Newsletter on the Results of Scholarly Work in Sociology, Criminology, Philosophy and Political Science

The Impact of Technology on the American Academy

Harvey W. Kushner — 2024-11-30

This article traces the growth of technology over the last 75 years within colleges and uni- versities within the United States. Particular attention is paid to the impact of Y2K and the COVID-19 pandemic on technological advances employed by institutions of higher education. The impacts of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT are also explored in detail with suggestions for their effective employment. The article concludes with a rather dire warning.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence on the Evolution of Accounting

Izhar Haq — 2024-11-30

Artifical intelligence nowadays is attracting the focus of both academics and practitioners due to its contrubtion in achieving major changes in business environment. Public accounting as field has benefited a lot from machine learning. Thus, this article aims to highlight the importance and influences of artifical intelligence on accounting. To achieve this aim, this article started with giving a brief overview about artifical intelligence and its evolution over time. This overview helps in showing the power of artifical intelligence and how it attracted investments of billion of dollars due to its leading role in reducing business costs and providing business solutions. Furthermore, the article identifies how artifical intelligence works as this helps accountants to better undertsand machine learning and identify how it can be optimally used in the field of accounting to get the best results. However, to be widely used in the field of accounting, major investments are required and this is one of the obstacles that faces regional small and mid-sized firms that do not have the required resources to effectively implement artifical intelligence. However, the availablity of pre-packaged applications that are offered by big companies such as Google and Amazon can enable small and mid-sized firms to benefit from artifical intelligence. Nonetheless firms will need to train their labor force to benefit from artifical intelligence. Despite the fact that artifical intelligence can help accounting professionals to perform their jobs more efficiently and eliminate reptitive tasks, it is important to note that maching learning cannot eliminate the accountants’ role. Artifical intelligence in the accounting field enables accountants to provide their companies with tecnhologies that can save time, increase the efficiency of tasks, reduce costs and help accountants focus more on value-adding activities.

The Incomputability of Calculation: Wittgenstein, Turing and the Question of Artificial Intelligence

Giorgi Vachnadze — 2024-11-30

Calculation is one of the foundational concepts operating at the basis of the notion of an algorithm. Seemingly intuitive, it remains nonetheless no small task to provide a rigid theoretical framework for articulating an ontology of computation. The central and primary point of oscillation around which the following paper will revolve, is concerned therefore not only with the complicated questions that make up the foundations of logic and mathematics, but the social and political implications that follow directly therefrom. Whether a machine can think is directly tied to the question of whether calculation is a form of thinking. That is, whether human thinking is a form of calculation. Subversively, Wittgenstein claims not only that human thought is irreducible to computation, but that human calculation itself is a form of thinking that is entirely different from anything that could be labeled “mechanical”. Wittgenstein’s critique of the Turing Thesis paves the way for a new variety of Foucauldian Biopolitics aimed specifically at the discourse surrounding Artificial Intelligence. A discourse that bears a suspicious resemblance to Christian pastoralism.

The End of Neoliberalism? Byung-Chul Han’s and Yoko Ogawa’s Rediscovery of Contemplation in Accelerated Times

François Debrix — 2024-11-30

Several critical theorists have suggested that the way out of neoliberal capitalism is to accelerate it in order to force its collapse. In The Scent of Time, German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls for a different challenge to neoliberalism by way of a rediscovery of contemplation. Han suggests that contemplation can undercut the vita activa (or active life), which Han blames for the hyper-active neoliberal ways of being and living, as well for the seeming impossibility to end neoliberal time(s). This article examines Han’s thought on contemplation, highlighting his critique of both neoliberal time(s) and acceleration. It expands the scope of Han’s analysis by turning to Japanese author Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Housekeeper and the Professor. Ogawa’s novel revolves around time and memory. Ogawa offers a compelling understanding of contemplation that complicates Han’s thought. Ogawa’s sense of contemplation resists being defined by neoliberal modalities of living even though it often remains stuck in them. This article concludes by asking what it means for neoliberal subjects to allow Ogawa’s contemplation to enter their lives, and what critical possibilities it might bring.

Platonism Across Borders: From the Global Point of View to the Inner Life of Things

Marco Andreacchio — 2024-11-30

Historicist scholarship has contributed to obscuring a fundamental sense in which classical, canonical Chinese scholarship is by and large Platonic. Chinese classics have been systematically used, rather than properly understood. As a result, they have been effectively denied the right to guide us into an understanding of what they point to — their message. Now, such a message may prove to significantly help today’s scholarship in facing a crisis of standards unwittingly exposed by historicism itself. The present work questions historicist assumptions by way of 1. accessing traditional Chinese literary sources in their original poetic context and 2. testifying to the sense in which Platonism cuts across civilizational borders. In this respect, the present investigation serves as a case study inviting recognition of Platonism as a currently viable poetic solution to the crisis of modern science.

Category Context of the Etymology “Conflict”

Maxim Lepskiy — 2024-11-30

The digitalization of the world, the conflict and variability of context in social networks turns people to search for the meanings and meanings of “conflict” in authoritative dictionaries that have their own categorical context, a reflection of the universal and the specific in a changing world. The study is updated by the need to resolve the conflict, which, without understanding the essence and context of conflicts, is the most complex theoretical and practical issue in professional negotiations.

The purpose of the article is to understand the categorical context of the etymology of conflict in dictionaries.

Research methodology. The article demonstrates the results of a holistic etymological study that goes through the stages of: searching for significant attributions as the meaningful meaning of the “conflict”; the subject field of “conflict” and the categorical range of similar and opposite meanings; searching for the opposite phenomenon; categorical context of the meaning of the conflict.

The article discusses the “root”, “created” and “derived” meaning of the conflict. In “conflict” the following semantic essential attributions are defined: forceful, coercive, opposing, controversial, victimized and/or resource-loss aspects. The study of synonyms “dissentio”, “dissideo”, “discordo” and antonyms “consentio”, “concordo”, “consido”, “conveni” allows us to consider linear and non-linear interaction in the process of conflict formation and resolution.

The opposite of “conflict” is “concordo”, as a reflection of coordination and removal of the contrast of sharp isolation.

Basic to the conflict are the contexts of subjectification of an objective contradiction; ex- istential confrontation; crisis-government context; differentiation of “other” as an extroverted- introverted subjective conflict; social-environmental contradictions in the field of personality development The use of contextual meanings of dictionaries in content analysis allows us to determine the profile of changing conflict contexts.

Learned Helplessness, Resilience, and Time Perspective in Ukrainian and Israeli Citizens Amid Prolonged Warfare: Social and Neurobehavioral patterns

Vitalii Lunov — 2024-11-30

The incessant, incomprehensible war in Ukraine and Israel inevitably determines everyday uncertainty and chronic stress, which significantly affect the mental health, well-being and functioning of the civilian population. This study examines the problem of studied helplessness, resilience and understanding of life in the context of the perception of a temporary perspective among Ukrainian and Israeli citizens. The study highlights the possibility of using the “Unified Framework for Integrated Psychological Assessment and Intervention,” which combines metacognitive, neuropsychological and psychodynamic approaches. This framework is proposed as the most important strategy for meeting the complex psychological needs of people in war-affected areas. By applying this comprehensive framework, mental health professionals can develop more thoughtful and effective support systems, increase resilience, encourage future-oriented thinking, and mitigate feelings of helplessness, ultimately improving the well-being of a person living in a prolonged environment.

War’s Effect on Criminality

Dwight Wilson — 2024-11-30

This article analyzes how war affects criminal behavior by examining both historical and contemporary conflicts. It focuses on the ongoing war in Ukraine, looking at crime before, and during the conflict. The study also considers the American Civil War, the rise of outlaws in the American West, and the post-World War I crime wave in the U. S. Additionally, it looks at the collapse of the Soviet Union and the role of riots and the “War on Drugs” in shaping crime in America. The article provides insights into how war and social unrest impact criminality, offering lessons for understanding modern wars.

Medicalization as a Critique of Modernity

Mark Horvath — 2024-11-30

Representatives of the medicalization thesis in sociology propose that in modernity the human condition is increasingly translated into quantified and medical terms. Problems are increasingly reduced to issues of individual and public health. On the one hand, this results in an increase of government intervention in the lives of citizens, concentrating power in the hands of experts, while politics legitimates itself via medical expertise. On the other hand, subjects themselves demand medicalization as a form of recognition. Medicalization as a sociological paradigm problematizes the modern drive to construct issues in medical terms. However there are no easy answers, as alternative medicine too is a form of medicalization. More reflexivity is warranted when it comes to problematization and categorization of phenomena associated with the human condition.

Media and generational conflict: from ethnography of deviance to cybernetics

Nello Barile — 2024-11-30

The media have played a central role not only in defining identities but also in managing the conflicts they trigger. This is particularly evident in the 1960s, when the generational conflict supported by the modernization of society and consumption was clearly delineated, but it persists today in a completely different era. Not only because of the considerable transition from a vertical to a horizontal society, from the centrality of institutions and of the “father” to an inclusive and in its own way problematic democratization. Our era is also crossed by a general feeling defined as retromania (Reynolds, 2011), capable of pervading every area of daily life, communication, consumption and fashion. For this reason it may make sense to “unfreeze” from the past a book that aimed to take stock of the issue of youth subcultures, beyond the brakes and inhibitions of a more institutional sociology. Herein lies the value of a reflection that manages to avoid in- volvement in the same panic that it studies, such as the excessive enthusiasm of some exponents of Cultural Studies for youth cultures. This study deals with the new youth formations of the Sixties, namely the epic of the Mods and the Rockers, whose epic clash on the English beaches is explained for the first time within a more general framework. Against the banal description of media as “mirrors” or “shapers” (Hodkinson, 2016) of social phenomena, a more complex interpretation suggests that they are circular and adductive means where a specific social identity can be manufactured according to social trends.