This other atmosphere: against human resources, Emoji, and devices

Frequently humans are invited to engage with modern visual forms: emoji, emoticons, pictograms. Some of these forms are finding their ways into the workplace, understood as augmentations to workplace atmospheres. What has been called the ‘quantified workplace’ requires its workers to log their rates of stress, wellbeing, their subjective sense of productivity on scale of 1-5 or by emoji, in a context in which HR professionals develop a vocabulary of Workforce Analytics, People Analytics, Human Capital Analytics or Talent Analytics, and all this in the context of managing the work environment or its atmosphere. Atmosphere is mood, a compote of emotions. Emotions are a part of a human package characterised as ‘the quantified self’, a self intertwined with - subject to but also compliant with - tracking and archiving. The logical step for managing atmospheres is to track emotions at a granular and largescale level. Through the concept of the digital crowd, rated and self-rating, as well as emotion tracking strategies, the human resource (as worker and consumer) engages in a new politics of the crowd, organised around what political philosopher Jodi Dean calls, affirmatively, ‘secondary visuality’, high circulation communication fusing together speech, writing and image as a new form. This is the visuality of communicative, or social media, capitalism. But to the extent that it is captured by HR, is it an exposure less to crowdsourced democracy, and more a stage in turning the employee into an on-the-shelf item in a digital economy warehouse, assessed by Likert scales? While HR works on new atmospheres of work, what other atmospheres pervade the context of labour, and can these be deployed in the generation of other types of affect, ones that work towards the free association of labour and life

Gewißheit und Wahrheit bei Popper

Il saggio indaga il rapporto fra certezza e verità in Popper nei diversi periodi in cui può essere suddivisa la sua opera, cercando di mostrare come Popper abbia sempre cercato di concepire questo rapporto modulando in modi diversi il proprio fallibilismo, ciò che con poche, ma assai significative eccezioni, ha sempre condotto ad un'insostenibile separazione fra questi due concetti. Nelle sue prime opere Popper contrappone alla certezza l’obiettività scientifica, contrapponendo gli Erlebnisse di percezione, soggettivi e assoluti, agli enunciati scientifici, intersoggettivamente controllabili. Con l'adesione alla teoria semantica della verità di Tarski Popper rinuncia soltanto apparentemente al suo fallibilismo, poiché – tramite la separazione del concetto di verità da quello dei criteri per accertarla – egli contrappone di nuovo nettamente certezza e verità, rendendo ancora una volta impossibile la fondazione delle ipotesi empiriche da parte dell'esperienza. Con la teoria dei tre mondi Popper tenta di evitare gli esiti relativistici della sua epistemologia, accogliendo alcuni punti della teoria platonica delle idee, che, se coerentemente sviluppati, conducono alla completa (ma di nuovo inaccettabile) identificazione di certezza e verità. Ma per altro verso egli modifica in modo talmente radicale la dottrina platonica da riproporre un’insostenibile separazione fra certezza e verità scientifica

Alteration of Penicillium Expansum Through Lyophilization and Cryopreservation

Critical realism is a frequently mentioned, but not very well-known, late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century philosophical tradition. Having its roots in Kantian epistemology, critical realism is best characterized as a revisionist approach toward the original Kantian doctrine. Its most outstanding thesis is the idea that Kantian things-in-themselves are knowable. This idea was—at least implicitly—suggested by thinkers such as Alois Riehl, Wilhelm Wundt, and Oswald Külpe. Interestingly enough, the philosophical position of the early Moritz Schlick stands in the critical realist tradition as well. As will be outlined in the course of this paper, both Schlick’s magnum opus General Theory of Knowledge (1918) and his seminal Space and Time in Contemporary Physics (1917) are based on the assumption that the objects of science are relations and that relations have the status of Kantian things-in-themselves. By way of conclusion, I shall point out that this— more or less directly—leads to the current debate over ‘structural’ realism