Search results for "Nothing"
showing 10 items of 59 documents
A naïve way of looking at fuzzy sets
2016
In this study, we consider the concept of a predicate (P) in a universe of discourse X from a specific viewpoint, i.e., the informational viewpoint with respect to its linguistic use. Its meaning and its different types are considered, particularly by considering the predicates that are "measurable" and designate a "collective" (P) in X, which is not always a classical subset of X. We show that the collective P manifests itself in different "states" or fuzzy sets, where knowledge and representation depend on the available information regarding the use of the predicate P in X. We also analyze the linguistic concept of a "collective" where the fuzzy sets are nothing other than informational s…
Outcome of liver transplantation for hepatopulmonary syndrome: a Eurotransplant experience.
2019
Hepatopulmonary syndrome (HPS) is a pulmonary vascular complication of liver disease that affects up to 30% of patients with cirrhosis [1]. Intrapulmonary vascular dilatations and shunts result in gas exchange abnormalities, ranging from elevated alveolar-arterial oxygen gradients with no hypoxemia to very severe hypoxemia [1, 2]. Currently, liver transplantation (LT) is the only treatment option [3]. The Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) is a scoring system for assessing liver disease severity that has been validated to predict the 3-months waitlist mortality, and is used by Eurotransplant for prioritising allocation of liver transplants [4]. Footnotes This manuscript has recently b…
The leftovers. The dead in life and social disappearance.
2020
Through an analysis of the TV series The Leftovers, we delve into the concept of "social disappearance" and into how it expresses the limits between life and death. The analysis focuses on the event that drives the plot: the mass disappearance of millions of people without reason. It has three moments: (1) the reconstruction of the order that the disappearance has broken; (2) the deviation of the mourning processes from their original logic; and (3) the acceptance that in the post-disappearance world nothing will be the same as before. The text offers some suggestions for thinking about possible lives in a world that is broken and with no promise of reconstruction, a world in which "social …
‘He is Quirky; He is the World's Greatest Psychologist’: On the Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common
2016
In this article, we challenge the concept of the therapeutic relationship as an operationalisable entity. In contrast to this idea, we introduce Alphonso Lingis’ concept of community, and his distinction between the rational community and the community of those who have nothing in common. This is done through speculative analysis of a transcribed sequence from a research interview with a boy who speaks about his experiences of receiving mental health care. This boy and his family were helped through a network-oriented, dialogical approach. In the sequence highlighted here, the boy speaks of the significance of a particular mental health practitioner. The boy expresses appreciation for the h…
Everyday life and the new shapes of identities : The different meanings of ‘things that did not happen’ in the lives of Finnish older persons during …
2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives in many ways since the end of 2019. This paper investigates the everyday lives of Finnish older persons during the first three months of the pandemic when they were required to stay in “quarantine-like conditions.” The study utilises the ‘sociology of nothing’ in exploring the meanings of nothingness in the everyday lives of older people; that is, the things, events and people that were absent from their lives because of the pandemic. The main interest of the article is to reverse the typical analytical focus from ‘things that happened’ to ‘things that did not happen’ and to shed light on the experiences and descriptions of older persons' unlived…
Alvis Hermanis: “To Be Everything and Nothing at All”
2021
This chapter is about the oeuvre of Alvis Hermanis, a Latvian stage and opera director and artistic leader of New Riga Theatre. It focuses on the road Hermanis took from the 1990s, as a young and rebellious postmodern director, into the second decade of the twenty-first century. In such productions as Long Life (2003), Inspector General (2006), The Sound of Silence (2007) and Brodsky/Barishnikov (2015), he approaches psychological theatre on a new, innovative level, exploring it as a kind of time machine in order to study people and history. In 2013, Hermanis entered the world of opera. In his productions including Alois Zimmerman’s Die Soldaten (2013), Leos Janacek’s Jenufa (2014) and so o…
The self-organizing consciousness as an alternative model of the mind
2002
Through the concept of self-organizing consciousness (SOC), we posit that the dynamic of the mind stems from the recurrent interplay between the properties of conscious experiences and the properties of the world, hence making it unnecessary to postulate the existence of an unconscious mental level. In contrast, arguments are provided by commentators for the need for a functional level of organization located between the neural and the conscious. Other commentaries challenge us concerning the ability of our model to account for specific phenomena in the domains of language, reasoning, incubation, and creativity. The possibility of unconscious semantic access and other alleged instances of a…
Relational priming is to analogy-making as one-ball juggling is to seven-ball juggling
2008
Relational priming is argued to be a deeply inadequate model of analogy-making because of its intrinsic inability to do analogies where the base and target domains share no common attributes and the mapped relations are different. The authors rely on carefully handcrafted representations to allow their model to make a complex analogy, seemingly unaware of the debate on this issue 15 years ago. Finally, they incorrectly assume the existence of fixed, context-independent relations between objects. Although relational priming may indeed play some role in analogy-making, it is an enormous – and unjustified – stretch to say that it is “centrally implicated in analogical reasoning” (sect. 2, para…
Hegel's Time: Between Tragic Action and Modern History
2019
AbstractThis paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that (modern historical) spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. This way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediac…