13,779 research outputs found

    Grasping nothing: a study of minimal ontologies and the sense of music

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    If music were to have a proper sense – one in which it is truly given – one might reasonably place this in sound and aurality. I contend, however, that no such sense exists; rather, the sense of music takes place, and it does so with the impossible. To this end, this thesis – which is a work of philosophy and music – advances an ontology of the impossible (i.e., it thinks the being of what, properly speaking, can have no being) and considers its implications for music, articulating how ontological aporias – of the event, of thinking the absolute, and of sovereignty’s dismemberment – imply senses of music that are anterior to sound. John Cage’s Silent Prayer, a nonwork he never composed, compels a rerethinking of silence on the basis of its contradictory status of existence; Florian Hecker et al.’s Speculative Solution offers a basis for thinking absolute music anew to the precise extent that it is a discourse of meaninglessness; and Manfred Werder’s [yearn] pieces exhibit exemplarily that music’s sense depends on the possibility of its counterfeiting. Inso-much as these accounts produce musical senses that take the place of sound, they are also understood to be performances of these pieces. Here, then, thought is music’s organon and its instrument

    How the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche can be succinctly encapsulated within his Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy

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    This thesis aims to illustrate that the broad philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche can be subordinated to his conceptual dichotomy: the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy. Through an analysis of the Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, as well as a brief analysis of the Will to Power, I will make the case that the dichotomy is the umbrella under which all Nietzschean concepts are to be read and understood. The texts that were chosen represent key stages in Nietzsche’s intellectual development – from the Birth of Tragedy, which marks the beginning of Nietzschean philosophy; to Twilight of the Idols, which represents the end. The constituent parts of the dichotomy are to be understood in two contexts: firstly, the terms (Apollonian/Dionysian) are used to denote the forces required for the creation of art; secondly, the terms come to signify the type of individual who makes use of those forces as it is the case that different types of art can be created by different types of men. Nietzschean philosophy is to be understood through art as it is explicitly stated that the essence of existence is one of a perpetual Becoming wherein there exists only that which is created by man, for man, in service of man’s own will to power. All attempts to discern a fixed Being in-itself existing outside of this will to power are false and are indicative of a weak and sickly disposition, the symptoms of which are found in the progenitors’ art (be it a morality, table of categories, or a transcendent deity). Through the positing of the thing-in-itself as the will to power Nietzsche conceptualises the world of Becoming as a canvas onto which two different types of men imprint a Being which reveals, physiologically, their endowment as either Apollonian or Dionysian

    On Curation: A Hermeneutical Approach

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    Starting point of this paper is the philosophical field of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics was established to account for different conditions of understanding and how they shape our interpretative processes. As different times constitute different conditions, the goal of the discipline essentially is to bridge the temporal gap between the creation of a work and its perception at a given point in time. Whereas traditionally, understanding was a matter of analyzing the historical tradition of author/artist and reader/viewer, nowadays, the perception and interpretation of art is shaped by another instance, the curator. Under the premise that selection and arrangement, i.e. curating, cannot be neutral, the author analyzes different contexts in which curating takes place and how different contexts account for different effects on our perception of art. After outlining the development of the curatorial practice—from institutional to independent curation—, a case study of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann serves as opportunity to examine specific phenomena and exhibitions in a detailed manner. A cultural and methodological cesura is proposed after which curators were able to execute the power and influence they have today: independent curation and the ahistorical exhibition. Ahistorical exhibitions disregard chronological display and enable curators to create individual narratives and themes by gathering artworks in a cross-temporal and geographical manner. Throughout the paper, it is assessed if and to what degree the application of hermeneutics onto the field of independent curation is fruitful. This theoretical analysis is followed by a market overview, in which various functions the curator fulfills in different institutions, e.g. museums, galleries, auction houses, are outlined and compared. Optimally, the consideration of cultural and commercial factors enables viewers to approach and see (curated) art in a differentiated way

    Consent and the Construction of the Volunteer: Institutional Settings of Experimental Research on Human Beings in Britain during the Cold War

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    This study challenges the primacy of consent in the history of human experimentation and argues that privileging the cultural frameworks adds nuance to our understanding of the construction of the volunteer in the period 1945 to 1970. Historians and bio-ethicists have argued that medical ethics codes have marked out the parameters of using people as subjects in medical scientific research and that the consent of the subjects was fundamental to their status as volunteers. However, the temporality of the creation of medical ethics codes means that they need to be understood within their historical context. That medical ethics codes arose from a specific historical context rather than a concerted and conscious determination to safeguard the well-being of subjects needs to be acknowledged. The British context of human experimentation is under-researched and there has been even less focus on the cultural frameworks within which experiments took place. This study demonstrates, through a close analysis of the Medical Research Council's Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU) and the government's military research facility, the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down (Porton), that the `volunteer' in human experiments was a subjective entity whose identity was specific to the institution which recruited and made use of the subject. By examining representations of volunteers in the British press, the rhetoric of the government's collectivist agenda becomes evident and this fed into the institutional construction of the volunteer at the CCRU. In contrast, discussions between Porton scientists, staff members, and government officials demonstrate that the use of military personnel in secret chemical warfare experiments was far more complex. Conflicting interests of the military, the government and the scientific imperative affected how the military volunteer was perceived

    Animating potential for intensities and becoming in writing: challenging discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia through the use of storying and other post qualitative inquiries

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    Written for everyone ever denied the opportunity of fulfilling their academic potential, this is ‘Chloe’s story’. Using composite selves, a phrase chosen to indicate multiplicities and movement, to story both the initial event leading to ‘Chloe’s’ immediate withdrawal from a Further Education college and an imaginary second chance to support her whilst at university, this Deleuzo-Guattarian (2015a) ‘assemblage’ of post qualitative inquiries offers challenge to discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia. Adopting a posthuman approach to theorising to shift attention towards affects and intensities always relationally in action in multiple ‘assemblages’, these inquiries aim to decentre individual ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ identities. Illuminating movements and moments quivering with potential for change, then, hoping thereby to generate second chances for all, different approaches to writing are exemplified which trouble those academic constraints by fostering inquiry and speculation: moving away from ‘what is’ towards ‘what if’. With the formatting of this thesis itself also always troubling the rigid Deleuzo-Guattarian (2015a) ‘segmentary lines’ structuring orthodox academic practice, imbricated in these inquiries are attempts to exemplify Manning’s (2015; 2016) ‘artfulness’ through shifts in thinking within and around an emerging PhD thesis. As writing resists organising, the verb thesisising comes into play to describe the processes involved in creating this always-moving thesis. Using ‘landing sites’ (Arakawa and Gins, 2009) as a landscaping device, freely creating emerging ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015a) so often denied to students forced to adhere to strict academic conventions, this ‘movement-moving’ (Manning, 2014) opens up opportunities for change as in Manning’s (2016) ‘research-creation’. Arguing for a moving away from writing-representing towards writing-inquiring, towards a writing ‘that does’ (Wyatt and Gale, 2018: 127), and toward writing as immanent doing, it is hoped to animate potential for intensities and becoming in writing, offering opportunities and glimmerings of the not-yet-known

    The culture of the perfect body: analysis of the use of dietary and anorectic elements to weight loss and eating disorders

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    Eating disorders are psychological disorders that directly affect the physical health of those who suffer from them, with a high mortality rate. Women are more prone to eating disorders than men, which is why most research focuses on women. Thus, 10% of patients with eating disorders are men. The results of bibliographical research are presented through in-depth interviews about the perception of the body that Social Work and Psychology professionals, who worked in both the public and private sectors, as an element that can influence eating disorders. This perception has been analyzed as an element that influences eating disorders. This research reaches three main conclusions: First, the body is considered by professionals as an instrument to stop time when personal identity problems arise, especially when the patient is a woman. Second, professionals perceive their patients' bodies as a responsibility in open conflict with social perceptions seen as something unattainable, ideal, and subject to unattainable parameters. Finally, the perception of the body is guided by social imaginaries in which morality (taboo and sin) and the biological are predominant

    Coloniality and the Courtroom: Understanding Pre-trial Judicial Decision Making in Brazil

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    This thesis focuses on judicial decision making during custody hearings in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The impetus for the study is that while national and international protocols mandate the use of pre-trial detention only as a last resort, judges continue to detain people pre-trial in large numbers. Custody hearings were introduced in 2015, but the initiative has not produced the reduction in pre-trial detention that was hoped. This study aims to understand what informs judicial decision making at this stage. The research is approached through a decolonial lens to foreground legacies of colonialism, overlooked in mainstream criminological scholarship. This is an interview-based study, where key court actors (judges, prosecutors, and public defenders) and subject matter specialists were asked about influences on judicial decision making. Interview data is complemented by non-participatory observation of custody hearings. The research responds directly to Aliverti et al.'s (2021) call to ‘decolonize the criminal question’ by exposing and explaining how colonialism informs criminal justice practices. Answering the call in relation to judicial decision making, findings provide evidence that colonial-era assumptions, dynamics, and hierarchies were evident in the practice of custody hearings and continue to inform judges’ decisions, thus demonstrating the coloniality of justice. This study is significant for the new empirical data presented and theoretical innovation is also offered via the introduction of the ‘anticitizen’. The concept builds on Souza’s (2007) ‘subcitizen’ to account for the active pursuit of dangerous Others by judges casting themselves as crime fighters in a modern moral crusade. The findings point to the limited utility of human rights discourse – the normative approach to influencing judicial decision making around pre-trial detention – as a plurality of conceptualisations compete for dominance. This study has important implications for all actors aiming to reduce pre-trial detention in Brazil because unless underpinning colonial logics are addressed, every innovation risks becoming the next lei para inglês ver (law [just] for the English to see)

    From Democrat to Dissident

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    Recounts the author's experiences and reasons that led him to reject the Democratic Party and become a conservative

    Encountering, explaining and refuting essentialism

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    Essentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous — even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the first in a collection of articles focused on various manifestations of essentialism, this article offers a brief historical outline of how social anthropology deployed essentialist thinking, even amongst its canonical exponents. It examines how Durkheimian theorisations and the structuralist traditions to which they gave rise — in particular assumptions of the singular and homogeneous symbolic classification of society — lent themselves to essentialism. It considers the example of South Africa where essentialist social theories contributed to inhumane political formations. Given that essentialism always carries a latency to be used for pernicious ends, the article concludes by considering social anthropological approaches that might permit an understanding of individuals and society in ways that neither lead to nor need essentialist thinking, and instead recognise the contradictoriness, flux and incompleteness inherent in social life.PostprintPeer reviewe

    Animal sentience

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    ‘Sentience’ sometimes refers to the capacity for any type of subjective experience, and sometimes to the capacity to have subjective experiences with a positive or negative valence, such as pain or pleasure. We review recent controversies regarding sentience in fish and invertebrates and consider the deep methodological challenge posed by these cases. We then present two ways of responding to the challenge. In a policy-making context, precautionary thinking can help us treat animals appropriately despite continuing uncertainty about their sentience. In a scientific context, we can draw inspiration from the science of human consciousness to disentangle conscious and unconscious perception (especially vision) in animals. Developing better ways to disentangle conscious and unconscious affect is a key priority for future research
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