War and Peace
Abstract
If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.’ Isaac Babel Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately connected with the national history that is played out in parallel with their lives. Balls and soirées alternate with councils of war and the machinations of statesmen and generals, scenes of violent battles with everyday human passions in a work whose extraordinary imaginative power has never been surpassed. The prodigious cast of characters, both great and small, seem to act and move as if connected by threads of destiny as the novel relentlessly questions ideas of free will, fate, and providence. Yet Tolstoy’s portrayal of marital relations and scenes of domesticity is as truthful and poignant as the grand themes that underlie them. In this revised and updated version of the definitive and highly acclaimed Maude translation, Tolstoy’s genius and the power of his prose are made newly available to the contemporary reader.
... "To elicit the laws of history we must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and select for study the homogeneous, infinitesimal elements which influence the masses." [97] As pointed out by Vitány [98], Tolstoy was, in modern terms, advocating the formulation of a Statistical Mechanics of history. The work we have presented is an attempt to formulate such a theory for the spatial history of language. ...
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model shows that the boundaries of language dialect regions are controlled by a length minimizing effect analogous to surface tension, mediated by variations in population density which can induce curvature, and by the shape of coastline or similar borders. The predictability of dialect regions arises because these effects will drive many complex, randomized early states toward one of a smaller number of stable final configurations. The model is able to reproduce observations and predictions of dialectologists. These include dialect continua, isogloss bundling, fanning, the wave-like spread of dialect features from cities, and the impact of human movement on the number of dialects that an area can support. The model also provides an analytical form for S\'{e}guy's Curve giving the relationship between geographical and linguistic distance, and a generalisation of the curve to account for the presence of a population centre. A simple modification allows us to analytically characterize the variation of language use by age in an area undergoing linguistic change.
The purpose of this chapter is to bring the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Toril Moi’s account of the hermeneutics of suspicion applies to a clumsy, stereotyped version of the hermeneutics of suspicion, not to Ricœur’s approach. Moi’s version is not suspicion; it is dogmatism. What is “hidden in plain view” is exemplified in Wittgenstein (“surface grammar” from “depth grammar” distinguished) and Tolstoy. Moi quotes Simone de Beauvoir, attributing to reading literature the possibility of giving one a “taste of another life.” This is the empathic moment. Ricœur is not regarded as a philosopher of empathy such as Max Scheler or Edith Stein (though Ricœur’s practice of it as a teacher was at a high empathic level), and the title of this chapter is intended as a provocation to “consider the possibility.” For Ricœur, empathy would not be a mere psychological mechanism. Empathy would be the ontological presence of the self with the Other as a way of being—listening as a human action that is a fundamental way of being in which “hermeneutics can stand on the authority of the resources of past ontologies.” In a rational reconstruction of what a Ricœurian approach to empathy would entail, a logical space is made for empathy to avoid the epistemological paradoxes of Husserl and the ethical enthusiasms of Lévinas. How this reconstruction of empathy would apply to empathic understanding, empathic responsiveness, empathic interpretation, and empathic receptivity is elaborated from a Ricœurian perspective.
This chapter takes the reader through empathy’s receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, in examples corresponding to each. Empathy and radical empathy are exemplified in detailed vignettes from Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Mann, and Bulgakov. With two words “Blue Roses,” Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie captures empathic responsiveness. Misfirings and failures of empathy are exemplified in emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and getting lost in translation in the literary examples. Empathy is distinguished from intuition in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Master Flea, which provides an example of an empathy-like technology that shows the limitations of empathy. From the perspective of the omniscient narrator, the realist novel is a “miracle of empathy.” Precisely because minds are not transparent, empathic translation, understood as perspective taking, is required. Boris Uspensky developed an entire poetics based on the dynamics of perspective taking in literature, and it is on the work of Uspensky that we shall rely here. This dynamic perspective shifting would not make sense in literature without the empathic ability to take a walk in the Other’s shoes (the folk definition of empathy).
To improve understanding of prototyping practice at the fuzzy front end of the design process, this article presents an analysis of a prototyping dataset captured during the IDEA challenge – a 4-day virtually hosted hackathon – using Pro2booth, a web-based prototype capture tool. The dataset comprised 203 prototypes created by four independent teams working in university labs across Europe supported by interviews carried out with each of the teams after the event. The results of the study provide nine key findings about prototyping at hackathons. These include elucidation of the purposes of prototypes in physical, digital and sketch domains and characterisation of teams’ prototyping practices and strategies. The most successful strategy focused on learning about the problem or solution space, often via physical prototypes rather than following more prescriptive ‘theoretical’ methodologies. Recommendations on prototyping strategies in hackathons or similar scenarios are provided, highlighting the importance of practical strategies that prioritise learning and adaptation. The results of this study raise the broader question to the wider research community of how design research and teaching should balance high-level strategic approaches with more hands-on ‘operational’ prototyping.
Organizational change research has shown how change processes in organizations connect sequentially to form a trajectory of change through time; however, research has yet to offer an understanding of how ongoing organizational change integrates more distant change processes across time to shape the organization’s long-term trajectory. To better understand the dynamics between ongoing change and the shaping of trajectories, we refer to change processes as turning points, arguing that turning points are immanent to – and formative of – trajectories. We define turning points in terms of their definitional, directional and curvilinear features, which we relate to the shaping of organizational change trajectories. Drawing on Deleuze’s concept of the fold and the distinction between actual and singular events, we theorize how actors connect past and future turning points of the trajectory as singular events into enacting the actual events of the current turning point. Inspired by Deleuze’s conception of the fold, we then develop a theoretical framework for the shaping of organizational change trajectories at turning points. This framework contributes to current change research by explaining how ongoing change processes give shape to trajectories of change that subsequently shape the ongoing process of change. It also contributes to the literature by proposing a more dynamic and central role of continuity in change. Finally, our use of Deleuze’s concept of the fold enables us to suggest how theorizing actors’ movement through time may extend current process views of time.
Anxiety as an affect is experienced on a psychological level and is associated with other affects such as despair, anger, hopelessness and other negative feelings. Moreover, fear is accompanied by physical reactions: increase in heart rate and blood pressure, muscle tension, dizziness, change in voice and facial expression and shock-like paralysis. Fear is therefore a psycho-socio-somatic phenomenon (Ermann 2019). In this sense, fear is (a) a basic feeling of human existence and is attributed to the foreboding of death and the presentiment of the limitedness of human existence (b) also to the abysses of the human soul (the unconscious), which elude immediate access. Fear in certain situations (situational fear) serves to cope with or avoid concrete dangers. Freud (1926) called this signal anxiety (Rudolf and Heningsen 2017). It is an alarm signal and serves to protect against real threats by evoking appropriate reactions (see more below). Fear has shaped in a very deep way the cultures of our world over the millennia. In religion, in philosophy and in art, this fundamental affect has a lasting impact. Psychoanalysis, with its more than 100 years of tradition, has contributed significantly to research into pathological anxiety, as has behavioural therapy. It arises from the psychodynamics of conflicts or crises (see more below).
This article is determined to analyze the way Russian political and ideological system is using linguistics in the means of its informational and psychological aggression against Ukraine. The war launched by Russian Federation has become the culmination of its prolonged aggressive actions on many fronts: ideological, economical, cultural, linguistic and so on. Current cremlin hosts are trying to regain full control over Ukraine in every imaginable way, drawing on the previous political regimes' experience. This article investigates one of the definitions of chauvinism as harassment of so-called "small nations" on the domestic and international levels that is shaping into political oppression and assimilation of languages. Have it that cremlin ideologues have always exploited any opportunity to diminish Ukrainians' self-consciousness, in particular by means of different quasi-scientific theories. Here we explored one example of the forementioned such as the creation of fake exception to the rule of spelling of prepositions "in" and "on" with administrative geographical names by Russian philologers that only applied to place-name "Ukraine". In contradiction to linguistic norms of Russian language Russians use "on Ukraine" in accusative and locative cases. We respectively analyzed arguments of Soviet linguists D. Rozental and K. Bilinskyy, and also modern Russian geographers and their theory of geo concept that basically comes to one statement: such version has been made up through history and is backed up by the expression "on the outskirts". The Ukrainian linguist I. Ohiyenko's work, in which he explained that the expression "in Ukraine" positioned it as a separate state, is mentioned in the article. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the logical norm "in Ukraine" was being used in the official documents of Russian Federation for a while, but after the cremlin tacked its course to re-establish its dominance over the former Soviet republics, they returned to the previous version. The sources that have been studied in the article point out that the political and ideological system is of a paramount importance for Russian linguistic science and is using it as a non-lethal weapon against Ukraine.
In the book of Job, Job is initially described as “perfect and upright,” yet Yahweh allows Satan to inflict terrible suffering on him. From their Deuteronomistic orientation, Job’s comforters insist that Job must have sinned and deserves punishment. If Job is truly innocent, the quandary of theodicy arises because Yahwistic monism views Yahweh as the one and only loving, all powerful God of justice and mercy. However, in his exegesis in his set of engravings of the book, the nineteenth-century poet and artist William Blake viewed Job not as “perfect and upright,” but as wrapped in a self-absorbed bubble of false piety, dedicated to traditional memory and habit. This article selects six of Blake’s engravings and by means of a literary-psychological methodological approach demonstrates how Blake anticipated certain modern exegetical methods in his aim to “justify the ways of God to man.” He claimed the right to use his own imaginative response to the text, rather than rely on the meaning handed down by tradition and memory. The initial divide between heaven and earth is bridged when the youthful Elihu rejects their traditional wisdom, and brings Job to the point where he can experience God as an immanent divine presence. The advance of science, for instance, Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species, and subsequent research in a variety of disciplines has resulted in a new understanding of the inevitability of suffering and evil, and goes some way to validate Blake’s monistic insistence that “without contraries is no progression.”
Theodore John Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, died by suicide in June 2023. One of the most best known criminals of the late twentieth century, and a former Harvard mathematics prodigy with an IQ of 167, Kaczynski is remembered for the 1995 publication of his 35,000-word anti-technology essay, Industrial Society and Its Future. This work called for the rejection of technological civilization and the embracing of wild nature. Its publication led to Kaczynski’s identification, apprehension, and a convoluted set of legal proceedings that culminated in a coerced plea arrangement and his incarceration in the US federal supermax prison. Kaczynski was not permitted to introduce a defense of necessity. Instead, he was labeled as ‘mad’ by the press and his family, and identified as a paranoid schizophrenic by a court-appointed psychiatrist. But several commentators have argued that Kaczynski’s reasoning is sound. Indeed, many of Kaczynski’s observations about technology and the environment have proven to be prescient. Accordingly, a new generation of followers have adopted his anti-technology philosophy. If Kaczynski was correct about technology and the environment, this might warrant a reevaluation of his socio- theoretical writings and reconsideration of his constructed persona as a mad genius.
Why is deciding to do something sometimes so slow and difficult? How do we make decisions when lacking key information? When making decisions, the higher areas of the brain deliberately suppress lower areas capable of generating much faster but ill-considered responses while they develop ones that are more sophisticated, based on what can be gained in return. In this engaging book, the authors explore the increasingly popular neural model that may explain these mechanisms: the linear approach to threshold ergodic rate (LATER). Presenting a detailed description of the neurophysiological processes involved in decision-making and how these link to the LATER model, this is the first major resource covering the applications in describing human behaviour. With over 100 illustrations and a thorough discussion of the mathematics supporting the model, this is a rigorous yet accessible resource for psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists and neurophysiologists interested in decision-making.
A number of foreign artists received the earliest commissions to represent Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812 for Russian emperors. My paper is a case study of a German artist who served the Russian Imperial court. Peter von Hess trained at the Academy in Munich and served both King Ludwig I of Bavaria and Otto I of Greece. In 1839, Emperor Nicholas I commissioned the artist to complete 12 monumental canvases for the Winter Palace representing key battles that followed Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. While earlier battle paintings and portraits commissioned by Alexander I dealt only with elite officers and the emperor, Hess’s paintings elevated the common Russian as the bearers of a great sacrifice and as the true defenders of Russia. This representational shift is the product of changing ideas concerning Russia’s involvement in several alliances from 1803 to 1815 that included Austria, England, Sweden, and Prussia. In addition, over the course of Nicholas I’s reign, the concepts of “autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality” crept into representations of the Russian experience of the Napoleonic wars.
Pure quality of will theories claim that ‘the ultimate object’ of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false—or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object—namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action; I call this competence of will. I offer a conjectural explanation of the two dimensions of (moral) responsibility: it matters to us that people actually perform adequately well because of how much it matters to us that we are able to live and work together successfully.
The longest utopia in Hungarian was written by the most popular and prolific romance writer of the nineteenth century, Mór Jókai (1825–1904). Utopian impulses are present in many of his works, and utopian attitudes culminate in his great work, The Novel of the Century to Come, which began to be published in a serialized form in 1872. The book describes a fictive twentieth century in which Hungary has an important role, partly through the invention of a flying machine by a Hungarian. This machine changes the world in opening new possibilities in commerce and communication, and radically changing warfare and hence international political structures, so after long struggles, the world reaches a state of eternal peace. The analysis discusses the complex structure of the work, the various utopian constructs it presents, and the ideas and motivations behind them. A central problem discussed in this chapter is the combination of an intentional view of history with the structural features of utopia.
In this chapter Peter Wallensteen deals with the formation of the peace research agenda during the past hundred years. The choice of topics is seen as a result of real world experiences. They come in the form of traumas, such as World Wars and nuclear weapons, or hopes, such as the forming of international organizations or the use of non-violent change. These events result in different agendas for different peace research milieus. The chapter also links this to philosophical thinking on peace and war, going back to Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas More.
For Foucault, discourses shape people’s knowledge and inform how they act in a society. Power over others is legitimated by dominant discourses, a means through which hegemony discloses itself: a given group is entitled to oppress another. As a parent-educator based in Italy, I see such discourses manifesting themselves in actions and speeches. As a researcher, I also perceive the power of the dominant discourse promoted by the Western academies, which excludes many diverse knowledge systems present in the world.Using personally-orientated action research, in my living-educational-theory enquiry I aim to make a more aware contribution in the socio-historical and socio-cultural context I live in. I therefore clarify which values inform my way of being, and I analyse how much I’ve been influenced by dominant discourses which go against the values I hold. It is my responsibility to respect and absorb different types of knowledge, recognising the other as significant. In this, I’m led by a sense of hope: while acting against dominant discourses, I, and others, are making use of our social imaginations. In my hometown a community of authentic learners is forming. In it, we seek to convert ‘power-over’ to ‘power-with’ as we generate educational knowledge together.
The author's narrative generation study is based on two types of systems: the integrated narrative generation system (INGS) as a single narrative generation and reception mechanism and the Geinō information system (GIS) as a multiple narrative production and consumption mechanism. The first theme of the chapter is to introduce an idea that deals with narrative phenomena as the integration of both systems. This theme is tied to the topic of narrative content creation by presenting kabuki narrative generation or kabuki-oriented narratology and Watakushi Monogatari as a collection of narrative content to be created by the author. Hence, the second objective is to describe kabuki-oriented narrative generation and the third is to explain the ideas, thoughts, and design underlying Watakushi Monogatari in the context of internal and external narrative generation to create and distribute narrative content. Through these three themes, this chapter bridges the gap between narrative generation systems and narrative content with kabuki-oriented narratology and Watakushi Monogatari.
This paper restates the central point of Protean Power , pushes the analysis forward by engaging each of the commentators, and concludes by underlining the importance of uncertainty and potentialities and mapping some of the areas that need further attention.
This article is devoted to the discussion of Russian colonial and anti-colonial social imaginaries. It starts by delving into the definitions of colony and colonization, and proceeds to the analysis of the colonial experience of the Russian continental Empire. The internal colonization thesis is also analyzed in the context of the imperial reality. The complex Soviet experience is understood as, on the one hand, a radical break with the past, through decolonization and anti-colonialism. The author, on the other hand, agrees with those who claim that Stalinism can also be understood in terms of an internal colonialism theory. This article, however, emphasizes the metaphoric nature of the internal colonialism arguments. In conclusion, the author describes different features of Russian colonial/anti-colonial experience as aspects of what he calls the modernity of control and what he describes as the dominance of the rational mastery discourses over imaginary signification of autonomy.
Leadership has a rich historical tradition and has fascinated people for centuries. Key concepts and ideas drawn from that tradition and from research, and explored in the modern context of health care, such as leadership and power; leadership and organizational culture; leadership and courage; and the forms of leadership that adapt to context-self, interpersonal, and strategic-shape our definition of modern health leadership. That definition is the foundation upon which LEADS is built.
Studies on mind-wandering frequently use reading as an experimental task. In these studies, reading is conceived as a cognitive process that potentially offers a contrast to mind-wandering, because it seems to be task-related, goal-directed and stimulus-dependent. More recent work attempts to avoid the dichotomy of successful cognitive processes and processes of mind-wandering found in earlier studies. We approach the issue from the perspective that texts provoke modes of cognitive involvement different from the information processing and recall account that underlies many early mind-wandering studies. After all, reading itself is an umbrella term for activities that are characterized by a variety of phenomenological and functional signatures. We conceptualize reading and mind-wandering in relation to each other through the framework of enculturated predictive processing, which is informed by research in literary studies. Earlier accounts think of reading predominantly in terms of the construction of situation models that organize textual information. By contrast, enculturated predictive processing foregrounds shifting stances readers can take in relation to the text. Characters featuring in literary texts might be mind-wandering themselves, or passages in literary style might make the construction of a clearly defined situational model impossible. Furthermore, we take into account that texts often elicit mind-wandering through the construction of task-relevant and attention-driven virtual scenarios in readers' minds. This more complex account of reading can enrich recent attempts to understand mind-wandering as a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon. The study of mind-wandering can benefit, we argue, from a closer attention to the process of reading and to the texts it deploys as stimuli. The emerging perspective from enculturated predictive processing and literary studies makes distinctions in reading that in turn enable research on mind-wandering to ask more precise questions about (1) different kinds of mind-wandering, (2) different modes of reading, and (3) how and where they interconnect across time.
This chapter seeks to undertake a comprehensive structure of the author's narrative generation research. In particular, the chapter compactly shows the whole of the narrative generation studies as an indirect purpose by taking several concrete examples and aims to consider and discuss the respective components as the direct purpose. Through this chapter, the author presents an entire framework of narrative analyses in relation to the integrated narrative generation system and Geino information system, and conducts the analyses of a novel by Yukio Mishima and several aspects of kabuki. The final part provides directions for partially incorporating the results of the narrative analyses of Mishima and kabuki into the above narrative generation systems. In relation to this book's title, Content Generation Through Narrative Communication and Simulation, this chapter selects "narrative content" as "content" to be generated, conducts the analyses of narrative "communication," structure, and techniques, and attempts narrative "simulation" using the author's narrative generation systems.
What does it mean to live an “extraordinary” life? Dangerous question for a “recovering narcissist.” But this was the question posed to me in November 2008, when I was asked to speak at an event at my home university – Loyola University Chicago. Taking on the task of preparing to give this lecture – to a luncheon crowd composed of students, staff, faculty, and clergy – was an occasion to ponder the ways in which my life of six plus decades might be considered “extraordinary,” and so I spent many a walk with my canine companions Hope and Dharma pondering the question.
For many decades, economists dismissed culture as irrelevant to most questions in economic growth. However, in the past decade they have rediscovered its importance in the emergence of the Great Enrichment (the rapid and unprecedented process of economic growth since 1850) ( 1 – 3 ). In retrospect, this development seems inevitable. Once it was accepted that institutions are a powerful factor in explaining differences in national per-capita income today ( 4 ), culture—in the sense of the beliefs and values on which institutions were founded—could not be far behind. In a recent paper, Squicciarini and Voigtlander ( 5 ) provide further support for this idea by showing how culture affected the rise of the modern economy.
There are many psychic mechanisms by which people engage with their selves. We argue that an important yet hitherto neglected one is self-appraisal via meta-emotions. We discuss the intentional structure of meta-emotions and explore the phenomenology of a variety of examples. We then present a pilot study providing preliminary evidence that some facial displays may indicate the presence of meta-emotions. We conclude by arguing that meta-emotions have an important role to play in higher-order theories of psychic harmony and that Frankfurt-style accounts, which explain a person’s “reflective self-endorsement” exclusively in terms of volitional hierarchies, are inchoate and need to be augmented by a theory of meta-emotions.
In this article I focus on the crisis experts in Lebanon and, in particular, on one celebrated expert response to crisis, the crisis report. I suggest looking at the report as a techno-political tool that seeks to produce and disseminate knowledge about crisis and conflicts in different parts of the world, while packaged and structured in a universal format. As a first step I analyse the particular features of this format, such as size and scale. The main argument is that the report presents itself as an assemblage of a series of technical characteristics that help to shrink the world and make it fit the model format of the crisis expert. In a second step I open up the perspective and link the report’s micro-format to bigger questions on governing the world today. Here, I argue that, within current imaginaries of emergency, impending crisis and global terrorism, the crisis report functions as a particular kind of sentinel. I show that it can speak through the language of constant alertness and, crucially, the production of sentinel subjectivities that must be continuously monitored.
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