In thirteen essays from different aesthetic traditions, Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities problematizes our habituated customs of seeing and reading the familiar to focus on that which cannot easily be comprehended but may be sensed through encounters with the ruptures and gaps that quietly beckon our attention.

An investigation into the concept of life in Michel Foucault's work leads both to a more precise understanding of the development of his work and to the elaboration of a critical look at recent interpretations of his thought, especially in relation to the readings of the concept of biopolitics that oscillate between a positive and a negative interpretation of this concept. The analyzes of this term, which have proliferated among recent readings of Foucault's work, seem to lack a more accurate (...) understanding of the problem of life, from which largely results the very acuity of Foucault's reflections on biopower. What above all guides this brief and incipient reflection on Foucault’s notion of life is Muhle's (2021) finding that Foucault does not attribute an ontological status to the notion of life and that this life plays a double role (Gegenstand and Funktionsmodell) regarding its implication in biopower, as well as Mauer's assumption (2015) that Foucault turns to the notion of life in order to deviate from the concept of man, i.e., from humanism. These two hypotheses help us not only to shed light on the elaboration of Foucault's thought as a whole, particularly with regard to biopower, but also on recent readings of the notion of biopolitics. (shrink)

Este artigo se divide em quatro partes. Inicialmente apresentamos a noção de biopolítica de modo introdutório, considerando a relação entre poder soberano e biopoder. Voltamo-nos para a elaboração foucaultiana do termo de modo a esclarecer, em linhas gerais, seu sentido. Essa breve análise da noção de biopolítica encaminha-nos para o conceito de tanatopolítica, que aparece, na segunda parte do texto, como epíteto da derivação funesta da biopolítica. Na terceira parte, a partir de uma perspectiva biopolítica, lançamos luz sobre a crise (...) que enfrentamos. Trata-se de um esforço de evidenciar o sentido biopolítico da crise atual, considerando o conteúdo das reflexões de Foucault. Finalmente, na quarta parte, atualizamos o debate acerca da biopolítica por meio de uma análise da noção de imunidade formulada por Esposito, a qual fornece uma importante chave interpretativa da pandemia atual. (shrink)

Philosopher of science Bruno Latour defines the image as “any sign, work of art, inscription or painting serving as a mediation to reach something else.” According to this definition, mediation could very well be a synonym for image. In this article, I would like to use Latour’s work to argue for the crucial role that images play in overcoming a certain modern worldview that has divided the world into ontological essences that separate subject and object, nature and culture. It is (...) precisely the erasure of the mediations, the images that connect these different forms of life together, that has led to the positing of the modern constitution of autonomous essences, cut off from the many agencies that give them life. Using the art installations of artist Tomas Saraceno, this article will show that it is precisely this mediating role of art that lends it such an interdisciplinary and phenomenological role in allowing the invisible webs connecting earth and sky, nature and culture, human and non-human, to be seen. (shrink)

t. 1. Dialog s V. V. Davydovym -- t. 2. Nereshennye problemy razvivai︠u︡shchego obrazovanii︠a︡.

Robots are versatile devices that are promising tools for supporting teaching and learning in the classroom or at home. In fact, robots can be engaging and motivating, especially for young children. This paper presents an experimental study with 81 kindergarten children on memorizations of two tales narrated by a humanoid robot. The variables of the study are the content of the tales (knowledge or emotional) and the different social behaviour of the narrators: static human, static robot, expressive human, and expressive (...) robot. Results suggest a positive effect of the expressive behaviour in robot storytelling, whose effectiveness is comparable to a human with the same behaviour and better when compared with a static inexpressive human. Higher efficacy is achieved by the robot in the tale with knowledge content, while the limited capability to express emotions made the robot less effective in the tale with emotional content. (shrink)

Today political theorists and the public generally often associate descriptive representation with democracy. However, in Victorian Britain supporters of descriptive representation tended to be arrayed against democracy. The impression that democracy was incompatible with descriptive representation and a set of related values, primary among which was deliberation, formed one of the great obstacles which democratic theory faced in this period. These values belonged to a traditional theory of representation which held that Parliament ought to be a mirror of the nation (...) in its diversity and which judged democracy, in contrast, to be an illiberal mode of regulating the franchise because it risked handing the representation wholly to one part or class within society. In response to this school of thought, democratic theory developed two conflicting responses: first, that democracy could accommodate social and ideological diversity; second, that democracy was irreconcilable with the goal of mirroring diversity, but that nevertheless democracy had to be preferred on grounds of fairness and non-arbitrariness. (shrink)

Panpsychism, the view that the material elements of the universe have mental properties, has until quite recently remained in the periphery of the philosophical mainstream due to its blatant contradiction of normative Cartesian dualities, which divided the world into mental properties and material properties, that are devoid of value and sentience. The recent geological shift to the Anthropocene Age, in which human culture can be found in pesticide resistant mosquitoes and the ozone heavens, has undermined the foundations of Cartesian dualism, (...) making panpsychism a credible alternative. Yet some panpsychists go too far by conflating all distinctions between living and nonliving, human and nonhuman, evolved and made entities. Using Whitehead's process philosophy, this article will defend panpsychism and develop the philosophical criteria of causation, relationality, unity and intentionality to differentiate between natural living forms, natural nonliving forms, and human artifacts. (shrink)

Antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is protective against HIV. Low utilization rates amongst HIV vulnerable populations are due in part to the high cost of PrEP. Generic PrEP offers the potential to improve health at significantly reduced costs. In this study, we examine early utilization patterns and prices for generic PrEP. We discuss the opportunities and challenges for generic PrEP to improve health among HIV vulnerable populations.

The complexity and inefficiency of the U.S. health care system complicates the distribution of life-saving medical technologies. When the public health is at stake, however, there are alternatives. The proposal for a national PrEP program published in this issue of the Journal applies some of the lessons of the national COVID vaccine campaign to HIV prevention. In doing so, it draws on other examples of public health approaches to the financing of medical technology, from vaccines for children to hepatitis C (...) treatment. (shrink)

Though responses to the Anthropocene have largely come from the natural and social sciences, religious responses to the Anthropocene have also been gaining momentum and many scholars have been calling for a religious response to complement scientific responses to climate change. Yet because Genesis 1:28 does indeed tell human beings to 'subdue the earth' monotheistic religions have often been understood as complicit in the human exceptionalism that is thought to have created the conditions for the Anthropocene. In distinction to such (...) Biblical traditions, indigenous animistic cultures have typically respected all forms of life as 'persons' and such traditions have thus become a source of inspiration for ecological movements. After discussing contemporary Christian efforts to integrate the natural sciences and the environment into their responses to the Anthropocene, this article will turn to animism and seek to evaluate the risks and benefits that could ensue from a postmodern form of animism that could provide a necessary postsecular response to the Anthropocene. (shrink)

In the past decades, an enormous amount of precious information has been collected about molecular and genetic characteristics of cancer. This knowledge is mainly based on a reductionistic approach, meanwhile cancer is widely recognized to be a ‘system biology disease’. The behavior of complex physiological processes cannot be understood simply by knowing how the parts work in isolation. There is not solely a matter how to integrate all available knowledge in such a way that we can still deal with complexity, (...) but we must be aware that a deeply transformation of the currently accepted oncologic paradigm is urgently needed. We have to think in terms of biological networks: understanding of complex functions may in fact be impossible without taking into consideration influences outside of the genome. Systems Biology involves connecting experimental unsupervised multivariate data to mathematical and computational approach than can simulate biologic systems for hypothesis testing or that can account for what it is not known from high-throughput data sets. Metabolomics could establish the requested link between genotype and phenotype, providing informations that ensure an integrated understanding of pathogenic mechanisms and metabolic phenotypes and provide a screening tool for new targeted drug. (shrink)

In order to explore some of the divergences within new materialism and elucidate their relationship to actor-network theory, this article will develop Latour’s theory of agency and then compare it to those new materialists who uphold a ‘flat ontology’ that includes technological tools and those who uphold an animate/inanimate distinction. In light of the ecological crisis called the Anthropocene, the dissolution of the animate/inanimate distinction will be defended in order to address both polar bears and glaciers, coral reefs and clown (...) fish. Though Latour himself has defended such a dissolution, his political proposals to address the ecological crisis revert back to the modern and dualist position he has himself critiqued for so long. Using the gains of actor-network theory, while differentiating a new materialist ecological politics from that of Latour, will be shown to be necessary in order to find a solution to the crisis of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

For many environmental philosophers, the dualisms intrinsic to Modernity that separate body from mind and nature from culture must be deconstructed in order to develop an inclusive ecology that might respond to the Anthropocene Age. In seeking alternatives to human exceptionalism and humans as exclusive owners of souls to the exclusion of other animals, many scholars have turned to Asian philosophies founded in presuppositions that are far more eco-centric. Focusing on Buddhism, this article will outline some eco-centric aspects of Buddhist (...) dogma, focusing on the idea of co-dependent origination and the Buddhist idea that all things are empty of inherent existence and are constituted through relationality. Then we will show how such Buddhist ideas have been used to develop an ecology that instead of abstracting itself from place, as modern theories are wont to do, seeks to develop an intrinsic relationship to place, and even to locate subjectivity there. This is the Japanese theory of Fudo, developed by twentieth century philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji, a theory that is able to move beyond the dualisms of Western ideology to provide a promising response to the Anthropocene Age. If the being of being human is co-determined and co-dependent upon its milieu and upon the community of others living in such a milieu, we should be focusing on finding ways to re-claim and re-value such milieu as constitutive of human development and flourishing. In this way, we can replace Western universals and intrinsic essence with ontological specificity and the shared inter-dependent experience of community. (shrink)

The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have (...) proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy. (shrink)

We question the idea that the mirror neuron system is the substrate of social affordances perception, and we suggest that most of the activity seen in the parietal and premotor cortex of the human brain is independent of mirroring activity as characterized in macaques, but rather reflects a process of one's own action specification in response to social signals.

SummaryThis article offers a novel and comprehensive account of Walter Bagehot's political thought. It ties together an interpretation of Bagehot's liberal commitment to norms of discussion and deliberation, with an analysis of Bagehot's extensive arguments about the institutions of representative government. We show how Bagehot's opposition to American-style presidentialism, to parliamentary democracy, and to proportional representation were profoundly shaped by his conceptions of government by discussion, and the rule of public opinion. Bagehot's criticisms of English parliamentarianism, both of its pre-1832 (...) and post-1832 varieties were also motivated by those principles, as was his own proposal for parliamentary reform. By examining the whole range of Bagehot's writings on representative government and by connecting his institutional recommendations to his liberal principles, we are also able to better clarify Bagehot's position in Victorian political thought. The article concludes with a discussion of the debate leading up to the Second Reform Act, in which we elucidate Bagehot's disagreements with other prominent exponents of liberalism including John Stuart Mill, the “university liberals,” and Robert Lowe. (shrink)

Many scholars have understood the Anthropocene as confirming the patient work in the social sciences to deconstruct the nature/culture divide, for the human being is now present in the entire eco-system, from deet-resistant mosquitoes to the ozone hole in the heavens. Scholars like Bruno Latour have claimed that nature and culture have always been co-determined and thus that their separation was a case of modern bad faith with disastrous consequences. Because Latour blames this divide on the human exceptionalism that pitted (...) a human subject against a world of objects, and thus denied agency to other living and nonliving actants, the solution for Latour lies in recognizing their agency in an ‘enlarged democracy.’ Such scholarship has inspired many scholars to adopt a ‘flat ontology’ that treats all forms of agency, whether animate or inanimate, as equivalent and autonomous material forces. This article will elucidate Latour’s ‘democracy of things’ and explore the beneficial consequences for the Anthropocene of attributing autonomous agency to non-human actants, while at the same time discussing the negative repercussions of reifying the agency of technological tools as separate from human agency. Due to such widespread reification of technological agency, it will be shown that causal analysis that traces such agency back to its source in human political organization is required in order to adequately respond to the Anthropocene. (shrink)

SUMMARYDue to his famous conflict with John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen is often assumed to have been an opponent of toleration and intellectual freedom and a defender of authoritarian or reactionary principles. These assumptions are misleading. Stephen was, and was known in his time to have been, a champion of toleration. This essay provides a comprehensive overview of his writing on these themes, drawing from a wider array of texts than is usually considered in the study of the Stephen-Mill (...) controversy. Contrary to popular belief, Stephen had a deep and multi-faceted argument in favor of toleration. As a critic of contending theories of toleration and freedom of discussion, Stephen was concerned to defeat what he saw as the resurgence of a priori principles in Victorian political philosophy and to combat the expansion of a proper notion of toleration to include a cluster of beliefs and attitudes of which he disapproved. In his approach to these issues Stephen was, arguably, as representative of Victorian thinking as the author of On Liberty. (shrink)

In Feb. 2022 Sungho Kimlee passed away. In his memory, we present this revised and abridged version of a portion of his dissertation, Factions and Orders: from Machiavelli to Madison. Sungho summarized the work as follows: “Since antiquity, thinkers have held that every society consists of two hostile orders – the few and the many. But they have disagreed on the proper method for defusing this civic divide, and their various proposed remedies can be classified into three approaches. The first (...) approach aims to eliminate the division between the rich and the poor by abolishing private property. Plato’s Republic inaugurated this method, which was later embraced with ambivalence by Thomas More and vigorously defended by Karl Marx. The second approach merely aims to contain the harmful effects of the binary civic divide. Plato proposed two methods for accomplishing this in the Laws: Plutarch championed the first method, and Aristotle the second. My dissertation traces the genealogy of the third approach – the method of supplanting the binary civic divide with more numerous divisions. This oft-neglected method was pioneered by Rousseau, who prescribed the creation of artificial divisions by the state as a remedy for majority factions. (shrink)

That which we call “negative theology” inspires within us both fascination and unease. We can either challenge all “negative theology” as a language game that is both impractical and contradictory, as many contemporaries do, or we can explore the question in light of the recent arguments of Derrida. The primary thesis in this paper is that we should reject “negative theology” as a descriptor and replace it, following the nomenclature of the Dionysian corpus, with “mystical theology.” In doing this, we (...) will come to realize that “mystical theology” no longer has the ambition to make constative use of language; its ambition is rather to be freed from such use. Thus, we move from a constative (and predicative) use of language toward a strictly pragmatic usage. This movement has yet to be proved, and what follows is an attempt to do just that. (shrink)

I present the traditional debate about the so called explanation of Russell’s paradox and propose a new way to solve the contradiction that arises in Frege’s system. I briefly examine two alternative explanatory proposals—the Predicativist explanation and the Cantorian one—presupposed by almost all the proposed solutions of Russell’s Paradox. From the discussion about these proposals a controversial conclusion emerges. Then, I examine some particular zig zag solutions and I propose a third explanation, presupposed by them, in which I emphasise the (...) role of an implicit premise in the derivation of the paradox. In conclusion, I propose a different zig zag solution obtained by the adoption of a negative free logic. (shrink)