The Phenomenology of Kantian Respect for Persons

Emotions can be understood generally from two different perspectives: (i) a third-person perspective that specifies their distinctive functional role within our overall cognitive economy and (ii) a first-person perspective that attempts to capture their distinctive phenomenal character, the subjective quality of experiencing them. One emotion that is of central importance in many ethical systems is respect (in the sense of respect for persons or so-called recognition-respect). However, discussions of respect in analytic moral philosophy have tended to focus almost entirely on its functional role, in particular the behaviors that respect disposes us to engage in (or refrain from). Here we wish to investigate the phenomenal character of respect, what it is like to feel respect for persons. Since Kant is the reference point for modern discussions of respect, we try to reconstruct Kant’s account of the phenomenology of respect, but also endeavor to refine his account in light of our own phenomenological observations

Emotion resonance and divergence: a semiotic analysis of music and sound in 'The Lost Thing', an animated short film and 'Elizabeth' a film trailer

Music and sound contributions of interpersonal meaning to film narratives may be different from or similar to meanings made by language and image, and dynamic interactions between several modalities may generate new story messages. Such interpretive potentials of music and voice sound in motion pictures are rarely considered in social semiotic investigations of intermodality. This paper therefore shares two semiotic studies of distinct and combined music, English speech and image systems in an animated short film and a promotional filmtrailer. The paper considers the impact of music and voice sound on interpretations of film narrative meanings. A music system relevant to the analysis of filmic emotion is proposed. Examples show how music and intonation contribute meaning to lexical, visual and gestural elements of the cinematic spaces. Also described are relations of divergence and resonance between emotion types in various couplings of music, intonation, words and images across story phases. The research is relevant to educational knowledge about sound, and semiotic studies of multimodality

The Code of Protest. Images of Peace in the West German Peace Movements, 1945-1990

The article examines posters produced by the peace movements in the Federal Republic of Germany during the ColdWar, with an analytical focus on the transformation of the iconography of peace in modernity. Was it possible to develop an independent, positive depiction of peace in the context of protests for peace and disarmament? Despite its name, the pictorial selfrepresentation of the campaign ‘Fight against Nuclear Death’ in the late 1950s did not draw on the theme of pending nuclear mass death. The large-scale protest movement in the 1980s against NATO’s 1979 ‘double-track’ decision contrasted female peacefulness with masculine aggression in an emotionally charged pictorial symbolism. At the same time this symbolism marked a break with the pacifist iconographic tradition that had focused on the victims of war. Instead, the movement presented itself with images of demonstrating crowds, as an anticipation of its peaceful ends. Drawing on the concept of asymmetrical communicative ‘codes’ that has been developed in sociological systems theory, the article argues that the iconography of peace in peace movement posters could not develop a genuinely positive vision of peace, since the code of protest can articulate the designation value ‘peace’ only in conjunction with the rejection value ‘war’

Waves of infinity in the goblet of the imagination

The article was submitted on 23.05.2016.In this article, the poetic worlds of Fyodor Tyutchev and William Blake are analysed in terms of their comprehension of infinity. Both of them combine their notion of infinity with an understanding that the divine is manifested in the tangible world. The article demonstrates that Tyutchev talks about two infinities – the daily one, which establishes the divine unity of existence, and the nightly one, which leads everything into chaos. They can be easily recognised as the actual and potential infinities in the philosophy of Aristotle. Blake recognises infinity as the procedural deployment of the Universe and, at the same time, as the divine foundation of everything: this allows all things to be part of unified universal space. For him, the infinite and eternal essence of each thing (taking into account that everything is infinite and eternal at every point in space and time) fills things with their inner light and allows them to witness God. The opportunity to perceive nature like this is given by the loving heart and a vivid imagination, but is closed to both human and universal reason. The infinity perceived by reason is just a dark void, which closes worlds and separates them from each other.Анализируются поэтические миры Федора Тютчева и Уильяма Блейка с точки зрения их понимания бесконечности. Оба поэта связывают свое понятие бесконечности с тем, как Божественное проявляется в материальном мире. Показано, что Ф. Тютчев говорит о двух бесконечностях – дневной, которая манифестирует Божественное единство бытия, и ночной, которая ведет все к хаосу. Они вполне соответствуют понятиям актуальной и потенциальной бесконечности в философии Аристотеля. У. Блейк понимает бесконечность как процессуальное развертывание Вселенной и в то же время как Божественную основу всего. Это позволяет всем вещам быть частью единого вселенского пространства. Для него бесконечная и вечная сущность каждой вещи (учитывая, что все оказывается бесконечным и вечным в каждой точке пространства и времени) заполняет все своим внутренним светом и позволяет им свидетельствовать о Боге. Это дает возможность воспринимать природу так, как это дано любящему сердцу и живому воображению, но такое восприятие закрыто для разума, будь он человеческий или вселенский. Бесконечность воспринимается разумом лишь как темная пустота, которая закрывает миры и отделяет их друг от друга

Negotiating the inhuman: Bakhtin, materiality and the instrumentalization of climate change

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness

More cat than cute? Interpretable Prediction of Adjective-Noun Pairs

The increasing availability of affect-rich multimedia resources has bolstered interest in understanding sentiment and emotions in and from visual content. Adjective-noun pairs (ANP) are a popular mid-level semantic construct for capturing affect via visually detectable concepts such as "cute dog" or "beautiful landscape". Current state-of-the-art methods approach ANP prediction by considering each of these compound concepts as individual tokens, ignoring the underlying relationships in ANPs. This work aims at disentangling the contributions of the `adjectives' and `nouns' in the visual prediction of ANPs. Two specialised classifiers, one trained for detecting adjectives and another for nouns, are fused to predict 553 different ANPs. The resulting ANP prediction model is more interpretable as it allows us to study contributions of the adjective and noun components. Source code and models are available at https://imatge-upc.github.io/affective-2017-musa2/ .Comment: Oral paper at ACM Multimedia 2017 Workshop on Multimodal Understanding of Social, Affective and Subjective Attributes (MUSA2

Modernity and Sustainability

Since always sociology disclaimed about the role of science and technique. First, it used to analyse the firms, making some critics, during their period of the highest expansion and industrialisation, and later focussing on their unpredictability and uncontrollability. Science and technique follow the fate of modernity. The human activities through science and technique modify the society and, as it’s happening any time more, they create risks even more uncontrollable. From the risk hypothesis we pass into the threat until arriving to a real crisis. From the different crisis of the post-modernity era, the most severe seems to be the environmental one. This work analysis how, through the risks linked to the unpredictability of human actions we arrive to the modernity and post-modernity crisis. Attention is put on the consequences of this crisis, driving men to solve the existing problems, creating from the beginning the base principles of the society itself, in a sustainable path

Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD : elicited production of passives

Children with ASD and an IQ-matched control group of typically developing (TD) children completed an elicited-production task which encouraged the production of reversible passive sentences (e.g., “Bob was hit by Wendy”). Although the two groups showed similar levels of correct production, the ASD group produced a significantly greater number of “reversal” errors (e.g., “Wendy was hit by Bob”, when, in fact Wendy hit Bob) than the TD group (who, when they did not produce correct passives, instead generally produced semantically appropriate actives; e.g., “Wendy hit Bob”). These findings suggest that the more formal elements of syntax are spared relative to more semantic/pragmatic/narrative aspects (e.g., manipulating thematic roles) in at least high-functioning children with ASD