Discrimination is a negative, destructive and marginalizing attitude as old as the history of humanity. It becomes visible in many different forms such as racism, sexism, nationalism, sectarianism, religiousness, and classism. When we look at the sources of discriminatory attitudes and tendencies, we encounter a wide range of reasons. For example, factors such as wrong learning, created fears, distorted feelings of hatred, scientific, philosophical, political thoughts, religiouspolitical personalities, and flawed educational understandings can be shown as some of these. In this (...) study, while the meaning, source, problems and solutions to the problem of religious intolerance, which is one of the discriminatory attitudes, are discussed from historical and social perspectives, the views of the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum are taken into consideration. (shrink)

The paper is composed of two parts. The first part covers juvenile delinquency with all its characteristics. When analyzing the delinquency, we gave a special place to the socio-pathological phenomena which is more and more present and the rate is higher from year to year. Social pathology is a huge issue that requires special commitment, first, for its detection and then prevention. Within the delinquency, we also cover the most common crimes committed by juveniles. In the second part of this (...) paper, the authors deal in more details with a specific form of crime which can also be committed by juveniles: child sexual abuse and pedophilia. First, the difference between child sexual abuse and pedophilia will be discussed, a difference that is of particular importance in cases where minors are abusers. Furthermore, the main characteristics of cases when both perpetrators and victims of sexual abuse are minors will be addressed. Although these criminal offenses are rarer in practice unlike the criminal offenses and deviant behaviors treated in the first part, however, knowing the main characteristics and specifics of such cases is of particular importance for the legal-criminal treatment of the perpetrators of these criminal offenses. (shrink)

In this provocative and original work, Slavoj Zizek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock's Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author's acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political (...) significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Wearing facial masks became a common practice worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigated (1) whether facial masks that cover adult faces affect 4- to 6-year-old children’s recognition of emotions in those faces and (2) whether the duration of children’s exposure to masks is associated with emotion recognition. We tested children from Switzerland (N = 38) and Brazil (N = 41). Brazil represented longer mask exposure due to a stricter mandate during COVID-19. Children had to choose a face displaying (...) a specific emotion (happy, angry, or sad) when the face wore either no cover, a facial mask, or sunglasses. The longer hours of mask exposure were associated with better emotion recognition. Controlling for the hours of exposure, children were less likely to recognise emotions in partially hideen faces. Moreover, Brazilian children were more accurate in recognising happy faces than Swiss children. Overall, facial masks may negatively impact children’s emotion recognition. However, prolonged exposure appears to buffer the lack of facial cues from the nose and mouth. In conclusion, restricting facial cues due to masks may impair kindergarten children’s emotion recognition in the short run. However, it may facilitate their broader reading of facial emotional cues in the long run. (shrink)

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at ages 2 to 3 (Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1985; Nakipoğlu, Uzundag, & Sarıgül, 2021). So far, however, we know very little about children's understanding of causatives with novel verbs. In the present study, we asked: (a) (...) When does the generalization of causative morphology in a novel context emerge? and (b) What role does child-directed input play in this development? To answer the first question, we conducted comprehension-judgment experiments with children aged 2;6–6;11 using pseudo-verbs (Study 1 & 2). Results showed that children preferred the Turkish causative suffix -DIr over an unrelated or no suffix to denote caused events earliest at age 4;10. To answer the second question, we analyzed child-directed speech from a longitudinal corpus of Turkish language acquisition (Study 3). Results showed that when addressing children younger than age 3, caregivers used the -DIr suffix with little variation considering the overall variability of verbs they could utter. Overall, these findings suggest that productivity with morphological causatives in a novel context emerges in a later stage of acquisition. This later development might partly be accounted for by the insufficient variation of morphological causatives in the early input. (shrink)

The authors of the book believe that utopia is a multidimensional concept, hence best understood with a multidisciplinary perspective. The book seeks utopian thinking in political theory, international law, populism, Turkish Islamism, and it dilates on the themes of modernism and classless society in the selected utopias.

This article aims to make a distinction among contemporary artworks that use algorithmic technologies. Departing from Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, the focus is given to artworks that use algorithmic agencies, as assemblages of human and nonhuman entities. Making an ethno-methodological analysis of three artworks, The Pitiful Story of Deniz Yılmaz (2015–present) of Bager Akbay, Artificial Intelligence for Governance, the Kitty AI (2016) of Pınar Yoldaş and Plantoid (2015) of Primavera Di Filippi, the article examines paratactical use of algorithmic (...) agencies in contemporary artistic practice. Exploring, revealing and learning from the tactics used by platforms, corporations and institutions that control and govern, paratactical use of algorithmic agencies generates a self-reflexive perspective on such tactics of control. Paratactical works also explore absurdities and contingencies embedded in algorithmic technologies. They work within failures and errors, and perform subversive ways of thinking, acting and enacting. In conclusion, paratactical works deal with the reproduction, distribution and normalization of ignorance, extinction, degeneration, corruption and destruction. (shrink)

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun (...) resolution are implemented in this paper. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results. (shrink)

In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj i ek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more ...

The latest book by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek takes the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the beginning of a dazzling inquiry into the realms of radical politics, philosophy, film (Hitchcock, Fight Club ), and psychoanalysis. Of Organs without Bodies Joan Copjec ( Imagine There's No Woman ) has written: "With all his ususal humor and invention, Zizek -- the acknowledged master of the 180 degree turn -- here takes a trip into "enemy" territory to deliver Deleuze of (...) a marvelously rebellious child, one that seriously challenges Deleuze's other progeny with a surprising but convincing bid for succession. Those who thought Deleuze's forward march into the future would follow a straight path are forced to rethink their stance. From now on all readings of Deleuze will have to take a detour through this important -- even necessary -- book." Eric Santner ( On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life ) describes Organs without Bodies as offering "an entirely new degree of conceptual clarity and political urgency. Through his deep engagement with the logic of Deleuze's project, Zizek opens up new possibilities of thought beyond the terms of the current political debates on globalization, democratization, war on terror. Once again, Zizek has produced an utterly timely and radically untimely meditation." Recently profiled in The New Yorker , and hailed by the Village Voice as "the giant of Ljubljana," Zizek is one of the most provocative and entertaining thinkers at work today. (shrink)

With his characteristic wit, Zizek addresses the burning question of how to reformulate a leftist project in an era of global capitalism and liberal-democratic ...

Book synopsis: In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Zizek looks for the kernel of truth in the totalitarian politics of the past. Examining Heidegger's seduction by fascism and Foucault's flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, he suggests that these were the 'right steps in the wrong direction.' On the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the bolsheviks, Zizek argues that while these struggles ended in historic failure and horror, there was a valuable core of idealism lost beneath the (...) bloodshed. A redemptive vision has been obscured by the soft, decentralized politics of the liberal-democratic consensus. Faced with the coming ecological crisis, Zizekk argues the case for revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat. A return to past ideals is needed despite the risks. In the words of Samuel Beckett: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'. (shrink)

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly (...) why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep... I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. Every word has a weight here, in this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan "lamella". Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called "partial object": a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present: "'All right', said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin', thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'" The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a "something" that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal - more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the "living dead" which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void - its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die : when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. (shrink)

With a new introduction by the author In this deliciously polemical work, a giant of cultural theory immerses himself in the ideas of a giant of French thought.

The essays in this volume, focus on this distinction in their consideration of Hegel's political philosophy - his attempted (re)construction of modern ethical ...

As a slew of recent work in epistemology has brought out, there is a range of cases where there's a strong temptation to say that prudential and (especially) moral considerations affect what we ought to believe. There are two distinct models of how this can happen. On the first, “reasons pragmatist” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations constitute distinctively practical reasons for (or against) belief. On the second, “pragmatic encroachment” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations affect what one (...) is epistemically justified in believing. The pragmatic encroachment model appears to have several advantages over reasons pragmatism, and this has led many recent philosophers to endorse the former. However, in this paper we argue that a version of reasons pragmatism can be (at least largely) saved from these purported disadvantages once paired with an independently plausible permissivism about epistemically justified outright belief. This hybrid view—“permissivist pragmatism”—holds that when there is more than one epistemically permitted doxastic attitude, practical (including moral) considerations can determine which epistemically permitted doxastic attitude one all-things-considered ought to have. This view avoids both the problems faced by simple versions of reasons pragmatism, and those that distinctively attend pragmatic encroachment, while preserving the advantages of each view. (shrink)

Sometimes, learning about the origins of a belief can make it irrational to continue to hold that belief—a phenomenon we call ‘genealogical defeat’. According to explanationist accounts, genealogical defeat occurs when one learns that there is no appropriate explanatory connection between one’s belief and the truth. Flatfooted versions of explanationism have been widely and rightly rejected on the grounds that they would disallow beliefs about the future and other inductively-formed beliefs. After motivating the need for some explanationist account, we raise (...) some problems for recent versions of explanationism. Learning from their failures, we then produce and defend a more resilient explanationism. (shrink)