Kind Of Reality Research Articles

Vegetarianism and Veganism: Animals and Moral Status

Vegetarianism and Veganism:Animals and Moral Status Jack Smith (bio) The Ethics of Killing Animals, edited by Tatjana Višak and Robert Garner. Oxford University Press, 2016, 272 pp., $29.95 (paper). The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, edited by Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer. Oxford University Press, 2016, 232 pp., $29.95 (paper). The Vegetarian: A Novel by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. Hogarth, 2015, 192 pp., $14.65 (hardcover). Traditionally, food has been related to social gatherings, and we can’t help but see in food an entity that helps define us as human beings in a social context. But food preference is also highly personal. We express our own inclinations, desires, and tastes when we select what we eat, and we should be at liberty, surely, to choose what we eat—well, ruling out cannibalism. And yet many vegetarians hold that morally we should not be at liberty to eat meat, since it involves animal cruelty, especially in the case of factory-farmed meat, which is how most meat today is produced. Vegans who take a moral stance on animal well-being eschew all meat plus dairy products. Why? Because the hens that bring us our eggs and the cows that bring us our milk may endure even greater suffering than the pigs and cows slaughtered for our dining benefit. The moral status of animals has generated a vast literature, freighted and nuanced with complex philosophical and ethical theories. If this literature has flourished in the last forty years, it has its roots much earlier, framed not only in theological doctrine but also in philosophy. Are animals things with instrumental value only? For René Descartes, seventeenth-century French philosopher, there were two kinds of reality: [End Page 179] mind and matter. In Descartes’ view, humans have nonmaterial minds; animals are matter only. Lacking a cogito, or an “I am,” lacking consciousness, even sentience, animals cannot think, nor can they feel pain or pleasure. For Descartes they have no moral status, just as machines have none. We can treat them as we wish. Descartes, a philosophical modern, is the forerunner of scientific materialism. I mention him only to establish the connection between one’s metaphysics and one’s ethics. A later Enlightenment philosopher who also illustrates such a connection is Immanuel Kant, who holds that animals are not “persons”—they lack moral agency, being incapable of reflecting on their lives, and for this reason, they do not have inherent value. But, for Kant, they are sentient; they do feel pain. Even so, since they are not “persons,” we have no direct obligations to animals, though we may have indirect ones, in that our mistreatment of animals can carry over to our treatment of persons, who do have inherent value. Animals have only extrinsic, or instrumental, value for Kant. Descartes’ and Kant’s ideas have laid the groundwork for much of the philosophical/ethical discussion of animals in the literature today. Before further discussion, I need to point out that the term for animals today is “nonhuman animals,” a term that places humans in the same basic biological category as the living beings we call “animals,” but with a different status. The central question in the ethical literature on animals is: What is our responsibility, if any, toward them? Here, one first needs to distinguish between animal rights and animal welfare. Animal rightists subscribe to rights theories: for example, Tom Regan, who holds that any “subject of a life”—that is, any being whose existence matters to it—has inherent value, just as humans do. Peter Singer, famous utilitarian in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham, adopts an interest or welfare theory, holding that any animal that can “suffer” must be included in our moral universe. An animal’s need to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain must be counted. Animal welfare is a theory that argues for protecting animals from pain. Killing has been seen, traditionally, as a postwelfare issue. A short chronological overview of seminal figures in the animal rights literature may be helpful at this point. In 1975, Peter Singer launched the modern animal rights movement with Animal Liberation, arguing that harmful treatment of animals, especially in...

The Physical Meaning of the Wave Function

Under some well-defined conditions, the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics enables physicists, chemists and others to calculate and predict the outcome of a vast number of experiments. In fact, especially the Schr?dinger equation which involves an imaginary quantity describes how a quantum state of a physical system changes with time and is one of the main pillars of modern quantum mechanics. The wave function itself is a determining part of the Schr&oumldinger equation, but the physical meaning of the wave function is still not clear. Altogether, does the wave function represent a new kind of reality? This publication will solve the problem of the physical meaning of the wave function by investigating the relationship between the wave function and the theory of special relativity. It is shown that the wave function is determined by notion co-ordinate time of the special theory of relativity. Moreover, the result of this investigation suggests a new understanding of the wave function, according to which the wave function and co-ordinate time of the theory of special relativity are equivalent.

Lay’s The Chinese as They Are (1841) as an Excellent Example Illustrating the Importance of Studying Art Reception in Art History

This paper illustrates in what ways writings in travel books or other written forms are similar to art works, and are worth studying, and challenges the dominant methodology of studying art works/images in art history. It is to emphasize that studying both image making history and image reading history is to make our understanding of art history complete, otherwise, we would miss out half of the art history because it takes both art creation and art reception to complete the whole existence of art. It is thus very important for art historians to research on art reception embedded in writings about art, and to investigate into art creation or production which embodied in art works/images. George Lay’s The Chinese as They Are (1841) is an excellent example demonstrating a very high level of receptive creativity in the entire period of my research (1600-1860). Lay’s ground-breaking discussion of painting and calligraphy pushed the level of European understanding to the highest ever. He evaluates Chinese painting based on Chinese aesthetics like the use of line, and particular canons and rules for learning painting. All these are elements constituting Chinese artistic values with which pictorial features function very differently from the European ones. Lay’s evaluation indicates that he makes a paradigm shift because his judgment, unlike others, is not based on European standards. Not being bounded by the European standards, Lay pays attention to many visual qualities, sees another kind of realism conveyed by lines and curves, appreciates ways of rigorously studying the depicted subjects; and recognizes the portrayal of the subjects’ (humans, plants, and birds) internal emotion and attitude, which they are not found in European painting. On calligraphy, his understanding of calligraphy is exceptional and extremely profound in the history of the European reception of Chinese calligraphy. In the whole period of the present study he was the first and only one to identify four types of script, to appreciate Chinese writing as an independent art form, and to evaluate this art based on Chinese aesthetics and artistic principles. Lay’s high level of receptive creativity in understanding Chinese art was extraordinary and unprecedented. It thus exemplifies and illustrates that it is very essential for art historians to research on written texts in order to study art reception which constitutes half of art appreciation.

Facebook as a Finite Province of Meaning

Facebook today represents one of the main avenues that people use to create and develop relationships. Indeed, in the 10 years since its birth, Facebook has changed the concept of community, given new meaning to the sense of belonging and even produced a new language. However, what is its meaning? What is the real reason for its spread, which obviously goes beyond superficial and simplistic explanations? This article proposes a reading of Facebook using classical concepts of sociology such as the concepts of sense, action and meaning. Particular attention will be given to the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and to his idea of finite provinces of meaning in order to discover whether it is a construct applicable to Facebook. To achieve this, we propose a phenomenology of Facebook to understand what kind of reality it represents and what similarities and differences are encountered in the prominent world of everyday life.

Two Contemporary Approaches to Political Theory

Broadly speaking, the form that contemporary Anglo-American political theory has taken since the 1970s, with its reinvigoration in the seminal work of John Rawls, can largely be described as Platonic and Kantian, focusing on the formulation, comparison, and evaluation of abstract principles of justice, and only subsequently looking to their application in the real world. Concerned about this, a number of critics of the contemporary paradigm in political theory have emerged to offer their own alternatives. This article will discuss two of them: Raymond Geuss and Amartya Sen. This article does three things. Its first section lays out the realist approach to political theory advocated by Raymond Geuss and the comparative approach advocated by Amartya Sen, respectively. Here I argue that Sen's comparative approach can best be understood as a kind of realism. In the second section of this article, I explore what I take to be an underlying concern behind the work of both Sen and Geuss, and which, although it is rarely explicitly mentioned (and certainly never fully developed), I think we should bear in mind: namely, a strand of anti-Platonism in political theory. Third and finally, I present three arguments for why a realist approach to political theory is likely to be superior to those of their contemporary adversaries: the argument from efficacy claims that realist approaches are more likely to impact real politics; the argument from cognitive distortions claims that realist approaches are better equipped to notice and critically evaluate and revise undue assumptions and distortions of various kinds; and the argument from abstractness claims that since such distortions are likely to increase with a theory's degree of abstractness, and since realist theories tend to be less abstract than their competitors, a realist approach will likely be less susceptible to such distortions to begin with.

Manifesto for a critical realist relational sociology

In recent years, many different versions of relational sociology have appeared. In this paper, I present a critical realist version developed since 1983, which is also called ‘relational theory of society’ (CRRS). It shares with the other relational sociologies the idea of avoiding both methodological individualism and holism. The main differences lie in the way social relations are defined, the kind of reality that is attributed to them, how they configure social formations, and the way in which their changes are conceived (morphogenesis and emergence). In particular, this approach is suitable to understand how the morphogenesis of society comes about through social relations, which are the connectors that mediate between agency and social structure. The generative mechanism that feeds social morphogenesis resides in the dynamic (that is, in their ways of operating) of the social relations networks that alter the social molecule constituting structures already in place. Social morphogenesis is a form of surplus of society with respect to itself. Society increases (or decreases) its potential for surplus depending on processes of valorization (or devalorization) of social relations.

The Reality Effect and the Real Effects of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?

While it is common for scholars to concede that realism is nearly impossible to define, the story of realism's emergence as a specific literary movement in the nineteenth century is rarely disputed. Literary critics and historians alike frequently identify the emergence of “programmatic realism” with the rise of the novel in the modern, industrialized nation-states of France and England, thereby requiring the existence of an industrialized urban capital, a developing bourgeoisie, and definitive national consciousness. This article intervenes in such accounts by evaluating Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?—a novel, or antinovel, that while little read in the West is arguably one of the most important Russian texts of the nineteenth century. Written in 1863, just two years after the liberation of the serfs in Russia, N. G. Chernyshevsky's novel remarkably departs from the traditional realist style of writing that characterizes more canonical French and English novels in favor of another kind of realism. This realism harnesses the truth claim that is implicit in the realist agenda as well as the communicative force of the novel to not only objectively render sociality reality but to radically transform it as well.

Fostering Team Creativity in Virtual Worlds

This article addresses the potential of virtual worlds as a platform for creative team collaboration. The proliferation of geographically distributed teams, striving towards innovative results, calls for ICT that support team creativity. Three-dimensional virtual worlds represent such an emergent and rapidly developing collaboration tool. A systematic literature review was conducted to reveal the affordances of virtual worlds contributing towards team creativity.The results of the literature review reveal eight proposed affordances relevant for virtual worlds to foster team level creativity. Avatars (1) allow the team members to express themselves and their insights and point out information to others. Changing the users’ frame of reference (2) embraces the virtual world’s potential as a context for creative action. Perceived feeling of co-presence (3) within the team members, and user’s own experience of immersion (4), contributes towards engaging creative team collaboration. Multimodality (5) and rich visual information (6) facilitate communication between team members. Finally, virtual worlds allow teams to modify the collaboration environment to simulate a new kind of reality (7), and offer a selection of supporting tools (8) that can be utilized in the creative collaboration.Departures for further research efforts and insights for practitioners engaged in virtual world collaboration are presented.

In Defence of War:

<i>In Defence of War:</i>

Why a journal devoted to establish a link between the five senses and sciences

The answer is complex, and at a certain extent not fully explained by rationality. But what we can say at the very starting point of this adventure is the need to keep us in touch with reality, that kind of reality that deals with the possibility to interact with others through the senses and sciences. And sometimes, sciences let the innovations be possible in order to help senses.

Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel: Epistemologies of Contemporary Realism

The historical novel is one of the most popular and critically significant genres of postcolonial writing, but, to date, almost no systematic scholarship is dedicated to it. This essay proposes theoretical and critical parameters for exploring this genre. It begins with the observation that plausibility is a key principle articulated by many postcolonial writers and explores how framing novels in these terms, as a kind of realism, requires readers to negotiate heterogeneous structures of reference—and, in particular, to read imaginary characters as abstractions of historical phenomena. The second half of the paper explores the theoretical implications of this ontological heterogeneity, suggesting how the genre’s conventions are inflected by normative patterns of gender, race, and temporality. Overall, I propose that it is possible to read the postcolonial historical novel as a kind of allegory, and I offer the term allegorical realism to describe this paradoxical mixing of conceptual and affective knowledge.

Psihologija između psihičke i realne realnosti - koju realnost psihologija istražuje?

There is still no precise answer what is generally considered a reality in psychology and what kind of reality is the object of psychological praxis. This is primarily related to the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between subjectivity and psychic reality. The introduction of psychic reality as the decisive factor in the emergence of pathology and relativization of real reality enabled psychoanalysis to shift the focus from the real, external, objective, and physical to the unconscious fantasies, by which the inner world got its rightful place in the construction of 'mental'. Although psychological reality is located in the unconscious as well, Freud did not intend to declare the whole experience as purely subjective, but he thought that experience reflects unconscious influences, more precisely, unconscious desires and fantasies. Since all forms of knowledge are subjective, therefore, subject to the influence of the unconscious, it seems that psychic reality and subjectivity reflect unconscious influences to varying degrees, i.e. they show varying degrees of objectivity. This is corroborated by conscious states such as guilt and anxiety, which are such only because they are the result of unconscious dynamics triggered by the transfer, switched to an objective situation. It is not debatable that the sensory data as perceptual knowledge of external objects have a greater degree of objectivity than pure fantasies which are largely subjective and are very little based on the objective. Stressing the importance of the psychological reality both for the structure and for the psychology that seeks to understand the same structure, we will stress the ubiquity of that reality based on the ability of an infant to form primitive object relations in reality and in fantasy from the very beginning of life. Already, at the very beginning of life, a child finds himself in a vicious circle where the real experiences inevitably influence the unconscious fantasy, and then the fantasy affects the reality. Such constructed psychic reality remains to exist during a lifetime in each subject. It is completely the same to say that the weight of the pathology determines the importance of the role of psychological reality or that any strengthening of psychic reality is reflected in the production of the pathological.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: REFRAMING AUDIENCE PERCEPTION OF JUSTICE IN BATMAN TRILOGY

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: REFRAMING AUDIENCE PERCEPTION OF JUSTICE IN BATMAN TRILOGY SUC VE CEZA: BATMAN UCLEMESI ADALETIN HEDEF KITLE ALGISI Assoc. Dr. Feryal CUBUKCU1 Dokuz Eylul University Abstract Film scholars debate whether mainstream Hollywood film industry creates social values or merely reflects social values, or even creates and then reflects social values, which leads to the fact that films inarguably resonate with their socio-historical-economic moment. Culture shapes media even as media shapes culture. The role of media in public perceptions and understandings of crime and justice issues cannot be underestimated. While films do not purport to be truthful, they seek to create a kind of reality that audiences will accept as credible and valid. This study aims at exploring primarily what the relationship is between law, language and film, with the emphasis on how crimes are constructed, how victimization is represented and how justice is treated in the comics especially the Batman series by Christopher Nolan.

Hinterland's Who’s Who: Birding, Multiplicity, and Barn Owls

Hinterland's Who’s Who: Birding, Multiplicity, and Barn Owls

WAHDAT AL WUJUD DALAM PEMIKIRAN IBNU ARABI

&lt;p&gt;Ibnu Arabi, the Grand Master of Islam, is a great thinker whose controversial thought, &lt;em&gt;wahdat al-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;wujud&lt;/em&gt;, has significantly influenced the mystiques of Islam. The meaning of &lt;em&gt;wahdat al-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;wujud&lt;/em&gt; is basically two folds, i.e. that Being is the only One which exists and that the universe is merely a manifestation of the One. The One Being here refers to Allah SWT. The One covers up all the existing phenomena and functions as a resource which emanates the entire universe. In this context, He is referred to as &lt;em&gt;al-Haqiqat al-Muhammadiyah&lt;/em&gt;. He might also be viewed as both &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Universal Soul &lt;/em&gt;for His being the source of cosmos that governs the universe and &lt;em&gt;the Universal Body &lt;/em&gt;for His reflecting any actions on every single micro existence that forms the universe. Furthermore, when His existence is deemed as a &lt;em&gt;jauhar &lt;/em&gt;(jewel) that face-up any occurrences, He is typically known as &lt;em&gt;al-haba’&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The concept of &lt;em&gt;w&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;ahdat al-w&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;ujud&lt;/em&gt; can actually be simplified into the principle of &lt;em&gt;laa maujuda illa wujud al-&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;wahid&lt;/em&gt; (no existence except the Existing One, the Being). The One might reveal His own existence into different &lt;em&gt;martabat &lt;/em&gt;or levels: &lt;em&gt;Martabat Ahadiyah, Martabat Wahidiyah, &lt;/em&gt;and &lt;em&gt;Martabat Tajalli Syuhudi.&lt;/em&gt; Those standing points trigger Ibnu Arabi to believe that any kinds of realities or existences are nothing but a true reflection of the One.&lt;/p&gt;

The Role of Imagination in James’s and Dewey’s Understanding of Religious Experience

Many aspects of The Varieties of Religious Experience found their theoretical background in other books of James psychology or philosophy. In this article I try to connect his theory of imagination in The Principle of Psychology with his supernaturalism regarding religious experience. Both suppose a theory of the “feeling of reality” that explains how, under the working of imagination, abstract ideas or remote ideals can be perceived as real and lively, becoming motives for action, although they may not have anything to do with sense experience. Although imagination is not mentioned in James’s doctrine of the will to believe, it is central in both understanding this doctrine as well as the overall vision of James psychology and philosophy of religion. Similarly, imagination is essential to grasp a better understanding of how ideas and ideals unite with reality in Dewey’s thoughts concerning religion. I find it useful, in order to have a better understanding of James position, to compare it with what Dewey has to say about it in A Common Faith. Contrasting their theories will show that James’s understanding of imagination can only be understood if rooted in a kind of realism about the ‘unseen universe’.

Response by J. Hillis Miller

Response by J. Hillis Miller

Avançando Pelo Século XXI: Telenovela, Um Gênero Perene

In this text I present production/exhibition of telenovelas from a broad point of view at the end of the rst decade of the XXI century, characterized by the presence of technology, supporting new configurations of narrative interactions (convergence, transmedia). And what is the position of telenovelas in this context? What changes and what remains? The forms of seeing, commenting and interacting change. The taste for emotion, ction that touches reality remains, but a kind of reality that is fantastic and idealistic. Coloring the end of exhaustive days. For the ones who like or for who do not like(but watch), telenovelas keep on being the synthesis of society dynamic. A synthesis that enlarges the possibilities of having a lifetime full of emotion, being able to recognize an identity that joins us, even in face of differences.

The Selection Problem

In Fiction and Fictionalism, Mark Sainsbury has recently dubbed &#8220;Selection Problem&#8221; a serious trouble for Meinongian object theories. Typically, Meinongianism has been phrased as a kind of realism on nonexistent objects&#160;: these are mind-independent things, not mental simulacra, having the properties they have independently from the activity of any cognitive agent. But how can one single out an object we have no causal acquaintance with, and which is devoid of spatiotemporal location, picking it out from a pre-determined, mind-independent set&#160;? In this paper, I set out a line of response by distinguishing different ways in which a thing may not exist. I show that the selection problem (a) does not arise for past, currently nonexistent objects&#160;; (b) may not arise also for future existents (provided one massages na&#239;ve intuitions a bit)&#160;; and (c) even for mere possibilia&#160;; but (d) is a real snag for purely fictional objects, such as Holmes or Gandalf. As for (d), I propose a solution that forces Meinongianism to introduce a kind of ontological dependence of purely fictional nonexistents upon existents. The strategy complicates the intuitively simple, na&#239;ve Meinongian framework a bit, but looks quite promising.

Remaking reality: Echoes, noise and modernist realism in Luigi Nono'sIntolleranza 1960

AbstractAfter the premiere of Luigi Nono'sIntolleranza 1960at Venice's Teatro La Fenice in 1961, the critical press began a series of debates and redefinitions in response to what struck them most: how noisy the opera was. Although they agreed that Nono's work was unlikely to be popular with a broad public, many immediately recognized thatIntolleranzacould serve to recall the horrors of Fascism and the sounds of war – to offer, in other words, a warning call that history must not repeat itself. In a debate in the Communist newspaperL'Unità, the sonic hubbub was interpreted as a new kind of realism, formed in order to use memories of the Fascist regime as an allegory of contemporary oppression. The potency of the opera's noise was seen as in part due to Nono's incorporation of the auditory experiences of cinema and television, thus providing an insight into how traditionally elite genres such as theatre and opera could respond to the emergence and increasing hegemony of new mass entertainments. This article seeks to placeIntolleranzawithin these fraught and conflicting discourses on mid-twentieth-century Italian modernity, and show that postwar reconstruction was as much about a concern for the past as it was with a coming to terms with the present.