Search

Many think that a specific aspect of phenomenal consciousness—valenced or affective experience—is essential to consciousness's moral significance (valence sentientism). They hold that valenced experience is necessary for well-being, or moral status, or psychological intrinsic value (or all three). Some think that phenomenal consciousness generally is necessary for non-derivative moral significance (broad sentientism). Few think that consciousness is unnecessary for moral significance (non-necessitarianism). In this paper, I consider the prospects for these views. I first consider the prospects for valence sentientism in light of Vulcans, beings who are conscious but without affect or valence of any sort. I think Vulcans pressure us to accept broad sentientism. But I argue that a consideration of explanations for broad sentientism opens up possible explanations for non-necessitarianism about the moral significance of consciousness. That is, once one leans away from valence sentientism because of Vulcans, one should feel pressure to accept a view on which consciousness is not necessary for well-being, moral status, or psychological intrinsic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the influence of colonialism in South Korean viral outbreak films. It specifically interrogates the pathways viruses travel—from the Global South to the Global North—how such travel happens along colonial routes, and how such travel lays bare postcolonial conflicts between South Korea and, namely, the US empire. I introduce the notion of viral imperialism in my film analysis, a concept that implies the long tentacles of empire reaching from the Global North into the Global South, while also following along historically colonial routes that tap into existing narratives and fears of contagions. By weaving film analysis with the historical context of US empire-building in South Korea and the development of South Korean public health, I argue that these films offer a critique of empire as a process that is willing to sacrifice some (read Koreans) for the health and safety of the empire and, arguably, the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the use of Manhattan's grid in Colson Whitehead's "Zone One" as a symbol of control and governance. Topics include the grid's role in reinforcing social and political systems, its connection to the architectural structure of the city. The article also explores the grid's function as a mechanism of bureaucratic control, and the ethical implications of its use in governance, particularly in relation to the novel's depiction of zombie extermination.

This paper explores the persistent association between China and the apocalypse in Western political thought. Using the 1979 film The China Syndrome as a starting point, it examines how China is depicted as the specter of global catastrophe: as a society unable to recover from its own nineteenth-century collapse, and the post-apocalyptic form assumed by Europe itself. Through the writings of John Stuart Mill and Niall Ferguson, the paper highlights how the trope of "apocalyptic China" has evolved with shifts in global power, reflecting Western anxieties about its own decline and the perceived inevitability of China's rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has always been something of the monster baked into the comic book superhero's DNA. Whether it pertains to the reality-bending powers of superhero soaring through the air, seeing through walls, setting her body aflame or altering her size, or by the more Gothic literary antecedents and 'science gone amok' themes constitutive of their origin stories, the comic book superhero treads a fine line between saviour and monster, as often evinced in the oscillating reactions of approbation and fear displayed by the diegetic public's reaction to them. Marvel Zombies, Marvel Comics' commercially successful depiction of its beloved superheroes as ravenous, flesh-eating cannibals, expresses one of the more recent and unsettling throwbacks to the monstrous origins and nature of the Marvel superhero. Employing Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's methodology of reading culture from the figure of the monster, this article proposes to explore Marvel Zombies as an indictment and parodic criticism of the Marvel Superhero. Just as the double is, per Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic approach, an uncanny reminder of repressed truths and desires, so too does the decaying Marvel Zombie function as the uncanny doppelganger of the Marvel superhero, revealing the stagnant character development at its rotten core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010–2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mindless, and often violent undead horde symbolizing humanity's destruction? However, zombification has affirmative, emancipatory possibilities. In "Epidemiology," from Season 2 of the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), we see the zombie's affirmative and emancipatory potential. In this essay, I argue zombification enlivens Community by provoking the show to rethink its relationship to its nominal protagonist, Jeff Winger, and to itself as a piece of avant-garde comedy television produced during the "Golden Age of Television," what media scholars also call, "Peak" or "Prestige TV." In this episode, Community evolves its understanding of its central protagonist by shifting, in some respects, from a conventional and historically predictable character to a character far less conventional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I criticize the explanatory reductionism underlying the zombie argument from the point of view of the philosophy of science. I argue that it is a thesis that finds no support in the available models of reduction, a thesis that is based on an unfounded idealization of the natural sciences and that depends on an uncertain appeal to the possibility in principle of a future unified physics. I conclude that the uncertain character of these assumptions calls for a reassessment, not only of the implications of this type of argument for methodological naturalism but also of the role such arguments play in the study of consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dead Past Growing Block theory of time—DPGB-theory—is the metaphysical view that the past and the present tenselessly exist, whereas the future does not, and that only the present hosts mentality, whereas the past lacks it and is, in this sense, dead. One main reason in favour of this view is that it is immune to the now-now objection or epistemic objection (which aims at undermining the certainty, within an A-theoretical universe, of being currently experiencing the objective present time). In this paper, I examine the additional arguments offered by P. Forrest and G. A. Forbes to back the DPGB-theory and show that they do not work. I also examine a proposal to rescue the DPGB-theory suggested by an anonymous reviewer for this journal and argue that it does not work either. Moreover, in line with D. Braddon-Mitchell and against Forbes, I argue that the DPGB-theory is indeed committed to the existence of zombies in the past. Being ad hoc and burdened by a very odd and counterintuitive ontological commitment, the DPGB-theory turns out to be rather unpalatable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that individual propositional knowledge, as traditionally analyzed in terms of true-justified-ungettiered belief, does not require phenomenal experience. Accordingly, those who are satisfied with the traditional conception need to come to terms with the possibility that AI and other zombies that lack phenomenal experience possess knowledge. Alternatively, those who resist attributing knowledge to AI based on the assumption that knowledge requires phenomenal experience need to modify or replace the traditional conception of knowledge to incorporate this requirement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution aims to address the intriguing issue of whether Industry 4.0, as a techno-economic paradigm shifter, may have a greater potential for exaptation (i.e., using it not for pursuing of quantitative but that of qualitative development) and, if so, what technologies may accelerate this process. Existing research indicates that graphene technology has the potential to lead the way in this area. The paper addresses not only why and how a graphene-aided Industry 4.0 can be conducive to this function (i.e., making exaptations easier on a larger scale), it examines the wider context for exaptations by questioning whether the current setup of the real economy, the financial universe, and the public sector offers a supportive environment for exaptations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise and prime of mashup-prose in 2000-2010s made this subgenre the most controversial in the modern literary process. The Ukrainian embodiment of mashup-prose stands out against the world background thanks to the writers' creative reinterpretation of its key formulas in combination with a critical vision of history and a pronounced folk humor. We define the specifics of the mature form of mashup expression in Ukrainian literature using the example of the story by O. Dekan (and I. Nechui-Levytskyi) "Kaydash Family vs Zombies" for the first time. O. Dekan's reinterpretation of the mashup model "transformation of a classical artistic work" is indicative and testifies to the creative implementation of the Western artistic matrix in the mature Ukrainian subgenre of 2020s. The interaction in this story of sequentially located plot-image blocks, where the matrix is sustained and where the classic plot by I. Nechui-Levytskyi is left behind, can be considered as a hybridization of a mature mashup-form in the previously predicted by us the transition from mashup as a subgenre to the mashup as local artistic technique. The mashup-processing strategy by O. Dekan of I. Nechui-Levytskyi's story is organic to the world experience of this subgenre and, despite the shortcomings of the text, proves the writer's original attempt to develop canonized scheme to a level of a new subgenre type. The "Kaydash Family vs Zombies" among similar national texts reflects the main parameters of the updated at the beginning of the XXI century fantasy paradigm as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifteen years, a new literary trend has emerged based on the zombified rewriting of great classics of universal literature as a consequence of the success of the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombie (Grahame-Smith); this trend includes several texts from the Hispanic literary tradition. In this paper we analyze this postmodern phenomenon through the comparative study of three zombie adaptations and their original Spanish classics. Our objective is to deepen our understanding of the (re)writing mechanisms used by the authors of these adaptations: LaZarillo. Matar zombis nunca fue pan comido (2010) by González Pérez de Tormes, Quijote Z (2010) by G., and La casa de Bernarda Alba zombi (2009) by García Lorca. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities and management consultants are locked in a danse macabre. We turn to the vampire genre to elaborate on the relationship of consulting companies to the university sector, focusing on the University of Alberta in Canada and Monash University in Australia. We are academics with long experience of the consequences of change management and the employment of consultants in universities. Deb is sufficiently "long in the tooth" that her entire career spans the period of heightened government and private sector intervention in Australian universities that began in the late 1980s and more recently she has had the experience of watching this process occur again, at speed, in Canada. Ben is a representative of the National Tertiary Education Union at Australia's largest university. He is also an experienced journalist who has reported on Australian higher education and public policy for more than two decades. The essay argues that consultants and universities are engaged in a mutually dependent relationship designed to sustain each other at the expense of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a scenario-based learning activity to bring challenges in strategic communication and leadership to students' lived experience. It details the goals, setup, steps, and appraisal of a group activity conducted at a course's start. The activity aims to foster cohesion among students from diverse backgrounds and offers a hands-on introduction to the challenges faced by strategic communication practitioners and leaders. Leadership, Strategic Communication, and courses within communication that include a complex group assignment. The Zombie Apocalypse (ZA) learning activity is part of a second-year course in an international master's program. The course introduces students to key concepts in strategic communication and leadership and encourages students to apply these in practice. The ZA aims to 1) prepares students for undertaking a complex group assignment (develop a strategic communications concept) in a diverse group. Specifically, it concentrates on the following objectives: assess priorities, challenge own values and perspectives, experience challenges of planning and acting with limited information, understand the importance of delegation and trust in teamwork, reflect upon emotional responses and their impact on performance under time pressure. By that, the ZA is not limited to strategic communication and leadership courses. It is suited to prepare students for complex group assignments in a wide variety of communications courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the intersection of apocalypse and personal trauma in Colson Whitehead's "Zone One", specifically examining how the specter of 9/11 influences the portrayal of family and domesticity in a zombie-infested New York City. Topics include the transformation of apocalyptic themes in literature post-9/11, symbolic role of zombies in reflecting historical and familial trauma, and Whitehead's critique of American exceptionalism through the depiction of a decaying nuclear family.

To teach about race is to recognize how there are communities whose worlds are shaped by violence, death, and resurrection, such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, George Floyd, and the many unnamed. Resurrection invokes the zombie figure. Zombies are iconic, and as implemented in an interdisciplinary course, a means to foster opportunities to engage with a social figure whose multiple meanings are cultural, historical, and political, and also notions of race and racial meaning-making. Through the figure of the zombie, this autoethnographic revisiting of a course takes up what Lugones calls playful "'world'-travelling." To unpack "'world'-travelling" we examine how it was facilitated through the "world café," a teaching modality. This article examine an educational environment where students engaged in the complexities of race relations in the US by hacking learning rituals that foster understanding racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the brief military service of Private Hector Sylvestre, a young Franco-Ontarien paratrooper executed by the SS. His career began as a conscript in the Active Army, serving nine months prior to enlisting in the Canadian Active Service Force. From this point forward he made a series of fateful decisions, which ultimately led to his death as a member of the French Resistance. His path from Zombie to "martyr" is unique for a Canadian soldier during the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future as a critique of capitalism at the time of the climate crisis of the Anthropocene. Robinson presents capitalism as the dominant and most destructive force of our times, with the market functioning as a monstrous entity that consumes everything in its reach, including humans and the planet. Referring to the notions of the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and the Necrocene and the concept of capitalist realism, I analyze the images of zombies and the process of zombification and discuss alternatives to the capitalist mode of production presented in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the image of zombies in Chinese culture, the traditional perception of their appearance and internal characteristics. A wide scope of written sources served as the basis of the study: inscriptions on oracle bones, ancient fortune-telling calendars, historical treatises, chronicles and commentaries on chronicles, essays on geography and medicine, fiction of old and modern China, as well as entries and comments from the Chinese blogosphere. The authors examine how the idea of evil spirits (with a body or bodiless ones) first appeared in the religious worldview of the ancient Chinese, and trace its origin to the doctrine of existence of multiple souls in one person. The article also details the formation of the pictorial image of Chinese zombies: animated corpses covered with hair or dressed as government officials, with their arms extended forward, hopping on straight legs unable to bend their knees. As for the functional characteristics of zombies, the authors discuss not only their well-known features (e.g., cannibalism), but also their deep inner connection with water and drought. In conclusion, the authors explore the evolution of zombies in modern urban legends and demonstrate the continuity of traditional demonology that develops into modern narrative. Apart from that, the article contains a number of analogies and comparisons of the Chinese image of zombies with other nations’ mythological tradition.

This is a film review of Handling the Undead (2024), directed by Thea Hvistendahl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German word destruktion is used here in the sense that philosophy should destroy some ontological concepts and the everyday meanings of certain words. Tradition allows the transmission of knowledge, but it can perpetuate certain prejudices. According to Heidegger, tradition transmits, but it also conceals. Tradition induces self-evidence and prevents us from accessing the origin of concepts. It makes us believe that we do not need to return to that origin. Making tradition transparent dissolves the concealments it has provoked. Here, I apply this idea to the mind–body problem, which has inherited occultations that are born from Descartes himself. As a result, a new philosophical framework for research on consciousness emerges: that, as an individual cognitive being, I cannot avoid splitting reality into what I am and what I am not, extending then the individual duality to a collective error transmitted culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores militarism as a function of, and response to, ontological insecurity through speculative fictions of a zombie apocalypse, specifically the 2013 film World War Z (WWZ). It begins with the question: why is the zombie apocalypse so terrible for women? The zombie apocalypse genre relies on existing political and social conditions to articulate anxieties and vulnerabilities and to present avenues for resistance or, as I argue is the case for WWZ, to reassert the norms of dominant power structures as a kind of salvation. WWZ is a form of everyday theorizing that highlights the connections between militarism, gender, and ontological insecurity and that asserts the need to return to "traditional" (Western-centric, heteropatriarchal) values to save ourselves. The article presents the zombie as a knowledge system, analyzing the political work that the zombie does as a materialization of ontological insecurity and its reaffirmation of the necessity of a heteropatriarchal militarism and masculinist protection. Like many films in the genre, WWZ entrenches the necessity of a militarized response to the end days and relies on the trope of the "Just Warrior," here supported by international institutions, to save the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monsters have been rehabilitated in popular culture, moved from the realm of the truly monstrous to the world of neoliberal 'sameness'. The zombies of In the Flesh and the vampires in True Blood, as only two examples of this trend, have lost their monstrous edge and have come to represent different ways of being human. While some discussions of this reimagined monster describe the weaving of monsters into mainstream culture as a way of acting out discourses of inclusion, I argue here that contemporary narratives that focus on monsters as metaphors for difference and inclusion are, ultimately, not providing a vision of a utopian world of equality. Instead, these representations are enacting a dystopian vision of a neoliberal social order that demonstrates a fear of true or radical difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the use of horror movie motifs like zombies and mad doctors, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) stands in drastic contrast to other young adult dystopian properties like The Hunger Games (2012), for example, in that Scorch Trials uses allegory as a means to comment on neoliberalism, alienated labor, and commodity fetishism essentially functioning as a Marxist critique of capital. However, this reading only occurs subtextually. By using a contextual cultural studies approach, which reads film as embedded in cultural politics, and a "monsterology," which captures capital as a specter within the film, this essay will serve as an intervention surrounding discourse on The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. In doing so, this analysis will make the case that films targeted at students and young adults are important sites of pedagogy that contribute to an understanding of how capital alienates us from ourselves, each other, and social democratic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jim Jarmusch's 2019 zombie flick The Dead Don't Die uses comedy to both critique the zombie genre and confront the many horrors of twenty-first century life. Zombies are symbols for human anxieties, whether those are anxieties about "otherness," anxieties about nuclear annihilation, anxieties about mindless overconsumption, or anxieties about environmental catastrophe. The Dead Don't Die explores all of these anxieties, focusing on the fear of environmental catastrophe. The zombies in The Dead Don't Die rise from their graves because polar fracking has caused the earth's axis to shift, reanimating the dead. In its critique of the zombie genre, the film asks whether the zombie film's history of political and social commentary is still (or ever has been) effective in creating social change. Ultimately, The Dead Don't Die is concerned with the failure of the zombie to produce lasting change and what that means for a world still plagued by greater horrors than the undead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from strategic whiteness and guided by racial rhetorical criticism, this article analyzes Disney's Zombies movie trilogy. Situated within the context of anti-Critical Race Theory policies and the use of children and K-12 education as political pawns, the timely release of Zombies as a postracial narrative motivates this research. Through the positioning of humans, zombies, werewolves, and aliens as fixed symbolic racial groups within the imagined utopian United States town of Seabrook, Zombies presents an ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that sustains white power and fluidity. This rhetorical analysis presents three conclusions. First, the imaginary utopian town of Seabrook is a postracial space developed around stereotypical racialized characters and narratives that contribute to the historical marginalization of Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and Black people. Second, through the protagonist Zed and the cinematic construction of zombies, the trilogy perpetuates a postracial anti-Blackness via the inscription of a policed and controlled monstrosity onto Black identity. Third, the second protagonist, Addison, engages in the propagation of whiteness via voyeuristic racial tourism and white purity. In total, the children's mediated narrative upholds white centrality and power obviated by contemporary DEI discourses and representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we understand the relation between corporate agency, corporate moral agency and corporate moral patienthood? For some time, corporations have been treated as increasingly ontologically and morally sophisticated in the literature. To explore the limits of this treatment, I start off by redeveloping and defending a reductio that historically has been aimed at accounts of corporate agency which entail that corporations count as moral patients. More specifically, I argue that standard agents are due a certain type of moral concern, but corporate agents are not due that type of concern, so they are not agents of, at least, the standard type. Diagnosis: because corporations plausibly lack qualia, they are 'zombie agents' that mimic real agents. This explains why they are neither standard agents nor standard moral patients: they are not standard agents because they lack mental states, and because they lack experiences, they are, at best, morally notable rather than morally respectable. However, I then argue that we nevertheless have instrumental reasons to include them in our moral responsibility practices, both because that is what notability involves and bluffingly, and both when it comes to treating them as moral agents and as moral patients. Hence, we may treat corporations as part of our moral responsibility practices to a limited extent anyway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]