Making Monsters

Instructors have critically sought ways to embody the theories and ideals espoused in radical texts and work to better force changes in the type of students we produce. What is presented here is an honest reflective dialogue, based on a reflexive critique of 17 years as a professor and the students I have encountered. But more importantly, this is also based on an equal set of years studying the aftereffects of White supremacy, the “candy wrapper” left on the ground at a campsite that informs someone was present, insinuates what may have been done, and eludes a sense of disregard while foreclosing any understanding of what it will go on to do next. Those candy wrappers are the “mild” subjects of the legacy of lynching, colonialism, and state-sanctioned violence. So, in the context of being a faculty member engaged with students, I pose a question to you, for us, from me: What if instead of “transgressing” White supremacy, we are in fact maintaining it? Many of us in higher education have come to an understanding that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is insufficient for college teaching and student learning to positively move forward through the 21st century. If we are to understand White supremacy not as a societal add-on that has corrupted the world around us but instead as the actual world around us, how do we properly contextualize this in a course or class? How do we foster experiences that deepen an understanding of a systemic reality? This essay challenges reductionist understandings of White supremacy as a matter of privilege that are reflected in DEI, culturally responsive teaching, dismantling, antiracist, invisible-knapsack-based approaches. Could it be that through this reduction we are instead producing “monsters”?

Journeying to the actual World through digital games: The Urban Histories Reloaded project

The paper aims at reflecting on the potential of digital games to convey meaning, tell stories and, most importantly, become a tool to discover and experience the actual world. Using as a case study the experience of the Urban Histories Reloaded. Creatività videoludica per azioni di cittadinanza (Urban Histories Reloaded. Digital Game Creativity for citizenship actions) project (UHR), we will discuss the role digital games can play in activating territorial processes, by favouring the engagement with the actual world as well as with playful approaches to city living. In particular, we will focus on the artist residency for game designers, game artists, and game programmers held in Padua between September and October 2020 within the frame of the project and on its main outcome, the mobile game MostaScene. MostaScene consists of a fifteen-minute mobile game set in District 5 Armistizio-Savonarola of Padua. Both its design and its overall content have intertwined with the urban space since the very beginning. Above all, we will inspect the use of digital games for city-making actions via two different paths: on the one hand, through the involvement of stakeholders (public institutions and specific groups, but also and most importantly citizens) as co-designers; on the other hand, using digital games as non-functional experiences that may encourage innovative interpretations of the urban space for player. From a theoretical perspective, this research requires us to look at digital games as both fictional worlds that involve imagination and interpretation, as well as digital worlds that are experienced as part of reality in a phenomenological sense. Once this is acknowledged, we can provide an overview of how games can tackle reality and engage with the actual world.

The missing mass

In response to the Lateral Thoughts quiz “Sporting chance”, in which question 8 asked for a rough estimate of the theoretical maximum height a pole vaulter could jump, and why the actual world record is slightly above this.

The State of Nature

The chapter assumes that the state of nature is the state of the world prior to the existence of social rules, and then goes on to argue for the following claims. (1) We have reasons for action in the state of nature. (2) In those state of nature worlds in which we all know what reasons for action we have and are motivated to act on them—for short, those worlds in which we are ideal—these reasons for action would support our exiting the state of nature, that is, our creating and maintaining certain social rules. (3) The social rules we have reasons to create would include social rules telling us what to do in both worlds in which we are ideal and nearby worlds in which we are non-ideal. (4) These need not be rules that we have any reason to abide by in the actual world in which we are non-ideal. (5) Thinking about the role of social rules in fixing what we have reason to do in those states of nature in which we are ideal and non-ideal suggests a complicated and novel story about what we have knowledge of, insofar as we have knowledge of what we have reason to do in the actual world in which social rules exist willy-nilly.

Sharing real and fictional reference

This chapter extends the framework of MSDRT (Mental State Discourse Representation Theory) to the problem of reference in fiction, and to the role and function of fictional names. Central to the investigation is the notion of an Entity Representation (ER), a central feature of MSDRT and used previously in the communication-theoretic analysis of the pragmatics and semantics of non-fictional names in Kamp (2015). As argued in that paper, the use of proper names within a speech community leads to networks of connected ERs in the mental states of their users. These networks provide the names with a kind of intersubjective identity. In this respect, fictional names resemble non-fictional names—those that refer to real entities, that exist in the actual world in which we live. This chapter proposes an analysis of fictional names and fictional reference that capitalizes on this resemblance.

Revisiting Videogame Logic: Impossible Storyworlds in the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster

This paper demonstrates how two logics (narrative and videogame) function in a select number of contemporary blockbuster films. The paper is divided into three sections: The first outlines narrative and videogame logics; the second presents examples from Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) and Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) to demonstrate how videogame logic structures the events in each film; and the third discusses how these logics create specific storyworlds (imaginary worlds distinct from the actual world) that are unnatural and/or impossible.

Another way to look at counterfactuals

Counterfactuals such as If the world did not exist, we would not notice it have been a challenge for philosophers and linguists since antiquity. There is no generally accepted semantic analysis. The prevalent view, developed in varying forms by Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and others, enriches the idea of strict implication by the idea of a “minimal revision” of the actual world. Objections mainly address problems of maximal similarity between worlds. In this paper, I will raise several problems of a different nature and draw attention to several phenomena that are relevant for counterfactuality but rarely discussed in that context. An alternative analysis that is very close to the linguistic facts is proposed. A core notion is the “situation talked about”: it makes little sense to discuss whether an assertion is true or false unless it is clear which situation is talked about. In counterfactuals, this situation is marked as not belonging to the actual world. Typically, this is done in the form of the finite verb in the main clause. The if-clause is optional and has only a supportive role: it provides information about the world to which the situation talked about belongs. Counterfactuals only speak about some nonactual world, of which we only know what results from the protasis. In order to judge them as true or false, an additional assumption is required: they are warranted according to the same criteria that warrant the corresponding indicative assertion. Overall similarity between worlds is irrelevant.

The Symbolic Journey of E. Pavlov’s “Violin” from the Actual World to the Virtual and Back

Pavlov, Ye. & Pavlova, T. (2018). Violin. Kyiv: Rodovid. [In Russian & English].

Linguistic organization of the duality of mythological worlds in B. Pasternak’s poem "Wind" ("Veter")

This article presents a linguopoetic analysis of Boris Pasternak’s poem "Wind" ("Veter") from the position of the lingual embodiment of the duality of mythological worlds. This research focuses on the symbol of "the wind as a spirit", upon which the poem’s whole mystical idea relies. The purpose of this article is to reveal which the linguistic means used to translate the duality of mythological worlds, as well as how this cognition merges with the author’s experience and determines the poem’s figurative system and idea. The understanding of the duality of mythological worlds requires the law of participation (L. L vy-Bruhl) – the identification of the mental, emotional, and physical properties of a person and nature. In Pasternak’s poem, the suffering and rushing "I" of the deceased lyrical hero becomes the wind. In this study, the word-symbol "wind" is studied in the semantic and semiotic aspect as a sign. Its signifier is the lexeme wind meaning 'perceptual idea of an air flow'; signified – the symbolic meaning of 'spirit, soul, immortality', due to the etymological meaning of the word and pagan mythology. The results reveal that the symbol "wind" is the carrier of the duality of mythological worlds, and it programs the fictional world of the poem: on the one hand, these are the actual world of the lyrical heroine, the house, and the wind, which swings pine trees; on the other hand – the imaginary world of the spirit of the dead lyrical hero. The lexical resources of the poetic text translate this opposition in the ratio of the words I and wind, personal pronouns I and you, as well as the words ended and alive. At the grammatical level, the duality is expressed by the contrast of the verbal forms of the past and present time, as well as by the passage from the indirect thought (the lyrical hero’s mental monologue) to the 3rd person narrative about the wind and the pine trees and by the return of the poem to the lyrical hero’s indirect thought at the end. This is how Pasternak implements one of the main ideas of his novel "Doctor Zhivago" – the idea of immortality, which is confirmed in the article by referring to the novel’s macro context and biographical materials.

Less Known Results on the Solar System

For a two half millennium evolution of knowledge from the Democrit’s natural, rational atomized material conception to the Newtonian, Maxwellian, Einsteinian mathematized physics, the research in the most cases has followed a deductive route from observable facts/reality according to the Mach’s rigorous positivism principle. During the last century both experimental and computational technology progress has accumulated a solid factual datum support on the better knowledge of our actual world, so that the research is beginning on inductive route of the hidden/dark detailed processes as a whole. This revolutionary stage of physics, based on a holistic integral approach, is concerned with the relativity-gravity evolution in a quantifiable space-time universe created after the morphogenetic light explosion (or the 4D-BIG BANG). The paper presented herein contains some less known aspects on the work of solar system as a whole, along with the specific activity of the Earth-planet as a part integrated into the solar complex.