Academic literature on the topic 'REALITY AFTER EARLY WITTGENSTEIN'

This paper examines the early and late thoughts of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein through the comparative study of two of his famous works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. A whole summary of the two works will not be presented in this paper; instead, essential concepts and ideas from the same two topics Wittgensteins view on language and reality and Wittgensteins view on logic will be summarized from the two works independently. After the summary, a discussion of Wittgensteins thought evolvements on the same topic will be delivered. The paper examines the essay with a critical analysis of the two contrary perspectives through links to historical background and an evaluation of the ideas. Even though Wittgensteins works have been extensively studied, this presentation will demonstrate them from a broader perspective. This essay aims to provide an in-depth review of Wittgensteins philosophical movements of thought in areas including meaning, logic, and the philosophy of language.

Abstract After the publication of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work the question was raised whether that work involved idealist tendencies. The debate also engaged Wittgenstein’s immediate students. Resistance to presumed idealist positions had been ideologically central to G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and other representatives of realism and early analytic philosophy. While Wittgenstein disagreed with them in key respects, he accepted their tendentious definition of ‘idealism’ at face value and bequeathed it to his students. The greatest flaw in the Realists’ view on idealism was their assumption of symmetry between realist and idealist approaches. For Realists, the chief task of philosophy was to establish what kinds of thing exist, and they took Idealists to offer an alternative account of that. However, the Idealists’ guiding concern was rather to investigate the subjective conditions of knowledge. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method was closer to theirs than to that of the Realists. This is especially obvious in his rejection of Moore’s idea of immediate knowledge. Ultimately, the trouble with Wittgenstein was not that he endorsed any kind of idealist ontology. It was his refusal to deliver the expected realist ontological messages on the supposed question of whether reality is independent of language or otherwise.

The paper examines Johann Georg Hamann’s influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late philosophy. Wittgenstein’s letters, diaries and Drury’s memoirs show that Wittgenstein read Hamann’s writings in the early 1930s and 1950s. Wittgenstein’s diary notes and the Cambridge lectures show that Wittgenstein’s discussion of Hamann’s views in 1931 corresponds to adopting a Hamannian view of symbols and rule-following. The view of language as an intertwining of signs, objects and meanings in use forms a common core in the philosophies of Hamann and Wittgenstein. The harmony of language and reality takes place in communicative use, so non-communicative private languages and pre-linguistic ideal forms of representation are not possible. Language is a free response to reality, and it involves belief-systems and trust.

Abstract This article explores the relationship between Wittgenstein (both early and late) and Whitehead, specifically regarding the different views of the relationship between language and reality in these two thinkers.

In an influential article, Gerd Grasshoff has argued for the identification of the objects in Wittgenstein's Tractatus with the ultimate constituents of reality in Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics. Grasshoff's interpretation is based on two interrelated claims: (1) The specific determination of the objects in the world and the relation among them is the primary theme in Wittgenstein's early philosophy, because it is the primary theme for Hertz. (2) Wittgenstein did not assume the existence of simple objects on purely logical grounds without having specific examples of simple objects in mind, because Hertz did not do this.

The article focuses on the experimental music that emerged after the Second World War and in graphic musical notation. He has a special interest in the influence exercised by the reading of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus in the musical work Treatise by Cornelius Cardew. The isomorphism between language and reality and the different types of propositions formulated by the first Wittgenstein represent a new conception of music in the composer.

In the Notebooks 1914-1916, Wittgenstein engages himself in a dialogue with Schopenhauer’s project —one that Wittgenstein makes his own— of substituting an immanent metaphysics of human experience for the transcendent metaphysics discredited by Kant’s critique, and thus for finding a path that would be able both of capturing the reality of human agency and of staying away from the kind of self-alienation that appears to be the necessary consequence of philosophical reflection. Wittgenstein’s reflections on the ethical and the metaphysical will are instrumental to bring this project to successful completion. However, I will go well beyond Wittgenstein’s early work in order to elucidate what strikes me as the solution provided by the late Wittgenstein (mainly, in On Certainty) to two problems that the Notebooks and the Tractatus left unanswered. On the one hand, there is the question about whether the agreement between agency and passivity is possible—namely, about how to come to see the friction of the world not only as something that is, but rather as something that ought to be. On the other, there is the problem of how to make of ethical subjectivity and metaphysical subjectivity two constitutively co-related aspects of the same transcendental subjectivity.

Technology is changing the world and becoming the world itself. The technical work as a world becomes a scheme that accommodates people and things in a seamless manner as they work together in an unforced manner. In generic terms, the relation of works and worlds, and the corresponding experience of a technical world is established with reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein. The practical and metaphorical example is the incubator for premature babies, which creates a safe atmosphere for the life of the newborn. The incubator represents a technically created world that becomes a protective «shell». The early adoption of digital technologies by children is also partly due to the desire of parents for safety and quiet. The success of early introduction to mobile devices relies greatly on new technological devices with touchscreens and visual interfaces. In the digital world, small children have much more power, agency, autonomy, the ability to change the environment, and at the same time have fun. Modern children enter the digital world at almost the same time as the physical world. They cannot distinguish digital and the physical worlds according to a criterion of reality. The convenient world of technology built by adults becomes a shell or even a trap for children that is perceived by them as a natural and necessary part of the world. Children perception becomes magical: they are affected by magic seduction of the touchscreen, which recomposes a reality that is interrupted, suspended, and returns it as modified, technicized.

AbstractThis paper reconsiders the notion that Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus may only be seen as comparable under a shared ineffability thesis, that is, the idea that reality is impossible to describe in sensible discourse. Historically, Nagarjuna and the early Wittgenstein have both been widely construed as offering either metaphysical theories or attempts to refute all such theories. Instead, by employing an interpretive framework based on a ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus, I suggest we see their philosophical affinity in terms of a shared conception of philosophical method without proposing theses. In doing so, this offers us a new way to understand Nagarjuna’s characteristic claims both to have ‘no views’ (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13.8 and 27.30) and refusal to accept that things exist ‘inherently’ or with ‘essence’ (svabhāva). Therefore, instead of either a view about the nature of a mind-independent ‘ultimate reality’ or a thesis concerning the rejection of such a domain, I propose that we understand Nagarjuna’s primary aim as ‘therapeutic’, that is, concerned with the dissolution of philosophical problems. However, this ‘therapy’ should neither be confined to the psychotherapeutic metaphor nor should it be taken to imply a private enlightenment only available to philosophers. Instead, for Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are cast as a source of disquiet for all of us; what their work offers is a soteriology, a means towards our salvation.

InThe Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s struggle to provide a theoretical framework for his narration of the self finally becomes obvious. About 30 years after he wrote his great and fascinatingSources of the Self, Taylor closes the gap between the self as a radical being-in-the-world and its analytical premises. Even if the main topic of Taylor’s new book may seem to be only a comparison of what he calls ‘HHH-theory’ and ‘HLC-theory,’ there are two other authors, the combination of whose ideas clarifies not only his approach to language but also to his concept of ‘reality’ as such: Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This book explores the formation, development, and characteristics of modern China's finance, focusing especially on Guangdong province as a case study to illustrate both the macro-level trends and the micro-level reality. The chronological range of this book is mainly from the late Qing period to the early Republican Era ending in 1937, when the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War broke out. After the concept of modern finance was introduced to China for the first time in the late Qing period, the efforts to build modern finance continued in the Republican Era both nationally and locally. But this process was interrupted by the outbreak of the war against Japan in 1937 and, having been derailed, did not subsequently recover due to the subsequent civil war between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. This interrupted process of financial modernization was resumed with Reform and Opening-up, launched in 1978. Therefore, in order to illustrate the structural transformation and persistent characteristics of China’s fiscal system, this book also includes discussions of the early Qing period and current Chinese finance.

This chapter explores how Bethenny Frankel's stabilization as an icon coincided with a sharp increase in reality television's encouragement for stars to monetize their so-called “personal lives” and with a distinctive phase of capitalistic production where entrepreneurship of the self reaped a compelling combination of economic and affective reward. In this respect, what may appear as the rising stardom of a singular, idiosyncratic personality should instead be read as having particular ramifications for feminized media culture. Dovetailing with an early-twenty-first-century cultural moment dominated by a worldwide economic recession, Frankel's success illustrates that economies of self can be leveraged as platforms on which to model female self-actualization, a pathway that inevitably involves the accrual of monetary gain.

This chapter focuses on selected poems that Sarah Piatt published between 1866 and the mid-seventies. This period was simultaneous to the evolving debates about reality categories traced in Chapter 2 but prior to the oft-construed advent or high point of realism in the eighties and nineties. Even at this relatively early stage of her career, Piatt articulated a consistent realist counterpoetics that challenged the conventions of romantic idealism from the inside—that is, from within the culture in which she was simultaneously pursuing her career. These poems reproduce conventions of genteel poetry in complex forms of reiteration that function as replication or indictment. This poetic practice is also one of the keys to Piatt’s realism.

The book explores Roman Catholic doctrines after the Second Vatican Council regarding the Jewish people (1965–2015). It establishes the emergence of the teaching that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is irrevocable. What does this mean for Catholics regarding Jewish religious rituals, the land, and mission? The book examines early magisterial documents that seem to contradict current teachings. The apparent contradiction is historically contextualized. It argues two points. First, that earlier teachings accept the positive value of Jewish rituals within certain conditions. This can be applied, in principle, to contemporary religious Jewish rituals. These earlier traditions also show a positive valuation of Jewish cultic practices within the early Christian church. The book examines new Catholic approaches to the Old Testament. Despite different New Testament teachings about the land, it is argued that the promise of the Land to the Jewish people, with various conditions, can be regarded as valid for Catholics. The book also examines the Holy See’s shifting attitude to the modern State of Israel and its pragmatic silence on the theology of land. The book proposes a form of minimalist Catholic Zionism: affirming the land without excluding a just Palestinian resolution. The book explores unresolved Catholic teachings on ‘mission’ and ‘witness’. The centre of this debate concerns the new assumption that Christians should not erase God-given Jewish identity. The book asks: could Hebrew Catholics witness to this reality while also testifying to the compatibility and unity of the two covenants?

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question—how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does not lie in some foundational idea of the universal as that of human nature or the human condition but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other within overlapping forms of life. The book shows how reality as ordinary and domestic is impaired not only by catastrophic events but also by the repetitive and corrosive soft knife of everyday violence and deprivation. It advances a view of ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. The book also presents a picture of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable and ethnography is treated as intimately connected to autobiography as a form of reflection emanating from the impersonal regions of the self.

This article explores Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas about the nature of philosophy, with particular emphasis on his rejection of “T-philosophy”—a traditionally dominant form of philosophy that, although self-consciosly a priori, is shaped by theoretical goals and methods of reasoning that closely resemble those of the sciences. After discussing the goals and methods that characterize T-philosophy, the article presents a formidable Wittgensteinian argument against that practice. It proceeds to describe the sort of treatment of particular philosophical problems that is called for by this argument; and it assesses the common complaint against Wittgenstein that his overall position is self-undermining—an anti-theoretical theory. It goes on to consider whether Wittgenstein’s perspective involves an objectionable prioritization of language over reality, that is, an objectionable “linguistic turn”. Finally, it compares Wittgenstein’s arguments with the Oxonian “ordinary language philosophy” of philosophers such as Austin, Ryle, and Strawson.

This chapter examines the underpinnings of full employment policy, and the popular understandings of economic life that went along with it. It examines how and why the defeat of unemployment achieved such importance, and how the policy was understood and represented from the 1940s onwards. Next it looks at the tensions surrounding this policy aim from the 1970s, and how it unravelled in the 1980s. The downgrading of the significance given to full employment was accomplished by a variety of strategies to reshape understanding, from the questioning of the ‘reality’ behind official enumeration of unemployment in the early 1970s through to the revival of ‘scrounger’ narratives. It looks at how the Conservative government after 1979 reacted to the surge in unemployment, and how they tried to establish a new popular understanding of the causes of job losses.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been shown to be a significant problem for both patients and relatives after critical illness. For patients the recall of delusional memories from the period in ICU can be a powerful trigger for the development of PTSD. Such memories are described by patients as very vivid and difficult to separate from reality. Early recognition and treatment of PTSD, where needed, can reduce the long term effects. Chronic PTSD, where symptoms have been present for three months after the traumatic event, is associated with a number of long term health problems such as chronic pain. It can also have profound effects on relationships, financial status and overall wellbeing. The provision of an ICU diary has been shown to reduce the incidence of PTSD in patients and reduce the level of PTSD-related symptoms in family members. For the majority of patients this relatively simple intervention helps them to fill in memory gaps and combat any delusional memories they may recall.

The early absence of women police protagonists from novels and television programs was an accurate reflection of social reality. Women were largely excluded from the majority of police patrol and crime investigation jobs until the 1970s. Despite their integration into a wider range of police duties, women continued to struggle to remain and advance in their positions and often were relegated to police work that was behind the scenes of street patrol and investigation. This chapter begins with a discussion of the experiences of real-world women working in policing after the 1970s integration period. It then elaborates the ways in which Prime Suspect 1 brought the feminist genre to the television police procedural form, a subgenre that has been especially resistant to women in lead roles. The final section reflects on how the portrayal of women police officers in the Prime Suspect series comports with the lived experiences of actual policewomen, in particular, those who occupy high ranks in police organizations.

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.

AbstractDeep in the bayous of Louisiana lies Isle de Jean Charles, home to the tribe of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, made up of the tribes of the Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw, since the early 1800s. At this time the three tribes were distinct and had kept much of their culture intact by isolating themselves from European contact, even if it meant ceding their land. They were seen as “invisible people,” those who kept to themselves to avoid contact with whites. As the remnants of the tribes of the Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw resettled in Terrebonne Parish, their land encompassed 22,000 acres (about half the size of Washington, DC). After their initial displacements, the tribe suffered loss of land again when oil companies dug more than 10,000 miles of canals straight through the wetlands and brought oil rigs to Isle de Jean Charles. Promised repair of wetlands never happened. Isle de Jean Charles has now been reduced to only 320 acres (which is about five and a half times the size of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC), and, in some places, is only a quarter of a mile wide. Virtual reality lessons have been implemented to teach others by documenting the residents’ voices using their history of place and ancestry and experiences of displacement due to the dramatic loss of land brought on by the destruction of wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico.

AbstractBased on an empirical case study, this chapter puts forward the thesis that in order for an innovative learning environment (ILE) to work as intended, three things must be aligned: teaching (the teacher), space (the designer) and organisation (the school management). Ideally, when designing new ILEs all three factors are considered in the design process in order to ensure a common goal: creating the best space for innovative learning. In reality, this rarely happens and the users are left with a physical learning environment where the intentions do not always match educators’ expectations and established practices. To remedy this dilemma, the chapter proposes an additional activation phase in the design process after implementation—that is, the early use phase of a new build—where the intentions of the space are translated into actions, and refinements negotiated through discussions with the users through a participatory process. The purpose of this phase is to match pedagogies with spatial possibilities. The methodology used is Research through Design.

Abstract Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) came from a wealthy and well-connected family in Danzig. After private education and travel, he studied medicine at the University of Göttingen and philosophy in Berlin and Jena. In his early work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Suffficient Reason (1813), he developed the view that the logical principle of suffficient reason entails metaphysical determinism: everyevent, everyobject, every moment of consciousness is necessarily determined by—and determines—others. In his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer argues that Kant’s thing-in-itself is not a postulate: it can be directly experienced as an activity of Willing. Equally critical of Hegel, he argued that Hegel’s dictum “the Real is the Rational” must be abandoned; the agonistic striving of the Will cannot be rationally reconstructed. Influenced by his study of the Upanishads, Schopenhauer saw human suffering as a manifestation of the Will’s expression of—and struggles against— the conflict and suffering brought about by the psychological dominance of unsatisfiable desires. Because artistic creation is also an expression of the Will, aesthetic experience can nevertheless present us with another—more serene— avenue to reality. Although Nietzsche eventually became critical of (what he saw as) Schopenhauer’s simplistic, unremitting pessimism, his theories of the Will to Power and of Eternal Recurrence are indebted to his predecessor. More recently, commentators have found Schopenhauerian traces in Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

Abstract As has become widely recognized in recent years, one of the fundamental differences between Frege and Russell concerns their views of the constituents of singular sentential ‘contents’. Frege and Russell agree that at least one purpose of a proper name is to stand for an object, and both agree that sentences containing proper names, as well as the contents such sentences express, are about the objects designated by the names in those sentences (if those names succeed in designating at all).

In the hands of the early fajia (often translated as Legalist) thinkers, classical Chinese moral-political philosophy took a decidedly bureaucratic turn, away from the paradigmatic norm that saw politics as derivative of the moral virtues of the political actors, which characterized the mainstream approach to politics at the time, most famously represented by the Confucians. The early fajia thinkers saw the institution of the state as a domain that required its own operating norm, irreducible to others. In these fajia thinkers, impartiality became the most important institutional norm that eclipses virtues like filiality or even benevolence and righteousness. Furthermore, some early fajia thinkers, especially Shen Dao, would seek to map the state onto the cosmos, essentially merging the two into a single reality such that the state could be perceived to operate “naturally.” All subsequent thinkers had to confront the question of how to deal with the increasingly bureaucratized and powerful state.

Abstract Some aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought, especially on modernity and on the condition of Europe after 1945, are considered in the light of a remark he makes about the ‘apocalyptic’ view of the world. The influence of Tolstoy on Wittgenstein—already apparent in the closing pages of the Tractatus, but not limited to that early work—is discussed and elaborated with reference to the idea of a ‘form of life’ as a locus of order, and also to that of ‘exceptionality’ in an unfolding course of events; the latter sets up a connection with the ‘apocalyptic’ theme. This imaginative backdrop remains visible in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which draws upon it to perhaps unexpected effect in achieving a dialectical balance between the motifs of order and breakdown.

Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful tool to motivate its participants to active participation, while providing augmented feedback to instruct the subject and improve task performance. This chapter presents the technical prerequisites of different recording, display, and rendering technologies. VR does not replace the real environment, but is a tool for setting up automatic training schedules. VR can be a good solution to train dangerous or difficult tasks. VR is being applied in physiotherapy, occupational therapy to recover limb functionality after disease or accident, and to enhance cognitive learning. VR technologies can also be applied to provide feedback as assistance during activities of daily living. Despite the many technological achievements and positive results in many therapeutic and assistive applications, the field of VR rehabilitation is still in an early phase. VR technologies will continue to grow, gain further mainstream acceptance and, eventually, have a significant positive effect on therapeutic outcome.

Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful tool to motivate its participants to active participation, while providing augmented feedback to instruct the subject and improve task performance. This chapter presents the technical prerequisites of different recording, display, and rendering technologies. VR does not replace the real environment, but is a tool for setting up automatic training schedules. VR can be a good solution to train dangerous or difficult tasks. VR is being applied in physiotherapy, occupational therapy to recover limb functionality after disease or accident, and to enhance cognitive learning. VR technologies can also be applied to provide feedback as assistance during activities of daily living—this is then typically called augmented reality (AR). Despite the many technological achievements and positive results in many therapeutic and assistive applications, the field of VR rehabilitation is still in an early phase. VR technologies will continue to grow, gain further mainstream acceptance and, eventually, have a significant positive effect on therapeutic outcome.

The chapter focuses on the specifics of working with elementary school English language learners in ESOL pull-out programs. The authors, a TESOL professor and two ESOL pull-out teachers in elementary schools, examine the role of the ESOL program instructor in this type of academic setting. To give the readers a better idea of what the job of an ESOL pull-out teacher entails, the chapter presents portions of teacher interviews offering insights from two elementary pull-out programs. It provides first-hand accounts of real life experiences of instructors in established programs. They not only reflect on what it is like to teach ELLs in this type of program, but also offer practical suggestions, as well as comment on additional programs and services, such as summer school and after school academy, available to ELLs in their district. The goal of the chapter is to better familiarize elementary educators currently working in districts with pull-out programs or those considering this option as a career choice, and to better prepare them for the realities of everyday work.

Introduction: the use of virtual reality in Parkinson’s disease is a very effective therapy, as it promotes important actions for the knowledge of the motor, stimulating neuroplasticity, through visual feedback. Study design: This is a systematic review of the literature. Objective: The objective of this study was to analyze the use of reality in the rehabilitation of functional capacity in the different stages of Parkinson’s disease. Methods: this is a systematic review, carried out from January to August 2017, by means of electronic search in the databases: Pubmed, Scielo, Lilacs, Science Direct and Medline. The descriptors used were: virtual, video game, Parkinson’s, physiotherapy and rehabilitation and all the words in English. They were defined as inclusion criteria for studies that used virtual reality as treatment for patients with Parkinson’s, classifying patients in stages (I, II, III, IV and V) according to the Hoehn & Yahr scale. Literature review articles, description of virtual reality without showing the sample of statistical results and case study were excluded. Results: 7 articles were selected. After analyzing them, it was possible to observe that patients in the early stages showed improvement in perception, gait and balance. However, patients who were in other more advanced stages of the disease only improved their perception. Conclusion: patients in the early stages of clinical Parkinson’s disease have satisfactory results when compared to the advanced stages.

Depression is the most common mental illness which leads to various health consequences among mothers following the delivery of their babies. Post-partum depression leads to self-harm, suicidal ideation, or harming the newborn, hurting family life. Early detection and management of depression during the antenatal period would prevent both maternal and neonatal complications. Hence, knowing the risk factors may help in planning care for individuals reducing the burden on the health care system. There is a lack of exact evidence of the common risk factors for developing depression after childbirth in Asian mothers. Therefore, this systematic review aims to identify the common risk factors for post-partum depression among mothers after childbirth in Asian countries. Relevant literature from 2017 to 2023 was searched in CINAHL, MEDLINE, PUBMED, Science Direct, and Cochrane databases. Seven highly relevant articles were selected using the PRISMA flow chart. Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) and its tools were used to carry out the critical analysis of each selected article. Following the in-depth analysis, three key themes were derived: an unfriendly home builds an unhappy mother, expectation versus reality leads to depression, and poor financial status leads to an unsafe post-partum period. The study highlighted that mothers in Asian countries are affected by a wide variety of complex post-partum depression risk factors. Improving knowledge, early detection of emotional needs, counseling, effective use of contraceptives, and delivery of high-quality care during the ante-natal period are necessary for reducing post-partum depression among antenatal mothers.

Service robots have been applied in an increasing number of scenarios, including homes, hospitals, offices, schools, hotels, etc. To ensure the usability of the interaction interface and process in the application of service robots, the design of human-robot interaction in the application of service robots involves various interaction modalities, different robot forms, and different physical behaviors of robots in space, etc. This makes it challenging to have low-cost, high-fidelity prototype methods that support design exploration in the early stages of service robot application design.Currently, many rapid prototyping techniques have been applied to the design exploration stage in the design of service robot applications, such as paper prototypes, storyboards, video prototypes, etc. However, these methods have limitations, including low fidelity and being out of the environmental context. Researchers have also been exploring new prototype methods to meet the design exploration and testing requirements for HRI design. Some studies have explored the use of VR test HRI prototypes, and most of them focus on the technical aspect, and the performance of HRI capabilities. Other studies focus on specific HRI design aspects: interactive mechanism, anthropomorphic appearance, social acceptance, and so on. Approaches focusing on these aspects are not suitable for prototyping and testing the overall interaction scenarios of service robot applications.Based on the characteristics of virtual reality technology, this paper aims to explore how virtual reality technology can be used to support multi-user collaborative design of service robot applications in a virtual environment. To address this issue, this paper proposes a system for supporting collaborative design of service robot applications. The system framework and implementation will be described in detail in the paper. Specifically, the system enables multiple users (designers or stakeholders) to enter a virtual environment in real-time using head-mounted VR devices. Users can select appropriate environment model assets based on the target application scenario and perform bodystorming "on site". Using a modular robot building tool, users can add virtual robots to the space and add or delete functional components, as well as adjust the position, size, and orientation of the components. The system's Wizard-of-OZ module allows users to control the robot's movement and component status. The Graphic UI is embedded into the physical display of the robot via WebView and supports the simulation of the Graphic UI interaction process. After completing the initial application concept ideation and virtual robot design, users can use WoZ and Role-Playing techniques to perform the human-robot interaction process to evaluate and optimize the interaction design. In addition, the recorded video of the performance can also support subsequent design discussions.The system is implemented using the Unity game engine, and users interact with the system using the Oculus Quest headsets and controllers. The design activities case based on the system will be evaluated and discussed to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the system. Further, we discuss the limitations of this work and the future research directions for supporting the design of service robot applications using virtual reality.

With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, the 21st century is known as the urban century. However, in an urbanized world that goes hand in hand with a growing world population, a “silent” process of urban shrinkage has been taking place for some time. In the first decades after the Second World War, the decline of cities was initially limited to the old urbanized regions of the world. In the late 20th and early 21st century, it spread to developing countries and has become a global phenomenon. The Serbian urban population grew from the 1960s to the 1980s, while it stagnated in the 1990s. Complex spatial-demographic and socio-economic changes during the post-socialist transition have determined the demographic development of urban settlements in Serbia towards shrinkage. At the beginning of the 21st century, the urban population in Serbia has slightly increased, but the disproportions in population development between urban settlements have deepened, reinforcing the previously existing urban polarization. In the last decade a negative average annual rate of change of the urban population in Serbia was recorded. As a result, more than 80% of urban settlements in Serbia are affected by the process of urban shrinkage. Urban shrinkage is thus becoming a challenge at both global and local levels. The paper analyses the development of the total population in 167 urban settlements in Serbia in the period 1961-2022. The aim of paper is to determine the main urban trends in Serbia, focusing on the phenomenon of urban shrinkage.

Falls and falling remain a significant problem for people as they age. This work proposes a mobile augmented reality (AR) based system called “Fall Prevention via Notification System” (Fall PreNoSys) to detect likely tripping hazards around the wearer and provide notifications to help them avoid safety problems, along with two phases of user feedback to improve the system design. Blending mobile technologies and human-computer interaction requires significant work on human interface components to become an effective, calm, and useful tool in daily life. A series of studies involving human participants was conducted to gather feedback on the Fall PreNoSys interface design, its utility, and its underlying concepts. Current AR research in gerontechnology and in-home assessments represents a nascent field, and Fall PreNoSys offers a novel approach to fall prevention.Fall PreNoSys uses a Microsoft HoloLens v2 to gather real time 3D models of the space around the user. These models are segmented to identify potential tripping hazards, and the HoloLens scene understanding library is employed to classify objects using an AI classifier. The combination of the Fall PreNoSys algorithm for object segmentation and scene understanding results in a list of objects that can trigger notifications as the user moves around a room.To evaluate notifications style and to get feedback from possible users of the system, two pilot user studies were performed. These studies provided early-stage feedback, initial impressions, guided the continued design of notifications, tested the object detection algorithm's robustness, and evaluated user reactions to static and dynamic notification types developed for Fall PreNoSys.Notifications took the form of 3D visual objects projected onto the HoloLens' AR screen within the wearer's field of view. These notifications were shaped as arrows or OSHA safety-style triangles and were placed on or near identified potential hazards. Based on user feedback from the first phase of the user trial, notifications became interactive, changing color, bouncing in place, and reacting to the participant's relative location to orient their attention to hazards.The study used walking tracks with likely in-home tripping hazards, a combination of machine learning-based detection algorithms, and multiple styles of visual hazard notifications. Study data was collected through two phases of interviews, user feedback of their experiences with the technology, and measurements using the System Usability Study scale to help guide further development of Fall PreNoSys and similar systems in the future. Future work on Fall PreNoSys includes a series of studies with older adults after the latest user feedback from this study is incorporated into the interface design. Additional work includes using eye gaze notification acknowledgements, user path estimations, and out-of-view edge notifications to help people interact with notifications, adapt to the user's walking path, and handle issues with the AR screen's field of view limitations.

Objective: Compared with other subtypes of breast cancer, a higher percentage of HER2-positive patients achieve a pathologic complete response (pCR) to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT). Most randomized studies of neoadjuvant therapy in HER2-positive breast cancer have employed anthracycline and taxane-based NACT regimens. In the aggregate, these studies suggest a pCR rate approaching 50% among patients with operable HER2-positive disease receiving anthracycline, taxane, and trastuzumab-based therapy (AC-TH). In the phase II TRYPHAENA study, the pCR rate reported for the docetaxel, carboplatin, trastuzumab, and pertuzumab (TCHP) regimen was 64% compared with 55% among those treated with an anthracycline-based regimen (FEC-THP), a difference that was not statistically significant. Anthracycline-free regimes are currently preferred as NACT in international guidelines, but, in the Brazilian reality, anthracycline regimes such as AC-THP are still widely used. As a practical example, a portion of patients with locally advanced disease need to start NACT but depend on ISH (in-situ hybridization) result to HER-2 directed therapy. Methodology: A retrospective analysis was conducted on patients treated with AC-THP in the neoadjuvant setting in a Brazilian breast cancer center in Goiânia, Goiás. A medical record review was conducted on patients treated with AC-THP in the neoadjuvant setting and at least 1 year of follow-up after surgery. Data on patient demographics, stage of breast cancer, systemic therapy, pathology reports, and surgical data were collected. Results: Information from 44 patients was reviewed and evaluated for total pCR (tpCR, ypT0/is ypN0). The average age was 50.3 years (range 28–75 years, with 18% over 65 years old). HER2 positivity by IHC 3+ was achieved in 80% of patients, and 20% had IHC 2+ and ISH positive. In the 63.4%, the estrogen receptor (ER) positivity was > or = 10%, and 38.6% and 25% had clinical stages IIB and IIA, respectively. Overall, 35 (80%) received AC dose dense, 18 (41%) patients underwent lumpectomy, and 26 (59%) underwent mastectomy. The average number of nodes removed in SNB patients (86.3%) was 3 compared with 15.5 in ALND patients (13.7%). A tpCR occurred in 31/44 (70.5%) patients overall, in 14/16 (87.5%) patients with HR-negative or weak, and in 17/28 (60.7%) HR-positive disease. After an average of 44.2 months of follow-up, 95.45% of patients were still free of breast cancer recurrence (2 relapses) and the overall survival was 100%. Conclusion: In the report from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2017, tpCR occurred in 41/57 (72%) patients. In the cohort A from Berenice trial, the pCR rate was 61.8%. Cross-trial comparisons should be interpreted with caution given the differences in patient populations, but based on this report, our real-world results were at least comparable with randomized trials and with results from developed countries.

Belonging to a present which submits a huge influx of information, the generation of the past 10 years is “naturally” developing skills for managing the huge amount of inputs, "Digital Natives" (the term belongs to Marc Prensky) seem to be perfectly adapted to a very animated environment in which messages and stimuli come and go at high speed. In this informational whirlwind, the virtual environment plays a central role and, gradually, the huge basket of the Internet will include information, cultures and personalities. A reality of today’s Romanian school, identified in the findings of a research from 2015, is that the school is only the third training provider regarding the best practices in self-education by searching the Internet, after the circle of friends / colleagues and family. Starting from this fact, our exploratory study aims to draw attention to education providers in Romania on the need for early education of youth on the efficient exploitation of the Internet resources and, including in terms of their future professional career, the optimal use of Social Media platforms in the area of Self-Branding. Our undertaken endeavour highlights the need to educate young people for the concern to build a personality profile, optimal and desirable in the virtual environment, in the context of the likelihood of targeting some top jobs on the labour market of the future where important employers frequently hire specialized recruitment agencies to identify the "perfect employee" for a certain position. Study findings are summarized in a mini-guide to good practices upon which we insist to be implemented early in the education of young people for a profitable meeting with Social Media

Abstract Running multi-million cell simulation problems in minutes has been a dream for reservoir engineers for decades. Today, with the advancement of Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), we have a real chance to make this dream a reality. Here we present our experience in the step-by-step transformation of a fully developed industrial CPU-based simulator into a fully functional GPU-based simulator. We also demonstrate significant accelerations achieved through the use of GPU technology. To achieve the best performance possible, we choose to use CUDA (NVIDIA GPU’s native language), and offload as much computations to GPU as possible. Our CUDA implementation covers all reservoir computes, which include property calculation, linearization, linear solver, etc. The well and Field Management still reside on CPU and need minor changes for their interaction with GPU-based reservoir. Importantly, there is no change to the nonlinear logic. The GPU and CPU parts are overlapped, fully utilizing the asynchronous nature of GPU operations. Each reservoir computation can be run in three modes, CPU_only (existing one), GPU_only, CPU followed by GPU. The latter is only used for result checking and debugging. In early 2019, we prototyped two reservoir linearization operations (mass accumulation and mass flux) in CUDA; both showed very strong runtime speed-up of several hundred times, 1 P100-GPU (NVIDIA) vs 1 POWER8NVL CPU core rated at 2.8 GHz (IBM). Encouraged by this success, we moved into linear solver development and managed to move the entire linear solver module into GPU. Again, strong speed-up of ~50 times was achieved (1 GPU vs 1 CPU). The focus for 2019 has been on standard Black-Oil cases. Our implementation was tested with multiple "million-cell range" models (SPE10 and other real field cases). In early 2020, we managed to put SPE10 fully on GPU, and finished the entire 2000 day time-stepping in ~35 sec with a single P100 card. After that our effort has switched to compositional AIM (Adaptive Implicit Method), with focus on compositional flash and AIM implementation for reservoir linearization and linear solver, both show early promising results. GPU-based reservoir simulation is a future trend for HPC. The development of a reservoir simulator is complex, multi-discipline and time-consuming work. Our paper demonstrates a clear strategy to add tremendous GPU acceleration into an existing CPU-based simulator. Our approach fully utilizes the strength of the existing CPU simulator and minimizes the GPU development effort. This paper is also the first publication targeting GPU acceleration for compositional AIM models.

Abstract The advantage of cable deployed electric submersible pump (CDESP) systems are beginning to be understood and realized as experience has been gained with the deployment and retrieval of these systems. Cable deployed ESP systems have at times been touted as a temporary system for failed conventional ESP systems. Long-term successes have demonstrated the value of permanently installed CDESP systems, which provide the benefit of reduced production deferral, less costly change-out, and reduced HSE risk. The decision to change from conventional ESP to a rigless CDESP system is not necessarily a simple conclusion. The decision must consider technical, economic, and operational considerations to gain the full benefit from the technology. The learnings developed over multiple deployments and retrievals will benefit decision makers in the evaluation of the technology use. The technology application presented in the paper sheds the light on a journey to develop and bring alternative ESP deployment from concept to reality, overcoming technical and operational challenges. The current CDESP requires a rig to initially construct the permanent completion to accept the rigless CDESP system. Production rates requirements determine the ESP size, and in turn the tubing and wellhead size. Pressure control equipment is installed on top of the Christmas tree. Rigless installation and retrieval of the CDESP is performed on an elevated tower with the wellhead in place. The tower design has been improved to allow the production flowline to remain in place. A minimum of two well barriers, with one barrier well kill fluid, are in place at all times. A key learning of the killed well CDESP system is the need to understand the potential changes to the reservoir after sustained production in planning the replacement of a failed ESP. Kill fluid losses can be higher than expected with restorative well cleanup and production. Actual deployment or retrieval time can be improved with successive change-outs. Long-term operational robustness of the CDESP is proven with a system continuing to operate after 5 years of cumulative operations. This paper shares the lessons learned from an early technology adopter with multiple deployment and retrievals in various well environments including highly fractured reservoirs and high hydrogen sulfide wells.