This article presents information about facades, their thermal insulating role in buildings in Albania. The façade in construction is one of the necessary factors to ensure a longer life of the buildings and indoor thermal comfort. Façade systems are composed of different materials, which provide a protective effect during the life of the building. The article will focus on the characteristic materials used in Albania for the construction of facades and the main materials used from the year 2000 (...) up to today. The article will be informative, statistical, and comparative in order to draw conclusions. Nowadays building facades are again becoming one of the main subjects of discussion, undoubtedly due to the increasing importance of the building envelope in relation to energy consumption. In the 90s, minimal attention was paid to the efficiency and quality of facades; everything was done strictly in relation to residency requirements. But, during this last decade, Albania experienced a construction boom, with a series of good new buildings, which are accompanied by progress in the architectural style and in the techniques of building materials usage. However, the advantages of façade systems in construction are not only to make the building long-lasting. The function of facades always undergoes changes and advances over time, in terms of their impact on the temperature fluctuations inside the building or energy storage. (shrink)

Charged with personal, societal and legal significance, the hymen, as a fold of flesh, has the power to rule the sexual identities of unmarried women in Turkey. This article examines the forms and associated meanings of contemporary challenges to virginity rules among educationally advantaged, upwardly mobile young women. The article demonstrates that in the process of negotiating often contradictory expectations of their sexual behavior, young women cultivate purposefully ambiguous identities related to their state of virginhood. The author calls these identities (...) ` virginal facades' and explores their complex and contradictory implications. The author highlights an important normative shift from a focus on the physical reality of virginity to a focus on the moral expression of virginity, and emphasizes the intricate connection between social class and women's sexuality experienced by some young women as sexual guilt. (shrink)

Alongside his work as a practising architect, Sigurd Frosterus (1876–1956) was one of Finland’s leading architectural critics during the first decades of the 20th century. In his early life, Frosterus was a strict rationalist who wanted to develop architecture towards scientific ideals instead of historical, archaeological, or mythological approaches. According to him, an architect had to analyse his tasks of construction in order to be able to logically justify his solutions, and he must take advantage of the possibilities of the (...) latest technology. The particular challenge of his time was reinforced concrete. Frosterus considered that the buildings of a modern metropolis should be constructivist in expressing their purpose and technology honestly. The impulses of two famous European architects – Otto Wagner and Henry van de Velde – had a life-long influence on his work. Urban architecture with long street perspectives and houses with austere façades and unified eaves lines was the stylistic ideal that he shared with the Austrian architect Wagner. An open and enlightened urban experience was Frosterus’s future vision, not National Romantic capriciousness or intimacy drawing from the Middle Ages. According to Frosterus, the Belgian van de Velde was the master interior architect of the epoch, the interior of the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar being an excellent example of his work. However, already in the 1910s Frosterus’s rationalism developed towards a broader understanding of the functions of the façades of business edifices. In his brilliant analyses of the business palaces by the Finnish architects Armas Lindgren and Lars Sonck, he considered the symbolic and artistic values of the façades to be even more important than technological honesty. Moreover, references to the history of architecture had a crucial role in the 1920s and 1930s when he wrote about his main work– the Stockmann department store in the centre of Helsinki.  . (shrink)

The paper addresses the contemporary features of aesthetic capitalism (Böhme, 2001; 2017) in the city, connecting beauty studies with established analyses of ‘territorial stigmatization’ (Wacquant, 2007) in the framework of critical whiteness studies. My argument is that beautification practices in marginal public spaces can be regarded as an attitude of aesthetic neocolonialism. The text investigates the role that art plays in establishing spaces of difference, focusing on the analysis of the idea of beauty exhibited and used in processes of urban (...) transformation. This beautifying operation could mask the intent of domesticating the ‘urban exotic’, representing the aesthetics of the ‘urban other’, overlapping processes of hypervisibilization and invisibilization within the production of normative white visual domains. The resulting transformation is viewed as a new field of value extraction from the urban space while at the same time being a new arena for privilege and inequality production. (shrink)

This article focuses on urban space and heritage. Our aim is to understand how ordinary streets in Perth respond to urban change and how much these urban streets represent Western Australia’s heritage. The intention is to eschew the dominant branding of WA as Australia’s mining state and shift the spotlight so that in addition to the economic and material, light is also shed on the socio-cultural in the everyday and the vernacular. This project uses Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis approach to explore (...) a contrapuntal reading of heritage that disrupts the deserving, dominant and fixed histories of High Road in Willetton and High Street in Fremantle. Amid the tides of migration, commerce, and cultures, heritage facades on High Street Fremantle appear singular and fixed, whereas multiple cultures have been extracted for sale on High Road. Superficially High Road seems diverse, but the overarching impulse across both sites is commerce – ‘Business as usual’ reigns. (shrink)

Many common approximation methods in physics practice 'causal process avoidance' in their operative procedures and such methodologies weave densely throughout the usual fabric of 'classical mechanics'. It is observed that Hume was unable to find any grounding for a robust conception of 'cause' largely because he unwittingly looked in those regions of mechanics where genuine causal processes had already been tacitly expunged.

Προσόψεις θεάτρων και Νυμφαία θεατρικής πρόσοψης. Η σχέση μεταξύ τους Το άρθρο αυτο μελετά τις ομοιότητες ανάμεσα στις προσόψεις των θεάτρων και των μνημειακών νυμφαίων. Η συζήτηση αφορά κυρίως στα λεγόμενα νυμφαία με ευθύγραμμη πρόσοψη, τα οποία συγκρίνονται άμεσα με τη scaenae frons ενός ρωμαϊκού θεάτρου. Η έρευνα βασίζεται σε τέσσερις παραμέτρους : α. τη μορφολογία, όπως φαίνεται μέσα από τις ομοιότητες των δύο μνημείων, λ. χ. τη χρήση συγκεκριμένων αρχιτεκτονικών στοιχείων, β. τη λειτουργία και τη χρήση αυτών των δημοσίων (...) μνημείων εντός του αστικού τοπίου – σε σχέση με την κοινωνική, πολιτική και πολιτισμική ζωή των πολιτών, γ. την εικονογραφία, δηλαδή τη μελέτη του γλυπτού διακόσμου, ο οποίος αναπτύσσεται στις μνημειακές προσόψεις και των θεάτρων και των νυμφαίων · και τα δύο αυτά μνημεία φιλοξενούν παρόμοια εικονογραφικά προγράμματα, τα οποία ακολουθούν συγκεκριμένους κανόνες, αποβλέποντας ταυτόχρονα στην προβολή συγκεκριμένων μηνημάτων, δ. τη σχέση με το ιερό στοιχείο, το οποίο ενέχεται τόσο στα θέατρα όσο και στα νυμφαία · ένα μεγάλο μέρος των θεάτρων και των νυμφαίων έχουν κατασκευαστεί εντός ή πλησίον ιερών, ενώ πολλά θέατρα φιλοξενούν νυμφαία στους χώρους τους. (shrink)

“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” juxtaposes elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of commodities in the economy of high capitalism. “Allegory in the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the inner world.”32 Each of the exposé’s six sections consists of two parts: “Fourier, or the Arcades,” “Daguerre, or the Panoramas,” “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” “Haussmann, or the Baricades.”33The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical (...) starting point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron “Pompeian” pillars, to offer in its enticing bay windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois merchandising. Fourier houses his “land of Cockaigne” in a “reactionary modification” of the arcade.34Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David’s pupils when they “draw from nature.” Politically superior, the city still dreams of the country. “The panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling about life.”35 They drive a wedge between “plastic foreground” and “informational base.” The worker in the literary panorama is “a trimming for an idyll.” Technical innovations in photography reduce the representational significance of painting. Now photography “is given the task of making discoveries”: it explores the sewers and catacombs. It markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism. 32. “Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt geräumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln” .33. Adorno objects to the use of people’s names in these titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior” section is the collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical: Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the beginning.34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. “Das Schlaraffenland,” “ihre reaktionäre Umbildung” . Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He has written on the French Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

Southeast Asia has numerous religions and diverse forms of state-governance, so the populations largely have the freedom to express themselves within the context of their society. Expressing oneself can occur within the context of their religion, using the language they have been cultured within, if they remain in their cultural-context. This paper explores the context of Buddhist nations using militarized-language, seen as problematic by Dr. Matthew Kosuta, who professes in his masters-thesis that it is a contradiction. A portion of my (...) article refutes his position, on the grounds that Buddhism developed within the Hindu-Brahmanism context and caste was normalized in regions influenced by such culture. Equally, it could be noted, the Buddha also used a language that was suitable for agriculturalists, merchants, Brahmins, so a militarized-language was just one way to speak to some people within their own social context, which was understandable not just to them, but to anyone interested in attaining Nibbāna. (shrink)

The market-based innovation known as assisted living (AL) has changed the landscape of long-term care in the US. Using Edgar Schein’s three-level conceptual framework of organizational culture and data from a two-year qualitative study of five AL facilities located in suburban Philadelphia, we argue that misalignments among publicly stated values, material artifacts, and underlying assumptions can create a climate that fosters ethical tension. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with staff at all levels, we derive five operational assumptions that guide behavior (...) in the facilities included in our study, and we describe how facility artifacts and espoused values give rise to ethical tensions and, at times, ethical violations. The findings highlight the imperative for providers and managers in all industries to look beyond the façade of artifacts and espoused values to underlying assumptions, and to recognize that these three levels must be aligned in order to create and sustain a culture in which ethics is a visible and enduring element and where ethical conduct is encouraged on an everyday basis. (shrink)

The market-based innovation known as assisted living (AL) has changed the landscape of long-term care in the US. Using Edgar Schein’s three-level conceptual framework of organizational culture and data from a two-year qualitative study of five AL facilities located in suburban Philadelphia, we argue that misalignments among publicly stated values, material artifacts, and underlying assumptions can create a climate that fosters ethical tension. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with staff at all levels, we derive five operational assumptions that guide behavior (...) in the facilities included in our study, and we describe how facility artifacts and espoused values give rise to ethical tensions and, at times, ethical violations. The findings highlight the imperative for providers and managers in all industries to look beyond the façade of artifacts and espoused values to underlying assumptions, and to recognize that these three levels must be aligned in order to create and sustain a culture in which ethics is a visible and enduring element and where ethical conduct is encouraged on an everyday basis. (shrink)

New work is used as a general term to summarize professional developments in contemporary work style, structure and modus of organizations and society—this means collaborative work and flexible working hours on individual levels, and flat hierarchies and participatory decision-making on organizational levels. Contemporary corporations strive to orient toward the concept of new work to keep up with stakeholder demands, for instance in their branding strategies as an employer. However, studies on organizational practices indicate that alongside explicit values and agendas, organizations (...) tend to slyly exert power to secure their interests. Constructive dismissal is one such instance where contractually protected employees are made to resign their positions because the work environment is altered to become increasingly unbearable. This research analyzes two case studies to explicate routine dismissal procedures at the managerial level in two internationally operating German corporations. Both corporations explicitly profile as new work environments and are structured according to democratic principles including flat hierarchies, feature institutionalized diversity management including control committees for equal opportunities, and emphasize values such as workplace dignity, employee agency, and equality. The data contain long-term participatory observation collected over a 6-month period from two managers of 5 and 8 years of experience in managerial duties. The content analysis of data reveals characteristics of everyday processes in these organizations especially in terminating managers. The findings are presented as the ‘model of the silent dismissal,’ containing seven types of managerial termination carried out by implicit power and symbolic conventions that circumvent subject participation and litigation in an effortless manner. After exposing the model’s mechanisms, we turn to discuss its meaning for both terminated and surviving subjects against a critical theoretical framework of neoliberalism, democracy, and power. (shrink)

Marcantonio Raimondis so-called Caryatid Façade has received scant attention, yet it occupies an important place in the printmakers oeuvre and was widely admired and imitated in the sixteenth century. The image, which features an architectural façade adorned with Caryatid and Persian porticoes and an oversized female capital, does not fit easily with the usual narrative about Raimondis career in Rome, summed up in Vasaris account that he collaborated with Raphael to publicise the masters storie. Rather than being an (...) illustration of a religious or mythological subject, it brings together architectural fantasia, archaeology and Vitruvian studies, reflecting on the origins of the orders and the nature of architectural ornament. Arguably, it is also an indirect trace of Raphaels unfinished projects to reconstruct Rome and to collaborate with humanist Fabio Calvo and others on a new, illustrated edition of Vitruvius. (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin has gained a reputation of a thinker and literary theorist somehow hostile to poetry, and more specifically to the epic. This view is based on texts, in which Bakhtin creates and develops a conceptual contrast between poetry and the novel (in "Discourse in the Novel") or between epic and the novel (in "Epic and Novel"). However, as I will show, such perceptions of Bakhtin's position are grounded in a misunderstanding of Bakhtin's writing strategy and philosophical approach. Bakhtin often (...) draws such conceptual contrasts as the ones between epic and novel, but does so not in order to characterize pre-given phenomena (in this case, the epic and the novel as two groups of literary works), but to construct a conceptual space which he in turn uses to explicate elements of his philosophy. (shrink)

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old (...) Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p<0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular. (shrink)

This paper argues that knowledge is an instance of a more general and familiar normative kind—that of success through ability (or success through excellence, or success through virtue). This thesis is developed in the context of three themes prominent in the recent literature: that knowledge attributions are somehow context sensitive; that knowledge is intimately related to practical reasoning; and that one purpose of the concept of knowledge is to flag good sources of information. Wedding these themes to the proposed account (...) helps to explain a wide range of standard Gettier problems. It also helps to explain barn façade cases, which require a different kind of treatment. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 1 - 39 Through a novel set of texts drawn from Plato, Porphyry, Plotinus, Ps. Julian, Proclus, Hermeias, Synesius and Damascius, I explore how anagogic _erōs_ in master-disciple relationships in Neoplatonism contributed to the attainment of self-knowledge and to the transmission of knowledge, authority and inspired insights within and outside the _diadochia_. I view anagogic _erōs_ as one of the most important channels of non-discursive pedagogy and argue for the mediating power of anagogic (...) _erōs_ in the attainment of the main goal of the Platonist: reorienting desire from sensible to intelligible beauty and changing one’s ontological status to become like god and attain union with the divine. After considering the problematic nature of Socratic _erōs_, its skeptics and detractors, I discuss the dynamics of philosopher-disciple relationships and the experience of anagogic _erōs_ in the following: the attack on Porphyry and defense by Plotinus following Porphyry’s recital of an ecstatic poem on _Hieros Gamos_, the concealment of anagogic _erōs_ behind the authoritative façade of an oracle, the intensely devotional private letters of Ps. Julian to the aged Iamblichus and of Synesius to his female master Hypatia; the identification of anagogic _erōs_ with theurgic ascent in Syrianus’s school according to Proclus and Hermeias and the experiences of anagogic _erōs_ outside the _diadochia_ in Damascius’ _Philosophical History_. I conclude that the true and correct practice of philosophy had much, if not everything to do with the anagogic _erōs_ between the true philosopher, the bacchant and the philosopher in training, aspiring to become transformed from thyrsus-bearer into bacchant. The privileged and exalted status given to the divine lover ensured the transmission of the philosophical tradition in all its richness, preserving both its discursive and non-discursive aspects as a system of thought, as a way of life and as a way of being and loving. (shrink)

The experiments reported herein probe the visual cortical mechanisms that control near–far percepts in response to two-dimensional stimuli. Figural contrast is found to be a principal factor for the emergence of percepts of near versus far in pictorial stimuli, especially when stimulus duration is brief. Pictorial factors such as interposition (Experiment 1) and partial occlusion Experiments 2 and 3) may cooperate, as generally predicted by cue combination models, or compete with contrast factors in the manner predicted by the FACADE model. (...) In particular, if the geometrical conŽ guration of an image favors activation of cortical bipole grouping cells, as at the top of a T-junction, then this advantage can cooperate with the contrast of the conŽ guration to facilitate a near–far percept at a lower contrast than at an X-junction. Varying the exposure duration of the stimuli shows that the more balanced bipole competition in the X-junction case takes longer exposure times to resolve than the bipole competition in the T-junction case (Experiment 3). (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze the façade and staircase of the historic building of the University of Salamanca as an expression of the relationship between philosophy, theology and art in the Spanish Siglo de Oro, and will try to provide a new perspective on the sculptural elements present in both spaces of the university. There are few interpretations on this subject, but they all converge on understanding sculptures as an expression of the myth of the Spanish monarchy. This essay, (...) instead, will show how those same elements can be read in relation to the moral and anthropological needs of 16th century humanity and, thus, that the relationship between university spaces and the people who frequent them is even closer. To enter a space, according to such an interpretation, does not simply mean to use it, but to frequent it and understand in it and from it reflections for everyday life. (shrink)

The barn/barn façade thought experiment is familiar to most epistemologists. It is intended to present a counterexample to certain causal theories of knowledge; in it, a father driving through the countryside with his son says, ‘That's a barn’ while pointing to a barn. Unbeknownst to the father, however, a film crew is working in the area, and it has constructed several barn façades. While the father did correctly point to a barn when he made his assertion, he could have (...) just as easily pointed to a barn façade, and so, many hold, he does not know that the structure at which he is pointing is in fact a barn. If this is so, then it follows that true beliefs formed from reliable causal processes may still not qualify as knowledge. (shrink)

The dorsal turn -- Facades of the other : Heidegger, Althusser, Levinas -- No one home : Homer, Joyce, Broch -- A line drawn in the ocean : Exodus, Freud, Rimbaud -- Friendship in torsion : Schmitt, Derrida -- Revolutions in the darkroom : Balázs, Benjamin, Sade -- The controversy of dissidence : Nietzsche.

Section 1 articulates a genus‐species claim: that knowledge is a kind of success from ability. Equivalently: In cases of knowledge, S’s success in believing the truth is attributable to S’s ability. That idea is then applied to questions about the nature and value of knowledge. Section 2 asks what it would take to turn the genus‐species claim into a proper theory of knowledge; that is, into informative, necessary and sufficient conditions. That question is raised in the context of an important (...) line of objection against even the genus‐species claim; namely, that there is no way to understand the attribution relation so that it does all the work that it is supposed to do. Section 3 reviews several extant proposals for understanding the attribution relation, and argues that none of them are adequate for answering the objection. Section 4 proposes a different way of understanding the relation, and shows how the resulting view does resolve the objection. Section 5 completes the new account by proposing a way to understand intellectual abilities. Section 6 briefly addresses Barn Façade cases and lottery propositions. Section 7 briefly addresses a question about the scope of knowledge; in particular, it shows how the new view allows a neo‐Moorean response to skepticism. (shrink)

In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of (...) the universe. Can it really be that even while you toss and turn late at night in the throes of an important decision and it seems like the scales of fate hang in the balance, that your decision is a foregone conclusion? Can it really be that everything you have done and everything you ever will do is determined by facts that were in place long before you were born? This problem is one of the staples of philosophical discussion. It is discussed by everyone from freshman in their first philosophy class, to theoretical physicists in bars after conferences. And yet there is no topic that remains more unsettling, and less well understood. If you want to get behind the façade, past the bare statement of determinism, and really try to understand what physics is telling us in its own terms, read this book. The problem of free will raises all kinds of questions. What does it mean to make a decision, and what does it mean to say that our actions are determined? What are laws of nature? What are causes? What sorts of things are we, when viewed through the lenses of physics, and how do we fit into the natural order? Ismael provides a deeply informed account of what physics tells us about ourselves. The result is a vision that is abstract, alien, illuminating, and-Ismael argues-affirmative of most of what we all believe about our own freedom. Written in a jargon-free style, How Physics Makes Us Free provides an accessible and innovative take on a central question of human existence. (shrink)

Gettier presented the now famous Gettier problem as a challenge to epistemology. The methods Gettier used to construct his challenge, however, utilized certain principles of formal logic that are actually inappropriate for the natural language discourse of the Gettier cases. In that challenge to epistemology, Gettier also makes truth claims that would be considered controversial in analytic philosophy of language. The Gettier challenge has escaped scrutiny in these other relevant academic disciplines, however, because of its façade as an epistemological (...) analysis. This article examines Gettier's methods with the analytical tools of logic and analytic philosophy of language. (shrink)

Theories of knowledge as credit for true belief, or as cognitive achievement, have to face the following objection: in the famous Barn façades case, it seems that the truth of Barney's belief that he is in front of a barn is to be explained by the correct functioning of his cognitive capacities, although we are reluctant to say that he knows he is in front of a barn. Duncan Pritchard concludes from this that a safety clause, irreducible to the conditions (...) a true belief must satisfy in order to be credited to the believer, constitutes a necessary condition of knowledge. Because those who define knowledge as a cognitive achievement have not convincingly answered this objection, I intend, in the first section of this paper, to refute it by showing how practical and doxastic achievements differ. Then I defend the idea that we should also distinguish two kinds of environmental epistemic luck, and, correlatively, two kinds of safety, that are not equally incompatible with knowledge. Finally, I argue that this distinction is inevitably vague and I indicate some consequences of this vagueness for our knowledge‐intuitions. (shrink)

Section 1 articulates a genus-species claim: that knowledge is a kind of success from ability. Equivalently: In cases of knowledge, S’s success in believing the truth is attributable to S’s ability. That idea is then applied to questions about the nature and value of knowledge. Section 2 asks what it would take to turn the genus-species claim into a proper theory of knowledge; that is, into informative, necessary and sufficient conditions. That question is raised in the context of an important (...) line of objection against even the genus-species claim; namely, that there is no way to understand the attribution relation so that it does all the work that it is supposed to do. Section 3 reviews several extant proposals for understanding the attribution relation, and argues that none of them are adequate for answering the objection. Section 4 proposes a different way of understanding the relation, and shows how the resulting view does resolve the objection. Section 5 completes the new account by proposing a way to understand intellectual abilities. Section 6 briefly addresses Barn Façade cases and lottery propositions. Section 7 briefly addresses a question about the scope of knowledge; in particular, it shows how the new view allows a neo-Moorean response to skepticism. (shrink)

The public debate on climate change is filled with moral claims. However, scientific knowledge about the role that morality, ethics, and values play in this issue is still scarce. Starting from this research gap, we focus on corporations as central decision makers in modern society and analyze how they respond to societal demands to take responsibility for climate change. While relevant literature on business ethics and climate change either places a high premium on morality or presents a strong skeptical bias, (...) our sociological model depicts morality as an indeterminate force: it can lead to both workable solutions or merely reinforce the status quo, depending on what different corporations make of it. We describe, on the one side, the diffusion of moral values in the media discourse on climate change and, on the other side, the specific responses of corporations. While the media discourse generates a pressure on corporations to act responsibly, their moral claims do not provide clear advice for action. As a result, morality becomes available to organizations as a medium that can be re-specified according to their internal dynamics. Corporations transform moral values into something compatible with their own structures through a variety of different responses: introducing formal ethical structures (e.g., codes of conduct), initiating value-oriented projects, or developing informal moral norms, and so on. In some occurrences, morality becomes a mere façade, while in others it serves as a decision-making criterion and deeply influences core activities in firms. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt is one of the most widely read and influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. His fundamental works on friend and enemy, legality and legitimacy, dictatorship, political theology and the concept of the political are read today with great interest by everyone from conservative Catholic theologians to radical political thinkers on the left. In his private life, however, Schmitt was haunted by the demons of his wild anti-Semitism, his self-destructive and compulsive sexuality and his deep-seated resentment against the (...) complacency of bourgeois life. As a young man from a modest background, full of social envy, he succeeded in making his way to the top of the academic discipline of law in Germany through his exceptional intellectual prowess. And yet he never felt at home in the academic establishment and among those of high social standing. In his works, Schmitt unmasked the liberal Rechtsstaat as a constitutional façade and reflected on the legitimacy of dictatorship. When the Nazis seized power Schmitt was susceptible to their ideology. He broke with his Jewish friends, joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and lent a helping hand to Hitler, thereby becoming deeply entangled with the regime. Schmitt was irrevocably compromised by his role as the ‘crown jurist’ of the Third Reich. But by 1936 he had already lost his influential position. After the war, he led a secluded life in his home town in the Sauerland and became a key background figure in the intellectual scene of postwar Germany. Reinhard Mehring’s outstanding biography is the most comprehensive work available on the life and work of Carl Schmitt. Based on thorough research and using new sources that were previously unavailable, Mehring portrays Schmitt as a Shakespearean figure at the centre of the German catastrophe. (shrink)

The very first line of Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, states the following surprising definition: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing [Per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit existentiam, sive id, cujus natura non potest concipi, nisi existens]. As we shall shortly see, for many of Spinoza’s contemporaries and predecessors the very notion of causa sui was utterly absurd, akin to a Baron Munchausen attempting (...) to lift himself above a river by pulling his hair up. How can a thing cause itself into existence, if before the causal activity, the cause did not exist at all? Indeed, in one of his earliest works, Spinoza himself claimed: “No thing, considered in itself, has in itself a cause enabling it to destroy itself (if it exists), or to make itself [te konnen maaken] (if it does not exist)” (KV II 26|I/110/14-16). Moreover, in other early works, Spinoza refers to God as an “uncreated thing” (TIE §97) or “uncreated substance” (CM II 1|I/237/20), and not as a cause-of-itself as in the Ethics. What made Spinoza desert the common, traditional, view of God as the uncaused first cause, or uncreated substance, and adopt instead the apparently chimerical notion of God as causa sui? A very likely explanation for this development suggests that Spinoza’s rationalism, his commitment to the principle that everything must have a reason both for its existence and for its non-existence – a commitment stated clearly both in the Ethics (see, for example, E1p8s2 and E1p11d2), and in Spinoza’s other writings (see, for example, Ep. 34 (IV/179/29)) – made him realize that the notion of an uncreated, or uncaused, thing is of no use for him: if everything must have a cause, then the first cause, or the most fundamental being, must be a cause-of-itself. All this is well and good, but we should not let Spinoza off the hook so easily, for the immediate question which arises now is whether Spinoza is not simply cheating his readers. Does Spinoza have a reason – i.e., argument – that could convince us that causa sui is indeed a more adequate characterization of God and not merely an opportunistic and ad hoc façade for the good old uncaused cause? While there are many important questions surrounding Spinoza’s notion of causa sui, it is the last question which will be the focus of this short chapter. In the first part of this chapter, we study, briefly, Descartes’ engagement with the notion of causa sui. In the second part, I show that Spinoza understood the causation of causa sui as efficient, and not formal, causation. The third and final part will attempt to locate precisely the alleged problem with the notion of causa sui, and consider how could Spinoza defend the intelligibility of this notion. Regrettably, limitations of space will force us to leave the examination of Spinoza’s closely related notion of being-conceived. (shrink)

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of AI technologies on the climate crisis beyond their mere resource consumption. To critically examine this impact, I introduce the concept of AI futurism. With this term I capture the ideology behind AI, and argue that this ideology is inherently connected to the climate crisis. This is because AI futurism construes a socio-material environment overly fixated on AI and technological progress, to the extent that it loses sight of the existential threats (...) ahead. In that way, the perceived significance of the planetary reality is softened, and the unsustainable paths charted by the AI industry remain opaque. To make this argument the paper unfolds in two main sections. (1) It delves into the ideology of AI futurism and its discursive impact on the societal perception of the climate crisis. (2) It employs a materialist perspective to elucidate the tangible effects of the AI industry on the climate crisis, and to show what is going on behind the façade of AI futurism. Adding to a critical theory of AI and the climate crisis, this paper starts a realistic conversation about the challenges posed by the intersection of these transformations. (shrink)

It is commonplace to consider taste as the organ through which we know beauty and enjoy beautiful things. Looking beyond this facade, the newest translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work lays bare the far-from-comforting character of a fault line that irremediably divides the human subject. At the crossroads of truth and beauty, cognition and pleasure, taste appears as a knowledge that is not known and a pleasure that is not enjoyed. From this vantage point, aesthetics and economics, Homo aestheticus (...) and Homo economicus reveal their secret and uncanny complicity. With Taste, Agamben takes a step into the history of philosophy, reaching to the very origins of aesthetics, to critically recover the roots of a cardinal concept for Western culture. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetics. Originally written in 1979, this essay illuminates a key category in his most recent writings, promising to engage not only the author's readers in philosophy, sociology and literary criticism but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well. (shrink)

The method chosen here draws on concepts borrowed from sociology and anthropology. This double conceptual approach is necessary for a society divided between values inherited from medieval Christianity and precapitalist practices. Seventeenth-century France did not think of itself as a class society but as a society of orders. Since sociology is a system of knowledge whose concepts are taken from an imaginary construct, it is thus more suited to analyzing bourgeois society than societies in transition.6 In trying to measure the (...) past with the aid of tools forged in and for contemporary societies, the sociologist runs the risk of only measuring an artifact, produced by his theories in the field of history. Hence the need for the anthropological concepts, including the notion of exchange, among others, whether material , symbolic , or sexual .This approach will bring to light the contradictions underlying the society of the ancient régime. Whereas an ordinary sociohistorical approach views the reign of Louis XIV as unified under a dogmatic classicism, the socioanthropological approach stresses the tensions and oppositions running through this society. Classicism appears then as a façade covering up the change that it cannot imagine. This “spectacle”7 makes it possible to unite contradictory social practices, both those produced by consumption and which originate in the medieval economy and those belonging to the early accumulation of capital which sketch future bourgeois economic practices. 6. See Cornelius Catoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey .7. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, rev. English ed. . Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French literature at Stanford University. His publications include Le roi-machine, Les metamorphoses de Tintin, and Le prince sacrifié. Alice Musick McLean, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, is specializing in medieval narrative and the literature of the fantastic. (shrink)

By analysing three works of fiction set in Havana, Fresa y Chocolate by Tomas Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabi, Retour à Ithaque by Laurent Cantet and Viva by Paddy Breathnach, we propose to study the Cuban capital as a sick body, as an architecturally, economically, politically and socially dilapidated organism. Its citizens struggle to survive, lacking basic necessities and trapped under a claustrophobic political and social surveillance, which the film directors convey through the use of a variety of aesthetic (...) devices. There is a form of symbiosis between Havana and its inhabitants. The characters are confined in a labyrinth of alleys, stairs and narrow corridors, enveloped in a nocturnal atmosphere. The constricted arteries through which they move show that the body of Havana lacks oxygen. Its inhabitants need to find spaces to breathe and to express their authentic selves, to regenerate. This space is to be found behind Havana’s façades, behind its closed doors and even on a roof-top terrace. These private spaces reveal the dual nature of the city and its people, and constitute pockets of liberty as well as places of catharsis. The external façade presents a socially acceptable figure while covering and protecting the authentic self. The private spaces provide the physical and mental oxygen that the soul of Havana needs to survive. It is here that individual liberties flourish, allowing rights to be asserted, and art to be both preserved and created. The premise of a spiritual transformation begins to take form. (shrink)