Le conflit d’interprétation, associé aux aspects de la santé, de la contamination radioactive et des indemnisations, est toujours d’actualité dans le monde. Dans cette analyse, l’auteure avance que les expériences subjectives apportées par les récits construits par les survivants du désastre de Goiânia, au Brésil, défient les identités et les frontières définies par la biomédecine pour encadrer cette catastrophe.

This essay is a historical–geographical account of how scientists and public health officials conceptualized and assessed northern radioactive exposures in the late 1950s and 1960s. The detection of radionuclides in caribou bodies in northern Canada both demonstrated the global reach of nuclear fallout and revealed the unevenness of toxic relations and radioactive exposures. Following the documentation of the lichen–caribou–human pathway of exposure, Canadian public health officials became increasingly concerned about the possibility of heightened radioactive exposures among Indigenous (...) northerners. Between 1963 and 1969, scientists and officials with Canada’s Radiation Protection Division coordinated an interdepartmental monitoring program through which they sought to determine whether the consumption of contaminated caribou meat had caused radioactive exposure levels in northern communities to exceed the officially recognized “safe limits.” In 1969, the northern monitoring program was suspended after officials determined that radionuclide body burdens had not exceeded the threshold for radioactive exposures. While the RPD emphasized its development of a technoscientific approach to measuring radioactive body burdens, the legitimacy of the monitoring program was linked directly to interdepartmental relations within Canada’s colonial northern administration. I situate the northern monitoring program within broader shifts in public health approaches to radiation protection and use Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of nuclearity to demonstrate how RPD officials employed the logic of the threshold in their assessment of radioactive exposures. (shrink)

Postulated before 1920 to account for observations such as the fluctuating measured half-life of polonium and the unusual migration of polonium causing radioactive contamination throughout laboratories, by 1930 the phenomenon of aggregate recoil had become part of international textbook science. The formation of radioactive aggregates has been confirmed, but their migration is probably due either to volatility and diffusion or to electrostatic polarity and attraction. Knock-on recoil and sputtering may contribute to the release of such aggregates from (...) solid surfaces, whereas carry-along recoil—the type of recoil event associated with the accepted theory of aggregate recoil—is shown here to run counter to known scientific principles. (shrink)

Radioactivity accompanied by ionizing radiation has always existed on the Earth, as well as in space, and so in every living tissue there are traces of radioactivity. With the discovery of the said radiation and identifying its effects on the human body, the fear of this phenomenon appeared. At high doses radiation causes serious tissue damages, while at small doses it can cause cancer and induce genetic defects. The best antidote for fear is knowledge. It is important to know the (...) margins safety of radiation for human life. As a result, the topic of radioactive contamination of the environment has now become one of the most significant. In recent years the radon problem is a subject of a wide debate of geologists, geophysicists, ecologists, physicians, specialists in radiometry, and, of course, philosophers and sociologists, since the need for assessing the potential radon danger concerns human lives, human functions in society, and human future. (shrink)

The relevance of the study lies in the need to assess the influence and significance of socio-political movements in stimulating political and social changes, in this case, the anti-nuclear movement in Kazakhstan. This will allow for a deeper understanding of the complexity and multidimensional nature of organised collective actions and may inform future research and policy development related to nuclear testing, environmental issues, and public health. The article aims to define the philosophy of the international anti-nuclear movement, “Nevada-Semey” (“Struggle for (...) peace, on their own land”). The authors point to the causal link that the researched international anti-nuclear campaign is a social phenomenon that emerged as a consequence of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site activity. Therefore, the academic writings, and normative documents concerning the work of this nuclear testing ground and its consequences for the environment and human health are analysed first of all. Journalistic studies, scientific articles, and monographs on the international anti-nuclear movement “Nevada-Semey” are studied and analysed. The authors of the article found and investigated that the studied campaign had its philosophy, along with the main goal it was concerned with humanitarian aid and legal provision for residents of settlements affected by the polygon. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the Fukushima power plant disaster, autoradiography became an increasingly widespread artistic technique for producing cameraless photography. By exposing photographic film directly using contaminated objects and materials, contemporary artists autoradiograph the geopolitics and local histories of atomic contamination due to bombing, testing, nuclear reactor explosions, mining or uranium disposal cells. In my article, I discuss the implications these autoradiographic works have for the concept of photography by drawing on Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects. Being hyperobjective, radioactivity (...) confronts human beings with a vast non-human temporality, which, in turn, necessitates a shift in our understanding of photography. While photo theory has often been modelled on snapshot photography, privileging instantaneity and pastness, autoradiography is a durational and pluri-temporal procedure that points emphatically towards the future and invites us to reconceptualize the basis of photographic ontology. (shrink)

Food irradiation is a physical method of processing food (e.g. freezing, canning). It has been thoroughly researched over the last four decades and is recognized as a safe and wholesome method. It has the potential both of disinfesting dried food to reduce storage losses and disinfesting fruits and vegetables to meet quarantine requirements for export trade. Low doses of irradiation inhibit spoilage losses due to sprouting of root and tuber crops. Food- borne diseases due to contamination by pathogenic microorganisms (...) and parasites of meat, poultry, fish, fishery products and spices are on the increase. Irradiation of these solid foods can decontaminate them of pathogenic organisms and thus provide safe food to the consumer. Irradiation can successfully replace the fumigation treatment of cocoa beans and coffee beans and disinfest dried fish, dates, dried fruits, etc. One of the most important advantages of food irradiation processing is that it is a coldprocess which does not significantly alter physico-chemical characters of the treated product. It can be applied to food after its final packaging. Similar to other physical processes of food processing, (e.g. canning, freezing), irradiation is a capital intensive process. Thus, adequate product volume must be made available in order to maximize the use of the facility and minimize the unit cost of treatment. Lack of harmonization of regulations among the countries which have approved irradiated foods hampers the introduction of this technique for international trade. Action at the international level has to be taken in order to remedy this situation. One of the important limitations of food irradiation processing is its slow acceptance by consumers, due inter alia to a perceived association with radioactivity. The food industry tends to be reluctant to use the technology in view of uncertainties regarding consumer acceptance of treated foods. Several market testing and consumer acceptance studies have been carried out on food irradiation in recent years. These studies showed that, if the safety and the benefits of food irradiation were properly explained, the consumers were willing to accept irradiated foods. Considering its potential role in the reduction of post-harvest losses, providing safe supply of food and overcoming quarantine barriers, food irradiation has received wider government approvals during the last decade. There is also a trend towards increased commercialization of irradiated food. Currently, there are 47 irradiation facilities in some 23 countries being used for treating foods for commercial purposes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nuclear Power after Fukushima 2011:Buddhist and Promethean PerspectivesGraham ParkesDuring 2010 many environmentalists previously opposed to nuclear power were deciding, in the face of anthropogenic climate change from burning fossil fuels, that the only way to prevent runaway global warming would be to build more nuclear power plants after all.1 There are risks involved—though fewer than with carbon-based sources of energy.2 When one compares the detrimental effects of nuclear power (...) with those of burning fossil fuel, it is clear that the human injury and death toll (not to mention environmental devastation) resulting from the former have been nothing compared to the damage caused by the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, owing to mining accidents, oil spills, and so forth—not to mention the massive carbon dioxide emissions.On the other hand, the problem of how and where to store the growing amount of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, which remains deadly for many thousands of years, has yet to be solved. Costly security measures have to be taken to guard against terrorist attacks and theft of materials usable for nuclear devices. When full safety features are included, nuclear power plants become ever more expensive to build, and the costs of insuring them against accidents are so prohibitive that governments have to subsidize them, which they are increasingly unwilling to do.Not long after the explosions and meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in March 2011, two dismal world records were announced: in 2010 we discharged a record amount of carbon dioxide (more than 30 gigatons) into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels, and, as a direct consequence, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (as measured at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Hawai'i) reached a record level of 395 parts per million. These figures suggest that we are continuing to generate a rise in global average temperatures that is already destroying the livelihoods of millions and will soon jeopardize the lives of hundreds of millions more.As a consequence of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Japan—long a leading promoter of nuclear power—has begun to enforce some widely neglected safety regulations and is seriously reconsidering its reliance on nuclear energy. China has put construction of [End Page 89] new power plants on hold. Other nations (such as Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Thailand, and Malaysia) have decided to phase out or cancel plans to build more nuclear power stations. Yet the primary motivations remain unclear, since people's attitudes toward the dangers of nuclear radiation are anything but rational—as evidenced by the mass departure of foreigners from Japan after the catastrophe at Fukushima, when health dangers beyond the vicinity of the power station were minimal.In Europe, the reaction to the Fukushima disaster has clearly been aggravated by memories of the catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986. While Chernobyl was a more widely destructive event than Fukushima, releasing a much greater amount of radioactivity, its effects on human health continue to generate disagreement. According to the third report on the effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe issued by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), among the 134 plant staff and emergency workers who suffered acute radiation syndrome (ARS), the condition proved fatal for twenty-eight of them. By 2006 another nineteen ARS survivors died, although their deaths were not directly attributable to the effects of ionizing radiation. Although the report attributes "a substantial fraction" of the six thousand cases of thyroid cancer in people who were children at the time of the accident to their consumption of milk contaminated with iodine-131, only fifteen cases had proved fatal by 2005, some twenty years later.3 The death toll, then, was fewer than fifty.By contrast, a study by a group of scientists from Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, estimates the number of deaths attributable to the meltdown at around 980,000—almost twenty thousand times greater than the estimate by the UN scientific committee.4 What are we to make of this vast discrepancy, especially since the UNSCEAR report "was prepared in close cooperation with... (shrink)

This essay traces the complex constellation of ideas that informs Anders's turn to the generalizing expression ‘the human’ in his postwar work. It mobilizes the properties of radioactive material and digital data, which are both curiously imperceptible to our senses, to discuss Anders’s insistence on the universalizing pronoun `we' and assess its significance in the contemporary world. To do so, it aligns Anders's work with current debates about the Anthropocene and critiques of the use of the term ‘the human’ (...) in postcolonial settings. (shrink)

The proper relationship between phenomenology and naturalism has reemerged as a pressing issue following interdisciplinary developments in the cognitive sciences. Most solutions opt for a naturalized phenomenology, rather than a phenomenological naturalism. This article takes up the latter approach, confronting the implications of Merleau-Ponty's reformulation of Husserl's paradox of subjectivity. I argue that Merleau-Ponty's formulation—which I term “the paradox of madness”—reveals a deep, ontological contingency in what Husserl took to be necessary transcendental structures of consciousness and world, revealing that these (...) transcendental structures are in fact embedded in and contaminated by the very world they constitute and disclose. (shrink)

Nucleic acid hybridization is being increasingly used in viral diagnosis. Most of the assays described so far for this purpose require the use of radioactive probes. Their replacement by Non‐radioactive assays has many advantages and makes the technique feasible in routine diagnostic work. Non‐radioactive assays have had limited use but their diagnostic value has been demonstrated for a number of virus infections. They have the main advantages of employing stable probes, of avoiding safety hazards and of being (...) easy and rapid to perform with limited laboratory facilities. Their main disadvantage compared to radioactive assays is in having relatively low sensitivity. Improvements in probe construction, in labelling and detecting methods, in sample treatment and in hybridization conditions may well increase their usefulness. (shrink)

Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while CC (...) is false, there is a true restriction of it to cases involving counterfactual dependence on a coin flip. The failure of CC falsifies a model where the easy possibilities are counterfactually similar to actuality. Next, we show that extant normality models, where the easy possibilities are the sufficiently normal ones, are incompatible with the restricted CC thesis involving coin flips. Next, we develop a new kind of normality theory that can accommodate the restricted version of CC. This new theory introduces a principle of Counterfactual Contamination, which says roughly that any world is fairly abnormal if at that world very abnormal events counterfactually depend on a coin flip. Finally, we explain why coin flips and other related events have a special status. A central take home lesson is that the correct principle in the vicinity of Safety is importantly normality-theoretic rather than (as it is usually conceived) similarity-theoretic. (shrink)

: Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

One extreme example of intergenerational environmental change is given by nuclear waste. The radiation from a typical nuclear waste assembly will remain fatal for humans for millennia, creating the problem of communicating a warning about hazardous repositories to people so far in the future that we cannot assume any common ground with them in terms of languages and cultural contexts. This poses limitations to solutions proposed in the context of semiotics. The need for communicating danger and for keeping future people (...) away from certain sites may be tackled from a more sensorial and aesthetic perspective. Given the size of nuclear waste repositories, and the problem of keeping people at a distance, the dimension at which the problem must be tackled is environmental. This work argues for an exploration of what environmental aesthetics, despite and perhaps thanks to all the ongoing definitional and conceptual debates in the discipline, has to offer. (shrink)

In this article we investigate whether long-term radioactive waste management by means of geological disposal can be understood as a social experiment. Geological disposal is a rather particular technology in the way it deals with the analytical and ethical complexities implied by the idea of technological innovation as social experimentation, because it is presented as a technology that ultimately functions without human involvement. We argue that, even when the long term function of the ‘social’ is foreseen to be restricted (...) to safeguarding the functioning of the ‘technical’, geological disposal is still a social experiment. In order to better understand this argument and explore how it could be addressed, we elaborate the idea of social experimentation with the notion of co-production and the analytical tools of delegation, prescription and network as developed by actor-network theory. In doing so we emphasize that geological disposal inherently involves relations between surface and subsurface, between humans and nonhumans, between the social, material and natural realm, and that these relations require recognition and further elaboration. In other words, we argue that geological disposal concurrently is a social and a technical experiment, or better, a long-term socio-technical experiment. We end with proposing the idea of ‘actor-networking’ as a sensitizing concept for future research into what geological disposal as a socio-technical experiment could look like. (shrink)

: This article analyzes German debates on the microbiology of infectious diseases from 1865 to 1875 and asks how and when organic pollution in tissues became noteworthy for aetiology and pathogenesis. It was with Ernst Hallier's pleomorphistic microbiology that the organic character of alien material in tissues came to be regarded as important for pathology. The process that followed saw both vigorous biological critique and a number of medical applications of Hallier's work. Around 1874 contemporaries reached the conclusion that pleomorphous (...) vegetation was most likely of little importance if not accidental in relation to the aetiology of infectious diseases whereas the idea of monomorphous micro-organisms facilitated a causal explanation. It was only then that notions such a pure cultures, bacterial specificity, etc. favored by Ferdinand Julius Cohn and his school became popular in medical circles. (shrink)

The Sa gītipary ya is the earliest Sarv stiv da philosophical text that enumerates a series of contaminants (anuśaya) , i.e. innate proclivities, inherited from former births, to do something of usually evil nature. This early list comprises seven such contaminants. As it is the contaminants that lead a worldling (p thagjana) to doing volitional actions and thus to forming a karmic result (karmavip ka) , these contaminants naturally also bear on the path to salvation. The gradual development of the (...) peculiar Sarv stiv din path to salvation necessitated a gradual refinement and reinterpretation of the original list of seven contaminants. Apart from a mere technical aspect, this reinterpretation also reflects the viewpoint of the Sautr ntika school of Buddhist philosophy on the nature of contaminants, i.e. their acceptance of a latent and an active state of the defilements, vis- -vis the Vaibh ika viewpoint according to whom no such difference exists. Within Sarv stiv da literature, the H daya treatises illustrate this philosophical development. (shrink)

The Sa gītipary ya is the earliest Sarv stiv da philosophical text that enumerates a series of contaminants (anuśaya) , i.e. innate proclivities, inherited from former births, to do something of usually evil nature. This early list comprises seven such contaminants. As it is the contaminants that lead a worldling (p thagjana) to doing volitional actions and thus to forming a karmic result (karmavip ka) , these contaminants naturally also bear on the path to salvation. The gradual development of the (...) peculiar Sarv stiv din path to salvation necessitated a gradual refinement and reinterpretation of the original list of seven contaminants. Apart from a mere technical aspect, this reinterpretation also reflects the viewpoint of the Sautr ntika school of Buddhist philosophy on the nature of contaminants, i.e. their acceptance of a latent and an active state of the defilements, vis- -vis the Vaibh ika viewpoint according to whom no such difference exists. Within Sarv stiv da literature, the H daya treatises illustrate this philosophical development. (shrink)

The treatment of Australia's Aboriginal people by the nuclear industry is a poorly researched topic. That is not merely a gap in the academic research on related topics, but it has “real world” consequences. Put simply, the paucity of information about the mistreatment of Aboriginal people makes it easier for nuclear interests to repeat past practices; and conversely, proper documentation and publication of past practices detrimental to Aboriginal people can make it more difficult for nuclear interests to repeat those practices. (...) Over the past decade Friends of the Earth Australia has sought to partially remedy the information deficit in the context of its work with Aboriginal communities involved in debates regarding uranium mining and proposed radioactive waste repositories. One thread of that work is the growing body of multimedia work by FoE member Jessie Boylan covering the legacy of the atomic bomb tests, uranium mining and waste repository proposals. Another thread of the project is detailed written documentation of past and present incidents of mistreatment of Aboriginal people by nuclear interests. This article builds on that research and focuses on attempts to impose radioactive waste repositories on the land of unwilling Aboriginal communities in South Australia. (shrink)

A research project was conducted which explored LGBT hate crime. Participants were invited to share their narratives and personal experiences of hate crime, discrimination and violence through semi-structured interviews. The study helped us understand how people who experience ‘hate’ responded to, managed and reconciled the identities for which they were victimized. This case study focuses on a situation where a research participant requested a copy of an interview they gave for the hate crime project. The interview copy was to be (...) used for the participant’s own personal purposes. The participant’s request potentially risked the contamination of ethical data collection, with their own covert data gathering. The ethical implications of this scenario raise many questions for ethicists and researchers to discuss. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical andsocial questions that underlie the present UKdiscussion whether GM crops and organicagriculture can co-exist within a given regionor are mutually exclusive. A EuropeanCommission report predicted practicaldifficulties in achieving sufficientseparation distances to guarantee lowerthreshold levels proposed for GM material inorganic produce. Evidence of gene flow betweensome crops and their wild relatives has beena key issue in the recent Government consultation toconsult on whether or not to authorizecommercial planting of GM crops, following theresults of the current UK (...) farm scale trials.The admixture of imported Bt transgenes intolandrace varieties of Mexican maize alsopresents difficulties. An ethical evaluationis made of the claim that organic growersshould expect protection from adventitioustraces of GM constructs in their products. Towhat extent – on either side of the debate –can any particular group in society set upagricultural standards for itself that mayeffectively restrain others from an otherwisejust business? The assumptions behind notionslike ``purity'' and ``contamination'' areexamined, together with their underlying viewsof nature and human intervention. The 2001UK Agriculture and Environmental BiotechnologyCommission report is relevant to theseissues. While the Government wishes to promotethe UK biotechnology industry and is underpressure from US claims of trade restraint, astrong organic lobby demands purity from GMcontamination. Does this adversarial framingof the issues reflect broader public opinionin the UK public consultation? Inarriving at policy decisions, the role of thevirtue of tolerance is considered inpost-modern and Christian ethical contexts. (shrink)

Vaccine refusers often seem motivated by disgust, and they invoke ideas of purity, contamination and sanctity. Unfortunately, the emotion of disgust and its companion ideas are not directly responsive to the probabilistic and statistical evidence of research science. It follows that increased efforts to promulgate the results of vaccine science are not likely to contribute to increased rates of vaccination among persons who refuse vaccines because of the ‘ethics of sanctity’. Furthermore, the fact that disgust-based vaccine refusal is not (...) monolithic – vaccine refusers manifest disgust at different objects and invoke different ideas about purity and contamination – further complicates public health efforts to increase vaccination rates. (shrink)

Despite the upsurge of research on disgust, the implications of this research for the investigation of cultural pollution beliefs has yet to be adequately explored. In particular, the sensitivity of both disgust and pollution to a common set of elicitors suggests a common psychological basis, though several obstacles have prevented an integrative account, including methodological differences between the relevant disciplines. Employing a conciliatory framework that embraces both naturalistic and humanistic levels of explanation, this article examines the dynamic reciprocal process by (...) which contamination/contagion appraisals in individuals serve to shape—and are in turn shaped by—culture-specific pollution beliefs. This complex interrelationship is illustrated by examining ancient Near Eastern and modern ethnographic documentation of pollution beliefs, highlighting the underappreciated function of these pollution beliefs as folk theories for the spread of infectious disease. By evaluating how pollution beliefs shape contamination appraisals in individuals, it will be argued that cultural inheritance has played a much larger role in guiding disease avoidance behavior than has been previously recognized. (shrink)

Through an immanent reversal of Husserl’s approach to the problems of genesis, writing, and time, Derrida radicalizes the phenomenology of historicity in the direction of a contamination between the empirical and the transcendental. In this paper, I argue that this also entails a transformation of the very concept of tradition: every tradition is always already tainted by the possibility of constitutional crisis and oblivion and it can only be questioned by thought after the historical fact. I conclude with an (...) account of the general meaning of Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology, and indicate its importance for his later work. (shrink)

About 22 years ago, the physics world was briefly rocked by claims of evidence for a new “5 th force”, based on reanalysis of data from an early 20 th century experiment. Baron Roland von Eötvös, a Hungarian nobleman, had performed extensive measurements of the correlation between inertial mass and gravitational mass and published them in 1922. The lead article in the January 6, 1986 issue of Physical Review Letters had the unassuming title: "A Reanalysis of the Eötvös Experiment" by (...) Ephriam Fischbach, et al. Two days later the New York Times ran an article with the headline: "Hints of Fifth Force in Universe Challenge Galileo's Findings" describing the possible implications of Fischbach's work. (shrink)

The accidents at Three Mile Island and Chemobyl have slowed the development of commercial nuclear fission in most industrialized countries, although nuclear proponents are trying to develop smaller, allegedly “fail-safe” reactors. Regardless of whether or not they succeed, we will face the problem of radioactive wastes for the next million years. After a brief, “revisionist” history of the radwaste problem, Isurvey some of the major epistemological and ethical difficulties with storing nuclear wastes and outline four ethical dilemmas common to (...) many technological and environmental controversies. I suggest two solutions to these ethical dilemmas and show why they are also economical and realistic proposals. (shrink)

We investigate whether air pollution harms business ethics from the perspective of earnings manipulation, which exerts a real effect on the economy and social welfare. Using a large sample and a comprehensive air quality index in China, we find that firms located in cities with more severe air pollution exhibit higher levels of discretionary accruals and are more likely to restate their financial statements, consistent with exposure to air pollution leading to more earnings manipulation. We further provide causal evidence using (...) propensity score matching and a discontinuity regression design exploiting the Qinling Mountain–Huai River Heating Policy Line, which exogenously leads to more air pollution to cities located immediately north of the Line but not those in the south. Our findings are robust to controlling for weather conditions and alternative samples and measures of air pollution and earnings manipulation. Overall, this study unveils how the ecological environment shapes business ethics. (shrink)

The accidents at Three Mile Island and Chemobyl have slowed the development of commercial nuclear fission in most industrialized countries, although nuclear proponents are trying to develop smaller, allegedly “fail-safe” reactors. Regardless of whether or not they succeed, we will face the problem of radioactive wastes for the next million years. After a brief, “revisionist” history of the radwaste problem, Isurvey some of the major epistemological and ethical difficulties with storing nuclear wastes and outline four ethical dilemmas common to (...) many technological and environmental controversies. I suggest two solutions to these ethical dilemmas and show why they are also economical and realistic proposals. (shrink)

The global pandemic outbreak in 2020 was a disturbing experience for most people worldwide. The primary way of protecting human life was social distancing and lockdown, often forcing people to stay at home. The confinement made the fear and uncertainty grow bigger and bigger. Fortunately, the online connection was still as possible and essential as never before. The text is inspired by a series of remote meetings under the working title Viral Culture: Bio Art and Society, initiated by academic curator (...) Claire Nettleton to put together people working in art&science area. Recordings of the Zoom gatherings complemented by notes and chat transcriptions served as intriguing storage of topics and ideas. This article focuses on the three threads: being-with (other humans, the virus and other non-human actors), caring without touch and the pandemic interpreted as a vast bio art project. All the archived materials, including the present article, will potentially function as historical documents in the future, showing how a specific group of transdisciplinary culture producers dealt with the global crisis in its first phase. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a detailed proof-theoretical analysis of a natural deduction system for classical propositional logic that (i) represents classical proofs in a more natural way than standard Gentzen-style natural deduction, (ii) admits of a simple normalization procedure such that normal proofs enjoy the Weak Subformula Property, (iii) provides the means to prove a Non-contamination Property of normal proofs that is not satisfied by normal proofs in the Gentzen tradition and is useful for applications, especially in formal (...) argumentation, (iv) naturally leads to defining a notion of depth of a proof, to the effect that, for every fixed natural k, normal k-depth deducibility is a tractable problem and converges to classical deducibility as k tends to infinity. (shrink)

The article explores the demands that the conflictual dimension of globalization poses for a cosmopolitan education. Such an emphasis seems necessary in times where the populations who undertake inter- and intra-national border crossings are increasingly those who are forced to: those trying to escape unbearable poverty, atrocious wars, the disenfranchised and victims of racist, sexist or religious persecution. Reflecting on the experiences articulated in the two graphic novels, Persepolis and American Born Chinese, the dimension of the globalizing world and its (...) impact and demands on its future world citizens which comes to the fore is one that highlights the necessity for learning how to take a critical and political stance rather than the search for how education can facilitate a smooth adaptation to a new mobile order. Stanley Cavell’s examination of the relationship between autobiography, philosophy, and the founding of a self-reliant voice will be reconsidered in light of its contribution to re-thinking the meaning of a cosmopolitan education between critical self-appropriation and developing a transformative political vision of a new societal order. (shrink)

This essay explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as experimental culture for the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. The essay further attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in science to explain (...) the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance on contingencies of time and place and highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study while at the same time shedding light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender. (shrink)