Fixing the World

Author(s):  
Jennifer Wenzel

What kind of remedy or redress can literature and other forms of counterfactual imagining offer in the face of environmental injustice? This epilogue draws together from the book’s previous chapters insights about consumerism, citizenship, enclosure, and exposure in order to contemplate this question. Pivoting from The Yes Men Fix the World (a 2009 documentary about the culture-jamming pranksters, the Yes Men) to Chinua Achebe’s reflections on the difference between “beneficent” and “malignant” fiction, the epilogue argues that we should understand all such fictions as risky: unpredictable in how their causes and effects work themselves out across time and space. Such risks entail not only exposure to the possibility of harm, but also leaps of faith into the unknown and the as-yet unrealized, as well as the prospect that the innocence we tend to imagine about ourselves might be countered with a newfound sense of complicity, entanglement, or even self-reflexive solidarity.

1983 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56
Author(s):  
John Morreall

Any reflective account of theological language acknowledges very early that words drawn from our experience with creatures have special meanings when applied to God. Because God transcends the created world, we cannot take predicates which apply to creatures and apply them to God without modification. And the more transcendent God is understood to be, the more modified will our language taken from creatures have to be when it is used in theology. A primitive theism which thinks of God simply as a very powerful person will view the difference between God and creatures as merely a matter of degree and not of kind. In such a view God transcends things in the world only in that he has a greater degree of the properties we find in creatures, so that predicates taken from creatures, ‘wise’ and ‘strong’, for example, can be applied to God in almost a straightforward way. The only change in meaning is that God is moreknowing and stronger. In a more sophisticated theism such as Judaism or Christianity, on the other hand, God' transcendence is seen not simply as a difference in degrees of properties, but as a difference in kind. The being God is is radically other than the kinds of beings we find in the created world. Indeed, it is sometimes claimed that God is not even ‘a being’, a thing which exists; rather God is ‘being itself’, ‘pure existence’. Aquinas, for instance, held that God does not haveproperties. God is absolutely simple, and so if we can talk about properties at all in talking about God, we have to say that God is identical to God' properties. God, too, differs radically from creatures in that he is not in time and space, nor is he dependent on anything else. But our language used with creatures is full of explicit or implicit references to time and space and to dependence, so that we cannot take our ordinary terms derived from our experience with spatio-temporal, dependent creatures and apply them straightforwardly to God.


Author(s):  
Jack Zupko

Unlike most other important philosophers of the scholastic period, John Buridan never entered the theology faculty but spent his entire career as an arts master at the University of Paris. There he distinguished himself primarily as a logician who made numerous additions and refinements to the Parisian tradition of propositional logic. These included the development of a genuinely nominalist semantics, as well as techniques for analyzing propositions containing intentional verbs and paradoxes of self-reference. Even in his writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy, logic is Buridan’s preferred vehicle for his nominalistic and naturalistic vision. Buridan’s nominalism is concerned not merely with denying the existence of real universals, but with a commitment to economize on entities, of which real universals are but one superfluous type. Likewise, his representationalist epistemology accounts for the difference between universal and singular cognition by focusing on how the intellect cognizes its object, rather than by looking for some difference in the objects themselves. He differs from other nominalists of the period, however, in his willingness to embrace realism about modes of things to explain certain kinds of physical change. Underlying Buridan’s natural philosophy is his confidence that the world is knowable by us (although not with absolute certainty). His approach to natural science is empirical in the sense that it emphasizes the evidentness of appearances, the reliability of a posteriori modes of reasoning and the application of certain naturalistic models of explanation to a wide range of phenomena. In similar fashion, he locates the will’s freedom in our evident ability to defer choice in the face of alternatives whose goodness appears dubious or uncertain.


2018 ◽  
pp. 5-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. Grigoryev ◽  
V. A. Pavlyushina

The phenomenon of economic growth is studied by economists and statisticians in various aspects for a long time. Economic theory is devoted to assessing factors of growth in the tradition of R. Solow, R. Barrow, W. Easterly and others. During the last quarter of the century, however, the institutionalists, namely D. North, D. Wallis, B. Weingast as well as D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, have shown the complexity of the problem of development on the part of socioeconomic and political institutions. As a result, solving the problem of how economic growth affects inequality between countries has proved extremely difficult. The modern world is very diverse in terms of development level, and the article offers a new approach to the formation of the idea of stylized facts using cluster analysis. The existing statistics allows to estimate on a unified basis the level of GDP production by 174 countries of the world for 1992—2016. The article presents a structured picture of the world: the distribution of countries in seven clusters, different in levels of development. During the period under review, there was a strong per capita GDP growth in PPP in the middle of the distribution, poverty in various countries declined markedly. At the same time, in 1992—2016, the difference increased not only between rich and poor groups of countries, but also between clusters.


Author(s):  
Brian Willems

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.


Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman

This chapter focuses on the reality of persons in a world of things. It begins and ends with some relevant views drawn from the Jewish philosophers Buber (1878–1965), Heschel (1907–72), and Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–93). Framed by the Jewish concerns, it turns to a philosophical exploration of human personhood. The chapter begins by consiering Sellars's classic essay on the scientific and manifest images of “man-in-the-world.” Sellars shows how urgent and difficult it is to sustain a recognizable image of ourselves as persons in the face of scientism. With additional help from Nagel and Kant, it argues that persons cannot be conceptually scanted in a world of things. Notwithstanding the explanatory power of science, there is more to life than explanation. Explanation of what we are needs supplementing by a conception of who we are, how we should live, and why we matter. Those are questions to which Jewish sources can speak.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Kunal Debnath

High culture is a collection of ideologies, beliefs, thoughts, trends, practices and works-- intellectual or creative-- that is intended for refined, cultured and educated elite people. Low culture is the culture of the common people and the mass. Popular culture is something that is always, most importantly, related to everyday average people and their experiences of the world; it is urban, changing and consumeristic in nature. Folk culture is the culture of preindustrial (premarket, precommodity) communities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00013
Author(s):  
Danny Susanto

<p class="Abstract">The purpose of this study is to analyze the phenomenon known as&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">“anglicism”: a loan made to the English language by another language.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism arose either from the adoption of an English word as a&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">result of a translation defect despite the existence of an equivalent&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">term in the language of the speaker, or from a wrong translation, as a&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">word-by-word translation. Said phenomenon is very common&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">nowadays and most languages of the world including making use of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">some linguistic concepts such as anglicism, neologism, syntax,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">morphology etc, this article addresses various aspects related to&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicisms in French through a bibliographic study: the definition of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism, the origin of Anglicisms in French and the current situation,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">the areas most affected by Anglicism, the different categories of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism, the difference between French Anglicism in France and&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">French-speaking Canada, the attitude of French-speaking society&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">towards to the Anglicisms and their efforts to stop this phenomenon.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">The study shows that the areas affected are, among others, trade,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">travel, parliamentary and judicial institutions, sports, rail, industrial&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">production and most recently film, industrial production, sport, oil industry, information technology,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">science and technology. Various initiatives have been implemented either by public institutions or by&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">individuals who share concerns about the increasingly felt threat of the omnipresence of Anglicism in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">everyday life.</span></p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arathy Puthillam

That American and European participants are overrepresented in psychological studies has been previously established. In addition, researchers also often tend to be similarly homogenous. This continues to be alarming, especially given that this research is being used to inform policies across the world. In the face of a global pandemic where behavioral scientists propose solutions, we ask who is conducting research and on what samples. Forty papers on COVID-19 published in PsyArxiV were analyzed; the nationalities of the authors and the samples they recruited were assessed. Findings suggest that an overwhelming majority of the samples recruited were from the US and the authors were based in US and German institutions. Next, men constituted a large proportion of primary and sole authors. The implications of these findings are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
Nandi Syukri ◽  
Eko Budi Setiawan

Business Card is the most efficient, effective and appropriate tool for every business men no matter they are owners, employees, more over marketers to provide information about their businesses. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to bring and manage business card in large numbers also to remember the face of the business card owner. A Business Card application need to be built to solve all those issues mentioned above. The Application or software must be run in media which can be accessed anywhere and anytime such as smart phone. Kuartu is as business card application run in mobile devices. Kuartu is developed using object base modeling for mobile sub system. The platform of the mobile sub system is android, as it is the most widely used platform in the world. The Kuartu application utilizing NFC and QR Code technology to support the business card information exchange and the Chatting feature for communication. Based on the experiment and test using black box methodology, it can be concluded that Kuartu application makes business card owner to communicate each other easily, business card always carried, easy to manage the cards and information of the business card owner can be easily obtained. Index Terms— Business Card, Android, Kuartu, NFC, QrCode, Chatting.


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