Religion and the Mystery of Existence

This paper questions the idea that theism can function as an explanatory hypothesis to account for the nature and origins of the cosmos. Invoking God cannot dissolve the mystery of existence, and the characteristic religious response here is one of awe and humility. I then address David E. Cooper’s challenge of showing how a ”doctrine of mystery’ can have any discursible content. It is argued that certain aspects of our human experience afford us glimpses of the divine nature -- intimations of the transcendent, which shine through from the ineffable source of our being to the human world we inhabit

InDL: A New Datasets and Benchmark for In-Diagram Logic Interpreting based on Visual Illusion

This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluating deep learning models' capacity for in-diagram logic interpretation. Leveraging the intriguing realm of visual illusions, we establish a unique dataset, InDL, designed to rigorously test and benchmark these models. Deep learning has witnessed remarkable progress in domains such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, models often stumble in tasks requiring logical reasoning due to their inherent 'black box' characteristics, which obscure the decision-making process. Our work presents a new lens to understand these models better by focusing on their handling of visual illusions -- a complex interplay of perception and logic. We utilize six classic geometric optical illusions to create a comparative framework between human and machine visual perception. This methodology offers a quantifiable measure to rank models, elucidating potential weaknesses and providing actionable insights for model improvements. Our experimental results affirm the efficacy of our benchmarking strategy, demonstrating its ability to effectively rank models based on their logic interpretation ability. As part of our commitment to reproducible research, the source code and datasets will be made publicly available here: \href{https://github.com/rabbit-magic-wh/InDL}{https://github.com/rabbit-magic-wh/InDL}

Rhetorical Democracy: An Examination of the Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Despite the fact that there is nothing in the Constitution requiring it, nor prescribed by any other federal law, the President\u27s delivery of an inaugural address has become a de facto requirement of the official Presidential inauguration. The Presidential inaugural address is an anticipated feature of all inaugural ceremonies because it is where the newly elected president outlines, among other things, his perspective on the manner, conduct and overall form of the American government. Within this outline, the rhetoric utilized by the President during inaugural addresses shapes the way in which the American people understand our system of government on both a theoretical and functional level. This research examines the utilization of the term “democracy” in presidential inaugural speeches as a rhetorical device and the impacts of this terminology upon conceptions of American governance. This rhetorical analysis provides a lens to view the changing dynamics of American political thought

Secularism, Decoloniality and the Veil: Kutlug Ataman and Cigdem Aydemir on Hair and Veiling

This article looks at the selected works by two artists, Kutlug Ataman and Cigdem Aydemir, whose works are tackling hair, with a particular commentary on veiled Muslim women in secular spaces. The article argues that the current discussions on the topic, as well as the artistic responses, are often shaped by the narrative that logic of coloniality produced, but rarely attempt to delink from this narrative to change the terms of the conversation – which is a decolonial praxis. The discussion contextualizes the works by unpacking the Turkish case, on which both artists com- ment, discussing the positioning of Muslim women in Western(ized) public spaces and the resulting dehumanizing hypervisibility. I argue that while Ataman makes an important intervention on the topic with, Aydemir goes further, rejecting dehumanizing clas- sifications and delinking from the existing narrative

'As Planning is Everything, it is Good for Something!’ A Coasian Economic Taxonomy of Modes of Planning

Against two extreme forms of thinking, which have influenced planning theory, this article argues, in the context of a looming amount of literature generated in a movement for private planning, that the distinction between private planning and public planning is a valid one, but one in need of tweaking. However, the plan–market dichotomy (i.e. the assumption that state and private planning is mutually exclusive) is fallacious. Informed by the neo-institutional economic assumption of rational decisions and the stance of contractual solutions, it rides on the surge in private planning by proposing a taxonomy of planning that combines two modes of planning with two types of planning agent and discusses their possible interrelationships using some neo-institutional economic reasoning informed by the ideas of Coase. Some pedagogical and theoretical implications are also discussed.postprin

Discounting Credibility: Doubting the Stories of Women Survivors of Sexual Harassment

For decades, federal and state laws have prohibited sexual harassment on the job; despite this fact, extraordinarily high rates of gender-based workplace harassment still permeate virtually every sector of the American workforce. Public awareness of the seriousness and scope of the problem increased astronomically in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as women began to publicly share countless stories of harassment and abuse. In 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace published an important study analyzing a wide range of factors contributing to this phenomenon. But the study devotes only limited attention to a factor that goes straight to the heart of the problem: our reflexive inclination to discount the credibility of women, especially when those women are recounting experiences of abuse perpetrated by more powerful men. We will not succeed in ending gender-based workplace discrimination until we can understand and resist this tendency and begin to appropriately credit survivors’ stories. How does gender-based credibility discounting operate? First, those charged with responding to workplace harassment--managers, supervisors, union representatives, human resource officers, and judges—improperly discount as implausible women’s stories of harassment, due to a failure to understand either the psychological trauma caused by abusive treatment or the practical realities that constrain women’s options in its aftermath. Second, gatekeepers unjustly discount women’s personal trustworthiness, based on their demeanor (as affected by the trauma they often have suffered); on negative cultural stereotypes about women’s motives for seeking redress for harms; and on our deep-rooted cultural belief that women as a group are inherently less than fully trustworthy. The impact of such unjust and discriminatory treatment of women survivors of workplace harassment is exacerbated by the larger “credibility economy”—the credibility discounts imposed on many women-victims can only be fully understood in the context of the credibility inflations afforded to many male harassers. Moreover, discounting women’s credibility results in a particular and virulent set of harms, which can be measured as both an additional psychic injury to survivors, and as an institutional betrayal that echoes the harm initially inflicted by harassers themselves. It is time—long past time--to adopt practical, concrete reforms to combat the widespread, automatic tendency to discount women and the stories they tell. We must embark on a path toward allowing women who share their experiences of male abuses of workplace power to trust the responsiveness of their employers, judges, and our larger society

Designerly ways of speaking: investigating how the design tribe of researchers speak on design thinking

This thesis investigates how a community of design researchers speak on ‘Design Thinking’, a key concept in design research. The thesis traces the development of Design Thinking theory over the last 100 years. It identifies errors associated with how influential research (for example, Buchanan; Cross) frames the history of investigation into Design Thinking. For example, influential theorists do not consider a complete history of investigation into the way that designers think when discussing timescales of Design Thinking research. The thesis then summarises existing research into ways of speaking associated with Design Thinking and identifies significant gaps in the knowledge. Gaps include the absence of an agreed definition of ‘Design Thinking’ despite repeated calls. A lack of existing studies which use methods specifically designed to investigate ways of speaking have helped to create the gaps in knowledge. The thesis asks: how do Design Thinking researchers speak on Design Thinking? What purposes do these ways of speaking serve? The original work involves using methods specifically designed to investigate ways of speaking (Corpus Linguistics and Content Analysis). Three studies on ways of speaking are undertaken. The data set consists of peer-reviewed papers which focus on Design Thinking. The papers are published in design journals so are representative of ways of speaking used by the small academic design research community. This thesis terms this community the Design Tribe. Ways of speaking contrast progressive Design Thinking with a range of dominant, established ways of thinking (for example, STEM models). A distinctive lexicon characterises the way that researchers speak on Design thinking. Design Thinking is: agile, complex, fluid, multimodal and collaborative; established alternative ways of thinking conceal, standardize, are rigid, squash and reduce. The study reveals a range of inconsistencies associated with the ways that researchers classify Design Thinking. These issues highlight the part that a distinctive lexicon plays in enabling researchers to claim knowledge on Design Thinking. While there is little evidence to suggest a distinctive Design Thinking, there is certainly a distinctive and coherent form of discourse. This thesis terms this discourse, ‘designerly ways of speaking’. The thesis also uses critical theory developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to speculate on aspects which help to sustain designerly ways of speaking