Republican and liberal traditions do not encourage a framework of understanding between different cultures. An ethical and political design of a plural society must be created whereby the maze of cultures we live among may be accommodated for. The most dominant moral conceptions in this sense are relativism, universalism and fundamentalism. All of these positions have different limitations and possibilities. The author chooses to defend a “modus vivendi” among cultures which does not bring forth indifference or contempt to others, (...) namely foreigners– immigrants or refugees. The “modus vivendi” defended must transcend simple coexistence among cultures and adopt a cosmopolitan view, calling for sacrifices in solidarity with those who do not share our culture. This open way of living can lead to real dialogue among cultures, starting with the acknowledgement of their diversities, which are neither homological nor can they be placed in order of priority from the “western ethnocentric” point of view. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Start Exercising Your Brain Now: 201 Word and Number Exercises to Challenge Your Memory, Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Skills, Vocabulary, and More! Keep your brain active, even with MCI. For adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment, brain exercises are the best way to stay sharp and delay the onset of dementia. That’s why cognitive specialist Dr. Tonia Vojtkofsky tailored this fun workbook specifically for people with MCI. It’s the first of its kind! Find a word that meets the definition and contains the letters (...) “CAN” Truthful; straightforward; frank A brown nut with an edible kernel A cylinder black of wax with a wick Pick the one statement that is correct: UWYVX V is right of X. W is right of V. V is between U and Y. Y is right of W. Find and complete the pattern: 5, 8, 12, 17, 23, _____, _____, _____, _____. 14, 56, 224, 896, _____, _____, _____, _____. 5, 15, 30, 90, 180 _____, _____, _____, _____. Plus: Complete the word, image recall, determine the order, matching, true or false, logic problems, decode using clues, trivia, discover the pattern, word mazes, and math games. “The idea for the book originated from my need to provide appropriate brain exercises for my clients who have MCI. All of the brain-exercise books on the market today are for people with no cognitive impairment and therefore were too hard for my clients. I knew that I had to provide something for this underserved population.”—Dr. Tonia Vojtkofsky. (shrink)

Public policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in (...) human life and central to many public policy challenges. In this paper, we supply evidence that incorporating morally salient dimensions of a culture is critically important for producing relevant and accurate evaluations of social policy when using multi-agent artificial intelligence models and simulations. (shrink)

Cheating is a serious issue among business students worldwide. However, research investigating the social factors that may help prevent cheating in Chinese higher education is rare. The present study examined two key social relationship factors of perceived teacher-student relationships and peer relationships by the students. It attempted to build a model which addressed the effects of two variables on Chinese business students’ cheating behaviour: the teacher’s approachability and the relationship goal of the students. Two important social influence factors were also (...) tested as mediators: neutralizing attitudes and perceived cheating norms of the students. A student survey was conducted with 1329 questionnaires collected. The results showed the negative effects of both social relationship variables on cheating, and that their effects were fully mediated by neutralizing attitudes. Moreover, perceived cheating norms fully mediated the effect of the teacher’s approachability, but not so for the relationship goal of the students. This study provided novel insights and recommendations for promoting academic integrity in Chinese business schools and universities. (shrink)

It is being argued, in this article, that multicultural education is subversive because it challenges the assumed inevitability and superiority of the dominant culture by presenting alterna-tives to it. For multicultural education to be subversive, however, culture has to be understood as an order of things mapped across truth and power axis à la Foucault. These order of things are sup-pressed by the dominant culture in order to maintain its hegemony. It is being further argued that with the help of (...) Foucault's genealogy we can understand how multicultural education can liberate subjugated order of things. (shrink)

The determination of the place of life in nature has been a major philosophic issue. Some, in their attempt to show the continuity of nature, have resorted to the reductive method and have argued that the living differ in no significant sense from the non-living, unless it be in their complexity; others, in their desire to emphasize the qualitatively varied aspects of nature, have drifted to disjunctive method and have claimed that there is an unbridgeable gap between the living and (...) the non-living. Yet life in its natural setting presents both continuity with the physical world and a distinctive difference from it. One need neither sunder the continuity in nature nor deny the empirically observable qualitative differences. It is this principle that will guide the present discussion of life. (shrink)

Although the same environmental regulations apply to all regions in China, legal enforcement can be different due to local economic development priorities. There is still a lack of knowledge about how regional disparities affect the operating performance results of the implementation of corporate environmental management practices, thus providing little information for foreign companies when they invest and develop their production base in China. To fill this research gap, this paper collects data from the Fortune 500 Chinese firms to investigate the (...) moderating role of regional disparities in affecting the performance results of corporate environmental management efforts based on the institutional theory. The disclosed corporate environmental responsibility practices serve as proxy to represent corporate environmental management practices. Content analysis approach was applied to collect and analyze CER practices published in the corporate reports of Chinese manufacturers. The results show that CER has a positive impact on operating income, while regional disparities influence the relationship between CER and corporate operating income. Specifically, CER and operating income are positively related in Eastern China; on the contrary, they are negatively related in Western China. This paper adds to the body of knowledge about environmental discrepancies in the same emerging economy, and provides insights for systematic consideration in terms of the issues of government environmental regulations and corporate environmental strategies. (shrink)

This article isolates ten prepositions, which constitute the undercurrent paradigm of contemporary discourse of health disease and medicine. Discussion of the interrelationship between those prepositions leads to a systematic refutation of this paradigm. An alternative set is being forwarded. The key notions of the existing paradigm are that health is the natural condition of humankind and that disease is a deviance from that nature. Natural things are harmonious and healthy while human made artifacts are coercive interference with natural balance. It (...) is suggested that the current paradigm is influenced by the world of finances and by instrumental reason. The alternative model suggests that human nature cannot be delineated. Humans fashion their own selves and nature by artificial means, medicine among them. The article discusses the implications of the paradigm adapted in various scholarly and popular debates such as the use of sex hormones for contraception, the care of the elderly, holistic medicine and distributive justice in health care. Medicine is not an isolated or a privileged realm. There is no unique entitlement to health care. It is always part of a broader agenda of social values and institutions. A open view of human societies, values and practices as they are situated within concrete material conditions is the platform required for an integrative and creative discourse of health care. (shrink)

Managers face an ethical dilemma in the allocation of scarce resources to corporate social responsibility because the underlying managerial incentives behind such CSR spending can range from pure altruism to complete financial orientation. Despite the importance of the managerial role in implementing CSR, prior studies generally have treated the role of managers as an exogenous factor. This study builds on recent studies on the managerial characteristics in studies on CSR by examining how managerial efficiency influences the outcomes of CSR. Using (...) a newly developed measure of managerial efficiency, we find that, on average, managerial efficiency is positively associated with a subsequent change in corporate social performance, although the association is weak in the level of total CSP. We find that efficient managers are more likely to engage in the product-related CSR that directly connects to corporate financial performance but are less likely to engage in environment-related CSR. We also find that CSP is positively associated with CFP with efficient managers. Our findings contribute to management and other stakeholders’ understanding of the association of CSR to its outcomes, CSP and/or CFP, which is hinged by the indispensable moderating role of managerial efficiency. (shrink)

In many Western European countries, gender equality and sexual tolerance have increasingly become markers of national cultures and European values that face an insistent threat from Muslims. Gender equality and sexual tolerance are increasingly framed in cultural terms and they play an important role in the construction of a social imaginary based on a cultural antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This article argues that a new ‘culturalized’ social imaginary has been established by turning ‘immigrant workers’ into ‘Muslim immigrants’ over the (...) last three decades. The unending moral panics around Muslim immigrants’ cultural practices such as honor killings, forced marriages, headscarves, female circumcision and homophobia create a sense of imminent threat and force progressive movements to forge unlikely alliances with right-wing groups against the insidious threat. These alliances are not, however, ephemeral mobilizations in defense of ‘common achievements’; the notion of common achievements creates a sense of cultural sameness vis-a-vis Muslims. Thus, what we see is the displacement of the internal frontiers and the creation of a new ‘hegemonic bloc’ around ‘common cultural values’. And this hegemonic displacement creates unresolvable tensions within feminist and queer movements. (shrink)

This study presents an exploration of the belief changes of prospective teachers through social co-constructivist teaching. The future presumed in-class teaching orientations of the PTs were also estimated by metaphor analysis. A case study was conducted to monitor the belief changes of the PTs and estimate their probable in-class practices. The participants were six PTs involved in a certification in education programme. The data were gathered from the following different sources; interviews, written reflections and metaphor explanations. The data that were (...) analysed interpretatively and specific parts of the analysed data were subjected to quantification. The PTs held considerably conventional and idealistic teaching beliefs prior to the implementations. The PTs improved their reasoning and enlarged their conceptualisations regarding teaching and learning after the implementations. Five types of teaching belief typologies displaying inherently sophisticated nature of the beliefs were extracted. Some of the PTs appeared to have promise in terms of implementing more learner-centred teaching; however, others preserved their traditional teaching practical orientations. It was considered that changes in teaching beliefs may have motivational and attitudinal dimensions. Finally, capturing the metaphors of the PTs regarding teaching and learning appeared to provide more realistic insights into the estimated in-class practical orientations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Daodejing (DDJ) is an ancient Chinese text traditionally taken as a representative Daoist classic expressing a distinctive philosophy from the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE). This essay explicates the ethical dimensions of the DDJ paying attention to issues related to war and peace. The discussion consists of four parts: (1) “naturalness” as an onto‐cosmological argument for a philosophy of harmony, balance, and peace; (2) war as a sign of the disruption of the natural pattern of things initiated by (...) the proliferation of desire; (3) defensive war and appropriate war conduct required when one has to be involved in warfare; and (4) the natural and spontaneous way of living that would prevent war from happening in the first place. This essay attempts to show that what makes the DDJ different from other military texts, or what is called the “art of war corpus” in China is that the discourse of war and warfare in the DDJ is presented via its unique understanding of peace at the personal and social levels. The DDJ is meant to be an inquiry into an effective method to prevent war from happening amid a world full of selfish interests and excessive desires. It proposes that peace is not only a condition in which there is freedom from war and overt violence, but a state of harmony that marks human life and its betterment. (shrink)

Annual changes in twinning and triplet rates by zygosity were investigated in eight countries during the period 19721999.

Most jurisdictions require that a mental capacity assessment be conducted using a functional model whose definition includes several abilities. In England and Wales and in increasing number of countries, the law requires a person be able to understand, to retain, to use or weigh relevant information and to communicate one’s decision. But interpreting and applying broad and vague criteria, such as the ability ‘to use or weigh’ to a diverse range of presentations is challenging. By examining actual court judgements of (...) capacity, we previously developed a descriptive typology of justifications used in the application of the Mental Capacity Act criteria. We here critically optimise this typology by showing how clear definitions—and thus boundaries—between the criteria can be achieved if the ‘understanding’ criterion is used narrowly and the multiple rationales that fall under the ability to ‘use or weigh’ are specifically enumerated in practice. Such a typology-aided practice, in theory, could make functional capacity assessments more transparent, accountable, reliable and valid. It may also help to create targeted supports for decision making by the vulnerable. We also discuss how the typology could evolve legally and scientifically, and how it lays the groundwork for clinical research on the abilities enumerated by the MCA. No data are available. This paper does not report any original data. (shrink)

The present study aims to elucidate whether insight problem solving could be facilitated by the cognitive component of humour. The authors take interest in whether the logical mechanisms of humour can affect how fast insight problems are solved. To that end, the authors conducted two experiments where participants solved insight problems after watching visual humorous stimuli such as videos and slideshows. The first experiment demonstrated the overall impact of facilitation by humour on insight problem solving; however, it did not show (...) any difference in how particular logical mechanisms of humour affect the solution time of insight problems. The second experiment showed that the cognitive component of humour could selectively affect insight problems whose difficulty stems from different sources. These results suggest that the cognitive component of humour, when operationalised as logical mechanisms and schema switching, contributes to solving insight problems. (shrink)

We show that the lattices of the normal extensions of four well-known logics—propositional intuitionistic logic \, Grzegorczyk logic \, modalized Heyting calculus \ and \—can be joined in a commutative diagram. One connection of this diagram is an isomorphism between the lattices of the normal extensions of \ and \; we show some preservation properties of this isomorphism. Two other connections are join semilattice epimorphims of the lattice of the normal extensions of \ onto that of \ and of the (...) lattice of the normal extensions of \ onto that of \. The link between \ and \ is a well-known isomorphism established by the Blok–Esakia theorem. (shrink)

Adaptation to climate change impacts is a key research topic in business ethics that poses substantial implications on the good lives of human beings. The commercial port sector is a highly relevant study focus with its pivotal roles in supply chains and international trade. Hence, it is important to investigate whether the port planning system and practice is appropriate in tackling climate change impacts. But beforehand, we must thoroughly understand the attitude and behaviors of port planners and operators on ports’ (...) climate adaptation planning. Through a survey towards 21 ports in Canada, the paper investigates the attitude and behaviors of port planners and operators on ports’ climate adaptation planning. Towards the end, we propose a new approach so as to enable port stakeholders to carry out climate adaptation planning effectively. The paper offers important insight to researchers to investigate the ways in developing effective climate adaptation plans and practice for ports and other business sectors. (shrink)

Det er eit uttalt mål å gjøre grunnskulelærarutdanninga forskingsbasert. I det dominerande tankemønsteret i grunnskulelærarutdanninga er det konstruert ei motsetning mellom vitskapleg kunnskap og erfaringskunnskap. Vitskapleg kunnskap vert skildra som noko positivt, medan erfaringskunnskap får ei negativ omtale. Dette filosofiske essayet vil framskrive ei re-oppfatning av denne dikotomien. Målet med arbeidet er å redusere dikotomien mellom desse to kunnskapsformene og vise ei forståing som er meir jambyrdig, og som samlande kan bli kalla for lærarens levande kunnskap. Teorien om levande kunnskap (...) tar utgangpunkt i mennesket si heilskapande erkjenningsevne. Mennesket sin kognitive kapasitet inneheld både rasjonelle, etiske, emosjonelle og motoriske erkjenningar. Eit avgjørande aspekt med den levande kunnskapen er lærarens etiske- emosjonelle kunnskap og sensibilitet i tillegg til den logisk rasjonelle evna. (shrink)

This study examines the roles of environmental strategy and accounting in corporate carbon performance, as measured by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. A novel interaction model is developed based on legitimacy theory and natural-resource dependence theory to capture the interaction between environmental strategy and accounting. An international sample of 3322 firms from 73 countries is used in the analysis, based on a panel data design for 17 years (2005–2022). The empirical findings reveal an overall reactive role of these environmental initiatives (...) in relation to carbon performance. The marginal effect analysis shows that environmental accounting favourably moderates the effect of environmental strategic functions on carbon performance, indicating that the former facilitates the translation of the latter into practice. Similarly, environmental strategic initiatives improve the impact of environmental accounting information on carbon performance. The main contribution of this study stems from methodologically demonstrating how the synergy between environmental strategic initiatives and environmental information mechanisms can translate into improved carbon performance. This finding has multiple societal, practical and research implications. The interaction effect evidence can be viewed as consistent with recent trends of integrated approaches to thinking and reporting, where interrelated phenomena are integrated into operational and reporting contexts to improve efficiency. This can be of interest to policymakers, investors, corporate managers and providers of assurance services related to carbon performance. (shrink)

Kur’ân-ı Kerîm lafızlarının eda keyfiyetlerini ihtiva eden kıraatler İslâmî ilimlerin birçoğunun önemli mevzuları arasında yer almaktadır. Özellikle tefsir ilminin temel konularından olan kıraatler söz konusu ilmin sembol şahsiyetlerinden olan Zemahşerî’nin (öl. 538/1144) tefsirinde de kayda değer bir yer işgal etmektedir. el-Keşşâf tefsirinde kıraat ihtilaflarına sıkça müracaat eden Zemahşerî’nin kıraatler konusundaki yaklaşımı kendisinden sonraki müfessirleri de etkilemesi yönüyle önem arz etmektedir. O, ele aldığı kıraatlerin bazen hüccet bazen de nispet yönüne temas etmektedir. Kıraatlere daha çok lügavî açıdan yaklaşan Zemahşerî, ilgili kıraatlerin (...) özellikle dilde hüccetliği üzerinde durmaktadır. Bununla birlikte çoğu zaman bahse konu ettiği telaffuzla okuyan isimleri zikretmeyi de ihmal etmemektedir. Onun zikrettikleri arasında sahih kıraat sahibi imamlar (kıraat-i aşere imamları), şâz kıraat imamları ve seleften kıraati ile meşhur şahıslar yer almaktadır. Müfessirin bu tavrı onun meseleye vukûfiyetini de ortaya koymaktadır. el-Keşşâf’ta sahih kıraatlerin yanında birçok şâz kıraate de yer verilmektedir. Müfessir zaman zaman -sahih olsun şâz olsun- bazı telaffuzların naklî temeline de inmekte, ilgili telaffuzu tâbiîne, sahabeye hatta Hz. Peygamber’e nispet etmektedir. Ancak bu nispet esnasında bir sorun göze çarpmaktadır. O da söz konusu telaffuz şekillerinin sıhhati meselesidir. Zira bir kıraatin sahih olabilmesi için onun kıraatçiler nezdinde makbul bir senetle gelmesi, Arapça’ya ve Hz. Osman tarafından yazdırılan mushaflardan birinin imlasına uygun olması gerekmektedir. Müfessir birçok yerde sadece “Hz. Peygamber’in kıraati bu şekildedir.” gibi kesin ve net ifadeler kullanmakta, ele aldığı telaffuz şekli hakkında bir değerlendirme ya da bir kaynağa atıfta bulunma ihtiyacı hissetmemektedir. Mevzubahis tefsirde Hz. Peygamber’in okuduğu söylenen şâz kıraatler Yazma Eserler Kurumu (YEK) tarafından neşredilen Keşşâf Tefsiri mütercimlerinin de dikkatini çekmiş, konuyu değerlendirdikleri “el-Keşşâf’ta Kıraatler” başlığı altında şu cümleye yer vermişlerdir: “Bunların en ilginci herhalde Hz. Peygamber’e nispet edilen -fakat mütevâtir kıraatlerde yer almayan- kıraatlerdir.” Bu tespit, el-Keşşâf’ta yer alan bu kıraatlerin derinlemesine incelenmesini gerekli kılmaktadır. Ancak önemine rağmen ilgili konuda yapılmış bir çalışmaya rastlanılmamıştır. Bu çalışmada el-Keşşâf tefsirinde Hz. Peygamber’e nispet edilen kıraatlerin tespit, teyit ve tenkidi hedeflenmektedir. Öncelikle eserde bahsedilen bu kıraatlerin sayısı, kaynak ve isnatları tespit edilmiş, daha sonra bunların kıraat imamları arasında ne şekilde karşılık bulduğu ortaya konulmuştur. Tespitlerimize göre Zemahşerî bir kıraatin Hz. Peygamber’e nispetine özel bir önem vermemekte, rivayet ve kıraatin sıhhat ve şöhretine bakmamaktadır. Onun bu yaklaşımı hadisçiler nezdinde de kıraatçiler nezdinde de kabul görmemiştir. (shrink)

We study a dynamic auction mechanism in the context of private provision of a discrete public good under incomplete information. The bidders have private valuations, and the cost of the public good is common knowledge. No bidder is willing to provide the good on her own. We show that a natural application of open ascending auctions in such environments fails dramatically: The probability of provision is zero in any equilibrium. The mechanism effectively auctions off the ‘right’ to be the last (...) one to contribute, but intuition suggests that neither player wishes to be the last one to contribute. Since the player who contributes first has the advantage of being able to free ride on the contributions of the other players, no player wants to ‘win’ the auction. (shrink)

Este artículo reseña: Andrés GARCÍA INDA, La dulce militancia. Crítica de la razón indignada,prólogo de Chaime Marcuello Servós, ediciones Mensajero, Bilbao, 2020, 167 pp.

The article examines the new discourse on medical professionalism and responsibility through the prism of conflicts among moral values, especially with regard to truth-telling. The discussion is anchored in the renaissance of English-language writing on medical ethics in the 18th century, which paralleled the rise of humanitarianism and the advent of the word “responsibility”. Following an analysis of the meanings of the value of responsibility in general and in medical practice in particular, it is argued that, similarly to the Aristotelian (...) notion of equity, responsibility of care is a second-order value, which corrects virtues, laws and norms in exceptional circumstances. Virtues and practices of the second order, such as responsibility and deliberation, bear especially on professional doctoring, which includes a commitment to give priority to the good of the patient over one’s own good. It is argued that, in situations of conflict, and particularly conflicts between personal moral identity and the good of patients, the fundamental professional commitment is to critical and rational deliberation and to the cultivation of psycho-moral flexibility. This leads indirectly to moral growth and strengthening of professional character. (shrink)

The objective in this article is to apply a Daoist model of an ethic derived from the Laozi on writings of the Huang Lao tradition to offer a unique Daoist cosmically derived ethic in its own terms. Having our point of departure in the Laozi we refer to its paradoxical language as a living riddle that is inherent to the tradition, and as such it suggests a “model of modeling.” We find this model in Laozi 25, according to which self-so (...) (ziran自然) serves as foundation for an ethic that is neither dichotomizing nor rests on human moral conventions, rather as a guiding philosophy of living. On this basis we explore the question of an ethic in the Huang Lao tradition. (shrink)