Conscious visual perception can fail in many circumstances. However, little is known about the causes and processes leading to failures of visual awareness. In this study, we introduce a new signal detection measure termed subjective discriminability of invisibility that allows one to distinguish between subjective blindness due to reduction of sensory signals or to lack of attentional access to sensory signals. The SDI is computed based upon subjective confidence in reporting the absence of a target . Using this new (...) measure, we found that target misses were subjectively indistinguishable from physical absence when contrast reduction, backward masking and flash suppression were used, whereas confidence was appropriately modulated when dual task, attentional blink and spatial uncertainty methods were employed. These results show that failure of visual perception can be identified as either a result of perceptual or attentional blindness depending on the circumstances under which visual awareness was impaired. (shrink)

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze forges alliances among science, philosophy and the arts in order to propose a systems theory of culture-formation based on the distinction between differen(t)iation and differen(c)iation. The first term refers to spatial and temporal difference, as might be charted graphically on a geometric grid; the second term refers to the variations possible of an organism at any particular moment in its history, enabled, for example, by cell division and specialization in an embryo, or by spontaneous (...) genetic mutation in a species. While Deleuze identifies the first with mathematics and the second with biology, a more precise rendering of the difference between these two versions of difference can be found in llya Prigogine' s distinction between the precise determinism typical of the time-reversible perspective in physics and the statistical accounts of complex systems typical of the time-irreversible perspective. Often associated with dynamics, the time-reversible perspective refers to the search for laws governing physical events which make sense whether looking forwards or backwards in time, like the movement of planets and comets in Newtonian mechanics, or the trajectories of subatomic particles in Richard Feynman's quantum electrodynamics. Often associated with thermodynamics, the time-irreversible perspective refers to attempts to account for more complex processes, as in nineteenth-century descriptions of entropy as an endgame, or more recent characterizations of entropy as the initial condition for self-organizing processes. Furthermore, this epistemological distinction has ideological weight, particularly if we consider how disciplines like physics may value one epistemological model more than another. Since history has its own ideological struggles, which in turn have their origin in conflicting epistemological stances, we may find Prigogine and Stengers' s account of time-reversibility and time-irreversibility as competing stances useful for representing conflicting interpretations of historical events. -/- Deleuze and Prigogine quote each other on a number of occasions, which lends credence to Deleuze' s insistence that it is necessary to forge alliances among science, philosophy and the arts. Indeed, in a recent interview (with the author, May 3, 1994), Prigogine demonstrates familiarity with Deleuze's work, and notes that these two forms of difference, as well as the terms "repetition" and "difference," are coextensive with time-reversible and time-irreversible perspectives in the sciences. Prigogine and Deleuze developed their respective models of physical and cultural processes at approximately the same time, the mid- to late sixties. Further, Prigogine himself has often speculated on the cultural work of his own concepts. That philosophers have recourse to physics and physicists have recourse to philosophy (not to mention that Deleuze writes on literature, painting and cinema, and that Prigogine is an accomplished pianist) reinforces Deleuze's argument (here as well as in What Is Philosophy?, written with Felix Guattari) that science, philosophy and art should form alliances since all engage the problematic of chaos, only proceed differently toward it. Some have begun to call such an interdisciplinary pursuit epistemocritique.1 That Deleuze uses physical laws to describe the behavior of human subjects and of complex cultural systems raises questions about the epistemological and ideological implications of adopting tropes from physics to forge such alliances, given the relative power of scientific discourse in our epoch. While I will address these implications in my conclusion, here I want to argue that Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, with its sophisticated treatment of scientific and philosophical concepts, also deserves to be read as a form of epistE§mocritique. As an artistic construction, it draws on science and philosophy to foreground, especially in its depiction of the chaos of the postwar zone of Europe, the problematic threshold of historical consciousness as that consciousness acts to impose its own order on raw events. (shrink)

My paper focuses on the theme of visibility by teasing out some paradoxes of invisibility. In the ordinary social world, what is said to be invisible is generally what is here, right before our eyes, but to which we pay no attention. Care is invisible because it goes on without us seeing it. By suddenly making visible what is ordinarily invisible, the COVID pandemic has been a strange pedagogical moment, making visible the people who take care of “us”, and (...) revealing our entire society’s ignorance of what allows it to live—whether in the context of everyday life or in the urgency of the risk of death. The grammar of care has thus imposed itself on everyone, because care is never so visible as in those situations where a form of life is shaken. Care work has been revealed as invisible work that keeps everyone going. “Invisible” does not refer to a difficulty in perceiving but rather a refusal to see. A refusal to see something that is not hidden, but which we do not see precisely because it is right before our eyes. Invisibility is thus denial, in both the social and the theoretical realms, especially when care work is envisioned in the terms of the further invisibilization of care work when it is done for the benefit of women as in the “care drain” from poor to rich countries. The asymmetry in the relations between North and South is part of the invisibility of what sustains societies. The invisible chains of care reveal the extent to which the question of service is the fundamental question of social invisibility. (shrink)

“Asian women” is an ambiguous category; it seems to indicate a racial as well as a cultural designation. The number of articles or books on being Asian or Asian-American is on the rise in other disciplines, but in comparison to the material on black or Hispanic identities, Asians are largely missing from the field of philosophy of race. Things Asian in philosophy are generally reserved for those who study Asian philosophy or comparative philosophy, but that focus usually excludes reflections on (...) Asian identities as such. This lack in the literature prompted me to start my own reflection with such questions as: Why do Asians not take an active interest in discourse on race? What does the category “Asian” designate? What contributes to their invisibility in general? Is this a stereotype? Are they simply “white-identified?” Are Asians responsible for their own invisibility, or is there some other factor? What is the relation between Asian philosophy and being Asian, if any? Is there any interesting connection between being Asian and feminism? As a Japanese woman philosopher who is also interested in feminism, these questions seemed natural. This paper is an attempt to clarify some of these issues in the light of my experience working in the profession of academic philosophy. (shrink)

Imbued with historical, cultural, and social aspects, nurses' visibility and invisibility have often been studied in terms of their work. Based on the sociology of ignorance and the sociology of absences, our aim in this article is to shed light on how organizational processes can actively produce nurses' visibility or invisibility on care units. To this end, we conducted an exploratory qualitative study with 15 nurses in three tertiary care hospitals that are part of a large health and (...) social services center in Quebec, Canada. The data collected through semi‐structured interviews, nonparticipatory observations, and analyses of patient records were subjected to thematic analysis. Three themes were identified from the analysis: the context of nurses' visibility, the impact of organizational structure on nurses' visibility and invisibility, and visibility associated with the persistence of the traditional image of the nurse. Hence, these themes help illustrate how organizational processes favor visibility and invisibility, and the instrumentalization of nurses. This is important to highlight these processes and denounce them so that the legitimacy of nurses' epistemic and political positions in healthcare settings is better considered. (shrink)

This theoretical-reflective essay addresses ethics in nursing care for transgender people, emphasizing the tension between the care provided and the institutional invisibilities that perpetuate the exclusion of this population in the healthcare system. Based on universal principles of human rights and contemporary philosophical concepts, such as Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition and Judith Butler’s performative theory of gender, the text problematizes professional practice in the face of the specific demands and vulnerabilities of transgender people. Structural invisibility, sustained and reinforced (...) by cisnormativity norms and the absence of specific content in professional training, represents an ethical barrier to ensuring humanized and inclusive care. The study highlights that the denial of gender identity, the incorrect use of the chosen name, and the perpetuation of prejudices constitute ethical and human rights violations, aggravating suffering and health inequalities. The proposed reflection also emphasizes the responsibility of nursing professionals to transcend technique and take a critical, ethical, and political stance that recognizes others in their uniqueness and promotes care practices that respect diversity. The essay advocates the adoption of an ethic of recognition as the foundation for transforming care into a space of welcome, justice, and redress for structural inequalities. Finally, the text reaffirms the importance of transforming invisibilities into visibilities, and that nursing should position itself as an active agent in promoting equity and the rights of the transgender population, ensuring care that legitimizes, values, and respects their identities and histories. (shrink)

The target article “Bounded Justice, Inclusion, and the Hyper/Invisibility of Race in Precision Medicine” is a welcome addition to the corpus on inclusion in genomics and precision medicine (Ferrym...

Robert Hooke’s theory of gravitation is a promising case study for probing the fruitfulness of Menachem Fisch’s insistence on the centrality of trading zone mediators for rational change in the history of science and mathematics. In 1679, Hooke proposed an innovative explanation of planetary motions to Newton’s attention. Until the correspondence with Hooke, Newton had embraced planetary models, whereby planets move around the Sun because of the action of an ether filling the interplanetary space. Hooke’s model, instead, consisted in the (...) idea that planets move in the void space under the influence of a gravitational attraction directed toward the sun. There is no doubt that the correspondence with Hooke allowed Newton to conceive a new explanation for planetary motions. This explanation was proposed by Hooke as a hypothesis that needed mathematical development and experimental confirmation. Hooke formulated his new model in a mathematical language which overlapped but not coincided with Newton’s who developed Hooke’s hypothetical model into the theory of universal gravitation as published in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). The nature of Hooke’s contributions to mathematized natural philosophy, however, was contested during his own lifetime and gave rise to negative evaluations until the last century. Hooke has been often contrasted to Newton as a practitioner rather than as a “scientist” and unfavorably compared to the eminent Lucasian Professor. Hooke’s correspondence with Newton seems to me an example of the phenomenon, discussed by Fisch in his philosophical works, of the invisibility in official historiography of “trading zone mediators,” namely, of those actors that play a role, crucial but not easily recognized, in promoting rational scientific framework change. (shrink)

There is an aporia in Kant’s analysis of evil: he defines radical evil as an invisible disposition of the will, but he also demands an inferential connection between visible evil actions and this invisible disposition. This inference, however, undermines the radical invisibility of ra..

Contour adaptation is a recently described paradigm that renders otherwise salient visual stimuli temporarily perceptually invisible. Here we investigate whether this illusion can be exploited to study visual awareness. We found that CA can induce seconds of sustained invisibility following similarly long periods of uninterrupted adaptation. Furthermore, even fragmented adaptors are capable of producing CA, with the strength of CA increasing monotonically as the adaptors encompass a greater fraction of the stimulus outline. However, different types of adaptor patterns, such (...) as distinctive shapes or illusory contours, produce equivalent levels of CA suggesting that the main determinants of CA are low-level stimulus characteristics, with minimal modulation by higher-order visual processes. Taken together, our results indicate that CA has desirable properties for studying visual awareness, including the production of prolonged periods of perceptual dissociation from stimulation as well as parametric dependencies of that dissociation on a host of stimulus parameters. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a novel relational egalitarian theory of social exclusion that explains how society fails to treat socially excluded individuals – such as people experiencing homelessness, individuals with substance use disorders and mental illness and sex workers – as equals. I argue that society places and keeps excluded individuals at the very bottom of the social status hierarchy by treating them as socially invisible, or by rendering them physically invisible, or both. The upshot, then, is that part (...) of what is wrong with social exclusion is that it creates the invisible social class. (shrink)

I take up the call for a more nuanced engagement with race in bioethics by using Creary’s analytic of bounded justice and argue that it helps illuminate processes of racialization, or racial formation, specifically Blackness, as a dialectical processes of both invisibility and hyper-visibility. This dialectical view of race provides a lens through which the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genetics and genomics field can reflect on fraught issues such as inclusion in genomic and biomedical research. Countering (...) or interrupting racialization in precision medicine can involve asking how marginalized groups are made invisible or hyper-visible in various aspects of the research process. Incorporating these kinds of questions into biomedical research inclusion efforts could lead to potentially powerful engagements with marginalized groups and could provide the opportunity for stakeholders to engage with the ways that racialization can happen in real-time and might undermine good intentions. (shrink)

David Hull accounts for the success of science in terms of an invisible hand mechanism, arguing that it is difficult to reconcile scientists' self-interestedness or their desire for recognition with traditional philosophical explanations for the success of science. I argue that we have less reason to invoke an invisible hand mechanism to explain the success of science than Hull implies, and that many of the practices and institutions constitutive of science are intentionally designed by scientists with an eye to realizing (...) the very goals that Hull believes need to be explained by reference to an invisible hand mechanism. Thus, I reduce the scope of Hull's invisible hand explanation and supplement it by appealing to a hidden hand explanation. (shrink)

Axel Honneth characterizes social “invisibility” as a failure of recognition, that is, a failure to identify and positively affirm an individual person despite their physical visibility. Institutionalization in residential care settings often renders people socially invisible by default, insofar as they are not even physically visible to most fellow community members. I show how this form of social invisibility leads to an attenuated ability to exercise moral agency, that is, to moral invisibility. Feedback loops between psychological properties, (...) social relations, and physical environments exacerbate the problem of moral invisibility. We ought to be especially concerned about how this problem affects the growing number of people with dementia who will be living in residential care settings, as well as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss the idea of the invisible hand in the connection of its recent use in the philosophy of science. It has been invoked by some philosophers of science with a naturalistic bent as a part of their account of science. Some have made explicit references to the idea (Hull, 1988a) and others have only presupposed it (Giere, 1988; Goldman, 1991; Kitcher, 1993). I will argue that there are some problematic features in the way the idea (...) of the invisible hand isused inthese accounts. I will first discuss some general properties of the invisible hand explanations and then present some motives for its use in the theory of science. Then I will show how one particular philosopher of science, David Hull, uses the idea. I will use Hull's account as a practising target and offer some comments and criticism in order to promote more disciplined use of this model of explanation in science studies. (shrink)

While entrepreneurial ecosystems research has increasingly discussed inclusivity and systemic barriers facing women or racial minorities, it has largely overlooked how invisible inequalities restrict marginalized entrepreneurs. In this study, we focus on Dalits, a historically marginalized community in India facing invisible inequality (on caste lines), to examine how such inequalities manifest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, turning the ecosystem into a non-cooperative space, and how marginalized entrepreneurs navigate such non-cooperative spaces. Drawing on qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs and other ecosystem actors within (...) the Dalit community, we identify three ways in which invisible inequalities manifest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem: moral disqualification in economic opportunities, relational gatekeeping in entrepreneurial networks, and undermining social credibility. Furthermore, we find that marginalized entrepreneurs navigate this non-cooperative space by implementing three micro-practices: advocacy for targeted efforts, creation of alternate spaces, and clientelism. We contribute to research on the entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurship by marginalized groups, and caste in management. (shrink)

Invisible-hand explanations suggest that many social practices are a product of human action, but not human design. In coming to terms with such explanations, it is essential to distinguish between explanations of the _emergence_ of practices and explanations of the _persistence_ of practices. The kind of invisible-hand explanation that accounts for the emergence of practices might turn out to be altogether different from the kind that accounts for their persistence. The emergence of practices is often best explained by _aggregating_ explanations: (...) Diverse and dispersed action by numerous people might produce some kind of pattern, even if they did not foresee it or intend to bring it about. By contrast, practices often persist because of _evolutionary_ explanations. They survive some sort of competition. Survival value may have nothing to do with the emergence of a practice in the first place. (shrink)

The notion of a spontaneous social order, an order in human affairs which operates without the intervention of any directly ordering mind, has a natural fascination for social and political theorists. This paper provides a taxonomy under which there are two broadly contrasting sorts of spontaneous social order. One is the familiar invisible hand; the other is an arrangement that we describe as the intangible hand. The paper is designed to serve two main purposes. First, to provide a pure account (...) of the invisible hand, with some indication of the varieties of invisible hand (and, indeed, backhand) available. Second, to develop and motivate the unfamiliar conception of the intangible backhand. We believe that a recognition of the availability of this latter sort of spontaneous organising mechanism — and the mechanism is implicitly recognised in many traditions — is of great importance in political theory; it is of particular importance nowadays when the usual focus is entirely on the invisible hand. (shrink)

The Invisible World Beyond the Perceptual One. The purpose of this paper is to show the effects of the invisible world on the visible. The way in which the conscious, which we feel, is affected by the subconscious, which we too often do not perceive. Our life is affected by a hidden mechanism, by a shadow mechanism. Everything starts from the inside, from thinking, vision, mission, objectives… everything starts with a philosophical discourse amplified by a social one.

Major depressive disorder is one of the most common serious illnesses worldwide; the disease is also among those with the lowest rates of treatment. Barriers to access to care, both practical and psychological, contribute significantly to these low treatment rates. Among such barriers are regulations in many nations that require a physician’s prescription for most pharmacological treatments including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These rules are designed to protect patients. However, such regulations involve a tradeoff between the welfare of “visible” (...) victims, who might suffer negative consequences from a lack of regulation, and the well-being of invisible “victims,” who likely experience negative consequences that result from increased barriers to care. This article explores these tradeoffs and argues in favor of shifting SSRIs from prescription-only to over-the-counter status. (shrink)

The idea of the invisible hand has had an impact not only on the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries but on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well, and it has had a curious ideological career: in previous centuries it had been used to promote ideals of secular, enlightened progress, while in the twentieth and the twenty-first, it is used inversely to promote conservative reverence toward traditions. There are two main models for invisible-hand explanations, and the current, inverse, ideological use (...) of the idea of the invisible hand by conservative circles as against liberals and social planners springs from not distinguishing between the two models. (shrink)

Introduction -- Unintended consequences -- The origin of money -- Segregation -- The invisible hand -- The origin of money reconsidered -- Models and representation -- Game theory and conventions -- Conclusion.

In this paper, we analyze the recent public scandal involving Nafissatou Diallo and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to offer an account of the role affectability imbalances play in process-based invisibility. Process-based invisibilities, in this paper, refer to predictable narrative gaps within public narratives that can be aptly described as disappearances. We demonstrate that compromised, complex social identities, maladjusted webs of reciprocity, and a failure to fully appreciate basic affectability in large part cause affectability imbalances. Ultimately, we claim that affectability imbalances and (...) the three imbricated conditions that facilitate such imbalances—complex social identities, reciprocity, and basic affectability—are integral features of process-based invisibility. (shrink)

In Invisible Hands, the historians Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman identify a defining feature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: the decline of God as a source of order in favor of a new model of self-organization.” Sheehan and Warhman provide a novel account of how people on the threshold of modernity understood the continuing presence in the world of apparent disorder, randomness, and chance. If God no longer actively guaranteed that order will always prevail, what or whom did? The answer, the (...) authors argue, was a new appreciation for complexity, new understandings of causality, and new functions for the divine hand. At the foundation of this novel way of thinking was the ability to imagine complex systems--be they natural or human--asself-organizing. Invisible Hands maps and explains the intensifying presence of the languages of self-organization throughout the eighteenth century, proliferating as they did with ever greater sophistication across numerous intellectual domains and cultural arenas. For self-organization was less a theory than a field of new insights: insights into the dynamics of chance and randomness, into the relationship between agency and determinism, into the role of God in a world without hands-on providence. (shrink)

The ethical ‘eye’ of nursing, that is, the particular moral vision and values inherent in nursing work, is constrained by the preoccupations and practices of the superordinate biomedical structure in which nursing as a practice discipline is embedded. The intimate, situated knowledge of particular persons who construct and attach meaning to their health experience in the presence of and with the active participation of the nurse, is the knowledge that provides the evidence for nurses’ ethical decision making. It is largely (...) invisible to all but other nurses. Two nurse researchers, Joan Liaschenko of the University of Minnesota and Patricia Rodney of the University of Victoria, have investigated the ethical concerns of practising nurses and noted in their separate enquiries the invisible nature of critical aspects of nursing work. Noting the similarities in their respective observations, and with the feminist ethics of Margaret Urban Walker as a theoretical framework, this article examines the concept of ‘invisibility’ as it relates to nursing work and nursing ethics. (shrink)

This comprehensive study delves into the complex interplay between gender-based violence (GBV), privacy, visibility, and transparency within contemporary societal and legal contexts. It examines the dual nature of visibility—its power to advocate for GBV awareness while risking survivor/victim privacy—and the issues arising from the invisibility of such violence. The work emphasizes the necessity for nuanced approaches that honor privacy yet advocate for transparency and accountability. It calls for intersectional and inclusive strategies, integrating technology, legal reforms, and societal engagement to (...) address the multifaceted challenges of GBV. (shrink)

Hace tiempo se avisó de la existencia de antisemitismo también en círculos progresistas. Se trata de grupos sociales más sensibles por el carácter estructural de la discriminación y con alta simpatía para poblaciones vulnerables y que siguen la lógica posestructuralista de la crítica al poder. No obstante, en vez de incluir la comprensión del carácter estructural de la discriminación antisemita dentro de las actividades progresistas, parece existir una resistencia específica frente a la autocrítica respecto al tema del antisemitismo que defiere (...) fundamentalmente del trato de otras formas de discriminación. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo explorar las razones por las que la comprensión del antisemitismo como discriminación estructural no ha podido penetrar en debates académicos y sociales —tal como han penetrado en estos debates la comprensión del carácter estructural del sexismo o del racismo— más allá de los círculos de los estudiosos del antisemitismo. Para ello presentaré en la primera parte algunos elementos de la lógica estructural discursiva del antisemitismo. Exploraré en la segunda parte condiciones sociales estructurales que favorecen la percepción de la realidad según una cosmovisión antisemita. En la tercera parte hablaré de los efectos estructurales materiales y prácticos del antisemitismo para finalmente presentar mecanismos de rechazo de culpa específicas del antisemitismo. Se muestra cómo la propia lógica antisemita proporciona formas de neutralización y negación específicas, diferentes y adicionales a las demás formas conocidas de rechazo de culpa. (shrink)

Some photographs show determinate features of a scene because the photographed scene had those features. This dependency relation is, rightly, a consensus in philosophy of photography. I seek to refute many long-established theories of photography by arguing that they are incompatible with this commitment. In Section II, I classify accounts of photography as either single-stage or multi-stage. In Section III, I analyze the historical basis for single-stage accounts. In Section IV, I explain why the single-stage view led scientists to postulate (...) “latent” photographic images as a technical phenomenon in early chemical photography. In Section V, I discredit the notion of an invisible latent image in chemical photography and, in Section VI, extend this objection to the legacy of the latent image in digital photography. In Section VII, I appeal to the dependency relation to explain why the notion of a latent image makes the single-stage account untenable. Finally, I use the multi-stage account to advance debate about “new” versus “orthodox” theories of photography. (shrink)

This article analyzes Italian research and experimentation on the economic potential of certain plant species in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, also providing insight into beekeeping and honey production. It focuses on continuity of method and progress across regimes and on the invisibility of many of the actors involved in the development of agricultural science and food research. Specifically, “continuity” refers to the continuation of certain threads of Old-Regime experimentation by the scientific apparatus put in place during (...) the Napoleonic era. These threads were reworked and strengthened with the new means available to Frenchified Europe. The concept of “invisibility” derives from an expression by Steven Shapin and refers to actors who contributed to the development of agricultural science while remaining in the shadows. These include various types of technicians and members of rural society who supported the scientific work of scholars without receiving overt recognition. Continuity and invisibility were therefore two fundamental components both in the epistemological development of agricultural science and in the improvement of food research. The article analyzes case studies mainly from northern Italy – or rather, the various geopolitical entities existing in this geographical region – during the late Old Regime and the Napoleonic era, comparing them with examples from all over Europe. (shrink)

Building on work by Popper, Schweber, Nozick, Sober, and others in a still-growing literature, I explore here the conceptual kinship between Adam Smith''s ''invisible hand'' and Darwinian natural selection. I review the historical ties, and examine Ullman -Margalit''s ''constraints'' on invisible-hand accounts, which I later re-apply to natural selection, bringing home the close relationship. These theories share a ''parent'' principle, itself neither biological no politico-economic, that collective order and well-being can emerge parsimoniously from the dispersed action of individuals. The invisible (...) hand operates on ''memes'' the way natural selection operates on genes. Like Darwin''s concept, it brings together traditional opposites, ''nature'' and ''selection,'' forming a saltation-mitigating transition between biological instinct and full-blown conscious design. Herschel''s criterion of confirmation, which Darwin long strove to satisfy, is itself an invisible hand-like meme – a ''Midas effect'' revealing and rewarding the fittest theories, Darwin''s and Smith''s emphatically among them. (shrink)

In this chapter, it will be asked how the struggle between visibilization and invisibilization engages in a struggle against social suffering.Several insights taken from critical theory will be applied. First and foremost, we must understand the research on invisibilization as consequently dialectical. This is not only true on an ontological level, where visibilization and invisibilization, underlying structure and appearance are always related. It is also true on an epistemological level, where we can always make visible only some aspects. Attempts to (...) show the full picture must necessarily fail. We can only aim for related fragments that illuminate formerly dark spots in the landscape of our knowledge. Dialectics as “the consistent sense of nonidentity” also must be the guiding principle for the methodological approach. (shrink)

For several years, scholars have (for good reason) been largely preoccupied with worries about the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools to make decisions about us. Only recently has significant attention turned to a potentially more alarming problem: the use of AI/ML to influence our decision-making. The contexts in which we make decisions—what behavioral economists call our choice architectures—are increasingly technologically-laden. Which is to say: algorithms increasingly determine, in a wide variety of contexts, both the sets of (...) options we choose from and the way those options are framed. Moreover, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) makes it possible for those options and their framings—the choice architectures—to be tailored to the individual chooser. They are constructed based on information collected about our individual preferences, interests, aspirations, and vulnerabilities, with the goal of influencing our decisions. At the same time, because we are habituated to these technologies we pay them little notice. They are, as philosophers of technology put it, transparent to us—effectively invisible. I argue that this invisible layer of technological mediation, which structures and influences our decision-making, renders us deeply susceptible to manipulation. Absent a guarantee that these technologies are not being used to manipulate and exploit, individuals will have little reason to trust them. (shrink)

Violence has always accompanied human societies, and appeared in various forms of artworks such as movie, painting, and even cave art, but Persian painting by showing the utopian calm images surprisingly kept itself away from representing the violence, even in the scenes of war and slaughter. This paper aims to study the Persian painting –with focus on the early Safavid dynasty as the age of glory of Iranian art- on the basis of Žižek’s theory, to show that invisible violence floated (...) in Persian painting regardless of its extreme calm beauty and its different context from contemporary philosophy. Žižek categorizes the violence into three modes: visible subjective, and two modes of objective violence -Symbolic and Systematic - which are invisible and flow in latter layers. By going to deeper level of creation and content of Persian images which were illustrated in the court and on the command of rulers of the time, it is concluded that some elements of invisible violence such as strict law, visual symbols like “Qizilbash Hat”, the issue of the language, neighbor, fear of error, repetition of historical characters, extremism and nonviolent situation can be analyzed in the content or illustration of Persian Painting. (shrink)

We argue that using a calendar-tracker to capture invisible labour in the academy comes with conceptual and ethical limitations, which might affect how successfully our tracker can provide academics with conceptual resources to understand their invisible work as work.

When cosmic rays—high-energy particles from outer space—encounter the Earth's atmosphere, they produce particles called neutrinos. To detect them, physicists go underground inside deep mines where the overlying rock can filter out the cosmic-ray background radiation. I examine how the first such detection of neutrinos in 1965 by an international team of physicists at the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) in India—a gold mine where the British began mining in 1880—was made possible by the invisible labor of lowered-caste, or Dalit, miners. By (...) studying the underground, this paper contributes to recent attention to verticality in the history of science, while moving away from the dominant approach to spatial studies of sites of science, the lab–field framework, and instead examining the social, political, and economic conditions that made KGF, with its depth, possible as a site for physics.Using labor histories of KGF and archival material about the experiments, I argue that the mines became nearly three kilometers deep only because of a regime of racialized labor in which Dalit miners worked in difficult and dangerous conditions for less than subsistence-level wages. I also show how the experiments depended on this invisible labor that ran the mines. (shrink)

Recognition of legal personhood in contemporary international and domestic law is a matter of signs. Those signs identify the existence of the legal person: human animals, corporations and states. They also identify facets of that personhood that situate the signified entities within webs of rights and responsibilities. Entities that are not legal persons lack agency and are thus invisible. They may be acted on but, absent the personhood that is communicated through a range of indicia and shapes both legal and (...) popular understanding of powers and obligations, they lack standing in judicial fora. They are signified as entities that are the subjects of action by legal persons, for example exploitation through rights regarding natural resources or commodification of ‘wild’, companion and other non-human animals. They are also signified as members of a diverse class of non-persons such as ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’. This article explores the consequences of law’s signification of personhood and the natural world before asking whether we both should and could recognise domains such as specific rivers, forests or even Antarctica as a type of legal person. Recognition might acknowledge the salience of nature in the ontologies of colonised First Peoples. It might also underpin a global response to climate change as the existential crisis of the Anthropocene. In understanding law as a matter of signifiers and syntaxes the article cautions that ostensible recognition of some domains as persons has been aspirational rather than substantive, with observers misreading the sign as necessarily transforming power relationships. The article also cautions that personhood for nature or particular domains may be contrary to the self-determination of colonised First Peoples. (shrink)

This paper examines the structural transformation of consciousness that occurs when an individual stands before an artwork and begins to encounter their own inner state. Before conscious recognition takes hold, the inner world exists as a layered, undifferentiated field — not absent, but without orientation. The act of sustained aesthetic encounter initiates a phenomenological reversal: consciousness turns back upon itself not through deliberate effort, but through the gradual release of its outward momentum. Drawing on Husserl's account of pre-predicative experience, Merleau-Ponty's (...) analysis of pre-reflective bodily consciousness, and Noë's concept of aesthetic arrest, this paper argues that artworks function not as objects of interpretation but as conditions of presence — structural grounds upon which self-aware perception can emerge. Darkness, in this account, is not a deficiency to be overcome but a necessary phenomenological condition that preserves the density of inner experience before it is fragmented into language and concept. The paper traces five structural moments: the invisible place of pre-reflective suspension, the density of darkness, the turning of consciousness toward itself, the artwork as ground of presence, and the altered temporality of return. Together, these moments describe a form of self-awareness that does not arise from interpretation but from the cessation of its urgency. (shrink)

The following is a commentary on “Ethical Considerations for Psychologists Providing Treatment for Arab Americans”. Cho brings to light important issues on providing ethical treatment with the Arab American community. However, there is currently no formal mechanism to identify the number of Americans of Arab descent, thus impacting the ability of researchers to study psychological treatment with Arab Americans. In addition, many Arab Americans are refugees with exposure to trauma, highlighting the need for understanding the role of culture in trauma (...) when working with this community. Implications of these issues pertinent to the Arab American community and the need for psychologists to act in advocacy roles are discussed. (shrink)

There is yet to be any animal welfare or protection law for domestic animals in China, one of the few countries in the world today that do not have such laws. However, in Chinese imperial law, there were legal provisions adopted more than a 1,000 years ago for the care and treatment of domestic working animals. Furthermore, in traditional Chinese philosophy, animals were regarded as constituent part of the organic whole of the cosmos by ancient Chinese philosophers who saw no (...) strict delineation between humans and non-human animals. Notwithstanding, the attitude and practice towards animals in ancient Chinese life was also ambivalent and was predicated upon the practical utility of animals for the service of humans and society. Such practice can be seen through the legal provisions in imperial China. This paper first discusses animal’s place in traditional Chinese philosophy and then in Chinese imperial law. It raises the issue of the gap discernable from the philosophical thought on animals and practice regarding animals in everyday life in China. The paper argues that given the gap in perception and attitude regarding animals, law can play an important role that moral teaching has not been able to achieve. (shrink)