Decalogue Five: A Short Film about Killing, Sin, and Community

Decalogue Five tells the story of Waldemar Rekowski (Jan Tesarz), a jaded taxi driver, Piotr Balicki (Krzysztof Globisz), an idealistic, newly-licensed attorney, and Jacek Lazar (Mirosław Baka), a young and troubled drifter, whose lives intersect with one another as a result of fate, or contingent circumstance, or some combination of both. With brutal detail and detachment, the film depicts Jacek’s seemingly aimless wanderings through Warsaw, his senseless killing of Waldemar, his interactions with Piotr (his court-appointed attorney), and his eventual execution after a failed defense in court. Like other films within the Decalogue series, Five illustrates what happens when human beings are forced to confront ethical dilemmas (and thus are forced to confront themselves as responsible moral decision makers) in a world that seems to offer little in the way of moral direction, meaning, purpose, and community with others. Discussing the overarching aim of the Decalogue series as a whole, Krzysztof Kies´lowski refers to the sense of alienation, aimlessness, and loneliness that often describes the human conditio

Sean Sayers' Concept of Immaterial Labor and the Information Economy

The concept “immaterial labor” is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary social theory. In his 2007 work The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics, Sean Sayers offered an extensive response to several critical redefinitions of labor (Habermas, Benton, Arendt) and immaterial labor (Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri). Sayers returned to the subject in his more recent book, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes.1 As one of the few accounts that contests the contemporary Marx critics with regard to fundamental concepts such as labor and immaterial labor, his contribution should be taken seriously

Affective Sustainability. Is this what timelessness really means?

Sustainability is always about regard to the environment: an intelligent use of resources and not returning to nature what it cannot degrade without long-term damage. Politics, business and thus research have been predominantly concerned with the direct impact on the environment of the diverse human activities in our society. There is of course awareness about all the indirect effects caused by these activities but as these effects are more complicated to identify and calculate, it could reasonably be suggested that these have not got the same attention and hence have not been thoroughly explored. Important resources are required for the production of objects, which subsequently turn out neither to meet humans’ needs nor to fulfil their desires. This issue involves not just the misuse of resources but also the addition to waste problems. Needs and desires are not unrelated to material and function but reach mostly beyond the physicality of the object as argued by Krippendorf (2006), among others. Timelessness is unrelated to physicality and is most likely the ultimate example of sustaining. However, this phenomenon does not easily allow interpretation as it is basically philosophical, which also would complicate its transition into other domains. The deconstruction of timelessness in an earlier work (Borjesson, 2006) resulted in the phenomenon being conceptualised as affective sustainability. Four notions were identified as mainly informing timelessness: time, tradition, aesthetics and perception. When subsequently studied in several disciplines, these notions produced indicators on how to understand better what makes objects retain their significance in a changing human context. These indicators are not to be categorised as a set of tools or even less as a model to be applied in the design process: they are directional rather than normative. Moreover, they are best understood as support and inspiration to develop design thinking and have been the subject for further analysis as part of continued research. This has increased the clarity of the directions not only in relation to design thinking but also where to continue research. Keywords: Sustainability, Human ways of living, Human ways of being, Lived and Learned experience, Emotion, Affect, Feeling, Cognition.</p

Marketing Particularities in Tourism and Services

The marketing has as an essential objective the orientation of firms’ activities based on the market needs. This presupposes, necessarily, the existence of an informational system very well established, that observes any rapid changing market environment: the consumer, distributor and competition. Marketing services is a marketing specialized domain, autonomous, clearly differentiated, in the process of consolidation and development. The services characteristics such as: immateriality, inseparability, variability, inability of storage, they normally lead to a discussion on whether the marketing of services is similar to or different from that of physical goods.marketing services, market environment, immateriality, inseparability

Augustine’s Use of Neoplatonism in Confessions VII: A Response to Peter King

A modified version of Michael Gorman's comments on Peter King’s paper at the 2004 Henle Conference.  Above all, an account of Augustine’s purposes in discussing Neoplatonism in Confessions VII, showing why Augustine does not tell us certain things we wish he would. In my commentary I will address the following topics: (i) what it means to speak of the philosophically interesting points in Augustine; (ii) whether Confessions VII is really about the Trinity; (iii) Augustine‘s intentions in Confessions VII; (iv) King‘s hypostatic interpretation‖;(v) Christology