Kafka's writings are frequently interpreted as representing the historical period of modernism in which he was writing. Little attention has been paid, however, to the possibility that his writings may reflect neural mechanisms in the processing of self during hypnagogic (i.e., between waking and sleep) states. Kafka suffered from dream-like, hypnagogic hallucinations during a sleep-deprived state while writing. This paper discusses reasons (phenomenological and neurobiological) why the self projects an imaginary double (autoscopy) in its spontaneous hallucinations and how Kafka's writings (...) help to elucidate the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. I further discuss how the proposed mechanisms may be relevant to understanding paranoid delusions in schizophrenia. Literature documents and records cognitive and neural processes of self with an intimacy that may be otherwise unavailable to neuroscience. To elucidate this approach, I contrast it with the apparently popularizing view that the symptoms of schizophrenia result from what has been called an operative (i.e., pre-reflective) hyper-reflexivity. The latter approach claims that pre-reflective self-awareness (diminished in schizophrenia) pervades all conscious experience (however, in a manner that remains unverifiable for both phenomenological and experimental methods). This contribution argues the opposite: the. (shrink)

Reflexive Signature Intelligence (RSI) is proposed as a physically anchored alternative to conventional, test-based definitions of intelligence. The paper starts from an “Axiom of Bounded Subjectivity”: any metric that is defined purely on an agent’s internal state history or output distribution (as in IQ tests and factor-analytic models) remains irreducibly relative to the reference population. Such metrics can capture local proficiency (for example, solving formal problems) but systematically fail to measure global coherence across life domains. In response, RSI defines intelligence (...) as the capacity of a cognitive system to align its overall trajectory with a universal informational equilibrium state, denoted sigma_Z, which is specified within a causal-symmetric informational framework. Sigma_Z is treated as the unique minimum-entropy production state compatible with the total boundary conditions of the system, rather than as a statistical norm of a given population. -/- On this basis, the paper develops a dynamical model in which the cognitive state relaxes towards sigma_Z with a characteristic coupling parameter kappa and a measurable informational divergence D(rho || sigma_Z). These quantities are then operationalized by importing concepts from predictive processing (precision priors), synergetics (order parameters and relaxation times), and ecological resilience (return time to baseline). RSI explicitly decouples domain-specific hyper-performance from global intelligence: extremely high performance in a narrow formal domain can coexist with low RSI if the broader biographical and behavioural pattern exhibits large informational divergence across other relevant domains. A key conjecture, the “Coherence–Efficiency Hypothesis”, links high intelligence to ethical alignment via long-term thermodynamic efficiency: structurally incoherent, exploitative strategies are modelled as incurring a higher long-run informational cost. The framework is presented as a falsifiable research programme, including concrete experimental signatures (such as multiphasic recovery dynamics after perturbation) and a minimal maximum-entropy toy model for sigma_Z, while remaining open to future empirical constraints and possible extensions to informational contributions to spacetime geometry. (shrink)

This chapter argues that nonaction views of tics rely on a misguided understanding of the temporality of human action and perception. First, I explore two ‘chicken-or-egg’ debates in tic disorder scholarship which revolve around the question what comes first – acting or perceiving? – and what this means for the intentionality of symptoms. I then zoom in on the construct of a single tic sequence, where these debates take place. As I will show, nonaction proponents of tics posit a linear (...) causal-temporal model of symptoms which assumes that neural stimuli cause tics from the bottom up. This reductionist stimulus–response model has spawned such ill-fated questions as: When do intentions enter the process of ticcing? Or: Which part of a tic sequence is intentional? Drawing on the work of a range of thinkers past and present – from Dewey’s critique of the reflex arc to Wu’s work on attention – I highlight the structural circularity intrinsic to all acting and perceiving, which suggests that intentions do no ‘enter’ tic sequences but are always already present from the get-go. Tics, however, are uniquely hyper-circular due to their repetitiveness and sameness. I conclude by exploring how this hyper-circularity could impact phenomenal experience and what its psychiatric relevance might be. (shrink)

Understanding alterations of selfhood (termed self-disorders or self-disturbances) that are considered typical of the schizophrenia-spectrum is a central focus of phenomenological research. The currently most influential way of phenomenologically conceiving self-disorders in schizophrenia is as disorders of the so-called most basic or “minimal self”. In this paper, we first highlight some challenges for the minimal self-view of self-disorders, focusing on (1) problems arising from the supposedly “essential” or “universal” nature of minimal self with respect to phenomenal awareness and (2) the (...) critical implications of alterations of self-experience in schizophrenia that involve heightened or exaggerated sense of self. In the second part, we tentatively explore how a (non-egological) transparency-view of consciousness may offer an alternative way of understanding the experiential abnormalities involved in self-disorders in schizophrenia. We discuss how such a transparency-view (1) may account for loss-of-self experiences; (2) is compatible with the key notion of “hyper-reflexivity”; and (3) can help explain instances of self-disorder involving increased sense of self. In conclusion, we consider some possible advantages of this alternative view for research on self-disorders and clinical approaches. (shrink)

This book explores disembodiment, the experience of feeling alienated from one’s own body, and shows how it emerges across clinical and social domains. It begins with an account of embodiment as the foundation of lived experience, interpersonal connection, and cultural inscription, before examining how disruptions of body image, body schema, ownership, and agency destabilize this balance. Clinical cases illustrate different pathways into disembodiment: the alien limb in BIID, the loss of presence in depersonalization and PTSD, the fractured agency and (...) class='Hi'>hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenia, and the distorted body image of anorexia. The analysis then turns to racial disembodiment, where systemic racism and the white gaze impose estranging perspectives that reshape subjectivity at multiple levels. To link these phenomena, the book introduces the uncanny as a framework for understanding how the familiar body becomes strange, and concludes by exploring re-embodiment techniques—from sensory illusions to VR—that open therapeutic and social possibilities. (shrink)

It is well established by psychopathological research that disorders of self-experience are among the main features of schizophrenic prodromes in a pathogenetic sense. Disorders of the phenomenal self, as "lack of ipseity" (the vanishing of the feeling of being embedded in oneself and of distinctiveness between the self and the outer world) and "hyper-reflexivity" (the monitoring of one's own life entailing the tendency to objectify parts of one's own self in an outer space) are considered key phenomena of (...) schizophrenic vulnerability. In this paper, I argue that the analyses of the disorders of phenomenal self catch only some dimensions of schizophrenic vulnerability, since they mainly focus on the pathological changes in subjective experience of an isolated self and disregard the fact that the self is not purely personal. Because our existence is fundamentally tied to a social existence, the feeling of one's own self and the sense of "reality" of an experience are products of intersubjectivity and not only a private process based on introspection or reflexivity in which one is engaged in an idiosyncratic way. Building on, and extending, contributions of the phenomenological tradition, I attempt to demonstrate that intuitive attunement is the basic prerequisite for establishing one's sense of "reality" (feeling familiarly related to one's environment) and for establishing one's sense of "ipseity" (the sense of existing as a subject of awareness). In the last part of the paper, I show the importance of the concepts "lack of attunement" and "antagonomia" (the rejection of conventional knowledge and intuitive attunement, experienced as dangerous sources of loss of individuality) to establish a comprehensive theory of schizophrenic vulnerability. I finally discuss the implications of this view for empirical research and clinical management of schizophrenic vulnerability. (shrink)

This paper uses certain of Michel Foucault's ideas concerning modern consciousness (from The Order of Things) to illuminate a central paradox of the schizophrenic condition: a strange oscillation, or even coexistence, between two opposite experiences of the self: between the loss or fragmentation of self and its apotheosis in moments of solipsistic grandeur. Many schizophrenic patients lose their sense of integrated and active intentionality; even their most intimate thoughts and inclinations may be experienced as emanating from, or under the control (...) of, some external being or mysterious foreign soul (‘I feel it is not me who is thinking’; ‘I have been programmed’). Yet the same patients may also experience the self as preeminent, all-powerful or all-knowing (‘My thoughts can influence things’; ‘This event happens because I think it'). Here one may feel confronted with the very paradigm of irrationality: profound contradictions suggesting regression to primitive ‘primary-process’ thinking or utter collapse of the higher faculties of mind. I argue, however, that these dualities so basic to schizophrenia can best be understood very differently: as consequences of a kind of alienation and hyper-self-consciousness (‘hyper- reflexivity') that is closely analogous to what occurs in the post-Kantian era of Western intellectual history. The parallel dualities of modern thought have been most extensively discussed by Foucault, who describes paradoxes, tensions and other dilemmas central to what he calls the modern ‘episteme'; these result from what Foucault sees as the modern human being's introverted and ultimately self-deceiving preoccupation with, and overvaluing of, the phenomenon of his own consciousness. Parallels between these contradictions and those characteristic of several withdrawn schizophrenic individuals are described and analysed. The paper concludes with an Afterword in which some possible neurobiological underpinnings of these schizophrenic experiences are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars such as Louis A. Sass have criticized self-disorder model and, drawing on Sartre’s concept of transparency, explored an alternative phenomenological explanatory model for schizophrenia—transparency disorder model. This paper argues that transparency disorder model faces several challenges: 1) Like the concept of minimal self, the concept of transparency is an essentialist concept and cannot account for the dynamic pathogenic process of schizophrenia; 2) The concept of transparency is unrelated to the operation of pre-reflective immersion. This paper proposes (...) intentional arc disorder model as an alternative to transparency disorder model, positing that the core symptom of schizophrenia is the disruption of intentional arc by hyper-reflexivity. This paper argues that intentional arc disorder is mainly reflected in two aspects of symptoms: 1) Disturbance of conscious content; and 2) Disturbance of conscious form. Disturbance of conscious content primarily involves disintegration and reconstruction of the holistic meaning of the present, disruption of potential behaviors, and diminished self-presence. Disturbance of conscious form mainly involves objectification of perceptual experience leading to an increased self-presence, and objectification of embodied experience resulting in alienation of the lived body. (shrink)

Objective: The aim of this paper is to present an interview with Louis Sass, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, USA. His work is recognized worldwide, and he has been a visiting professor at several institutions, notably in Paris in 2008–2009, and in Belgium in Ghent, Brussels, and Liège in 2023–2024 (as part of the Chaire Francqui program). The interview was conducted in French during Jérôme Englebert's academic stay in New York and at Rutgers University. Method: The method consists (...) of an interview with Louis Sass. The questions concern his main influences and the original readings he makes of authors essential to his work. The transdisciplinary dimension of his work is also highlighted and discussed. Results: Louis Sass is one of the leading specialists in the phenomenological understanding of schizophrenia. He has published numerous articles and several books on psychopathology, the most famous of which is Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Revised edition, Oxford University Press, 2017). This book is an attempt to understand the schizophrenic mind by exploring its parallels with the avant-garde art and thought of 20th century “modernism” and “postmodernism.” Madness and Modernism introduced the concept of hyper-reflexivity, which is today considered, in the field of phenomenological psychopathology, as a crucial element of schizophrenic experience and a characteristic sign of this existential condition. In addition to psychopathology, Professor Sass's contributions are also to be found in the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, anthropology, and ethnography. He is also interested in the Rorschach test, which he teaches to clinical psychology students at Rutgers University. Discussion: One sentence in this interview neatly sums up Sass's interest in developing original ways of understanding complex phenomena such as psychopathological conditions, but also various forms of literary and artistic expression or, more recently, different ontologies encountered in ethnographic fieldwork: “What interests me is appreciating the sophistication of others who have been seen in an overly simplistic way.” Conclusion: This interview provides an overview of the work of this important author of phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

Drawing upon core phenomenological contributions of the last decades, the present paper provides an integrated description of the development of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. Specifically, these contributions are the transitional sequences of development of psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia as envisioned by Klosterkötter and rooted in the basic symptoms approach, Conrad’s Gestalt-analysis of developing psychosis, and Sass and Parnas’ self-disturbance approach. Klosterkötter’s contribution provides a general descriptive psychopathological approach to the transitional sequence of the development of auditory hallucinations. The key concepts (...) in Conrad’s proposal are discussed, as their role is central as driving forces of the process from non-psychotic symptoms to overt hallucinations. Finally, Parnas and Sass link psychiatry to philosophy and psychology, and provide an in-depth and thorough description of these phenomena in their work on schizophrenia as a disorder of consciousness and self-experience with hyper-reflexivity and diminished self-affection as key aspects. (shrink)

According to the traditional Western concept of freedom, the ability to exercise free will depends on the availability of options and the possibility to consciously decide which one to choose. Since neuroscientific research increasingly shows the limits of what we in fact consciously control, it seems that our belief in free will and hence in personal autonomy is in trouble. -/- A closer look at the phenomenology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) gives us reason to doubt the traditional concept of freedom (...) in terms of conscious control. Patients suffering from OCD experience themselves as unfree. The question is whether their lack of freedom is due to a lack of will power. Do they have too little conscious control over their thoughts and actions? Or could it be the opposite: are they exerting too much conscious control over their thoughts and actions? -/- In this chapter, we will argue that OCD patients testify to the general condition that exercising an increased conscious control over actions can in fact diminish the sense of agency rather than increase the experience of freedom. The experiences of these patients show that the traditional conception of freedom in terms of ‘free will’ has major shortcomings. There is an alternative, however, to be found in the work of Hannah Arendt. She advocates a conception of freedom as freedom in action. Combined with phenomenological insights on action, Arendt’s account of freedom helps us to get a more adequate understanding of the role of deliberation in the experience of freedom. We argue that the experience of freedom depends on the right balance between deliberate control and unreflective actions. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is an entangled, more-than-human relational network, shaping and being shaped by the societal, cultural, and political structures in which it is embedded. This paper explores the role of artists as critical practitioners engaging with AI, to examine how AI-generated self-representations materialise identity and reinforce or counter well-known AI biases in gender, race, and embodiment. Drawing on feminist technoscience – particularly its focus on the entanglement of body, environment, and technology – and autotheory, the study treats generative AI as (...) an instrument of vision and voice. Using generative AI to create a partial digital twin, a self-portrait, is situated as an inherently embodied and relational practice. Through a combination of desk-based research and a practice-based, reflexive engagement with RunwayML, the paper documents the author’s attempt to create an identical-looking digital twin, revealing systemic biases embedded in AI-generated self-portraits. The paper uses embodiment as connective tissue linking theoretical and lived experience. Generative AI consistently misrepresented gender and age, defaulting to hyper-feminized aesthetics and youthful features while reliably reproducing Whiteness. The study also critically examines voice cloning and text-to-speech synthesis, highlighting how AI’s training data constrain language, accent, and vocal traits. By positioning AI-generated imagery and voice synthesis as material-discursive practices, the research extends debates on bias, agency, and self-representation in human–machine interactions. It argues that artists working with generative AI not only expose its epistemic limitations but also provide counter-narratives through creative, embodied interventions. The findings highlight the ways artists can help to meet the urgent need for more inclusive AI infrastructures, transparent dataset practices, and a reframing of digital self-representation beyond generative AI’s algorithmic defaults. (shrink)

Representations of urban youth and its cultures of display have become an increasing focus of attention for contemporary cinema. The film La Haine (1995) received critical acclaim for its raw depiction of `ghetto life' for alienated `minority' youth in France. In this article, we use this text as a way of exploring the cultural politics of such filmic practices. La Haine's aesthetic strategies of an affective `hyper-realism' and postmodern authenticity are scrutinized for their racialized politics of representation. The discussion (...) focuses on the film's reflexive presentation of racialized youth and their musical cultures. We argue that while the film lucidly captures the intensity of an urban existence, its aesthetic strategies and self-reflexivity belie a deeper unacknowledged ethico-political relation to racialized Otherness. (shrink)

In this article, I consider ‘skin portraiture’: a mode of representation that privileges quasi-anonymous, fragmented, magnified and anatomized images of skin. I argue that this mode of representation permits a heightened awareness of embodied experiences such as reflexivity, empathy and relationality. Expanding understandings of difference through its engagement with haptic imagery and visuality, skin portraiture reorients the boundaries between ‘I’/‘not I’ and subject/object – often through touch – and challenges the cultural commitment to traditional notions of bodily autonomy. By (...) doing so, skin portraiture functions as an antagonistic form of portraiture; that is, as a kind of anti-portraiture that pushes the genre into an expanded visual field and, at times, beyond representation. Exploring the skin-as-technology metaphor, I show that bio art skin portraiture creates chimeric skins through tissue culturing practices, permitting bodies to become radically relational. Bio art skin portraits celebrate the genetic and cellular differences between bodies through a visible collapse of epidermal boundaries, which engenders a hyper-haptic mode of seeing beyond the subject and her or his skin. Analysing the bio art of Jalia Essaïdi, ORLAN and Julia Reodica, and drawing on the work of Laura Marks and Erin Manning, this article explores the skin-as-technology metaphor in order to offer the arts and humanities an innovative understanding of contemporary embodiment. (shrink)

This chapter special attention is paid to theoretical and methodological issues of studying the cultural landscape by means of textual methods.In the first section we discussed the history of structural and poststructural understanding of the text. Yuri Lotman’s concept of the text and the concept of semiosphere significantly expand the possibilities for studying not only culture, but the geographical space that is transformed by culture—the cultural landscape. Concept of textuality loses certainty of its borders and covers an extremely broad scope (...) of human activity. Necessarily subjective mental constructs in the perception and scientific interpretation of reality were pointed by Boris Gasparov who introduced the concept of presumption of textuality into scientific. The presumption of textuality according to Boris Gasparov (in respect of acts of speech) is the need to submit a statement or event as direct and entirely foreseeable phenomenon. In the context of the presumption of textuality cultural landscape is an ideal object of study. The formation and existence of the cultural landscape defines its semantic structure, where not only events but also places associated with them are perceived as significant and carry a certain message to society. The criterion for significance of place in the culture supports the use of its name as a unit of the text and the ability of name for the formation of secondary (figurative) values, i.e. for denomination (Elena Berezovich).The secondary or figurative meanings of place names represent the message—for example, the secondary meanings of names Kamchatka and Kolyma doesn’t cause any serious discrepancies. These messages may be read in their historical and, accordingly, the semantic consistency. Sometimes, the loci-messages are used to generate new messages, for example, in the development of pilgrimage routes and thematic tours. In other cases, reading the loci-messages, the interpretation of place meanings and the local text of culture depends on the intentions of the perceiver.Names of places allow us to consider the texts of the cultural landscape as a «rolled-up mnemonic programs» (Yuri Lotman). Signs-place names and corresponding geographical objects are in certain respects to each other.The process of creating of any text is indicated by Alexander Piatigorsky as a subjective situation. Subjective situation in the cultural landscape continues infinitely, and the process of reading (perception) also does not stop, respectively, the subjective and the objective situations coincide in time. Culture doesn’t not only deal with (inherits, reflexes) previously created and captured in the geographical space senses, but also makes its own changes, even as a result of perception, if it involves revising messages created earlier. In this regard, with respect to the space semantically ordered by culture, nothing can be more appropriate than the notion of intertext, which occurs as a result of «reading-writing», as a space of convergence of various citations (Julia Kristeva). We come to the fact that the concept of the text is perceived and interpreted extremely broad—as flexible hierarchical, adjustably structuring system of significant elements (Vladimir Abashev), which allows us to interpret the cultural landscape as a text.In the second section patterns of existence of the text of the cultural landscape are examined. In the cultural landscape, as it was already noted, there is a fixation of meanings in space, which are changing, in spite of all its fluidity, nevertheless these meaning are associated with the place/region or macroregion of their appearing. The spatial structure of the cultural landscape can serve as a text, where each element has strong values and meanings. The intersection of meanings in a single locus gives the increment of meaning. The very multivalency in the space has a value of «cultural saturation», bordering on with the concept of cultural heritage.Elements of structure «center—province—periphery—the border» determine meanings of each specific geographical objects, occupying a certain place in this matrix. Roads in the cultural landscape serve both a spokesmen idea of communication and proper communication, especially actual in travelling, generating new meanings (the classics of the genre—«Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow» by Alexander Radishchev).The concept of palimpsest is applied to cultural landscape; the concept is used in interpretation and analysis of other texts of culture. Culture texts of various epochs are manifested in the landscape; overlapping one another, forming unique combinations, many of them falling into a new cultural-historical context are «read» again, sometimes with diametrically opposite permutation of emphasis and meanings.The logic of the sign system of cultural landscape is nonlinear; it doesn’t have a clear narrative structure. One can imagine the cultural landscape as netting meanings. If there are nodes, there is a fabric of irregular weaving. In the structure of the cultural landscape the emphasis is made on the selection of system of centers and semantically meaningful territories.In the cultural landscape there are polysemantic signs and lacunae of meaning. Actually the natural properties of the area have their meaning, but only in the presence of the observer. Lacunas may arise as wrong side of meanings in a particular system of philosophical, aesthetic, ethical origin. It is like natural landfills or «tent cities» of homeless that recur in the landscape of the city, but in places, virtually uncontrolled by urban civilization. The concept of the «escheated» area allocated by researchers there where weaker qualities or features for which this or that territory belongs to the great cultural or economic center of gravity is interesting in this respect.In cultural studies, though culture is seen as a text, the structural unit of the text is not defined. But the spatial component of culture requires a manifestation of the structure. In the cultural landscape the locus/place can become the structural unit, but in a different sense—as the locus-symbol, locus-message, locus-sign, for it implies that the symbolic value is connected to a particular territorial unit.The third section presents opportunities to explore the urban landscape rendered as a text. City is a special type of cultural landscape, which has a hyper-semantic richness, where each element and relationship of elements bears a message. A cityscape is full of symbols and messages where semantic of bypassed historical periods is transmitted; the elements of urban structure are also charged semantically—the planning of historical center and outskirts speak for themselves, etc.Deep ideas or the archetypes of world culture lie in the notion of the city. Myths, symbols and images serve as the basis of perception and reading the city: squares, circles, vertical lines are perceived in their archetypical sense—as a mandala (a symbolic scheme of the universe) of a city (Alexander Barabanov).Exploring the semantics of the landscape of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Toporov identifies such coefficients as: straightness, curvature, sloping streets; organization of space; indoor-outdoor space; the discontinuity-continuity and separation-fusion of space. The city has its own «language»—its physiognomic elements and objects (streets, squares, monuments, etc.), the city is interpreted in cultural studies as the heterogeneous text and has some common sense.The internal structure of the city, like the internal structure of the text, consists of a system of units and nodes (Kevin Lynch), links (relations) and the properties inherent in the city (the text), as a whole. Cities like literary texts have their own genre image that expresses to some extent the meaning of the place, the meaning of the city (Ekaterina Koneva).The fourth section discusses possible strategies for reading the text of the cultural landscape.In contemporary philosophy of culture (Valery Podoroga) the process of reading is understood as an attempt to understand the Other. The reader engages into communication with a text, which may be presented as the entity that understands its reader. The text grows, pervades its reader.Therefore, «reading» the text of the cultural landscape is similar to the method of modeling images of place offered by Dmitri Zamyatin—latent information is converted by a researcher, who comes in an active communication with it, in the space-sign model.In the act of reading the text of the cultural landscape one should take into account the fact that semiotic systems, as they determined by Yuri Lotman, while being read require a translation, as the semiotic mechanisms—that are not only essential for accurate transmission of the text, but they are mechanisms of the creative consciousness. The message, which appears as the text, suggests at least two cultural codes, not identical but equivalent—one encodes the text; the other is used for its decoding. Given that the exposition of the text of the cultural landscape is non-linear and does not determine by itself the direction of reading, that gets the reader more opportunities for deciphering and interpretation.In the cultural landscape there are always some areas, lines, and «blocks» for reading. The texts-landscapes of national history are easiest for reading. For example, the study of the semiotic structure of the cultural landscape of Russia based on Russian Poetry (Olga Lavrenova) shows that it is «frozen in the space a wave of colonization». Earlier developed European part of Russia is separated from the structureless, internally chaotic the space-place name Siberia by border-frontier of the Ural Mountains.The same text of the cultural landscape of Russia can not be read in historical, but also in religious and mythological way. This reading, in contrast to the historical, is more versatile and at the same time more general. Texts of cultural landscapes of regional and local levels can be read in the same vein. Geopolitical reading (in the prism of politics in the cultural landscape of Russia, where quite other structural elements stand out –for example such as «red belt»), reading from the history of ideas or geobiography of individuals can be justified.Reading of the landscape has a few other key approaches. First, it is determined by the point review, and secondly, plastic landscape, its rhythm, structure stand out as important elements. Reading of the landscape has three main levels—poetry (sensitive), aesthetic and cognitive.In the fifth section, another strategy for reading of the text of the cultural landscape is proposed—through local cultural texts representing a body of art, documentary and folklore texts related to a specific place. The texts of works of art serve as generators of meanings for a specific cultural landscape/place. The presence of texts that are genetically related to the landscape implies that the landscape as a semiotic system is also built on the principle of «mosaic of citations», as the product of absorption in the informational component of the landscape of other texts and while reading this intertext—the generation of other texts are launched.Vladimir Toporov fundamentally investigated for the first time the issue with local text of culture by the resorting to the example of St. Petersburg text of Russian culture, which he defined as a construct of a general nature, characterized by semantic overcompaction, which he termed as synthetic supertext tuned to a higher meanings and purposes, having a semantic connection, wholeness, the presence of the core rising to a single source. Vladimir Toporov examines and classifies (in axiological and ontological key) semantic aspects of the image of the city, ranging from high to low, explores the myths that underlie the text of St. Petersburg—the myth of the creator, the eschatological myth, the myth of the ontological opposition to Moscow. Nature and landscape features serve as one of the storylines in the St. Petersburg text. It is fully justified to view the Petersburg text not only as a meaning, but also as a communication function of the landscape of St. Petersburg, transmitting itself as a message «to Russia» and outside.Vladimir Abashev investigated Perm text of Russian culture. Analyzing the written sources starting from Epiphanius the Wise, Boris Pasternak to modern «samizdat» poetry, posters and brochures, the researcher includes semiotizated features of the landscape, history, geography, consumer attitudes and behavior in the Perm text. As the result paradigm of the local text is determined, here we can find both specific objects of the urban landscape and complex hybrid units like the «Permian animal style». An important element of Perm text is the ability of of its name «Perm» to be applied in anagrams, which are used as giving birth to meanings in shaping the image of the city. Resonance of Perm text in Russian culture, of course, can not be compared to the St. Petersburg text. Nevertheless, since the time of Aleksander Pushkin, pronounced the famous «from Perm to Tavrida» in the poem, addressed to «the slanderers of Russia», the name of «Perm» sounds like some kind of expression of existent ultimacy.Another limit can be found in the above mentioned poem filled with patriotic fervor «To the slanderers of Russia»—Tavrida—inspired Aleksander Lyusy to study the text of the Crimea, which is a more recent variation on the theme of ancient myth. The same author explores the Caucasus text of Russian literature, where, unlike other local texts, themes of captivity, love and revenge are clearly expressed.Miron Petrovsky considers Kyiv text not in the regard of Russian culture in general, but in Mikhail Bulgakov’s literary heritage, where the city of Kiev is interpreted as the eternal city (Rome-Jerusalem), perishing in a global cataclysm. The plastic landscape of Kyiv and its metaphysics (inverting spaces) are reflected in the storylines of many novels.The reflection on «the genius and the place» is no less interesting than the local texts, in this reflection authors from different positions and with different methodological arsenal study images of places and spatial concepts in some classical works of Russian literature. The monograph of Pyotr Vail «Genius Loci» seems to be the most significant study of concepts of space, made in philological vein.The sixth section—it is another strategy for reading of the cultural landscape, this time with the help of travel, which as a cultural phenomenon has its own semantic categories. The semantics of the cultural landscape requires not a dispassionate observation in the direct contact with it, but empathy—the study applying hermeneutical method of research. Worldly, mundane space is available to third-party observation and description, but it is very poor in its semantics. These spaces exist simultaneously in one and the same cultural landscape, and a traveller moving along the face of the planet, chooses in which of them he will make his way and accordingly how rich and polysemantic his observations will be.Travelling is seen as the geographical self-awareness of culture, as a prototype of a metaphor and concept of the way that is one of the fundamental in any culture. There is a classification of travel in the context of semiosphere—it is a vector in the plane for everyday travel, circling for eternal wanderers or cursed mythological characters, the vector of ascent—for spiritual journeys and pilgrimages. (shrink)

Graph-based frames have been introduced as a logical framework which internalises an inherent boundary to knowability (referred to as ‘informational entropy’), due, e.g. to perceptual, evidential or linguistic limits. They also support the interpretation of lattice-based (modal) logics as hyper-constructive logics of evidential reasoning. Conceptually, the present paper proposes graph-based frames as a formal framework suitable for generalising Pawlak's rough set theory to a setting in which inherent limits to knowability exist and need to be considered. Technically, the present (...) paper establishes systematic connections between the first-order correspondents of Sahlqvist modal reduction principles on Kripke frames, and on the more general relational environments of graph-based and polarity-based frames. This work is part of a research line aiming at: (a) comparing and inter-relating the various (first-order) conditions corresponding to a given (modal) axiom in different relational semantics; (b) recognising when first-order sentences in the frame-correspondence languages of different relational structures encode the same ‘modal content’; (c) meaningfully transferring relational properties across different semantic contexts. The present paper develops these results for the graph-based semantics, polarity-based semantics, and all Sahlqvist modal reduction principles. As an application, we study well known modal axioms in rough set theory (such as those corresponding to seriality, reflexivity, and transitivity) on graph-based frames and show that, although these axioms correspond to different first-order conditions on graph-based frames, their intuitive meaning is retained. This allows us to introduce the notion of hyperconstructivist approximation spaces as the subclass of graph-based frames defined by the first-order conditions corresponding to the same modal axioms defining classical generalised approximation spaces, and to transfer the properties and the intuitive understanding of different approximation spaces to the more general framework of graph-based frames. The approach presented in this paper provides a base for systematically comparing and connecting various formal frameworks in rough set theory, and for the transfer of insights across different frameworks. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following essay I (...) argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in... (shrink)

This essay builds on two questions: the relation of the child with the other and the child’s way of knowing, in which the resistance of the unreflected is not yet problematized. Through a reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Piaget’s idea of the child’s linear intellectual progression toward reflexive abstraction, I highlight the moment of unreflection by taking up the notion of ultra-thing, which Merleau-Ponty borrows from Henry Wallon. These ultra-things are entities with which the child entertains a vague relation and (...) which always remain at the horizon of her perception without yet being possessed in a representation or grasped in a concept. They include, for example, the sun, the sky, the Earth, the body as an object, existence before the birth of the child – uninhabitable dimensions or, to the contrary, ones that are necessarily inhabited. The concept of ultra-thing has not been sufficiently explored in Merleau-Pontian studies and its importance remains underappreciated. This essay thus formulates a hypothesis about the relation between ultra-things and hyper-reflection. (shrink)

Beginning with one of the most remarkable characteristics of cyber art, ‘interactivity’, in a context of generalized hybridization of the procedures and technological devices available in the current hyper-technological era, this article will highlight the festive dimension within contemporary artistic practices, especially in its technological and digital components. In order to take both its ‘creationist’ and ‘reflexionist’ aspects into consideration, the proposed interpretation will adopt as its starting point the questions introduced by classical anthropology about festivity: What establishes community (...) in cyber art? Which kind of community is established there and what is sacrificed in digital or cybernetic art? These questions are articulated with the discussion proposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Schechner about the task of building the reflexive play that is found in the work of art as such. The purpose is to gradually present, throughout the article, the peculiarity of the experience of ‘the festive’ in computing and numerical arts. (shrink)

The fact that sociology was born during the period of the Industrial Revolution does not authorize us to consider its discourse as lacking in philosophical elements that are rooted in a previous age. Neither can we consider as fully accomplished its role for modernity, nonetheless today, in an after-modern climate (in the sense of Donati 2009), sociology is trying to escape the prejudice of modern ethics to go beyond the clichés of postmodernity (Ardigò 1989). Filled with self-reflexivity and reductionist (...) dichotomies, the twenty-first-century sociologist feels the need to?own factual reality again? and to rediscover?a new metaphysics of the social world? (Donati 1993). If self-consciousness is in the world, sociology, perhaps, has to go beyond science and turn into?globology? (Arnason 1990), or into a sociology on a global scale, which looks at how world unification has occurred. In order to accomplish this, it has to be careful about what it was able to do best in the past:?to foresee and to enhance sustainable change,? to be aware of the?relational connections,? which no mathematics will ever be able to show, to build new?memes,? and to decide to accelerate or to go against the phenomena it encounters in its observation. Society in the twenty-first century will go beyond postmodern stagnation and turn into something new (After-modernity? Hyper-modernity? Trans-modernity?) if it is to be helped by the interpretations of sociology. Notwithstanding the endeavors to change, most Westernized countries are trapped in the lib-lab model, while China argues for a complete reconfiguration of the concepts of public and private, states and market, freedom and controls, copyright and copyleft. What is going to happen in the future? Are we going to fall into a technocratic and authoritarian form of neo-modernization? Are we going to rediscover the system of exchanging gifts? Are we going to create a fully?relational? society, going beyond the Hegelian categories of right and left? It will be the role of a?strong and relational? sociology to identify all the?viable? scenarios and to prepare its advent in symbolic terms. (shrink)

Le développement de l'individualisme et les orientations actuelles du design des technologies de l'information et de la communication se combinent pour ancrer réflexivement un modèle de l'action fondé sur le modèle de la distribution. L'acteur délègue une partie des choix de plus en plus nombreux qui lui incombent à son environnement artefactuel. Dans le champ de la communication interpersonnelle, ceci se traduit par le développement d'une gestion relationnelle basée sur la « présence connectée ». Dans le domaine des communautés épistémiques (...) de type OpenSource, les individus se mobilisent souvent sur un mode de réactivité immédiate plus que par délibération individuelle. La question se pose alors du statut moral et de la possibilité d'analyser de manière indépendante un collectif et un espace public d'individus hyper-connectés, organisés, outillés et adaptés plus pour réagir rapidement que réfléchir longuement.Development of individualism and the current guidelines for the design of information technology and communications combine to anchor a model of reflexive action based on the model of the distribution. The actor delegates some choices more numerous its obligations to its environment artifactual. In the field of interpersonal communication, this translates into the development of a relationship management based on "connected presence". In the field of epistemic communities like OpenSource, individuals often involve a more immediate response mode by individual deliberation. The question then arises the moral status and the ability to analyze independently a collective and public space of hyper-connected individuals, organized, equipped and adapted to respond more quickly than think long. (shrink)

The development of externalism—the thesis that mental and linguistic content is determined by factors outside the agent—was a landmark achievement in 20th-century philosophy. Yet, contemporary debates about Large Language Models (LLMs) are dominated by a resurgent, often unreflective, internalism that seeks to locate meaning "under the hood" in model weights and architecture. This paper challenges this internalist paradigm. First, it extends classic externalist frameworks (from Kripke, Putnam, Evans, etc.) to non-human systems like LLMs through a proposed method of "de-anthropocentric abstraction." (...) Second, it introduces and defends hyperexternalism: the radical thesis that external factors determine not only the content of an LLM's outputs, but also its structural and procedural properties. We argue that whether an LLM is genuinely following a rule (e.g., modus ponens), whether its representations are compositional, or whether an internal state functions as a belief versus a supposition, are all facts grounded in the model's training history, functional role, and relational embedding. If we are right, purely internalist approaches, such as Mechanistic Interpretability, are philosophically misguided. The Hyper-externalist manifesto provide a new framework for understanding AI and outlines a research program that reframes interpretability as an external, relational, and dynamic problem. (shrink)

I provide a characterization of weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice functions---that is, choice functions rationalizable by a set of acyclic relations---in terms of hyper-relations satisfying certain properties. For those hyper-relations Nehring calls extended preference relations, the central characterizing condition is weaker than (hyper-relation) transitivity but stronger than (hyper-relation) acyclicity. Furthermore, the relevant type of hyper-relation can be represented as the intersection of a certain class of its extensions. These results generalize known, analogous results for path independent choice (...) functions. (shrink)

In the global world, momentous migratory tides have produced hyper-pluralism on the domestic scale, bringing citizens with radically different conceptions of life, justice and the good to coexist side by side. Conjectural arguments about the acceptance of pluralism, the next best to public reason when shared premises are too thin, may not succeed in convincing all constituencies. What resources, then, can liberal democracy mobilize? The multivariate democratic polity is the original answer to this question, based on an interpretation of (...) Rawls which revisits Political Liberalism in the light of The Law of Peoples . The unscrutinized assumption is highlighted, often read into Rawls’s Political Liberalism , that a polity moves homogeneously and all of a piece from religious conflict to modus vivendi, constitutional consensus and finally to overlapping consensus. Drawing on The Law of Peoples , a different picture can be obtained. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of ‘hyper-ambition’ in academia as a contributing factor to what has been termed a ‘replication crisis’ across some sciences. The replication crisis is an umbrella term that covers a range of ‘questionable research practices’, from sloppy reporting to fraud. There are already many proposals to address questionable research practices, some of which focus on the values, norms, and motivations of researchers and institutes, and suggest measures to promote research integrity. Yet it is not easy (...) to promote integrity in hyper-competitive academic environments that value high levels of ambition. I argue that in such contexts, it is as likely that a kind of hyper-ambition is fostered that (inadvertently or otherwise) prioritises individual success above all, including to the detriment of scientific quality. In addition, efforts to promote values like integrity falter because they rely on sufficient uniformity in motivations or tendencies. Codes and guidance promoting integrity are, however, likely to influence those for whom such values are not optional, while others simply find ways around them. To demonstrate this I offer a thought experiment in which we consider the imaginary working situations of two ordinary academics. I conclude that tackling questionable research practices in the light of the replication crisis requires robust ‘top down’ measures that expect and accommodate a broader range of academic values, motivations, and tendencies, while challenging those that help to promote hyper-ambition. (shrink)

The hyper-Russellian skeptic is someone who thinks that only one of all your experiences was, is, and will ever be conscious. Which one? The very one you are having now. Before you were always a zombie, and you will be a zombie for ever after. In the present literature on the metaphysics of passage of time, there is disagreement on whether our feeling that time passes — the “dynamic flavor” of our ordinary experience — provides support to the A-theory, (...) that is, the thesis that the passage of time is an objective feature of reality. Lately, several philosophers have argued against this idea. In this paper I want to push this line of reasoning further by exploiting the hyper-Russellian scenario against the A-theory of time. (shrink)

In this paper we present a characterization of hyper-connexivity by means of a relating semantics for Boolean connexive logics. We also show that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is Abelardian, strongly consistent, Kapsner strong and antiparadox. We give an example showing that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is not simplificative. This shows that the minimal Boolean connexive logic is not totally connexive.

Hyper tableau reasoning is a version of clausal form tableau reasoning where all negative literals in a clause are resolved away in a single inference step. Constrained hyper tableaux are a generalization of hyper tableaux, where branch closing substitutions, from the point of view of model generation, give rise to constraints on satisfying assignments for the branch. These variable constraints eliminate the need for the awkward ‘purifying substitutions’ of hyper tableaux. The paper presents a non-destructive and (...) proof confluent calculus for constrained hyper tableaux, together with a soundness and completeness proof, with completeness based on a new way to generate models from open tableaux. It is pointed out that the variable constraint approach applies to free variable tableau reasoning in general. (shrink)

In a previous paper, we recast Morgado hyperlattices and Sette implicative hyperlattices (IHLs) in lattice-theoretic terms. By utilizing swap structures induced by implicative lattices, we obtained a direct proof of soundness and completeness for da Costa’s paraconsistent logic $C_\omega $ with respect to Sette’s hyperalgebraic semantics. Inspired by Kalman functors in the context of twist structures, we introduce the notion of hyper swap structures, a novel class of hyperalgebras that naturally generalize swap structure semantics. We prove that these hyperalgebras, (...) besides providing another class of hyperalgebraic models for $C_\omega $, induce a Kalman-style functor between the category of Sette IHLs and the category of enriched hyperalgebras for $C_\omega $. Specifically, we exhibit an equivalence of categories between Sette IHLs and their enriched hyperalgebraic counterparts using Kalman and forgetful functors. Similar results are extended to two axiomatic extensions of $C_\omega $. (shrink)

Predicates are "hyper-evaluative" when they depend on more than just the semantic values (be they intensional or more fine-grained) of their individual arguments, but also on the way those arguments are "coordinated" or "wired." I examine motivations and semantic implementations for such predicates, drawing from linguistics and computer science.

Some argue that God’s love or mercy would save everyone; others argue that God’s justice or respect for human freedom demands damnation; and others argue that God would annihilate the lost. I present a new alternative, hyper-annihilationism, on which each view is correct. According to hyper-annihilationism, God hyper-will annihilate the lost; the eschaton is such that all are saved; and it is possible that there are now people enduring everlasting conscious torment.

The notions of a hyper MV-deductive system, a -hyper MV-deductive system, a - hyper MV-deductive system, a -hyper MV-deductive system, a -hyper MV-deductive system and a -hyper MV-deductive system are introduced, and then their relations are investigated.

The article retraces three important steps along the path of Derrida’s Heidegger interpretation in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Readings of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Introduction to Metaphysics, and “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics” complement and further develop Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger, which revolves around the term “Walten” and its role in the world-formation that makes community possible. The analysis of what Derrida calls the hyper-sovereignty of Walten reveals an ethico-political ambiguity in Heidegger’s texts. On the (...) one hand, this hyper-sovereignty registers as a super-sovereign violence that founds theological-political world-constructs through the exclusion of those deemed other. On the other hand, like différance it serves as the condition of impossibility of a common world. Following Derrida’s provocation, I develop this second sense to argue that the dissolution of the common world entails an ethical imperative to carry the other with whom one has nothing in common. (shrink)

In this article I present HYPER-REF, a model to determine the referent of any given expression in First-Order Logic (FOL). I also explain how this model can be used to determine the referent of a first-order theory such as First-Order Arithmetic (FOA). By reference or referent I mean the non-empty set of objects that the syntactical terms of a well-formed formula (wff) pick out given a particular interpretation of the language. To do so, I will first draw on previous (...) work to make explicit the notion of reference and its hyperintensional features. Then I present HYPER-REF and offer a heuristic method for determining the reference of any formula. Then I discuss some of the benefits and most salient features of HYPER-REF, including some remarks on the nature of self-reference in formal languages. (shrink)

Drawing upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben, this essay focuses upon the potential of a single act to change a political order. Agamben’s writings retain the possibility for a paradigmatic gesture that opens a space for a politics not founded on a form of belonging grounded in a particular property, such as national identity. To illustrate this event this essay turns to Agamben’s construction of whatever-being, which is constructed hyper-hermeneutically. This term is chosen deliberately. Whatever-being retains a hermeneutic structure, (...) but is constructed through singular paradigmatic examples. These examples are evidence for whatever-being’s existence as a pure singularity, unable to be reduced to a particular quality. Such examples are gestures that allow future modes of belonging to separate themselves from oppressive foundations and dominating constructions of political existence, through revealing the possibility of a new way of being that does not require a revolutionary “zero hour” to be brought about. (shrink)

The Western consumer society, focused on shopping and material abundance, has been critiqued since the creation of the concept in the 1950s. The chapter discusses the idea of hyper-consumption driven by intense marketing focused on triggering people’s feeling of relative deprivation and the resulting desire to ‘improve’ and display one’s status through conspicuous consumption. Early modern examples of conspicuous consumption and their contribution to the fund of Western ‘high culture’ are discussed. The chapter juxtaposes the general hyper-consumption with (...) the documented rise in inequality within Western countries since the 1970s, and especially in the Anglosphere where redistribution through the welfare state is limited. The case study of excessive remuneration in the finance industry is contrasted with new forms of poverty, including the working poor. (shrink)

A Heyting algebra is supplemented if each element a has a dual pseudo-complement \, and a Heyting algebra is centrally supplement if it is supplemented and each supplement is central. We show that each Heyting algebra has a centrally supplemented extension in the same variety of Heyting algebras as the original. We use this tool to investigate a new type of completion of Heyting algebras arising in the context of algebraic proof theory, the so-called hyper-MacNeille completion. We show that (...) the hyper-MacNeille completion of a Heyting algebra is the MacNeille completion of its centrally supplemented extension. This provides an algebraic description of the hyper-MacNeille completion of a Heyting algebra, allows development of further properties of the hyper-MacNeille completion, and provides new examples of varieties of Heyting algebras that are closed under hyper-MacNeille completions. In particular, connections between the centrally supplemented extension and Boolean products allow us to show that any finitely generated variety of Heyting algebras is closed under hyper-MacNeille completions. (shrink)

A central frustration of recent political discourse is the consistent reduction of politically relevant factual and critical speech to mere expression of partisan commitment. Partisans of “the other side”—members of the other tribe—are viewed as de facto wrong, because partisans, even when their speech invokes mere facts or purportedly shared political principles. Ideally, democratic political discourse operates along at least two central dimensions: a dimension of shared factual, historical, and political assumptions, and a more contested dimension of interpretation, prioritization, and (...) evaluation that results in diverse and often competing understandings of what is good, and so of what is best to collectively pursue. Debates among advocates of competing conceptions of the good and partisans of diverse world views identifiable in terms of the second dimension are, on this picture, constrained and grounded by the shared factual and political commitments of the first, thus ensuring a meaningful basis for ongoing political engagement. While there is little reason to think this ideal has ever been perfectly realized, in recent political discourse statements that events have occurred, drugs are effective, or transparency is important in political conduct cannot seem to get uptake except as mere expressions of political partisanship any more than an actor on stage trying to convince her audience of the danger of a real fire that has broken out in the theater can get uptake for this claim except as an expression in a theatrical performance. In both cases, the real content and discursive intent of speech is undermined by the context in which it occurs. In the case of the actor on stage, the appropriate rules for uptake and interpretation are being followed, just to unfortunate effect. However, in the case of political discourse something seems to be wrong with the rules for uptake and interpretation that have come to dominate in many quarters. This essay relies on recent discussions of silencing and epistemic injustice to introduce the ideas of partisan silencing and hyper-partisan silencing in an attempt to say more precisely what has gone wrong with the rules for uptake and interpretation in political discourse. It then relies on Hannah Arendt’s analyses of truth and lies in politics to connect these phenomena to underlying features of political action and speech. Conditions of partisan and hyperpartisan silencing turn out to be a natural, if not inevitable, consequence of the relationship of truth-telling and deception to political action itself as Arendt understands this. Finally, the essay elaborates on two suggestive passages from Arendt’s 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” to propose potential strategies for resisting conditions of hyperpartisan silencing. Because hyper-partisan silencing itself imposes a certain discursive logic, there are kinds of political speech and action that might succeed in being understood as sincere and so in being persuasive—even in the face of hyper-partisan silencing—precisely because they challenge the assumptions that underpin this discursive logic itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hyper-Abjects:Finitude, “Sustainability,” and the Maternal Body in the AnthropoceneBethany DoaneThe concept of the Anthropocene prioritizes a new paradigmatic scale that seems to outweigh that of “the political”: imagining deep time or the death of the human species as a result of climate change tends to negate the (relatively speaking) smaller-scale concerns of race, class, gender, or capitalism. While feminist critique is often circumscribed by this political scale, and (...) thus may seem to be dwarfed or rendered obsolete by the geological, deep-time scale of the Anthropocene, examining issues of feminist concern from this geological perspective has profound implications for thinking not only of gender politics but also of how to construct something like the political at all in this new era. Suggesting a new and normative global politics is, of course, beyond the scope of this article, but perhaps we might begin to conceive of a political schema that would function more appropriately in light of this grander scale. At the very least we may begin to think the borders or limits of the species as it has existed in the modern era in a way that neither environmentalism nor posthumanism has yet been able to sufficiently tackle.The Anthropocene marks the epoch in which human activities have caused global environmental changes that will leave their mark in the geological strata of the earth itself.1 While the specific moments of its onset are contested, its beginnings are generally associated with the industrial age; Crutzen and Stoermer mark its onset at roughly 1800 with the beginnings [End Page 251] of the industrial revolution. (Timothy Morton pinpoints it more specifically with the invention of the steam engine in 1794.) The changes made in this era of geological, technological, and climate convergence have accelerated in the last seventy years or so in what scientists call the Great Acceleration, which began around 1940 and quickened anthropogenic impact with events like the testing/dropping of atomic bombs, the homogenization of biodiversity, mass extinctions as a result of human activity, and various types of drilling and mining.2 In the era broadly conceived as modernity, the steady march of “progress” that has so shaped the paradigm of the period has been made possible only through its own abjections: those phenomena that mark the era as limited, limiting, and unsustainable. In other words, the “birth of the modern world” was made possible only through devastating acts of violence: institutionalized inequalities like slavery, oppression, colonization, and war. These acts of violence translate as cannibalization at the global scale: the exploitation of most members of the species and the consumption of their resources for the benefit and luxury of the few. While these forms of violence have been criticized and confronted by political and theoretical movements since at least the middle of the twentieth century, thinking of them in terms of the Anthropocene and deep time allows us to consider their consequences in a new light. Our present awareness of the Anthropocene makes visible phenomena like climate, global warming, earth, and the “anthropos” that present us with the very real eventuality of species finitude. Species finitude calls into question not just the practices of modernity that have brought about the Anthropocene (the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few), but the entire paradigm of global thinking that is invested in progress, growth, and even in any environmentalism that calls for stewardship of the earth. The notion of care for an entity like “nature” or “the environment” only reinforces the separation between the human and its milieu, a separation that is impossible to maintain in light of the absolute inextricability that the Anthropocene brings to light.At the heart of this essay are two theoretical concepts: Julia Kristeva’s abjection, and Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, both of which stand for a sort of insufficiency or impossibility of discourse (politics, the Symbolic, etc.) in managing some Real object or phenomenon. Kristeva’s abject is generally thought of as functioning at two levels or scales: the personal, in which an individual must cast off the abject of the maternal body in order to become a proper subject; and the social or... (shrink)

In this paper, we study indiscernibility relations and complementarity relations in hyper arrow structures. A first-order characterization of indiscernibility and complementarity is obtained through a duality result between hyper arrow structures and certain structures of relational type characterized by first-order conditions. A modal analysis of indiscernibility and complementarity is performed through a modal logic which modalities correspond to indiscernibility relations and complementarity relations in hyper arrow structures.

We discuss the relationship between various weak distributive laws and games in Boolean algebras. In the first part we give some game characterizations for certain forms of Prikry’s “hyper-weak distributive laws”, and in the second part we construct Suslin algebras in which neither player wins a certain hyper-weak distributivity game. We conclude that in the constructible universe L, all the distributivity games considered in this paper may be undetermined.

The paper presents a new argument supporting the ontological standpoint according to which there are no mathematical facts in any set theoretic model of arithmetical theories. It may be interpreted as showing that it is impossible to construct fact-arithmetic. The importance of this conclusion arises in the context of cognitive science. In the paper, a new type of slingshot argument is presented, which is called hyper-slingshot. The difference between meta-theoretical hyper-slingshots and conventional slingshots consists in the fact that (...) the former are formulated in the semantic meta-language of mathematical theories without the use of the iota-operator or the lambda-operator as the abstractor, whereas the latter require for their expression at least one of these non-standard term-operators. Hyper-slingshots implement simpler language tools in comparison with those used in conventional slingshots. (shrink)

Women view hypersexuality on their part as being about not subordinating their sexuality to their prospective wifely and motherly duties. Thus, women see hyper-sexuality on their part as a form of rebelling.

Generalizations of Boolean elements of a BL-algebra L are studied. By utilizing the MV-center MV(L) of L, it is reproved that an element x L is Boolean iff x x * = 1. L is called semi-Boolean if for all x L, x * is Boolean. An MV-algebra L is semi-Boolean iff L is a Boolean algebra. A BL-algebra L is semi-Boolean iff L is an SBL-algebra. A BL-algebra L is called hyper-Archimedean if for all x L, xn is (...) Boolean for some finite n 1. It is proved that hyper-Archimedean BL-algebras are MV-algebras. The study has application in mathematical fuzzy logics whose Lindenbaum algebras are MV-algebras or BL-algebras. (© 2007 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim). (shrink)