Brand Logos More Prevalent In Recent News Sports Photos

The exposure is non-intrusive, serving as a backdrop to the sports action occurring at the arena. Because it cannot be separated from the action, this communication form is difficult to tune out perceptually

Fact and Fiction: Writing the Difference Between Suicide and Death

Did Michel Foucault die of AIDS or did he kill himself? Did he knowingly infect others in the bath houses in San Francisco or was he unaware that he was ill and of how less-than-safe sex could spread the same virus that infected him? What did he know about AIDS/HIV and what do we know about what he knew? Answers to these questions are ambiguous. This is due, in part, to the culture of homosexuality and the cultural response to AIDS/HIV at the time. It is also due to the conflicting reports about what Foucault knew, and when, in the press, in biographies and in a roman á clef that claims to tell the truth about Foucault in fiction. What are the facts in this case and where do we find them? This essay explores how facts became fiction and fiction became fact in the life and death of Michel Foucault

Thinking, the Unconscious and Film

In this essay, we explore a non-standard model of the unconscious, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the “productive unconscious,” to correct the too-often reductive tendencies of psychoanalysis and film. This introduces the image of a form of thinking we may find in our encounters with film that aims more at pleasure-taking than problem-solving and that, in so doing, really gets us to think. Drawing on this productive unconscious, we come to a richer appreciation of classic Hollywood cinema, a new understanding of classic,nouveau vague and neo-realist films, and we enjoy the chance to ignore the rules and reconsider thinking in philosophy and film

Growing Old Together: A Shared Achievement

In this essay, I account for what we mean by old, what it means to grow old, and what we might mean by a shared achievement in the case of growing old together. I turn to the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz for some early insights on the shared time embodied in growing older together and how a ‘werelationship’ shored up by this temporal structure is the foundation for constituting the social world. I follow Schutz’s attempt to use this temporality to describe the case of making music together and conclude that what Schutz calls growing older together is not the same as growing old together which is necessarily embodied in a way his account of making music together is not. I give an embodied, enactivist account of making music together as a performance and, drawing on recent work by Shaun Gallagher, offer an aesthetics of growing old together as a performance enacted by individuals whose intimate engagements in that performance accomplish the shared achievement of growing old together

Annunciations - Figuring the Feminine in Renaissance Art

Viewers of Renaissance representations of the Annunciation miss an important irony. Where Mary is figured as unimpressed by Gabriel\u27s proposal, she is upholding a masculinist ideal of female virtue. Where she is figured as delighted by the news, she represents an alternative feminine ideal that continues to be attractive to women and feminists, today. Inspired by the writings of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, I figure Mary in Renaissance representations of the Annunciation as contesting an ideal of feminine virtue that would deny her sexual difference and deny her pleasure in fulfilling her role as the bride and mother of God

Response-Contingent Positive Reinforcement: Incremental Validity in Predicting Depression Severity

Insufficient response-contingent positive reinforcement (RCPR), or pleasure obtained through interaction with the environment that increases the likelihood of rewarding behavior, has been hypothesized to directly contribute to the onset and persistence of depression symptoms (Lewinsohn, 1974; Lewinsohn, Sullivan, & Grosscup, 1980). The present study examined the utility of RCPR in predicting the presence and severity of depression symptoms relative to other well-established risk factors that included gender, stressful life events, traumatic life events, childhood maltreatment, and cognitive vulnerability. Based on bivariate and hierarchical regression analyses, all variables except gender were significantly associated with the severity of depression symptoms, with RCPR most strongly related to depression symptom severity. The incremental validity of RCPR in predicting depression symptom severity also was established, with RCPR accounting for an additional 12% of the variance when added to a regression equation. Implications for the conceptualization and treatment of depression are discussed

The World Achieved: Film and the Enacted Mind

Stanley Cavell taught us that films give us a view of a world that differs from the world in which we view films only by not being that world. Films, that is, screen a world for us and screen us from a world that is not our own. Cavell’s view is based on a photographic conception of film images. A film is composed of photographic images collected on reels and put in motion at twenty-four frames per second. In “More of the World Viewed,” Cavell dares us to come up with a theory of perception that challenges the assumption that the camera sees the world the way the eye sees it. Alva Noë has come up with just such a theory. In this essay, we challenge the photographic view of perception and the photographic basis of film to argue for an enactive conception of film viewing. On this conception, worlds in films are not viewed but achieved by affordances picked up and skills refined in the course of an embodied encounter with a world that includes films. Additionally, in this skilled achievement of the worlds in films, we also achieve something of ourselves. Ultimately, this view preserves and enhances many of Cavell’s key insights in the context of a new philosophy of mind

Socrates' Refutation of Apollo

It has been argued about Plato’s early dialogues that Socrates is made there to privilege beliefs derived from “information” he receives through certain forms of divination. These beliefs, the argument continues, are allowed to supplement Socrates’s elenctically established human knowledge while remaining “logically independent” of it.Such a view is needed, some believe, to solve the paradox that, while Socrates disavows knowledge of anything great or small, he is convinced that his life is morally unimpeachable. Socrates will also claim that wrongdoing is the result of ignorance implying that virtue follows from knowledge. These apparent conflicts can be explained, it is supposed, by Socrates’s confidence in divine signs which, while failing to secure the knowledge Socrates is seeking in answers to his “What is F?” questions, gives him the warrant he requires to hold the beliefs he does. This warrant could be substantively challenged, however, if it turned out that Socrates also believes these divine signs may be subject to elenctic refutation. I show, here, that Socrates does refute Apollo or, rather, that Socrates performs an elenchus on the god’s pronouncement, and that this elenctic test sheds important light on the meaning and function of “refutation” in Socratic argumentation. What Socrates hopes to exhibit through his examinations of the politicians, poets and artisans is just that, since there is someone wiser than Socrates, he has reasons for believing the god means something other than what he appears at first to say. If the apparent meaning of Apollo’s pronouncement cannot be shown to be inconsistent with the god’s otherwise infallible wisdom, Socrates will have reasons for doubting his own claim to lack such wisdom and for accepting the indictment brought against him. At his trial, Socrates argues that he refuted Apollo, but the jury, ironically, disagrees and convicts him of impiety

Avoidance and Depression: Evidence for Reinforcement as a Mediating Factor

Behavioral Activation theory (Martell, Addis, & Jacobson, 2001) posits that a pattern of excessive use of avoidant coping strategies removes an individual from environmental sources of reward and reinforcement and subsequently leads to the development (or maintenance) of depressive symptoms. This investigation examined this theory by establishing measures of environmental reward as mediators between avoidance and depression, while further demonstrating that there is a strong connection between avoidance and depression independent of anxiety. Reward was measured by both self-report questionnaire (Reward Probability Inventory; Carvalho et al., under review) and daily activity diary ratings (Hopko, Bell, Armento, Hunt, & Lejuez, 2003), which were considered proxy measures for positive reinforcement. Avoidance was primarily assessed with the Cognitive-Behavioral Avoidance Scale (CBAS; Ottenbreit & Dobson, 2004), which distinguishes between cognitive and behavioral avoidance. When anxiety was controlled, reward significantly mediated the relationships between depression and cognitive, behavioral, and total avoidance. However, when structural equation modeling incorporating latent variables for avoidance and reward tested the same model, reward was not a mediator. In post-hoc mediation analyses, gender differences emerged whereby among females, diary-measured reward only mediated the relation between cognitive avoidance and depression when anxiety was controlled, while in males diary reward was a mediator with all three forms of avoidance. This investigation, while producing mixed results overall, provides initial support for the proposed mediating role of reinforcement in the relationship between avoidance and depression and further highlights the relevance of avoidance and reinforcement in the conceptualization of depression