The Faces of Human Vulnerability

The notion of vulnerability is one of the beliefs of a recent current of moral and political philosophy, namely care ethics. Stemming, especially, from the North American feminist movement, this care ethics, based on the rejection of a universal and abstract morals, privileges the relational dimension based on the orientation towards human vulnerability.Subject to the weight of the tyranny of normality and perfection, contemporary societies, glorifying the individual who is useful and performant, struggle to hide, or more often than not deny the vulnerability of human beings. The notion of vulnerability appeared not only as a mutual sign of any person who is in a dependent situation, but also as one of the constitutive dimensions of the essence of living beings and of their life environment. In this article, the notion of vulnerability will be studied by identifying the representative themes of human vulnerability particular to their life and its conditions of being. Firstly, the hypothesis proposed by Freud in Le malaise dans la culture (2010)represents the underlying basis of this study on human vulnerability. Next, two important concepts guide the study proposed: the vulnerability inherent to human subjectivity, from the perspective of Lévinas, and the one akin the process of socialising of human beings, from the perspective of Habermas.

Politics of Manufacturing Consent in a Post-Truth Society

This article critically examines how human life today is faced with issues of dishonesty and deception. Using the concept of post-truth in analyzing and understanding the context of change in a global society under neo-liberalism, it focuses on the way powerful people, groups, political parties, and media now take recourse to strategies such as falsification, manipulation, or deception to influence and control the human mind. Those involved in doing this use nostalgic narratives, idealize a fictional past and generate conspiracy theories to create false consciousness and thereby colonize the life world. Such colonization not only promotes social pathologies but also limits the democratic, secular, and plural spirits of multicultural nations like India. The article ends by arguing that there are limits to such politics and the best alternative to the conundrum is the assertion of human subjectivity and agency, and alternative media can play a major role in this endeavor.

Philosophy of Existentialism: Individual Awareness in Indonesian Education

The philosophy of existentialism emerged driven by the uncertain world conditions due to world wars. So existentialism is present as a thought movement that emphasizes human subjectivity and freedom. This study has a purpose for reflection. Reflection means the process of understanding events in the mind or experience that is owned. This study uses descriptive qualitative research. This study utilizes a literature search. The literature search process begins with key phrases such as “existentialism”, “education” and “awareness”. Man must exist, which means realizing that he exists to control himself and act on his behalf. The philosophy of existentialism talks about human existence, while talking about humans means questioning educational issues. Each person is unique, which is different from one another. Realizing this is important for students, parents, teachers, principals, board members, and all those involved in education. Education is expected to realize the "intensity of awareness" of students. So that they are aware of their responsibility to determine the life they will live themselves.

The non-anthropocentric informational agents: Codes, software, and the logic of emergence in cybersecurity

Many theoretical approaches to cybersecurity adopt an anthropocentric conceptualisation of agency; that is, tying the capacity to act to human subjectivity and disregarding the role of the non-human in co-constructing its own (in)security. This article argues that such approaches are insufficient in capturing the complexities of cyber incidents, particularly those that involve self-perpetuating malware and autonomous cyber attacks that can produce unintentional and unpredictable consequences. Using interdisciplinary insights from the philosophy of information and software studies, the article counters the anthropocentrism in the cybersecurity literature by investigating the agency of syntactic information (that is, codes/software) in co-producing the logics and politics of cybersecurity. It specifically studies the complexities of codes/software as informational agents, their self-organising capacities, and their autonomous properties to develop an understanding of cybersecurity as emergent security. Emergence is introduced in the article as a non-linear security logic that captures the peculiar agential capacities of codes/software and the ways in which they challenge human control and intentionality by co-constructing enmity and by co-producing the subjects and objects of cybersecurity.

Neoliberalism and Religion in Latin America

The term “neoliberalism” has variable and broad meanings. It has even been suggested that we should dispense with the term altogether. However, in this text, I defend that we can find a very powerful concept of neoliberalism in the works of Dardot-Laval, and Brown. These thinkers show us that neoliberalism needs to be conceived as a rationality that produces a specific kind of human subjectivity, namely, the neoliberal Homo Oeconomicus or the Homo Neoliberalis. Such a concept is, in addition, crucial to understand the most recent and visible changes in Latin American religiosity, that is, the so-called “Latin American Protestant Turn”. This turn, as has been noted, should be more precisely called the “Latin American Pentecostal Turn”. Based on empirical studies that describe the main elements of this turn, I describe what seems to be the principal traits of the religiosity of the Latin American Homo Neoliberalis.

PSYCHOANALYSIS FACING CONTEMPORARY HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY

The article brings an analysis of the contemporary human subjectivity with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Schlomo Freud. Within the psyche of every human being, where the unconscious keeps memories, desires, pleasures, anguishes, repressions, often incontestable, causes the subject to relate them to pain, as something to be avoided. Today, in the face of contemporaneity, one observes that subjectivity is intertwined with the fear of discovering itself, with the fear of facing its own history and reality, seeking only to live momentarily, to live the present, to live the uncreated, without perspectives. In this context it is observed that the figure of Freud, or rather, the emblematic psychoanalysis, gains space more and more for his rescue, from when it was postulated. The search for happiness that most people believe to exist is implicitly linked to the action and attitude of every human being, since we know ourselves as such, independent of concrete subjective worlds or not. Therefore, the place of psychoanalysis, in the face of this context, is understood as a contraposition to the avoidance of pain, characteristic of the pursuit of present happiness.

Wretched Subjectivity

This article rethinks critically a landmark work of the twentieth century—The Captive Mind, by Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. Published in 1953, the book sought to understand human subjectivity, or, as it put it, “how the human mind functions,” in Cold-War Eastern Europe. I argue that, while probing what Western intellectuals of that time saw as the historical novelty of totalitarianism, Miłosz formulates an analysis that is rather retro. He represents Eastern Europe in terms of colonialism and imperialism—as a colonized realm and a colonized mind. What is more, he casts his representation in the terms of what Edward Said famously called “Orientalism”—producing a distorted, Orientalist work. Finally, while intimating hope for overcoming Eastern Europe’s domination, Miłosz shows that hope as illusory.

5G Joint Artificial Intelligence Technology in the Innovation and Reform of University English Education

This paper considers the issue of human subjectivity in the system of “5G + AI+Education” from the perspective of, on the one hand, the real need for the problems that gradually emerge in the new round of development and application of artificial intelligence, and a philosophical reflection on the application of artificial intelligence in specific fields, on the other hand. It is also a further examination of the issue of human subjectivity in the new context. On the other hand, it is also a further examination of the issue of human subjectivity in the new context of the times, which can also provide students with an immersive learning environment, and AI artificial intelligence and hologram technology can enhance students’ motivation. This paper shows the specific steps and implementation measures of “5G” technology into online oral teaching and provides a case study design to explore the new online oral teaching model, summarizing the advantages and proposing solutions to the shortcomings. The system visualizes each step of gesture recognition to facilitate students’ understanding. Students can experience the process of gesture recognition according to the guidance of the interactive interface, and then, the complex and abstract gesture recognition process is explained with a figurative example, which is conducive to primary and secondary school students’ deeper understanding and improved logical thinking. This will help primary and secondary school students to have a deeper understanding and improve their logical thinking skills. Finally, a comparison experiment is designed to verify the effectiveness of using this system to learn AI knowledge compared with traditional learning methods. The experimental results are analyzed to prove that using this system to learn AI knowledge is effective and helps improve users’ interest in learning and hands-on ability.

Faecal microbiota transplants: towards a healthy disgust scepticism

This paper engages with the obstacle of disgust surrounding the use of faecal microbiota transplants (FMT). In discourse about the human microbiome and microbiota-based therapies (like FMT), disgust has become an unavoidable emotion for physicians, patients and caregivers interested in these therapies. Additionally, microbiota therapies and microbiomes are challenging our conception of an individual biological self. As these two discourses converge with FMT, it becomes necessary to understand how they are working together. To do this, this paper explores the way disgust functions in the formation of subjects. Scholarship about disgust can be categorised into two approaches: disgust as a deep wisdom or disgust scepticism. The former approach focuses on the physiological, embodied aspects of our disgust reactions as evidence of ‘truth’ in disgusting encounters, and the latter recognises the way disgust is culturally contingent and adapted for use in moral and social determinations of good and bad. However, both positions accept the use of disgust as a defence against ‘toxins and diseases’. Yet, as this paper argues, we should take the sceptical approach further. The disgust sceptical approach, particularly as developed by Sarah Ahmed, does more than just challenge disgust’s role in moral deliberations. It also demands sceptical reflection on disgust as a universal defence against ‘toxins and diseases’. Much as disgust can be co-opted to support oppression, it too can be co-opted to reconstitute a false vision of human subjectivity—the coherent, contained and exceptional human subject situated above the natural world. The human microbiome, faecal therapeutics and being disgusted give us an opportunity to recognise ourselves as more-than-human subjects.

Improving the Performance of Frequently Used Korean Handwritten Character Verification Based on Artificial Intelligence through Multimodal Fusion

Handwriting verification is a biometric recognition field that identifies individuals’ unique characteristics contained in their handwriting. A single written character shows subtle differences depending on habits accumulated over time or the manner of writing. Based on this, it is often adopted in forensic investigations and as evidence in court. Existing handwriting verification is conducted by an expert, and is affected by the expert’s ability or subjectivity, causing different results to arise depending on the expert. Therefore, we propose a handwriting verification method that excludes human subjectivity and has objectivity. Using computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), we derived results that excluded human subjectivity, and the judgment strength was expressed through a likelihood ratio. To improve the existing method’s accuracy, we performed a more accurate verification through multimodal use from the biometric field. Multimodal handwriting verification is conducted using up to four characters (not just one) because individual handwriting in each character is different. For learning, n-fold tests were conducted to maintain test objectivity, and the average performance of single character-based verification was 80.14% and the multimodal method averaged 88.96%. Here, we proposed the objectivity of handwriting verification through learning using AI, and show that performance improved through multimodal fusion.