'Simulation, Simulacra and Solaris ' examines and contrasts the 1971 science-fiction film Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky with the 2002 film Solaris by Steven Soderbergh. Our text argues for the significance of simulation and simulacra in relation to the conceptual framework of Solaris, adapting as our primary model Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and simulacra.

Am Beginn des Jahres 2020 führten die Worst-Case-Szenarien von Virologen innerhalb weniger Wochen dazu, in Deutschland eine – politische – Ausnahmesituation zu erzeugen. Unterstützt wurde diese durch eine weitgehend einheitliche mediale Berichterstattung. So schienen Angst und Panik binnen kürzester Zeit zur normalen wie auch moralisch legitimen Reaktionsweise von Millionen von Menschen zu gehören. Und dies, obwohl der weitaus überwiegende Teil der Bevölkerung gar nicht zur Gruppe der an diesem Virus schwer oder schwerst Erkrankten gehört. Der nachstehende Essay schildert Eindrücke vom (...) Beginn der sog. Corona-Pandemie kurz vor und nach dem ersten „Lockdown“ in Deutschland im März 2020. Er verweist auf die ersten öffentlichen Beiträge von Wissenschaftler.innen aus nichtmedizinischer Sicht und erinnert an die Aufgabe der Bildungswissenschaften, auch und gerade in Krisenzeiten eine den Menschen in seiner Menschlichkeit stärkende Perspektive anzubieten. Worin diese konkret bestehen kann, soll im Folgenden näher beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

Die elf Beiträge dieses Bandes gehen aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln dem Problem der Verkörperung von Sinn nach: phänomenologische, psychoanalytische und sprachwissenschaftliche Ansätze bilden dabei den Schwerpunkt; sie werden aber durch Studien aus der Literaturtheorie, der politischen Theorie und der Filmwissenschaft ergänzt. Was heißt es – das ist die zentrale Frage –, den Körper als leibliches Medium aufzufassen, welches Sinn nicht nur verkörpert, sondern überhaupt erst entstehen lässt? Gibt es bereits eine Sprache des Leibes diesseits der Ebene ausdrücklicher Rede?

A palavra-chave é encontro, ou, talvez sua estranha intenção: a impossibilidade de expressar uma experiência que certos modos de classificação, ou uma tradição, impedem de ver o que é. Experiência que resiste ao acabado e inicia um processo de reconhecimento para dar lugar à expressão de seus vazios. Como criar esse percurso que se apodera de singularidades que a constituem? Deparamos-nos com a expressão de um ser em potência: toda vez que se tenta apreendê-lo, ele se deixa unir novamente por (...) aquilo que não tinha nada em comum, impelindo-me à criação. Expressa a necessidade de compreender os caminhos pelos quais alcancei a revelação dos pensamentos indizíveis que permitiram apreender como se engendram em nossa experiência. Descolando-se do plano da educação, seus procedimentos dirigem-se ao externo, em direção a outros planos, além do humano, passando por um plano de experiências interiores; recolhem vestígios atemporais da nossa experiência e os agrupa de tal maneira que se explicam por meios pouco confessáveis, complicando-se na expressão. Dado o desenvolvimento singular da revelação que surge com a necessidade da expressão, só mais tarde é que pude entender: o que parecia falta de sentido era justamente o sentido. É complexo descrever o que nos aconteceu. Mas foi justamente na frustração de tentar capturar o aprendizado que conseguimos de alguma forma compreendê-lo, embora não soubéssemos inicialmente traduzir essa compreensão em palavras: aí nasceram os pensamentos indizíveis. Tenho sempre comigo a sensação de que sua concepção está comprometida, donde surge um tal de desconforto, cada vez que tentamos enquadrá-los em uma explicação. Embora toda explicação exista neles e deles dependa de tal maneira que não pode ser concebida sem eles, contanto que venha depois. No instante em que surge a necessidade de dar a conhecer, esta se constitui em si mesma em um objetivo concreto. Deixo aqui palavras inspiradas em experiências mal sucedidas e encontros subseqüentes. (shrink)

Thesmophories à Athènes, une fête exclusivement féminine. Cette analyse permet de montrer comment les femmes interviennent, en contexte rituel, dans le domaine de la délibération politique. Il s’agit d’abord de discuter – à partir de l’analyse comparée de quelques passages des Thesmophories d’Aristophane et des Euménides d’Euripide – les hypothèses formulées par les archéologues sur la localisation de la fête des Thesmophories. Cette fête a en effet été associée à la Pnyx ou à l’Eleusinion ; nous proposons de la placer (...) dans les environs immédiats du lieu de réunion du conseil de l’Aréopage d’Athènes, à l’ouest de l’Acropole, et sur la même colline que l’Aréopage. Il s’agit ensuite de comparer les actes politiques masculins et les rituels féminins décrits à l’occasion de la fête des Thesmophories. L’enjeu est de comprendre si la « délibération » féminine de caractère politico-judiciaire qui est décrite dans la pièce d’Aristophane reflète un possible discours des femmes d’Athènes qui pouvait être perçu comme parallèle ou « similaire » à celui des hommes. En un sens et en prolongeant une étude de Christopher Faraone, il s’agit de savoir si les femmes d’Athènes rendaient effectivement une forme de justice lors de la fête des Thesmophories. Enfin il s’agit d’évoquer les discours alternatifs qui semblent avoir été produits par les femmes dans cet espace situé au cœur civique et politique de la cité. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the ambiguities and confusions that arise when studies of the ‘surveillance state’ are contrasted with studies of the ‘service state’. Surveillance studies take a largely negative view of the information capture and handling of personal data by Government agencies. Studies that examine Government service providing take a largely positive view of such data capture as Government is seen to be attempting to enhance service provision to individual citizens. This paper examines these opposing perspectives through a (...) series of case studies and concludes that a new understanding and methodology should be brought forward so as to create a reconciliation of these two points of departure for research. The call is for an holistic appreciation of data capture activities by Government so that researchers and public policy makers alike can appreciate and reconcile these competing perspectives. (shrink)

The question of whether social structures are efficacious can be tackled by examining how they are produced. There are roles and rules, and there are people. Only the latter have the necessary powers to generate social worlds as products. Changing the social world can be achieved only by changing the rules and customs active people follow. Selectionist models of change also draw our attention to rules. Finally, there are obstacles to social change in `reductions' - the minute social practices that (...) shape actual social orders. (shrink)

In this essay I enter into a recently published debate between Stephen Schiffer and Jerry Fodor concerning whether adequate sense can be made of the ceteris paribus conditions in special science laws, much of their focus being on the case of putative psychological laws. Schiffer argues that adequate sense cannot be made of ceteris paribus clauses, while Fodor attempts to overcome Schiffer's arguments, in defense of special science laws. More recently, Peter Mott has attempted to show that Fodor's response to (...) Schiffer fails, and furthermore that further study shows that the logical framework in which Schiffer and Fodor address their issue is susceptible to inconsistency.In this essay I argue that adequate sense can be made of ceteris paribus conditions. Against Mott, I argue that recent work in the model theory of non-monotonic logic indicates how his problem involving logical inconsistencies can be overcome. Against Schiffer, I argue that the claims that he makes against ceteris paribus clauses would lead to a fatal skepticism concerning indefinitely many of the claims we make about the world (and indeed that his claims would be destructive of the view of the special sciences that Schiffer himself presents in his paper), and that the semantical considerations from non-monotonic logic that I present provide a suitable framework for dealing with his complaints. Thus I come out on the whole on Fodor's side of this debate, although for my own reasons, as I argue against much of Fodor's own argumentation. (shrink)

This book explores the role of aggression in primate social systems and its implications for human behavior.

In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences (...) worrying and I come up with two candidate principles. I then argue that one principle should be rejected because it is inconsistent with permissivism. The principle we should accept implies that it is sometimes rational to maintain our beliefs, even upon learning that they were caused by irrelevant influences. (shrink)

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products (...) of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief. (shrink)

The global financial crisis that started in 2008 was followed by recessions, austerity measures, protests, and demonstrations. Relative deprivation theory offers an explanation as to why people engage in protests and violence, and the literature contains evidence that economic and environmental variables are often to blame. However, previous RDT scholars have not investigated how a country’s entrepreneurial attitudes can affect increases in civil disorder, which is the primary purpose of this study. The authors’ results provide not only conflicting evidence regarding (...) RDT explanations but also strong evidence that high levels of entrepreneurial attitudes can significantly dampen increases in society’s level of civil disorder. Levels of environmental degradation were found to have no impact on changes in civil disorder. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper describes the way in which a simple device, the pregnancy wheel, has been used by the medical profession to impose a new way of measuring and experiencing pregnancy.The change involves counting in weeks instead of counting in months and it is gradually replacing a commonsensical method that had deep physiological and cultural roots. In contrast, the medical methodology of counting forty weeks is more complicated and lacks direct connections to the events of pregnancyIn the encounter between the (...) doctor and the pregnant woman the pregnancy wheel has a variety of uses, among them determinations of the age and estimated size of the fetus.It plays an additional role, however, in the medicalization of pregnancy by providing the doctor with privileged information. It also influences modes of thinking through the way in which it deals with the question of the beginning of pregnancy, a question that has clear moral implications. (shrink)

How is medical knowledge made? There have been radical changes in recent decades, through new methods such as consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine. Miriam Solomon explores their origins, aims, and epistemic strengths and weaknesses; and she offers a pluralistic approach for the future.

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr.

A new, social epistemology of science that addresses practical as well as theoretical concerns.

John McDowell claims that the propositional attitudes, and our conceptual abilities in general, are not appropriate topics for inquiry of the sort that is done in natural science. He characterizes the natural sciences as making phenomena intelligible in terms of their place in the realm of laws of nature. He claims that this way of making phenomena intelligible contrasts crucially with essential features of our understanding of propositional attitudes and conceptual abilities. In this article I show that scientific work of (...) the sort McDowell claims cannot be done is in fact being done, and that this work presents strong evidence that there are psychological laws. The research I discuss is that by the psychologist Norman H. Anderson and his colleagues. I also argue that the considerations McDowell presents in defense of his claims do not constitute a significant challenge to the research that Anderson and his colleagues have done. It will be noted in the article that Anderson's work is relevant not just to McDowell's writings, but also to several much discussed issues in philosophy of cognitive science: the above two issues of whether there can be a science of ordinary psychological phenomena, higher cognition, comparable to that of the natural sciences and whether such a science would present laws, and also the issue of whether in such a science, and its laws, notions of folk psychology would play crucial constitutive roles. Anderson's work presents strong grounds for affirmative answers to all of these questions. (shrink)

A defense of imprecise credences (and other imprecise doxastic attitudes).

The work of Tversky, Kahneman and others suggests that people often make use of cognitive heuristics such as availability, salience and representativeness in their reasoning and decision making. Through use of a historical example--the recent plate tectonics revolution in geology--I argue that such heuristics play a crucial role in scientific decision making also. I suggest how these heuristics are to be considered, along with noncognitive factors (such as motivation and social structures) when drawing historical and epistemological conclusions. The normative perspective (...) is community-wide, contextual, and instrumental. (shrink)

This paper is about the connection between rationality and accuracy. I show that one natural picture about how rationality and accuracy are connected emerges if we assume that rational agents are rationally omniscient. I then develop an alternative picture that allows us to relax this assumption, in order to accommodate certain views about higher order evidence.

For this Clarendon Paperback, Dr Griffin has written a new Postscript to bring the original book fully up to date. She discusses further important and controversial questions of fact or interpretation in the light of the scholarship of the intervening years and provides additional argument where necessary. The connection between Seneca's prose works and his career as a first-century Roman statesman is problematic. Although he writes in the first person, he tells us little of his external life or of the (...) people and events that formed its setting. Miriam Griffin addresses the problem by first reconstructing Seneca's career using only outside sources and his de Clementia and Apocolocyntosis, whose political purposes are undisputed. In the second part of the book she studies Seneca's treatment of subjects of political significance, including his views on slavery, provincial policy, wealth, and suicide. On the whole, the word of the philosopher is found to illuminate the work of the statesman, but notable exceptions emerge, and the links that are revealed vary from theme to theme and rarely accord with traditional autobiographical interpretations of Seneca's works. (shrink)

The American regulatory model of corporate governance rests on the theory of self-regulation as␣the most effective and efficient means to achieve corporate self-restraint in the marketplace. However, that model fails to achieve regular compliance with baseline ethical and legal behaviors as evidenced by a century of repeated corporate debacles, the most recent being Enron, WorldCom, and Refco. Seemingly impervious to its domestic failure, Congress imprinted the same self-regulation paradigm on legislation restraining global business behavior, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This (...) anti-bribery initiative prohibits unethical and illegal payments made to foreign public officials in an effort to eradicate bribery as a rational-choice global market entry strategy. However, this paper illustrates, using newly complied statistics from 1977 to 2008, that the FCPA has not had a dramatic impact on U.S. global corporate behavior despite its recent high profile coverage and the tough regulatory rhetoric about corporate compliance. The paper also extends the prior Cragg and Woof FCPA efficiency study and provides current empirical evidence to resolve several unanswered questions raised by that earlier study. (shrink)

Greaves and Wallace argue that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy. In this paper I show that their result only applies to a restricted range of cases. I then show that the update procedure that maximizes expected accuracy in general is one in which, upon learning P, we conditionalize, not on P, but on the proposition that we learned P. After proving this result, I provide further generalizations and show that much of the accuracy-first epistemology program is committed to KK-like iteration principles (...) and to the existence of a class of propositions that rational agents will be certain of if and only if they are true. (shrink)