristotle, virtue epistemology defends an analysis of knowledge where beliefs are evaluated for their truth and the intellectual virtue or competences relied on in their creation. However, human flourishing may emerge from how degrees of (...) ignorance are managed in an uncertain world. Perhaps decision-making in the shadow of knowledge best explains human wellbeing—a Bayesian approach? In this dissertation I argue that a hybrid of virtue and Bayesian epistemologies explains human flourishing—what I term homeostatic epistemology. Homeostatic epistemology supposes that an agent has a rational credence p when p is the product of reliable processes aligned with the norms of probability theory; whereas an agent knows that p when a rational credence p is the product of reliable processes such that: 1) p meets some relevant threshold for belief, 2) p coheres with a satisficing set of relevant beliefs and, 3) the relevant set of beliefs is coordinated appropriately to meet the integrated aims of the agent. Homeostatic epistemology recognizes that justificatory relationships between beliefs are constantly changing to combat uncertainties and to take advantage of predictable circumstances. Contrary to holism, justification is built up and broken down across limited sets like the anabolic and catabolic processes that maintain homeostasis in the cells, organs and systems of the body. It is the coordination of choristic sets of reliably produced beliefs that create the greatest flourishing given the limitations inherent in the situated agent. (shrink)

This paper explores recent tendencies in the area of tax fraud. The paper stresses the importance of social norms and institutions and highlights the relevance of extending the standard theories of tax fraud which is based on a narrow deterrence concept. The paper also refers to underexplored topics that require further investigation such as the relevance of rewards, social interactions, and tax complexity stressing also the importance of moving more strongly into business tax fraud, exploring also the interactions within a (...) firm. In addition, further work is also needed at the empirical level to better understand the causes and consequences of tax fraud. The review also shows the usefulness of applying a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary approach. (shrink)

This article presents the results of a research project which investigated the vernacular political philosophy of the television program Doctor Who. Fans were asked about their political thinking, their interpretations of the politics of that program, and the relationship between these two. The results contribute to a cultural history of the political natures of different kinds of texts. These television viewers are revealed to be well able to articulate their own political thinking, and to argue cogently that Doctor Who is (...) not useful for that thinking. The politics of this group range from self-nominated Marxist to extreme right-wing; and their interpretations of the program's politics, when they are asked to produce them, are similarly wide ranging. It seems that the program does not function as vernacular political philosophy. This has implications for thinking about the 'ideology' of popular texts. (shrink)

This paper raises questions about the sort of knowledge which has come to count as professional development knowledge. The author interrogates the curriculum and pedagogy of academic professional development programs in Australian universities, drawing parallels with Third World development programs. She argues that professional development knowledge is privileged over disciplinary knowledge in setting lifelong learning agendas for academics, and notes some problematic consequences of this for academics engaged in professional development programs.

This chapter is offered as a contribution to the logic of down below. We attempt to demonstrate that the nature of human agency necessitates that there actually be such a logic. The ensuing sections develop the suggestion that cognition down below has a structure strikingly similar to the physical structure of quantum states. In its general form, this is not an idea that originates with the present authors. It is known that there exist mathematical models from the cognitive science of (...) cognition down below that have certain formal similarities to quantum mechanics. We want to take this idea seriously. We will propose that the subspaces of von Neumann-Birkhoff lattices are too crisp for modelling requisite cognitive aspects in relation to subsymbolic logic. Instead, we adopt an approach which relies on projections into nonorthogonal density states. The projection operator is motivated from cues which probe human memory. (shrink)