Quality education needs quality teachers to achieve success. Thus, this study determined the factors related to the teachers’ performance in delivering the K to 12 Curriculum in the Narra del Sur district, Palawan, Philippines. A descriptive-correlational research design was employed, with a sample of 132 randomly selected public elementary teachers. The study used frequency counts and percentages, arithmetic mean and standard deviation, and Spearman’s rho to analyze and draw conclusions from the data. The findings revealed a correlation between the respondents’ (...) age and their utilization of teaching materials and ICT. The number of pupils taught was correlated with teachers’ commitment, while number of pupils taught, position, highest educational attainment, and length of service were related to the respondents’ performance. The main problem encountered by the respondents was excessive workloads, paperwork, and reports. To solve the problem teachers encountered in delivering the K to 12 Curriculum, the respondents preferred preparing a work plan and allocating time to daily and weekly tasks to avoid excessive workloads. These results may aid policymakers and curriculum developers in the Department of Education to make relevant enhancements to the factors that affect teachers’ performance in curriculum delivery. (shrink)

Three professors reflect on the experience of creating a learning community of 22 students by linking courses in Literature and Ethics. The project demonstrates practical strategies for incorporating feminist scholarship and pedagogy into the core curriculum and for integrating core courses from diverse disciplines.

Academic institutions migrated to modular teaching-learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure the quality of the pedagogical innovations employed, the study determined the students’ evaluation of the faculty prepared instructional modules for the courses they enrolled in during the first and second semesters of Academic Year 2020-2021. Employing a descriptive-correlational research design, the study was participated by 644 students from three colleges who were then available during the data gathering. Data gathered through online surveys were then analyzed using descriptive statistics (...) and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient utilizing jamovi software. Results revealed that the faculty-prepared instructional modules were acceptable and satisfactory to the students. Besides, the students' evaluation of the instructional modules was positively related to their level of satisfaction. Still, the students recommended that a review of the modules be done before sending the modules; a more extended time allotment is considered, and sufficient concrete examples are given in the modules. With this, the faculty concerned are encouraged to review the phases involved in the design, development, and distribution of the instructional modules to make them highly acceptable and very satisfactory to the students while maintaining the quality of both the content and aesthetics of the learning materials. Considering the study’s limitations, further endeavors may be carried out to validate this pedagogical innovation. (shrink)

In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...) that such feminists are wrong to worry about a threat of male violence in relation to trans women. In Section 1 we argue that ‘TERF’ is not a merely descriptive term; that to the extent that McKinnon offers considerations in support of the claim that ‘TERF’ is not a slur, these considerations fail; and that ‘TERF’ is a slur according to several prominent accounts in the contemporary literature. In Section 2, we argue that McKinnon misrepresents the position of gender critical feminists, and in doing so fails to establish the claim that the ideology behind these positions is flawed. In Section 3 we argue that McKinnon’s criticism of Stanley fails, and one implication of this is that those she characterizes as ‘positively privileged’ cannot rely on the standpoint-relative knowledge of those she characterizes as ‘negatively privileged’. We also emphasize in this section McKinnon’s failure to understand and account for multiple axes of oppression, of which the cis/trans axis is only one. (shrink)

Teaching Internship is an integral journey for pre-service teachers, providing a platform to apply academic knowledge in the workplace. However, emotional experiences are prevalent during the internship, posing challenges for pre-service teachers. Consequently, this study aims to understand the emotional experiences of pre-service teachers during their internship and assess how it impacts their performance. The current study employed a qualitative method, adhering to a multiple case study design. Ten (10) fourth-year elementary pre-service teachers from Immaculate Conception College of Balayan Inc. (...) were selected using purposive sampling technique. Then thematic analysis was utilized to analyze the data. Results revealed that participants experienced both positive and negative emotional experiences that challenge their self-confidence, time management, teaching abilities, and relationship with cooperating teachers and students. These results indicate that emotional experiences are highly evident during teaching internship. With this, the suggested advocacy plan in this study proposes interventions such as seminars, workshops, and tours to enhance the emotional resilience, emotional support, and emotional management of pre-service teachers. Furthermore, future research is advised to utilize diverse methodological techniques and include a larger sample of pre-service teachers from various majors to encompass broader perspectives on the discussed topic, building upon the findings of the current study. (shrink)

This study was intended to determine the level of factors affecting the decision of 4th year BS Accountancy students from College of Maasin to work after graduation or to take the 2022 CPALE. In order to determine the factors affecting the decision of the graduating Accountancy students, the researchers adopted the descriptive survey design. Descriptive survey is a sort of descriptive study that uses surveys to collect data on a variety of issues. The goal of this information is to see (...) how different circumstances can be obtained among the respondents. The following results were derived in the course of the conduct of this study; There is bigger percentage of female than of male where 26 out of 27 belongs to the age group of 20 to 22. Majority of the student’s parent’s occupation status is working. Conversely, most of them only earns P2,000 to P5,000 per month even though the household member earning for a living is 1 to 4 members, the first 3 factors namely financial status, peer pressure and parent’s influence were found to slightly affect the decision of the student with regards to taking the CPALE or to work after graduation. The last factor, school’s teaching influence turned out that it somewhat affects the decision of the students, there is a significant difference between the teaching influence factor and the demographic profile of gender while on the age and parent’s occupation status, it has a significance difference with financial status factor. As BSA students taking a course where a licensure examination awaits after graduation, it is necessary to take some factors into consideration before coming up into a decision regarding taking the CPALE or to work after graduation. Based on the results of the study, the level of factors to affect the decision of the students was determined. It has been shown in the results that the three factors namely financial status, peer pressure and parent’s influence can slightly affect the student’s decision. However, among three, peer pressure has the highest weighted mean rating of 2.86. On the other hand, the school’s teaching influence has the lowest weighted mean rating of 2.29 which means it can somewhat affect the decision of the student. (shrink)

Elementary preservice teachers (EPTs) substantially impact the quality of mathematics education, and their subject preference and problem-solving performance are essential indicators of their readiness to teach. The study described EPTs’ subject preference and problem-solving performance. Through a sequential explanatory research design, the quantitative inquiry involved 125 random samples, while the qualitative inquiry was participated by 30 non-random samples. Data were obtained by using an online survey and conferencing. Quantitative data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and analysis of variance, whereas qualitative (...) data were themed accordingly. The EPTs displayed unsatisfactory problem-solving performance and preferred to handle subjects other than math. Besides, the analysis found no significant performance differences with the EPTs’ subject preferences. Further, the EPTs who preferred to teach mathematics expressed their confidence in mathematics. Meanwhile, the EPTs who preferred other subjects displayed math avoidance. The study revealed an alarming result indicating that the EPTs are unprepared for teaching. As agents in cultivating the nation’s mathematics education status, these EPTs must be equipped with fundamental content knowledge. It is suggested that educational decision-makers take measures to address the issues identified concerning EPTs’ readiness to teach mathematics successfully. (shrink)

Emotions are an everyday occurrence. Much work has been done into what the point of emotion is and what part emotions might play in our lives. The great impact emotions have on our lives means it’s not surprising that great philosophers have studied them over the centuries. Anger is an emotion that we encounter every day and most of us are very familiar with. Anger is a response to some ‘wrongfully’ inflicted damage to someone or something that one cares about. (...) When this happens, it is natural for us to feel the need for ‘payback. It is generally agreed by most philosophers that this wish for retribution is a key part of feeling anger. If there is no wish for retribution in your mind when you think you experience anger then perhaps you are experiencing grief or some other emotion. Nussbaum states that anger is a central threat to decent human interactions and posits that a necessary component of anger is the wish for retribution. She states that a wish for retribution can occur independently of anger but anger cannot occur independently of a wish for retribution. In this case – we would be feeling different emotion. This paper has two sections; In section One I will discuss in detail Nussbaum’s view, the two concepts of anger she presents: ‘Payback Anger’ and ‘Status Anger’. The former being anger with a retributive element and the latter being where one would react to an insult or wrong with anger in order to ‘put someone back in their place’ so to speak. This is followed by a brief word on why Nussbaum thinks anger might be beneficial in some circumstances. Section Two discusses cases of anger without the retributive element and how Nussbaum might respond to these cases. We will see how we can be angry at something within our circle of concern but simply want an end to the issue such as a war. This may not involve retribution but still generates anger. I discuss how we can be angry at a flatmate or family member but not want retribution. “Self-Retributive anger” comes up as another case where there does not seem to be retribution involved in anger towards the self. I also discuss here what retribution might consist of and how Nussbaum’s view is unclear on this. The conclusion will summarise the objections to Nussbaum’s view and the objections to that view culminating in a request for further empirical research to determine if we can establish the nature of the feeling of anger in humans. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a new account of the philosophical motivations for Descartes’s theory of judgment. The theory needs explanation because the idea that judgment, or belief, is an operation of the will seems problematic at best, and Descartes does not make clear why he adopted what, at the time, was a novel view. I argue that attending to Descartes’s conception of the will as the active, free faculty of mind reveals that a general concern with responsibility motivates his (...) theory of judgment. My account avoids some unappealing features of the standard interpretation, renders the theory more plausible than many have suggested, and explains why his theory does not fall neatly into any current-day position on the issue of the control we have over belief. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

The generation of novel refined scientific conceptions of intelligence, creativity and consciousness is of paramount importance at a time where many scientists deem the technological singularity and the achievement of self-improving superintelligent algorithms to be immanent while numerous other scientists characterize present-day algorithms as the mere implementation of superficial mimicry incapable of yielding outcomes such as superintelligence. The precarious epistemic state of affairs reflected in this discrepancy became increasingly palpable in the unfolding deepfake era even though informed safety- and security-relevant (...) actions need requisite variety in the near-term. Divergently, historically speaking, from the perspective of cosmology, science is described to already have successfully navigated from the geocentric model to the acentric model of the universe representing the currently best known explanation for the structure of the expanding cosmos. In analogy, this autodidactic paper expounds the scientific need for a broader contextualization of the current epistemic situation and explicates why acentric civilization-level epistemic relativity and invariance considerations can enable a more rigorous scientific evaluation of algorithmic superintelligence achievement claims – constraining the latter scientifically. (shrink)

This epistemic project examines an understudied existential risk emerging in the deepfake era: the fortunately up to this time (but not indefinitely so) reversible peril of humanity’s epistemic self-sabotage through an overestimation of algorithms linked to quantitative aspects and a paired underestimation of the own epistemic potential whose manifestations are in principle expressible via scientifically analyzable but currently often neglected qualitative facets. This scenario is metaphorically referred to as "π-Doom scenario". Instead of carefully crafting opaque hypotheses and formulating probabilistic predictions (...) of timelines that could easily evade scrutiny and/or could even themselves be initially generated by algorithms, scientifically and responsibly counteracting π-Doom requires new better riskier explanatory theories of intelligence, creativity and consciousness. A brief non-comprehensive literature review suggests that quite a few scientific instantiations (all of which have not yet been provisionally refuted) of that transformative requirement are already available at present. In short, π-Doom – the voluntarily or unintentionally effectuated cognitive resignation engendering an irrational algorithmically-motored process of running around in (epistemic) circles that could endanger the immediate future of a vulnerable civilization like present-day humanity – is wholly contingent on a choice of focus. (shrink)

Recent AI progress led to a boost in beneficial applications from multiple research areas including VR. Simultaneously, in this newly unfolding deepfake era, ethically and security-relevant disagreements arose in the scientific community regarding the epistemic capabilities of present-day AI. However, given what is at stake, one can postulate that for a responsible approach, prior to engaging in a rigorous epistemic assessment of AI, humans may profit from a self-questioning strategy, an examination and calibration of the experience of their own epistemic (...) agency – especially to counteract both intentional misdirection by unethical actors and unintentional epistemic self-sabotage. In this paper, we expound on a new avenue of utilizing AIVR tools to advance an AI-related misdirection awareness of humans in the deepfake era. Firstly, we harness scientific knowledge from the psychology and neuroscience of magic where the study of misdirection techniques is center stage. Secondly, we connect the latter to creativity research linking human creative potential to inspiration from the seemingly impossible. Overall, AIVR could become an empowering experiential testbed for human epistemic agency enabling a better rational evaluation of AI capabilities. However, a misuse of the same type of tools could yield AIVR safety risks if not counteracted preemptively. (shrink)

This study investigated the effectiveness of utilizing induced magnetism on the seed germination of radish (Raphanussativus) in terms of growth rate, growth speed, shoot growth, and overall development. This study utilized two groups that consisted of an experimental group where induced magnetism was present one control group where there was an absence of induced magnetism in the seed germination of Radish (Raphanus sativus). Moreover, this study aimed to determine the significant difference between the two in terms growth rate, growth speed, (...) shoot growth, and overall development. Both groups had the same amount of radish (Raphanus sativus) seeds planted in a rectangular wooden container with the same amount of measurement and soil content. This study used an experimental research design by utilizing the functions of an Electromagnetic Induction Device (EID) comprised of a 12v motor battery, light bulb, coiled wire, and switch. The EID was turned on for 10 minutes every day where the electric volts generated by the 12v motor battery were transported through the coiled wire and distributed to the metallic iron screen surrounding the area of the experimental group. The data gathered during the 12-day observation of the growth of radish (Raphanus sativus) were tabulated, analyzed, and evaluated using mean tests, standard deviation, and T-test. Based on the result and analyses of the gathered data, it was found that the experimental group, the one with the presence of induced magnetism, surpassed the control group in terms of growth speed, shoot growth, and overall seed development. However, it was also revealed that in terms of growth rate, there is no significant difference between the control group and experimental group. Therefore, the utilization of Induced Magnetism on the seed germination of radish (Raphanus sativus) is effective in terms of growth speed, shoot growth, and overall development. (shrink)

The story of Miss Mary Mitchell Slessor is not a story of a clairvoyant legend who existed in an abstract world but a historical reality that worked around the then Old Calabar estuary and died on the 15th of January, 1915 at Ikot Oku Use, near Ikot Obong in the present day Akwa Ibom State and was buried at “Udi Mbakara” (Whiteman’s grave) in Calabar, Cross River State. Mary was one of those early missionaries that went to villages (...) in the then Old Calabar where few missionaries dared to go in order to bring hope and light to the people that were in darkness. Through her evangelistic efforts, schools and hospitals were erected on her initiative, babies and twins saved from death, barbaric rites and customs stopped because of her undaunted love and passion for God and the people. After a centenary of death, one can easily conclude that what immortalizes a person is not what he does for himself but what he does for others. Mary Slessor’s name, work and care for twins can never be forgotten even in another century to come. The tripartite purpose of this paper is to first examine the stepping out of Mary Slessor from her comfort zone to Calabar (her initial struggle), her passion for the people of Old Calabar and her relational method of evangelism that endeared her to the heart of the people. (shrink)

In The Women of Grub Street (1998), Paula McDowell highlighted the fact that the overwhelming majority of women’s texts in early modern England were polemical or religio-political in nature rather than literary in content. Since that time, the study of early modern women’s political ideas has dramatically increased, and there have been a number of recent anthologies, modern editions, and critical analyses of female political writings. As a result of Patricia Springborg’s research, Mary Astell (1668-1731) has risen to prominence (...) as one of the most astute female political commentators of her day. Springborg argues for Astell’s importance as one of the first systematic critics of the philosopher John Locke, and she interprets Astell’s political thought as a reaction to Lockean Whig politics in the early reign of Queen Anne. But some scholars claim that it is a mistake to think that Astell was chiefly preoccupied with Locke, and others suggest that reading Astell in relation to Locke alone can distort our understanding of her larger political theory. In this chapter, I argue that a more accurate picture of Astell’s political outlook emerges by examining a little studied essay, ‘A Prefatory Discourse to Dr D’Aveanant’ in her 1704 work Moderation Truly Stated. In this critique of Charles Davenant’s Essays upon Peace at Home, and War Abroad (1704), Astell provides a commentary on the political ruthlessness of Niccolo Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy. Astell’s comments reveal that, in an age in which the political vocabulary was turning to the language of rights, property, and liberty, she still subscribed to the ancient world view, and the ethical-political language of virtue and the good. My intention is to show that these ethical dimensions of Astell’s political thought are consonant with her wider philosophy. (shrink)

A doctorate-holding editor/columnist at an alternative newsweekly, Cooperman dissects the symbolism of and women's ambivalence toward their domestic roles as depicted in recent culturally diverse US feminist fiction. Conceiving housework as "an art and science of the boundaries," she discusses individual authors, novels, and shared motifs: domesticity as ordering chaos, the unappreciated hollow woman, sustaining home ties, powers of life and death, the sacred in the mundane, and reasons for making a home. Includes a decent categorized bibliography, but no index. (...) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

When Kant begins his judgements of beauty in several step eventually, we reach a nexus to which taste and a certain subjectivity is taken into account. But at the end of the day we ask ourselves why is it beautiful? There are certain objects such as tragic poems and video games that are beautiful deemed beautiful. In this essay I will explore the tension created by Kant’s judgements of beauty and the beauty of tragedy through the medium of poetry and (...) video games. Mary Mothersill’s (2004) Beauty and the Critics Judgment: Remapping Aesthetics article brings together how word itself authorizes the notion of beauty from which Kant’s own struggle with this tension is further unresolved. This important development is brought into the forefront when we treat art as an epistemic experience much like how John Dewey (1934) wrote in his book Art as Experience. By framing this with Georg Trakl’s poem Grodek and Hideo Kojima’s video game Death Stranding, we see that Kant’s judgments show an understanding of the beauty of tragedy. (shrink)

This paper examines the settlement movement (a social reform movement during the Progressive Era, roughly 1890–1920) in order to illustrate what pragmatism is and is not. In 1906, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch proposed an analysis of settlement house methods. Because of her emphasis on interpretation and action, and because of the nature of the settlement movement as a social reform effort with vitally important consequences for everyone involved, it might be thought that her analysis would be pragmatist in character. This (...) paper shows that her analysis is empiricist, not pragmatist, and offers an alternative pragmatist sketch of settlement house methodology. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which meaning is generically mediated in the novel. In particular it addresses the productive diversity of meanings generated by critical interpretation and asks how, given this diversity, comprehension and consensus might be possible. I argue that the construction of subject, object, space and time is achieved in the novel through different manifestations of four key metaphors: voice, view, setting and event. These metaphors supply meanings that rely on a common experience of embodiment. (...) Embodiment supplies the basis for an intersubjectively established consensus which identifies subjects and objects in terms that correspond to the semiotic, syntagmatic and semantic uses of metaphor. I begin by surveying and reviewing certain constructionist accounts of language and meaning in order to establish the importance of metaphor in conveying meaning in rhetorical, rather than linguistic, terms. I then discuss two examples of continental philosophy on speech: Derrida on voice and Foucault on discourse. I demonstrate how meaning is rhetorically constructed according to the use to which metaphors are put—whether they denote formal, semantic, or functional aspects of meaning—through an explication of Foucault’s theory, reserving Derrida’s grammatology for my analysis of the stabilisation of meaning in the theory of certain narratologists (Gérard Genette and Marie-Laure Ryan). Voice and view are key terms in literary theory, and I examine refinements to these metaphors in Genette and Ryan. The insistence of these narratologists on restricting the rhetorical dimension of meaning undermines the value of the literary work, prompting me to argue for a relaxing of such constraints. I read Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang for its uses of voice and point of view, many of which expose the limitations of the narratological approach. This is a theoretical thesis, which engages a wide range of perspectives—constructionist, deconstructionist, sociological and structuralist—together with their various accounts of language, metaphor, speech and meaning. In terms of sociological approaches to genre and discourse, I employ the chronotope as a critical tool, examining it in the context of the theme of the country house to demonstrate the role of two of my key metaphors, setting and event, which are important for the construction of space and time in abstract terms. Focusing on novels by Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the country house defines the space and the temporality through which thematic and “material” elements are mediated, I reveal how the chronotope supplies an overarching coherence that unites thought and event in narrative. My readings of these novels describe a theory that is concerned with the rhetorical capacities of genre rather than with taxonomic constructions of form. To this end I argue that the metaphorical dimensions of narrative—voice, view, setting and event—be loosely drawn, according to the acknowledged mutability of genre. I also emphasise the constructive effect of metaphor whilst according it a rhetorical versatility consistent with the mutability and instability of genre as a semiotic tool, concluding that consensus is achieved in our readings of novels through the form’s reliance on these four key metaphors of embodiment. These metaphors have ordinary, everyday, widespread usage beyond narrative theory; in appreciating their rhetorical value, it must be noted nonetheless that any confusion that ensues is productive, for it results in the diversities of meaning and form celebrated in the literary work. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The year 2009 has been a year of numerous commemorations of both scientific and non-scientific achievements that contributed to the advancement of human kind. Protestants celebrated the 500th anniversary of the birth of Calvin; literary critics celebrated the 200th anniversary of the poet Edgar Allan Poe; and the musical genius Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was also born 200 years ago. 2009 further marked the bicentennial of the birth of Louis Braille, the inventor of Braille; and Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the (...) United States, who founded the National Academy of Sciences. Pierre Curie, famous for his work on radioactivity that he conducted together with his wife Marie Curie, was born 150 ago; as was John Dewey, a philosopher and psychologist who is recognized as one of the founding fathers of both pragmatism as well as functional psychology. UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union dubbed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. By doing so, astronomers celebrated the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s telescopic observations as well as the publication of Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova wherein he formulated the first two laws of planetary motion. 2009 also marked the last of a 3-year-long celebration of Planet Earth, another UNESCO-governed initiative. However, for evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science, 2009 will be largely remembered for its worldwide commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his magnum opus On the origin of species by means of natural selection. Footnote1 In order to pay tribute to Darwin’s major contribution to the advancement of evolutionary science, the International Union of Biological Sciences and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science have called the year 2009 the Darwin Year. Given that so many scientific discoveries were commemorated, COPUS, the Coalition on the Public Understanding on Science, called out 2009 as the Year of Science, in the hope to pay equal tribute to both the field of biology as well as astronomy. 2009 was indeed a year of biology. Somewhat overshadowed by the big Darwin celebrations, smaller-scaled events were held to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique; and the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt, the father of biogeography. In 1910, Constantin Mereschkowsky wrote his article on symbiogenesis entitled ‘The Theory of Two Plasmas as the Basis of Symbiogenesis, a New Study for the Origins of Organisms’. The article was published in the German Biologisches Zentralblatt, the journal that would later evolve into the current Theory in Biosciences. Somewhat forgotten, but equally important for the field of symbiogenesis, was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden, a Belgian paleontologist and zoologist famous for distinguishing parasitism from commensalism. Finally, Henry Bergson, known for inventing the currently rejected notion of élan vital, was born 150 years ago. In order to memorialize the important role these biologists played in the advancement of our understanding of the evolutionary process, a 2-day international conference was organized entitled: Evolution today and tomorrow, Darwin evaluated by contemporary evolutionary and philosophical theories. The conference was organized by The Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), in collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Biology of the same university, and the Lisbon Centre for Applied Psychology. The articles presented here are a spin-off of this conference. The current volumes contain the peer-reviewed articles of a selection of the plenary and invited speakers, as well as those of scholars who were additionally invited to contribute to the volumes. (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...) body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. Foreward by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Authors include Noel Carroll, Gregory Velazco Y Trianosky, Monique Roelofs, Whitney Davis, Eleanor Heartney, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Phoebe M. Farris, Mary Devereaux, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Karina L. Cespedes-Cortes and Paul C. Taylor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Stephen Davies, Jane Duran, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Keith Lehrer, Allen Douglas, Cynthia Freeland, Eva Kit Wah Man, Mary Bittner Wiseman, and Peg Brand's essay, "ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty.". (shrink)

The paper presents basic Gestalt psychological concepts of ego and self. They differ from other concepts in the way that they do not comprehend ego and self as fixed entities or as central controlling instances of the psyche, but as one specific organized unit in a psychological field in dynamic interrelation with the other organized units—the environment units—of this field. On this theme, well-known representatives of Gestalt theory have presented some general and special theories since the early days of this (...) approach that could partly be substantiated experimentally. They illuminate the relationship between ego and world in everyday life as well as in the case of mental disorders. Not only the spatial extension of the phenomenal ego is subject to situational changes, but also its place in the world, its functional fitting in this world, its internal differentiation, its permeability to the environment, and much more. The German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger emphasizes the significant functional role that this dynamic plasticity of the phenomenal world and its continuously changing segregation of ego and environment have for human life by designating the phenomenal world as a “Central Steering Mechanism.” In this article, ego and self as part of this field in their interrelation with the total psychological field will be illuminated from the perspective of the thinking of the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Lewin, Wolfgang Metzger, Mary Henle, Edwin Rausch, and Giuseppe Galli. (shrink)

In the fall of 1990 I had just began my doc- toral studies at the University of Connecticut. Freshly arrived from Italy, I came to the United States to work with Carl Schlichting on something to do with phenotypic plastic- ity. I spent most of that semester discussing with other graduate students what I thought was a momentous paper by Mary Jane West- Eberhard (1989) in the Annual Review of Ecol- ogy and Systematics. That paper, entitled Phe- notypic (...) Plasticity and the Origins of Diversity, was a (quite lengthy) forerunner of the (also quite bulky) book I am reviewing now. Like the paper, this volume has the potential to be momentous in the development of our ideas on phenotypic evolution. (shrink)

O renascimento do pragmatismo foi acompanhado por uma série de filósofas feministas que se esforçaram para resgatar do esquecimento as pensadoras que fizeram parte do movimento pragmatista clássico do final do século XIX e primeira metade do século XX. O presente trabalho visa introduzir aos leitores de língua portuguesa esse trabalho a partir de uma breve exposição das pensadoras Jane Addams, Mary Parker Follet, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Whiton Calkins e Ella Flagg Young.

From the Qur'an, Surah Maryam: -/- (21) So she conceived him, and went in seclusion with him to a remote place. (22) And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree: she cried (in her anguish): "Ah! would that I had died before this! Would that I had been a thing forgotten and out of sight!" (23) But (a voice) cried to her from beneath the (palm tree): "Grieve not! for thy Lord hath provided a (...) rivulet beneath thee;" (24) "And shake towards thyself the trunk of the palm tree: it will let fall fresh ripe dates upon thee." (25) "So eat and drink and cool (thine) eye. And if thou dost see any man say 'I have vowed a fast to (Allah) Most Gracious, and this day will I enter into no talk with any human being.'" -/- This Surah depicts a human being in unbearable pain. What makes the pain tolerable is the sympathy that God shows for Mary. Hearing her inner voice, understanding her suffering and her grief, God is moved to provide her with practical and substantive support to help her bear her agony. For me this story portrays a God who is active in the world, hears the supplications of humanity, and has empathy with the needy, the oppressed, and those who are suffering. -/- Yet I am concerned that our theological traditions in the Islamic world (as also in Christendom) have developed through the centuries such that God is now seen, by overwhelming theological consensus, as an immutable being, a being outside time who has determined our providence from the standpoint of eternity, who has foreknowledge of every free action of his creations and has designed all according to His plan for past and future events; who knows in advance even the timings and contents of our petitionary prayers and has decided already whether to answer them. (shrink)

This paper identifies, develops, and argues for an interpretation of Mary Astell’s understanding of self-government. On this interpretation, what is essential to self-government, according to Astell, is an agent’s responsiveness to her own reasoning. The paper identifies two aspects of her theory of self-government: an ‘authenticity’ criterion of what makes our motives our own and an account of the capacities required for responsiveness to our own reasoning. The authenticity criterion states that when our motives arise from some external source (...) without validation by our own understanding of the reasons supporting them, then they are not our own. The capacities requisite for responsiveness to our own reasoning are those of examining and evaluating our own motives and of resisting the social pressure to conform to others’ opinions. An upshot of this interpretation of Astell’s theory of self-government is that it reveals her insights into the ways ‘custom’ can undermine an individual’s ability to govern oneself. (shrink)

Mechanisms are said to consist of two kinds of components, entities and activities. In the first half of this chapter, I examine what entities and activities are, how they relate to well-known ontological categories, such as processes or dispositions, and how entities and activities relate to each other (e.g., can one be reduced to the other or are they mutually dependent?). The second part of this chapter analyzes different criteria for individuating the components of mechanisms and discusses how real the (...) boundaries of mechanisms are. (shrink)

Leuridan (2011) questions whether mechanisms can really replace laws at the heart of our thinking about science. In doing so, he enters a long-standing discussion about the relationship between the mech-anistic structures evident in the theories of contemporary biology and the laws of nature privileged especially in traditional empiricist traditions of the philosophy of science (see e.g. Wimsatt 1974; Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005; Bogen 2005; Darden 2006; Glennan 1996; MDC 2000; Schaffner 1993; Tabery 2003; Weber 2005). In our view, Leuridan (...) misconstrues this discussion. His weak positive claim that mechanistic sciences appeal to generalizations is true but uninteresting. His stronger claim, that all causal claims require laws, is unsupported by his arguments. Though we proceed by criticizing Leuridan’s arguments, our greater purpose is to embellish his arguments in order to show how thinking about mechanisms enriches and transforms old philosophical debates about laws in biology and provides new insights into how generalizations afford prediction, explanation and control. (shrink)

We characterize four fruitful and underappreciated epistemic roles played by the concept of an individualized niche in contemporary biology, utilizing results of a qualitative empirical study conducted within an interdisciplinary biological research center. We argue that the individualized niche concept (1) shapes the research agenda of the center, (2) facilitates explaining core phenomena related to inter-individual differences, (3) helps with managing individual-level causal complexity, and (4) promotes integrating local knowledge from ecology, evolutionary biology, behavioral biology and other biological fields. We (...) thereby also challenge arguments that the niche concept is superfluous in ecology. (shrink)

This chapter is a substantially expanded version of (and so substantially supersedes) “Words Fail Me. (Stanley Cavell’s Life Out of Music)” that appeared in Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2020). It offers to read Cavell’s claim that “philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical.” Its guiding thought is that a life that finds a home in philosophy from out of its devotion to music (as is true of, among others, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, all (...) philosophers Cavell wrote about and cared about) will take on a certain character. In Cavell’s case, his distinctive orientation in philosophy—call this his lifelong coming to terms with his abandoning a life in music—is guided in part by (1) an interest in those moments in experience where words seem to run out, or veer toward nonsense, leaving in their wake touchstones of ecstasy; and (2) an interest in the education of the senses, without which interest we risk their starvation. These twin claims are illustrated through an interweaving of remarks and reminiscences of Cavell on music that culminate in a reading of his last published pieces devoted to music, primarily “Impressions of Revolution.”. (shrink)

"The enterprise initiative is probably the most significant political and cultural influence to have affected Western and Eastern Europe in the last decade. In this book, academics from a range of disciplines debate Mary Douglas's distinctive Grid Group cultural theory and examine how it allows us to analyse the complex relation between the culture of enterprise and its institutions. Mary Douglas, Britain's leading cultural anthropologist, contributes several chapters."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights (...) Reserved. (shrink)

What are the conditions under which one biological object is a part of another biological object? This paper answers this question by developing a general, systematic account of biological parthood. I specify two criteria for biological parthood. Substantial Spatial Inclusionrequires biological parts to be spatially located inside or in the region that the natural boundary of t he biological whole occupies. Compositional Relevance captures the fact that a biological part engages in a biological process that must make a necessary contribution (...) to a condition that is minimally sufficient to one or more of the characteristic behaviors of the biological whole. Instead of emphasizing the diversity of part-whole relations in the biological world, this paper asks what biological part-whole relations have in common and what constrains their existence, in general. After presenting the two criteria for biological parthood I discuss in how far my account can cope with hard cases (e.g., redundant parts) and I reveal the merits and limits of monism. (shrink)

This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on reduction.

"William Day is . . . concerned to explore the dynamics of what Cavell calls 'a theology of reading' through a careful examination of a fragment of the philosopher's autobiography first published as 'Excerpts from Memory' (2006) and subsequently revised for Little Did I Know (2010). If, as Cavell suggests, 'the underlying subject' of both criticism and philosophy is 'the subject of examples', in which our interest lies in their emblematic aptness or richness as exemplars, exemplarity becomes central to the (...) aim of our reading. . . . Day considers how autobiography as a genre is preoccupied with the question of the author's exemplarity (Augustine or Rousseau), and in Cavell's retelling in 'Excerpts from Memory' he discusses how an event that Cavell would have us read allegorically - his move at the age of seven to a new apartment, his coming upon a familiar bowl containing nonpareils, his remark upon this to his father and his father's violent reaction - recasts a scene of paternal hatred as the child's offer of communion. Day suggests that this retelling proves to be redemptive: first, of the incident itself, and second, of the reader's own experience. Seeing how to read this autobiographical life as exemplary helps us to transfigure our own moments of deprivation into so many possibilities for freedom." --James Loxley and Andrew Taylor, introductory chapter to Stanley Cavell: Philosophy, Literature and Criticism, 15-16. (shrink)

Michelle’s thesis explores the extent to which a researcher could contribute to change by engaging leaders in conversations that might intensify commitment to or the direction of their actions around socio-environmental decline in Bermuda as a country historically organised in the tradition of an entrepreneurial for-profit enterprise. The framing of a space to reflect on highlighted the significance of time that led to the bricolage design of a heuristic device called a moon gate. Time, the keystone of the moon gate, (...) created a prism lighting up the twists and turns of kaleidoscopic images of the chaos of the markets and the creative diversity of human and nonhuman participants. She undertook a philosophical approach with her study of the contested space of time around sensitivity to maintaining a fulcrum point based on the wellbeing of people and planet. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of biology argues that we must rethink the biological individual beyond the boundary of the species, given that a key part of our essential functioning is carried out by the bacteria in our intestines in a way that challenges any strictly genetic account of what is involved for the biological human. The gut is a kind of ambiguous other within our understanding of ourselves, particularly when we also consider the status of gastro-intestinal disorders. Hegel offers (...) us theoretical tools to describe and understand our relationship to our gut. His description of our selves as continually mediated through otherness is strikingly compatible with the kind of structure contemporary biology presents us with. His accounts of digestion and habit, contextualized by his logic, help point toward an understanding of selfhood as porous and yet still capable of being sufficiently unified for us to make sense of ourselves, one which allows us to acknowledge otherness within us while still having enough unity for agency. (shrink)

Over the past few years we have seen an increasing number of legal proceedings related to inappropriately implemented technology. At the same time career paths have diverged from the foundation of statistics out to Data Scientist, Machine Learning and AI. All of these new branches being fundamentally branches of statistics and mathematics. This has meant that formal training has struggled to keep up with what is required in the plethora of new roles. Mathematics as a taught subject is still based (...) in decades old teaching specifications and has not been updated centrally as a curriculum to include new technologies, coding or ethics. This subject area is firmly split between ICT and Mathematics in secondary school, continuing on to be split between Computer Science and Mathematics at University. As we move forwards with technology we see these once seperate fields becoming increasingly intertwined. We propose that existing provision for concepts such as ethics and societal responsibility in analysis currently exist but have not been incorporated into the mainstream curriculum of School or University. This is partially due to the split between fields in an educational setting but also the speed with which education is able to keep up with Industry and its requirements. Principles and frameworks of socially responsible modelling beginning at school level means that ethics and real-life modelling are introduced much earlier than normal. Integrating these concepts with philosophical principles of society and politics ensures a suitable background for future modellers and users of technology to draw on. Modelling is currently undertaken in technical sciences at University but the Subject Benchmark Statements are not current (Subject Benchmark Statements describe the nature of study and the academic standards expected of graduates in specific subject areas. They show what graduates might reasonably be expected to know, do and understand at the end of their studies). Even in 2019 the UK did not yet have Benchmark Statements that discuss the learning to be done in Higher Education around AI and advanced Machine Learning. Where there is provision for AI and Data Science within degree courses ethics is not generally highlighted as a key concept. As such there can be a lack of focus on the teaching of modelling or ethics as specific skills. The skills required to use a basic statistical model, for example would not be sufficient to start from scratch and build an ethical model reflecting real-world scenarios with which to inform policy or organisational decision making. This is a skill in itself and includes such aspects as awareness of data quality, ethics, user implementation problems, context and an understanding of the environment that the model is being created in. As the field of analytics has progressed so quickly in the last decade modules such as those covering AI have simply been bolted on to Maths or Computing degrees rather than being fully detailed as key areas of study or driving new, more integrated courses of study. This paper posits that gaps at primary, secondary and tertiary educational levels need to be addressed. Implementing and integrating key concepts from school level is essential so that areas such as assumptions, caveats, quality assurance and answering the right questions with constructive challenge become a cultural fixture. This not only helps developers of technology but users of rapidly developing technology also. In addition, leadership and soft skills as part of this education will ensure that a cultural shift can take place and promote continuous improvement in analysis within organisations. The addition of key concepts throughout the educational system and the updating of potentially outdated curriculums is key to ensuring a functional society. A society where every citizen is a user of tech and those that develop it can be ethical and socially responsible in its development. (shrink)

"Lest one think that the focus on aspect-seeing in Wittgenstein is only a means to more contemporary philosophical ends, one ought to read Day’s remarkable 'Wanting to Say Something: Aspect-Blindness and Language'. Day considers the issue of aspect-blindness, arguing that universal aspect-blindness is impossible for beings with language. Specifically, he shows that a child’s first attempt at language, at trying “bloh” for “ball,” is neither an indication that the child sees the ball for the first time, nor an indication that (...) the child is giving a first label for an object seen all along. Rather, he shows that this attempt is an indication of the dawning of an aspect. The dawning of aspects, so common during the phase of language acquisition, becomes supplanted by language itself. Universal aspect-blindness is not humanly possible, then. Day argues that the acquisition of language results in a loss of desire for aspects (which it is possible to regain through art). Localized aspect-blindness is familiar because as language-users, we have lost our desire for aspects. Day then turns to questions about the deep purpose behind Wittgenstein’s style. Why are those doubting voices prominent? Why does Wittgenstein demand so often that the reader answer his questions? Day shows that these elements of Wittgenstein’s style arise from a motivation to regain his own desire for aspects, and he wants to re-awaken our own desire for aspects. Day motivates us to consider aspect-seeing in order to see Wittgenstein himself anew." --Chris Weigel, Book Review of Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Journal of the History of Philosophy 49:2 (April 2011): 263. (shrink)

Government transparency and accountability during Covid 19: The data underpinning decisions.

Marie Oldfield, Pro Bono Economics & Refugee Council. Over half the total applications for asylum the UK receives each year are initially rejected, yet nearly a third of these initial rejections are subsequently overturned on appeal. This process that fails to get decisions right first time imposes significant costs, not just on the applicants themselves, but also more widely on UK taxpayers. Asylum seekers are not entitled to welfare benefits nor employment except in some limited cases, and are often placed (...) in unsuitable conditions with lack of appropriate support to prepare their case for asylum. These unfortunate circumstances mean that they are unable to gather and present all the required evidence first time, even when the case for asylum is legitimate. As a result, the application is rejected and thus begins a cycle of appeals that might eventually lead to a successful outcome for the asylum seeker but will, in the process, burden the taxpayer with unnecessary administrative cost and cause the asylum seeker needless distress and prevent them from accessing suitable economic opportunities. • Our study estimates that there are approximately 4,000 initial rejections that are successfully appealed each year and, with each appeal incurring direct administrative costs of around £1,000, the price tag of incorrect initial decisions adds up to a hefty £4 million per year in unnecessary administrative costs alone. • There are other costs, too, that negatively impact asylum seekers and taxpayers, albeit in a more indirect manner. The longer the appeals process is dragged out, the more delay there is to successful asylum seekers entering the labour market which means lost economic activity and forgone tax revenue for the Exchequer. Long periods of unemployment also result in skills attrition and lower the probability of the asylum seeker successfully entering the labour market in the future. • A lengthy appeals process heightens stress and worsens mental health in asylum seekers, a group arguably already more vulnerable on this front. Unnecessary human suffering aside, there is also a monetary cost borne by the taxpayer should NHS mental health services become involved. Thus, there is a pressing and viable case for providing asylum seekers a stable environment in which to complete their applications for asylum. This would increase the likelihood of reaching correct decisions in the first instance, avoid unnecessary administrative costs of an arduous appeals process, enable successful asylum seekers to access the labour market and contribute to the Exchequer, and avoid placing extra demands on already strained NHS mental health services. (shrink)

Why interdisciplinary research in AI is so important, according to Jurassic Park. -/- “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” -/- I think this quote resonates with us now more than ever, especially in the world of technological development. The writers of Jurassic Park were years ahead of their time with this powerful quote. -/- As we build new technology, and we push on to see what can actually (...) be achieved there is an undertone of sales to whatever we build. The end product must be sold somewhere and to someone. This can derail any good intentions, just as building a resort full of dinosaurs was sold as a fun attraction, we see later in the film that it became a resort of terror. -/- In the field of AI we are certainly late to the party with ethics and regulation. Indeed, even existing modelling protocols have been, in many cases, circumvented or potentially ignored. This has led to a widening of the gap in the interdisciplinary field of AI. This is compounded by pop culture representations of AI and the Ethicist’s potential lack of knowledge surrounding technical progression in the field of AI. There are now seemingly two separate branches that ought to be in sync. The first branch is a group of Philosophers led by the Author of Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom, who believe that there is a singularity where AI takes over the world and starts to kill off humans. The second branch is the Technical Cohort who are led by companies such as Google and Deepmind. The remit of these developers is to see what can be developed and produced. Ultimately a separate sales team will determine what products can be sold. -/- We have seen multiple failures of AI due to lack of interdisciplinary discourse. Some cases include misallocated or cut off financial support and healthcare. This indicates the prevalence of issues that can grow and become ever more complex. -/- So, we have to ask ourselves two questions: One, do the Philosophers have a point? Two, does that point refer to humans programming AI in such a way that the destruction of the human race is its optimal aim in order to create a better future world? -/- Is the development of AI that different to an island of genetically engineered Dinosaurs? -/- The only solution, in my view, is interdisciplinary discourse. (shrink)

We argue that relating to myself as me provides, as such, a reason to care about myself: grasping that an event involves me, instead of another, makes it matter in a special way. Further, this self-concern is not simply a matter of seeing in myself some instrumental value for other ends. We use as our foil a recent skeptical challenge to this view offered in Setiya 2015. We think the case against self-concern is powered by unwarrantedly narrow construals of three (...) key notions. One is the notion of a first-personal way of relating to oneself. A narrow account of the first person in terms of special epistemic relations to oneself makes it easy to overlook a source of non-instrumental reasons of self-concern, located in the special relation a subject has to herself as agent. Two is the notion of what it is to be a reason. And, three, is the notion of self-concern itself. We show that the skeptical case rests in part on a slide towards neighbouring but distinct notions of egoism and selfishness. We also argue that Setiya’s notion of self-love, offered to capture the pre-theoretical intuition of self-concern, cannot do it justice. (shrink)

This paper examines how metaphors shape our thinking about and conceptualizing of artificial intelligence (AI), noting that their inherent imprecision leads to discrepancies in our understanding and objectives for AI. By exploring the concept of 'bad metaphors' that equate artificial intelligence with human intelligence, paper argues that these metaphors often carry additional, unintended meanings that distort our understanding and expectations of AI. The terms “artificial” and “intelligence” themselves are ambiguous and ideologically loaded, contributing to the complexity. The paper critiques the (...) anthropocentric and mechanistic metaphors, like “AI as human” and “brain-computer,” which perpetuate unrealistic expectations. By deconstructing these metaphors within broader cultural and historical contexts, the paper calls for a more nuanced and precise understanding of AI, moving beyond simplistic and potentially misleading analogies. (shrink)