Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016

This article explores how the TV series Black Mirror is evidence that entertaining TV series can provide us with highly elaborated critical thinking about crime and punishment. Based on the premise that society owns social imaginaries to guide our individual orientation, we explore the connection between screen technologies and our criminal imaginaries in this TV series. The article relates the aims of punishment according to criminal theory – prevention, retribution and rehabilitation – with two images that appear in episode 2.2 ‘White Bear’: the monster and its lynching.

This article examines the only known diagram of being-in-the-world provided by Martin Heidegger. Approaching the diagram from a rhetorical perspective, the article highlights Heidegger’s fundamental concern with communication and language at the heart of Dasein. Dasein is always being-open and being-addressed, and thus essentially communicative. Furthermore, Heidegger’s diagram extends our thinking about communication by bringing into relief the excessive and hyperbolic nature of communication itself.

Jean Baudrillard sees in today’s simulation the model ‘of a real but without origin or reality: a hyperreal’. With the hyperreal, the individual is unable to distinguish what is real and what is not. In this article, I argue how the pervasiveness of media, in the form of mobile phones, tablets with their applications and social networking sites, singularly or in unison create and sustain the existence of the hyperreal. They succeed at once through an imagined call for urgency and an implosion of meaning that cannot be contained. This type of media is a priori a form of simulation, and has not only erased the boundaries that exit between the real and the unreal but has also developed as a site accountable for continual deference of the being-in-theworld, forcing on the latter a perpetual existence in the hyperreal.

Privacy laws are fundamental to protecting individual freedom and autonomy against the tyranny of the majority, and the social orthodoxy imposed through gossip. While it is widely recognized within academic debate that there are limits to freedom of expression, there is little debate about the limits to the right of privacy. We argue that the public interest is a limit to the right of privacy, mediating between the rights of expression and freedom and the flow of information. In doing so, it clarifies not only when invasions of privacy are morally justified, but when claims to privacy are morally unjustified.

This analysis delves into the relationship with knowledge we engage when we communicate using comedy and humour. It explores four questions related to this enquiry: Is knowledge through comedy possible? Does funny discourse point us to the real? Do we laugh in the realm of reason? Is the knowledge channelled through comedy unitary? These questions position us within our own heads amidst the heuristic zigzag of alarm and happy release that precedes laughter. Furthermore, it observes the individualized nature of knowledge through laughter. Probing these questions illuminates epistemic niches and breaks some barriers between them.

This text responds to Ramsey’s defence of the lecture format based on a hermeneutic of dwelling as presented in his paper ‘Letters on the hermeneutic education of dwelling’. For him, good lecturers should create a place in-between where they promote a disclosure of consequences and conditions of possibility of tradition: under the lecturer’s guidance, a lecture should be an open letter to their students. The main point of my critique is not related to his apologia for the lecture, but instead to the insufficiency of the traditional hermeneutic discourse to accentuate its singularity – for instance, as the presence of a voice. In my response, the lecture is not only to be understood as an open letter (a text) but also as a non-dialectical correspondence, or rather as the cadence and reverberation of enthusiasm (éntheous).

This article is a brief response to Ramsey E. Ramsey’s essay ‘Letters on the hermeneutic education of dwelling’ published in Empedocles (6: 1, pp. 77–90). While it sees Ramsey’s defense of the lecture as a necessary articulation of the specificity of the work professors do in the humanities classroom, it points to the necessity of an enhanced self-awareness given the pervasive sense of crisis in the humanities, and in light of more recent developments on American and British campuses.

Media Freedom as a Fundamental Right, Jan Oster (2015) Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 338 pp., ISBN: 9781107098954, h/bk, £79.99

Il Cinema Europeo Contemporaneo: Scenari Transazionali, Immaginari Globali, Ilaria A. de Pascalis (2015) Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 314 pp., ISBN: 978887870988, p/bk, € 22.00