"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

From the psychic rat to the gorilla in the room, from British double-agent Kim Philby to comedian Steve Martin, The Incredible Shrinking Mind not only offers a provocative and entertaining critique, but also a profound and practical ...

Traditionally, there have been two methods of deriving the theorems of geometry: the analytic and the synthetic. While the analytical method is based on the introduction of numerical coordinates, and so on the theory of real numbers, the idea behind the synthetic approach is to furnish the subject of geometry with a purely geometric foundation in which the theorems are then deduced by purely logical means from an initial body of postulates. The most familiar examples of the synthetic geometry are (...) classical Euclidean geometry and the synthetic projective geometry introduced by Desargues in the 17th century and revived and developed by Carnot, Poncelet, Steiner and others during the 19th century. The power of analytic geometry derives very largely from the fact that it permits the methods of the calculus, and, more generally, of mathematical analysis, to be introduced into geometry, leading in particular to differential geometry (a term, by the way, introduced in 1894 by the Italian geometer Luigi Bianchi). That being the case, the idea of a “synthetic” differential geometry seems elusive: how can differential geometry be placed on a “purely geometric” or “axiomatic” foundation when the apparatus of the calculus seems inextricably involved? To my knowledge there have been two attempts to develop a synthetic differential geometry. The first was initiated by Herbert Busemann in the 1940s, building on earlier work of Paul Finsler. Here the idea was to build a differential geometry that, in its author’s words, “requires no derivatives”: the basic objects in Busemann’s approach are not differentiable manifolds, but metric spaces of a certain type in which the notion of a geodesic can be defined in an intrinsic manner. I shall not have anything more to say about this approach. The second approach, that with which I shall be concerned here, was originally proposed in the 1960s by F. W. Lawvere, who was in fact striving to fashion a decisive axiomatic framework for continuum mechanics.. (shrink)

The recent Catalanian crisis raises three issues, each of which is dealt with in a section of this intervention. First, the issue of a proper reconstruction of facts, which attributes the responsability to Spanish nationalism no less than Catalonian one. Second, the issue of a sociopolitical interpretation of Catalonian events, in a context charachterized by the difficulty of the various national establishments to handle the global challenges and the emergence of so-called populist movements. Third, the issue of a legal-constitutional way-out, (...) which could only consist of a federalist compromise. A very narrow way-out, however, entrusted more to the institutional fancy of jurists than to the agenzy of politicians. (shrink)

If the conceptions of belief, desire, and action resemble phlogiston in their scientific standing, how is it that so many true, singular, causal claims about human behavior are made using these concepts? Alexander Rosenberg appeals to the distinction between attributive and referential uses of language to handle this objection. It is argued that this does not work, and that the truth of our singular, causal explanations of human behavior is little short of miraculous given his account of the nomological situation.

This book is a lucid account of the amazing life of Sai Baba, one of the most revered saints, and one of the most extraordinary of India s holy men. The book discusses the life of this saint, his divine powers, and his teachings which sought to unite people of all creeds and faiths.

Initial claims that REM sleep is important in the consolidation of all memories have been revised and reduced to the claim that sleep has a role only in the consolidation of procedural learning. Now, Walker hypothesizes that sleep has no role in the “stabilization phase of consolidation” but only in the “enhanced learning” phase of procedural learning. Evidence for this vague, truncated hypothesis remains as inconsistent as that for prior claims.

The percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science to women has decreased almost every year over the last decade. That is, even though more women are awarded bachelor's degrees, and even though the percentages of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in disciplines similar to computer science increased, the percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science to women decreased. Thus, the pipeline, which represents the ratio of women involved in computer science from high school to graduate school, shrinks both (...) from one end to the other _and_ in the middle. Since the number of women at the bachelor's level affects the number of women at levels higher in the pipeline and in the job market, these facts are of great concern to many in the computing community.In this paper, we review the harsh facts concerning the percentage of degrees awarded in computer science to women. When we presented these facts in CACM, we requested that the community respond to the facts through an interactive survey. At this time, 120 people have responded to the survey. In this paper, we present the results we have obtained from compiling these 120 survey responses. (shrink)

The reception of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena in 1987 by classicists focused on Bernal’s errors of fact rather than on the content of his message. The thrust of this message was that Classics is a Eurocentric project that systematically excluded the Levantine and Egyptian contribution to European civilization. In 1996, I was hired to develop a Black Athena course to counter the Afrocentric view that black people were systematically excluded from their contribution to the fetishization of “Western Civilization” in Classics, (...) Near Eastern Studies, Art History, and History, among other fields of study. I chose to avoid devaluating Afrocentric views or valorizing traditional views of Greece as the ethnically pure fount of European civilization. Instead, the course structure underscored that a thorough interrogation of the evidence could promote inclusive and multicultural histories by focusing on how civilization began in the east. Fast forward to the present: classicists have embarked on numerous projects to decolonize the fields of ancient studies through outreach, “colorizing” the Classics, and by recruiting people of color to reshape these fields. In considering the ethical issues involved in this project to decolonize Classics and related areas of research, I argue that the institutional positionality of a discipline that inscribes itself as central can never de-colonize itself but should de-center its privileged position in favor of a broader approach including neighboring regions. (shrink)

The right candidate -- Life as a super -- Finding the super within -- Turning challenges into super opportunities -- A super success -- All in a day's work.

By developing an absurd counterfactual history, I show that many objections launched against Bohmian mechanics could also have been made against Newtonian mechanics. This paper introduces readers to Koopman–von Neumann dynamics, an operator-based Hilbert space representation of classical statistical mechanics. Lessons for quantum foundations are drawn by replaying the battles between advocates of standard quantum theory and Bohmian mechanics in a fictional classical history.

After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was growing more ‘liquid’ and ‘lighter’ than before. This essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize Bauman’s insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the ‘Mercurian’ culture of diasporic Jewish life.

Cet article s’intéresse à l’évolution récente d’une thématique particulière des nanosciences et nanotechnologies, les nanomachines moléculaires, au prisme d’un événement singulier dont la préparation a mobilisé les efforts des chercheurs avec une intensité particulière : la première course internationale de nanovoitures en avril 2017. Il retrace la genèse de ces objets, explique les motifs de l’organisation de la course, en raconte quelques épisodes et s’interroge sur la signification de cet événement : a-t-on affaire à un processus de gamification d’une technoscience (...) en mal de légitimité socioéconomique et de pertinence scientifique? Il montre qu’autre chose est en jeu, qui n’exclut pas la production de connaissances mais l’inscrit dans une nouvelle manière – technophanique – de réaliser des expériences. (shrink)

It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it difficult to believe reductive theses in ethics. I argue that the distinctiveness of the normative concepts we use in thinking about reductive theses offers a more promising explanation of this psychological phenomenon than the falsity of Reductive Realism. To identify the distinctiveness of normative concepts, I use resources from familiar Hybrid views of normative language and (...) thought to develop a Hybrid view of normative concepts. In addition to using this new Hybrid view to explain why reductive theses are difficult to believe, I show how to preserve several patterns of inference involving normative concepts that, intuitively, it is possible to make, and hence answer an important recent challenge to Hybrid views from Mark Schroeder. (shrink)

Quel bon vent, quel joli vent, ma vie m’appelle, ma vie m’attend French folk song 1. Presentists and Growing Block theorists appeal to ‘powerful intuitions’ when they defend their respective conceptions of time . Eternalists are prepared to go some length towards ‘reconciling’ the view from nowhen with at least some of these intuitions, or try to explain them away . Unaided intuitions may in fact underdetermine any particular metaphysical choice. One set of intuitions about time seems to have been (...) neglected, though, in spite of its power. These intuitions are the mirror image of those supporting the Growing Block theory , and they are modelled on a pre-reflective understanding of our own life. According to the intuitions, only the future and the present are real; the past isn’t. The present is the constantly eroding edge of the future, which thus shrinks incessantly. There is less and less future as the present proceeds. The obvious intuitive model of this view of time is our life; from which every day eats up a little bit. Smaller scale models are available in everyday life. As you are reading this text, you have less and less to read. You know it. You know that at some point you’ll finish, or stop, reading it. But a model is not enough to make a grand philosophical claim, and indeed the very existence of the model is the ground for a negative claim: a picture, it may be said, is holding you captive. The Future Shrinker has two tasks. The first is to show that the intuitive picture supporting the claim is robust and does not make implausible epistemological claims. The second task is to show that her theory is at least compatible with scientific lore, and at best a good way …. (shrink)

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...) how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. (shrink)

The depletion effect, a decreased capacity for self-control following previous acts of self-control, is thought to result from a lack of necessary psychological/physical resources (i.e., “ego depletion”). Kurzban et al. present an alternative explanation for depletion; but based on statistical techniques that evaluate and adjust for publication bias, we question whether depletion is a real phenomenon in need of explanation.

The big question mark (in guise of a preface) -- This incredible need to believe : interview with Carmine Donzelli -- From Jesus to Mozart : Christianity's difference? -- Suffering : Lenten lectures, March 19, 2006 -- The genius of Vatholicism -- Don't be afraid of European culture.

Robert Sugden argues that robustness analysis cannot play an epistemic role in grounding model-world relationships because the procedure is only a matter of comparing models with each other. We posit that this argument is based on a view of models as being surrogate systems in too literal a sense. In contrast, the epistemic importance of robustness analysis is easy to explicate if modelling is viewed as extended cognition, as inference from assumptions to conclusions. Robustness analysis is about assessing the reliability (...) of our extended inferences, and when our confidence in these inferences changes, so does our confidence in the results. Furthermore, we argue that Sugden’s inductive account relies tacitly on robustness considerations. (shrink)

"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism." So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need (...) to believe"--the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides. Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations, especially those of Islamic origin. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics," one that restores the integrity of the human community. (shrink)

"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism." So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need (...) to believe"--the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides. Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations, especially those of Islamic origin. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics," one that restores the integrity of the human community. (shrink)

Christian ethics is threatened today by two opposite dangers: on the one hand, violence by moral and religious fanatics and on the other hand, too-easy ...

The article explores the difference between something being merely extremely improbable but believable and something being literally incredible–unbelievably improbable without intervention of some sort. In the former case, a rational person would not expect a special explanation for the occurrence, but in the latter, she does. John Leslie and Peter van Inwagen have proposed principles that can be used to distinguish the two types of cases. The weaknesses of their principles are shown and a revised principle is proposed that is (...) more suited for the task. (shrink)

In This Incredible Need to Believe, philosopher Julia Kristeva identifies the present as a time of crisis identified with ‘ideality’; historically significant cultural idealizations are failing us, leading to social and cultural breakdown, which Kristeva believes is not being addressed in ‘secular’ western societies. Remarkably, she defends the universal significance of what she defines as ‘belief’, revisiting earlier work on language, literature and the unconscious, against the background of a recent revival of interest in ‘religion’. In an introductory way, this (...) article outlines ways in which Kristeva’s analysis can help feminist readers to take bearings at this time. (shrink)

Commentators have rightly focused on the reasons why Hume maintains that the conclusions of skeptical arguments cannot be believed, as well as on the role these arguments play in Hume’s justification of his account of the mind. Nevertheless, Hume’s interpreters should take more seriously the question of whether Hume holds that these arguments are demonstrations. Only if the arguments are demonstrations do they have the requisite status to prove Hume’s point—and justify his confidence—about the nature of the mind’s belief-generating faculties. (...) In this paper, I treat Hume’s argument against the primary/secondary quality distinction as my case study, and I argue that it is intended by Hume to be a demonstration of a special variety. (shrink)

The lack of public support for climate change policies and refusals to vaccinate children are just two alarming illustrations of the impacts of dissent about scientific claims. Dissent can lead to confusion, false beliefs, and widespread public doubt about highly justified scientific evidence. Even more dangerously, it has begun to corrode the very authority of scientific consensus and knowledge. Deployed aggressively and to political ends, some dissent can intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead both the public and policymakers to oppose (...) important public policies firmly rooted in science. -/- To criticize dissent is, however, a fraught exercise. Skepticism and fearless debate are key to the scientific process, making it both vital and incredibly difficult to characterize and identify dissent that is problematic in its approach and consequences. Indeed, as de Melo-Martín and Intemann show, the criteria commonly proposed as means of identifying inappropriate dissent are flawed and the strategies generally recommended to tackle such dissent are not only ineffective but could even make the situation worse. -/- The Fight Against Doubt proposes that progress on this front can best be achieved by enhancing the trustworthiness of the scientific community and by being more realistic about the limits of science when it comes to policymaking. It shows that a richer understanding of the context in which science operates is needed to disarm problematic dissent and those who deploy it. This, the authors argue, is the best way forward, rather than diagnosing the many instances of wrong-headed dissent. (shrink)

The incredible story of the woman--actress, dancer, yogi, globetrotter--who brought yoga to America and to much of the rest of the western world. Born Eugenia Peterson in early 20th century Russia, Indra Devi was a rebel from earliest childhood. In the 1930s she fled to Berlin, and then--driven by her passion for yoga and a fascination with yogic philosophy (and Theosophy)--she journeyed to India, at a time when unaccompanied young European women were unheard of. In India she performed perhaps her (...) greatest feat--convincing even the most recalcitrant yogis, from Krishnamurti to Krishnamacharya, to reveal to her the secrets of their art. She would go on to share what she learned with men and women around the world--teaching Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo in Hollywood, then moving to Mexico and later to Buenos Aires--helping to usher in the craze for yoga that continues unabated in the U.S. and throughout the world today. Written with vivid clarity, and describing the extraordinary spread and popularization of a philosophical movement, The Goddess Posebrings Indra Devi's little known but wholly remarkable story to life. (shrink)

The incredible achievements of modern scientific theories lead most of us to embrace scientific realism: the view that our best theories offer us at least roughly accurate descriptions of otherwise inaccessible parts of the world like genes, atoms, and the big bang. In Exceeding Our Grasp, Stanford argues that careful attention to the history of scientific investigation invites a challenge to this view that is not well represented in contemporary debates about the nature of the scientific enterprise. The historical record (...) of scientific inquiry, Stanford suggests, is characterized by what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives. Past scientists have routinely failed even to conceive of alternatives to their own theories and lines of theoretical investigation, alternatives that were both well-confirmed by the evidence available at the time and sufficiently serious as to be ultimately accepted by later scientific communities. Stanford supports this claim with a detailed investigation of the mid-to-late 19th century theories of inheritance and generation proposed in turn by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and August Weismann. He goes on to argue that this historical pattern strongly suggests that there are equally well-confirmed and scientifically serious alternatives to our own best theories that remain currently unconceived. Moreover, this challenge is more serious than those rooted in either the so-called pessimistic induction or the underdetermination of theories by evidence, in part because existing realist responses to these latter challenges offer no relief from the problem of unconceived alternatives itself. Stanford concludes by investigating what positive account of the spectacularly successful edifice of modern theoretical science remains open to us if we accept that our best scientific theories are powerful conceptual tools for accomplishing our practical goals, but abandon the view that the descriptions of the world around us that they offer are therefore even probably or approximately true. (shrink)

Fearful Symmetry brings the incredible discoveries of contemporary physics within everyone's grasp. A. Zee, a distinguished physicist and skillful expositor, tells the exciting story of how today's theoretical physicists are following Einstein in their search for the beauty and simplicity of Nature. Animated by a sense of reverence and whimsy, the book describes the majestic sweep and accomplishments of twentieth-century physics. In the end, we stand in awe before the grand vision of modern physics--one of the greatest chapters in the (...) intellectual history of humankind. (shrink)