The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

Collective memory researchers predominantly in the cultural and social sciences have commonly understood the concept of collective memory as a mere metaphor, as something not existing in itself as memory but useful only as a tool for referring to the way groups construct shared representations of their past. Few have however addressed the question of whether it is a metaphor or literal in its own right. This paper looks at the plausibility of the claim that collective memory is a mere (...) metaphor by probing its presuppositions, where the representationalist theory of mind emerges as the ground for such a claim. Then appealing to the externalist model of the mind championed in recent studies of mind in disciplines as varied as philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and collective intentionality studies, we try to expose the presuppositions of that claim, opening up possibilities for conceiving collective memory as not merely metaphorical but literal and naturally existing as memory. (shrink)

The Cognitive Science of Nationalistic Behavior, presented in this paper, integrates the political sciences of nationalities as invented communities with an evolutionary cognitive analysis of social forms as products of the human mind. The framework is modeled after the Cognitive Science of Religion, where decades of cross-disciplinary work has generated standards, predictions, and data about the role of individual cognitive tendencies in shaping societies. We study the nationalistic calendar as a cultural attractor and draw on cue-based behavioral motivation and differential (...) autobiographical memory systems to explain its appeal to the human mind. Calendrical elements are analyzed in the context of essentialist thought patterns and action representation systems. We conclude with the implications of calendrical thinking on the control of elites who aim to forge and reinforce national identities. This paper lays the groundwork for applying a similar approach to the study of other nationalistic elements. (shrink)

The article deals with the phenomenon of "social memory" in the light of current research studies. The next step is to see the recovery of the people's memory through the lens of biblical texts. The book of the prophet Jonah and the passage from the book of the prophet Amos 2:1-3 are the main texts the study is based on. The author emphasizes the main aspects of the text of the prophet Amos: condemnation of those who destroy the memory of (...) another people; indicating the consequences that the aggressor should expect for his action. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it is misleading to regard the brain as the physical basis or “core machinery” of moods. First, empirical evidence shows that brain activity not only influences, but is in turn influenced by, physical activity taking place in other parts of the organism. It is therefore not clear why the core machinery of moods ought to be restricted to the brain. I propose, instead, that moods should be conceived as embodied, i.e., their physical basis should (...) be enlarged so as to comprise not just brain but also bodily processes. Second, I emphasise that moods are also situated in the world. By this I do not simply mean that moods are influenced by the world, but that they are complexly interrelated with it, in at least three different ways: they are shaped by cultural values and norms; they are materially and intersubjectively “scaffolded”; and they can even “experientially incorporate” parts of the world, i.e., include the experience of parts of the world as part of oneself. (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control (...) of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)

Proceedings of the annual congress of the Finnish Philosophical Association in 2013. Theme: memory.

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of those (...) … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)

Renewed interest in collective memory has raised the need for conceptual elaboration of the topic and how it can be studied. In an attempt to clarify how it fits into interdisciplinary discussion the following conceptual oppositions are laid out: memory versus remembering, collective versus individual remembering, history versus collective memory, and strong versus distributed versions of collective remembering. Collective memory is then analyzed from the perspective of M. M. Bakhtin's understanding of ‘text’ in which a ‘language system’ is contrasted with (...) an ‘individual, unique, and unrepeatable’ pole of textual analysis. These ideas are harnessed to examine forms of dialogicality that shape collective memory, especially in politically contested cases such as Estonian and Russian accounts of conflict over the past century. (shrink)

The special issue Doing Memory, Doing Identity: Politics of the Everyday in Contemporary Global Communities draws on anthropological theory, performance studies, feminism, post-colonial studies and other theoretical traditions for an insightful examination of the everyday practices of doing memory. A series of ethnographies and qualitative studies from locations as diverse as Italy, Norway, Greece, France, Brazil and China complement profound theoretical analyses to investigate the multiple links between individual and collective pasts, futures and identities, especially focusing on emotions, embodiment, the (...) senses, difference and power relations. Taking a critical stance in regard to current social-scientific and socio-political debates, this special issue reflects on the political and ethical aspects of day-to-day memory practices and examines issues related to identity, imagination and otherness. (shrink)

Memory is a set of cognitive capacities by which humans and other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Philosophical investigation into memory is in part continuous with the development of cognitive scientific theories, but includes related inquiries into metaphysics and personal identity.

We have a striking ability to alter our psychological access to past experiences. Consider the following case. Andrew “Nicky” Barr, OBE, MC, DFC, (1915 – 2006) was one of Australia’s most decorated World War II fighter pilots. He was the top ace of the Western Desert’s 3 Squadron, the pre-eminent fighter squadron in the Middle East, flying P-40 Kittyhawks over Africa. From October 1941, when Nicky Barr’s war began, he flew 22 missions and shot down eight enemy planes in his (...) first 35 operational hours. He was shot down three times, once 25 miles behind enemy lines while trying to rescue a downed pilot. He escaped from prisoner of war camps four times, once jumping out of a train as it travelled from Italy into Austria. His wife Dot, who he married only weeks before the war, waited for him at home. She was told on at least three occasions that he was missing in action or dead. For 50 years, Nicky Barr never spoke publicly, and rarely privately, of his war-time experiences. He was very much a forgotten and forgetting hero (for further details, see Dornan, 2002). In his first public interview in 2002 on the Australian documentary program “Australian Story”, Nicky explained his 50 year silence by saying. (shrink)

Very often our memories of the past are of experiences or events we shared with others. And ‘‘in many circumstances in society, remembering is a social event’’ (Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000, p. 129): parents and children reminisce about significant family events, friends discuss a movie they just saw together, students study for exams with their roommates, colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, and complete strangers discuss a crime they happened to witness together. Psychology (...) is at the heart of recent interdisciplinary efforts to understand the relationships between an individual remembering alone, an individual remembering in a group, and the group itself remembering. (shrink)

Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or (...) cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering. (shrink)

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, (...) we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related. (shrink)

In this article we explore the contribution from social anthropology to the medical ethical debates about the use of informed consent in research, based on blood samples and other forms of tissue. The article springs from a project exploring donors’ motivation for providing blood and healthcare data for genetic research to be executed by a Swedish start-up genomics company. This article is not confined to empirical findings, however, as we suggest that anthropology provides reason to reassess the theoretical understanding of (...) autonomy as generally defined by Beauchamp and Childress. Careful consideration of the trust expressed by donors through the act of donation, furthermore, suggests that there is reason to redirect the ethical scrutiny from informed consent to issues concerning institutional arrangements and social responsibility. In particular, we suggest that an anthropological approach could facilitate a reconsideration of the political implications of using informed consent as a regulatory practice in tissue-based research. (shrink)

This article is about the recognition of personhood when death occurs in early life. Drawing from anthropological perspectives on personhood at the beginnings and ends of life, it examines the implications of competing religious and customary definitions of personhood for a small sample of young British Pakistani Muslim women who experienced miscarriage and stillbirth. It suggests that these women's concerns about the lack of recognition given to the personhood of their fetus or baby constitute a challenge to customary practices surrounding (...) burial as a Muslim. The article suggests that these women's concerns cannot be adequately glossed as a clash of Islamic belief versus Western medicine. Rather, they represent a renegotiation of Islamic opinion and customary practices within the broader context of changes in the medical and social norms surrounding pregnancy loss and infant death in multi-ethnic British society. (shrink)

. This article inquires into the social function of guilt, especially collective guilt, and the implications thereof for collective violence and collective memory. The focus is on the relationship between collective violence and collective memory in countries that have experienced cultural trauma, defined as a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric. Analyzing the dynamics—the mechanisms and processes—of remembering and forgetting such trauma, I argue that the idea of collective guilt is essential for making sense (...) of collective violence and collective memory. Specifically, I show that collective violence requires collective action; that collective action produces collective guilt; that collective violence generates perceptions—and misperceptions—of collective guilt; and that collective memory is formed, deformed, and transformed by perceptions—and misperceptions—of collective guilt. The article uses illustrative data from a variety of cases to illuminate these dynamics. It concludes by explaining why understanding these dynamics is imperative for responding to historic injustice in the twenty‐first century.Flash‐backs falsify the Past:they forgetthe remembering Present. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to sketch a preliminary framework for understanding the cognitive basis of the engagement of the mind with the material world. I advance the hypothesis that contrary to some of our most deeply-entrenched assumptions the relationship between the world and human cognition is not one of abstract representation or some other form of action at a distance but one of ontological inseparability. That is, what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly (...) separated external stimulus for setting an internal cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least, ex hypothesi. (shrink)

This paper seeks to elucidate how morality, landscape and environmental pratice are related as played out in a dialogue between farmers and the planning apparatus. Differing views on landscape and nature reveal differing but ever present moral messages inscribed in the land. It is argued that constructions of past, present and future time produce moral messages about landscape and nature. The Jaeren district on the south-western coast of Norway serves as the empirical base for this paper.

City-dwellers who are threatened by the risk of natural or social disasters are in search of safer houses. Each attempt to satisfy their need for safety, however, turns into another version of the security problem; so much so that, escaping from risk itself turns into different risks. The film 10 to 11 focuses on the socio-spatial conflict between a stranger and his neighbours who are anxious about a possible earthquake risk in Istanbul. Mithat, the protagonist of the film, is a (...) stranger not only to place but essentially to time. He lives within time and understands place as an essential means loaded by temporal experiences and memories. This paper deals with the multiple dichotomies between time and memory, between risk and fear, between aesthetics and security, and between attachment and profit in the context of urban transformation. The stranger, who is analysed for the first time as a temporal being in this paper, is discussed using Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of uncertainty and liquid modernity, Richard Sennett’s capitalism, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Frank Furedi’s culture of fear, Stephen Bertman’s hurried culture, Elias Canetti’s death, Giorgio Agamben’s forgotten and gone, Svetlana Boym’s nostalgia, and Halbwachs, Assmann, Connerton, and Arendt’s memory, as well as around the temporal spaces of museums, bibliopoles, antique shops, and cemeteries. (shrink)

This article proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow, circulation or movement of bodies by which it is most often theorized. The vibrations (or idiomatically ‘vibes’) among the sound system audience (or ‘crowd’) on a night out on the dancehall scene in Kingston, Jamaica, provide an example. Counting the repeating frequencies of these vibrations in a methodology inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis results in a Frequency Spectrogram. This (...) ranges from the sociocultural frequencies of nightly, weekly and seasonal cycles and circulations of musical style and fashion, to the material frequencies of the amplitudes and timbres of sound itself, with reggae’s signature low-pitched bass-line, to the corporeal frequencies of the flesh and blood of the dancehall ‘crowd’, pulsating with heartbeats and kinetic dance rhythms. The vibration model then addresses the intensities of affect in terms of auditory amplitudes, as with sonic dominance; feelings as frequencies; and the distinctive meaning of affect as timbre. This aims to encourage the radical impulse of the idea of affect to abandon the traditional envelope of the autonomous, self-consistent, rational individual. The meaning of affect is thus located in the ratio, proportions and patterning of vibrations, that is, outside the discourse of emotions or representation of feelings. (shrink)

Pencak Silat is a martial art, performance practice and system of body cultivation prevalent throughout much of Indonesia and the Malay-speaking world. This article compares different modalities of the practice and pedagogy of Sundanese Pencak Silat in West Java with more recent attempts to standardize practice at a national level under the auspices of the Indonesian Pencak Silat Association. Drawing on David Sudnow’s seminal account of learning how to play jazz piano, it is suggested that learning how to improvise is (...) a highly structured process that proceeds from the mastery of certain generic principles from which are generated potentially unbounded repertoires of habitual response. In the institutionalized instruction that is propagated by IPSI generative potential is subjugated to the desire to achieve homogeneity in practice. Aspects of Pencak Silat as it is taught nationally under the auspices of IPSI are examined in relation to the notion of spectacle. In conclusion, it is argued that the limits of the Nationalist project become self-evident as the dynamic potential of the body in Sundanese Pencak Silat is subsumed in an attempt to achieve fixity of the symbolic order. (shrink)

This article examines the tradition of punitive house demolition during the Roman Republic, but from a sociocultural rather than institutional-legal perspective. Exploiting recent scholarship on the Roman house, on exemplarity, and on memory sanctions, I argue that narratives of house demolition constitute a form of ethically inflected political discourse, whose purpose is to stigmatize certain social actors as malefactors of a particular sort . The demolition itself is symbolically resonant, and the resultant stigma is propagated by subsequent monuments—various structures, toponyms, (...) narratives, etc.—that attach to the housesite. These monuments are thought to bear the trace of what went before, hence transmit an account of the alleged malefactor's deed and disgrace. Far from obliterating the doer of misdeeds, then, the discourse of punitive house demolition fixes him in cultural memory as a negative exemplum. (shrink)

There are many different ways to think about what has happened before. I think about my own recent actions, and about what happened to me a long time ago; I can think about times before I lived, and about what will happen after my death. I know many things about the past, and about what has happened because people did things before now, or because some good or bad things happened to me.

The aim of this article is to explore the Irish dancing body by combining the growing social science interest in mobility with the established area of the body as a site of culture. On the basis of ethnographic observations and interviews about dance and culture in Ireland, I will discuss the Irish dancing body in relation to the construction of social memory, the embodiment of values linked to Irish national identity, mobility, dance competitions and global touring. First, I will detail (...) three distinct movement sequences from different dance forms in Ireland: competitive Irish dancing, dance theatre and Riverdance(the commercial Irish dance show). Second, I will look at how dance can be said to travel around Ireland, north and south, as well as back and forth to Ireland. The idea of the Irish dancing body offers an example of the unity of body and mind in dance, revealing also that abstract dance and movement communicate stories about their societies. In Irish dance, these stories feature displacement, longing and resistance, often steeped in the history. I conclude that this social memory connects a distinct Irish tradition with European modernity. (shrink)

Although there are exceptions, most researchers on collective memory have neglected the idea that collective mnemonics involve embodied aspects and practices. And though the corpus of Collective Memory Studies (CMS) has helped us better understand how social groups relate to time, especially to the past, it has taken little notice of how embodied social actors collectively relate to time. In contrast, expanding upon the French School and the French sociological tradition, I argue for an approach that, on the one hand, (...) connects mental schemata to bodily schemata to social frameworks. And on the other hand, I speak of how embodied social actors collectively relate to common pasts and presents; and of how embodiment can thus provide a structure of possibilities for individuals and groups, as well as shared compasses and orientations that help people move toward certain futures while foreclosing others. (shrink)

An archive is an integral part of literate and social life and is in the custody of political institutions for their historical value. It is argued that societies who lack the faculty of recording histories contribute to the archive-making process in a different context. To advance this, the work of anthropologists on the Igorots, more specifically the Kalingas, of the Philippine Cordilleras, and their tattooing practices are considered for heuristic purposes. It is in these societies, where the concept of the (...) Western archive is absent, that the body becomes a repository of significant life events and rituals concretized by tattoos. Tattooing becomes a form of memory on how bodies remember and create narratives and counter-narratives. To serve as a provocation for further research, Derrida’s two-fold understanding of the archive is utilized. The archive, on the one hand, as a commencement that evokes the writing of the archive and, on the other hand, the understanding of the tattoos as disjointed and incomplete, allows us to understand tattoos as a trace. (shrink)

The archive can take many forms but all are marked by a connective sequence: archive, memory, the past, narrative. The author explores this sequence through an account of her engagement with four different types of archive, constructing a phenomenology of the archive which highlights the promises and seductions offered to the researcher. Postmodern questioning may throw in doubt older conceptions, whereby the archive is used to legitimate knowledge claims about the past of a nomological nature. However, in a context where (...) intellectuals become interpreters rather than legislators, the role of the archive as repository of inert meanings is strengthened rather than weakened; using the archive helps us to understand the dialectical nature of the relationship between past and present and our own positioning within this. (shrink)

Since 1989, social change in Europe has moved between two stories. The first being a politics of memory emphasizing the specificity of culture in national narratives, and the other extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment heritage of reason and humanity. While the Holocaust forms a central part of West European collective memory, national victimhood of former Communist countries tends to occlude the centrality of the Holocaust. Highlighting examples from the Estonian experience, this article asks whether attempts to find one single (...) European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered under both Communism and National Socialism. Pluralism in the sense of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin is presented as a way in which to move beyond the settling of scores in the past and towards a respectful recognition and acknowledgement of historical difference. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study joins a prolific line of critical research on collective memory in relation to museums as ‘sites of memory’. It takes the political relations between museums and memory as the background against which audience production of discourses of remembering is analyzed. Collective memory is approached not as a passive ‘retainer’ of information, but as sets of public mnemonic practices which transpire in specific material and semiotic settings. The analysis is comparative and takes place in two Jewish history museums in (...) the US and Israel. It begins by ethnographically studying museums’ memory media, whereby discourse is produced and displayed. Then, the rhetorical currency of collective memory discourse is identified, illustrating that museum audiences’ discourses of remembering are dynamic remediations that break with institutional formats and establish audiences’ voice and subjectivity. Centrally, the analysis of more complex texts offers a tripartite typology of audiences’ discoursal strategies: Establishing addressivity, which concerns audiences’ self-positioning or whether they reflect on the museum’s historic narration or ‘step into’ it by directly conversing with historical figures; Re-citing, which concerns acts of importing texts into the museums’ discourse, creating new intertextualities and charging both the museum discourse and the cited texts with new meanings; Re-timing, which concerns indexing different mythical, religious, and national timeframes, which serve to embed the time of the museum visit. The study concludes by critically noting the scarcity of subversive visitor discourse in museums, and the vitality of collective ethnonational memory in Israel compared to transnational/cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust. (shrink)

This two-part article presents the research program for a theory and empirical analysis of religious evolution. It is assumed that religion isprimarilya co-evolution to societal evolution, which in turn is a co-evolution to mental, organic, and physical evolution. The theory of evolution is triangulated with the systems theory and the semiotically informed theory of communication, so that knowledge can be gained that would not be acquired by only one of the three theories: The differentiation between religion and its environment can (...) be reconstructed based on the theory of evolution. The elements of the theory of evolution can be understood as the formation of systems. The semiotically informed theory of communication clarifies the conditions of the combination of both the systems theory and the theory of evolution as well as its objects. In turn, the combination of the systems theory and the theory of evolution can describe how communication—including religion and science—evolves and is structured. (shrink)

The main purpose of the following inquiry is to emphasise the importance of a phenomenon long neglected by the majority of the human sciences, the artefact; each one of us, no matter what age, sex or culture, is in contact with artefacts every moment of our lives yet despite this they have received scant attention. The study begins by outlining a definition of the artefact, highlighting those characteristics which, in combination, ensure its centrality to social life before, through a discussion (...) of Popper's ideas, proceeding to see how material culture can be conceptualised as meaningful. In order to understand how meaning becomes attached to the artefact the notion of objectification will be analysed and, consequently, so shall the importance of both the type of activity and the physical nature of the materials involved in the artefact's production. Picking up on the theme of materiality this aspect of material culture will be shown to pose major problems to any interpretation of the artefact along semiological lines; language and material culture are evinced to possess fundamentally distinct characteristics which make comparisons between them far from straightforward. These differences will be analysed further, concentrating specifically on the role of context in the establishment of meaning. This leads on to the proposal that our understanding of artefacts can occur on three levels; three forms of knowledge are thus described of which a linguistically formulated type constitutes just one kind. The penultimate chapter tackles the ways in which artefacts affect us, how they are active elements in our relationships with them; therefore, a dialectical position is postulated in which both artefacts and agents take part. Finally, the study concludes by stressing some of its wider implications and suggests a few of the practical situations to which it can be applied. (shrink)

This article considers recent changes in the definition of religion and of media as the basis for framing the study of their relation to one another and recent research in the intersection they have come to form over the last two decades or so. The history, materiality, and reception of each have colored scholarly work, and made ethnography, practice, material culture, and embodiment key aspects of scholarship. A new paradigm for some scholars for studying mediation is aesthetics—no longer understood as (...) the “philosophy of the beautiful,” but as the study of perception in the mediated practices that make up lived religion. (shrink)

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming (...) as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

This paper presents ethical dilemmas concerning the termination of pregnancy, the management of childbirth, and the withdrawal of life-support from infants in special care, for a small sample of British Pakistani Muslim parents of babies diagnosed with fatal abnormalities. Case studies illustrating these dilemmas are taken from a qualitative study of 66 families of Pakistani origin referred to a genetics clinic in Southern England. The paper shows how parents negotiated between the authoritative knowledge of their doctors, religious experts, and senior (...) family members in response to the ethical dilemmas they faced. There was little knowledge or open discussion of the view that Islam permits the termination of pregnancy for serious or fatal abnormality within 120 days and there was considerable disquiet over the idea of ending a pregnancy. For some parents, whether their newborn baby would draw breath was a main worry, with implications for the baby's Muslim identity and for the recognition of loss the parents would receive from family and community. This concern sometimes conflicted with doctors' concerns to minimize risk to future pregnancies by not performing a Caesarean delivery if a baby is sure to die. The paper also identifies parents' concerns and feelings of wrong-doing regarding the withdrawal of artificial life-support from infants with multiple abnormalities. The conclusion considers some of the implications of these observations for the counselling and support of Muslim parents following the pre- or neo-natal diagnosis of fatal abnormalities in their children. (shrink)

Abstract: Forgiveness of wrongdoing in response to public apology and amends making seems, on the face of it, to leave little room for the continued commemoration of wrongdoing. This rests on a misunderstanding of forgiveness, however, and we can explain why there need be no incompatibility between them. To do this, I emphasize the role of what I call nonangry negative moral emotions in constituting memories of wrongdoing. Memories so constituted can persist after forgiveness and have important moral functions, and (...) commemorations can elicit these emotions to preserve memories of this sort. Moreover, commemorations can be a restorative justice practice that promotes reconciliation, but only on condition that the memories they preserve are constituted by nonangry negative, not retributive, emotions. (shrink)

Historical practice is described in terms of the intimacies involved in reading archival material and the fashioning of it into historical argument. Research into the domestic service relationship in 18th-century England, using household account books, underpins the historian's construction of imaginary relationships with the dead and gone. Other readers intervene in the writing process, and shape the history that is produced out of archival research.

This text was first published in Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, vol. 90 , March 2008 : 1–15. We thank gratefully Professor Robert Dodgshon for granting us the permission to reproduce it. ABSTRACT : From the moment it began to engage with time in a considered way, human geography has employed a variety of analytical and conceptual approaches to it. Recent work especially has greatly extended the range of these different approaches by stressing the innate - Géographie – Nouvel (...) article. (shrink)

Theoretical commentaries on AI often operate as a metadiscourse on the way in which science represents itself to a wider public. The sciences and humanities do the same kind of work but in different fields that encourage them to talk about their work differently: science refers to a natural world that does not talk back, and the humanities refer continually to a world with communicative people in it. This paper suggests that much AI commentary is misconceived because it models itself (...) on the way that science represents itself, rather than on the actual practice of science.AI theorists have become increasingly worried about the lack of evaluation in AI, the lack of reflexivity, and the lack of contact with society. Frequently these writers turn to concepts of tacit knowledge to work through these worries. In doing so they are recognising the problem of AI's second-order representation of science and trying to deal with it. However, this recognition of a problem with the representations of science simply turns back to the legitimation crisis of Western politics where many commentators use science precisely as a ‘model’ for western political institutions. They do so because science is one of the few areas of knowledge where it has been legitimate to use plausible methodology for representation that allows for arbitrary designations of authority as well as parallel systems of different authority. However, the plausible rejects any control on reflexivity, assumes an ethnocentric club culture and does not address social context.It is in this sense that the problems of legitimation in political liberalism are similar to those of legitimation in sciences, both are rooted in their uses of representation. AI's link with the representation of science places it in the heart of this debate about legitimacy. This paper suggests that AI does need to learn about reflexivity and that it might well do so by looking at the recent work on experimentation and representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation within the humanities. However, reflexivity may not be enough. Devising rules of thumb for the appropriate halting of reflexivity, is also needed to address social context and take action. (shrink)

One of the assumptions that impregnate academic discourse, even that of social scientists committed to the re-incorporation of their disciplines, is its extra-corporeal character. This article analyzes the scholastic construction of producing and perceiving oral, written or silent discourses as non-corporeal acts. First, it argues that there is a certain continuity between monastic rituals that build the spirit as something different from and higher than the body and academic rituals that train people to place the source of discourse in the (...) mind. Second, it explores how the separation of discourse from the discourse-producing body is currently built and reproduced through participation in university and academic rituals. It holds that such participation installs in the bodies of academics an identification with the habit of producing discourses. Finally, it suggests that the fact that attempts to re-incorporate body to social life are performed by academics who have been trained in disembodying their discourses conditions the results of such attempts. (shrink)

This paper seeks to contextualize Lycurgus' use of the historical example of King Codrus' self-sacrifice within Athenian social memory and public discourse. In doing so, it offers a solution to the puzzle of Lycurgus' calling Codrus one of the ἐπώνυμοι τῆς χώρας . I make the case that Codrus was one of the forty-two eponymous age-set heroes who played an important role in the Athenian military and socio-political system. I contend that devotion to the city's gods and heroes and knowledge (...) of their mythology were essential parts of the religious and ideological instruction of Athenian ephebes. Consequently, Lycurgus' citation of the Ephebic Oath, the self-sacrifices of King Codrus and the daughters of Erechtheus, as well as his repeated invocation of the city's gods and shrines, must be seen as integral elements of his indictment of Leocrates for cowardice and treason, behavior that is diametrically opposed to the hoplite ethos and religious devotion that were instilled into young ephebes. Lycurgus thus brings the jurors' memories of their own ephebate into the courtroom and taps into emotions and values that lie at the heart of Athenian collective identity. (shrink)

This dissertation is situated within the field of media studies, with a particular focus on the "materialities of communication." The concept of "materialities" is oriented to the underlying conditions that allow communication to take place: the places, carriers and modes of communication that serve to shape and even alter meaning. My dissertation asks how this "material turn" can usefully be applied to and help develop the study of theatre.