The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three (...) types of active literary engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, and necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading the narrator as not only a critic of colonial and postcolonial discourse but also a literary exemplar of the search for justice when it is difficult to know to what level of explanation to attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how the final season of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–19) makes a radical break from the previous three, exposing the misanthropy at the core of right-wing populism and calling for a fundamentally democratic response from the left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that poetry in performance has a potentially reparative function for the ethically lonely – the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the persecuted – in society. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the debate about cinematic motion in terms of the necessity for reception conditions in art. I shall argue that Gregory Currie’s rejection of weak illusionism – the view that cinematic motion is illusory – is sound, because cinematic images really move, albeit in a response-dependent rather than garden-variety manner. In §1 I present Andrew Kania’s rigorous and compelling critique of Currie’s realism. I assess Trevor Ponech’s response to Kania in §2, and show (...) that his focus on the cinematic experience is indicative of the direction the debate should take. §3 demonstrates that the issue is underpinned by the question of the role of reception conditions in the experience of art. In §4 I apply my observations on reception conditions to the problem of cinematic motion and conclude that Kania’s objections are unsuccessful due to his failure to acknowledge the necessary conditions for cinematic experience. (shrink)

Francis Hutcheson is generally accepted as producing the first systematic study of aesthetics, in the first treatise of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, initially published in 1725. His theory reflected the eighteenth century concern with beauty rather than art, and has drawn accusations of vagueness since the first critical response, by Charles Louis DeVillete in 1750. The most serious critique concerns the idea of beauty itself: whether it was simple or complex, and the (...) idea of a primary or secondary quality. It is the latter question I shall answer, attempting to clarify the problematic passage that appears at the end of the first section of Hutcheson’s first treatise. (shrink)

In this issue, Ahmadi1 reports on the practice of hymenoplasty—a surgical intervention meant to restore a presumed physical marker of virginity prior to a woman's marriage. As Mehri and Sills2 have stated, these women ‘want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.’ Although Ahmadi's research was carried out in Iran specifically, this surgery is becoming increasingly popular in a number of Western countries as well, especially among Muslim populations.3 What are the ethics of hymen restoration?Consider (...) the role of the physician. Two of the doctors interviewed by Ahmadi reported being in ‘a perpetual state of guilt because of the surgery's inherent aim at deceiving the groom’ and noted their ‘personal conflict’ at being involved in this deception. Yet: "None of the doctors believed that the surgery was unethical, arguing that the girl could be ‘abused’ and ‘can even die’ if she is discovered not … ". (shrink)

Cloud computing is considered as a new type of technology, in fact, it is an extension of the information technology's developments which are based on the pooling of resources and infrastructure to provide services depend on using the cloud, in the sense that instead of these services and resources exist on local servers or personal devices, they are gathered in the cloud and be shared on the Internet. This technology has achieved an economic success no one can deny it and (...) resorting to use it has many advantages, today it becomes known and recognized and begins to invade the libraries' area and imposes itself day by day because of the benefits afforded by using applications that have the ability to change the nature of library's services through the web hosting services which can be accessed via any internet connected device. And actually, libraries started using services provided by this technology especially in the field of digitization, indexing, supply, storage and the service of sharing and exchanging information resources in the virtual environment. For this, there is a need to conduct scientific research to find out librarians' trends and motivations about the use of cloud computing in their field of work. Where this research examines the librarians' trends towards the use of cloud computing according to the technology acceptance model (TAM). The study depended on descriptive analytical method using a questionnaire tool, and it has included all the libraries of Mentouri-Constantine1, libraries of university Abdelhamid Mehri-Constantine2, libraries of university Constantine 3, and libraries of Emir Abdelkader university of the Islamic science. And it reached a set of results including: that cloud computing is not used in a very large proportion by librarians, and they haven't a good cognitive level of its services, but in return, an interest was found by them to the cloud as a technology helps the office work implementation and the performance efficiency lifting and appreciates library services. (shrink)