„Quo Vadis, Aida?“ in the Context of Prosthetic Memory

The research for this paper was initially prompted by the insights of Alison Landsberg (Prosthetic Memory, 2004) on the development of prosthetic memory, namely the phenomenon of personally experienced content through the mass media – and the idea to apply the same insights to the film "Quo Vadis, Aida" (2020) directed by Jasmila Žbanić, because of the relevance of its topic on the Srebrenica genocide in 1995 for modern society. This paper analyzes the difference between collective and prosthetic memory, affective engagement concerning the process of identification in acquiring historical knowledge and prosthetic memory, and the elements of the film that encourage epistemological uncertainty and therefore potentially develop historical awareness and responsibility. Given the example of the film "Quo Vadis, Aida?", this paper aims to show the potential of mass media in developing prosthetic memory, which consequently brings to thinking about the other from the current perspective, thus encouraging moral responsibility and critical thinking.

Where We Produce One, We Produce All

Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon's enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.

A Belief Expressionist Explanation of Divine Conceptualist Mathematics

Many have pointed out that the utility of mathematical objects is somewhat disconnected from their ontological status. For example, one might argue that arithmetic is useful whether or not numbers exist. We explore this phenomenon in the context of Divine Conceptualism (DC), which claims that mathematical objects exist as thoughts in the divine mind. While not arguing against DC claims, we argue that DC claims can lead to epistemological uncertainty regarding the ontological status of mathematical objects. This weakens DC attempts to explain the utility of mathematical objects on the basis of their existence. To address this weakness, we propose an appeal to Liggins’ theory of Belief Expressionism (BE). Indeed, we point out that BE is amenable to the ontological claims of DC while also explaining the utility of mathematical objects apart from reliance upon their existence. We illustrate these themes via a case study of Peano Arithmetic.

“Die Grenzen des Sagbaren”: H. G. Adler (on) Writing Literature after the Holocaust

Taking the next step in our understanding of the testimony of Holocaust literature involves taking a step back to recuperate a theoretical approach that does not cede all human attempts at knowledge to skepticism. At odds with Theodor Adorno about the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, transformed his experiences into fiction. In his novel, Eine Reise, published in 1962, and in his 1965 essay on “Die Grenzen des Sagbaren,” or the limits of the sayable, Adler addresses these dilemmas. While Adorno collapses traditions of value into barbarity, Adler struggles to maintain, describe and explain the possibility of human resistance to evil. I examine Adler’s nuanced use of language in these two works and show that the rage and epistemological uncertainty that dominate the post-Holocaust world do not necessarily lead to the destruction of all traditional forms of meaning.

Digital Turn: Global Trends and Local Specifics

The article reviews emerging research programs and analyzes new research strategies, including media epistemological and media archeological approaches, interface semiotics, economic theory of communication between market entities, etc. The main questions of the article: how is a digital turn in culture possible, what are its preconditions and consequences that radically transform the context of life? The development of information technologies has led to the emergence of a number of research areas such as chaos theory, transformational linguistics, bioinformatics, etc. Applied theories today can already change not only basic epistemological, but also ontological concepts. Thus, the spheres of everyday existence, habitually labeled as marginal, become decisive for global political, economic and socio-cultural subjects. So, the message on social networks affects the stock markets, the behavior of computer players – on the ways of interacting with digital gadgets, and the instrumental and communication skills of our time, the network content of private video bloggers can sometimes determine the main agenda in the media. Software applications of the digital environment developed in the IT industry determine the set of tools available to the user, and with them, the ways of expressing and perceiving thoughts. The authors share the conclusion: whatever we work on, we work together with the digital mind, which in the form of Big Data, Big Five, Cyber DNA and other technologies determines our actions. The essence of the digital turn is not taken by the arsenal of pre-digital methodological attitudes that require a return to the original unity of logic, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics in an era of epistemological uncertainty. The situation becomes more complicated in connection with the declared counter-tendencies of globalization – glocalization.

Appropriate technology's prompt to ‘architectural thinking’, c. 1976

This article argues that the UK’s vanguard magazine Architectural Design (AD) promoted appropriate technology (AT) to prompt ‘architectural thinking’ about the late-modern crisis following the collapse of post-War consensus in the welfare state and its architecture. This was to be a crisis settled by the decade’s end in postmodernism and neoliberalism, a new consensus so overwhelming that it was heralded even in AT, especially those variants drawn from the Californian libertarianism of the Whole Earth Catalog. But British AT was also drawing from the UK’s eco-socialist Radical Technology group and its publication, whose chief artist, anarchist Clifford Harper, and editor Peter Harper, contributed to AD. At the beginning of the decade, the magazine’s sub-editor Martin Pawley insisted on the role of a lateral ‘architectural thinking’ of the sort inherent to AT, which pointed to futures by turn libertarian, socialist, and social democratic (its first advocate, Ernst Schumacher, had been a stalwart Keynesian and manager of nationalisation). Beyond politics per se, paradox and analogy were keynote to the decade’s epistemological uncertainty, from the ‘wickedness’ besetting design as a ‘problem-solving’ activity, to a post-structuralism eroding the long Enlightenment project, to a post-colonialism challenging Eurocentric technologies of exploitation. Indeed, AD could position design and AT as ‘non-aligned third way’ much as the so-called Third World indicated a ‘third way’ between the capitalism and communism of the so-called First and Second Worlds.

Analysing brain networks in population neuroscience: a case for the Bayesian philosophy

Network connectivity fingerprints are among today's best choices to obtain a faithful sampling of an individual's brain and cognition. Widely available MRI scanners can provide rich information tapping into network recruitment and reconfiguration that now scales to hundreds and thousands of humans. Here, we contemplate the advantages of analysing such connectome profiles using Bayesian strategies. These analysis techniques afford full probability estimates of the studied network coupling phenomena, provide analytical machinery to separate epistemological uncertainty and biological variability in a coherent manner, usher us towards avenues to go beyond binary statements on existence versus non-existence of an effect, and afford credibility estimates around all model parameters at play which thus enable single-subject predictions with rigorous uncertainty intervals. We illustrate the brittle boundary between healthy and diseased brain circuits by autism spectrum disorder as a recurring theme where, we argue, network-based approaches in neuroscience will require careful probabilistic answers. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Unifying the essential concepts of biological networks: biological insights and philosophical foundations’.

Concepts, Images, Determination. Some remarks on the understanding of Transcendental Philosophy by McDowell and Fichte

McDowell in Mind and World developed a post-transcendental understanding of some core philosophical puzzles of subjectivity, like consciousness, conceptual capacity and perception. One of the main assumptions in the background of his philosophical proposal is that all our possible experience has to be determined and therefore has to be acknowledged as conceptual, therefore this very experience has to be both relational and representational.After this statement of conceptual experience in the early 2000’s a debate started which still involves philosophers like Brandom, Gaskin, Wright, Heck, Stalnaker, Peacocke, Dreyfus.The discussion in the beginning was focused on the definition of the Space of Reasons, what is most lively today is the epistemological uncertainty of the possibility of perceiving imagines in a reductive view as perceptual (non-conceptual) experience. The proposal of McDowell is a quasi-Hegelian understanding of concepts. I think that is possible an alternative path, moving from a new understanding of conceptual spontaneity and of the determination in general, rooted in J. G. Fichte Sittenlehre (1812) and in the general framework of the Wissenschaftslehre (mostly the WL Nova methodo and some later expositions) in a broader and more nuanced understanding of the postkantian transcendental philosophy.

"Dragon-Ridden" Days: Yeats, Apocalypse, and the Anthropocene

Dragons, being imaginary creatures, escape the umbra of extinction shadowing multiple species on earth today. We can trace their lineage from Homer (at least in the European tradition) to the personal mount of of Daenerys Targaryen, Drogon, in Game of Thrones; or, from Beowulf to J. R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Because they are textual creatures, dragons display a re-silience and capacity to mutate that makes them eloquent ontological signifiers in mythic narratives, as motifs of epistemological uncertainty in folklore and cultural memory, and as embodiments of extra-human/pre-modern intrusions in the workings of history. Whereas Chinese dragons are often beneficial to the human species, European variants (including those found in Celtic folklore) are not. Dragons spell death and destruction; they demand human sacrifices, as in the legend of St. George. Their appearance suggests power and menace of extraordinary dimensions, as in Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock. (The Jabber-wock was first illustrated by John Tenniel in 1871 as a dragon, and the tradition continues well into the present day, in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, for example.) Dragons collude with destructive forces; their power to annihilate everything that stands for “human” is unwittingly referred to in Kanye West’s words above.2 I suggest in this essay that the image of the dragon offers us a portal into the highly ornate symbolic structures of W. B. Yeats’s historiography and his vision of the apocalyptic.