In 2023, Antarctic sea ice declined to historically low levels, prompting researchers to use CMIP6 climate models to assess the event’s rarity and connection to climate change.

Climate change, primarily driven by human activities, is becoming one of the most urgent global challenges of our time. Despite lingering doubts about climate change in some research documents, strong consensus within the scientific community still affirms that global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. Over the past decade, significant efforts have been made by humans to address the climate change crisis, resulting in certain impacts in combating climate change and raising awareness about its consequences. However, the question remains: (...) Are we heading in the right direction to effectively address this crisis, or do we need to reconsider our approach? This essay will examine some of major achievements in the fight against climate change, the increasing awareness of its impacts, the escalating severity of the climate crisis, and whether our actions are on the right track or require reevaluation. (shrink)

Hiện tượng băng tan ở Nam Cực đang ngày càng nguy hiểm với sức khỏe Trái Đất nói chung, và các cộng đồng cư dân bao gồm cả con người nói riêng. Nghe thì xa xôi vậy, nhưng tác động đang trở nên gần hơn bao giờ hết. Về mặt chu kỳ thời tiết, theo quy luật tự nhiên, giai đoạn hiện nay đáng ra phải là thời kỳ Trái Đất dịu mát đi. Thế nhưng trên thực tế, nhiệt độ (...) lại đang gia tăng. Suốt ba thập niên vừa qua, nhiệt độ Trái Đất liên tục tăng ở các mức kỷ lục chưa từng thấy kể từ khi dữ liệu bắt đầu được thống kê. (shrink)

Unlike resounding strikes and political agendas with much fanfare concerning the fight against the upcoming—or current, if you like it better—climate breakdown, little has been done to save the Earth and its atmosphere.

Since the last ice age, when ice enveloped most of the northern continents, the earth has warmed by about five degrees. Within a century, it is likely to warm by another four or five. This revolution in our climate will have immense and mostly harmful effects on the lives of people not yet born. We are inflicting this harm on our descendants by dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We can mitigate the harm a little by taking measures to control (...) our emissions of these gases, and to adapt to the changes by, for instance, building sea walls around coastlines threatened by rising sea levels. But these measures will be very expensive, and the costs will be born by us, the present generation, whereas the benefits will come to future generations. How much should we sacrifice for the sake of the future? Economists and philosophers have independently worked on the question of our responsibility to future generations. This book brings their work together and applies it to global warming. It suggests a programme for future research on the economic and ethical issues. The book is intended for economists, and for philosophers and other social scientists who have a little knowledge of economic methods. (shrink)

A key challenge for probabilistic causal models is to distinguish non-causal probabilistic dependencies from true causal relations. To accomplish this task, causal models are usually required to satisfy several constraints. Two prominent constraints are the causal Markov condition and the faithfulness condition. However, other constraints are also needed. One of these additional constraints is the causal sufficiency condition, which states that models must not omit any direct common causes of the variables they contain. In this paper, I argue that the (...) causal sufficiency condition is problematic: (1) it is incompatible with the requirement that the variables in a model must not stand in non-causal necessary dependence relations, such as mathematical or conceptual relations, or relations described in terms of supervenience or grounding, (2) it presupposes more causal knowledge as primitive than is actually needed to create adequate causal models, and (3) if models are only required to be causally sufficient, they cannot deal with cases where variables are probabilistically related by accident, such as Sober’s example of the relationship between bread prices in England and the sea level in Venice. I show that these problems can be avoided if causal models are required to be monotonic in the following sense: the causal relations occurring in a model M would not disappear if further variables were added to M. I give a definition of this monotonicity condition and conclude that causal models should be required to be monotonic rather than causally sufficient. (shrink)

The global Climate Change has unprecedented consequences in terms of scale and severity over human life. The accumulation of greenhouse gases and CFCs has increased environmental deterioration which is called global warming. Erratic changes in weather, brutal blizzards and floods, vicious heat wave etc. are only some of the effects of climate change. But the most dangerous effect of climate change is the melting of ice caps on the poles due to which sea levels are rising dangerously and life at (...) the poles is threatened. It is also a reality that habitation in several countries , not very much above the sea-level, for example, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Indonesia, which have a threat of huge displacement of human beings and domestic animals due to global warming. The survival of millions of people in developing countries like India is more vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change because of their limited capacity in terms of human financial and institutional resources. India is the world’s fourth largest economy and fifth largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter, accounting for about 5% of global emissions. India’s emissions increased 65% between 1990 and 2005 and are projected to grow another 70% by 2020. The major impacts of Climate Change on India are major shifts in temperature, effect on monsoons, rising of sea levels, change in crop cycle, etc. India has prepared the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) in 2008 for energy efficiency and sustainable development. India is a part to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Under the Ministry of Environment and Forests, a National Inventory Management System (NIMS) has been formed to generate a comprehensive knowledge base on scientific issues related to climate change and mitigation. This paper highlights the issue of impacts of climate change and measures adopted by the government to minimize the dangers. (shrink)

The sunspot data seems to indicate that the Sun is likely to enter Maunder Minimum, then it will mean that low Sun activity may cause low temperature in Earth. If this happens then it will cause a phenomenon which is called by some climatology experts as “The Little Ice Age” for the next 20-30 years, starting from the next few years. Therefore, the Earth climate in the coming years tend to be cooler than before. This phenomenon then causes us to (...) ask: what can we do as human being in Earth to postpone or avoid the worsening situation in terms of Earth cooling temperature in the coming years? We think this is a more pressing problem for the real and present danger that we are facing in the Earth. What we are suggesting in this paper is that perhaps it is possible to model Sun-Earth interaction in terms of Shannon entropy. Since Shannon entropy can be expressed as bits of information, then it would mean that perhaps we can do something with Earth temperature by controlling the amount of information transfer and storage in the Earth. This proposal is somewhat in resemblance with message of a 2012 movie “A Thousand words” where we shall strive to love our neighbours and nature, instead of being absorbed in a culture of less-meaningful fast-talk (starred by Eddie Murphy). (shrink)

‘Mapping accounts’ of applied mathematics hold that the application of mathematics in physical science is best understood in terms of ‘mappings’ between mathematical structures and physical structures. In this paper, I suggest that mapping accounts rely on the assumption that the mathematics relevant to any application of mathematics in empirical science can be captured in an appropriate mathematical structure. If we are interested in assessing the plausibility of mapping accounts, we must ask ourselves: how plausible is this assumption as a (...) working hypothesis about applied mathematics? In order to do so, we examine the role played by mathematics in the multiscalar modelling of sea ice melting behaviour and examine whether we can indeed capture the mathematics involved in the kind of mathematical structure employed by the mapping account. Along the way, we note that the cases of applied mathematics that appear in discussions of mapping accounts almost exclusively involve the employment of a single clearly circumscribed mathematical field or domain. While the core assumption of mapping accounts may appear plausible in such situations, we ultimately suggest that the mapping account is not able to handle the important added complexities involved in our sea ice case study. In particular, the notion of mathematical structure around which such accounts are framed does not seem to be able to capture the way in which some applications of mathematics require that very different pieces of mathematics be related to one another on the basis of both mathematical and empirical information. (shrink)

How about a different take on the rich and famous? First the obvious—the Harry Potter novels are primitive superstition that encourages children to believe in fantasy rather than take responsibility for the world-- the norm of course. JKR is just as clueless about herself and the world as most people, but about 200 times as destructive as the average American and about 800 times more than the average Chinese. She has been responsible for the destruction of maybe 30,000 hectares of (...) forest to produce these trash novels and all the erosion ensuing (not trivial as it’s at least 6 and maybe 12 tons/year soil into the ocean for everyone on earth or maybe 100 tons per American, and so about 5000 tons/year for Rowling’s books and movies and her 3 children). The earth loses at least 1% of its topsoil every year, so as it nears 2100, most of its food growing capacity will be gone. Then there is the huge amount of fuel burned and waste made to make and distribute the books and films, plastic dolls etc. She shows her lack of social responsibility by producing children rather than using her millions to encourage family planning or buy up the rain forest, and by promoting the conventional liberal stupidity of 3rd world supremacy that is destroying Britain, America, the world and her descendant’s future. Of course, she's not that different from the other 7.8 billion clueless - just noisier and more destructive. -/- It is the no free lunch problem writ large. The mob just can’t see that there is no such thing as helping one person without harming others. Rights or privileges given to new entrants into an overcrowded world can only diminish those of others. In spite of the massive ecological disasters happening in front of them everywhere everyday, they can’t pin them to the unrestrained motherhood of “the diverse”, which accounts for most of the population increase of the last century and all of that in this one. They lack some combination of intelligence, education, experience and sanity required to extrapolate the daily assaults on the resources and functioning of society to the eventual collapse of industrial civilization. Each meal, each trip by car or bus, each pair of shoes is another nail in the earth’s coffin. It has likely never crossed her mind that one seat on a plane from London to San Francisco produces about one ton of carbon which melts about 3 square meters of sea ice and as one of the overprivileged she has probably flown hundreds of such flights. -/- Not only the rich and famous, but nearly any public figure at all, including virtually all teachers, are pressured to be politically correct, which in the Western Democracies, now means social democratic (Neomarxist—i.e., diluted communist) third world supremacists working for the destruction of their own societies and their own descendants. So, those whose lack of education, experience, intelligence (and basic common sense), which should prohibit them from making any public statements at all, totally dominate all the media, creating the impression that the intelligent and civilized must favor democracy, diversity and equality, while the truth is that these are the problems and not the solutions, and that they themselves are the prime enemies of civilization. See my Suicide by Democracy 2nd ed (2019). -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

Development plans at different levels – from local to global – aspire to eliminate poverty, famine, to make health care accessible, to create better access to education, to improve transportation, employment, and the quality of life, all within next decades. Yet, these plans collide with the reality of climate change, more precisely the Anthropocene, which already creates high-dimensional conflicts. These will only intensify within decades because climate change and other consequences of the environment global devastation lead to a real decrease (...) of resources. These resources enable not only development but also an elementary reproduction of the essential preconditions of life. The current model of development has substantially contributed to the intensification of unequal accessibility to resources and existing conflicts have thus heightened and new ones have emerged. Water as an essential resource will cause new conflicts. Growing population, expansion of deserts and a sea level rise then increase conflicts for the land. Heat waves occur more often which strengthens conflicts for land suitable for human life, meaning that inhabitable areas are spreading. Therefore there is a need to re-evaluate the character and hierarchy of resources and their accessibility, and also concepts of development. The existing development of humankind has been done at the expense of others in many cases and mainly at the expense of the environment. The current situation raises a question of climate justice from both historical and systematic viewpoints. It opens a need to reformulate the concept of human rights from the perspective of their essential environmental preconditions and to define the status of environmental migrants. (shrink)

A high level of confidence in the identity of individuals is required to let them die as ordered by an advance directive. Thus, if we are animalists, then we should lack the confidence required to apply lethal advance directives to the cheerfully demented, or so I argue. In short, there is consensus among animalists that the best way to avoid serious objections to their account is to adopt an ontology that denies the existence of brains, hands, tables, chairs, iced-tea, (...) and lemonade. The adoption of such an ontology reduces the justificatory force of commonsense, which is key in arguing that we are animals and that we persist as long as we are biologically alive. With this loss of justification comes the loss of a high level of confidence that Quinn-pre-dementia’s lethal advanced directive applies to Quinn-post-dementia, via identity. If we do not have a high level of confidence that Quinn-pre-dementia’s advanced directive applies to Quinn-post- dementia, then it is not enough (on its own) to let Quinn-post-dementia die. (shrink)

The Government of Kenya (GoK) touts teacher-preparedness as a critical factor that shows the equipping of a professional teacher for quality performance and satisfactory learner performance in national examinations. Despite the efforts by the GoK, there is a worrying trend of students completing school with reading and writing difficulties. The Kenya National Examinations Council (2020) contends students’ poor performance in English for the past 5 years, falling short of the average mean of 50%. Descriptive research design was used. A sample (...) of 44 principals, 88 teachers and 345 form three students across 50 public secondary schools in Kakamega North, were targeted. A questionnaire, interview schedule, classroom practice observation schedule, and focus group discussion guide were used to collect data. Qualitative data was analyzed thematically whereas quantitative data was presented through tables, percentages and frequencies. Chi-square test was performed to test hypothesis. Response rate was 79.5%. The findings indicated that majority (97.1%) of the teachers participated in coursebooks and other revision textbook in-service courses as per the changing trends in teaching of English whereas ICT workshops had low percentages, a gap pointing on teacher level of preparedness. The findings from principals indicated, teachers of English sometimes declined to take up ICT in-service trainings for fear of additional responsibilities in school. Findings from FGDs show, teachers were rated average by most students in terms of preparedness in material use in classrooms. On determining the extent to which teacher level of preparedness influence implementation of English curriculum in school, teachers’ opinions had a Mean of 4.0000; Standard deviation of 3.08338; and Skewness of .397, indicating teacher level of preparedness has a high and strong positive influence on implementation of English curriculum in school if well checked and applied. The study established a significant relationship between teacher level of preparedness and implementation of English curriculum (p=0.007<0.05). Findings concur with KNEC (2020), contending students’ poor performance in English as unsatisfying. (shrink)

When you type the word “serendipity” in a word-processor application such as Microsoft Word, the autocorrection engine suggests you choose other words like “luck” or “fate”. This correcting act turns out to be incorrect. However, it points to the reality that serendipity is not a familiar English word and can be misunderstood easily. Serendipity is a very much scientific concept as it has been found useful in numerous scientific discoveries, pharmaceutical innovations, and numerous humankind’s technical and technological advances. Therefore, there (...) have been many books written around the concept. So why do we need this additional book? This is not just another book about serendipity. It has evolved from the Editor’s question lingering for a decade after finishing his widely cited article (coauthored with Prof. Nancy K. Napier of Boise State University, ID, USA) “Serendipity as a strategic advantage?” in T. Wilkinson’s edited volume Strategic Management in the 21st Century, published by Praeger. The Editor and contributing authors have tried to achieve the following in this title. Demystifying the Serendipity Myth The phenomenon of serendipity has always been thought of as a “miracle”. It is the mystery of human innovation and one of the ultimate secrets of our society. But serendipity is not just a lucky coincidence nor any hidden conspiracy. This book explores the science of the information process behind this seemingly miraculous phenomenon. It connects human society with nature, going back to the root of our existence and looking at the flame of survival to discover the harmony in making creativity. Presenting the nuts and bolts of being an adventurer of science The authors present their conceptual investigations into serendipity’s nature and its mechanism by examining interesting real events and stories. The content is thought-provoking, and readers are led to question and explore their own life stories and problems along the journey of reading this book. Catching an elusive high-value target requires great strategies and efforts. But there are no dark secrets here because this is the “way of nature” – how we humans have always strived for innovation without realizing the blueprints behind such processes. Unlike other books on serendipity, this book will show you that a powerful “secret” is closer than you think. Delivering practical uses for different audiences By understanding the conditionality and survival drivers of serendipity, individuals or organizations can make better decisions on creating the right environment to facilitate the encounter and attainment of this valuable phenomenon. For scientists: With clear explanations of the information processes underlying serendipity, flexible theoretical frameworks of mindsponge and the 3D principle of creativity, researchers are provided with the tools they need to dig deeper into their own fields of study and find practical applications, be it psychology, economics, sociology, or anything that involves innovation (which is, in fact, every scientific discipline). For curious casual readers: Everybody needs innovation to make breakthroughs or spice up one’s life. If you think great ideas come to people randomly from an unknown fairy place, this book will convince you otherwise without taking away that awe and wonder. But above all, you will know how to become more creative, scientifically and straightforwardly, with no snake oil and no weird tricks. For ambitious business people: The flame that brought about great successes throughout human history is within you. But you can only use it if you understand it. While others wait for serendipity to come, you will be able to actively hunt for those precious moments. As it has always been: the best hunters triumph, not the passive wanderers. And in this age of information chaos, finding the golden fruits is not easy. Those from information technology know this problem well, and this book is the treasure map that they have been seeking to navigate that stormy ocean looking for jewels. Like a kingfisher tracking its prey through the water, waiting to gracefully strike, with serendipity, a person seizes the prize of creativity amid the chaos of life. ¤ ¤ ¤ Official introduction: The book explores the nature, underlying causes, and the information processing mechanism of serendipity. It proposes that natural or social survival demands drive serendipity, and serendipity is conditional on the environment and the mindset, on both individual and collective levels. From Darwin's evolution theory to Sun Tzu's war tactics, major innovations throughout human history are unified by this key concept. In the rapidly changing world, information is abundant but rather chaotic. The adaptive power of serendipity allows people to notice treasures within this wild sea, but only for those who understand how it works. To increase the probability of encountering and attaining serendipity, one should employ the mindsponge mechanism and the 3D process of creativity, for without these frameworks, serendipity is truly an elusive target. The book also discusses methods to build environments and cultures rich in navigational and useful information to maximize the chance of finding and capitalizing on serendipity. As a skill, serendipity has a resemblance to how kingfishers observe and hunt their prey. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes the conceptual foundations and research on emotional creativity. Emotional creativity is defined as a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience. This construct pervades human creative performance and represents an important link between emotional experience and cognitive processes. Empirical research in this field has revealed various links of emotional creativity to personality variables (e.g., openness to experience), positive affect, fantasy proneness, coping strategies, post-traumatic growth, better self-understanding, and one’s engagement (...) in practicing creative leisure activities. In the applied settings, emotional creativity has been found to be positively related to the intrinsic motivation of employees, the innovative performance of employees, teaching efficacy, and an increased awareness of professional roles. Interestingly, the available meta-analysis of past studies revealed that women showed significantly higher emotional creativity than men. Emotional creativity has also been found to be lower in older adulthood compared to younger age. Because the levels of emotional creativity were found to be sensitive to the decline of cognitive functions in older adults, their decrease can be considered as one of the indicators of cognitive aging. Recent research in clinical neuropsychology has also revealed that older adults in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease showed decreased emotional creativity compared to healthy older adults. (shrink)

There is a critical need to understand the effect of changing assessment methods on demonstrated competencies in teacher education. This study examined how the transition from online to in-person testing affects the measured teaching competencies of students who completed a Competency-Based Enhancement (CBE) program, aiming to identify factors contributing to performance differences and strategies for adaptation. Using a one-group pre-test-post-test design, the study involved 669 graduating teacher education students at Pangasinan State University. Participants completed online pre-tests and in-person post-tests, with (...) data analyzed through paired samples t-tests, multiple regression, and ANCOVA. Findings revealed a significant decline in post-test scores despite CBE participation, suggesting a substantial effect of the testing modality change. The change in the testing environment emerged as the most significant predictor of score differences, while student engagement levels were positively associated with minor score decreases. These results underscore the need for adaptive assessment strategies in competency-based education programs. While limited to a single institution, this study recommends implementing a scaffolded approach to assessment transitions and enhancing student support services to mitigate adverse effects on performance across different testing modalities. (shrink)

The stronger the level of economic integration between countries, the greater the need to study the formation patterns of the stock market reaction to the financial information signals. This concerns the Ukrainian stock market, which is now in its infancy, and which reaction to financial information signals is sometimes ambiguous. The research aims to identify the formation patterns of return and volatility indicators of the Ukrainian stock market reaction to the US financial information signals. To assess the direct nature (...) of US financial information signals effect on the PFTS stock index, the GARCH econometric modeling toolkit was applied. The research information base is the PFTS stock index and the Federal Reserve System financial information signals at the discount rate for 2000–2019. The fetch is divided into intervals corresponded to the ascent and decline phases of the financial cycle. It was found that an unforeseen increase in the discount rate at the financial cycle decline phase by 25 basis points decreases the PFTS stock index return, on average by 2.9%. Besides, the hypothesis about the general change stabilizing effect in the discount rate on the Ukrainian stock market volatility at the financial cycle growth phase was confirmed. Nevertheless, for investors, the most essential is the regulator’s monetary signals in the discount rate at the financial cycle decline phases rather than at the ascent phases because there is a more significant increase in the volatility level. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the level of organizational performance in ceramic companies in the Tenth of Ramadan City, where the researchers used the descriptive analytical method, through a questionnaire distributed. The study reached a set of results, the most important of which are: the presence of a clear consensus of the study sample from the members of the senior management that all dimensions of the balanced scorecard variable are largely present in the ceramic companies under study, and the (...) results showed the approval of the study sample of workers in an average way on the application of the financial dimension and that it is applied Well, the approval of the study sample of the employees in an average way that tends to decline on the degree of application of the customer dimension and that it is applied by the senior management in an inappropriate way, the approval of the study sample of the employees in a large way on the degree of application of the internal operations dimension and that it is applied by the senior management in a large and appropriate way, approval The study sample of workers applying the learning and growth dimension is moderately low and it is applied inappropriately by the senior management. The study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: working on clarifying and translating the vision and strategy of the institution, working on clarifying the strategy and linking it to the goals, planning and setting goals and arranging strategic initiatives, promoting strategic feedback. (shrink)

How are causal judgements such as 'The ice on the road caused the traffic accident' connected with counterfactual judgements such as 'If there had not been any ice on the road, the traffic accident would not have happened'? This volume throws new light on this question by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches to causation and counterfactuals. Traditionally, philosophers have primarily been interested in connections between causal and counterfactual claims on the level of meaning or truth-conditions. (...) More recently, however, they have also increasingly turned their attention to psychological connections between causal and counterfactual understanding or reasoning. At the same time, there has been a surge in interest in empirical work on causal and counterfactual cognition amongst developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists--much of it inspired by work in philosophy. In this volume, twelve original contributions from leading philosophers and psychologists explore in detail what bearing empirical findings might have on philosophical concerns about counterfactuals and causation, and how, in turn, work in philosophy might help clarify the issues at stake in empirical work on the cognitive underpinnings of, and relationships between, causal and counterfactual thought. (shrink)

In the sea trade, the traditional paper-based bill of lading has played an important role across the globe for centuries, but with the advent of advanced commercial modes of transportation and communication, the central position of this document is under threat. The importance of the bill of lading still prevails as does the need of the functions that this document served in the past, although in a changed format. In the recent past, the world has witnessed a lot of debate (...) about replacing this traditional paper-based document with an electronic equivalent that exhibits all of its functions and characteristics, both commercial and legal. More specifically, unlike many rival travel documents, such as the Sea Waybill, a bill of lading has two prominent features, that is to say, its negotiability and its acceptability as a document of title in certain legal jurisdictions that are required to be retained in an electronic bill of lading so as to also retain the prominence of this document in the future landscape. This thesis is, however, more concerned about the legal aspects of adopting the electronic bill of lading as a traditional paper-based legal document as well as an effective legal document in the present age. However, the scope of this debate remains primarily focused on the USA and UK jurisdictions. In the course of this thesis, it is observed that, in the past, the bill of lading has been subject to a variety of international regimes, such as The Hague Rules and The Hague-Visby Rules, and presently efforts are being made to arrive at a universal agreement under the umbrella of The Rotterdam Rules, but such an agreement is yet to arrive among the comity of nations. On the other hand, efforts made by the business community to introduce an electronic bill of lading are much louder and more evident. The private efforts, such as the SeaDocs System, CMI Rules, and the BOLERO Project, etc., were, however, received by the fellow business community with both applause as well as suspicion. At the same time, there are a number of concerns voiced by the international business community on the legislative adoptability in national and international jurisdictions and the courts’ approach in adjudicating cases involving electronic transactions and these are making the task of adoption of electronic bill of lading in the sea-based transactions a difficult task. Therefore, in the absence of any formal legal backing from national and international legislations, these attempts could not achieve the desired results. In this thesis, the present situation of the acceptability of electronic transactions in general, and of the electronic bill of lading specifically, has also been discussed with reference to certain national jurisdictions, such as Australia, India, South Korea and China, in order to present comparative perspectives on the preparedness of these nations. On the regional level, the efforts made by the European Union have also been discussed to promote electronic transactions within its jurisdiction. All the discussion, however, leads to the situation where the level of acceptability of electronic bill of lading in the near future is found to be dependent upon the official efforts from the national governments and putting these efforts towards arriving at an agreement on Rotterdam Rules as early as possible. The other area of importance revealed in this thesis is the need for change in juristic approach by the courts while interpreting and adjudicating upon cases involving electronic transactions. On the whole, this thesis has provided a cohesive and systematic review, synthesis and analysis of the history of the bill of lading, its importance as a document of title, and attempts to incorporate its important functions within the fast-paced electronic shipping commerce of today. In such a way it has provided a valuable contribution to the literature by providing a comprehensive resource for jurists, policy-makers and the business community alike, as they work towards adapting the bill of lading so that it might be successfully applied in electronic form. (shrink)

The anglophone philosophy profession has a well-known problem with gender equity. A sig-nificant aspect of the problem is the fact that there are simply so many more male philoso-phers than female philosophers among students and faculty alike. The problem is at its stark-est at the faculty level, where only 22% - 24% of philosophers are female in the United States (Van Camp 2014), the United Kingdom (Beebee & Saul 2011) and Australia (Goddard 2008).<1> While this is a result of (...) the percentage of women declining at each point through-out the standard career trajectory, recent large-scale studies in the United States (Paxton et al. 2012) and Australia (Goddard et al. 2008) have identified a key drop-off point as the transi-tion between taking introductory classes and majoring in philosophy. So why do dispropor-tionately few female students choose to major in philosophy? (shrink)

It is not a particularly hard thing to want or seek explanations. In fact, explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. Children ask why and how questions very early in development and seem genuinely to want some sort of answer, despite our often being poorly equipped to provide them at the appropriate level of sophistication and detail. We seek and receive explanations in every sphere of our adult lives, whether it be to understand (...) why a friendship has foundered, why a car will not start, or why ice expands when it freezes. Moreover, correctly or incorrectly, most of the time we think we know when we have or have not received a good explanation. There is a sense both that a given, successful explanation satisfies a cognitive need, and that a questionable or dubious explanation does not. There are also compelling intuitions about what make good explanations in terms of their form, that is, a sense of when they are structured correctly. (shrink)

There is currently no generally agreed-upon definition of the mechanism of action of psychedelic therapy. Existing proposals have approached the issue from various perspectives, utilizing concepts on many layers of abstraction. Most commonly, mechanisms based on neurotransmitters have been proposed. From a clinical perspective, explanations on the psychological level would be more useful. This study provides one such explanation, focusing on the destabilization of trauma-related memories and their replacement with memories that allow for more adaptive behaviors. This mechanism is (...) not specific to psychedelics, and the study therefore illustrates a non-pharmacological process involving it. -/- The study features a male entrepreneur in his early fifties who suffered from chronic but non-debilitating anxiety and depression since his teenage years. In his mid-30s, he suffered from severe burnout but partially recovered. The amount of alcohol consumed was constantly relatively high. More recently, due to simultaneous relationship and workplace stress, he experienced a more severe episode of burnout, depression, anxiety, and insomnia. He felt completely exhausted when trying to get something done and became fearful of the workplace. Psychotherapy and various pharmaceutical medications provided little benefit. -/- After three months on sick leave, a trip to the mountains triggered severe insomnia. Sleep deprivation likely contributed to a spontaneous experience of altered states of mind, including a two-day period of hallucinatory visions. There was the feeling of being a complete failure, but through a new relationship initiated just before the trip, he received love and validation from his new partner, which contradicted the feeling of worthlessness. The combination of an altered state of mind and love induced an alteration of identity that resolved his depression, burnout, and sleep disorders. After three more months of self-organized rehabilitation, he successfully returned to work. -/- Six months after the trip, financial decline caused by his absence and unchanged stressful conditions at the workplace led to disappointment, motivational issues, and stress, but his work performance remained good regardless. One year after the trip, although his work-related stress had increased rather than decreased due to the financial situation of his company being more demanding than before his burnout, the positive outcome prevailed, proving its long-term stability. (shrink)

Henry Shue’s latest book, The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, is an excellent read, both clear and comprehensive. It is written in a way that makes it accessible to philosophers and non-philosophers alike. The book argues persuasively that the people alive today must take immediate and drastic action to tackle climate change, as the current decade will be crucial for determining how severe the impacts will become. Shue warns how a sharp (...) division into past, present, and future is misleading when it comes to climate change and can obfuscate the extent of the responsibility that the current generations bear. For us to acknowledge our responsibility, we must recognise how deeply intertwined our lives are with both the past and the future. One of these innate deep connections between generations is the extensive time period that carbon emissions can continue to contribute to climate change, for dozens of centuries. -/- The current generations have been bequeathed an energy system that relies on fossil fuels and that continues to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. For over two centuries now, the planet has been getting warmer as an unintended side effect of industrialisation. We are the first humans to understand the dynamics of the Earth’s climate and how human actions cause anthropogenic climate change. With the rapidly advanced scientific knowledge, it has become apparent that there is a need to quickly transition to a different energy regime. Shue points out that this knowledge has made us the first humans to recognise that action is required, but the urgency of the problem also makes us possibly the last to still be able to act before certain major threats are aggravated. With many irreversible climate change impacts, the date-of-last-opportunity to take action to prevent them might be very soon. According to Shue (2021, p. 6), “This gives us an awesome responsibility. Humans have accidentally set our own house on fire, and if we do not douse the flames while they are no more extensive than they are now, it may not be possible ever to extinguish them”. That is why we alive now are the pivotal generation. -/- Although a sense of urgency runs through the book and the seriousness of the situation is made very clear, Shue steers away from fearmongering. He does not think that human extinction is around the corner, but underlines that we cannot rule out such threats until we stop feeding the beast. Unless we cap emissions at a relatively safe level and transform our infrastructure to net zero, we will keep on increasing risks to future people by “adding continuously to the mushrooming danger” (p. 23). The book stresses that the possibility of passing several tipping points adds to the urgency and the risks because when positive feedback mechanisms are triggered, climate change accelerates. These positive feedbacks can feed into each other, such as when warming seawater melts even more ice, with the possibility of a cascade of feedbacks if enough tipping points are passed. Such changes are irreversible and could themselves become further positive feedbacks. Shue (pp. 24–25) warns that it is “likely that the near future is the last chance to avoid passing significant tipping points and entirely possible that the near future is the last chance to avoid provoking a cascade of tipping points” (emphasis in original). -/- While I applaud the general message of Shue’s book, I find that the brushstrokes he uses when identifying those responsible are a little too broad. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, it is questionable as to how many of us really know enough about the risks we are leaving future generations with. Secondly, discussion in terms of generations underplays the big differences between the responsibility of different groups of actors within them. In what follows, I will elaborate on these points. I should note from the outset, however, that although I think that these are important issues, I find them to be points of clarification in an impressive and ambitious book on why our actions have such significance and why objections to urgent, large-scale climate action are misplaced. (shrink)

Values related to culture, identity, community cohesion and sense of place have sometimes been downplayed in the climate change discourse. However, they have been suggested to be not only important to citizens but the values most vulnerable to climate change. Here we test four empirical consequences of the suggestion: at least 50% of the locations citizens' consider to be the most important locations in their municipality are chosen because they represent these values, locations representing these values have a high probability (...) of being damaged by climate change induced sea level rise, citizens for which these values are particularly strongly held less strongly believe in the local effects of climate change, and citizens for which these values are particularly strongly held less strongly believe that they have experienced the effects of climate change. The tests were made using survey data collected in 2014 from 326 citizens owning property in Höganäs municipality, Sweden, and included values elicited using a new methodology separating instrumental values from end values, and using the former as stepping stones to pinpoint the latter, that represent the true interests of the respondents. The results provide the first evidence that, albeit frequent, values related to culture, identity, community cohesion and sense of place are not the values most vulnerable to climate change. This in turn indicates a need to further investigate the vulnerability of these values to climate change, using a methodology that clearly distinguishes between instrumental and end values. (shrink)

This thesis examines philosophical controversies surrounding the evaluation of medical treatments, with a focus on the evidential roles of randomised trials and mechanisms in Evidence-Based Medicine. Current 'best practice' usually involves excluding non-randomised trial evidence from systematic reviews in cases where randomised trials are available for inclusion in the reviews. The first paper challenges this practice and evaluates whether adding of evidence from non-randomised trials might improve the quality and precision of some systematic reviews. The second paper compares the alleged (...) methodological benefits of randomised trials over observational studies for investigating treatment benefits. It suggests that claims about the superiority of well-conducted randomised controlled trials over well-conducted observational studies are justified, especially when results from the two methods are contradictory. The third paper argues that postulating the unpredictability paradox in systematic reviews when no detectable empirical differences can be found requires further justification. The fourth paper examines the problem of absence causation in the context of explaining causal mechanisms and argues that a recent solution is incomplete and requires further justification. Solving the problem by describing absences as causes of 'mechanism failure' fails to take into account the effects of absences that lead to vacillating levels of mechanism functionality. The fifth paper criticises literature that has emphasised functioning versus 'broken' or 'non-functioning' mechanisms emphasising that many diseases result from increased or decreased mechanism function, rather than complete loss of function. Mechanistic explanations must account for differences in the effectiveness of performed functions, yet current philosophical mechanistic explanations do not achieve this. The last paper argues that the standard of evidence embodied in the ICE theory of technological function is too permissive for evaluating whether the proposed functions of medical technologies have been adequately assessed and correctly ascribed. It argues that high-quality evidence from clinical studies is necessary to justify functional ascriptions to health care technologies. (shrink)

Katzav and Vaesen have argued that control by analytic philosophers of key journals, philosophy departments and at least one funding body plays a substantial role in explaining the emergence of analytic philosophy into dominance in the Anglophone world and the corresponding decline of speculative philosophy. They also argued that this use of control suggests a characterisation of analytic philosophy as, at the institutional level, a sectarian form of critical philosophy. I test these hypotheses against data about philosophy job (...) hires at key philosophy departments in the USA during the period 1930-1979, and against data about PhD completions during the period 1956-1965. I argue, further, that Katzav and Vaesen’s hypotheses can fully explain the data and are more fully able to do so than are some other key accounts of the emergence of analytic philosophy in the USA. (shrink)

It is now widely expected that climate change will be serious enough that a very large number of people will be displaced from their homes because of events relating to or resulting from climate change. Such events may include rising sea levels (and resulting increased salination of ground water), stronger hurricanes and tropical storms, drought, floods, increased and more intense wildfires, and other extreme or (previously) unusual weather events. Although estimates vary widely, it seems very likely that many millions of (...) people—perhaps hundreds of millions if sufficient precautions are not taken—will be forced from their homes by these events related to climate change. In the public imagination, much of the attention has been on ‘climate refugees’, where this is taken to mean people who have crossed borders. However, there is good reason to believe that a very large percentage—probably a significant majority—of displacement resulting from climate change will be, or could be, internal. In this chapter I argue that there are likely to be a large number of cases where internal displacement related to climate change is of international concern, and where, therefore, states have significant moral reasons to provide assistance, either directly to those displaced, or else to the state in which the displacement has taken place. My claim is that internal displacement arising from climate change is of international concern and so grounds a duty of aid by states able to provide it, when this displacement threatens the basic human rights of those displaced, and when the local or domestic government cannot or will not take the necessary steps to meet the needs and protect the rights of those who are displaced. (The uploaded version of this paper is an uncorrected proof. Please cite and refer to the published version.). (shrink)

Arthur Danto’s recent book, Andy Warhol, leads the reader through the story of the iconic American’s artistic life highlighted by a philosophical commentary, a commentary that merges Danto’s aesthetic theory with the artist himself. Inspired by Warhol’s Brillo Box installation, art that in Danto’s eyes was indiscernible from the everyday boxes it represented, Danto developed a theory that is able to differentiate art from non-art by employing the body of conceptual art theory manifest in what he termed the ‘artworld’. The (...) strength of Danto’s theory is found in its ability to explain the art of the post-modern era. His body of work weaves philosophy, art history and art criticism together, merging his aesthetic philosophy with his extensive knowledge of the world of art. Danto’s essentialist theory of embodied meaning provides him with a critical tool that succeeds in explaining the currents of contemporary art, a task that many great thinkers of art history were unable to do. If Warhol inspired Danto to create a philosophy of art, it is appropriate that Danto write a tribute to Warhol that traces how Warhol brought philosophy into art. Danto’s account of ‘Warhol as philosopher’ positions him as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century art, effecting a sea change in how art was made and viewed. Warhol achieved this by conceiving of works that embodied the answers to a series of philosophical puzzles surrounding the nature of art. Warhol, as Danto describes him, manifests himself in his art because he had transformed himself, in a way, into an icon of the times. This pragmatist notion that art should undermine the dichotomies that exist between art and life would, by some accounts, position Warhol to be the philosopher that Danto claims him to be, for he dissolved the philosophical questions posted by late modern aesthetic thinkers by creating art that imploded the accepted notions of art at the time. One of Danto’s greatest contributions to aesthetics is his theory’s ability to distinguish art from non-art, recognizing that it is the artist’s intention that levels the sublimity of art into the commonplace, thereby transfiguring the everyday. However, acknowledging this achievement, I argue that Warhol’s philosophical contribution actually manifests itself in a manner different from that proposed by Danto. Danto maintains that the internal drive of art leads to the unfolding of art theoretical concepts that ineluctably shift the terrain of world of art. I would agree with Danto that Warhol, almost as Hegel viewed Napoleon as Geist on a horse, pushed forward the boundaries of art through the actualization of art’s internal drive. But I would disagree that the conceptual nature of art is one that unfolds merely as a relation of concepts that artists trace through a connection to the meaning of history they forge using their unmediated grasp of style. Rather, I would argue that the artist’s style is not bound so narrowly to the meanings they express. Through their aesthetic articulations, artists initiate a process of social interaction. This process employs the philosophical logic which Danto attributes to Warhol indirectly, and through it, it is able to transfigure the vocabulary of art—the concepts of the artworld—by superseding the language of modernism. Warhol’s philosophical contribution is seen in his mastery of both the medium of art and the underlying logic of the medium’s expression and reception. (shrink)

In this paper, i provide an introduction to development ethics and make some observations about integral human development. i argue that although there is very little dialogue between these two traditions, they have a lot of common ground, and can helpfully inform one another. International development ethics is a largely secular field concerned with ethical reflection on the ends and means of development. i discuss four levels of ethical reflection: meta-ethical, normative, practical, or applied, and personal or integral. The first (...) three of these levels are well established in philosophical ethics. i introduce the fourth with the hope of encouraging more discussion of how individuals engaged in the theory and practice of development ethics ought to navigate the various spheres of their own lives. This last stage of ethical reflection and action can benefit greatly from work done in integral human development. Integral human development is integral in at least two ways: development is not simply economic development, but development the whole person, including social, political, creative, spiritual, etc., and development is the development of every person, whether the person is a marginalize peasant or a powerful élite. i explain why this second way of integration is both less discussed and more radical than the first. Resumen En este artículo, ofrezco una introducción a la ética del desarrollo y hago algunas observaciones sobre el desarrollo humano integral. Sostengo que, aunque hay muy poco diálogo entre estas dos tradiciones, tienen mucho terreno común y pueden ayudarse mutuamente. La ética del desarrollo internacional es un campo ampliamente secular que se ocupa de la reflexión ética sobre los fines y los medios de desarrollo. Discuto cuatro niveles de reflexión ética: meta-ético, normativo, práctico, o aplicado, y personal o integral. Los tres primeros de estos niveles están bien establecidos en la ética filosófica. Presento el cuarto con la esperanza de fomentar una mayor discusión sobre cómo los individuos involucrados en la teoría y la práctica de la ética del desarrollo deben navegar por las diversas esferas de sus propias vidas. Esta última etapa de reflexión y acción ética puede beneficiarse enormemente del trabajo realizado en el desarrollo humano integral. El desarrollo humano integral es integral en al menos dos maneras: el desarrollo no es simplemente desarrollo económico, sino el desarrollo de toda la persona, incluyendo social político, creativo, espiritual etc., y el desarrollo es el desarrollo de cada persona, sea la persona un campesino marginado o una de la ponderosa elite. Explico por qué esta segunda forma de integración es menos discutida y más radical que la primera. (shrink)

The anglophone philosophy profession has a well-known problem with gender equity. A sig-nificant aspect of the problem is the fact that there are simply so many more male philoso-phers than female philosophers among students and faculty alike. The problem is at its stark-est at the faculty level, where only 22% - 24% of philosophers are female in the United States (Van Camp 2014), the United Kingdom (Beebee & Saul 2011) and Australia (Goddard 2008).<1> While this is a result of (...) the percentage of women declining at each point through-out the standard career trajectory, recent large-scale studies in the United States (Paxton et al. 2012) and Australia (Goddard et al. 2008) have identified a key drop-off point as the transi-tion between taking introductory classes and majoring in philosophy. So why do dispropor-tionately few female students choose to major in philosophy? (shrink)

Critical examination of possible socio-political Anthropocene consequences leads to the conclusion that the sustainable development concept is not an adequate answer for current threats and risks. An effort to implement the sustainable development concept can even make climate changes and other forms of nature devastation worse, as it turns out on ongoing greenhouse gas concentrations growth in the atmosphere, despite obligations that result to all states of the world from Paris agreement. The climate change rate and range of plant and (...) animal species extinction confirms J. Lovelock´s thesis that humanity does not have enough time and, most likely, enough sources to implement the sustainable development concept and, as B. Latour points out, we do not have a big enough planet. Therefore, it is necessary to think about a retreat – to areas that are likely to stay livable even after the sea level rise and desertification; it is necessary to think about how to move millions of people from areas flooded by sea or parched by desert; to think about a change of our current way of life, of production of food and energy so that not only humankind as animal species would continue, but also our civilization and its technological and organizational knowledge. Even basic theses based on this concept indicate a need to reassess most political concepts, mainly the concepts of sovereignty, citizenship, but also those of freedom of movement and residence, freedom of business and consume, which work as fundamentals of the neoliberal economic-political system. Retreat expects complex and organized migration to beforehand chosen and arranged areas. Opposite to retreat is mass escape chaos that reduces human relations to fight for survival. As J. Lovelock proposed in his sustainable retreat concept, relocating people from areas affected by climate changes to climate oases would mean that rich northern countries give up their current, in fact, isolationistic politics of refusing climate migrants. Therefore, the concept of sustainable retreat requires much greater competence and especially willingness to cooperate not only nationally, but also internationally and globally, in addition to what humanity is capable of doing today. (shrink)

In 1937, the Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu discovered specific links between the rise and decline of the global peripheries. Akamatsu’s theory of development describes certain mechanisms whose working results in the narrowing of the gap between the level of development of the economy of developing and developed countries, and, thus, in the re-structuring of the relationships between the global core and the global periphery. Akamatsu developed his model on the basis of his analysis of the economic development of (...) Japan before World War II, with a special emphasis on the development of the Japanese textile industry. Akamatsu’s catch-up development includes three phases: import of goods, organization of the production of previously imported products, and export of those goods. This model proved to be productive for analyzing the development of many other developing countries, especially in East Asia, making the theory of flying geese popular among the economists of these countries, as well as the whole world. The “flying geese” model produces certain swings that may be denoted as Akamatsu waves. Akamatsu waves may be defined as cycles (with a period ranging from 20 to 60 years) that are connected with convergence and divergence of core and periphery of the World System in a way that explains cyclical upward and downward swings (at global and national levels) in the movements of the periphery countries as they catch up with the richer ones. (shrink)

In this chapter I focus on two problems facing immigration systems around the world, and Australia in particular. The topics addressed are chosen because each one involves important fundamental rights and because significant improvement in these areas is possible even if each state acts alone, without significant coordination with others. First, I examine refugee programmes, focussing specifically on the ‘two- tier’ refugee programmes pioneered by Australia with the introduction of Temporary Protection Visas by the Howard Government in 1999. Next, I (...) look at recent declines in refugee resettlement schemes from already stingy levels and, in relation to Australia in particular, I show how the tying of resettlement numbers to the number of affirmative asylum claims granted is both wrong- headed and counterproductive. The second area of immigration policy explored is family migration, another area where immigration systems around the world have been moving in the wrong direction, often via less than transparent administrative processes. Australia is no exception. While Australia’s family migration system is reasonably good on its face, in practice there are several factors which make the programme significantly less than satisfactory from the perspective of protecting the basic rights of migrants and, arguably more importantly, citizens. These problems can and should be fixed in straightforward ways, and since doing so would be more just, would have few— if any— significant negative consequences, and in fact would have a number of clear benefits, those changes should be made. (shrink)

In this new edition, a hypothesis is put forward for the first time to unify the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary theory by showing both events following the same set of fundamental interrelationships. As the evolution of life is a part of the evolutions of the universe, these two events express many fundamental similarities (this is self-similarity, which means a part of the system is similar to the whole system). Based on the same principle, the evolution of multicellular organisms, (...) social evolution, development of the human body, and human technological development are all a part of the evolution of life. Thus, they all follow the same set of rules that all life follows and, at the fundamental level, the interrelationships that the Big Bang follows. Therefore, all of these events follow the fundamental interrelationships and express fundamental similarities. In other words, all these events are the specific expressions of those fundamental interrelationships – the fundamental mechanism that governs everything in the universe. -/- Upon these interrelationships, new approaches to study social development and technological development are employed. By using the knowledge of the medical sciences, including the structures (anatomy and histology), functions (physiology) and development (embryology) of a human body; knowledge of the evolution of life; and the concept of fundamental interrelationships, we can see the future beyond the horizon. Using the nerve system in parallel as a model, we can comprehensively understand the development of the information revolution. Based upon parallel interrelationships, we can see that the transformation of society due to individuals’ power increase brought by new technologies bears great similarities with the transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water due the individual molecules’ kinetic energy increase. -/- As the fundamental interrelationships govern social evolution, all events in human civilisation are simply specific expressions of those rules in which significant social events not only changed the course of civilisation but left so many unanswered mysteries: how did the Greeks build such brilliant civilisations; why did the Scientific Revolution originate from the West rather than the East such as in China; why did the Chinese society remain in feudalism for such a long time while the Western society had evolved into a higher level – industrialization and modern society; why did the Chinese civilisation fall from its ancient glory in the modern time but rapidly re-rise again to a super power in the last few decades? All these mysteries remain unanswered because of the lack of fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology used in the traditional methodologies of social science. As the fundamental laws of physics are the fundamental mechanism for everything and these mysteries are a part of the evolution of life, the fundamental laws of physics and evolutionary biology are used in tackling these unanswered issues. For example, upon parallel relationship, Chinese civilisation is compared with the transition from unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms. From how unicellular organisms aggregate and evolve new rules to organise themselves, we can much better understand how human individuals aggregate to form societies and evolve new cultures to organise themselves in social evolution. Furthermore, transformation from the solid state of ice to the liquid state of water is used to analyze Chinese social evolution. With these approaches the mysteries in Chinese civilisation have been answered. -/- Ultimately, all these discussions in this book have demonstrated that the Interrelationships Model has unified social science with natural science, and furthermore, science with philosophy. This is an important attempt in answering the most fundamental and intriguing question of all – the Theory of Everything. -/- Currently, this book is for FREE download. (shrink)

The research focused on the cross-boundary impacts of ecological changes on the livelihood of communities in three villages in Stung Treng province, Cambodia. The research objectives were to analyze river ecological changes and their drivers, and to explore the impacts of these changes on the livelihood of the communities. The research was conducted in Kraom, Kaoh Snaeng, and Tonsang villages. The study found that there have been significant changes in the environment of these villages. The fishery resources have declined between (...) 2019 and 2022 due to factors such as population growth, illegal fishing, loss of flooded forests, and the presence of hydropower dams. The extent of flooded forests has also significantly decreased, negatively impacting fish populations and the overall ecosystem. Water level fluctuations have become irregular since 2018, with lower water levels during the rainy season compared to previous years. Riverbank landslides have been a concern, posing threats to safety and livelihoods. Excessive algae growth in the rivers has also been observed. The research findings indicate a decline in income from fish catch in all three villages, with varying levels of stability. Expenses for food have also varied. Migration patterns have been observed, with individuals seeking better opportunities elsewhere due to the decline in fish stocks. Crop damages have been attributed to irregular flooding and fluctuating water levels, leading to a decrease in crop cultivation. Changes in water quality, including the presence of lime and algae, have impacted the well-being of the residents. Overall, the research highlights the need for interventions and support to address the economic challenges faced by the communities, mitigate the loss of equipment and housing, and improve water quality. (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)

When we look at 800,000 year ice core data CO2 levels since 1950 have risen at a rate of 123-fold faster than the fastest rate in 800,000 years. When we see that this rise is precisely correlated with global carbon emissions the human link to climate change seems certain and any rebuttal becomes ridiculously implausible. The 800,000 year correlation between CO2 and global temperatures seems to be predicting at least 9 degrees C of more warming based on current CO2 levels.

The teikei movement is a Japanese version of the alternative food movement, which emerged around the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similar to now well-known Community Supported Agriculture, it is a farmer-consumer partnership that involves direct exchanges of organic foods. It also aims to build a community that coexists with the natural environment through mutually supportive relationships between farmers and consumers. This article examined the history of the teikei movement. The movement began as a reaction to negative impacts of mechanized (...) and chemically intensive agriculture promoted by the Japanese government. The movement experienced a rapid expansion in the early 1980s, and then gradually declined thereafter. The organic market expansion and certification system intersected with both cultural and gender role changes, impacting the teikei movement negatively. Consequently, the membership of teikei consumer groups has shrunk. Furthermore, the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident caused unprece dented damage to organic farmers in the affected regions. Despite the scientific uncertain about the safety level of radiation exposure, the organic farmers and the teikei consumer groups managed the situation and found a way to inspect radiation contamination. They did so with the support by networking with other teikei-related actors. This response to the nuclear power plant accident suggests that although the level of embeddedness presumably varies among teikei actors, ethics guided by the teikei principles are effective in forging a resilient partnership between farmers and consumers and in keeping the teikei system alive as an agent for social change. (shrink)

After years in distance learning, grade school teachers are now facing the threat of declining reading comprehension among elementary pupils in post-pandemic settings. Teachers observed a spike in the number of non-readers and frustrated readers in intermediate grade levels. Teachers expressed concerns about the state of the education system in the aftermath of the pandemic. The purpose of this exploratory study was to establish an understanding of the challenges and mechanisms of macro- and micro-management strategies of grade school institutions. There (...) were six teachers and six reading coordinators who participated in the study. The findings suggested that while reading comprehension was a problem before the pandemic, teachers realized a surge in the number of non-readers after opening back to face-to-face classes. This was an unanticipated phenomenon that called the academic institutions to respond immediately. Significant mechanisms of reading comprehension programs were profiling, initial detection, policy-based initiatives, and institution-based design. Collaborative and collective responsibility represented macro-management practices, while initiative and responsiveness reflected micromanagement practices. These practices and strategies provided conceptual and phenomenological underpinnings relevant to early-education reading comprehension. (shrink)

If it were followed by “I’m a president,” Richard Nixon’s televised denial (“I am not a crook”) would be tantamount to Jimmy McGill’s self-portrayal in Better Call Saul. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, an honest president or an ethical lawyer rarely emerges. They’re like needles in a haystack. Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to search for these rare artifacts and, in the process, ask, “Why do so many lawyers (and presidents) fall from grace, transforming into morally bad or corrupt actors?” (...) The ability to be a good or ethical person can deteriorate over time. In their personal and professional lives, people can make consistently poor choices in their capacity as moral agents. In turn, they cultivate flawed habits or what are often referred to as vices. Jimmy McGill’s trajectory is, without a doubt, a harrowing story of moral decline. In some ways, his transformation into Saul Goodman resembles a trite story about how a profession, lawyering, corrupts its practitioners. On a deeper level, McGill’s journey involves a fundamental change in how he habitually interacts with his environment, a change of motivation and disposition that is, almost entirely, a change for the worse. To know the content of Jimmy’s character is to be familiar with his story, a story of moral decline and ethical failure. (shrink)

In this article, I firstly discuss why a prioritarian clause can rescue the utilitarian doctrine from the risk of exacerbating inequality in the distribution of resources in those cases in which utility of income does not decline at the margin. Nonetheless, when in the presence of adaptive preferences, classic prioritarianism is more likely than utilitarianism to increase the inequality of resources under all circumstances, independently of the diminishing trend of utility. Hence, I propose to shift the informational focus of (...) prioritarianism from welfare to either social income or capabilities in order to safeguard those who are worse off. Following this, I argue that we may have reasons to limit the aggregative logic of priority-amended utilitarianism through one or more sufficiency thresholds, and that we can partially defuse the negative-thesis objection that is usually levelled against sufficientarianism, provided we interpret the threshold(s) as valid only as long as everyone is led above it. (shrink)

The article presents the results of an interdisciplinary (psychological, behavioral, sociological, urban) survey of residents of elite residential complexes of Odessa regarding theirs urban infrastructure preferences, as well as the degree of satisfaction with their place of residence. It was found that respondents are characterized by a high level of satisfaction with their place of residence. It was also revealed that the security criterion of the district is the main one for choosing a place of residence, which indicates the (...) unmet townspeople need for the general safety of the urban environment. Based on the obtained empirical data, an analysis of significant factors affecting the urban infrastructure preferences of residents from the point of view of the systemic concept of the social ecology of the city is conducted. Obtained data viewed that living in high-rise (multi-storey) buildings correlates with a low level of satisfaction, while low-rise buildings positively correlate with such significant aspects as the view from the window, a small number of neighbors, proximity to the sea, and effective house management. Multivariate regression revealed a positive relationship with such infrastructure objects as shopping and entertainment centers, postal services, places of family leisure, etc., which indicates the dominance of the consumer strategy in the behavior of the city resident. The collected empirical material served as the base for identifying the behavioral trends of the townspeople and allowed to simulate a qualitative profile of the activity of everyday support and personal development. (shrink)

Climate is a fundamental element of the environment. Human beings' sound living depends on a healthy and sustainable climate. However, our climate is losing its natural balance day by day. As a result, it is posing harmful effects on us through different types of natural calamities. Apart from several natural processes, anthropocentric (human-caused) activities are the main cause of it. Different types of natural disasters that are occurring in the environment—for instance, hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes, mudslides, floods, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and (...) weather events like extreme droughts and monsoons—are likely increasing in frequency due to climate change. On the other hand, sea level is gradually rising because of global warming, which is affecting all of us in various ways. Sea-level rise has potentially harmful consequences for the inhabitants of this surface. It will not only force the coastal population to migrate from the coastal zone to inland zones, but it will also affect the global population. Along with the sea-level rise, downpours and winter storms are also occurring in many places. These are some of the risks modeled by climate change. Therefore, climate change is a complex problem that should be addressed by the physical and life sciences, psychology, economics, and politics. Moreover, climate change also raises ethical questions, such as our obligations, rights, and duty to preserve a sound climate for future generations. The main aim of this paper is to provide arguments on behalf of our moral obligations to protect a balanced and secure climate for future generations from an ethical perspective. In this paper, I intend to discuss climate change and future generations, our moral obligations to preserve a sound climate for future generations, the rights of future generations to live in a healthy climate, as well as some ways to establish justice toward future generations regarding climate change, and finally, I will confer upon the role of present generations for sustaining a sound and healthy atmosphere of the climate. (shrink)

Core-periphery imbalances and regional disparities figure prominently on the agenda of several disciplines, which result from their enormous impact on economic and social development around the world. In sociology, international relations, and economics, this concept is crucial in explanations of economic exchange. There are few countries that play a dominant role in world trade, while most countries have a secondary or even a tertiary position in world trade. Moreover, when we are discussing global, continental, regional, and national economies, we can (...) present regions and even smaller territorial units which have higher wages than some underdeveloped areas within the same larger area in focus. Such regional inequalities and injustices are the main themes of the core-periphery model, which focuses on tendencies of economic activities to concentrate around some pivotal points. It seeks to explain the spatial inequalities or imbalances observable on all levels or scales by highlighting the role of horizontal and vertical relations between various entities from the level of towns and cities to the global scale. The existence of a core-periphery structure implies that in the spatial dimension, the socioeconomic development is usually uneven. From such a geographical perspective, the regions known as the "core" are advanced in various areas, while other regions described as the "periphery" serve as a social, economic, and political backstages, backyards, and supply sources or - in some cases - are even subject to degradation and decline. Furthermore, the level of development has a negative correlation with distance from the core. The economies of the states that have gone through various stages of development at the earliest and with the fastest pace have become wealthy core regions and growth poles. Those countries and regions where these processes have been slower become or remain the poor periphery. (shrink)

The current economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has created new changes and challenges for society, which has led to a deeper identification of pressing problems and to develop strategies and models for overcoming crises in various countries, industries and businesses. The formation and improvement of modern strategies and models of crisis management is impossible without optimizing the resources of economic entities, providing assistance at various levels of government to support priority sectors of the economy, finding additional sources of (...) funding to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure the effective develop and implementation of modern strategies and models of crisis management it is necessary to have information about the state of economic entities, relevant commodity, raw materials, financial markets, explore the internal and external environment, determine the impact of risks on current activities business entities or industries. The effectiveness of crisis management strategies and models is determined by the ability of the management system to ensure the support of business activity of economic entities in the relevant market and to stimulate effective consumer demand. The purpose of writing this scientific monograph is to substantiate the theoretical and methodological foundations and to form and improve strategies and models of crisis management taking into account new changes and challenges for society related to the COVID-19 pandemic and declining business activity of economic entities. The object of the author’s research was the process of formation and improvement of crisis management strategies and models in the conditions of market imbalance and change of the external environment, reduction of activity volumes of economic entities, growth of budget expenditures to combat the COVID-19, formation of new forms of activities and penetration of information technology into various spheres of life to optimize the negative consequences of a pandemic. The subject of the study were socio-economic, organizational and institutional processes of formation and effective implementation of strategies and models of crisis management in various areas of economic activity; substantiation of mechanisms for ensuring the competitiveness of economic entities and the formation new forms of entrepreneurship; development of modern information technologies; consideration of best practices in business process management and digitalization using world experience in various sectors of the economy caused by the COVID-19. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the study of determinants determined the level of financial security of economic systems. It is shown that the financial security of an economic system implies the achievement of a level of financial stability that will contribute to simultaneously maintaining financial equilibrium and ensuring targeted growth in line with the development strategy. The level of financial security of rail transport in Ukraine was analyzed and it was determined that the decline in its (...) security was the result of a complex interaction of external and internal factors, the main of which were tight government regulation, shifting the financial burden of social responsibilities to Ukrzaliznytsya, PJSC, lack of competition in the transportation of the main nomenclature of cargo and the unsatisfactory state of non-current assets. Based on the Argenti’s method, it is shown that the consequence of the inefficient financial management of Ukrzaliznytsia, PJSC are the reduction of its insolvency. Three main determinants of the financial security of rail enterprises were identified: a reduction in traffic volumes, an unstable capital structure and the impossibility of timely repayment of current liabilities. An additive model for assessing the impact of selected determinants on the level of financial security of Ukrzaliznytsia, PJSC is proposed. The analysis of the model parameters showed that the greatest impact has the index of industrial production, which is due to the predominant formation of its own financial resources of rail transport due to income from freight traffic. A complex of measures designed to improve the financial condition of rail enterprises was proposed. It is substantiated that in order to equalize existing threats, it is necessary to take political decisions aimed at improving the financial condition of Ukrzaliznytsia, PJSC by reducing the intensity of leaching of its financial resources, as well as implementing an anti-crisis financial strategy aimed at optimizing the capital structure and financial rehabilitation of rail enterprises. (shrink)

Algunos presupuestos teológicos de la crisis de Occidente Some theological presuppositions of the crisis of the West -/- Manuel Ocampo Ponce Universidad Panamericana Departamento de Humanidades -/- Resumen. Muchos hablan de una crisis en occidente y de los distintos factores que han contribuido a la misma. Sin embargo, no son tantos los que involucran los factores teológicos que han influido en dicha crisis. De aquí que el presente estudio sea un intento por presentar algunos de los presupuestos teológicos de lo (...) que se ha llamado “la crisis de occidente”. Se trata de presentar ciertas ideas filosóficas que han repercutido en las propuestas de algunos teólogos y pensadores del siglo XX y lo que va del XXI, y de demostrar que dichas ideas han producido cambios significativos en la concepción de Dios, en la concepción de las dimensiones personal y social del hombre, y con estas en la organización del mundo contribuyendo, en distintos niveles, lo que se ha denominado la crisis de Occidente. -/- Palabras clave: Dios, Cristianismo, ser, Teología, Metafísica, crisis, agnosticismo, relativismo, secularismo. -/- Abstract. Many speak of a crisis in the West and of the various factors that have contributed to it. However, few mention the theological factors that have influenced this crisis. Hence, the present study is an attempt to present some of the theological presuppositions of what has been called "the crisis of the West". The study presents certain philosophical ideas that have had repercussions on the proposals of some representative theologians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It seeks to demonstrate that these ideas have produced some changes in the conception of God, in the conception of personal and social dimensions and in the organization of the world. These have favored, at different levels, what has been called the crisis of the West. -/- Key words: God, Christianism, being, Theology, Methaphisics, crisis, agnosticism, relativism, secularism. -/- En las últimas décadas se ha hablado mucho de que el mundo occidental se encuentra en crisis. Crisis de pensamiento, crisis de valores, crisis moral, crisis en los ámbitos científicos, artísticos, humanos, ambientales, etc. Sin embargo, es necesario aclarar que, para comprender Occidente y su crisis, es imprescindible considerar el papel del cristianismo como elemento fundamental de la cultura occidental. No podemos dejar de lado que, si el cristianismo tiene un peso en el desarrollo de Occidente, también debe tener un peso en sus logros y en sus decadencias y fracasos. En efecto, así como no podemos entender el mundo árabe si no conocemos el Islam, o Asia si no conocemos el budismo, tampoco podemos comprender Occidente si no conocemos el cristianismo. Esa es la razón por la que pensamos que cualquier análisis serio de la cultura de Occidente, ha de considerar el cristianismo como elemento clave para su comprensión. Pero hay que ser conscientes de que el cristianismo abarca muchos ámbitos especulativos y prácticos que, en una investigación de esta naturaleza, son imposibles de abarcar. Por lo mismo, el presente estudio se limita a mostrar de manera muy panorámica sólo algunos de los elementos teológicos de la crisis de Occidente que muchas veces son pasados por alto en distintos ámbitos, considerando que la Teología cristiana está conformada por una fuerte base filosófica. Como corolario de este estudio se deduce una solución que deviene de los mismos factores que han sido causas de la crisis. Se ha realizado una selección de algunos autores que he considerado como representativos de movimientos de pensamiento que han dado lugar a ciertos cambios importantes, y presentarlos demostrando el papel que ha tenido la modificación de la Teología cristiana en la crisis de Occidente. (shrink)

Social integration was theorized to be a ‘secularizing’ process for immigrants in Western Europe. Assuming that immigrants adapt to new social environments by complying with the mainstream culture of their receiving countries, immigrant religiosity is expected to decline as they assimilate in societies where secular norms prevail. Alternatively, religion could be a coping mechanism for immigrants who struggle to assimilate in their receiving countries. ‘Buffer’ theories of religion suggest that religious identity could be interchangeable with ethnicity and nationality to (...) mitigate the identity conflicts immigrants experience. This paper addresses the following research question: What role does religion play in the identity conflict experienced by immigrants who are both an ethnic minority and a national of a Western European country? Particularly, I explore the pertinence of religious identity for first-generation Sub-Saharan African Christian immigrants (SSACI) in Germany and France, where the models of immigrant assimilation diverge. Statistical tests were conducted on data derived from two surveys to compare religious, national, and ethnic self-identities at the group and individual levels. The group comparisons suggest that Christianity was indeed more salient for SSACI than native-born Christians. SSACIs without citizenship were also more likely to experience identity conflict, to which they may cope by associating less with their ethnicity or more with their religious identity. Perceived discrimination was associated with identity conflict only in Germany where immigrant assimilation is traditionally based on a common ancestry, in contrast to the values-based model in France. These are consistent with the predictions derived from ‘buffer’ theories of immigrant religiosity but longitudinal studies are needed for a more robust understanding of these trends. (shrink)

Background: Multi Drug Therapy approved by WHO is the best treatment option for Leprosy. There is a significant decline of mortality and morbidity after the introduction of multi drug therapy. But the adverse effects causing changes in clinical and laboratory parameters to multi drug therapy are the main limiting obstacle for the treatment course completion. Objective: The aim of this study is to find out the effects on routine laboratory parameters including hematological and biochemical changes before, during and after (...) the treatment of multi drug therapy in leprosy. Methodology: A descriptive cohort hospital based study on 85 multi drug therapy treated leprosy patients using standard laboratory tools for routine investigations for 18 months. Results: During the one year multidrug treatment period, most of the routine laboratory parameters showed mild to moderate change from normal level during the first 3 months with gradual recovery in the following months. Complete blood count assessment revealed mild decline in Hb, PCV, MCH, MCHC, and moderate decline in WBC and Platelet count. A mild increase in liver function tests (Bilirubin, AST, ALT, Alkaline phosphatase) and renal function tests (S.Creatinine, b. Urea) was observed. A moderate decline in S. Sodium with mild increase in S. Potassium was found on investigating S. Electrolytes. Patients were fully recovered from all hemato-biochemical adverse effects after 6 months of completion of the multi drug therapy. Conclusion: Despite of mild to moderate hematological and biochemical adverse reactions with multi drug therapy, recovery was excellent after 6 months of completion of therapy. (shrink)