Cet article a déjà paru dans la Revue d'histoire des chemins de fer, n° 42-43, 2012, que nous remercions, ainsi qu'Hortense Soichet, de nous avoir gracieusement autorisé à le reproduire ici. Les évolutions techniques relatives aux modes de transport ont donné naissance à de nouvelles appréhensions possibles de la perception, conditionnées par le mouvement de la machine. Au sein d'un train, la vision est dépendante de la vitesse de déplacement et modifie le mode de perception des images grâce à (...) la (...) - Arts plastiques et autres – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow accurate are insights compared to analytical solutions? In four experiments, we investigated how participants' solving strategies influenced their solution accuracies across different types of problems, including one that was linguistic, one that was visual and two that were mixed visual-linguistic. In each experiment, participants' self-judged insight solutions were, on average, more accurate than their analytic ones. We hypothesised that insight solutions have superior accuracy because they emerge into consciousness in an all-or-nothing fashion when the unconscious solving process is complete, (...) whereas analytic solutions can be guesses based on conscious, prematurely terminated, processing. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that participants' analytic solutions included relatively more incorrect responses than timeouts compared to their insight responses. (shrink)

In this article I consider the presence of negative space in the form of imaginative listening spaces in Chantal Akerman's documentary South. This article examines the workings of memory and imagination from an auditory perspective, aided by two conceptions of the imagination, set out by Hannah Arendt and Toni Morrison, which I equate to a process of listening. Focusing my attention on the ‘inverted face’ or ‘back’ of the face-to-face encounter, my study brings together Don Ihde's work on relative silence (...) and the auditory imagination, Max Silverman's concept of ‘palimpsestic memory’ and Sara Ahmed's theorizing of a ‘politics of sides’. It suggests that a polyphonic mode of listening is required if the spectator is to see with doubled vision, beyond a racialized dichotomy, thereby gaining access to the ‘non-forms’ of hidden voices, stories and histories. (shrink)

According to some, there is a problem concerning the emotions we feel toward fictional entities such as Anna Karenina, Werther and the like. We feel pity, fear, and sadness toward them, but how is that possible? “We are saddened, but how can we be? What are we sad about? How can we feel genuinely and involuntarily sad, and weep, as we do know that no one has suffered or died?” (Radford, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1975). This is the (...) paradox of fiction which is based on the assumption that emotions, to be genuine and rational, should be directed toward existent beings. But if beliefs about existence are necessary for us to be rationally moved by something, and such beliefs are lacking when we are moved by fiction (because we do not believe fictional characters and events to be real), then our capacity for an emotional response to fiction is irrational. Consequently, our emotional attitude toward future generations should be considered as irrational as well. But is this really the case? Are there good arguments to consider future and fictional entities as similar from this point of view? Or would it be better to distinguish the two? Is there such a thing as a paradox of the future? If so, how does it relate to the more famous paradox of fiction? (shrink)

Carola Barbero | : Je m’intéresse dans cet article aux émotions que nous ressentons lorsque nous lisons une oeuvre de fiction. Certains philosophes pensent que notre implication émotionnelle dans la fiction constitue un paradoxe, et implique soit une forme d’irrationalité, soit la participation à un jeu de « faire semblant ». Ici, je soutiendrai qu’une Théorie de l’Objet à la Meinong, en défendant une approche réaliste des émotions liées la fiction, permet de résoudre adéquatement ce paradoxe de la fiction. (...) | : This essay concerns the emotions that we feel when reading a work of fiction. Some philosophers think that our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. The aim of this work is to show how the paradox of fiction can be dissolved by making use of an Object Theory in a Meinongian style. (shrink)

In response to the IABS conference theme to “advise practitioners,” this paper is framed in terms of two questions that have been found to be critical to practitioners. These are “what is Corporate Responsibility and how to do it” and “what is the value of Corporate Responsibility.” The paper uses theories from within the academic literature to develop a model to answer these two practitioner-based questions. An empirical framework based upon the model is developed and tested with a study of (...) customers of a financial service organisation in the UK. (shrink)

Motivated by the ongoing controversy surrounding corporate tax, this article presents a study that explores stakeholder expectations of corporate tax in the context of UK business. We conduct a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of community groups, as well as interviews with those representing business groups. We then identify eight themes that together describe “what” companies need to do, “how” they need to do it, and “why” they need to do it, if they wish to appeal to a (...) wide group of interested parties. We discuss our findings based on the corporate social responsibility literature and propose novel ways for community groups and business groups to connect on the topic of corporate tax, suggesting opportunities and themes for dialogue and potential steps to co-create solutions in a stakeholder society. (shrink)

This article is based on narrative, autobiographic interviews with domestic workers in Peru focusing on their migration and work experiences. The interviewees evoke a border discourse that divides and hierarchizes Peruvian society and stigmatizes migrants, especially migrant domestic workers. As domestic service leads to intense social interactions at this ‘border’, the interviewees are constantly forced to ‘translate’ when constructing their identity. The discourse-analytical bottom—up perspective focusing on membership categorization devices evaluates the performativity of the discourses of those considered as ‘oppressed’; (...) it analyses processes of subjection and subjectification: whereas some of the interviewees internalize the discursively attributed inferior ‘Me’, others use the constructed borders as an opportunity to develop hybrid discourse strategies that cross and even deconstruct social categorizations. By focusing on the agency of ‘border-crossers’, the article aims at scientifically ‘rethinking the social with cultural difference as a constitutive feature’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Tale of Three Zoras:Barbara Johnson and Black Women WritersHortense J. Spillers (bio)Talking about Zora Neale Hurston is like approaching the Sphinx—so much riddle, so many faces, and all of it occurring on fairly high holy ground since Alice Walker's remarkable discovery a couple of decades ago.1 But Barbara Johnson's criticism cracks the code on Her Majesty and brings the sign vehicle—"Zora Neale Hurston"—to the table of juxtapositions and (...) comparisons. There is the iconic Hurston, whose positioning between the Harlem Renaissance2 and the post-World War II writers gives her a priority of status that marks the woman artist's entry into literary modernism. The latter, in its variety of contexts and alignments, opened the way to certain experimental forms for these writers and might not have been completed as a systematic gesture before the late sixties and early seventies, when this generation of practitioners was free to create antiheroic figures and to probe the limits of representability. In short, with Zora Neale Hurston a window is pried open, a breeze blows through, and by the time of Toni Morrison's Beloved, an opening has become a prospect, a landscape of vistas of possibility. We can think of Hurston, then, as an enabler, who was not particularly encouraged by the literary politics of her age, from first to last; whether by the "maledom" of Harlem Renaissance avenues to reward and achievement, or by the paradigm shift of race politics in the 1950s,3 Hurston seems to have been equipped with the uncanny ability to create a kind of chaos, to behave outside the parameters of fashion, and to create dimensions of the mythical about her as she modeled versions of self.In her role as classically trained anthropologist and folklorist, Hurston is considered today one of the major theoreticians of black culture.4 Her collections of lore, a [End Page 94] motherlode of a southern-centered orality,5 of the countryside, are fruitfully poised against the displaced metaphysical traditions of discourse that we especially associate with figures like Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois.6 As it now appears, the oppositional currents that run between the Hurstonian and the DuBoisian figurations have yet to be reconciled: the latter is text-based, and the former exceeds the abiding centrality of the word. Barbara Johnson argues in A World of Difference that Hurston "tried to explain the difference between a reified 'art' and a living culture in which distinctions between spectator and spectacle, rehearsal and performance, experience and representation are not fixed" [159]. For Hurston, folklore was "'the arts of the people before they find out that there is such a thing as art.'" For Hurston, unlike DuBois, for example, black culture was not a project in the modality of Bildung, or the Hegelian notion, but, rather, a repertoire of gestures that might be said to belong to a second skin—the kinetic thing that is done or said.From our current perspective, what Hurston called "folklore" and what offered the occasion for the ethnographic foray might be given other names, though renaming these acts and gestures of the everyday does not make it any easier to reconcile the conceptual split in black culture theory between textuality and orality, or between "urban" and "countryside." But all of these locutions have been essentially eviscerated by radical changes in the availability and transmission of consumer goods that have rendered US local and indigenous cultures virtually indistinguishable from Jackson, Mississippi to Boston, Massachusetts. Take any interstate network across the land, east to west, or north to south: between McDonald's and the food/gas mart, scattered along ten- to twenty-mile sequences of roadway, one is quite astonished at the sameness and homogeneity of motifs that have translated particularity into an item of commerce and exchange. At one time, the critics were calling this outcome the postmodern flow, but my own hunch is that this apparent repetition and replication of the same are riddled with a variety of timbres and accents, still, that the Hurston ear was so sharp to articulate and define six decades ago. And in that intricate choreography between the life... (shrink)

This essay is a critical discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe as well as a first sketch of a History on Equal Terms. After giving a short summary of Provincializing Europe, I first argue, against Chakrabarty, that there is no necessary connection between the discipline of history and the metanarratives of modernity. To the contrary: the founding idea of the discipline of history was a turn against such grand narratives. With his attempt to deconstruct the narratives of the European (...) Enlightenment and of modernity, Chakrabarty therefore has to be regarded as a thinker of radical historicism rather than as a critic of the discipline of history. Second, I criticize the use of the term “modernity” in Provincializing Europe and the concept of modernity in general. Instead of a deconstruction of the discipline of history, I propose a deconstruction of the concept of modernity. This could open up the way for a History on Equal Terms situated within the discipline of history, that is, a historiography that would—just as Chakrabarty rightly demands—in principle pay the same attention to and expect relevant results from any region in the world, depending only on the focus of research. (shrink)

1. False information takes many shapes. While misinformation has long been a feature of conveying the human experience to others, the rise of the internet and social media has created conditions in...

In the triumvirate of personalities and motives—from Wright and Baldwin to Coates—we encounter the essential elements of the “crisis” that configures black passage in the New World. These lines of kinship, both consanguineous and ineffable, travelling from father to son, from uncle to nephew, from one generation to the next, lend us a figurative rhythm that grasps the notion of the processional —the traversal of time and space that remains fundamentally mysterious, just as we can put our finger directly on (...) the problem—black life is still as endangered and precarious as it ever was. If one regards such passage as a “crisis,” then it is precisely because it is riddled with turning points, sudden ruts and rifts in the road when the way seemed smooth and clear—those moments when decisions must be made—and from that perspective, African-American cultural apprenticeship offers, by definition, crisis not as a state of exception, but rather, as a steady state, given historical pressures that bear in on it and that become, as a result, intramural pressures. What I wish to do in these remarks is to clarify one of the questions engendered by this predicament, and that is to say, the riddle of identity and how it matters, but even more than an inquiry into the identitarian, I am searching for a protocol through intramural space. (shrink)

Nonostante Don Chisciotte e Madame Bovary si siano rovinati (letteralmente) la vita a forza di leggere romanzi, è opinione condivisa che le opere letterarie possano essere molto importanti, se non addirittura fondamentali, quale fonte di conoscenza. Non è quindi per caso che si comincino a leggere le storie ai bambini piccoli, che se ne richieda la lettura ai ragazzi a scuola e si cerchi di sensibilizzare il più possibile al mondo dei libri, perché, come diceva Umberto Eco, «[…] la nostra (...) ric... (shrink)

“Naturalismo” è una parola che si dice in molti modi, almeno tanti quanti nella storia della filosofia e nel sentire comune sono i modi in cui si è parlato di “natura” e di espressioni simili. Oggi, il tema del naturalismo in filosofia e della cosiddetta naturalizzazione che una filosofia dovrebbe eventualmente attrezzare determinate nozioni e teorie è tornato prepotentemente alla ribalta della riflessione filosofica, sulla scia dei successi provenienti dalle scienze cognitive (linguistica, n...

Reading starts with the act of perception and rapidly moves into an area concerning the recognition of written words. Word recognition consists of two aspects (functioning simultaneously and working in parallel): the phonological—converting groups of letters into sounds—and the lexical— giving access to a mental dictionary of the meaning of words. But what does the act of reading consist of? According to Peter Kivy, there is a parallel between reading texts and reading scores. And what about the reasons for reading? (...) When we read, we are not just interested in understanding what the signs stand for, but we also activate memory, perception, problem-solving, and reasoning, and our attention is also devoted to identifying those characteristics of texts which help categorize them as works of a specific genre. Readers play a central role: without them and their activity, there would be nothing but a page of black spots. As they read and understand, readers propositionally imagine what is written and, at a further level, they may also imagine objectually and simulatively. These objects come into being thanks to the words that we imagine are similar to what Roman Ingarden sees as a skeleton, needing the experience of reading to be appropriately concretized. (shrink)

Dopo Per un’estetica del cibo (2006) e L’altro gusto (2008), Nicola Perullo torna sul tema, tanto interessante quanto spesso trascurato, della filosofia della gastronomia, prendendo questa volta in esame l’esperienza del gusto. Superato brillantemente il pregiudizio secondo il quale sarebbe meglio non occuparsi degli oggetti gastronomici in quanto “meramente empirici”, Nicola Perullo entra nel vivo dell’indagine domandandosi che cosa propriamente sia implicato dall’atto di gustare, che cosa s...

This essay deals with some philosophical problems concerning the understanding of ethical conceptions in an alien culture. Its aim is to show that in investigating such conceptions we cannot proceed on purely empirical grounds; our own ethical concepts will, in a conceptual sense, determine what it is conceivable that we find.

A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers: ** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith ** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White ** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec ** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot ** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach ** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel ** Mass Reference and the Geometry of Solids, Almerindo E. (...) Ojeda ** Defining a 'Doughnut' Made Difficult, N .M. Gotts ** A Theory of Spatial Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries, A.G. Cohn and N.M. Gotts ** Mereotopological Construction of Time from Events, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi ** Computational Mereology: A Study of Part-of Relations for Multi-media Indexing, Wlodek Zadrozny and Michelle Kim. (shrink)

Theorists and practitioners in the fields of both Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Reputation have recently stressed the importance of taking a stakeholderperspective when researching the nature, development and impact of these concepts. While models of Corporate Reputation, such as the Reputation Quotient and SPIRIT were developed by actively engaging stakeholders in research, models of Corporate Responsibility have been developed in a more theoretical manner. There have thus been calls for the research approaches taken in reputation research to be applied to (...) the field of responsibility. This paper answers these calls and thereby provides two related outcomes: First, a conceptualisation of Corporate Responsibility is developed that draws directly upon stakeholder perceptions (in this case customers and employees of a financial institution). Secondly, a comparison between this conceptualisation and two existing models of Corporate Reputation is conducted. A formal comparison between the model of Corporate Responsibility developed in this paper and the RQ and SPIRIT models of Corporate Reputation suggests that there are considerable similarities between stakeholder conceptualisations of responsibility and models of reputation.Stakeholders may therefore not view responsibility separate from reputation, but rather as a largely overlapping concept. Questions about the causal relationship between the two concepts are also discussed. (shrink)

Drawing on corpora from West Africa and Iceland, the article presents a fieldwork-based comparative exploration of ‘things that place names do’. Treating toponyms as performative elements of culture, we have observed striking parallels as well as differences in the uses of place names in both regions. Place names communicate spatial orientation; play an important role in the commemoration of people and events; mark claims of possession; support the construction of identity; sacralize landscapes; and voice moral reprimands. They can provide entertainment, (...) by, for instance, inscribing ridicule into the land. They subvert as well as affirm hierarchies and power structures, and even play a role in interethnic conflict. Equally, they can become nuclei of storytelling, providing starting points for the invention of narratives. Showing the range of functions that place names can assume in two very different geographical contexts, the article presents a heuristic illustration of the potential of fieldwork-based approaches for toponomastic research. (shrink)

Simulationen mit Simulationspersonen gehören in der medizinischen Lehre zum Ausbildungs-Standard. In der medizinethischen Lehre ist dies bisher nicht in gleichem Umfang der Fall. Für ihren Einsatz, insbesondere in der klinischen Ethik, können gute Gründe angeführt werden, wie beispielsweise die Möglichkeit konkreter Erfahrungen als Lehrelement und die situationsspezifische Verbindung von Wissen, Können und Haltungen in einem Lernprozess. Die Konzeption von Simulationen mit Simulationspersonen in der medizinethischen Lehre ist jedoch voraussetzungsreich. Es müssen die mehrdimensionalen Lernziele und die Anforderungen an die medizinethische Lehre (...) berücksichtigt werden. Der Beitrag möchte anhand eines konkreten Beispiels einen Überblick über die Entwicklung und Konzeption von Drehbüchern bzw. Rollen-Skripten für Simulationen mit Simulationspersonen für die Lehre in der klinischen Ethik als wichtigem Teilbereich der Medizinethik geben. Dabei wird auf die besonderen Voraussetzungen und Spezifika dieser Simulationen eingegangen. Abschließend wird kritisch diskutiert, welchen Stellenwert das Training von kommunikativen Fertigkeiten in der medizinethischen Theorie und klinisch-ethischen Praxis haben kann und soll. Der Beitrag schließt mit der Überlegung, ob nicht auch in der Fortbildung von klinischen Ethiker*innen Simulationspersonen zum Einsatz kommen sollten. (shrink)