This draft preprint presents a nine step argument for “Connectionist Structuralism” (CS), an account of the ontology of abstract objects that is neither purely nominalist nor purely platonist. CS is a common, often implicit assumption in parts of the artificial intelligence literature, but such discussions have not presented formal accounts of the position or engaged with metaphysical issues that potentially undermine it. By making the position legible and presenting an initial case for it, we hope to support a constructive dialogue (...) between AI researchers and philosophers of metaphysics that helps both sides to refine the position. -/- CS proposes that each abstract object we can draw on in human analysis corresponds to a particular subset of an individual person’s brain structure whose functionality is isomorphic to a subset of the nodes and connections in a suitable connectionist network. In other words, abstract objects are physically realised, but in individual brains, rather than only in the referent objects (pure nominalism) or in metaphysical universals (pure platonism). -/- This paper’s minimum claim is that CS can account for all abstract object predicables regarding sensible properties, such as “is red” or “is a square”. Using evidence from cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and evolutionary biology, as well as a fully traceable toy example, we describe how CS can support our core cognitive uses of such sensible properties and can account for our core phenomenal experiences of them. In the former, CS provides sufficient albeit imperfect inferential safety, whose limitations are argued to strengthen rather than weaken the case for CS as describing human behaviour. In the latter, four target phenomenal features are accounted for – abstract objects as feeling intangible, non-located, transparent, and unchanging - along with accounts for further phenomena such as semantic refinement, the Stroop effect, synaesthesia, semantic clarity, sensory overload, and satiation. -/- Our minimum claim concerns the day-to-day usage and felt experience of abstract objects, but we suggest also an extended claim in which CS can form the basis of a pragmatic sufficient logic. As such, the initial outline of a response is provided for five common objections to positions that seek to ground abstract objects without reference to metaphysically stand-alone universals: referential opacity; identity of indiscernibles; infinite regression; non-physical concepts; and necessary truths. These outlines lay the foundation for (but do not seek to formally demonstrate) an extended CS account that addresses other abstract objects, including issues relating to their use in mathematics and formal logic. -/- The CS account leads to a four-layer hierarchy of similarity for whether your “red” is the same as mine. Considering both semantic and phenomenal similarity, we conclude that our “reds” are likely non-identical but can be made close enough for practical purposes. Finally, we describe how future work could elaborate CS as a metaphysical project and how confidence in it could be tested through empirical research. (shrink)

Electronic text can be defined on two different, though interconnected, levels. On the one hand, electronic text can be defined by taking the notion of “text” or “printed text” as the point of departure. On the other hand, electronic text can be defined by taking the digital format as the point of departure, where everything is represented in the binary alphabet. While the notion of text in most cases lends itself to being independent of medium and embodiment, it is also (...) often tacitly assumed that it is in fact modeled on the print medium, instead of, for instance, on hand-written text or speech. In late 20th century, the notion of “text” was subjected to increasing criticism, as can be seen in the question that has been raised in literary text theory about whether “there is a text in this class.” At the same time, the notion was expanded by including extralinguistic sign modalities (images, videos). A basic question, therefore, is whether electronic text should be included in the enlarged notion that text is a new digital sign modality added to the repertoire of modalities or whether it should be included as a sign modality that is both an independent modality and a container that can hold other modalities. In the first case, the notion of electronic text would be paradigmatically formed around the e-book, which was conceived as a digital copy of a printed book but is now a deliberately closed work. Even closed works in digital form will need some sort of interface and hypertextual navigation that together constitute a particular kind of paratext needed for accessing any sort of digital material. In the second case, the electronic text is defined by the representation of content and (some parts of the) processing rules as binary sequences manifested in the binary alphabet. This wider notion would include, for instance, all sorts of scanning results, whether of the outer cosmos or the interior of our bodies and of digital traces of other processes in-between (machine readings included). Since other alphabets, such as the genetic alphabet and all sorts of images may also be represented in the binary alphabet, such materials will also belong to the textual universe within this definition. A more intriguing implication is that born-digital materials may also include scripts and interactive features as intrinsic parts of the text. The two notions define the text on different levels: one is centered on the Latin, the other on the binary alphabet, and both definitions include hypertext, interactivity, and multimodality as constituent parameters. In the first case, hypertext is included as a navigational, paratextual device; whereas in the second case, hypertext is also incorporated in the narrative within an otherwise closed work or as a constituent element on the textual universe of the web, where it serves the ongoing production of (possibly scripted) connections and disconnections between blocks of textual content. Since the early decades of early 21st century still represent only the very early stages of the globally distributed universe of web texts, this is also a history of the gradual unfolding of the dimensions of these three constituencies—hypertext, interactivity, and multimodality. The result is a still-expanding repertoire of genres, including some that are emerging via path dependency; some via remediation; and some as new genres that are unique for networked digital media, including “social media texts” and a growing variety of narrative and discursive multiple-source systems. (shrink)

Beginning by offering an overview on legal aesthetic humanisms as a specific embodiment of critical discourse, and discussing the ways the recreation of juridical experience, rationality, and culture underpinning such a criticism, leaving behind monolithic views on textuality, judgment, and subjectivity, positively contributes to unsettling the main assumptions underlying typical understandings of law’s autonomy—mostly those of formal specification of juridical “sources” and “scientific” isolation of legal thought—, this paper argues that simply reproducing aesthetic heterodoxy as the epitome of a humanist (...) ‘alternative to law’, without first debating the very orthodox-heterodox binomial, ends up overlooking the discursive and methodological specificity of law, as a particular experience of practical and normative validity. In this way, it introduces, from an axiological-normative and juridically oriented standpoint, a different—jusaesthetic—argument for re-examining the relationship between law’s praxis, nomos, and community. (shrink)

The idea that Derrida kept silent on Marx before the publication of Spectres de Marx, in 1993, has become a commonplace in Derrida studies and in the history of Marxism and French 20th century political thought. This idea has often been accompanied by a certain representation of the relationship between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, and fed the legend of deconstruction’s «apoliticism» – at least before what some have called Derrida’s «ethicopolitical turn», usually dated in the early 1990s. Against this narrative, (...) this essay analyzes Derrida’s notorious «silence on Marx» before Specters of Marx from the perspective of the archives. Archival research transforms the narrative: Derrida’s «silence on Marx» was only «relative». Beyond the scene of publications, archives reveal another scene: multiple engagements with Marx and Marxist thought, marked and remarked in many archival documents – more particularly in a series of early seminar notes from the 1960s and 1970s. How does this archival scene transform our interpretation of Derrida’s «silence»? (shrink)

The mimetic theory forged by René Girard is completely closed by its own violence. Given that human violence was contained for centuries, by the victimary mechanism, its deconstruction by the Cross has unleashed a complete and total violence, leading us to the possibility of a real Apocalypse. We show here that this closure is based on a metaphysical view of desire, guiding us from the objet to the being of the model. Since Girard is always confined into metaphysics by his (...) constant use of the paradigm of the image, the presence and, consequently, the idol, we demonstrate that there is still a way out of violence, the same way that is today the way out of metaphysics. With Jean-Luc Marion and his phenomenology of givenness, we oppose the paradigm of the icon to the one of the idol, and therefore the model of the sign to the one of the image. We demonstrate then that global mimetic violence can be stopped if we no longer desire objects and start desiring saturated phenomena, which implies a complete shift in the way we think and receive phenomena. (shrink)

Las recientes crisis económicas han dejado en evidencia las fisuras del sistema económico capitalista y, con ello, se vuelve menester que el debate penetre en la raíz misma del sistema económico, donde se halla la fuente de los problemas. Así, cabe preguntarse hasta qué punto el capitalismo contemporáneo ha determinado el devenir histórico de las democracias occidentales. ¿Puede hablarse de sistemas democráticos propiamente tales dentro de los regímenes capitalistas modernos? A partir de la idea de democracia en Derrida y su (...) contrapunto con una crítica del capitalismo basada en Marx y Marcuse, este trabajo busca evidenciar las incompatibilidades entre capitalismo y democracia. -/- En la práctica, la democracia se trata de un esfuerzo incansable por impregnarse del espectro que es incapaz de asir por completo: permanente transparencia y movimiento, apertura a la alteridad hasta en sus propios cimientos. En el capitalismo, la objetivación de las relaciones de producción por la vía del fetichismo de la mercancía supone que las relaciones de poder económico también quedan objetivadas, asumiéndose como naturales, a-históricas y universales. Luego, la acumulación de capital y la consecuente asimetría de poder económico se traducen en relaciones inequitativas de poder político que ponen en jaque la factibilidad democrática en sociedades capitalistas. El capitalismo constituirá, así, la penumbra en la que el espectro de la democracia se desdibujará hasta, simplemente, desvanecerse. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

Hiromatsu Wataru’s philosophical thought revolves around an analysis of what he calls the “fourfold structure.” According to Hiromatsu, all phenomena in the world are structured in such a fourfold manner that “a given presents itself as something to someone as Someone,” and these four moments of the phenomenon are not independent elements, but exist only as terms of the functional relationship. This paper surveys and critically examines this theory of the fourfold structure, and shows, in particular, how this theory, while (...) largely presented as synchronic structural analysis, contains some conceptual motifs going beyond the synchronic framework. Specifically, with a focus on the process in which there arises a meaning common to different phenomenal givens and to different knowers, my analysis suggests the way in which phenomena are dynamically structured and thereby displaced in meaning as well as in the knowers’ role relationship. (shrink)

In his project of going beyond the “modern worldview,” Hiromatsu Wataru attached great importance to Ernst Mach’s philosophical thought and Einstein’s theory of relativity as challenging the premises of modern philosophy, which he characterized as substantialist and bound by the subject / object schema. This paper surveys Hiromatsu’s analysis of Mach’s phenomenalist element-monism, specifically his critique of Mach’s insufficient break with modern philosophy; his inquiry into Einstein’s relativity theory with a focus on its intersubjective cognitive structure; and the way he (...) extends his views on these themes to a general ontological-epistemological theory of the “fourfold structure.” Finally, it examines questions about Hiromatsu’s arguments regarding the tension between the dimensions of synchronic structure and structuring movement. An earlier version of this paper can be found as “Philosophers” in John T. Blackmore, Itagaki Ryōichi, and Tanaka Setsuko, eds., Ernst Mach’s Influence Spreads, 425–76. (shrink)

The authors' commentary on Bruno Latour's "Technology is society made durable" provides the reader with an opportunity to become acquainted with actor-network theory.

I argue that Husserl’s transcendental account of the role of the lived body in sense-making is a precursor to Alva Noë’s recent work on the enactive, embodied mind, specifically his notion of “sensorimotor knowledge” as a form of embodied sense-making that avoids representationalism and intellectualism. Derrida’s deconstructive account of meaning—developed largely through a critique of Husserl—relies on the claim that meaning is structured through the complication of the “interiority” of consciousness by an “outside,” and thus might be thought to lend (...) itself to theories of mind such as Noë’s that emphasize the ways in which sense-making occurs outside the head. But while Derrida’s notion of “contamination” rightly points to an indeterminateness of meaning in an outside, extended, concrete lived world, he ultimately reduces meaning to a structure of signification. This casts indeterminateness in terms of absence, ignoring the presence of non-linguistic phenomena of embodied sense-making central to both the contemporary enactivist program and to the later Husserl, who is able to account for the indeterminateness of meaning in lived experience through his distinction between sense and more exact linguistic meaning. Husserl’s transcendental theory of meaning also allows for a substantive contribution to sense-making from the side of the perceived object—an aspect missing from Noë’s account. Thus, in contrast to Derrida and to Noë, Husserl accounts for sense-making in terms of both the lived body and the lived world. (shrink)

The article presents a theoretical discussion and sociological analysis about the tensions in the building of social sex/gender relationships that are at the basis of the exclusion of women within the political field. It shows contents in dispute in the production of politics, considering the weight that categories play in the relations at a global level and in the school, the attributions inside the system sex/gender, the significations in politics, and the modes in which it is subjectified, resisted and confront (...) different logics to understand life and politics, considering the conceptual distinctions between Bíos and Zoé. This discussion allows the analysis of the imaginary institution within systematic difficulties and obstacles of political and legal kind during the post dictatorship in Chile, where based on arguments about the sex/gender system, the exclusion of women from the political field is established, limiting the development of politics that valorizes cultural diversity and human rights, accentuating discrimination and social exclusion. These shape the discussion over the modes in which the political field for women is configured, recovering the possibilities of conflict as an opening of that horizon. El artículo presenta una discusión teórica y análisis sociológico acerca de las tensiones en la construcción social de las relaciones sexo/género, que fundamentan la exclusión del campo político de las mujeres. Se distinguen los contenidos en disputa en la producción de la política, considerando el peso que tienen las categorías en juego en las relaciones a nivel global y en el espacio de la escuela, las atribuciones dentro del sistema sexo/género, las significaciones de la política, y los modos en que se subjetivan, se resisten y se confrontan diferentes lógicas para entender la vida y la política, teniendo como base las distinciones conceptuales entre Bios y Zoé. Esta discusión permite analizar la institución del imaginario en el marco de las dificultades sistemáticas y obstáculos de tipo político y legal durante la post dictadura en Chile, donde sobre la base de argumentos propios del sistema sexo/género, se establece la exclusión del campo político de las mujeres, limitando el desarrollo de políticas que pongan en valor la diversidad cultural y los derechos humanos, acentuando la discriminación y la exclusión social. Estos dan forma a la discusión sobre el modo en que se configura el campo de lo político para las mujeres, recuperando las posibilidades del conflicto como apertura de este horizonte. (shrink)

We propose a reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of the problem of Self-Affection in the first Kantian Critique. If the Time and the ‘I Think’ are unified is due to the notion of time as pure Self-Affection, that could capture the formation of Self without subordinating it to an extra-temporal connection. We attempt to show that Heidegger’s account considers time as a self-referential movement which however requires a delay and a retreat of itself to release what is coming. In order to (...) allow an encounter with another, the self-affective structure must give time to herself, which prevents the autarchic closure of herself. (shrink)

Considerations of Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, and of deconstruction as theory and practice, are bound to revolve around Derrida’s key notion of différance, developed at the outset of his career. However, Derrida’s conception of justice, which started to make its presence felt in his work in the late 1980s, should also be considered to play a major role, not least when bearing in mind his declaration, made in 1989, that “deconstruction is justice.” In this paper, the relation between différance and justice (...) is explored against the background of Martin Heidegger’s essay “Anaximander’s Saying” which, it is argued, played a formative role in the development of Derrida’s thinking. Derrida’s analysis of justice as being comprised of three aspects—justice as idea, as law or right and as deconstruction—is shown to bear a strong resemblance with the conceptual scheme drawn from Anaximander in Heidegger’s essay. The parallels between Derrida’s différance and the notion of usage, described by Heidegger as “the early word for Being,” are also brought out. (shrink)

I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s intentions in the (...) world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such. (shrink)

Inferentialism is the conviction that to be meaningful in the distinctively human way, or to have a 'conceptual content', is to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules. The term was coined by Robert Brandom as a label for his theory of language; however, it is also naturally applicable (and is growing increasingly common) within the philosophy of logic.

Several years before the recent French-American diplomatic squabble, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, arguably America’s two greatest novelists, wrote major works of a markedly anti-French tenor. Indeed, both Ravelstein and The Human Stain, with their disparate griefs against the French, share a remarkably similar plot: against a back-drop of Gallic treachery, a courageously conservative academic, condemned to death by his sexual excesses, asks, before dying, a novelist friend to write the story of his life. Framed by a consideration of an (...) idiosyncratic work of American sculpture that appears to depict the sexual servicing of Abraham Lincoln and an evocation of the career of William Bullitt, Freud’s collaborator on a study of Woodrow Wilson and America’s ambassador to Paris during the fall of France, this essay offers a reading of both novels and raises the question of American sanctimony and the price France may be expected to pay for it. (shrink)

How might Derrida be said to greet Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher? What kind of handshake does he offer? Derrida explicitly mentions the handshake at the very centre of his book, in the tangent devoted to Merleau-Ponty. A reading of this moment reveals an exemplary case of what happens when Derrida reads apparently ‘fraternal’ texts, and opens up further levels of difference. What then if we consider Nancy's response to Derrida, when the recipient of the handshake shakes back? By examining (...) Nancy's various (mis-)readings of Derrida's famous phrase ‘la différance finie est infinie’ it is possible to trace a subtle but irreducible non-reciprocity in this relationship, represented in the handshake of the ‘salut’ as greeting and valediction, beyond all safety or salvation. (shrink)

Deconstruction is often depicted as a method of critical analysis aimed at exposing unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language. Starting from Derrida's contention that deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one, I make a case for a different attitude towards deconstruction, to which I refer as 'witnessing'. I argue that what needs to be witnessed is the occurrence of deconstruction and, more specifically, the occurrence of metaphysics-in-deconstruction. The point of witnessing metaphysics-in-deconstruction (...) is affirmative: it is an affirmation of what cannot be conceived in terms of the system and yet makes this system possible. To the extent to which education is concerned with the 'coming into presence' of new beginners and new beginnings, it shares an interest with deconstruction. Through a discussion of the role of communication in education I indicate how we might witness the occurrence of deconstruction in education. Through this we may be able to identify openings that can become potential entrances for the coming into presence of new beginnings and new beginners. Such an engagement with Derrida's work is more than the application of 'his' philosophy to the 'field' of education and therefore also has implications for how we think of the very idea of philosophy of education. (shrink)

This work tries to show that the metapoetic meditation developed by Ramos Rosa throughout his very extensive poetic work not only did not condemn his poetry to a cold cloister in the textual plane, but also contributed decisively to the opening to the real, to the effect of evidence and to the sense of communion that would become increasingly sensitive in his writing. To this end, we propose to clarify the thread that, under the aegis of the poetic lucidity consecrated (...) by the author, leads us from his metapoetic meditation to a poetic meditation of an ontophenomenological and sapiential nature, that is, from his metapoetry to a poetry whose wisdom provides a set of intuitions with a sapiential and philosophical accent. It is our intention to contribute, in this way, to the understanding of the (cognitive and ontological) demand and scope of Rosa’s poetic path, as well as, collaterally, to the debate around topics such as poetic (self-)reference, the ontological status of the poetic text or the philosophy-literature relationship. (shrink)

“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”. Intralinguistic Semantics and Its Philosophical and Cognitive Consequences The aim of this paper is to present and metatheoretically analyse the model of intralinguistic semantics as set forth by Umberto Eco in his Theory of Semiotics. The distinctive feature of this system is the rejection of the realistic category of reference, understood as a correspondence of meaningful units with the extralinguistic domain of interpretation, i.e., with a class of extralinguistic semantic correlates. As a result, the (...) main idea of Eco’s theory is to replace the traditional extralinguistic semantics with the new one, in which the meaning of each unit is determined solely by its relations with the other elements of the system. Language formed in this way is semantically autonomous, intralinguistically closed and self-explaining. Analysis of Eco’s theory by means of the appropriate conceptual apparatus reveals the far-reaching philosophical and cognitive implications of his approach in studies on language, meaning and truth. (shrink)

Este trabajo examina cómo, para ocupar la tribuna vacante del filósofo-orador José Ortega y Gasset, el exiliado Eduardo Nicol elaboró el emergente problema contemporáneo de la relación entre retórica y filosofía. Esta cuestión atañe tanto al qué como al para qué de la filosofía. ¿Hay un “grado cero” retórico en el pensamiento? Y si existe, ¿es el grado óptimo, considerando la meta humana de la filosofía? Nicol respondió ambas preguntas avanzando sobre la semiótica fenomenológica de Husserl, para establecer en la (...) comunicación humana la constitución simultánea de expresión, significación y objetividad; y renunciando a la brillantez ensayística de Ortega como paradigma de influencia cultural de la filosofía. Pero, en el primer camino, no extrajo todas las consecuencias de su expresionismo; en el segundo, hubo de admitir una norma retórica algo diferente del grado cero, ya que la humanidad estaba en peligro. El caso de Nicol, en diálogo con todas las corrientes de la filosofía contemporánea, reafirma el lugar central que en ellas viene ocupando la semiótica. (shrink)

En este artículo nos proponemos analizar, desde una perspectiva lógica y ontológica, la noción de una “cuarta persona de la Trinidad”, tal como aparece en el De fide orthodoxa y De imaginibus de Juan de Damasco. Sostendremos que esta “cuarta persona” pone en cuestión la lógica de la teología trinitaria. En la medida en que es irreductible a lo divino y a lo humano, así como a la materia y al espíritu, la cuarta persona posee una naturaleza extra-ontológica que exige (...) para expresarse, consecuentemente, una cuarta persona extra-gramatical más allá de la sintaxis. (shrink)

While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films – from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, to Brian De Palma's Obsession, and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.. What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a nightmare. But it is also a (...) shrewdly reflexive film that haunts filmmakers, critics, and artists alike, raising fundamental questions about the ontology of moving images and the regime of fascination that churns them out. Douglas Gordon's Feature Film, D.N. Rodowick's The Wanderers, and Lynn Hershman's VertiGhost are contemporary examples of how the appropriation and contemplation of some the film's most iconic motifs, themes and strategies ask us to rethink the relation of fetishism to fabulation, and supplementarity to dissimulation and social engineering. Feature Film, The Wanderers, and VertiGhost are supplementary works, but like the original film they are about duplicity, doppelgänger, and dissimulation. What interests us is how they challenge the authority over, or even proximity to, that which returns in the form of the supplement. And ultimately, attaching themselves to the chain of forgers and forgeries, these supplementary works take their place in the vertiginous sequence of substitutions the film established: a neat allegory for a reign of the digital ghosting that Hitchcock could never have anticipated. (shrink)

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening (...) by distinguishing between l’écoute and l’entente. L’écoute is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and l’entente is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of l’écoute, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (il s’écoute) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (se fait entendre) as he makes himself listened to (se fait écouter). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both l’entente and l’écoute when it listens as Chaplin listens. (shrink)

This article traces commonalities between the practices of visual animation and modern law through a political and jurisprudential reading of the animated film Ratatouille. It contends that Ratatouille’s treatment of the ontological and anthropological problem of the human soul not only addresses the philosophical complexities inherent to animation, but also the ideological and material conditions that currently govern the practice of égaliberté in contemporary liberal democracies.

Scientific communication takes place at two registers: first, interactions with colleagues in close proximity—members of a network, school of thought or circle; second, depersonalised transactions among a potentially unlimited number of scholars can be involved (e.g., author and readers). The interference between the two registers in the process of peer review produces a drift toward conflict of interest. Three particular cases of peer review are differentiated: journal submissions, grant applications and applications for tenure. The current conflict of interest policies do (...) not cover all these areas. Furthermore, they have a number of flaws, which involves an excessive reliance on scholars’ personal integrity. Conflicts of interest could be managed more efficiently if several elements and rules of the judicial process were accepted in science. The analysis relies on both primary and secondary data with a particular focus on Canada. (shrink)

If it is true that semiotics has tried to establish itself as an autonomous science starting with Saussure and Peirce, in imposing itself as a cultural fashion since the 1960’s, due especially to Roland Barthes and his interest in the language of connotations, it is also true that from ancient treatises of medicine to books of magic, from rhetoric to logic, from nature to science, symbols— even from different points of view—have been the object of passionate reflections.

Responding to Guattari’s call for a ‘mutation of mentality’, the article explores unconventional horse-assisted leadership learning as promising ways of embodied learning to be affected and response-able. By drawing on and continuing the work of Guattari and posthuman feminist scholars, we aim to show that studying the affective pedagogics of opening up the senses and learning to be affected is of vital importance. We analyse a posthuman auto-ethnography of developing capabilities to live and breathe together that allow us to relate (...) in alternative ways. Experiments with affective pedagogy are conducted as they affect bodies through indeterminate and liminal contact zones and use aesthetics to evoke transformation in senses and thoughts, care and response. Since they are both domesticated and non-human, horses are promising companions in this endeavour of entrainment. However, these sensorial experiments also call for an ethics of cutting connections and, not least, of permitting refusals of refusals. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold objective. First, it engages with the interrelation of time, space, and matter in Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida and questions whether and how this interrelation effects the possibility of self-relation. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger suggests that the very structure of subjectivity is constituted by what he calls the ‘pure self-affection’ of time and thus the possibility of self-relation is intimately bound up with the temporalizing of time. In his 1964–65 seminar, Heidegger: the (...) Question of Being and History, Derrida translates this pure affection of time into the more generic term ‘auto-affection,’ which will remain a pivotal reference point for his deconstruction of the metaphysical privileging of time as presence. Derrida shows how the (im)possibility of auto-affection is bound up not only with time but also with space, or rather with the ‘spacing of time’ that he also refers to as ‘the trace.’ Second, the paper moves across the frontiers of philosophy and physics posing anew the question concerning the interrelations of temporality, spatiality, and materiality. With reference to what in general relativity is called ‘the curvature of spacetime,’ the efficacy of materiality in the movement of auto-affection is called into question. (shrink)

Buddhism has always produced epistemological systems, and those of the Mahāyāna, in particular, always showed knowledge and perception to be inherently delusive. “Higher” forms of Buddhism have a degenerative philosophy of history according to which a sort of Golden Age was disrupted by the rise and gradual development of knowledge and the delusion inherent in it, which have reached their apex in our time – the final phase of the “Era of Darkness.” From this standpoint, this paper intends to show (...) science, in which Marcuse saw an inherent instrumental/technological interest, to have been developed by delusion and to have simultaneously furthered the development of delusion, to the point at which they begot the deadly ecological crisis proper to this concluding phase of the Era of Darkness – which reveals as such the delusion at its root, achieving the latter’s empirical reductio ad absurdum and offering us the possibility of eradicating it and thus healing our minds and, hopefully, our world. (shrink)

The difficulty to pin down the philosophical content of structuralism depends on the fact that it operates on an implicit metaphysics; such a metaphysics can be best unfolded by examining Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist critique of it. The essay argues that both structuralism and Derrida’s critique rely on holistic premises. From an initial externalist definition of structure, structuralism’s metaphysics emerges as a kind of ‘immanent’ holism, similar to the one pursued, in the contemporary analytic panorama, by Donald Davidson. By contrast, Derrida’s (...) deconstructionist critique appears engaged in a ‘quasi-transcendental’ version of holism, which the author analyzes in connection with Martin Heidegger’s notion of Verwindung, or twisted overcoming. (shrink)

What we generally regard as ‘the face’ should be semiotically understood not as something given and monolithic, but rather stratified – it is at least threefold: biological (face), physiognomic (expression), perceivable (visage) – and relational as it has to be put within a narrative in order to make sense. The face lies at the centre of a whole semiotic system, the form of life, revolving around the issue of identity (which the face – the visage, to be precise – embodies (...) and still does not resolve). What we may call ‘the natural face’ is not, as common sense would suggest, the precondition of the ‘culturalized’ one (featured with modifications ranging from make-up and proper masks to surgery), but rather just one of the possible semiotic masks a person may choose to wear. At the same time, the mask does not have to be reduced to a deceptive device only (nor to be meant merely as a material object), being in fact at the centre of a more complex axiology. The classic veridictory square articulating the opposition between Being and Seeming may provide a suitable model for the semiotic square of ‘visageness’, so that we would have: Face, Disguise (the place of the mask proper), Fake, Anonymity. Based on these theoretical premises, the paper finally addresses popular music and outlines a provisional map of the pragmatics of the mask (subtractive vs. additive, ritualistic vs. continuous, material vs. virtual, mask as face vs. face as mask), as a suggestion for further studies. (shrink)

The present study investigates the collocation-induced semiosis of the linguistic sign AFRICA as being used in the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (known as COCA) (Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): one billion words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). Drawing on a hybrid theoretical framework, the study utilizes Charles Peirce’s (1931–58) semiotic model of the sign and Roman Jakobson’s theory of “markedness” (Jakobson, Roman. 1972. Verbal communication. Scientific American (Special Issue, September 1). (...) 73–80) as well as Stuart Hall’s treatment of “code” (Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, & Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, 117–127. New York: Routledge) and John Swales’ notion of “discourse community” (Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The study empirically tests the hypothesis that, in a given discourse domain, the relevant interpretant can decode a linguistic sign (representamen) in the co-text of its marked collocates in a way that is collocationally used via the two modes of iconic and indexical signification. The concordance-based analysis conducted in the present study offers two findings, theoretical and practical. First, the study proposes the theoretical concept of collocational semiosis as one way of methodologically integrating the study of collocation into a structural-linguistic analytic framework that richly intersects with the genre-based notion of “discourse community.” Second, in the academic discourse community of the COCA, to the expert interpretant, the representamen AFRICA has been decoded due to its marked collocates which have been technically used in two modes of signification, viz. iconic and indexical. (shrink)

Debord’s influential theory of the spectacle is vitiated by its lack of historical and analytical differentiation. This article draws on Debord’s own undeveloped distinction between the concentrated spectacle and the diffuse spectacle in order to propose a double genealogy and a fourfold typology of the spectacle since the French Revolution.

What has changed in Wolff-Michael Roth’s approach to research on knowing, learning and teaching since “Enhancing student achievement through computer-generated homework”? What is the Author’s perspective on interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinarity? Is there any importance of cooperation between cognitive science and social studies of science? What will be the future of mathematics?

All concepts, methods, and techniques of the philosophy of language arise from its conceptions of language. Conceptions of language have determined the character of the philosophy of language and the direction of its philosophical research. Various schools and currents within the philosophy of language differ from each other, mainly in the way they understand the referential character of the sign—that is, the relationship between the meaning of a word and its referential object.